Diversity - Multiculturalism = National Destruction

Diversity: History's Pathway to Chaos

8/25/2016 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com

Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history.

The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls and myriad other African, Asian and European communities spoke Latin, cherished habeas corpus and saw being Roman as preferable to identifying with their own particular tribe. By the fifth century, diversity had won out but would soon prove a fatal liability.

Rome disintegrated when it became unable to assimilate new influxes of northern European tribes. Newcomers had no intention of giving up their Gothic, Hunnish or Vandal identities.

The propaganda of history's multicultural empires -- the Ottoman, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the British and the Soviet -- was never the strength of their diversity. To avoid chaos, their governments bragged about the religious, ideological or royal advantages of unity, not diversity.

Nor did more modern quagmires like Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Rwanda or Yugoslavia boast that they were "diverse." Instead, their strongman leaders naturally claimed that they shared an all-encompassing commonality.

When such coerced harmony failed, these nations suffered the even worse consequences of diversity, as tribes and sects turned murderously upon each other.

For some reason, contemporary America believes that it can reject its uniquely successful melting pot to embrace a historically dangerous and discredited salad-bowl separatism.

Is there any evidence from the past that institutionalizing sects and ethnic grievances would ensure a nation's security, prosperity and freedom?

America's melting pot is history's sole exception of E pluribus unum inclusivity: a successful multiracial society bound by a common culture, language and values. But this is a historic aberration with a future that is now in doubt.

Some students attending California's Claremont College openly demand roommates of the same race. Racially segregated "safe spaces" are fixtures on college campuses.

We speak casually of bloc voting on the basis of skin color -- as if a lockstep Asian, Latino, black or white vote is a good thing.

We are reverting to the nihilism of the old Confederacy. The South's "one-drop rule" has often been copied to assure employers or universities that one qualifies as a minority.

Some public figures have sought to play up or invent diversity advantages. Sometimes, as in the cases of Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal and Ward Churchill, the result is farce.

Given our racial fixations, we may soon have to undergo computer scans of our skin colors to rank competing claims of grievance.

How does one mete out the relative reparations for various atrocities of the past, such as slavery, the Holocaust, the American Indian wars, the Asian or Catholic exclusion laws, indentured servitude, or the mid-18th-century belief that the Irish were not quite human?

Sanctuary cities, in the manner of 1850s Richmond or Charleston invoking nullification, now openly declare themselves immune from federal law. Does that defiance ensure every city the right to ignore whatever federal laws it finds inconvenient, from the filing of 1040s to voting laws?

The diversity industry hinges on U.S. citizens still envisioning a shrinking white population as the "majority." Yet "white" is now not always easily definable, given intermarriage and constructed identities.

In California, those who check "white" on Orwellian racial boxes are now a minority. Will white Californians soon nightmarishly declare themselves aggrieved minorities and thus demand affirmative action, encourage Viking-like names such as Ragnar or Odin, insert umlauts and diereses into their names to hype their European bona fides, seek segregated European-American dorms and set up "Caucasian Studies" programs at universities?

Women now graduate from college at a higher rate than men. Will there be a male effort to ensure affirmative action for college admissions and graduation rates?

If the white vote reaches 70 percent for a particular candidate, is that really such a good thing, as it was considered to be when President Obama was praised for capturing 95 percent of the black vote?

It is time to step back from the apartheid brink.

Even onetime diversity advocate Oprah Winfrey has had second thoughts about the lack of commonality in America. She recently vowed to quit using the word "diversity" and now prefers "inclusion."

A Latino-American undergraduate who is a student of Shakespeare is not "culturally appropriating" anyone's white-European legacy, but instead seeking transcendence of ideas and a common humanity.

Asian-Americans are not "overrepresented" at premier campuses. Their high-profile presence should be praised as a model, not punished as aberrant by number-crunching bureaucrats.

African-Americans who excel in physics and engineering are not "acting white" but finding the proper pathways for their natural talents.

Being one-half Southeast Asian or three-quarters white is not the touchstone to one's essence and is irrelevant to one's character and conduct.

No one is impinging on anyone's culture when blacks dye their hair blond, or when blondes prefer to wear cornrow braids.

Campuses desperately need unity czars, not diversity czars.

Otherwise, we will end up as 50 separate and rival nations -- just like other failed states in history whose diverse tribes and races destroyed themselves in a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog war with one another.

Immigration is NOT a Political Football Game

Neither Candidate Is Getting the Immigration Issue Right

6/7/2016 - Michael Barone Townhall.com

No contemporary political issue has been more controversial, or has been subject to more dubious analyses, than immigration.

Take Donald Trump's endlessly repeated promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. As I've pointed out, that is attacking a problem that no longer exists or that has diminished greatly. Net migration from Mexico to the U.S. was around zero between 2007 and 2014.

