Elsewhere in the epistle, Francis implicitly condemns Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, for misunderstanding the Church’s teaching on ordo amoris—the order of love. Vance, a convert who was catechized by two of the most intelligent Dominican priests in America (I introduced him personally to his first teacher), had defended the administration’s tough migration policy by referring to St. Thomas Aquinas’ teaching that the order of love requires us to love those closest to us first—not exclusively, but primarily, as God has given us the duty to care for them.
It turns out that JD Vance really is more Catholic than the pope. The Catechism teaches that the moral duty towards foreign refugees must be balanced by duties to the common good of the people within one’s own country. Yes, wealthy countries do have a moral responsibility to be generous in welcoming distressed foreigners, but they have the right to set limits on migration, and to refuse it when they judge that it harms the common good. The official Catholic teaching balances charity with common sense.
JD Vance understands that; Pope Francis does not. The pope, in his teaching, has sanctified open borders—even, as in Europe, when those ungated frontiers allow the migration into the Christian lands of Europe of millions of Muslims who at minimum do not share the ancestral faith of Europeans, and no small number of whom are militantly hostile to it. If Francis had lived in the time of Pius V, Europe would be Islamic today.
Category: Immigration
Is Illegal Immigration a Crime?
Over at the Stack.
It is. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats lied to us about this. Illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime.
Read it all. Very short.
Enforcement of Borders is neither ‘Draconian’ nor ‘Xenophobic’
I just heard a Democrat politician refer to the The Trump-Homan border crackdown as 'draconian' and 'xenophobic.' It is neither.
It is not cruel or severe. Although you may think that 'severe' is etymologically related to 'sever,' it is not. To witness a penology that includes beheading and limb amputation you will have to take a trip to the Middle East. Iran and Saudi Arabia are go-to locales for draconian punishments. If there are any draconian punishments in the USA at the present time, they are inflicted by leftists. J-6 trespassers and abortion protesters are good examples of inflictees.
As for 'xenophobic,' it it is the adjectival form of 'xenophobia.' Now a phobia is an irrational fear. But we who stand for the rule of law, have no irrational fear of foreigners or of things foreign. If we did, why would we freely travel abroad and indeed freely live for extended periods in foreign lands? ('Freely' as opposed to 'by military order.') I myself have lived two and a half years abroad: six months in Salzburg, Austria, a year in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, and a year in Ankara, Turkey, and I have intensively studied the native languages, cultures, religions, and histories of these countries.
What's more, I entered legally, did not overstay my visa, obeyed the local laws, ate their food, observed their customs, and dressed appropriately. I did not, for example, walk around Turkey Arizona-style in short pants. I showed respect for Muslim ways. I entered legally in the way my ancestors entered the USA, legally. And like them, I studied the native languages and did my best to assimilate.
You can always count on a leftist to misuse language. Language abuse is as it were inscribed into their DNA. Show me a leftist and I'll show you a linguistic hijacker. The scumbaggery of our subversive political enemies has many sources, but the mother of them all, and the mother of all subversion, straight from the pit of hell and the Father of Lies, is the subversion of language.
Integration, Free Association, Open Immigration
An addendum to The Integrationist Fantasy.
Forced integration violates the right to free association. To add to both the irony and the outrage, the integrators refuse to integrate with the integrated.
Open immigration is not only in open defiance of the rule of law, it also leads to a particularly offensive form of forced integration, as when illegal aliens are shipped to various locales to the detriment of the citizens who live there, citizens who lack the political clout to prevent the invasion.
It is no surprise why Trump garnered such strong support from the the black, Hispanic, and working class demographics.
Hats Off to Huntington Beach, California
It was the summer of '65. I was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California listening to the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, sing about hot rods, surfing, boy-girl relations and such when a song came on that "blew my mind" in the parlance of the day. But what I want to say, today, is that the city so-named
. . . voted to approve the initiative brought by Mayor Pat Burns to Declare the City of Huntington Beach a “Non-Sanctuary City for Illegal Immigration for the Prevention of Crime.” As the City Council Members commented, the intent of this Resolution is to deliberately sidestep the Governor’s efforts to subvert the good work of federal immigration authorities and to announce the City’s cooperation with the federal government, the Trump Administration, and Border Czar Tom Homan’s work. This new City policy and Declaration are common sense, supports our law enforcement, and advances public safety throughout the City. What the Governor is doing does not.
