08/12/2013
National Review has just triangulated against Rep. Steve King, who is emerging as the hero of patriotic resistance to the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge a.k.a. “Immigration Reform” bill in the House in parallel to Senator Jeff Sessions in the Senate — unquestionably because holy dread about King’s (indisputable) point, that illegal alien valedictorians are far exceeded by illegal alien drug mules, is the current price of Main Stream Media respectability. The editorial was unsigned, but VDARE.com’s James Fulford, a renowned textual critic, says: “I'll take a guess based on style — imitation WFB — that it was actually written by Rich Lowry, who in any case is responsible for it as NR Editor.”
Which is interesting to me, as a student of fashionable Manhattan journalism from my vantage point in Far Rockaway. I’ve decided there are two political writers named Rich Lowry, whose views on matters such as Trayvon Martin and the Amnesty/Immigration Surge Bill are significantly opposed. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call them “PC Lowry” and “Conservative Lowry.”
{Some readers don’t like us criticizing Conservatism Inc. pundits, saying that they are on our side. But they are not. Of course, Rich Lowry in particular, and the neoconservatives of whom he is an ally, systematically seek to destroy the lives of immigration reform patriots, paleoconservatives, race realists and anyone more brilliant than themselves, while sucking up to the Cultural Marxist Left. But, more significantly, their careerism causes them to be flat out wrong at key junctures. It is forgivable to change one’s mind, but one must own up to it, and explain why one did. Otherwise, one is no better than the scurviest politician.)
On March 24, 2012, 29 days after “white-Hispanic” George Zimmerman killed aspiring murderer Trayvon Martin in self-defense, PC Lowry jumped on the bandwagon against Zimmerman. Although there had been more than enough time to get the story straight — I had already published nine items at my personal blog exposing the hoax — PC Lowry followed the MSM script with its many falsehoods, under the particularly outrageous headline Al Sharpton is right
What is true of the stopped clock is also true of the perpetually aggrieved, shamelessly exploitative publicity hound: Through sheer chance, he occasionally will be right.
The Trayvon Martin case appears to be one of those instances for Al Sharpton. The longtime provocateur and MSNBC host has a leading role in the protests over the lethal shooting of the 17-year-old Martin at the hands of a zealous neighborhood-watch volunteer in the Florida community of Sanford.
During halftime of the NBA All-Star Game, Martin left the home of his father’s girlfriend to walk to the local 7-Eleven for Skittles and iced tea. It was about 7 p.m., and he caught the attention of 28-year-old George Zimmerman, who had taken it upon himself to patrol the neighborhood armed with a gun. He considered Martin suspicious and called 9-1-1, which dispatched police. Ignoring the 9-1-1 operator’s urging not to pursue Martin, Zimmerman followed the young man, got into an altercation with him, and shot him dead.
Zimmerman claims Martin attacked him from behind and he fired in self-defense. But while he was on the line with 9-1-1, Zimmerman was the one chasing Martin….
We may never know what exactly happened in the altercation. We do know this: Through stupendous errors in judgment, Zimmerman brought about an utterly unnecessary confrontation and then — in the most favorable interpretation of the facts for him — shot Martin when he began to lose a fistfight to him.
Florida has a "Stand Your Ground" law that stipulates that someone doesn’t have to retreat and may use deadly force if facing a threat of death or bodily harm. It is one of the reasons that the police didn’t press charges against Zimmerman. But the law is not meant to be a warrant for aggressive vigilantism. It was Martin, chased by a stranger who wasn’t an officer of the law, who had more reason to feel threatened and "stand his ground" than Zimmerman.
News accounts tend to leave out that Zimmerman is a mixed-race Hispanic. That doesn’t mean he can’t be a racist. (Although it’s murky, it sounds as if he mutters a racial epithet on the 9-1-1 call.) [Links added by VDARE.com, throughout. Since they're added by us, they have the deliberate effect of proving “PC Lowry” wrong and “Conservative Lowry” derivative. ]
But sixteen months later, on July 10, 2013, Conservative Lowry wrote:
MSNBC tried and convicted Zimmerman, executed him by firing squad, then propped the body up at the defense table so it could do it all over again. Host Lawrence O’Donnell said Zimmerman shot “a black teenager to death for having done absolutely nothing,” and opined that “I believe what we have here is evidence of a police cover-up.” At a rally, another of the network’s personalities, the Rev. Al Sharpton, compared the injustice done to Martin to the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ — and that may have been one of his cooler-headed moments.
The most poisonous interpretation of Zimmerman’s conduct — that he sought out and assassinated a black kid for being a black kid — was never plausible. Assassins generally don’t call the police before closing in and gunning down their targets. But it looks positively ridiculous in light of all the evidence suggesting that right before Zimmerman fired, Martin was beating Zimmerman, not the other way around … .
Accounts differ on who was crying out for help that night. Martin’s family says it was Martin; Zimmerman’s family says it was Zimmerman. But Zimmerman is the one who had the injuries, including a broken nose and lacerations on the back of his head, consistent with getting beaten up and being in distress.
All of this suggests that Zimmerman fired in self-defense. At this point, if he is convicted of second-degree murder as charged, he will be the one failed by the Florida criminal justice system — not Martin.
Justice, in the sense of a deliberate, lawful judgment consistent with the facts, was never the driving passion of the Zimmerman-haters. They wanted a racial morality play. If Trayvon Martin had been shot by another black person, no one would have cared. Al Sharpton wouldn’t have made him a cause. Lawrence O’Donnell wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. No one outside his immediate family and friends would have ever known his name.
