If you are Muslim, the Republican Party now wants to use the machinery of government to discriminate against those of your faith. If you are Mexican-American, the party has just embraced a man who has slandered your countrymen as rapists and criminals. And if you are in either group, Trump just declared you unfit to sit as a judge on any case that involves him. Because it is you who are biased, inevitably, thanks to your race or religion.
The damage to the Republican brand doesn't end with Muslims and Mexicans. Because many millions of Americans who pass this new test of ethnic and religious purity are appalled as well.
African-Americans are no doubt most alert to the wreckage this brand of thought leaves in its wake. But America is full of ethnic and religious groups that can remember when the finger was pointed at them. It is unnerving to hear Holocaust survivors say they hear an echo of fascism in the ranting of the new Republican standard-bearer.
It’s strange to see a Leftist publication complain about Trump’s alleged bigotry. Who is it that rejects individualism in favor of group identity? The Democrats. They’re obsessed with “diversity.” The rich diversity of individual ability, ambition, goals, values, moral character and courage that has enabled a free America to flourish? No. Diversity of race (or racial heritage). The racist “brand of thought” is embedded in the Democrat psyche. Strange indeed to see the Star-Ledger complain about anyone’s bigotry, given that it Trumpets the primacy of racial group identity that leads to bigotry.
Whatever racist sentiments real or imagined Trump may harbor, collectivist Leftists are the last people who have any standing to criticize anyone for that.
Related Reading:
The Racism of “Diversity” —Peter Schwartz
Bernie Sanders the Demagogue Enters the Democratic Presidential Race
9 comments:
There are aspects of Trump's personality that I don't like and things I wish he said more carefully.
Take his comments on Mexicans for example. He didn't say all Mexicans are criminals, he just said, in effect, that we aren't getting the best Mexico has to offer, and who can disagree. Just look at the most wanted list from Los Angeles - it's almost entirely Hispanic.
And he's right about Muslims. Why does the USA benefit from a single Muslim? What have Muslims contributed to the world in the last 500 years? Check out the most wanted list from Hennepin County (Minneapolis) -- at least 2 of the 10 are Somalis.
I don't know what Trump's views on race are, but based on his immigration policies we would have a chance of maintaing the USA as a majority white country. When the left talks about race they don't believe in diversity. They are against White, heterosexual, and patriarchal society. They are willing to import millions of Muslims and don't care if white women are raped (look at Europe).
Contra the article you linked to by Schwartz, race does matter. Groups vary in innate intelligence, criminality and other factors. Yes there is free will, but it is constrained by biology.
Now you might disagree with me that group differences have a biological basis. Fine, but you have to admit if these differences aren't genetic they might as well be.
Here is Mr. Schwartz:
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These circumlocutions translate simply into this: one’s race determines the content of one’s mind. They imply that people have worthwhile views to express because of their ethnicity, and that “diversity” enables us to encounter “black ideas,” “Hispanic ideas,” etc. What could be more repulsively racist than that? This is exactly the premise held by the South’s slave-owners and by the Nazis’ Storm Troopers. They too believed that an individual’s thoughts and actions are determined by his racial heritage.
Whether a given race receives special rewards or special punishments is immaterial. The core of racism is the notion that the individual is meaningless and that membership in the collective–the race–is the source of his identity and value. To the racist, the individual’s moral and intellectual character is the product, not of his own choices, but of the genes he shares with all others of his race. To the racist, the particular members of a given race are interchangeable.
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There may be some people who believe this, but not even the most hard core racists I've met would talk that way. Everyone believes that there are smart blacks and stupd blacks, smart whites and dumb whites, good whites and bad blacks, etc.
Schwartz is givin us a package deal. Either you believe in crude determinism or you believe in crude blank-slatism. But biology tells us that psychological traits have a genetic component and they vary from race to race.
There are some 14 year old who drive better than some 40 year olds. But we have bright line tests because it simplifies things. The white IQ is 100 and the black IQ is 85. That means it is rational to make decisions based exclusively on race. You wouldn't want to live in a majority black community because the low IQ is correlated with crime, etc. Based on the law of averages, it is almost statistically impossible for a black neighberhood to be as peaceful as a white one.
