The benefits of foreign labor are a lie

In Cuckservative, John Red Eagle and I conclusively demonstrated, using official government statistics, that immigrant labor is a net negative to Americans and American workers. Others who are looking into the subject are reliably finding that the importation of foreign labor is harmful:

Last year, thousands of American companies won permission to bring a total of more than 150,000 people into the country as legal guest workers for unskilled jobs, under a federal program that grants them temporary work permits known as H-2 visas. Officially, the guest workers were invited here to fill positions no Americans want: The program is not supposed to deprive any American of a job, and before a company wins approval for a single H-2 visa, it must attest that it has already made every effort to hire domestically. Many companies abide by the law and make good-faith efforts to employ Americans.

Yet a BuzzFeed News investigation, based on Labor Department records, court filings, more than 100 interviews, inspector general reports, and analyses of state and federal data, has found that many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to skirt the law, deliberately denying jobs to American workers so they can hire foreign workers on H-2 visas instead….

At the same time, companies across the country in a variety of industries have made it all but impossible for U.S. workers to learn about job openings that they are supposed to be given first crack at. When workers do find out, they are discouraged from applying. And if, against all odds, Americans actually get hired, they often are treated worse and paid less than foreign workers doing the same job, in order to drive the Americans to quit.

What’s more, companies often do this with the complicity of government officials, records show. State and federal authorities have allowed companies to violate the spirit — and often the letter — of the law with bogus recruitment efforts that are clearly designed to keep Americans off the payroll. And when regulators are alerted to potential problems, the response is often ineffectual.

I know it’s painful for the devotees of free trade, who love nothing better than to compare 21st century analyses to 18th century dogma, to admit, but the increasingly undeniable empirical reality is that free trade, and the free movement of labor, are about as Marxist, globalist, socially destructive, and economically harmful as Communism.

I’ve read every single defense of free trade that I can find. None of them, not a single one of them, holds up. And as for those who babble childishly about a protectionist government picking winners, as if that suffices to make a rational case, what on Earth do they think is happening in the USA and in the EU now?

All that free trade accomplishes is that it allows governments to pick winners from around the world rather than from inside their own borders. And the winners are those who are willing to pay the most for the privilege, which is why the dominant figures in the U.S. media are a) an Australian and b) a Lebanese based in Mexico.

The heart of the debate

Donald Trump sums up the existential question:

“I have a very hardline position – we either have a country or we don’t have a country.”

That’s Trump, explaining why he might be the one candidate GOP voters can trust on immigration.

The problem, of course, is that far too many Americans have been convinced that their country is nothing more than an idea. A “proposition nation”. Which is to say that it doesn’t exist at all.

Those who are fixated on the various policies espoused by the different candidates are failing to grasp the situation: America is not a given. And after being invaded by 60 million foreigners, America is already not America.

That’s why they talk about New America. New America sounds very exciting and progressive and all, but the key thing is to understand that in this context, “new” is synonymous with “not”.

Social justice convergence on social media

It’s easy to see they are terrified of the rising tide of nationalism, because they are absolutely determined to try to stop the signal. But all they will do is guarantee their own demise:

The two largest social networks, Facebook and Twitter, and the world’s largest search engine, Google, have teamed up with German law enforcement to delete “hate speech” within 24 hours in what is being seen as a last-ditch effort to silence public dissent about a gigantic wave of Syrian immigration.

The partnership to crack down on what Germany deems illegal speech comes after German law enforcement’s reported concerns about “racist abuse” posted to social media after the country’s huge and extremely controversial import of over a million Syrian refugees.

Justice Minister Heiko Maas is reported to have warned social networks that they must not become “a funfair for the far-right” and that “the benchmark to be applied will be German law and no longer just the terms of use of each network.”

Specialist teams will be used to track down, examine, and remove offending posts, and the process is not to take more than 24 hours.

The only reason they think they can do this is because they believe they have a monopoly on the rightful use of force. But because they have betrayed the Westphalian bargain that granted it to the State, they have lost the necessary Mandate of Heaven. History suggests that events will proceed accordingly.

You’ve heard of technocratic government, but the Merkel regime is the first technostasic one.

Why John C. Wright is not a libertarian

In which Mr. Wright explains why he is no longer a libertarian:

I often introduce myself as a recovering libertarian. It is not an entirely serious introduction, but it is not entirely frivolous either.

Why “recovering”? Sad experience teaches that any ideology, even a sound one, like libertarianism, is intoxicating. The appeal of ideology is the appeal of elegance. Just as Newton reduced all motions from the orbits to apples falling to three expressions, every intellectual craves a simple formula to explain the human condition. Libertarianism is based on a single principle that limits the state’s use of force to retaliation against fraud and trespass.

