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Recent News
Guess What?—Schumer-Rubio Ignores Collision Course Between Affirmative Action And Immigration
The Schumer-Rubio Amnesty/ Immigration Surge Bill emerged from the Senate Judiciary committee May 21st. The full Senate will consider a motion to vote on the bill (after having first, of course, pondered a motion to vote on the motion to vote) next Monday, June 10th.
So far as I can ascertain, neither the bill nor the 161 amendments the committee considered contained the phrase “Affirmative Action.” This is a pity, as the intersection of these two issues—immigration and Affirmative Action—is a place where current social policy shows itself at its most flagrantly illogical.
For immigration patriots, Affirmative Action is a good point of leverage: unpopular in itself, and doubly outrageous as affected by immigration—Affirmative Action is a zero-sum game, and allowing immigrants to benefit from it while simultaneously increasing their numbers inevitably dispossesses white Americans even faster. This issue was raised by the historian Hugh Graham, in Collision Course, as long ago as 2002.
With a Supreme Court decision on the Fisher case due any time now, coinciding with the Gang of Eight bill, that zone of intersection between the two issues is in the spotlight. This is a good time to brush up on Affirmative Action.
Probably most Americans who accept Affirmative Action assume that it still has its original purpose: to compensate American blacks for their ancestors’ status as slaves or second-class citizens. Yet:
Blacks of West Indian or African parentage are greatly overrepresented at the more competitive colleges compared to all blacks. At the Ivy League schools represented in the NLSF survey blacks with parents born abroad—mostly those from West Indian and African backgrounds—constitute 40 percent of all black students, an enormous overrepresentation considering the small percentage (approximately 13 percent) such students represent in the total black student age population in America . . . Immigrant-origin blacks compete with native-origin blacks for affirmative-action slots in elite universities, a development some native blacks find objectionable.
That is from Russell Nieli’s recent book on Affirmative Action, Wounds That Will Not Heal.
Nieli, who teaches politics at Princeton University, lays into his subject with gusto, declaring in his introduction that
40+ years of racial preference policies [have] had overwhelmingly negative consequences...Affirmative Action has been a disaster on multiple levels.
Nieli works his way painstakingly through all those levels, though concentrating almost exclusively on college admissions. Quotes here are from his book.
• Affirmative Action fortifies prejudice
Affirmative-action role models are not genuine and are soon recognized as such by all concerned. The role actually modeled by Affirmative Action recipients is that of a patronized black, Hispanic, or female who is of inferior qualifications...and who would not have gotten to where he or she is except for the existence of an official policy of government favoritism...
Resentments inevitably abound, especially among white and Asian students who remember disappointed high school friends and rejected applicants of their own race, some of whom were much better qualified than many of the black and Hispanic students they meet on campus.
(Resentments of that kind, while surely easy for most people to understand, have baffled at least one Supreme Court Justice.)
• Affirmative Action, with its associated rewards and resentments, strengthens ethnic tribalism, which “is a principle of social chaos and, ultimately, a formula for civil war.”
• Fundamental American norms of fairness and reciprocity are violated by Affirmative Action:
White people, even very bigoted ones, can accept the advancement
The Fulford File: Why No Dillingham Commission Before Gangsters’ Amnesty/ Immigration Surge Bill?
Dr. Thomas Sowell referred in his latest column [Abstract Immigrants, June 4, 2013] to the Dillingham Commission—technically the United States. Immigration Commission, which sat from 1907-1910 to examine the state of immigration to the US during what we think of as the Ellis Island or “Melting Pot” era. He wrote:
A hundred years ago, the immigration controversies of that era were discussed in the context of innumerable facts about particular immigrant groups. Many of those facts were published in a huge, multi-volume 1911 study by a commission headed by Senator William P. Dillingham.
