08/14/2017
VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow spoke at the American Renaissance conference recently, which went off largely without incident due to the willingness of the Tennessee Park Police to enforce the law. See video below:
I’ve been away from my cellphone for about two-three minutes coming up to the podium, so can someone tell me — what he done now? Has he invaded some enemy of Israel? Has he invaded a friend of Israel? Has he arrested Jerry Brown for trying to turn California into a Sanctuary State (which is a felony — aiding illegal aliens is a felony). Has he deported Kamala Harris? We told him to on VDARE.com!
He hasn’t done anything like that? Nobody knows? Well, the day isn’t over, give him some time!
[VDARE.com note: A whole thirty-six hours later, Trump fired communications directer Anthony Scaramucci! — see James Fulford’s Scaramucci Is Now FORMER Communications Director Because He Forgot The MSM Is A Deadly Enemy To Trump.]
I think the definitive word on Trump came from the blog Steve Sailer wrote back in April:
As a Los Angeleno, I’ve long felt that Donald Trump is the second New Yorkeriest New Yorker ever, behind only George Steinbrenner, who owned the New York Yankees baseball team from 1974 to his death in 2010. …unlike most team owners of the times, he battled constantly with his players and managers, especially Billy Martin whom he fired five times. Virtually every week seemed like a crisis if you were reading the sports pages. From 1975-1989, Steinbrenner changed managers 18 times, winning two World Series. Eventually, Steinbrenner slowed down and let Joe Torre win four World Series for him… To a Los Angeles Dodgers fan like myself who was used to the Dodgers having two managers (Walter Alston and Tom Lasorda) over 45 years and an announcer, Vin Scully, for 67 years, the Yankee revolving door soap opera always seemed like it couldn’t possibly go on a day longer.
But — it did go on, for many years. And it was very successful.
That’s how Donald Trump likes it. He spent his life on building sites. He likes chaos. So we all have to get used to it.
Now, my subject today is “Grading Trump’s Performance,” especially from my own perspective and VDARE.com’s perspective — we’re single-issue voters on the immigration issue. And this chaos is certainly irritating; it makes grading difficult. You have to see through the chaos and focus on the big picture, the emerging building.
But I’ll end the suspense: Donald Trump gets an A — for one simple reason: he’s definitely not Hillary Clinton.
As a matter of fact, he’s definitely not Jeb Bush either! So let’s make that an A+!
Bush would have added insult to injury. Cuckservative Review, and all the Coyote News talking heads would be telling us about The Conservative Case for Bush’s Amnesty/Immigration Surge. It would have been unbearable
Because an Amnesty/ Immigration Surge is absolutely what we would have gotten from Clinton. And a complete collapse of enforcement at the borders, let alone in the interior. And a massive increase in refugees (i.e., expedited, subsidized, politically favored immigrants — not refugees in the classical sense at all). She would have gone the full Merkel.
I can’t overemphasize how important this is. The 2016 election was, as Mike Anton called it, “The Flight 93 Election.” It was a desperate attempt, like those people in the plane that went down in Pennsylvania on 9/11, to get control of the flight or die. That was what had to be done. There was just no alternative.
A little while ago, I was talking to a Beltway immigration patriot (they do exist) and she was grumping about Trump not doing this or that — or actually more to the point, as I will argue, not doing it fast enough. So I eventually said to her: “What if Hillary had been elected?” She instantly said: “We’d be in hell.”
We have a Totalitarian Left in this country. We saw them outside today. And they really believed that they were all on the brink of knocking out the Historic American Nation — the American Nation as it had evolved by the time the 1965 Immigration Act, which opened the floodgates after a 50-year pause. They were going to do this final surge of Third World immigration. They were going to import enough demographic change to make their election irreversible.
And then, of course, there’s a Supreme Court. You know, the more I think about it, I can’t overstate the significance of the gay marriage decision. Regardless of the merits of the issue, the question is how it was arrived at. For the courts to find a right to homosexual marriage in the Constitution — if they can do that, they can do anything. They can do anything.
