The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | September 3, 2026 | No Comments

Say hello to Pamela Cisneros and, while you’re at it, go ahead and say good-bye because the 49-year-old resident of Queens, New York, died Monday in the proverbial “hail of police gunfire” after she stabbed two people — one fatally — and then charged toward NYPD officers while wielding two knives. Before we talk about this deranged psycho, however, let’s first talk about her victims. ABC News reports:

New York City police fatally shot an apparently emotionally disturbed woman after she allegedly stabbed two people in Times Square in a “random and unprovoked” attack on Monday afternoon, authorities said.

(No need for either “apparently” or “allegedly” in this context. The perp is dead. There is no “presumed innocent,” because there will be no trial. Also, dead people can’t file libel suits.)

One of the victims, 32-year-old Erin Piacenti of Chester, New Jersey, died at a hospital, according to the NYPD.
Piacenti worked at Bank of America. The bank said in a statement that it is “shocked and deeply saddened by the tragic loss of our colleague,” adding, “our hearts go out to her family and all of her loved ones.”
Piacenti and her husband welcomed a baby girl five months ago, and she was killed on her first day back at work after maternity leave . . .
She and her husband both graduated from Fordham Law School in 2021 . . .
The other victim, a 68-year-old man from Rhode Island, was taken to a hospital with life-threatening injuries and is in stable condition, officials said.
The victims were stabbed within 20 seconds of each near 41st Street and Seventh Avenue, according to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
The 68-year-old had just exited the subway and was waiting to cross the street with his wife when the suspect pulled two knives from a bag, waved them and then allegedly stabbed him in the abdomen “in what appears to be a random and unprovoked attack,” Tisch said at a press briefing.
The suspect then went up Seventh Avenue toward 42nd Street, where she approached the second victim, who was similarly stabbed in the abdomen in an apparently random, unprovoked attack, Tisch said.
The suspect allegedly then fled north toward the NYPD substation, authorities said. Witnesses flagged down officers who confronted her for four minutes and “gave her numerous commands to drop the knife,” which she refused, Tisch said.
“During the encounter, she told the officers, ‘I’m not dropping anything. I would rather kill both of you.’ She repeated, ‘I will kill you,'” Tisch said.
Officers deployed Tasers before two officers discharged their service weapons, Tisch said.
The suspect, identified by police as 49-year-old Pamela Cisneros of Queens, was pronounced dead at a hospital. She had a “documented mental health history,” Tisch said.

When the police commissioner says the knife-wielding maniac “had a documented mental health history,” what she actually means is that the suspect was deranged, demented, daffy, wacky, off her rocker, berserk, bonkers, non compos mentis, Looney Tunes, a few fries short of a Happy Meal and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. There is no doubt Pamela Cisneros was crazy, although you may wonder, “What kind of crazy was she?”

Cisneros had three children. After the birth of her third child, she reportedly experienced postpartum depression and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In 2019, she attempted suicide. According to her relatives, she received treatment and appeared to be doing better the past few years, but seems to have “gone off her meds” about a week before she went on the stabbing rampage that ended with her being shot by cops.

Were there clues? Were there omens that foreshadowed this outcome? Indeed there were. In a Facebook post last November, Cisneros began:

Hello to all!! I was called upon the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for this moment and time to inform you that the end times are here. Be kindly advised that the Lord would not leave me in ease until I posted this message which can attest to amount of love God has for all of us. The current events surrounding you can attest to my previous statement of the end times being present. There is news of war, pestilence, earthquakes, the diminished love of people to the point of stabbing others for no reason, sex slavery in this country and around the globe, widespread drug use, persecution of the Christian believer on a global scale, worldwide hunger, homelessness, etc.

So, “the end times are here,” the would-be prophetess informed her Facebook followers, and one of the signs was that people were “stabbing others for no reason.” After citing several Bible verses, Cisneros then wrote: “The Lord will also like for you to know that the warfare is spiritual and the battlefield is in your mind.” Fact check:  True.

Having no doubt myself about the truth of biblical prophecy and the reality of spiritual warfare, nevertheless I spotted the problem right at the outset, when Cisneros claimed that she had been divinely “called . . . for this moment” to deliver her Facebook sermon. She was on a mission, see? Out of all the people in the world whom God might have sent to warn us of the end times, somehow Pamela Cisneros got the call.

Far be it from me to claim any such divine appointment, but God moves in mysterious ways, and who knows? Perhaps I really have been sent to deliver a message for these troubled times: Crazy People Are Dangerous.