That and other studies of the time presented hard data on such things as which groups' children were doing well in school and which were not; which groups had high crime rates or high rates of alcoholism, and which groups were over-represented among people living on the dole. [VDARE.com Links added]
Sowell, the author Migrations and Cultures: A World View, probably knows more about the history of immigration than anyone in the United States Senate.
The Dillingham Commission’s reports (there are 41 volumes) are now online, scanned from the copies in the New York Library, and uploaded to Archive.org.
Here’s a list:
- [v. 1-2] Abstracts of reports of the Immigration Commission.
- [v. 3] Statistical review of immigration, 1820-1910.
- [v. 4] Emigration conditions in Europe.
- [v. 5] Dictionary of races of peoples.
- [v. 6-25] Immigrants in industries.
- [v.26-27] Immigrants in cities.
- [v.28] Occupations of the first and second generation of immigrants in the United States. Fecundity of immigrant women.
- [v.29-33] The children of immigrants in schools.
- [v. 34-35] Immigrants as charity seekers.
- [v. 36] Immigration and crime.
- [v. 37] Steerage conditions. Importation and harboring of women for immoral purposes. Immigrant homes and aid societies. Immigrant banks.
- [v. 38] Changes in bodily form of descendants of immigrants.
- [v. 39] Federal immigration legislation. Digest of immigration decisions. Steerage legislation, 1819-1908. State immigration and alien law.
- [v. 40] The immigration situation in other countries.
- [v. 41] Statements and recommendations submitted by societies and organizations interested in the subject of immigration
They’re all there, though I haven’t added links to every one. If you download the PDF, you can read them on your iPad, but there are also plain text versions which are easier to search. (For example, v. 36, Immigration and crime , quotes The Problem of the Black Hand , by Arthur Woods, McClure’s Magazine, May 1909. I found that article by searching the plain text for the words “Black Hand”—an old way of saying “Mafia.”).
Sowell continued:
Such data and such differences still exist today.
WaPo Compares Senator Sessions To George Wallace—He Must Be Doing Something Right!
See also: Senator Jeff Sessions: “The Best We’ve Got.”
Another day, another Main Stream Media attack on Senator Jeff Sessions—who continued to emerge as the one bright light of patriotic leadership as the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the vile Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill out of committee May 21 while spectators chanted "Si Se Puede" ("yes we can" invade successfully), with the votes of all Democrats plus Republicans Lindsey Graham, Jeff Flake and Orrin Hatch, the last two of whom shamelessly ran as border hawks in 2012. The bill will reportedly reach the Senate floor June 10.
Today’s attack: Jeff Sessions Wants to Single-Handedly Crush Immigration Reform by Jordan Fabian, ABCnews.com, June 3 2013). It contains this ludicrous complaint:
[Critics] accuse Sessions of stretching the facts to play to the fears of poor and lower-middle class voters in Alabama who worry that a wave of immigrants could hurt them economically.
"He is playing to a segment of Alabama society that is scared," said Helen Hamilton Rivas,[Email her] an immigrant-rights advocate who has lived in Alabama since 1980. "Fear drives a lot of the anti-immigrant stuff…
In fact, of course, poor and lower-middle class Alabamians have every reason to fear intensified workplace competition—as liberals like Ted Rall, Bernie Sanders, and John Judis, are now admitting.
Inadvertently revealing the ethnic animosity driving the immigration enthusiasts’ agenda, ABC reported:
Immigrant advocates like [founder and executive director of “America's Voice” Frank] Sharry also like to refer to the Alabamian by his full name—Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III—to conjure up an image of a Confederate general leading the charge.
"We can no longer overtly be tough on African-Americans, but we can overtly be tough on Latinos because we can hide behind the rule of law argument," is how Sharry summed up Sessions' immigration views.
Typically, the liberal mind refuses to notice that American blacks are the most harmed by mass immigration of cheapie low-skill foreigners.
