American Thinker

by E.M. Cadwaladr

    This pretty illusion is really nothing less than an encouragement to suicide. It is time that we natives of the West, rich or poor, black or white, male or female, reaffirm that our nations, cultures, and histories have value. It is time that we call out our enemies for who they are — openly, and without the simpering spectacle of worrying whose feelings might be hurt.

    When I started this article, I thought it might be helpful to lay out a couple of migration scenarios that even progressives would find intolerable. I settled on the Aztecs and New Guinea headhunters. The Aztecs used to practice human sacrifice to propitiate their gods. Headhunters consumed and ate their fellow human beings. Surely, I initially presumed, even progressives have limits. If you get deeply offended by the Nativity statues that your neighbors put out during the holidays, one might think you would find the extraction of a neighbor’s still-beating heart as an offering to the sun god off the table (even if the life cut short was not the life of someone who mattered). Then, too, exotic foreign restaurants are usually a tasty treat — but the charm might wane a little if you found a recognizable human body part on the evening’s bill of fare.

    On further reflection, I’ve given up this line of argument. “All people are basically good” is a definitional claim. It doesn’t mean people are “good” because they measure up against some standard. It means they are good because enlightened people, and only enlightened people, say so. Add to this that both the Aztecs and all the New Guinea headhunters were BIPOC (Black/Indigenous/People-Of-Color), and mere homicidal behavior would be glibly brushed aside as racist. Notably, progressives have no problem with the Chinese government (and others) killing 70,000 Americans a year with fentanyl — even if the sun god isn’t propitiated. Nor do our leftist neighbors hesitate to revile us for getting in the way of harvesting unknown numbers of organs from aborted babies. They don’t care about death at all if it isn’t the death of someone they deem worthy of life. The Atlantic, CNN, and MS NOW are always there to tell the indoctrinated whose lives matter. If the leftist judges and politicians perform the actual social surgery, the media are their willing and attentive anesthesiologists.

    Our grandparents’ judgmental old hearts would not have withered before the charge of racism. They wouldn’t have thought that Islam or Satanism was what the framers had in mind when they crafted the establishment clause. In any sane world, one person’s free exercise of religion cannot include the need to cause another person’s subjugation or death. Our ancestors wouldn’t have assumed that every person from every foreign culture was a mere victim of Western bigotry, a long-suffering poor soul yearning to reveal the progressive bleeding heart within. The worst among our ancestors would have judged newcomers by their appearances. The best of them would have judged them by behavior. Our contemporaries insist we should not judge them by any criteria whatsoever.

    Throughout history, the first order of business for almost any group of people has been the preservation of its members. The handful of societies that have approached outsiders with naïvely open arms have gone the way of the dodo — and for the quite similar reasons. Naïve fearlessness works only when there really is nothing to fear. Many people in the world are not a threat to us — they can and do make excellent citizens. Unfortunately, there are also genuinely malevolent individuals and even whole malevolent cultures. Pretending there are not is about as realistic as just deciding there is no such thing as cancer. Good ideas incorporate reality; bad ideas conceal it. Young left-leaning tourists who have thought North Korea might be a fun place to visit, or that hiking into Iran would be deliciously edgy, have learned about the reality of evil the hard way. Progressive government schools have taught our children to believe that prudent caution is an obsolete concept. Prudent caution is not only reasonable — it’s the only position that is or ever has been reasonable.

    In the rabid shrieking of our current age, another good distinction has been lost. Too many have forgotten that keeping a group of foreigners out of your country is not equivalent to killing them. Japan has very restrictive immigration laws, and no one seems to think the Japanese are murdering the people they keep out. The idea that Japan is for the Japanese hardly raises an eyebrow. This is because the Japanese are not the guinea pigs for the civilizational experiment progressives have been conducting. We are — you and I and our European cousins.

    One rare individual for whom deportation would almost certainly mean death is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has criticized Islam for much of her life. Returning her to Somalia would almost certainly be fatal — the “religion of peace” taking a decidedly uncharitable view on the question of apostasy. “Death” is their prescription. Chalk one up for justifiable asylum status. Returning the owners of the Quality Learing Center in Minneapolis to Somalia, on the other hand, would probably only make them poorer. That’s a favor I’d be happy to return.

Whereas the left has been sneering at our unsophisticated mindset since long before I learned to walk, I’ve yet to hear them make any real argument explaining why we should import people who despise us. “Diversity is our strength” is a slogan, not an argument. It’s a claim for which I’ve never seen any evidence. It’s a claim that no one outside the West believes. It’s a farce that we even have to say that importing people who despise us might not be a good idea. Christ may well have asked us to turn the other cheek, but I doubt he would have asked us to jump in front of a jihadist’s speeding truck. Nor is there any shortage of home-grown threats to our safety. What does “drag queen story hour” actually accomplish apart from making children more vulnerable to homosexual predators

    It would be nice if everyone were good — but not everyone is. Sadly, we have always had, and probably always will have, enemies. Yes, enemies. Not people who are just misunderstood, culturally “different,” or victims of some past offense your ancestors are presumed to have committed against them. Enemies — people who see you not as a person but as a thing to be used, defrauded, subjugated and sometimes even killed. Something to be sacrificed. Something to be eaten.

    The Democrat intelligentsia may not have literally filled our country with Aztecs and cannibals — but they have come as close as they could with the material they had available.