Category: Foreigners

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

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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.



 

The Pro-Hamas Socialist Democrats

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Anti-Israel protesters in New York City

Six months ago, a poll showed Mallory McMorrow leading in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat in Michigan being vacated by the retirement of Sen. Gary Peters. Two weeks ago, McMorrow quit the race after polls showed her support dwindling to a single-digit percentage. Meanwhile, Abdul El-Sayed, who was in third place in January, had surged into a nine-point lead in the primary by mid-June, with Rep. Haley Stevens in second place. McMorrow’s exit from the campaign has now turned the bid for the Democratic nomination into a two-horse race, and Stevens is ahead — but just barely — mainly because AIPAC has been pouring tens of millions of dollars into the state to try to stop El-Sayed. The Michigan primary is August 4, and it is fair to say that AIPAC is desperate to halt the slide of the Democratic Party into the de facto American branch of Hamas. Recent primary victories by anti-Israel candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America have set the alarm bells ringing. It all goes back to October 2023:

Most Americans to this day have only the slightest inkling of the atrocities Hamas terrorists perpetrated against innocent civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. If they knew, surely they would be revolted by the way so many Democrats — particularly those affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — have embraced the anti-Israel narrative of the war Hamas began that day. Indeed, it is fair to say that much of the DSA’s rhetoric on this topic is indistinguishable from Hamas propaganda.
The grinning poster boy for democratic socialism, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is up to his eyeballs in this pro-terrorist agenda, as the American Jewish Committee has observed:

For example, the DSA’s New York City chapter, with which Zohran Mamdani is affiliated, organized a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square the day after the October 7 Hamas massacre. At the rally, protesters chanted slogans including “Resistance is justified,” “Globalize the Intifada,” and “Smash the settler Zionist state”

Take note that this DSA rally happened before Israel had launched its military response to the 10/7 massacre. And what sort of “resistance” by Hamas did the DSA mob declare “justified” on that day? . . .

Read the rest of my latest American Spectator column.



 

Communism, the Palestinian Death Cult and the Pro-Terrorism Red-Green Axis

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Sometimes I have to remind people that I actually knew Sam Francis who, in recent years, has been recognized as a sort of prophet who foresaw the rise of what has become known as the MAGA movement.

Most of Sam’s younger admirers, knowing of his long battle against neoconservatives — which came into focus with his criticism of the 1991 Iraq war — are not exactly friends of Israel. What many of them may not realize is that Sam made a remarkable contribution to an understanding of the Middle East conflict, which his neoconservative opponents sought to erase from memory once he fell out with them during the first Bush presidency. Good luck finding an online copy of Sam Francis’s 1981 policy paper, “The Soviet Strategy of Terror,” which had an enormous influence on the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Sam was at one point a research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, which published that paper, but once he was cast out for being too politically incorrect, Heritage effectively “de-published” it, removing it from their website, a deliberate insult they have not repented more than 20 years after Sam Francis died.

Years ago, I obtained a samizdat copy of “The Soviet Strategy of Terror,” but it’s packed away in my papers somewhere in the garage, so I can’t quote it, however the key insight is this: The Soviet Union, in its worldwide warfare against the West, sponsored terrorist activity as part of a general strategy. In other words, terrorism wasn’t merely a tactic, but had deep roots in the Communist worldview, by which its use was justified, and was employed to destabilize conditions in such a way as to foment revolutionary upheaval and advance Soviet interests.

What is terrorism? It is the use of violence for political purposes, and is akin to guerrilla warfare — “insurgency,” as we are now wont to call it. Guerrilla warfare is used by those who, unable to defeat a stronger opponent through open combat between regular military forces, engage in raids and ambushes, then return to concealment among the civilian population. The distinction between guerrilla warfare and an organized terrorist campaign can be difficult to make. For example, during the Vietnam War, sometimes the Vietcong acted as guerrilla combatants and other times they were engaged in terrorism.

