Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)
A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Here’s a thought, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (waitress/batender/sophmore class president) makes it easy to imagine: AOC is proof of the mistake of extending the vote to 16-year-olds. With the exception of age, what’s the difference between her and Molly Ringwald’s character in “Sixteen Candles”? Answer: not much.
RogerG
Did you hear what the governor (Washington State) and Dem presidential aspirant, Jay Inslee, had to say on Monday about the “deplorables”, aka Trump supporters? He called them people from “non-enlightened area[s]”. What are they “non-enlightened” about? Why of course, it’s the chic hobby horses of the beautiful people: something called “implicit bias”, the climate-change apocalypse, and Green New Deal Stalinism. More directly, he connected the word to the hidden bigotry of “implicit bias”, a form only perceived by mystics on the Left, like him. Interesting.
Bigotry exists in America. Dah! And it exists in many places, including the heads of Washington State governors. A bigot can have “non-enlightened” thoughts about more than skin color and mosques. Sometimes, it can be directed at people who like a good macro-brew, NASCAR, pickup trucks, and live in farm country. My guess about Inslee is that his blue-collar familiarity is limited to SNL skits – or at least he became that way.
Inslee and company don’t hesitate in slamming folks who don’t accept their poorly-thought-out ideas. If he can’t find racist actions in an opponent’s behavior, then he’ll do a whirlybird incantation on their opinions with the magical words “implicit bias”. Thus, any view that runs counter to three-quarters of the ladies on The View is contorted into the Left’s long list of isms and phobias.
Bigotry reigns supreme, and it is abundant in our cultural “commanding heights”, to borrow from Lenin (which the Dems are fond of doing anyway).
RogerG
I know. I know. The title engages a noun that has entered cliché territory. Still, it applies to Mueller’s tome after an expedition of the likes of Alexander the Great’s invasion of Persia to the ends of the world. In the end, after $40 million and almost 2 years, all Mueller got was indictments of a bunch of foreigners who’ll never face an American judge and questionable actions against bit players for after-the-fact infractions/crimes. The whole rectal exam was about “collusion” – even the “obstruction” barking – and, in the end, there’s no there, there.
The brouhaha proved an old axiom that if you intensely look long enough, you’ll find something – even if that something amounts to … nothing. Turn a building inspector loose on my property for 2 years and he’ll find “something”. How many violations of law did you commit after waking up (maybe before), knowingly or unknowingly? We live in a world of a straightjacket of laws and regulations.
Bottom line: no collusion, and the charge of “obstruction” is silly – so says both Barr AND Rosenstein. The point raised by Barr before his elevation to AG is dispositive. If there’s no crime, for what reason could Trump be obstructing? Key to obstruction is evil intent, something deep within a person’s mind. If there’s no outward sign of it, and if there’s no reason for doing it, why put credence in it?
The reason for the Dem death grip on “obstruction” is politics. The Dems want Trump’s scalp at any price. They’ll pour over the encyclopedia-length full report to stitch together an impeachment indictment. They’ll hang onto any language in the report to keep the issue alive. “Do not exonerate” (in the Mueller summary) is an example. “Exonerate” is a measly word when an investigator does not exonerate. Either they recommend charges or they don’t. To pass the buck to Barr as if there’s a hint of a case, in spite of the lack of evidence and sound Constitutional reasons to reject it, will stoke the Dems’ impeachment fire.
In the end, we went to the Mueller café and got … nothing. It’s the equivalent of an air-burger on an empty plate.
RogerG
A few decades is more than enough time to evolve a system to game – or cheat – the rules. With the so-called “undocumented”, it’s as simple as getting into the country by whatever means at hand and a network of fraudsters will greet you with jobs, crooked documents, sanctuary, and the open arms of sympathizers. Maybe even before long, the right to vote. For today’s haute couture mavens, it’s greasing the skids for their kids. Well, they got caught. A slew of blue-America’s finest were indicted in Boston federal district court on charges of bribery to advance their kids to the front of the line into America’s allegedly “elite” schools, ahead of any of the more meretricious hoi polloi. Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites.
(See here for more)
All the gnashing of teeth for the marginalized and oppressed is a mere pose that they mistake for virtue. They do this as they steamroll a tiger mom’s child or a young family’s struggles with two jobs to save enough for their kids’ education. It’s disgusting!
