The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Lotus Fields of Multicultural Delusion’

Posted on | October 19, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘Lotus Fields of Multicultural Delusion’

 

What would we know if we knew everything about this army of Honduran “migrants” marching toward our southern border? Whose idea was this? Who spent money to organize this pre-election publicity stunt?

The caravan has been growing steadily since it left the violent Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on Saturday. The migrants hope to reach Mexico and then cross its northern border with the United States, to seek refuge from endemic violence and poverty in Central America.
Several thousand people are now part of the caravan, according to a Reuters witness traveling with the group in Guatemala, where men women and children on foot and riding in trucks filled a road on their long journey to Mexico.
“We’ve lived in neighborhoods where our children have seen disaster after disaster,” said Daisy Turcios, resting briefly outside a school. “We have seen dead bodies thrown in front of us. So that’s my goal, in truth, to reach a country where life can change for my children.” . . .
U.S. President Donald Trump decried “horrendous weak and outdated immigration laws,” in a series of Twitter messages starting on Tuesday. He threatened to cut off aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador if they fail to prevent undocumented immigrants from heading to the United States.
“Hard to believe that with thousands of people from South of the Border, walking unimpeded toward our country in the form of large Caravans, that the Democrats won’t approve legislation that will allow laws for the protection of our country,” Trump said on Twitter on Wednesday.
The Honduran government has urged citizens not to join the caravan, calling it politically motivated. On Wednesday morning near the Guatemalan border, authorities could be seen stopping Hondurans still hoping to join, with police in riot gear at one checkpoint halting buses carrying at least a hundred people.

If cities in Honduras are violent — “disaster after disaster” — who is responsible for those conditions? Is this a function of geography, so that anyone who sets foot in San Pedro Sula is suddenly overtaken by an urge to commit crimes? Or is this a reflection of something else?

Here’s a fact-bomb I dropped into a column a few weeks ago:

Of the top 10 cities in the world with the highest per-capita murder rates, half of them are in Mexico; the rest of the top 10 are in Brazil or Venezuela. Of the 50 cities with the highest murder rates, only four (St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans and Detroit) are in the United States; all the rest are either in Latin America or South Africa.

Who is killing whom? It’s a very simple matter to investigate. Whenever liberals start yammering on about gun control or “rape culture,” the proper response is to supply them with facts. Does your liberal friend really want to know why murder is more common in Baltimore than in Bethesda? Do liberals think the NRA is to blame for murders in Mexico or South Africa? Crime is a people problem, and until you spend some time thinking about what that means — until you have studied the demographics of crime — don’t presume to lecture me about public policy as if you are my moral and intellectual superior. This isn’t a field in which the Harvard alumnus has more knowledge and experience than I do and, while my background as an erstwhile juvenile delinquent isn’t likely to be recognized as a basis of expertise by Ivy League intellectuals, I can run circles around them in argument if they dare challenge me.

Steve Sailer coined the term “Dirt Gap” to express the common liberal belief that “oppressed” people are victims of geographic accident. Living in “tragic dirt” — places where crime, poverty and social dysfunction are prevalent — these people are victimized because they are excluded from “magic dirt,” places where prosperity and bourgeois norms prevail. If you don’t believe this theory, you’re a racist, according to liberals.

Now, it should go without saying that I do not believe that all residents of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, are bad people, no more so than I believe every resident of Baltimore is a bad person. However, when you begin talking about people in large numbers — as categories, about whom we can obtain statistical evidence and draw sociological conclusions — we must take group averages into consideration. And the fact is that the identity-politics formula of the modern Left forces us to evaluate people in this categorical way. Consider how allegations that Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American students have brought forth startling data about the failure of “diversity” initiatives in the Ivy League.

Speaking of Asians, a couple of weeks ago, I went to see Crazy Rich Asians, the themes of which are highly relevant to this topic:

Played by the adorable Constance Chu, Rachel is a latter-day Cinderella, and handsome Henry Golding as Nick is a 21st-century Prince Charming. There are plot twists aplenty, as Rachel struggles to win the approval of Nick’s mother, who thinks Rachel is too Americanized. And among the many things to love about this love story is that it is emphatically racist.
Americans are so used to hearing the word “racist” applied as a pejorative description of our own alleged sins that we forget the history of this word. First coined in France, racisme originally denoted a sense of national identity, and was employed by the French anarchist Charles Malato in 1897 to describe resistance to the internationalism that he advocated. Malato predicted that racisme, in the form of federations based on ethnic alliances (Latin, Slavic, Germanic, etc.), would precede l’avénement d’une humanité sans frontiers (“the advent of a humanity without borders”). From its French origin, “racism” was apparently imported into the English language by a U.S. Army veteran named Richard Henry Pratt who, among other things, strove to eradicate the vestiges of native culture among his students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which he founded in 1879. Both the French anarchist and the American educator saw racism as an obstacle to the assimilation of human beings into a homogenous global mass.
While most Americans think of racism in the historical context of chattel slavery and Jim Crow, the history of anti-racism is not exactly covered in glory. . . .