A Vietcong terrorist is executed in Saigon, 1968

As someone has remarked, the lesson of the Spanish Civil War is that if you think you’ve killed enough Communists, you’re wrong. And at the same time America was fighting Communists in Vietnam, the Soviet Union was sponsoring terrorism against Israel. This relationship began when Egyptian dictator Gamal Nasser became a client of the Soviets in the 1950s. Under Nasser’s sponsorship, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was created in 1964 with Ahmed Shuqeiri as its leader. However, after Egypt was humiliated in the 1967 Six-Day War, the PLO came under the control of Yassir Arafat, whose Fatah organization had been engaged in terrorist attacks on Israel since 1964. (You can read the relevant history from Discover the Networks, which is far more informative than Wikipedia.) It was the Six-Day War that put Israel in possession of Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the entirety of the Sinai peninsula. When Egypt and the other Arab powers counterattacked in 1973 (the Yom Kippur War), Israel successfully defended itself, and was thus dealing from a position of strength when it agreed, in the 1978 Camp David Accords, to return the Sinai to Egypt in a historic peace agreement. Despite making peace with Egypt, however, Israel was still viewed as a target by the Soviets, which continued sponsoring terrorism by the PLO.

The very concept of a “Palestinian” nationality is an invention of Soviet-sponsored propaganda. Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s recall the Soviet “brushfire” strategy, of sponsoring Communist insurgencies all over the world in so-called “wars of national liberation,” of which the terrorist campaign against Israel was just one example.

The history of the so-called “Red-Green Alliance” between leftists in the West and radical Islamists has been recounted by Eli Lake. What actually unites them, of course, is their anti-American fanaticism which is itself a legacy of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War (which did not end until I was in my 30s), there was always a non-coincidental convergence of Soviet propaganda themes and the rhetoric of leftists in the West.

One of the things I learned during the years in the mid-1990s when I went from being a yellow-dog Democrat to being a “right-wing extremist” was passed along to me by a former member of Rep. Larry McDonald‘s staff: Just because the Soviet Union collapsed did not mean that Communism was no longer a threat. Communism’s friends in the West didn’t just strike the tent and go home in defeat when the Berlin Wall fell and Gorbachev was ousted in Moscow. The radicalism of the “free Palestine” mobs is not actually a protest against Israeli policy or U.S. policy because, to invoke one famous maxim of the Left, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

It is unfortunate that some of our friends on the Right have allowed their opposition to neoconservative interventionism (“forever wars”) to lead them into a de facto alliance with the pro-Hamas leftists who portray Israel as the villain in the Middle East. There has been a lot of divisive online conflict between “America First” activists (including some I consider my friends) and the more outspoken Zionists in the Republican coalition (also including some of my friends). My own Zionist credentials being indisputable, I lament both this intramural conflict itself and the excessive vehemence of the rhetoric involved. “Mark Levin said this!” “Tucker Carlson said that!” Is this actually an argument about policy, or is it something else? Regardless of what anyone may say, I cannot help but ask: Cui bono? Who benefits from divisions within the Right?

There is a reason why you rarely see me jumping into these arguments to denounce people by name. Sam Francis got purged from the Official Conservative Movement™ as a result of foreign-policy quarrels in the 1990s, and the only reason we are where we are now — i.e., with the populist grassroots energy of MAGA now the dominant force in Republican politics — is because some of us were wise enough to keep our powder dry, to be discreet in our communications, and to maintain our focus on truly important issues. There have been times when I’ve foolishly lost my temper, or otherwise strayed from the advice I give others in these matters. Nevertheless, I continue to urge patience, and to counsel against joining circular firing squads. Always aim downrange. There are too many obvious enemies on the Left for us to waste ammunition fighting amongst ourselves. But you can see that Communists are still what they always were, even if they call themselves “progressives” now. They still embrace the same terrorist strategy that the Soviets pursued for decades. Let us focus on exposing them and defeating them, and not let ourselves get distracted from that mission.



 

The Terrorist ‘Dreamer’: End DACA Immediately, and Deport Them All

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The standard application fee for a B-2 tourist visa is $185, a sum that most Americans would consider trivial. In poor Third World countries, however, $185 might be more than a week’s pay, and that’s just for the application — paying $185 doesn’t guarantee the visa will be issued.