I understand the pull to cheat. They want the prestige of an elite school’s piece of paper (degree), not necessarily wisdom, for their kid. Chances are, the kid won’t get much enlightenment anyway. The curriculums are too corrupted with ideologized nonsense. It’s particularly true of the big-time schools with big-time sports and big-time endowments.
So, what are they cheating about? It must be all about how to get the piece of paper. No wonder we have kids flocking to socialism in spite of its history as a hot mess. Go figure.
RogerG
What’s the difference between Ilhan Omar’s (IO) comments about the Jews and the slurs of more famous vintage? Not much that I can tell. As a historian, she draws from the same scurrilous anti-Jewish tropes that would reach a crescendo of hate in National Socialism.
Here she is in comments before a microphone and in tweets:
“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
“It’s all about the Benjamins baby” – IO tweet, 2/10/2019.
“Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel. #Gaza #Palestine #Israel.” – IO tweet in 2012.
Take a look for yourself. The Nazi posters below were typical of the disgusting genre, and are emblematic of a growing sentiment in the Democratic Party.
However, Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie would find objectionable the negative aspersions directed at the USSR in one of the posters.
For these rising stars in the Dem firmament, they might agree with Lincoln Steffens’s assessment in a visit to the USSR (1921?), “I have seen the future, and it works”. The USSR is probably the “shining city on a hill” in the Bernie/AOC/Omar wing of the party.
RogerG
Case in point: Parenting Montana.
I begin with “crowding out”. Crowding out occurs when so much money flows to one thing that other things die on the vine. It happens in venues other than those based on mammon. Big, really big question: Has the state become so huge that it’s sucking the blood out of civil society? A vampire could work as a metaphor.
Nosferatu is phlebotomizing civil society. What is the victim, civil society? Our definitions are muddled. The UN’s World Health Organization tries to pigeonhole civil society away from business and government. To them, civil society is “collective action around shared interests, purposes and values”, and the third rail of life. Sorry, that’s way too cute. Sounds too much like something out of a snooze-inducing textbook. Actually, much business is born of the interactions of those “shared interests, purposes and values”. The same could be said of government, but civil society – and business, at least pre-Sanders – is voluntary. Government isn’t about voluntary. People in power have a quiver full of carrots and sticks to make you do something they want, and behind every carrot is a big fat hand holding that big fat stick. Isolate government to itself while civil society since business share too much DNA. Thus, in actuality, 2 rails exist.
Of side note, Ocasio-Cortez and her minions would like to gene-splice business and government together. That’s the socialist thing at work. They want 2 rails with this new hybrid Leviathan attacking the neck of a remaining and wilting civil society (in keeping with same metaphor).
This came to mind while streaming Pandora. An ad for “Parenting Montana” appeared between the music, another one of those dot-org’s. What the heck is that? Smelling a rat, yep, it’s government. Go to the website and you’ll find in the fine print a scat trail to a federal block grant program to the State of Montana, CFDA 93.959. Mind you, I find not much wrong with government helping to address the deeply troubled in our neighborhoods. The fly in the ointment is that it is today’s government doing it.
Our present government isn’t a better one than great grandpa’s; it’s just bigger, way bigger, and beset by the ACLU, dominated by a narrow demographic, and addicted to fashionable causes. The result is a mess.
I’m not sure what John Dewey and the rest of the Progressive leading lights of a century back, as pushers of big government, would think of today’s Leviathan. They envisioned a government of technocratic know-it-alls guiding us to the promised land. He probably couldn’t grasp the fact that the techs could lack wisdom and are infected with their own prejudices. What they, the Prog’s, produced is a government shaped around their experience of 16-plus years sitting in a classroom receiving curriculum. Yes, curriculum. For them, curriculum is the answer. There’s nothing that couldn’t be cured by more curriculum.
Follow the steps, procedures, and factoids and you’re supposed to be a better person. It is the chosen path for the representatives who made the law and the people who passed the civil service exam to get the thing up and running. Do you get the picture? The whole outlook is based on form (curriculum), not the substance (what’s in the curriculum).
Decamp to the website, ParentingMontana.org, and you’ll find curriculum and some referrals to nonprofits in government’s gravitational pull. Watch videos, read the how-to links, and pay a visit to a counselor steeped in the curriculum – more people with degrees and certificates as Dewey preached.
