Ignorance of History Nation Destined to Repeat Horrific Consequences - We Are There!

 

The Ungracious - and Their Demonization of the Past

12/30/2021 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com

The last two years have seen an unprecedented escalation in a decades-long war on the American past. But there are lots of logical flaws in attacking prior generations in U.S. history.

Critics assume their own judgmental generation is morally superior to those of the past. So, they use their own standards to condemn the mute dead who supposedly do not measure up to them.

Yet 21st-century critics rarely acknowledge their own present affluence and leisure owe much to history's prior generations whose toil helped create their current comfort.

And what may future scolds say of the modern generation that saw over 60 million abortions since Roe v. Wade, even as fetal viability outside the womb continued to progress to ever earlier ages?

What will our grandchildren say of us who dumped on them over $30 trillion in national debt - much of it as borrowing for entitlements for ourselves?

What sort of society snoozes as record numbers of murders continue in 12 of its major cities? What is so civilized about defunding the police, endemic smash-and-grab thefts, and car jackings?

Was our media more responsible, professional, and learned in 1965 or 2021? Did Hollywood make more sophisticated and enjoyable films in 1954 or 2021? Was there less or more sportsmanship among professional athletes in 1990 or 2021?

Was it actually moral to discard the "content of our character" and "equal opportunity" principles of the prior Civil Rights movement of 60 years ago? Are their replacement fixations on the "color of our skin" and "equality of result" superior?

Would America have won World War II with the current labor participation rate of only six in 10 Americans working? Would our generation have brought all American troops home and quit World War I in fear of the deadly 1918 Spanish flu pandemic?

Are we proud that most standardized tests of student knowledge and achievement continue to decline, despite record investments in education?

Do we ever pause to consider that we enjoy our modern standard of living and security because we were once a meritocracy that quit judging our workforce by tribal affinities and ancient prejudices?

Our generation talks of infrastructure nonstop. But when was the last time it built anything comparable to the Hoover Dam, the interstate highway system, or the California Water Project - much less sent a man back to the moon or beyond?

If prior generations were so toxic, why do we continue to take for granted the moral and material world they bequeathed to us, from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to our airports, freeways, and power plants? Did we ever defeat anything comparable to the Axis powers or Soviet communism?

We know the symptoms of the current epidemic of hating the past.

One is Orwellian renaming and statue-toppling. Historical revision often responds to puritanical mob frenzies rather than to democratic discussion and votes of relevant elected officials.

Where is the pantheon of woke heroes who will replace the toppled or defaced Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt?

Whose morality and achievement should instead be immortalized? Were the public and private lives of Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Margaret Sanger, and Franklin D. Roosevelt without sin?

Racial fixations tend predictably in one direction. In good Confederate fashion, we lump all individuals who look alike into inexact collectives of "white," "black," or "brown" - often to stereotype the supposed evils of so-called white supremacy.

But if we go down that tribalist and simplistic road of caricatured oppressors and oppressed, will future generations tally up each group's merits and demerits, to adjudicate the roles of millions of individuals in making America worse or better?

What standard would they use to judge our ignorant world of racial stereotyping - proportional representation in Nobel Prizes, philanthropy, scientific breakthroughs, or lasting art, music, and literature versus statistics on homicides, assault, divorce, and illegitimacy?

Immigration - when legal, diverse, measured, and often meritocratic - has been the great strength of America, as typified by industrious arrivals who chose to abandon their own homeland to risk new lives in a foreign United States.

But if America is so flawed and so irredeemable, why in fiscal year 2021 are nearly 2 million foreigners now crashing its borders - illegally, en masse, and intent on reaching a supposedly racist nation that is purportedly inferior to those they abandon?

According to the ancient brutal bargain, assimilation and integration grant the immigrant as much claim to America's present and past as the native-born. But then shouldn't the antithesis also be true?

Shouldn't immigrants at least respect those of the past who created the very country they now so eagerly desire, and died in awful places from Valley Forge to Bastogne to preserve?

Never in history has such a mediocre, but self-important and ungracious generation owed so much, and yet expressed so little gratitude, to its now dead forebears.