 

Category: Crime, New York

In The Mailbox: 09.02.26 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | September 3, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Thanks to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links last month!
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

MemeWar III: Time To Touch Carney’s No-No Square

OVER THE TRANSOM
Doug Ross: A Day Men Soared Above Paris (1783),
357 Magnum: Most People Call this Breaking and Entering
EBL: SCOTUS Ballroom Blitz, Wreck Fish, Maia Reficco, Most Underrated Italian Ragu, and “Mack The Knife”
Twitchy: Jim Acosta Claims Two Ambassadors Told Him America Reminds Them Of 1930s Germany, This Is Not The Person CNN Anchors Needed Rushing To Their Defense, and Try Not To Get Whiplash From Chris Hayes’ Pivot On Musk Vs. Soros Political Donations
Louder With Crowder: Brandon Gill grills founder of birth tourism company for illegals; his answers are infuriating, Caleb Hammer tries explaining to feminist why she should be more patriotic, even though she contributes NOTHING to society, Resurfaced Anne Hathaway clip reveals one of the most unhinged pro-abortion comments possible, Dad whose daughter is permanently disabled because of an illegal immigrant has ZERO patience for Democrats’ fake sympathy, and Kathy Hochul claims Trump is lying that she released 7000 criminals, but she’s the one getting fact-checked
Vox Popoli: Do or Don’t Do, Gulf War III: Game Three, A Fully-Operational Book Star, Federal Hasbara, and The Castalia Reader
Sensurround: Repeal the 19th Amendment! And While We’re At It, Nobody Gets To Vote
Defending The Wood Perilous: Fanfic vs. Original Stories
The Bugscuffle Gazette: My apologies
Cedar Sanderson: Lightly Toasted Marshmallow – Watery Disappointment

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: Sal’s X-Mutuals Take Over The Pentagon – Or Something
Dan Loesch: Stop Blaming Voters For Texas’ Senate Matchup,  also, Charlie Kirk’s Murderer Pleads Not Guilty
Don Surber: The Imperial Supreme Court allows Trump
STUMP: International Overdose Awareness Day 2026

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Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox: 09.02.26 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | September 2, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Weekend substackery and suchlike things, unfortunately delayed.
Coyote vs. Acme was very good, and you should go see it. Warner Brothers was insane not to release this sooner.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Doug Ross: The EU’s Slow-Motion Suicide, also, Hollywood’s $600 Million Gamble – The League of Leftist Superheroes
357 Magnum: UN Employees Took Part in Terror Attack
EBL: Red Snapper, “Ballad of William Penn”, Hong Kong Liberated in WWII, The Misfit, and Spoorloos : The most terrifying movie?
Twitchy: Kmele Foster Slaps Jemele Hill With Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand On CNN, Gov. Hochul Accuses President Trump Of Defunding The Police, and Emir Mamdani Sees Dead Mom In Times Square And Thinks “Perfect Time For Backpack Decorating”
Louder With Crowder: LA mayoral candidate boasts about her great accomplishment, AOC forgets what accent she’s supposed to use to pander to black people, Ms. Rachel’s shameless racial pandering gets brutally fact-checked by a black sheriff, James Talarico Believes That Christians Are Real “Villains” In All This, and BLM Activists Refuse To Get Over Target’s “Racist” Halloween Costume
Vox Popoli: The Multinodal World, First Harambe, Now Milo, Sort of Fantasy Women’s Association, Playing the War Card, and The Thumb on the Scale
Cedar Sanderson: Training & Habit Building, also, Monday Mixtape – Fairy Tale Lullabies
Mazelit Airaksinen: Help This 87-Year-Old Man Afford Safe Housing
Ammo.com: Analyzing Chicago’s 2026 Homicide Rate

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: China, Setting The Conditions – On Midrats, also, Understand Anthropic vs. Department of War
Don Surber: Fight Iran with pirates
Elizabeth Nickson: Don’t Panic – We’re In The Midst of Another Globalist Psyop
Glenn Reynolds: Goodbye, Dolly
STUMP: RIP Tim Curry – All Men Must Die,

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Category: Linkagery

‘Uncle Vicha’ and the Doom of California

Posted on | September 2, 2026 | No Comments

San Francisco Judge Linda Colfax

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the “Stop Asian Hate” movement gained nationwide attention, claiming there was a “sudden surge in anti-Asian racism” as a result of the pandemic. Some of us were skeptical, and noted how often attacks on Asian-Americans were perpetrated by the usual suspects. Such was the case in a 2021 incident in San Francisco:

