It’s not conservatism, it’s NATIONALISM

The coming Republican civil war on immigration:

“This is not conservatism.” With those four simple words, House Speaker Paul Ryan dismissed Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entry into the United States until the federal government gets terrorism committed in the name of Islam figured out.

“This is not what our party stands for,” Ryan added, “and, more importantly, it’s not what our country stands for.”

That may depend on how the party is defined. While elected Republicans have almost unanimously distanced themselves from Trump’s Muslim gambit, one poll found that nearly two-thirds of GOP voters agreed with him. Another determined that more than three-fourths believe the United States is accepting too many immigrants from the Middle East.

There is a civil war in the Republican Party on immigration. Those on Trump’s side tend to see the enemy as including the party’s leadership, consultants, intellectuals and donor class. (The dust-up over Trump and Muslims is likely to bolster that perception.) But they’ve been courted by other GOP presidential candidates too, including Ted Cruz, Scott Walker and Rick Santorum.

Walker is already out of the race and Santorum has stalled in the low single digits. But Cruz is ascendant and Trump has been leading in the New Hampshire polls for a longer period of time than Walker’s presidential campaign lasted.

Trump isn’t the most articulate or consistent spokesman for immigration control in the GOP. That distinction goes to Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. And Trump’s Republican critics would be the first to point out he isn’t the most conservative. But his rise has fueled a family argument inside the party about how conservatives should view immigration.

Ryan’s position has a long conservative pedigree. He has followed in Jack Kemp’s intellectual footsteps. He can cite Ronald Reagan as well. The Wall Street Journal editorial page that championed Kemp and Reagan’s tax cuts also called for open borders. Republicans like Ryan tend to see America as a proposition or an idea, defined by the political principles laid out in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

In this telling, immigration affirms the truths we hold to be self-evident, particularly that all men are created equal and the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. The willingness of immigrants to come here is a testament to the success of those principles. “Immigration,” writes veteran conservative columnist George Will, “is the entrepreneurial act of taking the risk of uprooting oneself and plunging into uncertainty.”

Restricting immigration, according to these Republicans, isn’t conservative because it requires government bureaucracies to interfere in labor markets. Immigration is like free trade and restricting it is like protectionism.

Read that last sentence again. Those who have read Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America will now understand, if they didn’t already, why we addressed free trade and immigration in the Immigration and Economics chapter, because the latter, in its open-borders variant, is a subset of the former.

It’s interesting, is it not, that the cuckservatives are willing to fight fellow Republicans to the death, but they’re always eager to negotiate a genteel surrender with the liberals. Of course, as we showed when discussing the six conservative principles laid out by Russell Kirk, cuckservatives reject the last two.

The long march continues

We haven’t won the cultural war for SF/F yet. We haven’t even begun to start winning it yet. But we are advancing.
It was interesting to see that he didn’t even hesitate before giving the correct answer. In any event, with the end of December approaching, it is time to start thinking about putting together the list of next year’s nominees recommendations.

The International Lord of Hate’s take:

Some Puppy supporters didn’t like how it was phrased, with “scandal” having negative implications. Personally, I like it. Especially the part where they used “Rocked”. Damn right. Rocked you like a hurricane. The scandal was the part where the CHORFs ran a lying media smear campaign, and handed out wooden butt holes, while block voting No Award to keep out barbarian Wrongfans having Wrongfun.

The French hunt the jihadists

As Americans and Brits alike have are wringing their hands over Donald Trump’s very moderate, entirely constitutional, and woefully insufficient proposal, the French are actively hunting the jihadists in their midst:

Police investigating the Paris terror attacks have shut down three mosques in a series of raids to close the net on Islamic extremists, the Express reports. Police in France also arrested the owner of a revolver found during Wednesday’s raid, France’s Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.

Security officials found jihadist documents at the mosque where yesterday’s raids took place.

They have placed nine people under house arrest. Another 22 have been banned from leaving the country Mr Cazeneuve said.

France has been under a state of emergency since 130 people were killed in a series of terror attacks in Paris on November 13. Since then, some 2,235 homes and buildings have been raided, 232 people taken into custody, and 334 weapons confiscated.