Issues develop not with curriculum per se. Curriculum is only a guide for what and how to teach. The person doing the teaching most assuredly is important, but even more important is the “what”, what are they teaching? The substance mentioned before. Sadly, the spiritual is absent from the syllabus. No room here for the faith. A Bible study is replaced by your state-sponsored counseling group led by your state-approved counselor. A referral to a church would be met by the hounds of the ACLU and years in court. The experience produces a vanilla curriculum without God.
It competes with the kind offered by your priest or pastor, but with a distinct advantage. Milton Friedman had it right when he said, “Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program”. Government draws strength from its access to everybody’s paycheck (the taxing power) and the Bureau of the Mint. And politics is the measure of success, not bottom-line metrics, so a program has life long after it became rancid (ag subsidies anyone?). Not exactly a level playing field here.
And government programs can be hip. Your local priest or pastor, in contrast, will be bound to God’s word, the Bible. Government is bound by politics, and politics is bound by money under the spell of any tight organization of commonly-oriented loud mouths. If something gets popular traction, you bet that the authorities-that-be will take it in. Consider gay marriage and transgender rights. Look at the pot craze sweeping red and blue states alike (see Forbes). The fashion-of-the-moment will find a place in government decrees on everything imaginable, including its “wisdom” on being a good mommy.
I saw the phenomena at work in a California high school. California being so chic in thought and feeling, and personally as a teacher and department chair (Social Studies), the staff and I were frequently told of a new mandate from the state to honor one of the many “marginalized” in our lessons. So, we went from unions to blacks to women to multiple ethnics to LGBTQ in its many variations, and back again. Remember, the more time devoted to balkanized America, the less time for the Constitution, the Civil War, Supply/Demand, the Great Depression, etc. “Crowding out” at work before your munchkins. Welcome to politics flummoxing your kid’s school.
It’s no less true for “Parenting Montana”. Scroll through the links. Since many problems in the home can be traced to the desire for a high, a good part of the guidance will be consumed with booze and drug abuse. Going to the links, I couldn’t find any mention of marijuana. I found heroin, meth, alcohol, but no “mary jane”. The words “abuse” and “reefer”, and its many equivalents, weren’t connected. Could it be that marijuana has a constituency? It’s fashionable whereas shooting up in a public bathroom isn’t.
But think about it: today’s THC-rich cannabis isn’t the stuff wafting through a 60’s Grateful Dead concert. It’s jam-packed with maybe 3x’s more (though potheads hotly dispute the figure). Hey, more bang for the buck, and with the “bang” comes all kinds of things attaching to your lungs as if you were lighting up a Marlborough (according to the American Lung Association). Even more disturbing are the neurological and cognitive effects (see here). It helps in germinating mental illness in the form of multiple psychoses like schizophrenia (see here). The junk should not be given a free pass as “Parenting Montana” does.
But what are you going to do when getting high becomes “medical” … and fashionable?
I can only imagine the kinds of mischief that a hotbed of a lefty dreamscape like California can put the money to. “Parenting” could be combined with “Heather Has Two Mommies” and how to teach your child to share a bathroom with someone of divergent genitalia. The possibilities are endless. If government is your mommy, you just found another way to inject politics into the family and the rest of civil society. And then is civil society all that civil? It certainly is more political. Soon, we may be down to only one rail: government. Sanders, AOC, and Marx would be smiling.
RogerG
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Who said this? Bernie Sanders? AOC in one of her Twitter fits? Any of our “woke” college activists rampaging at a Charles Murray presentation? Good guesses, but wrong. The author is Karl Marx in his “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”.
In one sense, though, it sounds like the kind of thing they would say (maybe not AOC because that would ask too much of her facile understanding). And it sounds like the kind of thing rattling the synapses of the vast majority of those manning our broadcast studios, newsrooms, and much of the publishing industry. It’s a view of the world smothering the mental faculties of many in the chattering classes, whether chattering with the mouth or a word processor.
The notion has infected much of what we read, watch, and learn in our classrooms. It’s the idea that a hidden structure of oppression exists to ensnare us no matter what we do. For Marx, the idea justified a complete revolution in the individual’s mind to the family to social relations to government. Everything was to be managed, and that means big, really big government. Sounds like the Green New Deal?
I’m reminded of Marx’s influence, now, almost every time I pick up my National Geographic Magazine (NGM). The magazine reads like a series of op-eds in The Daily Worker. A common tactic in its articles is to quote opinionated academics to buttress an opinion. Add some stats and a few graphs, and, voilà, an opinion becomes “science”. Marx also liked to say that his opinions were “science”.