You can read the rest of that column at The American Spectator. My point is that the millions of American moviegoers who have laughed and cried at this delightful romantic comedy are unlikely to recognize the celebration of Chinese ethnic pride as “racism,” because Americans have been taught a liberal belief system that can be summarized thus:

1. Racism is the worst of all possible sins;
2. White people are uniquely guilty of racism;

and

3. No country in the world is more racist than America.

All three of these beliefs are arguably wrong, but the minute you attempt to speak reasonably on this subject — to discuss race relations in a factual and logical manner — liberals accuse you of racism. They have succumbed to a cult mentality, and are incapable of considering anything that calls into question their liberal belief system about race. Their fanaticism would be startling, except that nothing should startle us when dealing with people who take Keynesian economics seriously.

Part of the problem is that liberals are used to playing a game in which they determine the rules. Anyone accused of racism is automatically disqualified from the game, according to the liberal rulebook, which is why liberalism has lately become little more than an angry mob running around, pointing fingers and yelling “RAAAAACIST!”

“Few things infuriate me so much as the cringing defensiveness of Republicans who think they can concede every premise of the liberal syllogism and yet expect voters to come to some other conclusion than ‘Vote Democrat.’ Too many Republicans have that cowardly punk reflex where, whenever there’s a fight, their first concern is for their own safety, rather than trying to win the fight.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, March 28, 2009

Liberals are wrong about race in the same way, and for the same reasons, they are wrong about everything else. They are in thrall to what Thomas Sowell called The Vision of the Anointed, which makes it impossible for them to consider a simple hypothesis: “What if I’m wrong?”

Unless you are willing to consider the possibility of error — e.g., that at some point in the past America public policy took a turn in the wrong direction — you will never be able to view current events in an entirely objective manner. Our education system is guilty of promoting a false conception of progress that prevents most people from “thinking outside the box” in this manner. Younger Americans have been taught a cultural Marxist history that views our national past as uniquely disgraceful, stained by genocide, slavery and injustice. Thus, the advance of liberalism in the 20th century — from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to LBJ — is presented as a Triumph of Progress over the forces of reactionary evil.

Even most Americans who call themselves conservative are not entirely free of this delusional Triumph of Progress belief. In order to free your mind of this mythology, you have to dig around and read old books that are usually out of print and hard to find. For example, grab a copy of Blair Coan’s The Red Web, which describes how Communists and their allies subverted anti-Red efforts in the 1920s. Or go read Alan Stang’s It’s Very Simple, a critical examination of the 1960s civil rights movement. Both of these books might fairly be labeled “fringe” or “extremist” in some way, but what makes them worth reading is that they were written by contemporary witnesses of events who were not liberals. Coan argues that U.S. policy was being subverted by pro-Communist elements as early as the Harding administration, and Stang argues that the civil-rights movement was being manipulated by those who wished to weaken the United States in its Cold War struggle against Communist aggression. Whatever your opinion of these subjects might be, in Coan and Stang’s books you will encounter facts generally omitted from the history books.

Two weeks ago, I described (“At the Edge of the Abyss,” Oct. 3) the difficulties that confront “a professional trafficker in politically incorrect thought.” Knowing that the Thought Police are constantly on the lookout for Wrongthink, we must necessarily be cautious in our arguments and also in our associations. It is very easy for the SPLC types to use their habitual tactics — the “Ransom-Note Method” of selective quotation, and “links-and-ties” guilt-by-association smears — to falsely label any conservative a proponent of “hate.” And of course, there is always the danger that we may spend too much time staring into the abyss and end up like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: “Exterminate the brutes!”

As we watch our society descending into madness, we must resist the temptation to despair and try to maintain our grip on sanity. There are always those who will counsel us to surrender to one alternative or the other — either to cease resisting the helpless drift into decadence, or else to join some kind of tiki-torch brownshirt movement. In warning against the latter danger, I cited the ZMan blog, written by an anonymous proponent of “race realism,” and he has volleyed back at me:

A point that cannot be made enough is just how scary it is for most normal white people to contemplate their future, even when they accept our demographic reality. Later in his post, McCain writes, “The prospect of a “permanent majority” alliance on the Left that disturbs ZMan is, indeed, a cause for concern. But despair is not a strategy. If we wish to summon to our banner all men of goodwill, we must be able to persuade them that we have hope of a better future. How about this: Discredit the institutions of the decadent elite.”
This is where most normal white people have been trained to veer from the road to reality into the lotus fields of multicultural delusion. Reading that line, I expected Ben Shapiro to pop up on my screen, lecturing me about how a nation is defined by its ideology, rather than the complexion of the people in it. It is that mental block that so many white people have which prevents them from taking the next step in their chain of logic. If the Left is going to be an explicitly anti-white coalition, then our side needs to be….libertarians!
Now, in fairness to Robert Stacy McCain, I don’t know much about him. He could be /ourguy/, but working as a missionary in the land of the normie. He could be a super normie guy who is struggling with the changing world around him. He could have been bitten by the werewolf of race realism and is starting to turn. I have some recollection of him being quoted by gentry conservatives, but I could be mistaken.