 

 

 

Our Republic Continues to Suffer the Horrific Consequences of Leftist Government and Judicial Tyranny

 

Disparate impact comes to federal immigration law

By Andrea Widburg www.americanthinker.com

There are two types of illegal aliens in America: those who overstay their welcome and those who sneak across our Southern border.  The ones overstaying their welcome can come from anywhere in the world and, once kicked out, tend to stay out.  Those sneaking across the border, a matter of proximity, are heavily Hispanic.  The Washington Times caught up with and made known a district court decision from August holding that the law making it a criminal offense to re-enter the country is racist because it has a disparate impact on Hispanics and was enacted in the 1920s with racist goals in mind.

Miranda Du is the judge.  She got her legal degree from U.C. Berkeley, and Obama appointed her to the federal district court in Nevada.  Her rulings have consistently skewed left, and she's steeped in the language of the left.  In a case involving Texas women who argued that Nevada's legal prostitution conflicted with the federal government's anti-trafficking laws, Du ruled against them but sympathized with their "lived experience."  She also prevented churches from supporting the faithful during the COVID lockdowns.

Du outdid herself this past August in her ruling on 8 USC §1326, the federal law holding that illegal aliens who have already been removed once from the U.S. but who sneak back in can be criminally prosecuted.  The law, enacted in the 1920s and amended frequently since then, is facially completely neutral.  It's manifestly intended to keep the border from turning into a turnstile through which illegal aliens can endlessly return, no matter how many times they've been evicted from America.

The Defender Services Office Training Division of the Administration Office of the United States Courts (i.e., a government agency) wrote approvingly about Du's decision, claiming that the statute has nativist roots:

The original law criminalizing illegal reentry under 8 U.S.C. 1326 grew out of a disturbing time in history marked by the rise of eugenics, the Ku Klux Klan, and deeply nativist sentiments. See, e.g., Webinar: The Racist Origins of Illegal Reentry (and how to Challenge Them in Your Practice) (Oct. 15, 2020), by AFDs Kara Hartzler and Nora Hirozawa, available on the password protected side of fd.org here.

In effect, because Hispanics pour illegally into America, stopping them is inherently racist.

Du held that the law is racist in intent and created a disparate impact.  Therefore, she held, it violated the defendant's Due Process Rights that he was being charged with repeatedly violating American law by breaking into America.  As the Defender Services explained:

Mr. Carrillo-Lopez filed a motion to dismiss his indictment, arguing that because the facts and historical evidence presented show that the original illegal reentry law was enacted with a discriminatory purpose and still has a disparate impact, § 1326 is presumptively unconstitutional under Arlington Heights.  After briefing and hearings, the district court agreed with the defense. In granting the motion to dismiss, the District Court found that Mr. "Carrillo-Lopez has demonstrated that Section 1326 disparately impacts Latinx people and that the statute was motivated, at least in part, by discriminatory intent."  The District Court also considered whether the government had shown that § 1326 would have been enacted absent discriminatory intent, and concluded that the government failed to so demonstrate.  As a result, the Court held that "Section 1326 violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth Amendment." 

You caught, I'm sure, that Du not only writes about "lived experiences," but describes Hispanics as "Latinx," even though they hate that term.  Du's so woke.  She's also a pure activist.

As I noted at the start of this post, while people who overstay their visas are the most common illegal aliens, they're not the ones who break immigration laws repeatedly.  That honor belongs to Hispanics.  Because they violate the law the most, they are affected by it the most.  That does not mean, though, that the law was intended to or does discriminate against them.

Think about how Du's reasoning applies to other scenarios.  For example, Black-on-Black murder is the single biggest plague in the Black community.  And sadly, Blacks commit murder in numbers disproportionate to their overall representation in the population.  That means that Blacks are disproportionately likely to be arrested for murder.  Under Du's reasoning, our murder laws have a disparate impact and should be ignored.

Oh, wait!  That's exactly what's been happening for the past 18 months.  The result?  The murder rate across urban America has dramatically increased, with Blacks disproportionately affected, both as predators and prey.  Sometimes a criminal law's disparate impact isn't because of racism; it's because one group — say, Hispanics illegally and repeatedly entering America — are more likely to commit an act that is reasonably denominated a crime.

The case is on appeal in the Ninth Circuit, which Trump was able to make slightly less left but which is majority-leftist.  The outcome should be interesting.