Nearly all the natural moral rules all men carry in their hearts are satisfied by the simple rule that you may do as you like provided you leave your neighbor free to do as he likes. No neighbor may rob, defraud nor attack another.

The intoxication comes with each case that fits neatly to the theory. Natural morality agrees that wars to defend the innocent are permissible, as is killing in self defense. Natural morality agrees that a man should keep his contracts, and so on.

The theory says the state must remain carefully neutral in all cultural and moral questions: the use of intoxicating drugs for recreational use, suicide assisted or no, polygamy, prostitution, gambling, pornography, duels to the death (provided only all participants fully agree!) or, for that matter, copulating with a corpse on the roof of your house in plain view of the neighbors’ children playing in their backyards, and then eating the corpse, all must be legal.

For me, the intoxicating spell ended in three sharp realizations, each one as forceful as a thunderbolt.

Read the rest of it there.

As for me, I’ve always been a small-l libertarian rather than a large-L one. These days, I consider myself more of a Christian nationalist, or a Western Civilizationist than a libertarian per se. Human liberty is an important priority, but we now have a sound historical basis for understanding that a free and open society of the sort that Libertarianism assumed is simply not an option.

The self-lobotomizing of SF/F

Jeffro Johnson brings his epic series on Chapter N to a close with a sobering conclusion on the mental barriers being erected to separate entire generations of science fiction and fantasy readers from the genre’s history:

This estrangement between the generations… it isn’t normal. And it’s not just that people in the seventies would have read many of the same science fiction and fantasy authors that their parents and even grandparents did. The scope of things that fall within the black hole of the generation gap seems to be expanding almost exponentially now. Even things like Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry– I would have watched the same stuff that my big brother watched when I was a kid… and we were familiar with the same classic cartoons that out parents and grandparents would have watched. But that’s changed now. And it goes beyond these things just sort of quitely dropping off the radar for the moment. Millennials that will admit to never seeing them still “know” somehow that these things were racist or something and deserve to be erased. It might seem silly, maybe, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

When it was announced that the World Fantasy Award was replacing its iconic Lovecraft bust, Joyce Carol Oates declared that the literary canon is “saturated with racism, sexism, anti-semitism, anti-democracy… and lunacy.” Graciously she allows that “tossing it all out is no solution.” But why wouldn’t you toss it out…? If it really was as bad as people say, you probably would do just that. I mean really, why would people read the works of such terrible people…? They don’t. And if by some chance they do, the reaction can be almost physical sometimes, as this woman describes it:

    I read a lot of Bradbury as a teen and thought his stories were wonderful. Rereading his stories now is actively painful to me. I’m a lot more able to pick up on those subtle cues, and less able to make excuses for them, that the author doesn’t really see his female characters as important, or real, or three dimensional, or people.

Are we really so advanced a civilization now that The Martian Chronicles necessarily should make us ill?

Older people steeped in the classics will dismiss that as an outlier, but it really is a sign of the times. This attitude certainly shows up in a great many of the reviews of old works of fantasy and science fiction that pepper the internet. It’s almost as if there is a barrier in these peoples’ minds. As soon as they get to something they been trained to think of as being “problematic”, they shut down. Very little in the way of any kind of analysis of the material can even be done, because calling out and reviling everything from Madonna/Whore complexes to “black and white morality” is the sort of thing that passes for deep or sophisticated thinking.

The retiring of Lovecraft’s bust from the World Fantasy Awards is therefore not so much reminiscent of statues of Stalin being pulled down in post-Soviet Russia. It’s more a reflection of the Berlin wall… going up.

Social justice convergence destroys everything it touches and erases history because it can neither tolerate nor survive truth.

It burns! It BURNS!

Peggy Noonan, a “conservative” who voted for Obama in 2008 because reasons, can barely bring herself… to say…that terrible, terrible word.

Remember, the more they protest the term, the more they shriek “Nazi” and “fascist” and “racist” in an attempt to escape the burning flames, the more rhetorically effective you know it is. Calling a self-styled conservative a “cuckservative” is akin to brandishing a cross-shaped stake that was soaked in garlic and holy water in a vampire’s face.

Then driving that bad boy home.

That being said, if for tactical purposes you wish to have a calm and etymologically untainted dialectical term of use that they cannot reasonably protest in your arsenal, I suggest you utilize “demi-conservative”, as the cuckservative is an individual who only subscribes to three of Russell Kirk’s six conservative canons.