They can decide that the First Amendment doesn’t protect hate speech. And you can see the Left have begun to deploy the arguments on this, that free speech causes stress for various minorities and so on.
They could decide that the Second Amendment doesn’t have to mean that citizen have guns. They’ll say that “militia” meant the Army or something.
And I think perhaps the most significant: they can decide that the Electoral College doesn’t comport with the principle of One Man, One Vote. Or, for that matter, that the election of U.S. senators doesn’t comport with the principle of One Man, One Vote, because there’s a senator from Delaware and a senator from California and these states are vastly different in size.
They’ve already done this with the states. At one stage, the several states used to have all kinds of balancing mechanisms internally. Some of them would have Senates or they would weight the rural districts differently to try to protect the various communities against being dominated by the big cities — which is what you now see in California and Illinois. Well, that was overthrown in the 1960s in a little-noticed decision by the Warren Court.
There’s no reason why they can’t apply this to the federal elections and just simply go to a unitary state. And they mean to do that.
This problem of judicial imperialism — judge-made law, judges legislating from the bench — been developing for many years. I would trace it back to Brown vs. Board in ‘54 with the segregation decision, but maybe Sam Dickson has other ideas.
But it’s getting worse and worse. I wrote a cover story about it in Forbes 30 years ago! — I pointed out that it was judge-made law that created the tort crisis. People are able to sue for all kind of things that about 30 or 40 years earlier they hadn’t been able to sue for, not because there had been a change in the law, but simply because judges decided that the law meant something different from what it was always thought to mean. This had the most profound economic consequences.
But judicial imperialism now completely out of control. We can see this in the decisions about Trump’s executive orders about the travel ban and getting control of the refugee inflow. In effect, various Leftist judges have simply tried to seize control of immigration policy. They are right on the point of deciding that foreigners absolutely, positively have a right to emigrate to the US and that the President doesn’t have the right to change his mind on the recommended number of refugees for a given year, although it’s been done before. They are right on the point of wrestling immigration policy away from the democratic control and simply writing it into the Constitution.
Their success been mixed because the Supreme Court, to an extent, has stopped them — which is why the Supreme Court choice of Gorsuch was so important. If it had been up to Hillary, we would have had another wise Latina, like Sotomayor. You remember that she said that she could make better decisions because she was Hispanic. Funnily enough, when Donald Trump said the same thing, but in reverse, about that judge who was hearing the Trump University case, that he was prejudiced because he was Mexican, the whole world fell on his head — not for the first time or the last time.
But, of course, he’s right. There are judges who rule — who legislate — on the basis of their ethnic interests. So that’s what would have happened, which is why it really matter that Trump won. And it will go on mattering.
Now Jared didn’t go into this in his introduction — but I used to be a contender! I was involved in all these Main Stream Media operations, I used to write for Commentary Magazine, I used to know all these people quite well.
The long-time editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, who is like the Godfather of the neoconservative movement, was at with me at a dinner club I used to attend around about the time of the first Gulf War. He was fanatically in favor, not just of the war, but of Bush Senior’s going up to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. And I was puzzled by this. It’s not so much that I’m against the use of American force (in fact I think the Americans should invade Mexico) but I wanted to know what was going to happen next — after they removed Saddam.
Norman told me: “It just doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter. The important thing is just to get him out.” Of course, Bush I didn’t do that but Bush II did do it, resulting in the smoking ruin that we see there today.
But for Noman, that smoking ruin was a feature, as people say, not a bug. He wanted to see chaos in the area; he didn’t want to see a strong government that might possibly threaten Israel.
That’s how I feel about the situation now. The White House may be a smoking ruin — but it’s better than having Clinton there. Anything is better than having Clinton there.
Well, that’s the negative case for Trump. I guess I have go on and to try to grade his actual performance in office.