Race is a field rich with possibilities for exploitation by those inclined to see the world as Marx did. For instance, NGM’s April 2018 issue, “Black and White”, blathered about race as some “social construct” while veering off into Confederate statues and racial profiling. The opinions of opinionated profs were replete in the issue’s articles. The confusion of opinions with science has become a hallmark for the magazine, just like Marx.
Let’s examine the magazine’s treatment of racial profiling. There’s more to the story than “racist” cops, but you wouldn’t know it from the piece. Absent from the author’s angle on the issue is any recognition of something called “context” – context as in any other considerations. What about the uneven distribution of chaos in the home, the uneven distribution of violent crime on the streets, the war on drugs, the debilitating effects of made-in-America welfare, other issues like the epidemic of illegal immigration to the tune of an accumulated 11 million to 21 million “undocumented” (Who knows?), and the attendant presence of the Sureños/Norteños/MS-13 and Crips/Bloods? Circumstances exist beyond the hidden, unconscious prejudices of a police officer and the Man.
An interesting aside that’s never been adequately explained by the race hustlers: There was a time when NYC black cabbies would avoid fares from young black males. In advertising, it’s called branding. Past experience can brand an entire demographic, even among black cabbies tired of being crime victims by the very same demographic. I would think that something else is at work other than racism (hidden or otherwise) against blacks by black cab drivers.
Instead, NGM and its stable of writers traipse off into the fantasy of Marx’s world. Evil has always resided in the souls of our species. Racism and general mayhem have always been there. Marx’s non-stop revolution won’t change that fact. An ever-bigger government to police human thought and conscience won’t either. A healthy civil society – the very thing that the Left is systematically dismantling – with appropriate public sanctions is the answer.
Adopting Marx is a descent into the snake pit of totalitarian control. Bad, very bad.
RogerG
I’m loathe to admit this, but a small dose of maturity was administered by the Senator to politicized youngins, a few older than 18 and most appear to be around 12 (watch the video below). All mouthed lefty boilerplate in a visit to Feinstein’s office that couldn’t survive a serious high school debate.
It’s difficult to watch adults exploiting a group of tweens. They were members of the Sunrise Movement whose purpose is to stampede the country into enacting the Green New Deal and its Soviet-style central planning by hiding behind kids.
The title’s “kinda” part has to do with appearances, which can be deceiving. Today’s Democrats are in favor of more central planning. Yet, the presence of the Markey/Sanders/AOC Green New Deal makes the other Dems appear moderate. The fact is, the whole party has lurched left, and to the left means in the direction of the Socialist International. Some, like the Green New Deal sponsors, are just in a hurry to get there; others want to take a little longer and slower route to the same destination.
It’s much like the difference between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks of days of yore. They both wanted socialism. It’s just that the M’s were content with a more peaceful march to utopia while the B’s wanted it now, preferably with guns. The “M” and “B” thing is playing out in the office of Sen. Diane Feinstein and Democratic Party congressional caucus. Do you want your socialism straight (Bernie/AOC style) or diluted (Feinstein style)?
RogerG
Candidate Obama in 2008 came out with this zinger of condescension about folks in the hinterlands: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”. It’s as if the blue-collar dwellers outside the east and west coast soirees of the well-off are wallowing in falsehoods. Really, the urban fashionistas believe this drivel. Though, the pot-and-kettle thing keeps passing through my head. The self-proclaimed haute couture in look and thought have their own bigoted, ignorant fictions bouncing in their craniums. Legends abound in Appalachia and among the coastal with-it.
Widespread oppression of the “marginalized” – a special designation awarded to any group organized and loud enough – is gospel among the beautiful people. These people haven’t left the world of the “Mississippi Burning” script. To them, the “oppressed” are abused up and down the US interstate system. Big journalism acts as the modern Hesiod of these urban legends. Mythology isn’t an ancient phenomenon. It’s alive and well among attendees at Dem Party fundraisers.
But wiping egg off the faces of urban America’s “better” people is developing into a habit. Jussie Smollet is one among many rotten egg producers. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Maxine Waters, the functionaries at MSNBC, the networks, Hollywood, WaPo (The Washington post), NYT, et al – the list is getting too long – can’t wait to jump at the bait. They w-a-n-t to believe the myth is true. The only problem is that the playing field is littered with lies.
Let me count the ways. Be prepared, the list is long.
(1) In November 2016, a Muslim woman at U. of Michigan caterwauled that a 20-something white male threatened to burn her if she didn’t remove her hijab. The WaPo was hoaxed. Hoax #1.