Cazeneuve said the number of weapons apprehended so far is staggering. He said: “In 15 days we have seized one-third of the quantity of war-grade weapons that are normally seized in a year.”

All pro-gun advocates should strongly endorse the immigration ban and support the repatriation of all enemy nationals because the eventual alternative is a state of emergency and French-style crackdowns that will likely encompass the native population.

Now think about how many weapons are already stashed in the mosques across America.

That took longer than expected

The first fake review finally appears:

this book will just make you hate those people more
By Beamer on December 9, 2015

Unsurprisingly, this book is preaching to its choir. Are you a straight white male terrified of the fact that, while white males remain the most powerful group in America, people other than straight white males are being represented more and more often? Do the thoughts of gay people being able to marry or, gasp, women being named CEO over a perfectly qualified male keep you up all night?

Then this book will completely back your worldview.

But if you aren’t a frightened, shallow, impotent straight white male, this book will just make you hate those people more. I happen to be a straight white male. I embrace new thoughts in our leadership, because let’s be honest, we haven’t done such a great job the past 50 years. But Vox Day disagrees, and very openly feels only straight white males should lead.

Either you’re a terrified, impotent straight white male and you love him, or you’ll find this book to basically be an excellent reason to move to Canada.

It’s a fascinating portrait in SJW rhetoric. I mean, there is no reason at all for gay men and women to be just little bit concerned about mass migration from the Muslim world, right?
 

Love Gravity Wins.

The review is pure rabbitology. See, if you want to consider yourself brave and virile and deep, or if you’re female or non-white, or if you’re male and white and deeply apologetic about it, you must not read this book! It is Elil! Beware! Badthink and Thoughtcrime and Tharn await the unwary!

But at last, VFM, it’s Wild Hunt time! Beamer is male, has a dog, and likes the Repairman Jack novels of F. Paul Wilson. He’s a graduate of Boston College and Duke, and uses or used a Blackberry at work. His first name may be Mark and he had a relationship of some sort with a woman named Beth. First one to correctly identify him and provide contact details wins the free hardcover of his choice from Castalia House and gets a virtual skull for social media bragging purposes. Bonus skull for providing place of employment.

Duke University
MBA – 2010.
JD – 2007.

BA – English and Computer Science – Boston College.

Fan of hardcore music.

Soft spot for cheesy aquatic adventure novels.
Uses Blackberry at work. 

VFM Rules: The SJWs take a shot and the VFM immediately apply the Five Ds in reprisal. Dig, Doxx, Discredit, Disemploy, and Devour. Better make that move to Canada now, Beamer. The Vile Faceless Minions are coming for you.

UPDATE: And VFM 38 got him. But 59 minutes? Really, Minions, I expect more speed out of you. Everyone whose minion number ends in 4, you will report to Malwyn for encouragement and inspiration.

UPDATE 2: I can’t what it who even…. what is this?

The Adams Summary

I described our exchange as I saw it, Scott Adams describes it his way:

My summary of that exchange is that I asked you to defend your position and you succeeded. That is rare.

I’m not suggesting the U.S. should allow Muslims to immigrate at this point in history. I’m just trying to find a market price at which folks would agree the risk is worth the benefit, as they see it. You see no benefit in religious tolerance (in this specific context) and I judge that to be a credible and consistent point of view.

Rare.

To be clear, I see no way we could keep the risk to 100 terror deaths per year with continued Muslim immigration. So my price can’t be met.

We end up at the same place. I priced it differently but neither of us wanted the deal.

I concur with his conclusion. We place different values, as measured in American lives, on the principle of religious freedom in the USA. But because he correctly recognizes that there is no way to keep the risk below the price he is willing to pay – which, contra my assumption, turned out to be his actual position on the matter – he ended up on the same place that I did.

Which is to say that Muslim immigration should be banned on the basis of the tangible risk it poses to the lives of Americans.

Trump, the proto-Destructor

A great column by Glenn Reynolds in USA Today:

Enter Donald Trump. People who are unhappy with the things Trump is saying need to understand that he’s only getting so much traction because he’s filling a void. If the responsible people would talk about these issues, and take action, Trump wouldn’t take up so much space.