Does anyone here speak Latin? [One — John Derbyshire]. Aegrotat. It’s a degree that you can get at Oxford if you are sick on examination day. In other words, they will let you pass the examination if they think you would have passed it anyway. They just don’t give you a grade. And that’s more or less what I would do with Trump.
It’s not that he’s sick. It quite puzzles me when people go around saying that Trump is mentally unbalanced when it’s quite clear that it’s Hillary Clinton is mentally unbalanced. She has what psychiatrists call “Narcissistic Entitlement Syndrome.”
If you read this new book Shattered, about the Clinton campaign, you see that repeatedly when she lost primaries and, above all, when she lost the election, she was consumed by “rage” — which strikes me as a strange reaction. Depression, sadness, I can see. But anger? What does she have to be angry about?
But she was angry and I think she really is unstable. Her performance since the election has been scandalous. You realize that something like 56% of all Democrats think the Russians actually got into the voting machines and fiddled with them. That’s what they think happened.
It’s not surprising that that guy went and shot up Republican baseball team. They think it was literally stolen. She’s never been made to be responsible for that.
As I said, it’s not that Trump is ill — but the country is. It’s in crisis. Its institutions are buckling under the stress of this irrepressible conflict between the Historic American Nation on the one hand and what we call “Anti-America” at VDARE.com on the other. This is the Democratic coalition that is fundamentally made up of minorities and immigrants and is struggling to take control of the country. There are two nations warring in the bosom of one state and the institutions are buckling under the strain.
Plus, Trump really was a revolution. It was a hostile takeover of the party. He actually tried to placate the Establishment after he took over. That’s why he chose Pence as his vice president, which may prove to be a fatal mistake because it makes impeachment more attractive to them. That’s why he had Reince Priebus in there. But the GOP Establishment is not reconciled to him.
And, of course, above it’s a hostile takeover of the entire state, of the permanent government, which does not want to go in the direction that he’s talking about in any way. It wants to continue immigration. It wants to continue to intervene militarily. It wants to have free trade.
One thing about Trump: his campaign was a high concept campaign. There were lot of ideas in it, actually. They just weren’t ideas that the Main Stream Media and the ruling class liked.
And, finally, another reason why I think he deserves an aegrotat: the President of the United States is an extremely weak office. It’s not like you are the prime minister in a parliamentary system where, by definition, you control the legislative branch because you’ve got control of the executive branch. That’s how you get control of the executive branch, by controlling the legislative branch. He’s not like that at all. A president can’t just snap his fingers and order up bills.
I compared him last year, for those of you who were here, to King Kong in the old movie. You know, the curtain goes back and there’s King Kong on the stage in this huge iron frame, roaring.
But King Kong eventually did break free.
So we’re in the very early stages of judging what his performance is going to be. He’s not even staffed up yet. He’s remarkably slow at staffing up. This is actually good for us at VDARE.com because we have a number of writers who we thought would be in the Administration by now. (They’re all pseudonymous, by the way< for the benefit of the journalists here). But by and large, they are not in the Administration yet, although nobody else is either. It’s not like anyone else has been chosen; he hasn’t chosen anybody.
But eventually he will choose people and he’ll get the show on the road.
The bad news about Trump is that he’s not a professional politician. That’s why we see him put his foot in his mouth all the time. But that’s the good news, too, because no professional politician would ever have taken the right risks that he did.
You see this in his attacks on Jeff Sessions. From any normal politician, it would mean something if he was doing that. In his case, I think he’s just blowing off steam. He’s irritated by the situation, so he blows off steam. He roars. I think it is quite possible that Sessions is going to be Attorney General for the rest of the Administration.
I think!
But Trump has, I must admit, blown steam off about Sessions for a long time, and there’s a reason for this. This Russian hacking investigation is extremely serious.