Vicha Ratanapakdee . . . was an 84-year-old Thai man who was killed as a result of being forcefully pushed to the ground in a daylight attack in San Francisco, California, United States by an African-American male. His death became a lightning rod for the Stop Asian Hate movement.
At approximately 8 a.m. on January 28, Vicha left his daughter’s apartment in the Anza Vista neighborhood of San Francisco, where he had been supervising his grandsons, to go on a walk while the children were attending Zoom online classes. He was walking around Fortuna Avenue when 19-year-old Antoine Watson, an African-American male, ran across the street and violently shoved him to the ground. Vicha’s head hit the pavement as he fell. He never regained consciousness and died two days after arrival in the hospital from a brain hemorrhage. The killing was captured on a CCTV camera across the street.

Excuse the awkwardness of the prose in that Wikipedia summary, and let me call you attention to some of the facts here:

Two days after the assault, Antoine Watson was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse and murder. Watson was identified through additional surveillance footage, matching clothes, and the license plate of his BMW, which was on record as he had been stopped hours before the assault at around 2 a.m. for reckless driving and speeding after running two stop signs on Cole Street at Parnassus Avenue and crashing into a parked car. Shortly before the attack, a surveillance camera captured Watson parking his car in Anza Vista and punching a different parked vehicle before running off-screen. Both cameras showed Watson returning to the car to retrieve his cell phone and walking back to Fortuna Avenue, where he took pictures of Vicha’s unconscious body before leaving for the parking lot again and driving away.

Antoine Watson was driving a BMW. Were you driving a BMW when you were 19 years old? Yet here was this teenager, driving around San Francisco at 2 a.m., running stop signs and crashing into a parked car, and the cops just turned him loose? Beyond that, after assaulting 84-year-old “Grandpa Vicha” in an unprovoked attack, Watson returned to the scene of the crime to take a picture of the unconscious body of his victim, as if to collect a trophy of his deed. Also, no matter how closely you might have followed this story, you may not have realized that Antoine Watson was not a San Francisco resident. He was from Daly City in suburban San Mateo County, about 10 miles away from where he fatally assaulted Ratanapakdee. Aggravating circumstances, you see.

Antoine Watson in the courtroom.

We do not have a mug shot of Antoine Watson because apparently, as a result of some “criminal justice reform,” police in California no longer publish mug shots of criminals, because heaven forbid the voters discover who is actually committing crimes in their communities. Anyway, it took nearly five years for this case to work its way to trial. In January 2026, a jury refused to convict Watson of murder, instead finding him guilty of the lesser sentence of involuntary manslaughter. Two months later, there was outrage when San Francisco Superior Court Judge Linda Colfax turned Watson loose on probation, giving him credit for time served:

The judge said at the sentencing that imprisonment would have a “poor impact” on Watson.
“She said Mr. Watson has trouble in his life because he’s from a broken family, parents fighting … that doesn’t mean you can kill other people,” Vicha’s daughter, Monthanus Ratanapakdee, told the California Post.
Colfax — a former public defender who has boasted about her “inclusive” courtroom featuring a nameplate with her she/her pronouns — has previously come under fire for the lenient treatment of other accused criminals. . . .
When it comes to Watson, Ratanapakdee argued the sentence reflects “a pattern of prior leniency.”
She said that her dad’s killer, who had a criminal record as a juvenile, had already been given second chances.
Ratanapakdee felt that Colfax was “biased” against the prosecution.
“I’ve been there almost two months in the trial, and I see how she was taking sides with the defense. That is my opinion,” she said.
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins told The Post that Colfax’s decision was “troubling.”
“The judge was limited in some regard by the penal code that left his exposure at nine years, which is what we asked for,” Jenkins said. “But seemed to rely on this theory that because of his age at the time of the crime, he did not deserve more custody.
“While I can appreciate consideration of someone’s age and their youth, he took a man’s life — he took an innocent man’s life,” Jenkins added,
“And the fact that a judge believes that his time in the county jail was sufficient and he served probation is troubling to me. I don’t think it teaches him the magnitude of what he did.”

That phrase “limited in some regard by the penal code” is a major clue that the problem in California isn’t really just about left-wing judges — the legislature has enacted various “criminal justice reform” measures that make it difficult to put criminals behind bars and keep them there.

But who elects the legislature? Who elects the judges? And who was sitting on the jury that decided Watson was not guilty of murder?