But Trump's critics also miss something. Walls can actually work. The wall along the border near San Diego worked well enough a dozen years ago that many migrants crossed into the Arizona desert instead. It may not be feasible to build a wall along the Rio Grande in Texas, but the border there can be patrolled more effectively than it is now.

Trump's pointing out that some illegal immigrants from Mexico have been rapists drew harsh criticism. But it's true: Some have been rapists, and on average, immigrants from Mexico have had lower skills and less law-abiding backgrounds than immigrants from any other country. That makes sense when you consider that it's easier to cross a 2,000-mile land-and-shallow-river border than an ocean.

But it's important also to understand how the flow of immigration has changed. Data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey has shown how the picture changed from the pre-recession years of 1998-2007 to the most recent two-year period, 2014-2015.

In the earlier period, immigration from Mexico averaged 429,000 a year, nearly one-third of total immigration. More recently, it averaged 170,000 a year, just 11 percent of the total. But immigration from the rest of Latin America has increased significantly, from 269,000 annually pre-recession to 439,000 most recently. That leaves total Latin migration down by some 90,000.

Immigration from East and South Asia has more than made up for this, rising from a pre-recession average of 337,000 to 566,000 in 2014-2015. Immigration from Africa and the Middle East is also up, from 101,000 to 205,000.

The ACS data does not categorize these immigrants by skill level. But past patterns suggests that current immigrants on average have higher levels of education and skills than was the case in the surge of immigration in the quarter-century from 1982 to 2007. In that respect it may resemble more closely the Ellis Island immigration of 1892-1914.

That suggests less need for a wall on the Mexican border. But perhaps not. The Census data don't show how many non-Mexican Latin illegal immigrants make their way across America's southern border. The surge of "children" from Central America across the border in summer and fall 2015 suggests that this number is substantial -- and could grow much larger.

What should be done about this? Standard polling questions suggest most voters don't want to see mass deportations of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. But veteran political reporter Thomas Edsall, blogging in The New York Times, notes that those polls don't explain the resonance of Trump's immigration stands. Edsall quotes Berkeley scholar Lefteris Anastasopoulos as saying that polls provide "a significant underestimation of the backlash against newly arriving immigrants and an overestimation of the support for immigration among the public."

If that's right, Hillary Clinton took a grave political risk by agreeing with Bernie Sanders and promising that she won't deport "children" or any immigrants who don't have criminal records. As Center for Immigration Studies Director Mark Krikorian writes, Clinton is "embracing what amounts to Angela Merkel's immigration platform."

Clinton was one-upping the Obama administration's policy of letting illegal immigrants who claim to be "children" and their parents remain in the United States indefinitely. In effect she is calling for open borders, something that goes even beyond Barack Obama's executive action, which has been ruled illegal by a Texas federal judge and appeals court.

There's a strong argument for a revised immigration policy, like those of Canada and Australia, which would prioritize high-skill immigrants and reduce the number of low-skill people admitted under extended family unification provisions.

The reduced flow of migrants from Mexico and increased flow from South and East Asia is producing results closer to such a policy than what we saw during the 1982-2007 surge of immigration.

Trump's incendiary statements don't point directly toward that kind of immigration reform. But Clinton's advocacy of what amounts to open borders for the unskilled points in the opposite direction -- and it's far from clear that's what most voters want.

WEW Is Right - True Solutions Are Internal

The Decline of Civility

8/10/2016 - Walter E. Williams Townhall.com

One of the unavoidable consequences of youth is the tendency to think behavior we see today has always been. I'd like to dispute that vision, at least as it pertains to black people.

I graduated from Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin High School in 1954. Franklin's predominantly black students were from the poorest North Philadelphia neighborhoods. During those days, there were no policemen patrolling the hallways. Today close to 400 police patrol Philadelphia schools. There were occasional after-school fights -- rumbles, as we called them -- but within the school, there was order. In contrast with today, students didn't use foul language to teachers, much less assault them.

Places such as the Richard Allen housing project, where I lived, became some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional places in Philadelphia. Mayhem -- in the form of murders, shootings and assaults -- became routine. By the 1980s, residents found that they had to have window bars and multiple locks. The 1940s and '50s Richard Allen project, as well as other projects, bore no relation to what they became. Many people never locked their doors; windows weren't barred. We did not go to bed with the sound of gunshots. Most of the residents were two-parent families with one or both parents working.

How might one explain the greater civility of Philadelphia and other big-city, predominantly black neighborhoods and schools during earlier periods compared with today? Would anyone argue that during the '40s and '50s, there was less racial discrimination and poverty? Was academic performance higher because there were greater opportunities? Was civility in school greater in earlier periods because black students had more black role models in the form of black principals, teachers and guidance counselors? That's nonsense, at least in northern schools. In my case, I had no more than three black teachers throughout primary and secondary school.