You know, maybe Sessions shouldn’t have recused himself. On the other hand, maybe Trump shouldn’t have appointed this guy, Rosenstein as Deputy Attorney General. I can’t find anybody who understands how this happened. This guy was a career prosecutor, but he’s a career prosecutor in the Obama administration. There were very few people who were holdovers from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. He was held over in the Obama administration for a reason, which was that he was fulfilling their agenda in Baltimore. So there’s obviously something wrong with him. That’s the weak link. I don’t see why that was done.
However, I must say that I think we should step back from the partisan furor here. We have to admit that this Russian meddling in this election really did go beyond the pale.
There are somewhere between 12 to 20 million illegal Russian immigrants in the country. The Russians have a score of consulates supporting them. The Russian government has actually paid for a cell phone app to help these Russian illegals if they are picked up by ICE. Furthermore, Russia has changed its citizenship law. It’s openly calling on its legal immigrants here to be a Fifth Column acting in Russia’s interest. They can be both Russian citizens and American citizens. A Russian president, a few years ago, spoke to them and said, “You’re Russians who live the in US.”
Oh, wait a minute. I got that wrong.
It’s not Russia. it’s Israel! — I mean, Mexico!
Well, obviously, I don’t take this Russian stuff seriously. I think it’s quite increasingly obvious that most people don’t, even among Democrats.
But, I do take the Special Prosecutor seriously. The phenomena of a Special Prosecutor is like a Frankenstein monster. It’s not constrained by the usual checks and balances. It’s arguably unconstitutional. In fact, Antonin Scalia made a very powerful argument about it, saying that the Special Prosecutor phenomenon deprived of the president of exclusive control of the executive power; and he also warned that the law could be abused. He said: “I fear the Court has permanently encumbered the Republic with an institution that will do great harm." That’s what’s happening.
You know, we already have a prosecutorial abuse problem in this country. Americans are already in a situation where prosecutors can and do put anyone in jail if they really want to. If the federal government wants to you put in jail, it can. Paul Craig Roberts wrote a book about this nearly 20 years ago. Sam Dickson gave an excellent speech, I guess two years ago, about Martha Stewart, who was jailed not for insider trading, but because she “lied to a policeman.” In other words, she foolishly spoke to the investigators without a lawyer and answered questions that they could decide to show weren’t quite true.
The Special Prosecutor makes the situation much, much worse. He has a limitless ambit. He can go after anything he wants. He has a limitless budget. He can subpoena anybody he wants. It’s a walking perjury trap, as Ann Coulter called it.
You know, Bill Clinton certainly perjured himself over having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. But this was actually unearthed by a special prosecutor, Ken Starr, who had been appointed to look into a completely different scandal, the Whitewater real estate speculation, which actually they never found anything wrong in. But he was rooting around and eventually he was able to get Clinton under oath on this subject.
So the Mueller investigation is extremely dangerous for Trump. It’s like a parasite on the presidency, it’s like a tapeworm or something. Mueller can harass Trump and his family until he finds something or until he gets someone in a perjury trap. Or he just gets stuff that he then just leaks to the press, like Trump’s tax returns.
Pat Buchanan has a new book out on the Nixon presidency, which in many ways is extremely instructive if you’re thinking about the situation that Trump is in. I wrote a long article about it about a month ago. Pat said in his column this week: “Reports of Trump’s frustration and rage suggest that he knows he has been maneuvered, partly by his own mistakes, into a kill box from which there may be no bloodless exit.”
I gather Pat thinks there is no exit, which is quite depressing.
Trump has to get out of this. There’s a huge showdown coming. I don’t know how he’s going to do it, but he’s got to do it. So you can expect a real drama over that.
But it’s important to realize that whether or not Mueller’s fired, it’s always been the case that the Democrats were going to impeach Trump if they got control of the House. Our James Fulford wrote an article in April of last year recounting all of the various speculations of how Trump could be impeached that were going around in the Left wing media. This was before he’d even been nominated, let alone elected. They were planning to impeach him back them. They don’t need evidence for impeachment. It’s basically like a vote of no-confidence. It’s not a judicial proceeding. Otherwise Clinton would have been convicted, because he was guilty as hell of perjury. The Senate Democrats just decided to not pay attention to it.