Trayvon Martin’s shooting was an ideologically useful tragedy, and so the vultures did their worst.
[Zimmerman, a morality play that failed by Rich Lowry, Politico, July 10, 2013.]
Nowhere did Lowry acknowledge that he had done a 180 — or that he had previously said Sharpton was right.
He just wants to be on the winning side.
When, in 2012, long-time NR stalwart John Derbyshire, for years the only reason for reading that rag, replied to the Trayvon Martin Hoax in his Taki’s Magazine column with his own version of “The Talk”, the ludicrous warnings Black media parents had been claiming to give their children, Lowry responded, in what became one of the most notorious incidents of Political Correct censorship in recent years, by firing him.
This wasn’t just Lowry: neocon strategy was to appease the Cultural Marxist commissars over Trayvon Martin (and Obama’s re-election). Thus Son-in-Chief at Commentary Magazine, John Podhoretz, published a piece by a cheese-eating surrender monkey named David French. Even future Curse of Stein victim David Frum likewise waved the white flag.
Shamelessly, 15 months after his panicky purge of Derbyshire, and 10 days after George Zimmerman was acquitted, Lowry published a wishy-washy imitation of Derbyshire’s “The Talk” by Victor Davis Hanson (who then triangulated by misrepresenting and condemning Derbyshire).
Now, let’s look at the two Rich Lowries on the Amnesty/ Immigration Surge Bill.
PC Lowry was gung ho for George W. Bush, and fiercely opposed to Pat Buchanan’s 2000 insurgency, even though it was always obvious that Bush meant to promote Amnesty and Buchanan was an immigration patriot. During the 2006-2007 campaign, National Review only nominally opposed Amnesty — joining in, with trademark heroism, especially after it was defeated. And in 2011, National Review was back promoting Jeb Bush, whose sole selling point is treason, as presidential timber.
Still, more recently Conservative Lowry co-signed with Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol (proof of his subservience?) this powerful (maybe David Frum wrote it?) anti-Amnesty/ Immigration Surge editorial:
Marco Rubio says he doesn’t want to have to come back ten years from now and deal with the same illegal-immigration problem. But that’s exactly what the CBO says will happen under his own bill. According to the CBO analysis of the bill, it will reduce illegal immigration by as little as a third or by half at most. By one estimate, this means there will be about 7.5 million illegal immigrants here in ten years. And this is under the implausible assumption that the Obama administration would administer the law as written.
The bill’s changes in legal immigration are just as ill considered. Everyone professes to agree that our system should be tilted toward high-skilled immigration, but the Gang of Eight bill unleashes a flood of additional low-skilled immigration. The last thing low-skilled native and immigrant workers already here should have to deal with is wage-depressing competition from newly arriving workers. Nor is the new immigration under the bill a panacea for the long-term fiscal ills of entitlements, as often argued, because those programs are redistributive and most of the immigrants will be low-income workers….
There’s no rush to act on immigration. The Democrats didn’t do anything when they controlled all of the elected branches in 2009 and 2010. The Gang of Eight tells us constantly that we have a de facto amnesty for illegal immigrants now. Fine. What’s the urgent need to act immediately, then?
The Republicans eager to back the bill are doing so out of political panic. “I think Republicans realize the implications for the future of the Republican party in America if we don’t get this issue behind us,” John McCain says. This is silly. Are we supposed to believe that Republican Senate candidates running in states such as Arkansas, North Carolina, Iowa, Virginia, and Montana will be hurt if the party doesn’t embrace Chuck Schumer’s immigration bill? …
In any case, House Republicans should make sure not to allow a conference with the Senate bill. House Republicans can’t find any true common ground with that legislation. Passing any version of the Gang of Eight’s bill would be worse public policy than passing nothing. House Republicans can do the country a service by putting a stake through its heart. [Kill the Bill by William Kristol and Rich Lowry, The Weekly Standard, July 9, 2013.]
Needless to say, this echoes many of the arguments that VDARE has been using for years, which Lowry and his cronies at NR and The Weekly Standard seemed heretofore unable to grasp.
I had long wondered whether Lowry et al. had some sort of blind spot that made it impossible for them to recognize the economic and political disaster that Amnesty/ Immigration Surge meant for America.
But the editorial seems to reveal that they understood the issues all along. They just didn’t care.
I can’t overstate the importance of this. Conservatism Inc. operatives like Lowry may understand the National Question issues — but they will only acknowledge them out of political expediency, after organizations like VDARE.com have drawn blood.
In other words, they are just frontrunners. They have no principles, and no loyalty to America.
Specifically, if the obviously corrupt GOP House Leadership announces some kind of a “breakthrough” this fall, Lowry/ Kristol may or may not oppose it, depending on insider deals. And they will certainly not fight to the death against a Republican Party that sells out on the issue.
Rather than standing athwart history, shouting “Stop!,” they seek to ride it into the abyss.
Nicholas Stix is a New York City-based journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education. He spent much of the 1990s teaching college in New York and New Jersey. His work has appeared in Chronicles, The New York Post, Weekly Standard, Daily News, New York Newsday, American Renaissance, Academic Questions, Ideas on Liberty and many other publications. Stix was the project director and principal author of the NPI report, The State of White America-2007. He blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.