The three canons to which the demi-conservative observably fails to adhere are:

  • A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize “natural” distinctions
  • A faith in custom, convention, and prescription
  • A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.

Their failure to do so may not be entirely clear by these summaries of Kirk’s canons, but I will write a more detailed post later which will make it eminently clear that this is unquestionably the case. As you can see, many of today’s “conservatives” are actually demi-conservatives who have rejected literally half of what the father of American conservatism declared to be the conservative mind.

In a word, they are cuckservatives.

Speaking of which, Greg Johnson interviewed me about the book. I’ll post the link to the transcript when it’s available.

The anti-nationalist conspiracy succeeds

The second-round defeat of the Front National in France is not surprising; as I said, it is going to take TWO election cycles before the nationalists can come to power. But for now, the alliance of the left and “center right”, which in American terms is similar to the alliance between liberals and cuckservatives, has been sufficient to keep the Front National out of power:

France’s far-right National Front (FN) has failed to win a single region in the second round of municipal polls. The party was beaten into third place, despite leading in six of 13 regions in the first round of voting a week ago.

The centre-right Republicans finished ahead of President Francois Hollande’s governing Socialist Party.

FN leader Marine Le Pen said that mainstream parties had colluded to keep it from power and vowed to keep on fighting.

“Nothing can stop us now,” she told supporters. “By tripling our number of councillors, we will be the main opposition force in most of the regions of France.”

Ms Le Pen said the party had been “disenfranchised in the most indecent of ways by a campaign of lies and disinformation”.

She had stood as a regional presidential candidate in the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, while her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen was the FN’s candidate in the race in Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, in the south.

After both led with more than 40% of the vote in the first round on 6 December, the Socialist candidates in those regions pulled out so their voters could support Republican candidates in the second round.

The FN actually increased its votes in the second round to more than 6.8 million, from 6.02 million on 6 December as more people voted, according to the ministry of the interior (In French). But the FN share of the vote went down slightly from 27.73% to 27.36%.

The anti-nationalists always call the nationalists “Nazis”. It’s nothing more than the usual DISQUALIFY write large. But of course, through their collusion and corruption of the democratic system, the anti-nationalists ensure that the real version, the ultranationalists, will come to power through non-democratic means as soon as the nationalists realize that the will of the people is defined as automatically excluding them, stop playing the game, and throw their support to the ultras.

18 hours and going strong

Nick Searcy is still triggered:

Yes, Nick $earcy! ‏@yesnicksearcy
Box is too clueless to understand things like “origins.” He’s just trying to be “cool.”

Yes, Nick $earcy! ‏@yesnicksearcy
Do tell me more about the real world, failure at life. I’m just dying here, in my heated swimming pool. 

Yes, Nick $earcy! ‏@yesnicksearcy
Everyone decent distances themselves from the asshole Vox.

Yes, Nick $earcy! ‏@yesnicksearcy
It’s the only publicity Vox’s useless ass might ever get. Now that I’ve blocked him, it slowly dies away.

Yes, Nick $earcy! ‏@yesnicksearcy
I don’t disagree with Vox. He’s a racist pig who hates transracial adoption. I shun him.

Yes, Nick $earcy! ‏@yesnicksearcy
And all his loser minions have less than 50 followers.

The funniest thing is that he’s doing all of this furious tweeting from behind a block. He’s like the little dog that barks at you while hiding behind his owner’s legs. But you almost have to appreciate his total commitment to his own imagination. He is clearly living in his own little delusion bubble, the brave, tough-talking hero of his own play.

Apparently Nick has a growing number of enemies.

Yes, Nick $earcy! ‏@yesnicksearcy
Anyone who use the racist Stormfront term “#cuckservative” is my enemy. Period.

Searcy is the perfect demonstration of how the cuckservatives serve the Left. Nothing is more important to him than not being called racist. Which, of course, makes him eminently malleable.

UPDATE: 20 hours in. The Ilk are hilarious.

Yes, Nick $earcy!@yesnicksearcy
Sorry, dumbass. It’s Vox that won’t leave me alone.

Coyote287@Coyote443
You probably forgot to tell him about your adopted black son. Then he realize what a good guy u are.

Yes, Nick $earcy!@yesnicksearcy 1h1 hour ago
No, I told him about my son.  That really bothered him. See, he hates non-white adopted children. 

This cluelessness, of course, inspired more mocking.

Yes, Nick $earcy! ‏@yesnicksearcy
I wish you stupid Vox fart-sniffers were the least bit amusing. You’re just dull.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
You should have a sniff, Nicky. They smell like frangipani blossoms with just a hint of champagne.