The Senator from Alabama was resolute and calm throughout the two-day marathon Judiciary Committee markup. He was not dissuaded by Chairman Patrick Leahy's snarky asides about his many amendments. Sessions’ strategy: to highlight the faults of the legislation and make good-faith attempts to improve it. He stood for Americans who need to have jobs, whose rights are being shoved aside to make way for 30 million cheap new foreign workers in the next decade.
The markup looked like normal order on the surface, but the Gangsters met in advance to decide which tiny changes they would allow. Treason Lobby flack Frank Sharry was cheered by the solidarity of the Open-Borders group, gloating, "The Gang of Eight has . . . accepted a number of Republican amendments, but none of them undermine the core elements of the bill."
But Sessions' amendments and explanations have
Time to Stop Feeding the Chinese Tiger?
As America grew in the 1800s from a republic of a few millions, whose frontier stopped at the Mississippi, into a world power, there were constant collisions with the world's greatest empire.
Census Bureau Refutes “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” Mantra—Obama Won Because Of Old Black Ladies (And Turned-Off Whites)
Ever since last November’s election, we’ve been hearing that Hispanics comprised a record 10 percent of the vote—which therefore obliges Republican Congressmen to pass “comprehensive immigration reform” a.k.a the Schumer-Rubio Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill RIGHT NOW.
For example:
National exit polls showed that 10 percent of the electorate was Hispanic, compared with 9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2004. … A growing perception of hostility toward illegal immigrants by Republican candidates is driving many Latinos to the polls.
[Growing share of Hispanic voters helped push Obama to victory, By Donna St. George and Brady Dennis, Washington Post, November 7, 2012]
But what if these nice, round turnout numbers provided by the Edison exit poll company weren’t true? What if the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” clamor is based on exit poll error?
What if in 2012 the Sleeping Giant of the Latino Vote didn’t actually awake—but instead rolled over and started a new siesta?
In short, what if the Main Stream Media exaggerated the Hispanic share of the 2012 vote by a factor of almost 20 percent?
Well, we now have the numbers. We now know that the suppositions behind these awkward questions are true.
After every national election, the Census Bureau conducts a massive survey of voter turnout. Then it bureaucratically mulls over the results for months—while the conventional wisdom congeals around whatever slapdash numbers the exit poll firm emitted in the early going.
In contrast to the Census Bureau survey, though, exit polls aren’t designed to measure turnout. Heck, exit polls aren’t even very good at figuring out who won the election—just ask President John F. Kerry.
Exit polls can’t be based on the random samples that would be needed to measure turnout accurately, because the exit poll company has to bake a forecast of the electorate’s demographics into its plan of which precincts to send workers to cover. Not surprisingly, it tends to get back the results it anticipated.
Moreover, Hispanics are both of interest to sponsors and difficult to survey (they can need Spanish-speaking pollsters). So their needs are typically given more weight in planning the exit poll. The result: national exit polls have overstated the Hispanic share of the vote at least since 2000.
Now, finally, on May 9, the Current Population Survey division of the Census Bureau has issued its turnout report, scintillatingly titledThe Diversifying Electorate—Voting Rates by Race and Hispanic Origin in 2012 (and Other Recent Elections)[PDF]
Despite the title, it makes compelling reading.
It turns out that the official best estimate of the Latino share of 2012 voters isn’t 10 percent—but merely 8.4 percent:
So the standard story you’ve been hearing in the MSM for almost seven months is indeed inflated by 19 percent.
But what can you expect … because the conventional wisdom as embodied in that Washington Post story has been exaggerated for, roughly, ever.
Hispanics didn’t account for 9 percent of the 2008 electorate, but 7.4 percent. And in 2004, they weren’t 8 percent, but 6.0 percent. Way back in 2000, the exit poll claimed that Hispanics made up 7 percent, but the real number turned out to be 5.4 percent, as I reported for UPI on July 24, 2001. [Mexican-American Vote Smaller than Many Think]
But who did turn out in 2012 to drive Obama to victory? Who was the fresh new face of the American electorate in 2012?
