John Derbyshire: Trump’s UN Speech A Pleasant Surprise — Especially On Immigration, Refugees

By John Derbyshire

09/22/2017

Adapted from the September 22 Radio Derb, available exclusively on VDARE.com

President Trump opened his address to the United Nations General Assembly this week with a gracious tribute to those foreign leaders who had offered help with America’s recent hurricane and flood disasters. (No doubt these were connected somehow with the activities of the Trump administration. Don’t laugh: It was an article of faith in imperial China that natural disasters were a reflection of disorder in the human world. Those of you who have read the greatest novel ever written about China, Tibet, Wall Street, Buddhism, and Italian Opera will know that this belief can by no means be dismissed as a mere archaic superstition).

Then Trump gave a comprehensive survey of the foreign scene. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my own response was less negative than most. And his hints on immigration and refugees were positively welcome.

I was inclined to negativity, being a U.N.-hater. My ideal of a speech by a U.S. President to the U.N. would be one announcing, in as few words as possible, our withdrawal from the whole U.N. circus and the revocation of all diplomatic privileges for U.N. employees, with those who are not U.S. citizens being placed under 24-hour deportation orders.

The U.N. is an archaism. It accomplishes nothing that could not be done just as well with traditional diplomacy, brought up-to-date by online conferencing services. The typical U.N. functionary is the nephew or mistress of some banana republic dictator-of-the-week, with a high school education and a lavish expense account. These people do nothing useful. To the contrary, they are a nuisance to the inhabitants of Manhattan.

The whole thing needs to be scrapped, or at least moved to some location where its pointlessness is more in concord with its immediate surroundings: Haiti, perhaps, or Brussels, alongside the European Union headquarters.

I’m a radical, though; and I've come to terms with the fact that Trump isn’t. He’s not going to kick out the U.N., any more than he’s going to deport all the illegal aliens, or have a moratorium on legal immigration, or challenge Birthright Citizenship, or pull us out of NATO, or end Affirmative Action, or close down the Department of Education, or ban public-sector unions.

I'll take what I can get.

Best of all, for a National Conservative, were Trump’s repeated references to what he called "those three beautiful pillars … of peace" which are: sovereignty, security, and prosperity. The word "sovereignty" showed up ten times in the speech, and "sovereign" by itself another twelve times — you could almost call it the keynote of Trump’s address.

Globalists of both the cuckservative Right and the Left were horrified. Neocon Invade-The-World/ Invite-The-World fanatic Max Boot writing in USA Today, thundered

[Harry] Truman and his aides would have been appalled if they had lived long enough to see Trump preening before the U.N. General Assembly, praising national sovereignty as the greatest good in the world.

[At U.N., Trump’s 'me first' doctrine abandons Truman’s postwar ’security for all', September 19, 2017 ]

The globalist Left was just as horrified by Trump’s speech as the globalist Right. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering if they are really two different things.

MSNBC airhead Brian Williams wondered aloud whether the President’s repeated use of the word "sovereignty" was a "dog whistle" to his base — you know, those knuckle-dragging racist Nazi KKK white-supremacist bigots over in the West Virginia hollows [Brian Williams: Was Trump’s repeated use of ‘sovereignty’ during U.N. speech a dog whistle?, By Jessica Chasmar, The Washington Times, September 20, 2017]

Brian Williams' guest, some Lefty bimbo, went right along with this dog-whistle theory. Using the words "sovereign" and "sovereignty" that many times, she said, undermined international bodies like the U.N. []

Well, I certainly hope so.

Here was the Lefty bimbo on why Trump used the words "sovereign" and "sovereignty" so much:

It just means what he was talking about from the beginning, which is "America First, we're going to go it alone."

All responsible leaders have an obligation to serve their own citizens, and the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.

But making a better life for our people also requires us to work together in close harmony and unity to create a more safe and peaceful future for all people.

What I saw in the speech was a long-overdue redressing of the balance. Of course nationalism is not an unqualified good; of course nationalism has its pathologies. But you can say the same of globalism.

One thing Donald Trump’s election victory last year demonstrated is that many of us think globalism has gone too far, has over-reached, especially in the absurd and nation-destroying doctrine of Open Borders. We want to redress the balance. The good thing about Trump’s speech; It sounds as though he wants to redress that balance, too.

But my own reaction to Trump’s speech was mild by Dissident Right standards, leaving me wondering if my heart was too soon made glad.

The fiercer types, like Hunter Wallace over at Occidental Dissent, were denouncing the speech as pure neoconnery. The expression "George W. Trump" was getting new currency. Be interesting to see Hunter Wallace in debate with Max Boot.