And impeachment is not the end of the world. That’s what Clinton proved. In Nixon’s case, he was persuaded to resign before he was impeached, they broke his nerve. But, Clinton proved that wasn’t necessary. Nixon could be shamed; Clinton could not be shamed. I don’t think Donald Trump can be shamed either.
They need 60 votes in the Senate to convict him. So that’s what all this mau-mauing and yowling and hollering is about. They’re trying to break the GOP’s will. And, of course, the GOP is notoriously cowardly.
We think at VDare that demystifying impeachment is a great idea. There ought to be a lot more impeachments, not fewer impeachments. It’s a way for the democratic process to get control of the judicial branch, which has become intolerable.
I thought Obama should have been impeached for his two Executive Amnesties. We wrote a lot about that. And even some friends were worried about it because they said: “Well, it’s so far out of the conventional wisdom, that it will discredit you even to make this case.”
But, guess what? As soon as Obamacare appeared to be in jeopardy, Liberals rediscovered the impeachment power. David Dow, a writer at The Daily Beast, proposed impeaching the Supreme Court if they decided the wrong way. A law professor called Jonathan Turley actually proposed an FDR-type court packing scheme.
They’re allowed to have new ideas. We’re not allowed to have new ideas. At least, we’re not supposed to. But somebody has to have the new ideas on our side. And I nominate us!
I want to also say that it’s obvious from the way Trump has been behaving that he does have beliefs. Or at least instincts.
In 2000, when Trump was running for the Reform Party nomination, he started to attack Pat Buchanan, who was also running. And Trump is the type of guy that if he gets into a fight, he just picks up the nearest bottle and hits his opponent over the head with it. So what he did was he said that obviously Buchanan was a neo-Nazi. (Ironic when you think about the situation now).
Anyway, I don’t think it’s well known, but he actually apologized to Pat after the election. He wrote him a letter and apologized. It’s the only known case that I am aware of of Trump apologizing for anything. Of course, it wasn’t public! [ ‘The Ideas Made It, But I Didn’t’, By Tim Alberta, Politico, May/June 2017]
Trump, as you know, was The Creature From The TV Lagoon. He had this hit show, The Apprentice. How many people here ever watched the show? About four or five!
So, what this means is that you’re in what Charles Murray called the upper class because the top 5% of the population watches no television at all, except Netflix or something like that. Well, the average American watches 35 hours a week. Can you imagine?
And considerable number of those hours for over 10 years were with Donald Trump on The Apprentice. They all know him. He’s been in their living rooms repeatedly. I actually wrote to Charles Murray, who I’ve known for some years, and pointed this out — Did you realize that you anticipated Donald Trump?” He agreed but said, “That’s true, but Trump is awful anyway.”
I wrote back and said, it’s not the messenger, it’s the message. You couldn’t have been more of a gentleman and scholar than Pat Buchanan was or for that matter, Enoch Powell. And look what happened to them! So, I don’t agree with Murray on that.
But I just learned an interesting thing about The Apprentice show. There’s a book called Devil’s Bargain by Joshua Green that I just finished reading it. Green makes the point that no one seems to recognize that this show, apart from its huge success — and it had 20 million people watching it — was extremely popular with minorities, specifically African-Americans and Hispanics.
Trump, himself, was more popular with African-American and Hispanic viewers than he was with whites. The whites liked him, but not as much as the blacks and Hispanics did. He had a reason for saying during the campaign that minorities loved him.
In fact, this may be one reason why the show was such a huge financial success. The advertisers know that they have to hit the numbers but also they have to reach these ethnic niches. Well, The Apprentice did both. It gave them the absolute numbers and the niches. That all by itself should have made him a billionaire.
