Close window | View original article
The fondest hopes and dreams of the left and their media have been realized: There is now an open civil war in the Republican party.
It is an objective fact that, at the moment, Donald Trump holds a commanding lead and seems highly likely to capture the Republican nomination. You might think that the Republican leadership and conservative media would be trying to help the likely nominee, or at least keeping their mouths shut, but no.
The most recent edition of conservatism's most respected magazine, the National Review, dedicated an entire issue to the proposition of being "Against Trump." They didn't express support for anyone else; all that matters to them, apparently, is Anyone But Trump.
The National Review's action clearly reflects the feelings of the Republican party establishment: they'd rather the whole party went down in flames than to have to pretend to follow President Trump for four years.
Why? Doesn't America have enough schisms? Doesn't conservatism have enough internal conflicts? Don't we lose very effectively all the time without actually trying to lose on purpose?
The National Review is not the cause of the conflagration; it's been raging for some time, yes, even among the principals at Scragged. Is Donald Trump really the best conservative candidate? Could he really be more trustworthy than Ted Cruz, more unstoppable than Scott Walker, more morally upright than Ben Carson?
We respect all these men. Any of them would make a fine president in normal times. Some of them, particularly Ted Cruz, would make an excellent president in the future and we fervently hope he gets the chance.
Which he won't, unless Donald Trump is both the nominee and the president in 2016.
Our recent history convinces us that going to war against Donald Trump would doom the Republican party, the conservative movement, and as a direct result, doom the United States of America
Eight long years ago, when presented with the choice between Barack Hussein Obama and John McCain, Scragged could not endorse either and plumped for Mickey Mouse. Our reasoning at the time was that there are only three things which can destroy America - unlimited immigration, collapsing education, and overgrown bureaucracy - but neither of these candidates had any intention of doing anything to stop or even reduce any of these destructive forces.
Eight years later, these problems have only grown worse, as expected. Our education system is just as awful, just as suffused with politically correct dogma and anti-Americanism, just as controlled by leftists through and through, just as expensive, and just as ineffective as it was before. Our bureaucracy has continued to reach new heights of unaccountability and tyranny.
Yet none of these problems is really new, and both could be fixed with some willpower at the helm.
Immigration is different.
For all that we have been unable to fix our public education system overall, effective improvements are being accomplished on a small scale through experiments with charter schools and the like. We know the way forward. We lack the political will to implement the known solutions, but this can change in any election.
Similarly, cutting the bureaucracy off at the knees is a matter of finding a leader, or a Congress, with the intestinal fortitude to simply say "No!", weathering the resulting shutdown and inevitable pillorying at the hands of the liberal media. After they haven't received their paychecks for two, three, four, five, six months, how many bureaucrats will still be waiting around for one? Problem solved!
With our current overload of immigration, however, both legal and illegal, there is no going back. Once a person has been naturalized, the Constitution and decades of international law make it plain that they cannot be expelled without the most serious of reasons, generally involving fraud on their application which is usually difficult to prove.
Millions of anchor babies add to the problem. For all that "birthright citizenship" has no basis in the Constitution and our courts never suggested the idea until the 1980s, we've become accustomed to it, and it's hard to imagine the American people throwing out children who hold genuine U.S. birth certificates and passports. It's just not going to happen.
But that doesn't mean that illegal immigrants can't be expelled - as Donald Trump has promised. For that matter, international law gives total control of legal aliens to the host country; we have every right to expel some or all of them too, or simply to let their visas expire without renewing them.
Why is this so essential, of such overriding importance that it dwarfs all other considerations for us? Because people of Latin American culture, in particular, are steeped in socialism. Look at the history of Mexico, the very definition of the Third World - a place where the rich are rich, the poor are poor, there is next to no middle class, and crime and corruption are more powerful than we can imagine.
Yet the same political party keeps getting elected and re-elected - for seventy straight years in Mexico, for instance. How much positive change can you expect from a party whose very name is an oxymoron - the Institutional Revolutionary Party!? - and is a full member of the Socialist International? This party had no problem winning, and winning, and winning for an entire lifetime, even as Mexico failed, and failed, and failed again in every imaginable way.
Long ago, a freer America could successfully assimilate people of Latin American political backgrounds. There are a great many Hispanics in the United States who have been here for generations, and a fair number of them are politically conservative and traditionally American in their views. They may be ethnically Hispanic, but they are every whit as American as anyone else and they are perfectly welcome here.
Not so those who have arrived in the last half-century or more. When we say that "immigrants may be poor and foreign, but their kids will be successful Americans" we are thinking of 1915 not 2015.
What is the reality?
The longer immigrant children live in this country, the worse, on average, their health, their attitude, and their school performance. What's more, with each subsequent generation, immigrant children do worse and worse.