Certainly, no one who knows me would accuse me of cavorting in “the lotus fields of multicultural delusion.” Perhaps the ZMan is unaware that I’ve been hate-listed by the SPLC since 2003 (i.e., about 10 years longer than he has been blogging) and that I’ve been working as a journalist since 1986. I was a Wrongthinker before Wrongthink was cool.

It is false, however, to call me a “white supremacist,” a term that the liberal accuser is never expected to define. The first time someone slapped that label on me, I was shocked. After all, what can “white supremacy” possibly mean in the 21st century? Does anyone suppose that the United States is going to re-institute Jim Crow? We’re going to go back to segregated water fountains, etc.? This is absurd, and if anyone on the Right actually believes this is possible, they need to stop huffing paint fumes. At the same time, however, it is not “white supremacy” to point out that the racial policies of the Left are failing, and all you have to do is look at the homicide toll in Chicago (469 so far this year, an average of 11.2 murders per week) to get a hint of how wrong liberals are.

What does ZMan mean when he links me to “gentry conservatives” (???) and invokes a “demographic reality” we must “accept”? This is a sort of rhetorical gesture one notices among those who dislike the way two-party politics is a football game played between the 40-yard lines. During the 1960s, a certain populist politician remarked that there was not “a dime’s worth of difference” between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon on the major issues of the day. Curiously enough, the radical New Left essentially agreed with Governor Wallace in that assessment, and threw a massive riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that helped doom Humphrey’s candidacy. However, by 1980, it was apparent that there was at least 11 cents worth of difference between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and this had world-historic consequences.

Reagan became president in a time of crisis — the economy was a wreck, and Carter’s foreign policy weakness had brought disaster around the world — but in his inaugural address he said something brave and wise: “I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.”

When someone invokes “demographic reality” in a way which seems to imply that our nation is hopelessly doomed to be swamped by an incoming tsunami of the “wretched refuse,” I feel insulted, as if the resourcefulness and intelligence of the American people are being underestimated. We have not yet exhausted our national reserve of courage and common sense, and even I am sometimes surprised to see that Americans are still capable of mustering their fighting spirit when they become aware of danger. What else can explain Donald Trump’s miraculous victory in 2016? Trump had the courage to put the immigration issue front and center in his campaign, to shrug off the attacks from his #NeverTrump Republican critics, and thereby attracted voters in states the GOP hadn’t won in more than 25 years.

 

 

 

Pennsylvania? Michigan? No one imagined that a Republican could win those states in the 21st century, and yet Trump did it. Why? Because Trump did not accept the status quo of bipartisan consensus on immigration, or on trade policy, or anything else, really. Trump was willing to think outside the box, to question the “Gang of Eight” consensus about amnesty for illegal aliens, to look at the various elements of post-Cold War internationalism and ask, “Why is this necessary?”

Trump disrupted a narrative that had been made to seem inevitable, and in doing so, has driven the Left into paroxysms of helpless rage. We do not know what the future holds, but we know that the possibilities are more hopeful than they were before Trump was elected. It is enormously frustrating to watch the slow-motion process of realignment, to see setbacks and blunders on a daily basis, and to wish that the talking heads on TV would speak about the issues that concern us with as much clarity as our favorite writers do. Yet we have reason to hope that “demographic reality” (whatever is meant by that phrase) will not proceed in the same direction and at the same speed that it was heading prior to Trump’s presidency. His success has shifted the Overton Window, however slightly, in such a way that it might be possible to halt our society’s descent into decadence. This is why liberals are so desperate.

Dems struggle to mobilize
Latino voters for midterms
— The Hill, Oct. 11

‘We’ve got a Latino problem’: Dems fret
midterm turnout in key House districts
— Politico, Oct. 13

Democrats have a Latino problem.
Can they fix it in time?
— NBC News, Oct. 14

Democrats need Latino voters —
but fret too many will skip the midterms
— CNN, Oct. 15

Weird. Last week, Democrats were wringing their hands about Latino turnout and this week — what a surprise! — several thousand people in Honduras decided to walk all the way to Texas. You’d have to be wandering through the “lotus fields of multiculturalism” to believe this was just another random coincidence. And that ain’t me, babe.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

 

Category: Election, Immigration, Racism

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