Keep that information in mind, as we discuss Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, a Mexican who arrived in the U.S. in 2001 at age 6 along with his family, traveling on B-2 tourist visas. They never went back:

Federal officials say Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, identified in court documents as the alleged ringleader of a plot to attack the White House UFC event this past weekend, was in the country illegally after overstaying a visa, according to information from Fox News Digital.
According to Homeland Security information in the documents, Alvarez came to the United States as a child and received deportation relief through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2014 after failing to leave when his B2 visa expired in 2001.
Five co?conspirators have been arrested this month in what investigators describe as a plan to use explosive?laden drones to force an evacuation from the event, followed by sniper fire aimed at the fleeing crowd. Federal authorities say Alvarez was responsible for planning, organizing and directing the planned attack.
Court records identified Alvarez as a foreign national after he consented to consular notification following his arrest this weekend, though the documents did not specify his immigration status or country of origin.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lodged a detainer for him following his arrest by the FBI in Omaha, Nebraska, on the day of the event. . . .
According to the Department of Justice, Alvarez used the name “Shepherd” in a group chat dedicated to planning the attack and allegedly responded “as many and as deadly as we can get” when asked about making drones with explosives.

Andrew R. Arthur explains an important point about B-2 visas:

Lauren Bis, DHS acting assistant secretary for media relations, had the following to say about Alvarez and his alleged involvement in this purported plot:

This illegal alien from Mexico should never have been allowed in our country. He was the ringleader of a failed terror attack targeting UFC Freedom 250 at the White House. … He and his co-conspirators now face charges of conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit violence on White House grounds. He will face justice and swiftly be removed from our country.

Given that Alvarez was about six years old when he came to this country in 2001 on a B-2 tourist visa (likely with family), I wouldn’t go so far as to state that he “should never have been allowed” into this country, but (assuming the reporting is true), the fact he never left suggests that whoever brought him didn’t have the appropriate “nonimmigrant” intent, i.e., the intent to return home. …
And when nonimmigrants — and B-2 tourists in particular — fail to depart as promised, it makes it more difficult their fellow countrymen to come here temporarily, but legally, in the future. Let me explain.
Section 214 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) governs the issuance of nonimmigrant visas at consular offices abroad, and subsection (b) therein states that an applicant for such a visa is “presumed to be an immigrant” — that is presumed to be coming here permanently, not temporarily — “until he establishes to the satisfaction of the consular officer … that he is entitled to a nonimmigrant status”.
That “214(b)” ineligibility is the most common ground on which consular officers deny nonimmigrant visas, and when nationals of a specific country have high nonimmigrant “overstay” rates, consulates tighten up their nonimmigrant-visa issuances.
While I haven’t handled an immigration case in over a decade, I remain an attorney in good standing and receive calls from U.S. citizens and green card holders who are attempting, unsuccessfully, to secure tourist visas for their parents and other loved ones to come to this country for a visit.
It breaks my heart, but there is usually nothing I can do. “Once bitten, twice shy” doesn’t just apply to unfamiliar canines. Untruthful and noncompliant nonimmigrant visitors ruin others’ hopes, plans, and reunions.

When we hear the phrase “illegal immigrant,” we tend to think of someone wading across the Rio Grande or being smuggled over the border, but these “visa overstay” cases are also a huge part of the problem: Foreigners get into the country on tourist visas, student visas or temporary work visas, and then just never go back. And as explained, these cheaters make it more difficult for honest people to get temporary visas. They pay their $185 application fee and then get turned down for a tourist visa because some State Department staffer at the embassy suspects they won’t return after their visa expires. Dear reader, I am personally familiar with such a case, and it makes me angry.

Speaking of angry, here’s Andrew R. Arthur on DACA:

For more than two decades, congressmen from both sides have tried to pass some form of “DREAM Act”, that is, an amnesty for aliens living in the United States illegally after arriving here — with and without their parents — as children.
And for nearly a quarter century, they’ve been unsuccessful, and regardless of how it turns out, this case is unlikely to further their cause.
The failure of DREAM Act legislation led the Obama administration to create DACA, which provides quasi-legal status to aliens who entered the United States while under the age of 16 before June 15, 2007, who were born after June 15, 1981, who meet certain educational standards, and who have not been convicted of certain crimes.
DACA was not created by Congress, or even by executive order or executive action, for that matter. Instead, it’s the product of a memo issued by then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on June 15, 2012 (five months before that year’s presidential elections), that has become a political football ever since.
As its name suggests, DACA is a unique flavor of “deferred action”, an “inherently discretionary” exercise of “prosecutorial discretion” to which applicants have “no legal right”, though aliens granted deferred action don’t accrue periods of unlawful presence in the United States while in that status and are eligible to apply for employment authorization.
ICE is quick to add that “deferred action does not confer lawful immigration status upon an individual”, meaning that an alien granted DACA exists in a nether zone between legal and not.