The citizens of California are the problem.

In 2010, Kamala Harris was narrowly elected attorney general of California, getting only 46% of the vote, and defeating Republican Steve Cooley by a margin of less than 60,000 votes out of 9.6 million votes cast. Six years later, Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate with 62% of the vote. Running for president in 2024, Harris got 58% of the vote in California.

California is now a one-party state, and San Francisco has been a Democrat-controlled city so long that hardly anyone alive can remember the last time the city elected a Republican mayor (in 1964). Given this reality, California is utterly doomed. Nothing can be done to redeem the state, and this is true of any city or state where Democrats obtain hegemonic control. What is true of California may eventually be true of the entire United States, if people do not wake up to the danger.



 

Category: California, Crime

Police Bodycam Video Shows Response to Antifa Terror Attack on Texas ICE Facility

Posted on | August 31, 2026 | 1 Comment

It was past 11 p.m. on July 4, 2025, when police in Alvarado, Texas, stopped the red van that had been circling streets near the scene of a shooting. The first officer to look inside the van spotted a firearm on the front passenger side floorboard and immediately told the officer on the other side to detain the driver, who gave his name as “Meagan Morris.”

Bradford Morris, a/k/a “Meagan” Morris

Morris had apparently driven comrades in an Antifa terrorist cell to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Prairieland Detention Facility, where several of them began shooting fireworks toward the facility, while another terrorist, Benjamin Song, stood watch with an AR-15-style rifle. The plan for this “protest,” as the participants called it, had been hatched at a communal home in Dallas known as “The Big Gay House,” where 10 activists including Morris lived together.

Antifa gunman Benjamin Song

After the fireworks and vandalism began, security officials inside the ICE facility called 911. The first law enforcement officer to arrive on the scene was Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross. The Antifa terrorists began to flee. Gross shouted for them to stop and drew his pistol. Song nearby opened fire, hitting Gross in the shoulder, but the officer managed to stay in the fight. Gross fired three shots, one of which struck Song’s rifle, causing it to jam. Song took off running. He managed to remain at large for the next 11 days before finally being apprehended at a Dallas hideout.

Why did I begin this post by talking about the red van that officers stopped near the Prairieland shooting? Because when these Antifa terrorists were sentenced to decades in federal prison — including 100 years for Benjamin Song — their defenders insisted that they were merely “protesters” exercising their First Amendment rights:

“I am livid,” said Lydia Koza, whose wife, Autumn Hill, was sentenced to 50 years in prison. “The government wants to take her entire life away because she attended a protest. Nobody died.” . . .
Phillip Hayes, Song’s attorney, rejected characterizations that the protesters were extremists and said his client will appeal the 100-year sentence.
“This is a bunch of kids and young adults who really have a really big heart and really wanted their voice to be heard,” Hayes said. “It was never intended that anybody get hurt. It was never intended that any shots would be fired.”

Cameron Arnold, a/k/a “Autumn Hill”

Here’s why that red van is so important. After the officer spotted a handgun in the van and ordered the driver, “Meagan Morris” to be detained, the van was searched and yielded a vast arsenal of weapons — pistols, rifles, extra magazines of ammunition, body armor, etc. You don’t need all that stuff just to “let your voice be heard.” After the discovery of this cache of weapons, one of the officers on the scene said: “This is like a targeted hit on Prairieland,” then later added, “This is like a straight coordinated terror attack on f–king Prairieland.”

Within 15 minutes of the shooting that wounded Lt. Gross, one of his fellow officers deduced that this was a “coordinated terror attack” on the ICE facility. Contrary to what defenders of the suspects claimed, their intentions were not peaceful. Benjamin Song has been described as a “charismatic” leader of this particular Antifa cell, and we may surmise that he supplied his comrades with this “cover story,” wherein they claimed to have no idea about the planned violence. But how is it that these allegedly peaceful protesters were unaware of Song’s plans, when they rode from Dallas to Praireland in a van full of guns and ammo?

It would have taken at least 45 minutes of driving to get to the scene of their “protest,” and that van was packed with weapons, yet the Antifa comrades didn’t have the faintest clue that Song was planning to shoot up the place? God knows what might have happened had it not been for Lt. Gross’s excellent marksmanship, firing a shot that disabled Song’s rifle.