Read it all. (HT: Fellow native-Californian, Ingvarius Maximus of Alhambra)
The Integrationist Fantasy
Top o' the Stack.
E pluribus unum? Out of many, one? It can work, and it did work for a time, though not perfectly. But thanks to ‘progressives,’ regression has set in. Whether a One can be made of Many depends on the nature of the Many.
A viable One cannot be made out of just any Many.
To think otherwise is to succumb to what I call the Integrationist Fantasy. This is the dangerous conceit that people can be brought together peacefully and productively despite deep differences in their languages, religions, cultures, traditions, and values.
Read it all; it's short: your Twitterized (X'ed out?) brain will be able to process it.
The Road to One-Party Rule
Here is the Democrat plan clearly explained in a few words.
Defensive Gun Use Without a Shot Fired
Texas man defends family from machete-wielding home invader with his 9mm semi-auto.
A quartet of questions.
How would you repel a home invasion?
Would you vote for a political party they leaders of which intend to violate your right to self-defense?
Would you lay money on the proposition that the miscreant depicted in the article is an illegal alien?
Is it wise to vote for a party that stands for open borders?
Related: An Abuse of Language: 'Gun Buy-Back'
Michael Anton on “Celebration Parallax”
Here:
More tellingly, this charge is an example of something I call the “celebration parallax,” which is explained here. In brief, the celebration parallax holds that the same fact pattern is either true and glorious or false and scurrilous depending on who states it and, crucially, the perceived intent of the speaker.
So if someone says that the U.S. is experiencing levels of immigration that are unprecedented in human history, if it’s presumed or suspected that he might have doubts, then he is an evil racist. But when Bill Clinton or Joe Biden makes exactly the same point, well, that is A-OK! Because they are “good guys” who welcome “an unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop” (Joe Biden’s words). By the way, I leave to readers to intuit the difference between “unrelenting” (Joe’s word) and “ceaseless” (my word) and the reasons why the former is A-OK but the latter is somehow “racist.”
The Intifada Comes to America
Well, what did you expect?
Intifada refers specifically to two separate uprisings of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank over the past four decades, but more broadly, it pertains to the continued resistance of the Palestinians to the existence of Israel. When they shout “Death to Israel,” they mean it. It should be a top priority of Congress now to determine whether they mean it when they shout “Death to America.”
The rise of pro-Palestinian hatred in the United States should not be a surprising development to anyone. Even before President Biden opened the southern border to millions of unvetted “newcomers,” as the global elites like to call the invaders, there has been a reckless U.S. policy going back two decades to resettle Muslim refugees from Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Afghanistan in the U.S. heartland. And because immigration policy no longer treats assimilation as a worthwhile goal, many of those refugees are loyal to their homeland and their religion much more than to the nation that offered them safety and security.
I suppose that is an inevitable result of the globalist agenda of border dissolution and the merging of disparate populations for the purpose of sharing wealth and assuaging billionaires’ guilt.
But it is only inevitable if the rest of us tolerate it.
Heliophysics and Common Ground
The solar eclipse brought us all together for one day. Well, we do share common ground when, like Thales, our heads are craned upwards in wonder. That common ground is the home planet, spaceship Earth, upon which we stand, bitterly disagree, and slaughter one another when not distracted by an unusual celestial phenomenon. Clearly, common ground of the terrestrial sort is not enough: we also need ideological common ground to make the world less of an abattoir.
This is something the open-borders types don't want to understand. One of their fundamental errors is to imagine that all-inclusive diversity is compatible with social harmony.
It is not that diversity is not a value; it plainly is. Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive marketplace of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.
But no reasonable person values diversity as such. A maximally diverse neighborhood would include pimps, whores, nuns, drug addicts, Montessori schools cheek-by-jowl with tattoo parlors and liquor stores, Hamas terrorists, outlaw bikers, priests both pedophile and pure, Sufi mystics, bank clerks, insurance salesmen, people who care for their property, people who are big on deferred maintenance . . . .
You get the point. Only some sorts of diversity are valuable. Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal claim on our respect.
