Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* I love the New Yorker’s cartoons, but I’ve long had the impression when reading its articles that I’m spying on some Upper West Side conversation that wasn’t meant for me. I get the strange feeling that I’m eavesdropping.

One off-putting characteristic of media coverage of immigration-related issues in general is the passive attitude toward demographics. The displacement of natives by millions of foreigners with strange customs is just something that kind of happens, the way a thunderstorm happens. To the extent the issue is discussed, it’s always in feckless, reactive terms. “Have the French adapted their secular values to the needs of Muslim youth?” “Have you made sure your gutters are clear of leaf clutter?”

Every article about immigration-related problems should have stamped across the top, “Why did we even allow this to become an issue?!”

* So alienation causes Immigrants in France to start hating Jews? Also why does this article not get specific and name which Immigrant communities in France hate the Jews? Is it France’s Japanese Immigrant community? Is it France’s Icelandic Immigrant community?

* When those blacks and Muslims hate whites, Jews cheer it on as ‘anti-racism’.

When blacks and Muslims eventually notice that Jews are even more powerful in proportional terms than white gentiles, that is ‘antisemitism’.

* Three good Jewish atheist/agnostic British-American lawyer friends pointed this article out to me a few days ago. Several things to note:

– The article’s general survey of France and of the French banlieue is quite accurate. When I step into one of these neighborhoods I have the vague feeling of having walked into a creepy foreign movie with no subtitles. Even when the people around me speak French at least 80% of them do not think or reflect or respond to the same instinctive “cues” we and most of the people we know do – including most of the people of color we encounter in what we would consider “normal” quarters.

– The article is also correct that the most passionate jihadists seem to come from more “educated” backgrounds. This belies the common notion that the ISIL nutbags “don’t know their religion” – on the contrary, they know it better than most, which is why they follow the lead of the Prophet (insulting whom would be punishable by death, a sentence any Muslim in good standing is competent to carry out) – and also belies the notion that education and opportunity will result in better integration of disaffected (mostly Muslim by confession) communities.

– The article is however quite facetious in portraying Ben Ahmed as a hometown hero worthy of civic respect. Were he at all integrated or even desirous of integration he would have left those quarters as soon as he could…

As the example of the United States shows, no one can do more damage than an uppity ghetto community organizer, especially when the media covers for him. Brace yourselves if anyone ever starts murmuring about a Président Ben Ahmed of France.

John Derbyshire tackles Linda Chavez’s NY Post op/ed:

We have changed our collective mind about all sorts of things that our Constitution and laws once allowed—most notably slavery, of course. Perhaps we should change our minds about this. Is birthright citizenship a good thing for us today, or not? What are the arguments for it, as benefiting the U.S.A. and U.S. citizens? May we hear them, please?

Let’s hope we don’t need a Civil War to sort this one out.

At the time the 14th Amendment passed, there was considerable debate regarding groups that would be equivalent to today’s illegal immigrants, though the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants did not apply because no laws restricted immigration then.

Sen. Edgar Cowan, D-Pa., railed against those whose citizenship might be affirmed under the new amendment, calling for “expelling a certain number of people who invade her borders; who owe to her no allegiance; . .  . who pay no taxes; who never perform military service; who do nothing, in fact, which becomes the citizen, and perform none of the duties which devolve upon him.”

Sound familiar? But he wasn’t talking about Mexicans. “I mean the Gypsies,” he said.

If that’s what he meant, I must say, Sen. Cowan was talking good sense.

Another Cowan diatribe sounds eerily prescient of Trump’s warnings: “There is a race in contact with this country which, in all characteristics except that of simply making fierce war, is not only our equal, but perhaps our superior.”

This will be baffling to readers unfamiliar with 19^th-century American anxieties. Why doesn’t she tell us which race Sen. Cowan meant? Is it over-suspicious of me to think that perhaps she left the race unidentified so that some subset of her readers would take the Senator’s remarks to have been anti-Semitic?

In fact Sen. Cowan clarified his meaning in his next sentence: “I mean the yellow race; the Mongol race.” He was expressing the common and perfectly reasonable fear that our Pacific coast, under-populated and remote from the centers of American civilization, would succumb to a mass influx from China, then populous at the Malthusian limit and in the throes of late-dynastic turmoil.

(Note that Sen. Cowan’s fears were founded in part on the belief that East Asians were “perhaps our superior.” A little later he says: “Of their industry, their skill, and their pertinacity in all worldly affairs, nobody can doubt.” The same fear of admitting great numbers of a superior race shows up in the congressional debates on Japanese exclusion in the 1920s. Racist? I guess so; but surely not “supremacist.”)

… Trump is dead wrong on birthright citizenship, and Republicans shouldn’t follow him down the rabbit hole.

Once again: If birthright citizenship is a good thing for our nation today, let’s hear the arguments.