And there’s a lesson for our ruling class there: Calling Trump a fascist is a bit much (fascism, as Tom Wolfe once reported, is forever descending upon the United States, but somehow it always lands on Europe), but movements like fascism and communism get their start because the mechanisms of liberal democracy seem weak and ineffectual and dishonest. If you don’t want Trump — or, perhaps, some post-Trump figure who really is a fascist — to dominate things, you need to stop being weak and ineffectual and dishonest.

Right now, after years of Obama hope-and-change, a majority of Americans (56%) think Islam is incompatible with American values. That’s true even for 43% of Democrats.

In that sort of environment, where people feel unsafe and where the powers-that-be seem to be, well, weak and ineffectual and dishonest, the appeal of someone who doesn’t seem weak and ineffectual grows stronger.

You can see this in France, where the long-marginalized “far right” National Front is now winning elections all over. It’s doing so well because the French people, after not one but two Islamist mass shootings in Paris, feel that their government is not serious about protecting them, and their way of life, from their enemies.

Likewise, it’s a bit hard to take people seriously about Trump’s threat to civil liberties when President Obama was just endorsing an unconstitutional gun ban, when his attorney general was threatening to prosecute people for anti-Muslim speech (a threat later walked back, thankfully) and when universities and political leaders around the country are making clear their belief that free speech is obsolete.

Glenn is making two very important points here.

  1.  If the ruling parties break the laws and manipulate the democratic rules to keep out the law-abiding, democratic nationalists, they will soon find themselves facing the the lawless, anti-democratic, and violent ultranationalists. They are methodically cutting down the very trees of respect and authority that protect them from the people.
  2. The ruling Left has made it clear that they have zero respect for our free speech or our unalienable rights. That means we need not respect theirs.

The mainstream media and the political establishment pretends to be frightened of Donald Trump in order to try to keep American nationalism down, but they should treat him fairly and let the chips fall where they may rather than play their games in order to defeat him. Because despite being somewhat of a bull in a china shop, Trump plays by the rules. And others are watching his example, and learning from it.

Cuckservative at Return of Kings

Roosh introduced Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America, to the Return of Kings readership. If you’ve already read it, perhaps you might leave a comment there with your impressions for the benefit of those who haven’t otherwise heard of the book. From the Prologue:

What is now taking place in Europe is a microcosm of what is happening, on a larger scope and timescale, in the United States of America. Although the European population of 508 million is larger than the U.S. population of 320 million, the 28 member nations of the E.U. fit into about half the land taken up by the 50 united States. Moreover, unlike the heterogeneous American “nation of immigrants”, the European nations are homogeneous and distinct, with long histories, traditions, and collective memories that stretch back for centuries. That is why a much smaller number of immigrants arriving in a much shorter period of time has triggered the powerful nationalistic response that is already overturning governments and will ultimately shatter the European Union.

That is why it is important to realize that the same divisive process is well underway in the United States, albeit at a larger order of magnitude. And one of the tragic ironies of American politics is that it is the very group of people who most proudly proclaim their loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and to the traditional values of America’s founding fathers, conservatives, who have helped lead the way to America’s decline and eventual collapse. They have done so by forgetting the central purpose of the very document they revere.

The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America contains an extremely important phrase that is almost always ignored by those who appeal to it, or to the men who wrote it, in defense of immigration. It states:

    We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The key phrase is this: “to ourselves and our posterity.” The blessings of liberty are not to be secured to all the nations of the world, to the tired and huddled masses, or to the wretched refuse of the teeming shores of other lands. They are to be secured to our children, and their children, and their children’s children.

To sacrifice their interests to the interests of children in other lands is to betray both past and future America. It is to permit an alien posterity, like the newly hatched cuckoo in another bird’s nest, to eliminate our own, and in doing so, defeat the purpose of the Constitution. It is, like the cuckolded husband, to raise the children of another man instead of one’s own sons and daughters.

It is, in a word, cuckservative.

