11/19/2008
In Obama’s new improved America, we will all be a lot nicer — or else. In the interests of everyone’s self-esteem, all cultural beliefs and practices will be celebrated rather than criticized. (The really heinous ones, like slavery, violent witchcraft and FGM will be conveniently ignored.) All the darker aspects of human nature — violence, greed, hatred, etc — will be solved by the enforcement of a kumbaya ideology of massive denial. Knuckle-draggers who can’t get with the program of universal peace and love will learn to regret their stubbornness in vegetarian reprogramming camps.
(That’s black humor — if we're still allowed to use the term).
We already can see a preview of things to come. The leftists are on the warpath about what they construe as "hate speech" — usually just reasoned debate about borders, culture and immigration. According to protectors of lawbreaking foreigners from the New York Times to La Raza, any suggestion of immigration law enforcement unduly stirs the blood of Redstate citizens (you know, the ones still clinging to religion and guns), driving them to acts of violence and murder.
The New York Times in particular has urged a crackdown on speech — which is a little odd, considering how the press is supposed to venerate the First Amendment. The NYT’s' attitude is typified by a November 14 editorial, The High Cost of Harsh Words, which essentially blamed the recent murder of Ecuadorean illegal immigrant Marcello Lucero on the remarks of a local official, Steve Levy, who has been a stand-up guy for law and borders.
"Words have consequences. Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, is learning that the hard way during a horrible week. Seven teenagers were arrested and charged in the fatal stabbing last Saturday of Marcello Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, on a street in the Long Island village of Patchogue. [ … ]
"Mr. Levy’s past harsh words and actions against undocumented workers have now left him cornered with a tragically limited ability to lead the county in confronting a brutal act that surely pains him as much as anyone. "
It is downright bizarre for an editorialist to respond to a despicable crime by condemning a public official for speaking out against immigration chaos. A bunch of roughneck teens got drunk at a bar and decided beat up a Mexican, with horrific results. There is no evidence whatsoever that anything Levy said precipitated the crime.
Worse (perhaps), the Times insulted the many millions of Americans across the political spectrum who want their immigration laws enforced:
"[Levy] parroted extremist talking points, going so far as to raise the alarm, utterly false, that illegal immigrants' 'anchor babies' were forcing Southampton Hospital to close its maternity ward. He denounces racist hatred, yet his words have made him a hero in pockets of Long Island where veins of racism run deep. "
It’s no wonder the Times stock is in the tank (hitting a 52-week low on November 14) when it calls some of its readers "racists." Insulting customers is not usually good for business.
Interestingly, another Times article the same day [A Killing in a Town Where Latinos Sense Hate, by Kirk Semple] noted twice that engaging in mugging was a regular pastime among some students …
"PATCHOGUE, N.Y. — It was an occasional diversion among a certain crowd at Patchogue-Medford High School, students said: Drink a few beers, then go looking for people to mug, whether for money or just for kicks. [ … ]
"Acquaintances of the defendants said it was not unusual for groups of students from the high school to go out looking for people to mug. 'It was just for fun, or for money,' said Taylor Fallica, 15, a student at the high school who said he was a friend of Mr. Conroy and the other defendants."
Are robbery and assault no longer crimes in New York State? If anything precipitated the deadly violence, it was the apparent acceptance by authorities that high school students get drunk and mug — an attitude which encouraged kids to continue this amusing activity.
And even assuming that the killing of the Ecuadorean was rooted in anger over community changes caused by massive illegal immigration, what teenager would take action based on the words of an adult authority figure? Ask any parent how often that happens.
The major cause of the crime: too much drinking by stupid adolescents. It is simply a fact that excessive drinking makes some people mean. Yet no one is calling for another failed Prohibition.
In telling contrast, in another instance of controversial speech, the NYT emitted a full-throated defense of the First Amendment in an article titled, Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech [June 12, 2008]. The subject was the contentious censorship trial of columnist Mark Steyn for a criticism of Muslims which appeared in the Canadian magazine Macleans [The future belongs to Islam, October 20, 2006].