Steve:
But we don’t live in a mystical world of statistical group averages. We live in a world of individuals, each of whom has the ability to think, shape his own character, form and change his own opinions, and make the most of whatever biological endowments he is born with—or not—according to his choice. My point is not to dispute the statistics you cite. It’s to say they are irrelevant and unfair in judging any particular individual.
Schwartz’s point is not to assert that most racists “talk that way” or even think that way in every encounter with individuals. His point is to identify the undiluted premise behind the “diversity” campaign. Most people who support “diversity” probably don’t even consider themselves racists, and may actually believe they are fighting it. But it is important to understand the premise behind the idea to clarify your own thinking so you don’t get trapped into inadvertently advancing bad premises and to enable you to counter bad ideas—especially bad ideas deliberately snuck into the culture under cover of circumlocutions.
The issue of Muslims does not correlate to the issue of race, however. A religion is a chosen set of beliefs, not an accident of birth.
Thanks.
America shouldn't "import" anybody. Open immigration does not mean open borders. It means tight control of our borders and a rational screening process. Obviously, criminals, terrorists, and people with infectious diseases should be barred. Likewise, open immigration should not extend to countries that pose a national security threat to the U.S., such as Iran. The screening process should also require proof of basic education and the means to self-support, along with a ban on collecting on the American welfare state, at least for a meaningful period of time. But "there is no public policy significance to race differences in IQ." Every aspiring immigrant should be judged on individual merit.
Incidentally, not being a criminal, being able to support yourself, having some education are all correlated with high (or at least higher IQ).
If you take the screending process seriously, then you'd pretty much restrict immigrants from Europe since in most other places you don't have criminal background checks (and we wouldn't trust them if they did). And you'd have to rule out people from Muslim countries, since they don't have laws against domestic abuse or don't enforce them. (In other words, you couldn't allow someone in from Pakistan because there is no way of knowing whether he's a serial wife beater.)
Mr. Jackson: It takes a rights respecting nation, which the United States of America, today, is NOT, to have open immigration. A rights respecting nation has open immigration, meaning it lets in ITS OWN, meaning rights respecting individuals. It screens by examining ones criminal past. If one has no criminal past, in terms of ITS laws, let 'em in. Today, the U.S. lets in anything, maybe baboons posing as humans, in order to kill rights by the present criminal legislation and regulations, and in the future, at the polls, paving the way to more crime by criminal plan under cover of the guise of government by law. A rights respecting country, like the United States of America used to be, will let in anybody if he's not a crook. If he's 4'11", weighs about 80lb., an has an IQ of 70, but can and will pluck some vegetables, fruits and nuts to earn his subsistence, HE'S IN, he's one of us with the sky as his only limit. He don't need no PH.D or special professional or trade skills. If he's just a 'dumb jack' who'll bust his ass and sweat to produce, he's in.
I've been a truck driver, driving a big o.t.r. tractor with 53' trailers coast to coast. I delivered a load to a place just outside Baltimore. Another trucker beat me to the punch, got his paperwork signed and left. I watched him. He clumb up into his big rig (and it was big), fired it up and drove off. This little squirt was about 4'6', maybe 70lb. His cab interior was probably customized to his smallness. But as he pulled out and maneuvered, he handled it like a real MAN. I thought of the rest of the ball busting stuff involved in truck driving which he surely did. Watching, I about knelt down in reverence, then got my papers signed.
In a rights respecting country, anybody can do it, on his own.
Mike,
I wish what you say were true. (I used to believe it.)
What if we allow large numbers of "rights respecting" Muslims into the US. The first generation might do OK. Yet with the second and third generation the low IQ and high inbred nature of their population will take over. This is what happened in France. It's the second and third generation that many of the Jihadists are drawn from.
It's also happened here in the USA with Hispanics.
It's the principal of regression to the mean. Things tend to return to their averages.
If we were to even consider open immigration we'd have to end the weldfare state for everyone (not just immigrants). It' just too easy for immigrants to get welfare (marry a native and get WIC benefits based on your family size, etc.). I do think multiculuturalism and other trends are making things worse.
Steve, since you asked:
A proper, pro-rights, open immigration policy need not be and should never be a national suicide pact. Open immigration does not mean an anything goes, open borders policy without restrictions and that ignores context.
I made my comments about 2d generation Muslims being the problem before I heard about the Orlando massacre. But again the pattern emerged.
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