How the hell has DACA survived? It’s not a law passed by Congress, nor is it an executive order. DACA exists because of a mere memo issued by Janet Napolitano 14 years ago, which ought to have been canceled the very day President Trump was first inaugurated in 2017, yet we still have many thousands of these DACA recipients in the country. Even if we stipulate that some of these people are potentially good citizens — having arrived here as children, through no criminal intent of their own, etc. — they have now had more than a decade to get their paperwork straightened out and obtain permanent legal residency (i.e., “Green Card” status) and go through the seven-year naturalization process.

The point here is that foreign lawbreakers make it more difficult for everybody else, in part because abuses of the immigration system make us Americans so angry that we start saying things like, “Mass deportation is the moderate option.” (Don’t ask about the extreme option.)

When politicians start using gimmicks like DACA to rig the system, it only compounds the anger among those of us who are smart enough to figure out that we’re being lied to, and who refuse to be guilt-tripped by a lot of “diversity is our strength” rhetoric or excerpts from the poetry of Emma Lazarus. Americans historically have been a pragmatic people, willing to apply practical common sense to any problem we encounter, but our leaders have taken advantage of our good nature by offering phony “reforms” and allegedly temporary measures like DACA that, upon closer examination, are really amnesty. Politicians know amnesty is unpopular, and therefore engage in attempted deception about what it is they’re doing. When we see through their charades and call them out, they then accuse of us of xenophobic bigotry: “RAAAAACIST!”

There is a certain handsome young fellow — an athlete and scholar from a fine Christian family — in a Latin American country famous for soccer and beef, who would very much like to visit the United States. About three years ago, this gaucho of the pampas was working in a coffee shop to earn his tuition when he made the acquaintance of an American girl who was spending her junior year of college studying abroad in a Spanish-language immersion program. Because the girl was very beautiful, of course the fellow at the coffee shop fell deeply in love with her. After she returned to America, the handsome young fellow went through the ordeal of trying to obtain a visa to come visit her (in order to meet the girl’s father, as is proper). He paid that $185 application fee and was turned down by some State Department hack at the U.S. embassy.

“Do not worry,” said the girl’s father. “This is the Biden administration. Once Trump gets in office, he’ll make Marco Rubio the Secretary of State, and my friend Marco will fix this problem.” The lovebirds are still waiting for this Hallmark Channel movie to reach its happy ending, but perhaps you understand my resentment of the status quo, where we’re expected to feel sorry for illegal aliens, even while the system makes life difficult for those who obey the law and follow the rules.

My interest in this issue is quite personal, and calling me a xenophobic bigot is only going to make me even angrier than I already am.

Remember: Mass deportation is the moderate option.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! It has been pointed out by commenters that Trump tried to end DACA, but that got overturned by a 5-4 Supreme Court, as if Cabinet secretaries can just determine immigration policy and, once such a policy is established, it can never be changed by any future administration. Exactly how that’s constitutional, I can’t understand. Neither could Justice Thomas:

DHS created DACA during the Obama administration without any statutory authorization and without going through the requisite rulemaking process. As a result, the program was unlawful from its inception. The majority does not even attempt to explain why a court has the authority to scrutinize an agency’s policy reasons for rescinding an unlawful program . . .

DACA was “unlawful from its inception,” and yet somehow it’s against the law to end it? It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma.



 

Democrats Electing Jew-Haters, While Losers Blame … THE JOOZ!

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Since the Hamas terror attack on Israel in October 2023, the left wing of the Democratic Party has made “Palestine” its all-or-nothing issue, more important than anything else soi-disant “progressives” claim to care about. Some of us suspect that money from Qatar, Iran and other Muslim governments has been subsidizing pro-Hamas activism in the United States and other Western countries, especially in terms of podcasts and other online “influencer” propaganda (e.g., Nick Fuentes).

Following up on Monday’s post about Graham Platner, would you care to guess whom Mr. Nazi Tattoo is blaming for his problems?

First of all, as Emily Zanotti and others have pointed out, Platner flunks math — Susan Collins has raised about $10 million in contributions for her reelection campaign, of which some $350,000 are from AIPAC, which is certainly not a “staggering one-third of her money.” But really, when Democrats are backing a candidate with a Totenkopf tattoo, why would anyone blame Jews for supporting his opponent?