Starting in the 1960s, the values that made for civility came under attack. Corporal punishment was banned. This was the time when the education establishment and liberals launched their agenda that undermined lessons children learned from their parents and the church. Sex education classes undermined family/church strictures against premarital sex. Lessons of abstinence were ridiculed, considered passe, and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills and abortion. Further undermining of parental authority came with legal and extralegal measures to assist teenage abortions, often with neither parental knowledge nor parental consent.

Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette are behavioral norms, transmitted mostly by example, word of mouth and religious teachings. As such, they represent a body of wisdom distilled through the ages by experience and trial and error. The nation's liberals -- along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals and the courts -- have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. Many people have been counseled to believe that there are no moral absolutes. Instead, what's moral or immoral is a matter of personal convenience, personal opinion, what feels good or what is or is not criminal.

We no longer condemn or shame self-destructive and rude behavior, such as out-of-wedlock pregnancies, dependency, cheating and lying. We have replaced what worked with what sounds good. The abandonment of traditional values has negatively affected the nation as a whole, but blacks have borne the greater burden. This is seen by the decline in the percentage of black two-parent families. Today a little over 30 percent of black children live in an intact family, where as early as the late 1800s, over 70 percent did. Black illegitimacy in 1938 was 11 percent, and that for whites was 3 percent. Today it's respectively 73 percent and 30 percent.

It is the height of dishonesty, as far as blacks are concerned, to blame our problems on slavery, how white people behave and racial discrimination. If those lies are not exposed, we will continue to look for external solutions when true solutions are internal. Those of us who are old enough to know better need to expose these lies.

Troubled Times Mount on a Daily Basis

Yes, the System Is Rigged

8/12/2016 - Pat Buchanan Townhall.com

"I'm afraid the election is going to be rigged," Donald Trump told voters in Ohio and Sean Hannity on Fox News. And that hit a nerve.

"Dangerous," "toxic," came the recoil from the media. Trump is threatening to "delegitimize" the election results of 2016. Well, if that is what Trump is trying to do, he has no small point.

For consider what 2016 promised and what it appears about to deliver.

This longest of election cycles has rightly been called the Year of the Outsider. It was a year that saw a mighty surge of economic populism and patriotism, a year when a 74-year-old Socialist senator set primaries ablaze with mammoth crowds that dwarfed those of Hillary Clinton.

It was the year that a non-politician, Donald Trump, swept Republican primaries in an historic turnout, with his nearest rival an ostracized maverick in his own Republican caucus, Senator Ted Cruz.

More than a dozen Republican rivals, described as the strongest GOP field since 1980, were sent packing. This was the year Americans rose up to pull down the establishment in a peaceful storming of the American Bastille.

But if it ends with a Clintonite restoration and a ratification of the same old Beltway policies, would that not suggest there is something fraudulent about American democracy, something rotten in the state?

If 2016 taught us anything, it is that if the establishment's hegemony is imperiled, it will come together in ferocious solidarity -- for the preservation of their perks, privileges and power.

All the elements of that establishment -- corporate, cultural, political, media -- are today issuing an ultimatum to Middle America: Trump is unacceptable. Instructions are going out to Republican leaders that either they dump Trump, or they will cease to be seen as morally fit partners in power.

It testifies to the character of Republican elites that some are seeking ways to carry out these instructions, though this would mean invalidating and aborting the democratic process that produced Trump. But what is a repudiated establishment doing issuing orders to anyone?

Why is it not Middle America issuing the demands, rather than the other way around?

Specifically, the Republican electorate should tell its discredited and rejected ruling class: If we cannot get rid of you at the ballot box, then tell us how, peacefully and democratically, we can be rid of you? You want Trump out? How do we get you out?

The Czechs had their Prague Spring. The Tunisians and Egyptians their Arab Spring. When do we have our American Spring? The Brits had their "Brexit," and declared independence of an arrogant superstate in Brussels. How do we liberate ourselves from a Beltway superstate that is more powerful and resistant to democratic change?

Our CIA, NGOs and National Endowment for Democracy all beaver away for "regime change" in faraway lands whose rulers displease us.

How do we effect "regime change" here at home?

Donald Trump's success, despite the near-universal hostility of the media, even much of the conservative media, was due in large part to the public's response to the issues he raised.

He called for sending illegal immigrants back home, for securing America's borders, for no amnesty. He called for an America First foreign policy to keep us out of wars that have done little but bleed and bankrupt us.

He called for an economic policy where the Americanism of the people replaces the globalism of the transnational elites and their K Street lobbyists and congressional water carriers.

He denounced NAFTA, and the trade deals and trade deficits with China, and called for rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

By campaign's end, he had won the argument on trade, as Hillary Clinton was agreeing on TPP and confessing to second thoughts on NAFTA.