Old black ladies.
According to the Census survey,
Political Correctness At Elite Law Schools: It’s Not The Professors, It’s The Students—Which Is Why You Should Give To VDARE.com!
Law School Wars: Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow [Email her] recently gave a written statement to a Federalist Society conference on Intellectual Diversity in which, after repeating some trite quotes from John Stuart Mill, she wrote that Harvard aims to promote—
…civil and curious engagement across all kinds of divides—be they defined by race, region, class, language, political party, gender, ideology, or other signifiers of difference. Modeling and cultivating honest and engaged discussion across lines of difference is not only our best practice. It is our commitment to make good on the privileges that the Harvard Law School enjoys, reflects, and bestows.
[Nick Rosenkranz, Harvard Federalist Society Conference: Intellectual Diversity and the Legal Academy, Volokh Conspiracy, April 10, 2013]
Significantly, Harvard Federalist Society president Joel Alicea responded in the Washington Times [The academy’s war on free thinking: U.S. law schools treat diversity of news [views?] as a ‘thoughtcrime’, May 27, 2013]. He repeats much what Minow says, though he finds a different John Stuart Mill quote. But he suggests that the real problem that Minow does not address is that most elite law schools have overwhelmingly liberal faculty
But neither Minow nor Alicea mentioned the most outrageous attack on “free thinking” at Harvard Law, which occurred just three years ago—when the Harvard Federalist Society was AWOL.
In 2010 a Harvard Law student wrote a private e-mail to a friend. She said:
I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances.
This student was at the top of her class at Harvard. She had secured a clerkship with 9th Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski.
(With rare exceptions, Supreme Court justices do not hire clerks who have not previously clerked at the federal circuit level. Accordingly, the most competitive clerkships in the country are for “feeder judges” whose clerks often go on to the Supreme Court. Kozinski is one of the top five feeder judges in the country.
(The HLS student’s name is well known, but I am not mentioning it here
Europe’s Immigration Crises Point To America’s Future
While no one is looking, Europe is poised to re-enter History. The Main Stream Media is squabbling about homosexuality, Islam, and unemployment, but at the heart of the Traditionalist specter haunting Europe is the core issue—immigration.
On May 21, 2013, the distinguished French historian and traditionalist activist Dominique Venner committed suicide in the Cathedral de Notre Dame in Paris, occupied France. The media quickly declared that Venner was a fanatical Catholic who had killed himself in order to protest gay marriage, a narrative a typical Huffington Post reader could understand and comfortably denounce. See for example Right-wing historian shoots himself in Paris's Notre Dame cathedral 'in protest at gay marriage', Daily Mail, May 21, 2013 and Notre Dame Suicide: Far-Right Activist Dominique Venner Reported To Have Shot Himself, Huffington Post, May 21, 2013
In actuality, Venner was a pagan in the mode of Alain de Benoist, a “New Right” intellectual who bemoaned Europe's lack of an “identitarian” religion and referred to himself as a “French-speaking European.” He saw his death was neither a desecration nor gesture of reactionary self-indulgence but a kind of ritual, an act of supreme self-affirmation and a “[rebellion] against the crime of the replacement of our people.” Notre Dame's importance was not that it was a cathedral, but that it was that it was a center of an “immemorial” and uniquely European spirituality.
Left wing activists chortled at the death of a hated old white man and “fascist.”[The Fascist History Behind Dominique Venner’s Suicide at Notre Dame, by David Sessions, Daily Beast, May 23, 2013]
The uniquely vile feminist activists of FEMEN openly celebrated his death with a topless protest at the church. Of course, just as they misread Venner's religion, they misread his intent. Homosexual “marriage” in France, is, as Venner stated, a red herring. Within decades, the new Islamic population the Republic seems determined to import will do more to homosexuals then just put them in the closet.