No, there will be no debate

Ken White of Popehat suggests how a reasonable discussion about guns could begin:

We yell, we signal to the like-minded, we circle our wagons, we take shots at opponents. But we don’t change minds. Take a look at the discussion of guns on your Facebook feed right now. Do you think it’s going to build a majority on any issue?

Say we wanted to have a productive conversation. Imagine we wanted to identify our irreducible philosophical and practical differences, seek any areas of agreement, persuade anyone on the fence, and change some minds. What might we do….

If you’d like to persuade people to accept some sort of restrictions on
guns, consider educating yourself so you understand the terminology
that you’re using. And if you’re reacting to someone suggesting gun
restrictions, and they seem to suggest something nonsensical, consider a
polite question of clarification about terminology.

No. We don’t want a discussion. We aren’t discussing anything. There is nothing to discuss. There will be no debate. There is absolutely nothing you can say to move us one iota. We have very clearly communicated the same message over and over again: No. Under no circumstances.

Come for them and we’ll come for you.

No more free Wacos.

Molon labe.

Mailvox: change is inevitable

Farmer Tom doesn’t like it and he is seriously thinking about taking his tractor and going home:

This place is really going down hill in a hurry.

The host is now full on Trump supporter.

The vast majority of the guests seem to be so uninformed as to not know who Nate is?

I guess it’s time to find somewhere else to hang out.

I liked the place when “The Yellow Bus” was new.

Some things have changed, and not for the better.

Translation: I’m a Christian conservative and I don’t like it if things aren’t going in the way that I approve at all times. If anyone feels this way, then don’t comment here. Stick to reading and stay out of the discourse. I have never been concerned with the opinion of those who prefer to stomp off in a huff or retreat to snarky sniping than to offer substantive criticism and to articulate their positions, no matter who they might happen to be.

Of course, it may be nothing more than FT not wishing to stick around to defend his self-assured Iowa prediction, as the most recent RCP average has: Trump 25.7, Cruz 22.3, Carson 15.7, and Paul behind !Jeb!.

I’m personal friends with the Iowa campaign managers for Trump and Cruz. I know Carson’s Iowa guy, Huckebee’s guy, hate the a-hole who was Perry’s guy. Met several times Rubio’ s guy, once in his Senate office.

I know these people and the insides of the system.

I can tell you right now that Trump will not win Iowa, he will get second or third.

1. Carson
2. Trump
3. Cruz
4. Probably Rand because the RP people will hang to the end.

Maybe he is right. Maybe he is not. I have no idea; I don’t do political predictions anymore. Regardless, the fact that you’ve been here for years means that I will occasionally cut you some slack, not that I will overlook it when you’re behaving like a run-of-the-mill anklebiter or a prima donna. I find it somewhat frustrating when Ilk demonstrate that, despite years of reading here, they still can’t manage to control their emotions, construct proper syllogisms, or gracefully accept being shown to be wrong.

As I told FT in the comments: This place has not changed, but the world has. In this electoral campaign cycle, Trump is the only candidate who matters, and it is not because of who he is or what he might do if he wins.

This is basic game theory. As I have said repeatedly in the past, there are only three issues that matter today. In their current order of importance, they are:

  • Immigration
  • Gun Control
  • Federal Reserve

We can ignore the latter. None of the candidates even understand the issue and none of them are likely to do anything about it. Trump, being a maverick, is the only one who might even look at the issue, but that’s totally speculative and therefore irrelevant.

On guns, Clinton and Sanders are terrible, Ben Carson is bad, and most of the Republicans, including Trump, are both good and reliable. I’m not at all concerned about Trump saying he would take a serious look at the no-fly list, that was in response to a question about Islamic terrorism and in no way indicates that he has any interest whatsoever in sailing against the populist pro-gun position.

Nate said that we would have come down hard on another candidate who said the same, which is true, because unlike all the other candidates, Trump speaks off the cuff and without having his statement massaged by fifty consultants. If Bush said it, you can bet he’s looking to push anti-gun. In the context that Trump did, he’s wondering why known terrorists are permitted to arm themselves; he’s more likely to jail or deport them than attack gun rights.

