The Other McCain

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

Can We Deport the NY Times, Please?

Posted on | December 22, 2018 | 1 Comment

It’s difficult to maintain my emotional equilibrium this morning, as my senses are assailed by woeful tidings from every direction. Go take a look at Ed Morrissey’s roundup of how the pull-out from Syria means that our Kurdish allies in the region are now totally screwed. This isn’t some whining #NeverTrump tantrum, but geopolitical realism and, even if we can trace it all back to the Obama-era meddling of the 2011 “Arab Spring” project, it’s a responsibility Trump inherited when he became president and abandoning allies is always bad business. Meanwhile . . .

 

The New York Times has published the most anti-American column imaginable on the subject of immigration, with this astonishing headline:

None of Us Deserve Citizenship

From that startling premise — that Americans, including New York Times readers, are undeserving of any protection by our own government — the writer Michelle Alexander continues her argument:

After all, none of us born here did anything to deserve our citizenship. On what moral grounds can we deny others rights, privileges and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves?
Jose Antonio Vargas’s powerful book “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen” wrestles with the moral, emotional and psychological dimensions of America’s perennial question: Who deserves citizenship? With remarkable sensitivity to the extraordinarily wide range of people whose lives are affected by our nation’s immigration policies, he writes from the perspective of someone who was brought to this country illegally at the age of 12 to live with his grandparents, leaving his mother in the Philippines. Ever since his grandfather confessed to him, at age 16, that “you are not supposed to be here,” he has battled deep feelings of unworthiness and has striven to earn the right to belong. . . .
It’s tempting to imagine that our position as gatekeepers is morally sound — since we’re frequently reminded that “all nations have a right to defend their borders” — but our relationship to those who are fleeing poverty and violence is morally complex. Not only does birthright citizenship bestow upon us a privileged status that we haven’t earned; our nation’s unparalleled wealth and power, as well as our actual borders, lack a sturdy moral foundation. But for slavery, genocide and colonization, we would not be the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world — in fact, our nation would not even exist. This is not hyperbole; it’s history.

The word for this is sophistry, a tendentious argument that begins by assuming a conclusion (in this case, that the U.S. has no right to enforce its own immigration laws) and then scours around for any sort of “evidence” to throw into the balance of an appeal to emotion necessary to compel our acquiescence. If you reject Michelle Alexander’s argument, she implies, your opposition is proof of your blood-drenched guilt for “slavery, genocide and colonization.” She expects us to be so overcome by sympathy for Jose Antonio Vargas, author of a “powerful book,” that we ignore every practical consideration which might cause us to disagree with her open-borders stance. Every fact the could be introduced to the discussion as evidence in favor of strict border enforcement she simply waves away by asserting that “history” renders our national existence morally illegitimate. Because no one born in America has “earned” citizenship in a nation whose “unparalleled wealth and power” was wrongfully obtained, Ms. Alexander implies, therefore our “privileged status” means we have no right to defend our interests.

By the way, why is this “America’s perennial question”? Isn’t it because our decadent elite are deeply soaked in the kind of anti-American sentiment manifested in Ms. Alexander’s column? Hasn’t our intellectual class been tutored in Cultural Marxism by their university professors? Didn’t the prejudicial beliefs she cites as “history” originate as Soviet propaganda during the Cold War? Can’t we trace her arguments back to the work of CPUSA members Herbert Aptheker and Howard Zinn?

Using “history” to de-legitimize America, to turn our nation’s success into proof of our own evil, was a hallmark of Communist propaganda during those decades when, as Nikita Khrushchev boasted, the Soviet Union aimed to “bury” us, and it is remarkable how this kind of anti-American rhetoric has outlived the Soviet regime by more than 25 years.

Since Ms. Alexander wishes to recommend “powerful” books to her readers, I will respond by recommending Thomas Sowell’s powerful 1998 book, Conquests and Cultures: An International History. Sowell patiently explains why the kind of arguments made by Ms. Alexander are invalid, namely that “slavery, genocide and colonization” are worldwide phenomena, commonplace occurrences in human history, rather than a unique moral failing of America. If we examine history from this global perspective, certainly we cannot be made to feel ashamed of the remarkable success of the United States, and become more interested in preserving our heritage than in destroying it, which is what Michelle Alexander and her editors at the New York Times would have us do.

Nevertheless, since Ms. Alexander has asserted that no one, herself included, has a right to U.S. citizenship, what is to prevent President Trump from issuing an executive order to permanently exile her from the United States? Indeed, as liberals are eager to have us believe Trump is an authoritarian dictator, why couldn’t he draw up an “enemies list,” perhaps including the entire staff of the New York Times, and order them shipped to some foreign country, perhaps Syria. If no one “deserves” citizenship — a “privileged status” that protects us from arbitrary power — then Trump might use his dictatorial authority to rid the country of his critics. You don’t like ICE rounding up illegal aliens? OK, then, instead we’ll order ICE to start rounding up liberals. We’ll put them on a boat and ship them to Syria, and they can join the Kurdistani freedom fighters in the battle against ISIS, or Turkey, or whoever else they want to fight. It doesn’t matter, so long as we can get these liberals out of America, a country they so obviously hate. Good-bye, “privileged status”!



 

Category: Immigration, New York Times

Comments

One Response to “Can We Deport the NY Times, Please?”

  1. Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove
    December 23rd, 2018 @ 10:38 am

    […] The Other McCain wonders if we can deport the NY Times […]