The issue is not gay marriage. It's the French state's war on the French nation. The massive street protests rocking the French Republic are not about stopping homosexuality, but about
The Richwine Atrocity: How Come Only The Left Retrieves Its Wounded?
I have an unusual personal perspective on the Jason Richwine atrocity. William F. Buckley's breakthrough book was his first, God and Man at Yale. In the early 1950s, he scoured Manhattan for a publisher, without success. This caused him to go far afield and contact a small Midwestern house then located in a walk-up office in a Chicago suburb. The publisher was my uncle, Henry Regnery.
And the rest is history—save for two incidents.
The book not only made Buckley's reputation but also certainly added luster to my uncle's struggling firm. However, the Henry Regnery Co. suffered an offsetting financial blow when, at the behest of Mortimer Adler, the contract to publish the Great Books series for the University of Chicago was withdrawn because of the Buckley book.
Regnery issued Buckley's next book, McCarthy and His Enemies, co-authored with his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell. But there would be no hat trick. By then, Buckley was a bankable literary commodity and could cut a better deal with an established New York house. So he did.
My uncle was a kinder sort than I am, and I remember him recounting the break without rancor and more the kind of bemusement that implied "that's just Bill…”
I had a darker take on Buckley’s selfishness and treachery, which was borne out by subsequent events. But unfortunately, Buckley’s traits are now dominant in what VDARE.com calls “Conservatism Inc.” or the “Respectable Right.” In this respect, perhaps Buckley was indeed, as we are incessantly told, “the father of modern conservatism.”
Dr. Richwine has been defended by my friends who inhabit the guerilla outposts of the Dissident Right. They are right to blast Richwine's Cultural Marxist oppressors, but they overlook an important asymmetry between the two sides. The Left may savagely attack their perceived enemies, but they consistently stay loyal to one another. As the saying goes, they retrieve their wounded. The Right, on the other hand, is filled with people who will, out of cowardice or cynicism, betray their colleagues when the going gets tough.
"No Enemies To The Left" was not an idle promise restricted to the French Left. Leftists hardly ever abandon a comrade on the field of battle. The association between Barack Obama and the admitted terrorists Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn has never been disavowed by the President. The inflammatory positions held by his long-time Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright have been spun into irrelevancy.
By comparison, those on the other side of the aisle are forever slashing at their right flank.
Buckley had perhaps the most notches on his quill. The excommunication of Robert Welch
Memo From Middle America | More On The Romeike Case—What’s Wrong With Wanting White Immigrants?
This picture of Hannelore and Damaris Romeike was used by Slate’s Sally Kohn to highlight the unbearable whiteness of the Romeikes.
VDARE.COM readers know that our country’s refugee/asylum policy is a disaster.
For example, the Boston bombings would never have occurred if the Chechen/Avar Tsarnaevs had not been given asylum here. The fact that Tamerlan and the parents later returned to Russia – the country they were supposedly fleeing – indicates what a fraud it was. And, as Steve Sailer has pointed out recently, the Tsarnaevs weren’t the only ones.
(See Michelle Malkin’s article America's Insane Asylum for Jihadists, Hustlers and Frauds for even more examples).
Janet Napolitano, however, assures us that our asylum screening process is A-OK--just like she claims the border is secure and the system worked to stop the underwear bomber.
But even though there is room for fraudulent refugees like the Tsarnaev family, and room for tens of millions of illegal aliens and their families, according to Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, there is no room for a family of white German evangelical homeschoolers.
Back in March, I reported on the predicament of music teachers Uwe and Hannalore Romeike, who fled Germany in 2008 due to government harassment they received for home schooling their children. They had been fined and were facing the possibility of losing custody of their children. (They now have six, with another on the way). The Romeikes settled in Tennessee and applied for asylum.