There are many possible explanations, but the result is plain: poor, uneducated, socialist Hispanic immigrants vote overwhelmingly for Democrats which is why Democrats welcome them regardless of the destruction they wreak. Simple math indicates that importing tens of millions of people who are almost all on one of our two political sides will give that side power for years to come. A study of illegal immigrants - who can't vote anyway and have little incentive to be involved in politics at all - discovered that 31% nevertheless identify as Democrat vs. only 4% as Republican.
Hey, aren't Hispanics Catholic, which means anti-abortion, pro-family, anti-homosexual, and thus conservative? Nope: Catholic Hispanics voted even more monolithically for Obama than did non-Catholic Hispanics, at a staggering 83%.
But - don't people of immigrant background grow more conservative as the old country gets farther away? This used to be true, but it hasn't been for a long time. For one thing, the "old country" isn't very far away at all - it's only a phone call, a brief plane ride, or in the case of Mexico, a quick wade away.
And the result is:
The Pew Research surveys also find that second-generation Hispanics and Asian Americans ... are more inclined to call themselves liberal and less likely to identify as Republicans [than their first-generation parents].
Case closed: the problem doesn't lessen as time goes on, it gets worse.
So let's sum up where we are:
If we continue on our current path of unlimited immigration, legal and illegal, the traditional American values conservatives know and love are as dead as the dodo. Liberal media are already trumpting that white Americans will be in the minority by 2040, less than a quarter century from now, and it's clear that the coming demographic is overwhelmingly liberal Democrat. When firebrands like Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn say that Americans will soon be an oppressed, derided minority in their own country, they are absolutely correct unless the wave of socialist immigration is not stopped in its tracks and thrown back with all possible vigor as Donald Trump has sworn to do.
Electing Republicans has made absolutely no difference. George W. Bush presided over a Republican House and Senate. Far from taking the opportunity to save his country and party by closing the border and expelling interlopers, he attempted to cram an amnesty down America's throat. The current Republican House and Senate majorities have supported a Democrat-style spending blowout with barely a peep, Ted Cruz again being the notable and honorable exception.
There are more Republicans in state houses all across the country than there have been since the 1920s, for all the good it has(n't) done us.
The simple fact is, our Republican mandarins, elites, establishment, and officeholders have utterly betrayed the principles most of their base hold dear. They aren't even smart enough to save their own positions; who could be so stupid as to let his enemy import unlimited reinforcements? Yet that's what pro-immigration Republicans are doing, and when it comes to taking action, that includes nearly all Republicans in any office.
The American people have figured this out and are demanding outsiders on both sides. Truly, an outsider is our only hope.
Donald Trump has held just about every possible political view over the course of his life, and even now his policy pronouncements are half-incoherent at best. We recognize we are taking an enormous risk in supporting Donald Trump, and that it could go very wrong.
Suppose that happens? In what way are we worse off than we already are? Not a whit - America is still on the road to perdition just as it's been for many years, with no additional harm done.
It doesn't have to end like that, though. If Donald Trump is one thing, he's a fighter. When you are surrounded by enemies on all sides, that's the time to deploy the berserker, which is what the desperate conservative Republican base is attempting to do.
Ted Cruz is a good man. He's even a fighter! But he can't take the fight to the media half so effectively as Mr. Trump can, which is a critical, killer handicap. We'd like to see him in a powerful position in a Trump administration, learning how to emulate the master manipulator so he can be a great president later on down the line. But he's not there today.
As for the rest of the Republican candidates, what's to say? They've all supported amnesty, except the admirable Dr. Ben Carson who unfortunately has dropped into no-hoper status at this late date.
Jeb Bush? Marco Rubio? Dare we say John Kasich? Please, just give us Hillary and get it over with!
We freely admit that our hopes for a President Trump are unjustifiably optimistic, possibly ludicrously so. Any sane conservative has to admit, though, that there is at least some possibility that Donald Trump will keep his promises. He loves to fight, and if he fights everybody in Washington he can't help hurting leftists since that's mostly what's there. Unlike anybody else, he has mastered the black arts of media manipulation and can turn the tables on the left like nobody we've ever seen.
With anybody else, there's not even that much hope. At best, we have a slightly less corrupt administrator of the welfare state tyranny we are fast becoming, who'll smoothly usher us into the Third World with as few jostles as possible.
By all means, vote your conscience; the current crop of Republican candidates is spectacular overall. We simply have a hard time imagining any candidate other than Mr. Trump actually accomplishing much in the way of turning the tide. Even the sainted Reagan only slowed government growth without reversing it.
And if you're fatalistic, if you're persuaded that America is doomed regardless - then vote for Mr. Trump anyway. At least that way we'll all be entertained on our trip down the crapper.