For example, one may value a district which is home to a diversity of restaurants (Turkish, Thai, French. . .), but only if they are all good restaurants. A diversity which includes ptomaine joints, greasy spoons, and high-end establishments is not the sort of diversity one values. Diversity of quality is not a value. The same goes for diversity of moral decency, diversity of criminality, and so on. Or one may value a philosophy department in which a diversity of courses is on offer, but not one in which the diversity extends to the competence levels of the instructors or the preparedness levels of the students. One wants excellent instruction on a diversity of topics – but that is just to say that the value of diversity must be kept in check by the competing value of unity: the instructors ought not be diverse in respect of their excellence.
Diversity unchecked by the competing value of unity leads to divisiveness. For this reason, one ought not ‘celebrate diversity’ unless on is also willing to ‘celebrate unity.’ And this is precisely what too many leftists and 'woke' folk cannot, or will not, comprehend. They unreasonably emphasize diversity at the expense of unity.
Liberty and security form another pair of competing values. The only liberty worth wanting is one that can be exercised in a secure environment. The liberty to quit my domicile at any time night or day is worth little or nothing if I am assaulted the minute I step into the street. On the other hand, the only security worth wanting is one that allows the exercise of liberty. The security of totalitarian lock-down is not a value.
So what is to be done? Job One for all of you is to do your bit to make sure that Joe Biden is sent packing.
Multi-Racial but not Multi-Cultural: Self-Critique of a May 2017 Entry
In May of 2017, I wrote:
The USA cannot help but be a multi-racial society, but if we cannot agree on a common culture for public purposes with English as its official language and the values of the founding documents as its foundation, then the end is in sight. But collapse takes time and those of us in our mid-60s, assuming we don't live too long, should be able to weather the storm without too much stress.
I am less sanguine now; things are far worse.
One problem is that we lack the collective will to demand the assimilation without which even legal immigration is a recipe for Balkanization. Any sane person who does not intend the destruction of our republic should be able to see that the values of Sharia are incompatible with American values, and that no Muslims should be allowed to immigrate who are unwilling to accept and honor our values. There is no right to immigrate, and immigration must be to the benefit of the host country.
But the problem just mentioned is minor compared to the problem that we don't even have the 'logically prior' collective will to enforce reasonable laws and put a stop to illegal immigration and the flouting of Federal immigration law by so-called 'sanctuary' cities and other jurisdictions. First, stop illegal immigration, then worry about assimilation in connection with legal immigration.
This unlikely to happen even if Trump gets a second term.
Once more: improper entry into the country is already a violation of the criminal code. When the mayor of a great city, New York, refuses to deport illegal aliens who commit such serious felonies as driving while intoxicated, then you know that there is precious little common ground left.
We cannot agree on this? Then what can we agree on?
We conservatives can blame ourselves to some extent. We lost ourselves in our private lives while the destructive Left had its way.
Paradoxically, our appreciation that the political is a limited sphere has left us at a disadvantage over against leftists for whom the political is the only sphere.
This is an ingredient in what I call The Conservative Disadvantage.
Creative Play with the Race Card
No Person is Illegal!
That's true. No person is illegal. But who ever said that any person was?
'Woke' knuckleheads of the sort who recently criticized Joey B's SOTU reference to Lincoln Laken Riley's murderer as 'an illegal' regularly give something like the following lame argument:
1) No person is illegal.
2) If any person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien,' then some persons are illegal.
Therefore
3) No person is justifiably labelled an 'illegal alien.'
Therefore
4) The expression 'illegal alien' and such related expressions as 'illegal immigrant' must be banned.
There is no need to concern ourselves with the inferential move from (3) to (4). The argument is unsound because (2) is plainly false.
To see that it is false you have to be able to distinguish between agent and action, between doer and deed. 'Illegals' are so-called because of their illegal action, namely their illegal entry into the country, and not because they themselves, as agents, are illegal.
Of course, an appeal to sweet reason will get you nowhere with a leftist; what they understand is the hard fist of unreason.
As I have said many times, it is unreasonable to expect that all disputes can be settled reasonably.
And yet we have to have reasons at the ready for the reasonable.
That is why I wrote the above. Besides, I'm a natural-born scribbler who just loves to write, and loves to read what he has written. The life of the mind is its own reward.
A ‘Deplorable’ Straight from Central Casting . . .
. . . 'calls out' the lying leftist scumbag mayor of Athens, Georgia. James Lee takes on Kelly Gertz. Was this staged? No, but it certainly looks that way. One of Hillary's 'deplorables' with a redneck hat, poor English, and missing a tooth rightly attacks a mendacious SOB whose first name is 'Kelly.'