If the legal/constitutional position is what Ms Chavez says it is, but no longer the right policy for our country, let’s change it, as other nations have done: Australia (2007), New Zealand (2005), Ireland (2005), France (1993), …

COMMENTS TO JOHN DERBYSHIRE:

* Anyone who is successful in a socio-political system that can be objectively viewed with suspicion, e.g. Latin America, the Middle East, Southern Europe, Russia, the Balkans, Subsaharan Africa and identitarian hustlers in the West, warrants suspicion. They’ve learned the techniques used to get on top. If you succeed in a highly corrupt environment, you surely didn’t get there squeaky clean or tainted no matter what your individual worth.

The problem is American whites just aren’t equipped to deal with it. Yes, we yell. Yes we also use public shaming as a socially conditioning technique. Yes we have white collar corruption. But let’s be honest, we have nothing on those cultures in which mistrust and amoral familism have permeated public life for centuries. Those same Americans who will scream at a politician at a Tea Party townhall will stand in line at any business and pay their taxes.

Why deal with that pathological crap if we can avoid it? The US has its own pathologies and they are numerous and pervasive, but that doesn’t mean should import others. And just because reform has been possible in the past with groups who came from corrupt societies, doesn’t mean it will always work.

I agree with liberals and leftists that the Constitution should reflect changing realities. I’d also say that the Declaration of Independence was hopelessly naive, written by a young, dreamy Virginian subject to flights of fancy, even if he could turn a fancy phrase. He was simultaneously one of the greatest minds our nation ever produced, whose ideas are models for us all, and a dangerous fool who should have never been allowed within twenty feet of pen or paper.

…Corruption indices, poverty as indicator of corruption and poor leadership, anthropological studies that indicate if a society is plagued by extreme misogyny, low levels of trust, amoral familism or tribal/clan nepotism. Of the list I gave, YOU give me an example of ONE of country that is by any objective standard mostly liberal with a transparent government and whose indigenous cultures are committed to impartial meritocracy.

Who said “white” America? That’s your little addition, channeling Professor Ignatiev, are you? Indeed Latin America has been historically ruled (or misruled) by a white or almost white elite. Eastern Europeans are white.

Naive, yes. The Declaration of Independence should have been very specific. It should have used specific language limiting its claims to the American community as was. We could have incorporated later arrivals, but we would have much more control over the rate of incorporation and the terms on which they joined without being charged with hypocrisy and our indigenous leftist elements and cheap labor lobbies and war-mongerers would not have had such a strong propagandistic tool.

But that’s Jefferson for you. All high-minded ideas, but not concerned with minor details. That fool committed us to all sorts of crap with his “all men.” Same goes for the 14th Amendment. It should have been much clearer and more specific, i.e. “we hereby grant citizenship to former slaves, who were held by in the territories of the US, excluding former slaves from foreign territories (e.g. West Indians like Louis Farrakhan, Colin Powell or Eric Holder), and their descendants.”

From VDARE in 2013: One of the genuine Patriotic heroes of the American Immigration disaster has done it again:

A projected $650 million in welfare benefits will be distributed to illegal alien parents in 2013, county officials said Monday.

Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich announced the latest figures from the Department of Public Social Services….An estimated 100,000 children of 60,000 undocumented parents receive aid in Los Angeles County, according to Antonovich

“When you add the $550 million for public safety and nearly $500 million for healthcare, the total cost for illegal immigrants to county taxpayers exceeds $1.6 billion dollars a year,” Antonovich said in a statement. “These costs do not even include the hundreds of millions of dollars spent annually for education

Undocumented LA County Parents On Pace To Receive $650M In Welfare Benefits CBS Los Angeles September 16, 2013 (VDARE.com emphasis)

Antonovich has been making a habit of collecting and compiling these figures, as I noted in 2011 in Drudge Scores Twofer: Immigrant/American Job Grab, and Anchor Baby Costs and last year in Antonovich Raises Anchor Baby Costs Again. Where Is Congressional GOP?

In a healthy political climate this enterprising work would have made Republican Antonovich a strong GOP candidate for statewide office rather than pitiful morons like Meg Whitman.

But this is Mexifornia where, thanks to a critical degree to treasonous forces within the GOP, Mexican mestizos have been allowed to achieve the most spectacular migratory conquest since their ancestors crossed the Bering Strait.

Applaud Michael Antonovich

As usual, Antonovich’s work has been ignored by most of the MSM even in California. But a Point-and Splutter at MediaMatters Conservative Media`s Misplaced Hysteria Over Immigrants And Welfare by Solange Uwimana September 18 2013 notes several “Right-wing” websites did pick it up and also the wonderful Laura Ingraham who

…read the news on her radio show and used it to call for the end of birthright citizenship — which, under the 14th Amendment, makes anyone born in this country an American citizen. She also argued that the news should end all talk of immigration reform.

Of course, she is right.