More importantly, no one is going to do anything about gun control. Obama has been calling for it non-stop, they’ve been staging multiple false flags to try to drum up popular support – yes, they have, there is no question about it – and yet people are gunning up like never before. Gun control is the most important issue, but it is not one that is any more relevant in this particular election than is the Federal Reserve. I trust every single Republican candidate in this regard, including Ben Carson, who has completely changed his rhetoric on the subject once being confronted with the American public’s cast-iron will on the topic.

That leaves immigration. And here, Trump is the only candidate who is even beginning to address the scope of the existential problem. All the Democrats, and more than half of the Republicans, actually want to make it worse. Even if you don’t support him, or trust him, the mere fact that he is in the race has changed the debate on the subject more than the combined efforts of every anti-immigrationist, every open-borders skeptic, and every anti-free trade economist. He has been a literal Godsend in this regard, no matter what happens in the end.

In short, Donald Trump has radically changed the culture, and culture always trumps politics. And that is why petty sniping about the usual politics is not only pointless, it demonstrates that you are too stuck in an intellectual rut to even understand what the rest of us are discussing.

A dialogue with Scott Adams

To put it into context, I was quoting this piece by Adams to which I had already linked:

Vox Day ‏@voxday
“I would accept up to 1,000 dead Americans, over a ten-year period, to allow Muslim non-citizens to enter this country.” @ScottAdamsSays

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
What’s your number?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Mine is zero. False dilemma. Plenary power doctrine permits Muslim immigration ban. 124 years of precedent.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
The legal question can be separated.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
It can be, but it shouldn’t be. That IS the context, after all. Look, it’s a good question. Just bad answer.

emilio rodriguez ‏@emiliorrubio
Mine is also 0. Seeing as we gain NOTHING from muslim immigration. It’s no benefit for a cost.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Nothing except respect for people of different religions (freedom). Do you value that at zero?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Yes, because I know military history. Muslim immigration into Dar al-Harb means war. Always.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
It’s a risk assessment about saving more than lives than you kill (in the long run).

Vox Day ‏@voxday
You need to reassess. Because the correct answer is definitely and absolutely zero.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Religious intolerance has bad history. Are you sure it always ends well?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Not always, but sometimes. If there was no intolerance at Vienna, at Lepanto, and Tours, no Enlightenment.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Would you expel legal Muslim residents in the country under the same principle of safety over principle?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Yes. And I predict that every single Western country will within three decades. Reconquesta 2.0.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
False dilemma, though. Your principle doesn’t exist legally, and it’s your principle, not mine.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Opinion noted. See my book, The Religion War (sequel to God’s Debris). Speaks to that scenario, in fiction.

Now, if you wish to analyze this, what you’ll see is Adams engaging in pseudo-dialectic, while I am utilizing dialectic in a rhetorical manner. With its 140-character limit, Twitter is a very poor medium for complex communication, but it does have the benefit of stripping away the ability to engage easily in word games. The simplicity of the medium makes communication cruder, but more direct.

Adams is not an SJW, but here he argues in a similar manner, simply moving the goalposts each time his point is successfully dealt with. However, Adams is an intellectual in the true sense; he likes to play with ideas so one should never assume that what he is saying is necessarily what he genuinely believes.

Adams knows the choice he puts forth is a false dilemma; it is based on a false foundation of the United States being a polity that enforces complete religious freedom. This is nonsense, as the transmutation of “Congress shall make no law” into “a moment of silence in public schools is outlawed” suffices to demonstrate. And Muslims are already banned from immigrating as “people who practice polygamy” as per the 1891 statute.

That’s why Scott wants to leave the legal aspects out, because they also render his dilemma moot. He tries risk assessment, but that’s even worse ground for him both rhetorically and dialectically due to the 1,300-year history of Muslim violence. So he tries to go to the abstract, but as numerous people on Twitter pointed out, “respect” is not synonymous with “granting permanent residence rights and citizenship”.

In the end, he’s forced to argue from incredulity concerning an proposition that no one has even made yet, but even there, he’s on shaky ground because most Americans would happily repatriate every Muslim in America tomorrow. While he does do a good job maintaining frame, the problem with doing so as your argument keeps shifting is that you eventually wind up looking like one of those whom Aristotle described as being unable to learn from information.