According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, (USCIS),
Refugee status or asylum may be granted to people who have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, and/or membership in a particular social group or political opinion. ..Refugees are generally people outside of their country who are unable or unwilling to return home because they fear serious harm. …You may apply for asylum in the United States regardless of your country of origin or your current immigration status…. Refugees & Asylum USCIS
The Romeikes applied for asylum status and received it in 2010 (
Peter Brimelow's WND Op-ED: Amnesty Means More Plutocrat Plundering
[Originally published on WND, May 20, 2013. Updated for VDARE.com with more links.]
Washington has (another) dirty secret: Nobody read, or is going to read, the Heritage Foundation’s report of the net fiscal impact of the Gang of Eight’s proposed illegal-immigrant amnesty.
(The report concluded the impact will be $6.3 trillion over 50 years—or, to put it another way, all by itself amnesty will bump up government spending by a percentage point or two of Gross Domestic Product every year).
It’s not the report’s fault. It’s beautifully written, logically compelling and marshals a lot of numbers with great skill. (I speak as a veteran of 40 years in financial journalism.)
And, of course, professional politicians do tend to be innumerate lawyers with ADD personalities, incapable of sitting still, congenitally committed to schmoozing rather than studying.
But the real reason the report isn’t being read: Everyone has already made up their minds.
In the case of the patriot opponents of amnesty, this is actually laudable. They have grasped the great truth enunciated by the late, great free-market economist Milton Friedman: “It’s just obvious that you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”
In a welfare state—more properly a “transfer state,” because taxpayers pay for a lot besides welfare, notably public education (averaging over $12,000 per pupil annually), health care, etc.—it’s inevitable that most people are net fiscal burdens. They are all supported by the relatively small proportion of higher-earning, usually highly educated taxpayers.
An estimated half of the illegal aliens present in the U.S. don’t have high school degrees. Another quarter have only high school degrees. They will always earn, on average, low incomes. They will always be a net fiscal burden (as will many legal immigrants, whose numbers are set to double under the Gang of Eight’s proposal).
Patriot opponents of amnesty realize that legalizing illegal immigrants must be a net fiscal cost. They don’t need to know the details.
But immigration enthusiasts typically have never considered this fiscal dimension. Incredibly, the Gang of Eight have made no attempt to cost the huge influx they propose. There have been essentially no other attempts, apart from Heritage’s report.
No surprise. Immigration enthusiasts have long shown that there are absolutely no considerations of fact or analysis that will sway them from their obsessive drive to increase immigration.
Logically, the Gang of Eight’s bill should not have survived the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing. That dramatically and conclusively demonstrated that the U.S. government has utterly failed at selecting, monitoring and assimilating immigrants (remember Dzokhar Tsarnaev became a U.S. citizen on Sept. 11, 2012), let alone keeping them off welfare. (The Tsarnaevs were on it.) Washington clearly cannot be trusted to run an amnesty program for 11-20 million illegals—much less a projected increased immigration influx estimated at 33-57 million over the next decade.
For that matter, America’s post-1965 immigration disaster
From Under The Rubble | Is The Rule Of Law Immoral? (Part III) “Your Excellency: Tear Down This Stone Wall!”
[See earlier Is the Rule of Law Immoral? Ask Archbishop José Gomez! And Is The Rule Of Law Immoral? (Part II) More Bishops Weigh In]
"What we got here is a failure to communicate."
Last week the Rubble talked to Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa), a prominent member of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security. Rep. King disagrees with Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, who, we noted earlier, advocates amnesty for illegal aliens in the name of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference (USCCB). Abp. Gomez picked up the standard left by his predecessor, Roger Cardinal Mahony, who routinely spoke to Hispanic rallies and condemned opponents of amnesty—among them millions of Catholics—for "fanning the flames of intolerance, xenophobia and, at times, bigotry."
While the Cardinal’s language is unfortunate, such disagreement is hardly unique. A USCCB committee chairman has been criticizing the budget proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R- Wis.) for a couple of years now. Before that, the USCCB was a lead advocate for the adoption of national health care—in fact, Obamacare would never would have passed without the bishops’ critical support early on. When they finally discovered that the law was a dagger aimed at the heart of Catholic moral teaching, it was too late. With its passage, Obamacare poses one of the greatest challenges to the Church’s religious liberty in American history.