 

America is in a State of Confusion on Most Subjects

 

Democrats Lose Hispanic Voters -- Lots of Them

12/29/2021 - Byron York Townhall.com

The Democratic Party's problem with Hispanic voters is worse than leaders think, according to a new assessment by the highly regarded strategist Ruy Teixeira. That conclusion is particularly important because Teixeira wrote the influential 2002 book "The Coming Democratic Majority," which convinced many Democrats that a growing Hispanic population -- one that heavily supported Democrats -- was the key to permanent Democratic dominance of American politics.

Now, with Hispanic voters abandoning the Democratic Party in droves, it's all falling apart. "The seriousness of this problem tends to be underestimated in Democratic circles for a couple of reasons," Teixeira writes in a recent Substack article. "(1) They don't realize how big the shift is; and (2) they don't realize how thoroughly it undermines the most influential Democratic theory of the case for building their coalition."

Teixeira's last point is an understatement. The idea of a permanent Democratic majority is based totally on Hispanic voters. No other group is growing at the rate the Hispanic population is growing. When Democrats looked forward to the day when a nonwhite-majority America elected Democrat after Democrat, they were basing it on the growth in the number of Hispanic Americans, coupled with the assumption that those voters would loyally support Democrats. If that doesn't happen, there's no permanent Democratic majority.

And for now, at least, it doesn't seem to be working out. Instead, Teixeira cites several measures of Hispanic voters increasingly supporting Republicans. A new Wall Street Journal poll found them split evenly on the question of whether to support the GOP or Democrats in the 2022 congressional elections. That's a big change from an imposing Democratic advantage in previous races. The poll also showed the Hispanic vote virtually tied in a hypothetical 2024 Joe Biden-Donald Trump rematch -- after supporting Biden by more than 25 points in 2020.

There's more. In Texas, which Teixeira calls "perhaps the Democrats' most prized target" for winning with growing Hispanic support, "Biden's ratings among Hispanics have been dreadful." A recent Dallas Morning News poll found Biden's support at 35% approval and 54% disapproval among Texas Hispanics. Those voters particularly disapprove of Biden's handling of the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, in the Virginia governor's race, Teixeira notes with some astonishment, "Democrat Terry McAuliffe actually lost the Latino vote." That took some work, but McAuliffe accomplished it.

Teixeira also points out that Hispanic voters moved in large numbers to Trump between 2016 and 2020. And not just in Florida and Texas -- the shift was also seen in Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia.

Hispanic voters are particularly cool toward Biden. "Working Class Joe" does not seem to connect with those voters, who are largely working class. Hispanic voters without a college degree "[gave] Trump a remarkable 41% of their vote in 2020," Teixeira notes. That is especially important because about 80% of the Hispanic vote nationwide could be classified as working class.

But it's not just Biden. Latino voters appear to be increasingly turned off by the Democratic Party itself, and particularly by its progressive leaders. That was certainly true in 2020, the year of Black Lives Matter for much of the party. The Democrats' increasing focus on racial issues left Hispanic voters unmoved. And that leads to what is perhaps Teixeira's most important point:

"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrats have seriously erred by lumping Hispanics in with 'people of color' and assuming they embraced the activism around racial issues that dominated so much of the political scene in 2020, particularly in the summer," Teixiera writes. "This was a flawed assumption. The reality of the Hispanic population is that they are, broadly speaking, an overwhelmingly working class, economically progressive, socially moderate constituency that cares above all about jobs, the economy and health care."

Hispanic voters did not want to defund the police. They did not want to slash police budgets or reduce the number of officers. They didn't want to reduce the role of law enforcement in keeping the peace. And they didn't like the idea of reparations. They were, in other words, entirely out of touch with the Summer of BLM.

Finally, many Hispanic voters are repelled by the anti-Americanism of some progressives. Hispanics in a recent survey "said they would rather be a citizen of the United States than any other country in the world and by 35 points said they were proud of the way American democracy works," Teixeira notes. Such opinions, he adds, "contrasted starkly with the negative views of progressive activists."

In other words, Hispanic voters seem to be out of sync with the most powerful trends in today's Democratic Party. Will it last? Who knows? But at this moment, the Democrats' problem presents a huge opportunity for Republicans.

This content originally appeared on the Washington Examiner at washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-democrats-lose-hispanic-voters-lots-of-them.

Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.