(2) Taylor Volk, a bisexual student at North Park U., said she was targeted with hateful notes and emails shortly after Trump’s election victory. Hoax #2.
(3) In, once again, Nov. 2016, Ashley Boyer of Philadelphia blamed that staple of these fibs – white/male/Trump supporter – for harassing her with a gun and getting rid of the “n’s”. The charge went viral only to be debunked by police. Hoax #3.
(4) An 18-year-old Muslim woman in Louisiana in Nov. 2016 (Getting the idea?) charged white men for robbing her and yelling racial slurs. The only problem: it wasn’t true because she said so. Hoax #4.
(5) In May of 2017, racial slurs, anti-gay insults, and Nazi references were spray painted on a church by, as it turned out, the church’s own organist. The WaPo ended up cleaning its face of egg. Hoax #5.
(6) An 18-year-old Muslim woman, Yasmin Seweid, of NYC in Dec. 2016 declared that she was assaulted by drunken white Trump supporters in the subway. She confessed. Hoax #6.
(7) Dec. 2016: David Williams of Denton, Texas, torched his own car and spray painted “n’ lovers” on his garage. A police investigation exposed the scheme as a hoax, but not before David and his wife garnered $5,000 from a GoFundMe page. Hoax #9.
(8) A Muslim student at Beliot College in Feb. 2017 found anti-Muslim smears on his dorm room door. He did it according to the Beliot police chief. Hoax #8.
(9) Synagogues and Jewish schools were the subject of bomb threats in March 2017. Surprise, the peril was linked to Trump. Well, a US-Israeli man was arrested. Wait, the story gets richer. An ex-reporter with The Intercept, Juan Thompson, kept the pot boiling with new threats to Jewish community centers. He would be indicted shortly thereafter. Hoax #9.
(10) In May 2017, racist, anti-black notes appeared at St. Olaf College. The WaPo had to walk back their story after a black student was identified as responsible for the slurs. Hoax #10.
(11) Racist messages – “Go home n***er” – were discovered at the Air Force Academy’s prep school. Sadly for the hate-crime posse, one of the targeted black students was the author. Hoax #11.
(12) A Kansas State University student reported to police racist graffiti on his car in November 2017. Later he admitted to doing it himself. Hoax #12.
(13) Racist graffiti is all the rage with hoaxers. In Nov. 2017, racist graffiti was discovered on the mirror in a Missouri high school. He prank was conducted by a “non-white” enrollee. Hoax #13.
(14) A Texas waiter at an Odessa steak house Facebooked in Dec. 2018 a racist slur on a napkin, and it went viral … of course. The only problem: The waiter admitted to faking it. Hoax #14.
(15) The Covington Catholic High School episode of Jan. 2019 was a disgrace. The WaPo and the Detroit Free Press were all over the story with an account of an elderly Native American being abused by prep-school white boys in MAGA hats. The story as it ran in the media – to put it mildly – was misleading. The Black Hebrew Israelites taunted the kids with vile insults and Nathan Philips (the Native American activist) provoked them by incessantly chanting and pounding his drum in their faces. Hoax #15.
(16) A spate of anti-Semitic vandalism hit NYC in Nov. 2018. It turned out that the culprit was a Democratic party activist and former City Hall intern, not a follower of Alex Jones. Hoax #16.
(17) Donald Trump was blamed for the arson of a black church in Greenville, Miss., back in Nov. 2016. The WaPo must have been embarrassed when a fellow black congregant was fingered as responsible. Hoax #17.
(Thanks to the Daily Caller for the list.)
Why the mad rush to believe the unbelievable? The answer might be found in the need to validate a pre-recorded fable of the world. Traditional journalistic skepticism be damned. It’s full-speed-ahead toward a much too deeply rooted folklore in our commercial and media centers, aka big cities. Big media has been caught in too many falsehoods. Their credibility is shot. If they can’t deliver reliable news and information, what can they serve up?
A void exists to be filled by the rhetorical burps of Twitter and Facebook and the retinue of “fact checkers”, and they are linked in a miasma of interrelationships. Facebook, for instance, uses Snopes.com to filter “fake news” and hate speech. Snopes is a mess, if court documents in the divorce of the married co-founders is any indication. Former candidates for political office (on a “dump Bush” platform), prostitutes, vixens with a “dome” complex on pot, and no functioning standards of objectivity are rampant (reported by Forbes and The Daily Mail). A fact-checking degree is offered at some colleges but that’s no guarantee. Naïve and left-leaning 21-year-olds aren’t about to produce the gospel.
