07/26/2014
In the post-Derbyshire era, the most talented, prolific, and ideologically sound writer at National Review — and I would argue in the entirety of the Beltway Right — was Mark Steyn. Steyn’s books America Aloneand After Americaare crucial reading for anyone concerned about the National Question, and in recent years Steyn has become increasingly vocal on immigration questions. Perhaps more importantly, he’s also become an important critic of failing American institutions like the legal system — which opens the door to him becoming a far more subversive and substantial writer.
Unfortunately, Steyn no longer writes at National Review — ostensibly because of a difference in legal strategies in a lawsuit about the supposed credentials of a global warming advocate. While Steyn has hardly been silenced — he’s still an occasional guest host for Rush Limbaugh, among other things — the loss of such an important voice at National Review was a real misfortune for immigration patriots, and perhaps sealed that institution’s death spiral into GOP hucksterism and total irrelevance.
Steyn continues to write at his website. His most recent column on immigration is a typically bracing report on the United States government compensating for ignoring illegals by terrifying a Boy Scout troop, of all things.
One of the reasons why so many Americans oppose amnesty and a "path to citizenship" for illegal aliens is because, even if one buys it in utilitarian terms, to accept that an honorable American identity can be born from an illegal act seems to mock the very essence of citizenship and allegiance.Yet, putting aside the soon to be amnestied millions, it seems to me the deformation of law necessary to accommodate the armies of the undocumented is having a broader corrupting effect on the federal bureaucracy. For example, can you think of anything more risible than working for something called "US Customs & Border Protection"? There is no "border" to "protect". On the Rio Grande, President Obama, the Coyote-in-Chief, has simply erased said border.
So one sympathizes with the psychological burdens of being an employee of "Customs & Border Protection". Perhaps that explains why, as they abandon "border protection" on the southern frontier, they seem to be compensating by obstructing and terrorizing law-abiding persons on the northern frontier.
[Holiday Memories You'll Cherish Forever, by Mark Steyn, SteynOnline, July 25, 2014]
After recounting the sordid tale of how Border Patrol agents ripped apart the van of the Boy Scouts in retaliation for one of them taking a picture, Steyn concludes,
There are still people like Mr Vonderheid, who think that if they're putting you through the wringer for four hours that just goes to show how seriously they take this "national security" stuff. But in fact the opposite is true. Every four hours that the incompetent Homeland Security bureaucracy is spending on Iowa boy scouts is four hours they're not spending on someone who merits the scrutiny. And considering that the most lavishly funded government on the planet has let in everyone from Mohammed Atta and Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the man who attacked and raped a 93-year old Omaha woman unto death, a serious people who were truly the "good citizens" Mr Vonderheid wants would demand that these bullying twerps learn to prioritize …American life is bifurcating into the undocumented and the overdocumented. On the southern border, the bazillions of US laws are meaningless — proof of identity, medical tests, none of it matters. And the less it matters on the Rio Grande the more the zealots on the 49th Parallel will take apart your car if they think you've got a Kinder egg in there. Anyone who thinks that attitude can be confined to the border and not work its way deep into the rest of American life is deluded.
Well said. Of course, someone else said it a decade ago — Sam Francis. He even gave this phenomenon a name — anarcho-tyranny.
[There’s a drift] toward authoritarianism that mass immigration provokes.We see the drift in this country, with the Patriot Act and its spawn at airports and in random searches of law-abiding citizens — all because our own overclass will not enforce standing laws against illegal immigration and does nothing to halt the transformation of American society by millions of aliens.
Unwilling to control immigration and the cultural disintegration it causes, the authorities instead control the law-abiding.
This is precisely the bizarre system of misrule I have elsewhere described as "anarcho-tyranny" — we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).
Perhaps wisely for his career, Steyn neither mentions Francis nor "anarcho-tyranny" by name, less it prompt the squawking of the $PLC. But even the best writers favored by the Beltway Right are still playing catch up to Francis and the other "castaways" of the conservative movement featured at VDARE.com. Unfortunately, they had better stop playing around and catch up quick — because time is running out.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.