Congressman Steve King (R-IA)
has noticed just how extremist today’s respectable conventional wisdom has
become. So King has been exercising a Trump-like knack for trolling the
Establishment with blunt truths that enrage goodthinkers into revealing just how
much their worldview is founded upon hatred of average Americans.
Over the weekend, King
tweeted:
[Geert] Wilders understands that culture and
demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody
else’s babies.
Those last three words set off a paroxysm of
tut-tutting, with The New York Times declaring King to stand revealed as a “white nationalist.”
Chris Hayes of MSNBC lamented:
“Somebody else’s babies” is such a vile
phrase, I can’t get it out of head.
Columnist Roger Cohen raged in the NYT:
Fascist genetics now have a place on Capitol
Hill…. Wilders-loving King might also go to Ellis Island for a refresher on the
American idea.
Especially incensed were ethnically
privileged Conquistador-Americans,
such as Miami’s blond Republican congresswoman Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, who tweeted:
Diversity is our strength.
Blair Nathan observed
of King’s remarkably effective remark:
The fact that it is so clearly, axiomatically
true is why it’s controversial!... They’ve never had to express their first
principles on the national question, which most Americans reject out of hand.
Now people like Trump and King are forcing them to articulate what, in
principle, they actually believe. So they have to say “America doesn’t belong
to American citizens,” and they’re upset because they know American citizens
disagree.
King is particularly hateful because he
represents Sioux
County, Iowa, which Stanford economist Raj Chetty’s big 2015 study
of IRS returns from 1996 to 2012 found to be the single
best county in America for raising children who are upwardly
mobile. Sioux County is extremely white, Protestant, native-born,
traditionalist, and prosperous. It represents the egalitarian essence of
everything that coastal elites find deplorable about the people they currently
preside over.
“The problem remains that most of the modern
world was built by deplorables, whom the diverse are indoctrinated to resent.”
Numerous talking heads responded to King that
taking care of “somebody else’s babies” is what America has always been about.
John Adams and the other Founding Fathers weren’t fathers looking out for the
interests of their progeny. Instead they were inseminating an idea: that America exists for the
benefit of the huddled masses of not-yet-arrived immigrants who are, by
definition, the only true Americans.
For example, when John wrote to Abigail Adams
in 1780:
I must study politics and war that my sons may
have liberty to study painting and poetry, mathematics and philosophy. My sons
ought…to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music,
architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
John and Abigail weren’t
talking about, say, their actual sons, such as 12-year-old John Quincy Adams.
They were instead enthusing about their metaphorical sons, the wretched refuse
who would someday arrive and take over America.
After all, Alexander
Hamilton was an immigrant and nonwhite and secretly
Jewish, right? (I mean, Hamilton was smart, abrasive, and good with
money, so he couldn’t have been a Scotsman. Who ever heard of anybody
intelligent named “Hamilton”?)
Your $500 Broadway musical ticket wouldn’t tell you politically correct
untruths, now, would it?
Seriously, American history
has been so severely retconned over the past half century that it’s apparent
that most of the people gasping at King’s heresy are only vaguely aware of how
humorously deluded they have become.
Countless pundits sputtered in response to King
that America has always been “a nation of immigrants,” without realizing that
this phrase barely existed in American discourse until it was promoted by the
Anti-Defamation League’s propaganda arm in the 1960s.
In reality, Hamilton was highly suspicious of
immigrants, writing:
The United States have already felt the evils
of incorporating a large number of foreigners into their national mass; by
promoting in different classes different predilections in favor of particular
foreign nations, and antipathies against others, it has served very much to
divide the community and to distract our councils. It has been often likely to
compromise the interests of our own country in favor of another.
Hamilton’s colleague John Jay noted in the
second Federalist
Paper that America was lucky not to be burdened with
diversity:
…Providence has been pleased to give this one
connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same
ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached
to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and
customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by
side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty
and independence. This country and this people seem to have been made for each
other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance
so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the
strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and
alien sovereignties.
Similarly, the single most
important expression of the Founding Fathers, Gouverneur Morris’ Preamble to
the Constitution, America’s mission statement, refers directly to “ourselves
and our posterity”:
We the people of the United States, in order
to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,
provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the
blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish
this Constitution for the United States of America.
Likewise, Benjamin Franklin’s most important
work of social science, his 1754 essay “Observations
Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” was an anti-immigration
pamphlet. Franklin objected to his political opponents in Pennsylvania, the
descendants of William Penn, importing Germans to rig elections.