Obviously, I’m not someone who spends time listening for “dog whistles” of racism, and I’m perfectly willing to call out Jews whose behavior deserves condemnation (e.g., Jamie Raskin, “the Leading Cause of Antisemitism in America”). But it is obvious to me that Democrats are willing to exploit the Left’s “Palestine” obsession in ways that reek of 1930s Germany. Anytime a Democrat wants to juice up the “progressive” grassroots, scapegoating AIPAC is now the go-to tactic.

You probably never heard of Saikat Chakrabarti, but he’s a Harvard-educated Silicon Valley tech bro who made a fortune after getting in on the ground floor at Stripe. Chakrabarti reportedly spent $10 million of his own money on a congressional campaign in California’s 11th District, for the seat vacated by Nancy Pelosi’s retirement. He finished third in Tuesday night’s primary, and guess who got the blame?

Scott Wiener is a disgusting scumbag who might some day challenge Jamie Raskin for the “Leading Cause of Antisemitism in America” title, but why scapegoat AIPAC? Did those cunning Jews talk Saikat Chakrabarti into wasting $10 million for a third-place finish?

Expect to see more of this kind of rhetoric from Democrats between now and the November midterms, and if somehow Republicans manage to keep control of Congress, Democrats will blame THE JOOZ!



 

Congo: ‘The Horror! The Horror!’

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The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly known as Zaire, and before that, the Belgian Congo, is one of those Third World nightmare hellholes that I describe as being “worse than Baltimore.” However, since a new federal prosecutor has brought Baltimore’s homicide problem under control, I’ll describe the DRC as worse than Memphis.

Joseph Conrad famously used the Belgian Congo as the scene for Heart of Darkness, with the madman Kurtz dying of fever, his final words being: “The horror! The horror!” The situation has not much improved lately, as the State Department warns: “Do not travel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) due to crime, civil unrest, and health. Some areas have increased risk due to armed conflict.”

And then there’s the deadly ebola outbreak:

A second incident of Congolese youths storming an Ebola clinic to demand the return of infected bodies for funerals took place on Sunday evening, as the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) announced the number of suspected infections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda has surpassed 900.
Eyewitnesses reported gunfire at the Mongbwalu General Hospital in the eastern DRC province of Ituri, the epicenter of the Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak, as a mob of angry youths stormed the treatment center to demand the return of two bodies of Ebola victims. Some reports said members of the mob were armed, while others said police fired the shots in an attempt to disperse the crowd.
“There was gunfire and the medics were trying to evacuate the patients and the staff,” said Dr. Richard Lokudu, medical director of Mongbwalu General Hospital.
Lokudu said the hospital remained “on general alert” as of Monday morning. It was not clear from official reports if anyone was injured during the altercation.
A similar incident occurred on Thursday at Rwampara Hospital near Bunia, the capital of Ituri province. In that case, a mob of angry youths set fire to the Ebola treatment center when the hospital refused to hand over the body of a popular local soccer player who was believed to have died from Ebola.
On Saturday, another mob attacked an Ebola treatment clinic in Mongbwalu operated by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and set fire to one of its tents. No injuries were reported, but 18 people who were undergoing Ebola testing fled from the facility and could not immediately be located to resume treatment. . . .
Officials in the northeastern DRC banned funerals and gatherings of over 50 people on Friday, in an effort to slow the spread of the deadly disease. Funerals in the outbreak region are seen as super-spreader events because the bodies of dead Ebola victims can be highly contagious and people tend to come into physical contact with them during funeral ceremonies. . . .
Parts of the eastern Congo are controlled by violent insurgent and jihadi groups with links to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and over a million people have been displaced from their homes, making treatment and contact tracing for Ebola exceptionally difficult.

If Joe Biden was still president, he’d be bringing ebola-infected Congo refugees to America. “The horror! The horror!”



 

‘There Is No Truth … Only Power’

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French degenerate Michel Foucault

Before he died of AIDS, Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and also sodomized boys in Tunisia. These facts are not unrelated.

Any argument must stand or fall on its own merits. As every educated person knows, attempting to refute an argument by attacking the personality of its proponent is a logical fallacy known as ad hominem. Nonetheless, it has been my observation that advocates of unusual arguments — ideas that seem destructive or counter-factual — generally have something in their biography which helps explain their motives.