The Times piece was written by Adam Liptak, a reporter who attended the tribunal against Steyn in British Columbia. It offered a thoughtful explanation of the American view on free speech, while comparing it to less robust protections in every other society.
"Earlier this month, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined $23,000 in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep.
"By contrast, American courts would not stop a planned march by the American Nazi Party in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, though a march would have been deeply distressing to the many Holocaust survivors there.
"Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business executive who had called food stamps 'basically a Puerto Rican program.' The First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote [PDF], does not allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be suppressed or punished just because they may increase 'the general level of prejudice.' "
Well, no one has accused The New York Times of intellectual rigor of late, particularly when the subject is immigrants. Telling the truth about immigration — that decades of unskilled, unassimilating foreigners have harmed American society deeply — is threatening to elite liberals like those at the Times who are invested in the ideology of multicultural utopianism. The paper is therefore happy to smack down speech with which it doesn’t agree, in the larger effort to dissolve the American nation.
The underlying problem: for all the elites' enormous power in business, education and media, there was still enough representative government in place for an aroused citizenry to defeat amnesty last year.
Unquestionably, the Open Borders brigade believes that a verbally inhibited electorate will be better for their side. And that means lots more accusations of racism — and worse.
The big escalation this round: the attack on free speech by connecting it with violence against non-Americans. Saying that illegal aliens, ahem, are "breaking the law" is apparently too upsetting for America’s marketplace of ideas.
Hence the Main Stream Media’s treatment of the Lucero murder. As usual, The New York Times leads and others follow. The Associated Press had this headline November 10: Advocates say rhetoric fuels anti-Hispanic crime.
"Observers and Hispanic advocates blame a climate of harsh rhetoric surrounding the national immigration debate.
"'I don’t think it’s merely coincidence that these hate crimes are going up at the same time there’s a violent at times debate over immigration,' said Kevin [Johnson,] dean of the law school at the University of California-Davis.
"'We talk about immigration, we're not particularly careful in the terminology,' he said. 'Inflammatory terminology is frequently used, that helps to sort of rile people up.' "
But what are citizens supposed to do when the truth is inflammatory? Shut up to please La Raza and The New York Times?
This is the reality: Millions of foreigners routinely cross the border illegally, buy stolen identification and unlawfully take jobs that by law are supposed to be held by citizens and legal immigrants. Employers' use of exploitable foreign workers has figured largely in the loss of the blue-collar middle class: occupations like construction and meatpacking no longer support families as they have in the past. A century of labor progress in terms of wages and workplace safety has been wiped out by open borders.
In areas of high influx, the social service system designed for citizens is strained to the breaking point. Schools and the healthcare system are buckling under the needs of foreign families that are poor, unskilled and uneducated.
These are facts. It is the ruination America for profit and ethnic transformation that is inflammatory, not the words used to describe it. Anti-sovereignty activists' focus on shutting down free speech is a strategy to suppress opposition. If they can repress Americans' outspoken condemnation of border anarchy, then the possibility for a massive amnesty is much enhanced. Only the high-decibel fury of citizens stopped the last attempt.
The MSM’s supposed concern about the death of Mr. Lucero would be easier take seriously if there were any comparable attention to the many crime victims of illegal aliens and immigrants generally.
But there isn’t. With very few exceptions, crime victims of illegal aliens and immigrants are noted in local media only. For information about victims of criminal aliens you have to read VDARE.com and other internet sites dedicated to telling the truth about immigration anarchy.
One-Worldism is the goal of elites and utopian leftists. Censorship of dissenting views is a means to that end.
Friends of American sovereignty and culture don’t need name calling and epithets. The truth about America’s immigration disaster is harsh enough.
Brenda Walker (email her) lives in Northern California and publishes two websites, LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. She recently added a fine new John Stuart Mill quote to the files: "Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist." (From Chapter 16 of Representative Government)
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.