 

You can watch the whole video at YouTube, compiled by Midwest Safety, one of the best channels for police video footage. And as you watch it, pay attention to the section where they’re searching the van and find the driver’s license of “Autumn Hill,” now doing a long federal sentence “because she attended a protest,” we are told. Yet that driver’s license was found in proximity to multiple firearms, inside a van that had been circling Prairieland, apparently hoping to pick up the Antifa comrades who had engaged in this raid on the ICE facility. We are not deceived.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

Category: Crime, Immigration, Terrorism, Texas

Rule 5 Sunday: More Coffee, Please

Posted on | August 31, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

It’s @Rule5Tweets, not Rule 5 Texan. Oops.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, Lucky, Lake Ontario – Dear Landlord, MAGA Lake America, Irina Demick, “Too Much Fun With So Many Men”, To Barcelona With Love, Agnez Mo, “Hillbilly Heaven”, “Letter To Heaven”,  RIP Dolly Parton, A Woman of Substance, The War of 1812, Happy Birthday Barbara Eden, and PETA Maine Lobster Festival

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Agustina Añon from Uruguay You Say?, Fish Pic Friday – Andrea Carlos Zamora, Tattoo Thursday, Dolly Parton Dead at 80, The Wednesday Wetness, Tuesday Tanlines, Maybe I’ll Meet You at the Jubilee, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Random Celebrity News, Just Another Sunday in the South, Palm Sunday and ASMFC Considers Reallocating Menhaden Quotas 

BACON TIME: Rule Five Sweet Sweet Summertime

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Embracing The Suck

Posted on | August 30, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Not a good week for Senators fans. First we get swept by the Angels in a two-game set at RFK, then it was back on the road to New York, where we lost two out of three to the Hated Yankees. They were all close games, so I’m hoping things even out later in the season. For now, we’re 6-11, four games behind the Twins and half a game behind the A’s.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
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Rule 5 Sunday: Coffee Time
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A Distraction From the Distraction
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In The Mailbox: 08.25.26 (Morning Edition)
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In The Mailbox: 08.25.26 (Evening Edition)
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Did You Know That @ElonMusk Has Reinstated the @X Accounts of ‘Noted Neo-Nazis, Anti-Semites, and More’?
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In The Mailbox: 08.27.26 (Early Evening Edition)
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In The Mailbox: 08.28.26
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Thanks to everyone for all the links!

 

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Category: FMJRA Award

How You Got Hasan Piker: It Started With Cowardice in the Public School System

Posted on | August 29, 2026 | No Comments

A couple of months ago, I saw this brief video clip on X, and grabbed the transcript of what Piker said:

“This is such an insane and fundamentally un-American concept. I cannot begin to explain this to you, okay? Ellis Island, like, every — every American citizen that currently is a natural-born U.S. citizen has — is like a couple generations removed from not being a U.S. citizen, that became a U.S. citizen due to birthright, Okay? Not just birthright, but also especially due to birthright. Like, go back far enough and every single American, every single American — go back far enough — is the children of migrants. Okay? This is literally the United States Of America. This is the most un-American thing that you could push for. I don’t understand how you can even push for it.”

What a Gordian knot of misunderstanding! What Piker is sharing here is not, however, a fringe extremist belief, but rather what has become a mainstream view of American history. We hear similar things said by Democrats and Republicans alike, and said so often that many Americans don’t even realize that it’s wrong. Why? Because our schools long ago stopped telling the truth — which some might consider offensive — and instead promoted the “Nation of Immigrants” myth Piker now preaches.

The pioneer settlers of the British colonies in North America were not “immigrants.” The territories in which they settled, claimed by the British crown, were not a nation-state with a government that might grant them a visa. Rather, they came to a remote wilderness whose only human inhabitants were illiterate heathens lacking any written law or any government beyond tribal alliances to whatever chieftains and warlords might emerge from time to time among them. However much anyone may romanticize those natives as “noble savages,” they didn’t have established ports of entry where immigrants could apply for admission. It is absurd and insulting for Hasan Piker to compare the first English settlers of Jamestown, Plymouth, etc., to 21st-century “migrants.”

When Daniel Boone led a group of pioneer settlers through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky in 1775, how in any sense were they “migrants” comparable to the people Hasan Piker was defending as entitled to automatic citizenship for their offspring, without regard to the legality of the parents’ residency in the United States? It is absurd. I would argue that it is because so many have been miseducated.

How has this confusion arisen? Why does this kind of rhetoric not meet with universal condemnation from educated Americans? I would argue that it is because so many have been miseducated about our history.

