The Other McCain

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First-Person Plural Pronouns: Steve King and the Problems of ‘Our Civilization’

Posted on | March 13, 2017 | Comments Off on First-Person Plural Pronouns: Steve King and the Problems of ‘Our Civilization’

 

Rep. Steve King is the most influential conservative in Iowa and, because of its first-in-the-nation caucuses, Iowa is one of the most influential states in presidential politics. The road to the White House goes through Iowa and, if you’re a Republican, you want Steve King on your side.

It is therefore important to pay attention to the controversy that arose over the weekend when King expressed support for Geert Wilders, who may become the next prime minister of the Netherlands, riding a wave of backlash against immigration from Muslim countries. The Dutch election is Wednesday and, commenting on anti-Wilders protests by Dutch Muslims, King re-tweeted a pro-Wilders message.

 

 

Judging from the reaction to this sentence — “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies” — you might have thought King had quoted the infamous neo-Nazi “Fourteen Words” slogan. Yet the Iowa congressman was simply summarizing, within the condensed 140-character confines of a Twitter message, what Mark Steyn has explained at length in his 2006 book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Europe’s demographic decline have enormous consequences for American policy. The flood of Muslim “refugees” into Europe and the wave of Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe are related phenomena, and these problems are in turn related to the very low birth rates among Europeans. How to address these issues as a matter of public policy is a very serious matter, but we cannot solve a problem if the terms of debate are inhibited by a political correctness that regards some facts as “racist.”

What does Steve King mean by “our civilization”? Among other things, this could include representative democracy, limited government, a free economy, the rule of law and the First Amendment. All of these American traditions are indeed imperiled by cultural and demographic trends and, while Mark Steyn did not go so far as to say, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” this is really the question raised by the open-borders stance of the Left. If you read the Constitution, you find that our Founding Fathers sought to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Americans today — including the descendants of slaves, and the children and grandchildren of immigrants — are the inheritors of that liberty, and we see today many threats to our liberty. On college campuses, the First Amendment is threatened by radical mobs who attack speakers they disagree with, and our economic freedom is imperiled by a national debt now approaching $20 trillion.

People in Iowa appreciate Steve King for his willingness to speak unpopular truths, and if any Republican thinks his pro-Wilders tweet was pushing a bit far against the politically correct limits of acceptable speech, let them make their case. However, the results of the last presidential election indicate that many Americans are waking up to the realities that King was attempting to describe, which are the same realities that Mark Stein was writing about in America Alone. If Wilders’ allegedly “far right” party wins Wednesday’s election, perhaps this will focus further attention on the seriousness of the larger problems that our decadent elite — in politics, in media, in academia — have tried for so long to conceal from the American people. Screeching accusations of “racism” will not solve these problems, and yet the Left really has nothing else to say, and how long can Americans be expected to play along with this charade?

America’s liberty was founded on behalf of “We the People,” and we must keep looking at that pronoun and asking, “Who are ‘we’?”

(Hat-tip: Taylor Millard at Hot Air.)



 

Category: Immigration, Iowa, Islam, Netherlands, Racism

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