Mailvox: the power of freedom

A reader writes about a recent life-changing experience:

Yesterday, me and my wife took the second step in buying a gun — attending a four-hour Basic Firearms Safety Course .  The first step is finding out whether your town’s police authority will give out gun licenses.  Since [State] is a “shall issue” state, forget about getting a licence in [Big City] or another large city, forget it unless you’re well-connected.  The instructor said that this de facto ban was illegal, but what are you going to do?

All 40 seats were full.  This facility hold this class every day.   The instructor said that ever since the Paris attacks, they haven’t been able to keep up with the demand and would hold a second class if they had the range time.  The demographics were quite telling.  There was a 50/50 gender mix with six other couples.  There was one 18 year old guy and only one other guy under forty.  The rest of us were middle-aged and middle-class.  And… we were all white.

I wasn’t alone in having trouble practicing loading/unloading the full-sized guns.  My hands weren’t big enough, and I ended up waving the barrel around too much while trying to release the magazine clip.  Oops.  And my index finger ended up sliding down from alongside the barrel into the the trigger guard.  Double oops.  And I pointed the revolver up in the air when unloading it.  Nope nope nope.  Beginners mistakes; easily identified and fixable with training.

On the range, I got a very good cluster.  The instructor was astonished that I’d never picked up a handgun before, and my last time firing a gun was a 22 for the Boy Scout merit badge.  

I really enjoyed firing.  I lined up the sights, felt an adrenal rush, stopped thinking, slowly squeezed, and watched bullets hit the target.  It was a shock when the gun went ‘click’ instead of ‘pop’.  So here’s my problem.  All my life, I’ve been told guns are evil and as a upper-middle class white guy, I shouldn’t use one.  But it was fun, dammit!

Next step is to get a licence.  And more classes, leading up the practical purchase of a pump-action shotgun with an 18-22″ barrel that both my wife and I can handle.

The American militia is awakening. I have no doubt it will be ready when the time comes. None at all. Will it be enough? Only time will tell.

And if you haven’t armed yourself and your family, what are you waiting for? You can’t possibly say that you haven’t been warned. Repeatedly.

The evil of the Rebel Alliance

Or, as Milo calls it, Space ISIS:

There’s so much wrong with Star Wars that it deserves a book-length treatise to cover properly. After all, the famous Red Letter Media takedown of The Phantom Menace is longer than the film itself. For that reason I will focus on three of the worst mischaracterisations: the Rebel Alliance as good guys, the tragically misunderstood Jabba the Hutt, and Palpatine’s supposedly evil Empire.

This is going to upset some diehard fans, but who do you trust more? Milo, who always tells you the truth while being witty, charming, handsome and having great hair, or the filmmakers who tried to tell you that Jar Jar Binks is a hero?

THE REBEL ALLIANCE
The Alliance is a ragtag band of fighters from many different cultures bonded together by a hatred of the Empire, fighting an asymmetric war resulting in massive collateral damage and loss of civilian life. They take their lead from mystics hiding in caves and swamps, and want to return the galaxy to a primitive religion that hasn’t changed for 600 years. That’s right nerds: the Rebel Alliance is ISIS.

The Jedi are a typical wishy-washy Mother Gaia-style progressive cult. Their most obvious failing is not using the real Force powers. Force lightning is actually quite humane; it’s like hitting a bad guy with a taser instead of cutting him in half with a lightsabre.

Same thing with force choke: do we really need to shoot a criminal resisting the will of the Emperor? Why not subdue him with a choke–or the term we use in the Sith community, enhanced persuasion techniques? Besides, in the far-flung future of Star Wars, SJWs have ensured force-sensitive individuals get affirmative consent every 10 seconds while using their powers so there’s really no big deal.

The Jedi are sick bastards. They use the Force to cloud the minds of others. The movies show this being done to stormtroopers, but you just know Luke uses it on dates at the cantina.

You can argue about the details. But the core thesis that the Star Wars film franchise is garbage? As much as it pains me, a former fan who once successfully collected the entire blue-card set, who saw the original film seven times in the theater as a child, to say it, he’s right.

You see, I saw The Phantom Menace. “Garbage” is too kind.

Professional note: Milo is a master, no, he is THE master of social media PR. This is perhaps the most epic large-scale trolling in the history of social media. You can’t imitate him. Unlike Mike, you can’t even learn anything from him; it would be like trying to take lifestyle advice from an exploding supernova or trying to pick up a few composition tips from Mozart.

Sorry, make that Wagner. As we are reliably informed, Mozart, too, is garbage.

Sometimes, all you can do is sit back and admire the incandescent artistry.