This tradition of frequently errant advocacy gives rise to a question on the minds of many Americans, and not only Catholics: why have the Catholic bishops so consistently championed the political agenda of the left, over the course of so many years? Ironically, the sole exception is the life issues—those moral teachings which the bishops haven’t taught since the mid-1960s, according to USCCB President Timothy Cardinal Dolan.
One cause might lie in the culture of today’s hierarchy: after all, a generous majority of today’s American bishops—men of my own generation—probably grew up in diehard Catholic Democrat families like I did. When they were young, abortion was not an issue for either party: it was condemned almost universally. Their party loyalty was tough, surviving even the Democrats’ strident opposition to landmark civil rights legislation. Through the years, the affinity continued to grow despite the Democrats’ increasingly radical pioneering of abortion on demand as the party’s primary social goal.
All along, individually and through the USCCB’s sizable Washington bureaucracy, the bishops routinely incorporated the Democrats’ political agenda into their version of Catholic “morality,” espoused in a steady stream of political manifestos published in the name of the Catholic Church.
Cardinal Dolan has indeed lamented that the Church’s teaching on sexual morality found few champions among American bishops in the years since the 1960s. [When the Archbishop Met the President, By James Taranto, WSJ, March 31, 2012]However, that was not the only Church teaching that fell into desuetude after the Second Vatican Council. In spite of the Council’s call for a vigorous laity responding with enthusiasm to its vocation to serve God in the modern world, many bishops continued to embrace the age-old practice of clericalism.
The Crisis Of Clericalism
What is clericalism? “Clericalism assumes that clerics not only are but are also meant to be the active, dominant elite in the Church, and laymen the passive, subservient mass,” writes Russell Shaw, who was for years the Secretary of Public Affairs for the U.S. bishops’ conference in his book To Hunt, to Shoot, to Entertain: Clericalism and the Catholic Laity..
To be sure, Vatican II sounded a trumpet call for the “Age of the Laity”—yet the bishops and their bureaucracies have continued to drown out the voice of the laity in precisely those areas where the laity have professional experience and expertise, and the bishops do not.
As a result, “the clericalist mindset does fundamentally distort, disrupt, and poison the Christian lives of members of the Church, clergy and laity alike,” Shaw writes.
One might observe that clericalism has wrought similar damage to American public life as well.
Brilliantly and at length, Shaw dissects the “mentality of clerical elitism,” an attitude that dismisses the laity with the back of the hand: the laity should “Pray, pay, and obey,” as Catholic shorthand has summarized it over the years. Regarding specific issues like immigration, health care, and the budget, Shaw observes that “this proliferation of sociopolitical judgments of a very specific nature is an expression of clericalism.” And the door swings only one way.
Congress, Clerics, And Cowards
Catholics in public life tend to fall into one of two groups: Group One agrees with the bishops on the welfare state but disagrees with the Church’s teaching on human life, and thus supports abortion rights, Obamacare’s Contraception Mandate, and similar initiatives of what Blessed John Paul II called the “Culture of Death.” Group Two agrees with the Church’s teaching on human life but disagrees with the bishops on the welfare state.
Catholics are free to differ on the welfare state, but not on abortion. Yet, Catholics in Group Two get hammered by the bishops, while those in Group One get a free pass.
A curious dialectic is at work. Consider: Bishop Stephen Blaire leads the USCCB’s attack on Rep. Ryan’s budget, calling it immoral and unjust. Meanwhile, Bishop Blaire is silent regarding the
Where Were You When Richwine Got Derbed?
When Murray Rothbard gave his famous speech at the 1992 meeting of the John Randolph Club, I had not yet been born. Whether someone my age can be accurately described as a "Paleo", a "post-Paleo", or something else entirely is a debate for another time. What can be said with certainty though, is that whatever side I am on, it is the wrong side. It is the side that is losing, the side that no one would choose to be on.