And what this means was that Trump was the answer to the GOP Establishment’s prayers. He could have won as a Republican appealing to minorities and advocating a Bush-type Amnesty/ Immigration surge. He could have been Mile Bloomberg!
Just like Romney did. Romney made it very clear that, if you watched very closely, that he was going to go to Comprehensive immigration reform. He said “We’ll do it in the first year.” Nobody paid any attention because the Main Stream Media wanted to portray him as an extreme right-winger, but that was clearly what he was going to do.
Trump managed to do a lot better than Romney with the minorities, but he didn’t do it by pandering on immigration. He did exactly the opposite.
Trump actually started to attack Obama in 2012 over Obama’s birth certificate, which for mysterious reasons he was very reluctant to release. That actually hurt The Apprentice’s ratings with blacks. But that didn’t stop Trump. And during this election cycle he went for patriotic immigration reform.
That’s not something that you would normally expect someone in his position and social class to do. It means that there’s something there.
This transgender ban, which was about three crises back this week — that’s all about the border wall. There’s money for the border wall in the next spending bill. It’s called a minibus. A row broke out because the conservatives wanted to take out military spending on transgender surgery. The Democrats, of course, opposed it and so did a number of Republican wimps. So, the thing was voted down. The conservatives were so upset about this that they appealed to Trump for support. They wanted him to learn on the Republican wimps to get them to change their minds. Trump’s response to this was to ban transgenders from the military altogether.
Somebody said: “We asked him to light a candle and he firebombed the table”! [Trump’s ban on transgender troops is infuriating both Democrats and Republicans, by Carly Sitrin, Vox, July 26, 2017 ]
Now, of course, Trump is right on the merits. The military banned all kinds of people because of pre-existing conditions — flat feet, etc. I know someone who was just rejected from the Air Force because he’s been on an antidepressant within the last year. And the minute fraction of the population that thinks it’s been born with the wrong sex has much more serious problems than depression. They’re just not a risk that any rational businessman would take.
Remember, Trump has shown that he’s not interested in the homosexual aspects of the culture war. That’s not why he did this. It’s not because he thinks that transgenders are problematic. He did it because he wants that wall. He can only get this bill if this problem of military surgeries is solved and he wants the wall, which is in the bill.
Now the Left knows this. When I was driving down yesterday to get here, I read this in VOX.com by Matthew Yglesias who is a real immigration no-goodnik, on the White House shake-up. He said,
Trump really likes the immigration issue. Whether you agree with the policy direction or not, one thing you can say for sure about DHS under Kelly is it has accomplished what Trump set out to accomplish. Immigration enforcement has become harsher, Central Americans appear to have become more reluctant to seek refuge in the United States, long-time undocumented residents have become more fearful, and things are more-or-less going according to plan.
So the Left know what Trump is doing here. Yglesias went on:
With the GOP legislative agenda in disarray, Trump is returning to the rhetorical tropes of anti-immigrant fear that won him the GOP nomination and empowering a competent ex-general who’s helped him translate those fears into policy. The most important stories of the week, explained, by Matthew Yglesias,Vox, July 28, 2017
I mean, that sounds very good to me!
Another writer, Dara Lind wrote about Trump’s speech yesterday in Long Island about the MS-13 gang. The headline that she had on her post, which went out last night, was “Trump just delivered the most chilling speech of his presidency: The president of the United States is explicitly encouraging police violence.” She went on: “Six months in the presidency, Trump’s already established a pattern: When his agenda is floundering, he returns to the theme that first made him a popular figure.”
She calls the theme “scary, immigrant criminals.
She continues:
It’s an opportunity for him to brag (with some basis in reality) about how much he’s accomplished as president, since his administration really has been able to make strides in expanding enforcement.
Again, this is from the perspective of the Left.
It’s dangerous because, at best, it successfully communicates to law enforcement agents that their moral superiority to the “animals” they apprehend justifies or even mandates violence. At worst, it communicates that message more broadly to the most fervent of the white supremacists who number among the president’s supporters.