What we are left with is each one of us running to our corners with our personal “truth”, emotional explosions when faced with pushback, no deliberation, and a mountain of urban legends that are held in a death grip like a Bible in a foxhole.
RogerG
Americans, a noxious notion has seeped into your kid’s school curriculum. It’s called “world citizen”. It’s happening to your kids, prep school to inner-city.
As a retired teacher of 30 years, I was perplexed. Is this an attempt to erase borders or proclaim allegiance to the UN or both? Anyway, the original concept of citizenship may go the way of plastic straws. The modus operandi is to fiddle with the minds of the youngins and tie the project’s prospects to the fortunes of the Democratic Party.
These Democrats aren’t kidding. They are actively trying to erase the border as they erase the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, and even legal and illegal resident. The cultural appropriator Beto (as in Robert O’Rourke) absconded with Reagan’s old line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, absent the reference to Gorbachev. 12 Dem-heavy states and DC already are issuing driver’s licenses to people whose presence in the country is in violation of our laws, thus creating havoc with motor-voter laws.
That bastion of insanity, California, has taken the chant of “healthcare for all” literally to mean “all”, as in any of the world’s denizens who can get here. Oh, Bernie in his 2016 concoction of the concept tried to stop migrants from receiving the benefits if they enter for that reason. The restriction is meaningless. How could it be enforced without a mind-reading machine? Sander’s 2017 version, the one tucked to the bosom of Dem candidates seeking to oust Trump, ended the masquerade. “Residents” are eligible for the freebie; the adjectives “legal” and “illegal” are absent.
Gillibrand goes further than the cultural appropriator with calls to dismantle ICE and the wall. She’s in good company with many in the Dem congressional caucus. And once these foreign citizens get here, it’s now wrong to count them as “non-citizens”, as per Manhattan Federal District Court Judge Jessie M. Furman (Obama appointee). Not only are we not to stop the citizens of other countries from entering but we are to be kept in the dark about how many are here.
“Foreign-born” is the approved moniker for everyone born on foreign soil and taking up stakes here. If they are non-citizens – which we can’t tell thanks to Judge Jessie – they are still citizens, citizens of another country. That makes for an interesting situation when voting rights for foreign citizens in the US gets traction among the Dem rank-and-file. Other countries’ citizens get to help choose what happens to US citizens. Soon, with the erasure of the border, every US election will require shipping ballots to Moscow, Mexico City, Managua, Capetown, etc., etc. With the Dems, what’s in a border anyway?
Voting rights is making the rounds among Dem strongholds in the US. Stacey Abrams (failed Dem candidate for Georgia governor) announced her support for the craziness in local elections. SF, of course, and some Maryland localities have already broken the ice (not ICE). They excuse the folderol with cries that non-citizens – legal or illegal (which we can’t tell thanks to Judge Jessie) – pay taxes. In tax-happy cities and states, yes, they pay some exactions. The legal ones pay but don’t have to mess around with jury duty and draft registration. Illegals ditto, but they don’t pay Social Security taxes and the like, unless they commit document fraud – which many have since that’s the only way for them to get paid. Advantages abound for those keeping their foreign citizenship. They avoid the flip side of rights: responsibilities.
Today’s Dem Party is clearly out to blur the line between citizen and non-citizen. And why not? It’s a rich vein of votes. It works to elect Democrats. In 50 Dem congressional districts, the foreign-born comprise more than 20% of the population (only 11 Republican districts meet the standard). Sandy Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was elected in a 25% foreign-born locale (almost 50% Hispanic). In-migration and out-migration combine to bend the partisan balance beam of a neighborhood.
If we take the words of the donkey party’s candidates at face value – And how could we take them otherwise? – what’s the point of being a citizen? Simply renting on American soil is enough to get all the bennies of the nanny state, condones massive document fraud, avoids certain inconvenient responsibilities of citizenship, and is a qualification for the franchise. For all practical purposes, naturalization is irrelevant. Now, that’s one way to repeal Art. 1, Sec. 8, Cl. 4 (naturalization power) of the Constitution.
Say bye, bye to the border. And isn’t that the point?
RogerG
* Thanks for the contributions of Howard Husock of “City Journal” and Matthew Continetti of “National Review”.