As I often tell fellow students who are in a state of shock after learning my thoughts on this or that topic, "Beliefs seem to choose us, not the other way around." I have met atheists who desperately want to believe in God but do not. Likewise, I have met Christians who agree logically with every atheist argument in the book—yet cannot bring themselves into a permanent state of disbelief.
I often feel as though I am in a similar situation. It would make my life a great deal easier if I just started reading The Nation and agreeing with every editorial. But that would not work: I read VDARE.com and Takimag for the simple reason that I agree with most of their articles—for better or for worse.
The "resignation" of Jason Richwine is just another reminder that I will likely spend my life in deep trouble for the beliefs I hold—a problem that is compounded by my young age. Paul Gottfried spoke on this some years ago at a meeting of the H.L. Mencken Club:
I’m especially impressed by those young people who are here. To say they have embraced the non-authorized Right indicates more than simply an ideological address. It betokens their willingness to become non-authorized dissenters, that is, to turn their backs on the characteristically stale conversations of media debates and the allowable differences of opinion within the Beltway.
Turning one’s back on this prescribed discourse means forfeiting the perks that flow from those in power. It also means being labeled as a troublemaker or extremist—and for those who persist in their orneriness, this choice may also mean being pushed out of magazines for which one previously wrote and having one’s books snubbed by the arbiters of acceptable political concerns.
A Call to the Alternative Right, takimag.com, November 10, 2009
Although some may not think it possible, my perspective is somewhat more pessimistic than Gottfried's.
He spoke of marginalization, which I do not fear. Perhaps I am being paranoid, but what I fear is complete blacklist status. I do not write under my real name, but what should happen if I am exposed is not a comfortable thought.
Unlike many of the authors across the Dissident Right, I was not yet born during what seems to have been the more "liberal" time when Joe Sobran was not synonymous with Holocaust denial, Pat Buchanan synonymous with Nazism, etc. I grew up after the Cultural Marxist Left had gotten a stranglehold on public discourse.
Simply put, all my heroes have been fired—and in some cases, I learned who they were precisely because their firing made headlines.
Should my real name come out, I would be "pre-fired", permanently marked
National Data | Lesson From 1965: More Immigrants = More Violent Crime
The 2013 Schumer-Rubio Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill now being debated aims to double legal immigration from what are already historic highs. In many ways, it can be regarded as the 1965 Immigration Act on steroids.
The 1965 Act notoriously unleashed an era of mass immigration after a 40-year lull, and shifted the ethnic mix of new immigrants from predominantly European to Hispanic and Asian. It is responsible for setting the US on the path to a white minority by 2040 or so. In future columns, I’ll be looking at its consequences in several other areas. Today: crime.
Crime rates have been falling for some two decades, while the foreign-born share of the U.S. population has been increasing. Immigration enthusiasts regularly tout this coincidence, but they are being intellectually dishonest. They simply don’t look back far enough.
A historic crime wave accompanied the post-1965 era of mass immigration. To this day, violent crime rates have not returned to the levels of the early 1960s.
The national crime rate—violent crimes per 100,000 population—rose from 200.2 in 1965 to a peak of 758.2 in 1991, according to historical FBI crime data. That was an increase of 279%. It’s now back down to 403.6.
Over the same period, California’s violent crime rate exploded by 356%. In New York State, the violent crime rate peaked in at 1,180.9 per 100,000 population in 1990, or nearly 62% above the national rate that year. It can hardly be a coincidence that California and New York were the epicenters
Woolwich Slaughter—Will the West Wake Up?
After a British soldier wearing a Help for Heroes charity T-shirt was run over, stabbed and slashed with machetes and a meat cleaver, and beheaded, the Tory government advised its soldiers that it is probably best not to appear in uniform on the streets of their capital.