Well, yeah. I'd be a happier guy, too, if we left the Afghans to their own devices (or livestock), told Northeast Asia to deal with its own regional problems, and let Venezuela revert to cannibalism, so long as they didn’t try to make an export industry out of it.

But when did we last hear a President say things like

• “The nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.”
• “Uncontrolled migration is deeply unfair to both the sending and the receiving countries.”
• “We will stop radical Islamic terrorism because we cannot allow it to tear up our nation.”
• “We support recent agreements of the G20 nations that will seek to host refugees as close to their home countries as possible.”
• “We have a policy of principled realism, rooted in shared goals, interests, and values.”
• “In foreign affairs, we are renewing this founding principle of sovereignty. Our government’s first duty is to its people, to our citizens — to serve their needs, to ensure their safety, to preserve their rights, and to defend their values.”

"George W. Trump" is not a bad descriptor. I’m not crazy about the "George W." part. Still, "George W. Trump" beats "George W. Bush" in my book.

And either of them is a cosmic improvement on Barack Obama’s anti-white radicalism.

By Ann Coulter was of course more negative than me; but even Ann liked the bit about refugees:

The part I liked was a little-noticed sentence or two on our refugee policy, saying we have a lot of experience with the migration of, you know, displaced, poverty-stricken people, and we see that it doesn’t help us and it doesn’t help them.

They need to stay in their countries. They need to put pressure, for one thing, to help them out, pressure for any economic changes, and he said for the cost of resettling one refugee in this country we can help ten potential refugees in their own countries.

I've never understood that. Why do they have to come here? Why can’t we help them where they are …?

Ann Coulter Reacts to President Trump UN Speech, Mark Simone Show, September 20, 2017

The balance is pressure from the refugee resettlement rackets, which the indefatigable Ann Corcoran has been documenting for years over at her Refugee Resettlement Watch website.

Recently, Ann published extracts from the audited financial reports for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. They got nearly a hundred million dollars in federal grants last year, up eighteen percent on the previous year.

And the Catholic Bishops Conference is just one of the nine refugee contracting agencies, most with reassuringly churchy-sounding names, with their snouts in the federal trough. It’s not even the one with their snouts deepest in the trough, either. That would be Episcopal Migration Ministries, which is 99.5 percent funded by taxpayer dollars!

That’s something to bear in mind when you read about e.g. Cardinal Timothy Dolan attacking Steve Bannon for saying, in an interview with Charlie Rose, Bannon that the Catholic Church has "an economic interest in … unlimited illegal immigration."

Which, harrumphed Cardinal Dolan, was "so ridiculous that it doesn’t merit a comment."

Possibly so: but as Michael Patrick Leahy pointed out, those dollar figures on the government grants the Church is getting for refugee resettlement show very clearly that, whatever the case is with illegal immigration, the Church has a big fat economic interest in that aspect of legal immigration. [Cardinal Dolan Bears False Witness Against Steve Bannon as Catholic Bishops Choose ‘Social Justice’ over Constitution on Illegal Immigration, by Michael Patrick Leahy, Breitbart, September 8,2017]

I'll admit I have a particular loathing for Cardinal Dolan because of the way he treated Frank Borzellieri, the New York City educator and devout Catholic who was hate-bombed by the CultMarx mob for some mildly race-realist things he'd said years earlier, and who received no support whatever from the Church he'd served faithfully for many years.

Far as I’m concerned, Dolan’s spiritual standing would be improved if he were to undergo one of the grislier styles of martyrdom.

This is especially relevant because we are coming to the end of the federal government’s Fiscal Year 2017, on October 1st. Before that happens, President Trump is required to submit his number for a refugee ceiling in the coming year.

[White House Weighs Lowering Refugee Quota To Below 50,000, By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Miriam Jordan, NYT, September 12, 2017]

The benchmark number here; fifty thousand. That’s the number Trump has mentioned in this context (it was in his “travel ban”) far below the 85 thousand admitted in fiscal 2017, which in turn is below the 110 thousand Barack Obama wanted admitted when he set the ceiling last year.

Now we're hearing that there is pressure on Trump from his advisors, especially Stephen Miller — who, by the way, is believed to have written the U.N. speech — and the Department of Homeland Security, pressure to lower the ceiling number even further.

As Ann Corcoran has proposed, and we have seconded, the correct ceiling number for refugees getting permanent resettlement in the U.S.A. during Fiscal Year 2018 is — ZERO!!!!!!!

That will mean an empty trough for Cardinal Dolan and the other Refugee Racketeers. But it will be in concord with the remarks on the subject in Trump’s U.N. speech, and with the national interests of the U.S.

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com:FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.