But if TPP is revived at the insistence of the oligarchs of Wall Street, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- backed by conscript editorial writers for newspapers that rely on ad dollars -- what do elections really mean anymore?

And if, as the polls show we might, we get Clinton -- and TPP, and amnesty, and endless migrations of Third World peoples who consume more tax dollars than they generate, and who will soon swamp the Republicans' coalition -- what was 2016 all about?

Would this really be what a majority of Americans voted for in this most exciting of presidential races?

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable," said John F. Kennedy.

The 1960s and early 1970s were a time of social revolution in America, and President Nixon, by ending the draft and ending the Vietnam war, presided over what one columnist called the "cooling of America."

But if Hillary Clinton takes power, and continues America on her present course, which a majority of Americans rejected in the primaries, there is going to a bad moon rising.

And the new protesters in the streets will not be overprivileged children from Ivy League campuses.

A Nation in Crisis - When Will It End?

The Dream Of Muslim Outreach Has Become A Nightmare

7/21/2016 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com

When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease.

But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama's remedies proved worse than the original illness. Obama gave his first presidential interview to Al Arabiya, noting that he has Muslims in his family. He implicitly blamed America's strained relations with many Middle Eastern countries on his supposedly insensitive predecessor, George W. Bush.

The new message of the Obama administration was that the Islamic world was understandably hostile because of what America had done rather than what it represented. Accordingly, all mention of radical Islam, and even the word "terrorism," was airbrushed from the new administration's vocabulary. Words to describe terrorism or the fight against it were replaced by embarrassing euphemisms like "overseas contingency operations," "man-caused disaster" and "workplace violence."

In apology tours and mythological speeches, Obama exaggerated Islamic history as often as he critiqued America. He backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He pushed America away from Israel, appeased Iran, and tried to piggyback on the Arab Spring by bombing Libya. He even lectured Christians on their past pathologies dating back to the Crusades.

Yet Obama's outreach was still interpreted by Islamists as guilt and weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated. Terrorist attacks increased. Obama blamed them on a lack of gun control or generic "violent extremism." Careerist toadies in government parroted the party-line message and even tried to outdo their politically correct boss.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano focused on returning veterans as terrorist risks. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry said that global warming, not the Islamic State, was the real threat. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the president asked him to make Muslim outreach a top priority for the agency. CIA Director John Brennan said that jihad "is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam." Director of National Intelligence James Clapper opined that the Muslim Brotherhood was largely secular.

The president often blamed the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for needlessly provoking Islam. Obama said that terrorist dangers were no more deadly than falls in bathtubs. He wrote off the Islamic State as an inept jayvee squad, assuring that they posed no existential threat. He campaigned on the premise that al-Qaida was on the run. Obama pulled all troops out of Iraq, which instantly degenerated into chaos.

Obama kept insisting that guns, not Islamic terrorists, were the real danger -- even as assassins used bombs from Boston to Paris, knives from California to Oklahoma, and, most recently, a truck to run over innocents in Nice, France.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies got the message and worried more about charges of "Islamophobia" than preempting deadly terrorist attacks. Authorities had either interviewed and then ignored the Boston, Fort Hood, San Bernardino and Orlando terrorists, or they had blindly ignored their brazen social media threats.

There was never cause for such weak-horse contrition.

Radical Islam never had legitimate grievances against the West. America and Europe had welcomed in Muslim immigrants -- even as Christians were persecuted and driven out of the Middle East. Billions of dollars in American aid still flows to Islamic countries. The U.S. spent untold blood and treasure freeing Kuwait and later the Shiites of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. America tried to save Afghanistan from the Soviets and later from the Taliban.

For over a half-century, the West paid jacked-up prices for OPEC oil -- even as the U.S. Navy protected Persian Gulf sea lanes to ensure lucrative oil profits for Gulf state monarchies.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the original architects of al-Qaida, were so desperate to find grievances against the West that in their written diatribes they had to invent fantasies of Jews walking in Mecca. In Michael Moore fashion, they laughably whined about America's lack of campaign finance reform and Western culpability for global warming.

The real problem is that Islamic terrorism feeds off the self-induced failures of the Middle East. Jihadists try to convince the Arab street that returning to religious fundamentalism and exporting jihad will empower Muslims to recapture lost primacy over a decadent and guilty West, just as in the mythical glory days of the caliphate.

In truth, religious intolerance, gender apartheid, illiteracy, autocracy, statism, tribalism and religious fundamentalism all guarantee poverty, economic stagnation and scapegoating. While much of Asia and Latin America progressed through reform, the Middle East blame-gamed its miseries on affluent Western nations and on Israel.

More disturbing, millions of Middle Easterners fled to the safety of Europe and the United States -- but on occasion, only to resist assimilation and show ingratitude once they got there.

In short, the dreamy Obama approach to terrorism has proved a nightmare -- and it is not over yet.