This miseducation has its roots in the 19th century. From the time of our War of Independence until about 1840, there was not much foreign immigration to the United States. Europe became embroiled in the Napoleonic wars, which consumed whatever excess energies might otherwise have led adventurous young Europeans to seek their fortunes in the New World and, when that era ended, the Industrial Revolution supplied new opportunities (including a demand for wage laborers) that sufficed to keep the population of Europe too busy at home to think of sailing off to America. The dramatic population growth of the United States, from about 4 million at the first census in 1790, to more than 17 million in the 1840 census, was almost entirely due to natural increase among the Americans who had fought the Revolution, with only small additions from new immigrants. That changed after 1840, however.

First there was the wave of Potato Famine Irish, and then there were refugees (mostly German) from the failed revolutions in Europe in 1848. The arrival of these thousands of foreigners in the 1840s spawned a new political party that came to be known as the “Know Nothings.”

“Bill the Butcher” in Gangs of New York is based on an actual historic figure, William Poole, who was an enforcer for the Know Nothings in their battles against the Democrats of Tammany Hall. The Know Nothings gained their greatest power in Massachusetts, where in 1854 they won a landslide, electing Henry Gardner as governor and a massive majority in the state legislature. Having arisen from the remains of the Whig Party, the Know Nothings quickly dissolved in the mid-1850s, however, and were largely absorbed by the new Republican Party as the chief opposition to the Democrats. In the intervening 1856 presidential election, however, divisions among this opposition (John Fremont as the Republican candidate and Millard Fillmore as a fusion “Whig American” candidate) made possible the election of Democrat James Buchanan with 45% of the popular vote. For years later, crisis produced the Civil War.

Once the war (and Reconstruction) ended, new issues arose in politics that led Americans to forget the controversies over immigration that fueled the brief life of the Know Nothing party, and both Democrats and Republicans sought to attract support from the immigrants (and their descendants) whose arrival in the 1840s had caused such a remarkable surge of nativist sentiment. There gradually emerged from this a tendency toward what has been called “The Proposition Nation” thesis, whose most emininent recent advocate is George F. Will. Supposedly, as long as anyone accedes to sentiments expressed in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, it doesn’t matter who he is, where he comes from, how or when he got here, or whatever else he might believe, that fellow is just as much an American as any descendant of the First Families of Virginia. This is obviously nonsense — idiotic and counter-factual — yet it has been promulgated by our educational system largely because teachers wanted to flatter the offspring of immigrants, and not risk offending them by any veneration of the colonial Old Stock.

Many of my conservative friends are Catholics, more often Italians or Poles than Irish, and none of them are offended by my recitations of the actual history of our nation as it pertains to immigration. They understand that I do not wish to insult them or their ancestors, nor to vaunt my status as a “Heritage American” in attempting to counteract the damage done by misleading rhetoric of the sort emitted by Hasan Piker. Most of our problems in America today can be traced to the decline of our public schools, and it would not be necessary for me to write at such length on this subject, if Americans had not been so misled by teachers whose cowardly refusal to speak the truth has helped foster the “Nation of Immigrants” mythology that Piker uses a weapon, daring to accuse us of being “un-American”! Shall we blame Emma Lazarus?

 

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

However fine this is as poetry, should it really be given the status of constitutional authority? This is an issue I’ve addressed before (e.g,, “American History 101: No, Emma Lazarus Did Not Write the U.S. Constitution,” Sept. 10, 2018) and reiterate here merely to demonstrate how we got to the point where we have Hasan Piker, who grew up in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey, presuming to lecture us about our own Constitution, particularly the Fourteenth Amendment, which had nothing to do with Turkish immigrants, and everything to do with the erstwhile slaves and their descendants. What nerve he has!

Would the slaves ever have been freed — would there have been a Civil War, a Union victory, a Fourteenth Amendment — had it not been for the Know Nothing nativists who battled the Tammany Hall Democrats before eventually becoming Republicans? Of course, being the descendant of Confederates, I’ve often contemplated questions of alternative history like this, but as it relates to our current crisis, I am more allied with Bill the Butcher than with the Democrats whom my ancestors supported.

Public policy ought to be based on reason, not sentiment, and we should prefer fact to falsehood. Hasan Piker tells an outright lie, claiming “every American citizen … is like a couple generations removed from not being a U.S. citizen,” and then accuses us of being “un-American” for disputing his falsehood. Only a coward would be shamed into silence by this tactic, and say what you will about me, I am not the descendant of cowards.

It’s time to stand up and tell the truth, America.



 

Category: Foreigners, History, Immigration
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