He pointed out that since the
territory wasn’t getting any larger, immigration drove down the standard of
living of natives, who were rapidly filling the colonies without need for
somebody else’s babies. Four score years later, Franklin’s measurement of how
fast Americans were increasing without immigration inspired Darwin’s concept of
the struggle for existence.
But that same year, 1754, the
young George Washington got into a firefight with the French near the future
site of Pittsburgh, setting off World War Zero, the Seven Years’ War.
Immigration restriction became an issue postponed for the future as the
colonies instead went on to conquer the continent, reaching San Francisco 94
years later.
But the continent is now
conquered, and thus the economic logic Franklin pointed out 263 years ago is
once again relevant: the fewer the immigrants, the higher and more equal the
standard of living. If it’s no longer appropriate to invade the world, perhaps
it’s no longer intelligent to invite the world?
Moreover, the divisive
cultural clashes that Hamilton and Jefferson saw growing out of immigration are
clearly plaguing us today as the diverse try to rewrite American history to
degrade the Founding Fathers’ contributions.
The reality is that human
beings are naturally concerned with their ancestors and descendants. The
“nation of immigrants” hype was the work of descendants of Ellis Island
immigrants understandably fictionalizing the past to make their forefathers
seem more crucial in the national story than they actually were.
As diversity increases, our culture seems to be
getting ever more obsessed with ancestry. Everybody except whites is encouraged
to be extremely touchy about relatives. Hispanics, for example, are told by
Democrats to identify as a race, even though they don’t. They are instructed
that any Hispanic illegal alien deported is their hermano to be avenged.
Yet the problem remains that most of the modern
world was built by deplorables, whom the diverse are indoctrinated to resent.
In my review of Charles Murray’s 2003 tome Human
Accomplishment, I noted that over the past 2,800 years:
In the sciences, 97 percent of the significant
figures and events turned out to be Western. Is this merely Eurocentric bias?
Of the 36 science reference books he drew upon, 28 were published after 1980,
by which time historians were desperately searching for non-Westerners to
praise.
Representative King pointed out this achievement
gap last summer. From an irate NYT article during
the Republican convention:
“If you’re really optimistic, you can say this
was the last time that old white people would command the Republican Party’s
attention, its platform, its public face,” Charles P. Pierce, a writer at large
at ‘Esquire’ magazine, said during the panel discussion.
In response, Mr. King said: “This whole ‘old
white people’ business does get a little tired, Charlie. I’d ask you to go back
through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been
made by these other categories of people that you are talking about? Where did
any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”…
Frantic yelling ensued, with the panelists
speaking over one another. “What about Africa? What about Asia?” April Ryan, a
reporter on the panel, said.
Indeed, what about Africa?
What about Asia? What is to be done about the fact that they didn’t contribute
all that much to the current world?
One increasingly popular
response to the irredeemable abundance of white male creativity is scrubbing
the names of dead white men from the historical record for being evil. This is
becoming ever more a ritual for those whose pride is oppressed by the excessive
accomplishments of their non-ancestors.
For example, this week the
Palo Alto, Calif., school board votes on a proposal to expunge the name of the
most important family in Silicon Valley history—the Termans—from a middle
school.
Lewis
Terman introduced standardized cognitive testing to America in
1916 with his Stanford-Binet IQ test. He believed genes were important to
intelligence, a view for which Charles Murray was recently assaulted at
Middlebury College.
We are often told that
intelligence testing is a “pseudo-science.” Yet Stanford continues to require
extremely high scores for admission on tests derived from the Stanford-Binet,
such as the SAT and the ACT. Stanford, which has been at the heart of intelligence
research for a century and which has no intention of giving up the SAT, now has
an endowment of $22.4 billion.
That is not a coincidence.
Lewis’ son, Fred
Terman, became Stanford’s visionary dean of engineering. From behind
the scenes, Fred pulled
the strings to create the Silicon Valley we know today and make it into a mighty arsenal in
the Cold War.
You might think that Lewis
and Fred deserve a middle school each, considering how central their
contributions have been to Palo Alto’s current prosperity. (The average
3,000-square-foot house in Palo Alto costs over $4 million.)
But activists want to spend
$100,000 to erase the Terman name from the one school jointly named after them.
A compromise proposal to rub
out just Lewis’ name was shot down on the presumption that the son inherits the
sins of the father.
But the contributions of giants like the Termans
are likely to haunt resentful memories even after their offending names have
been laboriously scraped away. “History…guides us by vanities,” acidly observed
T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontion”:
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
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