Communism is the classic example of this phenomenon. Even if a naïve idealist had been persuaded in the early 20th century that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, et al., had found the secret of liberating mankind from oppression and poverty, the idealism that won him over to Communism as a theory could not have survived the reality of Communism in practice under Stalin. Indeed, the cynical swindle of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had the effect of causing a great falling-away among Communists in America, who suddenly realized that all the anti-fascist “Popular Front” rhetoric of the 1930s had been a monstrous lie. What are we to make, then, of those who continued to support and defend Communism after 1939? In every case, the biographical factors must be considered.

Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements addresses this issue, classifying the types of personalities that are attracted to such movements. And I have summarized this insight simply: Bad causes attract bad people.

We know for a fact that Communism leads to mass murder, killing as many as 100 million people in the 20th century, and therefore must question the motives of its defenders. Hence, we can disregard the accusation of committing an ad hominem fallacy in so doing.

Something similar can be said for the philosophers of “postmodernism.” Michel Foucault was an influential French intellectual and also a homosexual pedophile, and this is not a coincidence, you see.

French libertarian Brivael Le Pogam writes:

I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).
We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.
We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality — everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.
Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.
For here’s what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.
Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.
That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.
It’s shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It’s our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt the way others export weapons.
What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them—that is the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and are not ashamed to transmit it.
So, forgive us. And back to work.

Well said! More from Le Pogam via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

Do You Hate Communism Enough?

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The answer to the question in the headline is obviously no — it is impossible that any of us could hate Communism as much as we should. Unless you were a Chilean helicopter pilot back in the day, perhaps, you could almost certainly use a booster shot for your anti-Communism.

This point was brought home by Data Republican:

I am going to keep repeating this until people understand this.
Karen Bass was not only a Castro operative and Communist, but she got elevated to Vice Chair of National Endowment for Democracy, which is the center of soft power operations in the US government. She is not a “DEI mayor.” She is extremely powerful at the global stage.
She was actively involved in shaping foreign policy with the Obama administration, especially Africa. Her Ghana visit during the LA wildfires wasn’t a vacation, it was part of a Biden delegate to greet Ghana’s new President.
She was considered HUD Secretary for the Biden administration. Instead, she nominated the person who would become the actual HHS Secretary – California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
Now, let me ask you. If a literal Castro operative gets elevated to this stage, what does this imply about the rest of the United States government?

Is this clear enough? Too many of our Republican friends dismiss Bass as a dimwitted clown, dangerous only because of her incompetence. However, Bass has held positions of major influence, and was among the finalists in Biden’s search for a VP pick in 2020. It was when she was under consideration for that choice that her early involvement in the Venceremos Brigade attracted critical scrutiny:

In the mid-1970s, California Congresswoman Karen Bass, who is now under consideration to be Joe Biden’s running mate, was an organizer for the Venceremos Brigade, according to several contemporaneous media accounts and an interview with the future congresswoman published in a 1996 Ph.D. dissertation. The brigade organized six-week work trips for American leftists of all tendencies who wanted to visit and support Cuba . . .
An event blurb in an October 1975 issue of the communist Daily World newspaper describes Bass, then 22, as “leader of the Venceremos Brigade in southern California.” Bass herself explained her work for the brigade to a doctoral candidate working on a 1996 Ph.D. dissertation submitted to the Fielding Institute, titled “Women Activists of Diverse Backgrounds: A Qualitative Study of Perceived Influences and Values.” “Another critical influence for Bass began, at age 19, and spanned the next five years: Cuba,” reads the document, written by Dawn Noggle, who is currently the director of mental health services for the Maricopa County correctional system. “As a ‘brigadista’ and then organizer for the Venceremos Brigades, Karen visited Cuba every 6 months.”

If the Daily World considered you a comrade? Yeah. And if you study more about the Venceremos Brigade, you realize that this group is what we may call terrorist-adjacent: The infamous Susan Rosenberg traveled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade in 1976.

In case you don’t know, Susan Rosenberg was part of the Weather Underground faction calling itself the May 19th Communist Organization (M19), which perpetrated the murderous 1981 Brinks robbery and bombed the U.S. Capitol in 1983. Violent hatred of America is what the Venceremos Brigade was really all about and yet, somehow, Karen Bass’s years of membership did not disqualify her from being elected to Congress and then becoming mayor of Los Angeles?

You may hate Communism as much as I do — which, nevertheless, is not enough — but there is clearly a larger problem: In the post-Cold War era, too many Americans don’t even realize that Communism is still an active danger, and therefore are willing to vote for radicals like Karen Bass. People need to beware of the existential threat of the Red Menace.