She’s talking about us!
She goes on:
Either way, it sends a clear message to Latinos in America — both unauthorized immigrants who are liable to be arrested by ICE at any time and might be falsely accused of gang membership in the process, and legal immigrants and citizens who nonetheless might “look like a gang member” to the wrong person based on the color of their skin.
At this point, I should interject that when there are 11 to 20 million illegal English immigrants in this country, I will have no objection to showing the law enforcement people my papers.
Then she goes on:
Trump is telling them [illegal immigrants] there is no one who can keep them safe. And his audience [law-enforcement professionals] greeted the message with thunderous applause.
So the Left knows know what’s happening — even if we sometimes lose track of it.
You know, immigration is the Sword of Trumpocles hanging over American politics. Although the president can’t just snap his fingers and have legislation ordered up, there’s actually quite a lot of legislation — and litigation — in the pipeline.
Obama had two amnesties. One was DACA, supposedly for children, 16 to 30. The other was DAPA for parents. Both of these were executive branch amnesty and, of course, both deserved and merited impeachment.
And of course the congressional Republicans should have stopped these Amnesties by either impeaching Obama or denying him funds, or nominations. And of course they didn’t.
But DAPA is dead. The state of Texas sued and a federal judge in Texas put it on hold. The Obama Administration appealed to the Supreme Court. There was 4-4 tie. That meant that the lower court decision held. Attorney General Sessions refused to litigate any further. DAPA is definitively dead.
Now, the same thing is true for DACA. Texas is about to sue and the rumor is that Sessions won’t make any effort at all to defend it, not even in the district court. It crosses my mind that the reason that Trump didn’t immediately end DACA (it is a rolling amnesty so it needs to be renewed every three years) is because he knows the courts are going to do it for him. It’s a somewhat uncharacteristically, cowardly way of doing it, but it’s how Obama sabotaged the Defense of Marriage Act. They just declined to defend it.
Anyway, it looks like DACA, with any luck, is dead.
Well, there’s lots of other legislation. There’s an interior enforcement bill called Davis-Oliver, which could be voted on in the House in August. Two pieces of that bill have already passed the House. One of those that passed is tightening up sanctuary cities and another is Kate’s Law, which basically is an attack on illegals that have been deported several times. They’re actually at Senator McConnell’s desk right now. He hasn’t let them go to committee. He could bring them up any day; he could bring them up Monday; the Senate is in session!
Even more dramatically, Senator Cotton and Senator Perdue have what they call a RAISE Act, which halves legal immigration. And there’s what they call RAISE 2.0, it’s not out yet; they’re still working on it. It doesn’t just halve legal immigration, it shifts to a merit-based system.
The President has repeatedly said that he’s in favor of this. He’s said it in the “State of the Union” address in February and then again in Ohio a couple of days ago. [Trump describes merit-based immigration system, USA Today, July 27, 2017]
So, if that bill comes out and he gets stuck into it, things could change very rapidly.
There’s also a refugee bill, which is going to make improvements in the refugee statute. Of course, the whole refugee racket should be abolished, but at least this is something. And there’s something under the E-verify legislation.
And the most important thing: under the refugee law, Trump gets to set the new refugee quota in September. He should set it at zero. The president has the right to do that. Except for perhaps a few thousand white South Africans! He has the right to do that too!
I’m going to go back to the Podhoretzes. Norman’s wife, Midge Decter, is a longtime friend and she’s actually responsible for Lydia and I meeting. I met my second wife because Midge was chairman of the Philadelphia Society and she invited me to speak there on immigration and there was Lydia in the front row.
Well, some years ago, I was discussing some hypothetical issue or other with Midge and she came up with a great phrase. She said: “We should have such problems!”
Well, with Trump we do have such problems. Thank God!
Thank you.
Peter Brimelow is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, is now available in Kindle format. Follow Peter Brimelow on Twitter.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.