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is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.”
“Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants,” economist Paul Krugman wrote that year in the paper. “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, Hillary Clinton voted in support of a fence on the Mexican border. So did Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and twenty-three other Senate Democrats.
Instead, the 2004 Democratic platform called for an amnesty for illegal immigrants and a path to citizenship. Vows to protect the border focused only on keeping out terrorists, drugs, and weapons, not on illegal immigrants themselves.
The change was purely a product of political calculation. Democrats understood that the overwhelming majority of immigrant voters would vote Democrat. Surveys showed they were right.
The people making immigration policy tend not to be affected by it. Los Angeles County, for example, is now overwhelmingly Hispanic. Upper-income Malibu, meanwhile, is still 87 percent white. New York is a diverse city, but former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s zip code isn’t. His neighborhood is 82 percent white, and less than 5 percent Hispanic. It’s still 1985 where Bloomberg lives, and will likely always be.
In 2004, the New York Times quoted a Southern Poverty Law Center official who suggested that anyone who opposed the Sierra Club’s new support for open borders was in league with racists and white nationalists. Morris, who is black, was shocked by the slur. “To have this considered
By redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. That’s helpful for them, since for the affluent, immigration has few costs and many upsides. Low-skilled immigrants don’t compete in upscale job markets. Not many recent arrivals from El Salvador are becoming lawyers or green energy lobbyists. An awful lot of them are becoming housekeepers. Mass immigration makes household help affordable. That’s one of the main reasons elites support it.
For Americans in the top 20 percent of income distribution, mass immigration is one of the best things that ever happened—cheap help, obedient employees, more interesting restaurants, and all without guilt. There’s no downside, at least none that you personally experience.
For perspective, Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of France, crowned himself emperor, defeated four European coalitions against him, invaded Russia, lost, was defeated and exiled, returned, and was defeated and exiled a second time, all in less time than the United States has spent trying to turn Afghanistan into a stable country.
Barack Obama—who campaigned for president on the promise to withdraw from Iraq—not only bombed the country, the fourth American president in a row to do so, but by the end of his term had recommitted troops on the ground.
On Election Day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of U.S. politics, American troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. The Pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. Barack Obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them.
The signature characteristic of America’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. No matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it. They certainly never blame themselves. Part of the reason for this is that most of them live in Washington.
The District of Columbia and its surrounding suburbs are now the wealthiest metro region in the country.
Schenck was one of thousands of Americans prosecuted by the Wilson administration for disagreeing with its policies. Remarkably, this did not seem to strike most Americans as strange or unconstitutional.
American Civil Liberties Union was formed in 1920 in part as a reaction to his case and others like it. For decades after its founding, the ACLU took an absolutist position on the First Amendment: ACLU lawyers defended free speech in all cases, and with particular vigor when that speech was unpopular or outright despised. It sometimes seemed like there wasn’t a villain or miscreant the ACLU wasn’t eager to represent. Klansmen, communists, anti-Semites, pornographers—all got free legal counsel when the ACLU determined their right to speak was under attack. When a Denver theater owner was
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did. The justices concluded that government could not limit expression except in cases
where speech “is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” and is likely to produce such action.
students rioted. Protesters lit fires, smashed windows, and threw rocks, committing at least one hundred thousand dollars in property damage. Six people were injured, including a woman who had come to see Yiannopoulos speak. She
Any deviation from orthodoxy was considered grounds for silencing.
The justification for attacks like this, ironically, was that certain ideas are so dangerous, they constitute violence and must therefore be squelched by force. Punching a speaker you disagree with isn’t assault; it’s self-defense. To many student activists, sticks and stones may break bones, but words can be lethal, and require a violent first strike.
When you sincerely believe you possess the truth, all disagreement looks like apostasy. For the greater good, it must be silenced. It’s distressing when academics take this view. It’s terrifying when prosecutors do.
But nowhere is speech more threatened than in Silicon Valley. In the spring of 2014, Brendan Eich became CEO of Mozilla Firefox, a company he helped found. Ten days later, he was forced to resign. Bloggers had discovered that six years earlier, Eich had donated money to Proposition 8, a referendum that banned gay marriage in California. Proposition 8 had passed by a wide margin. Fully 70 percent of California’s black population supported it. The year it became law, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama publicly opposed gay marriage. In 2008, Eich’s position was hardly a fringe view.
“At Google,” wrote Damore, “we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices.”
In perhaps the most Orwellian statement written since Orwell himself finished 1984, Google explained the decision this way: “Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions.”
Government regulates all sorts of speech in the private sector. Employers can’t fire workers for expressing their religious views, for example. In some states, such as California and New York, that protection extends to political beliefs. Whether Damore’s firing was constitutional awaits clarification from the courts.
Among intellectuals, the answer used to be obvious and widely agreed upon: the goal is a free society. You knew what that meant because all free societies share the same features: They tolerate dissent. They prize reason and encourage civility. They discourage witch hunts and groupthink. They try to ensure that people aren’t punished for saying what they think. They recognize that truth is always a defense.
For generations, journalists believed their job was to hold the powerful accountable. This very much included unelected bureaucrats committing unseen sins in the hidden recesses of the federal government.
What would happen if large numbers of Americans actually understood the federal tax code? All sorts of questions might arise. Why do we tax capital at half the rate of labor? That might be the first one.
punished. Is he twice as necessary as you are? Does he contribute twice as much to America?
You’d understand that in a society composed of many different ethnic groups, tribalism is the greatest threat to unity and order. Of course there will always be racism, because that’s the nature of people, and you’d work to discourage it. But you would resist using the existence of racism as an excuse for your failures. You would never, for example, blame an entire racial group for the sins of its ancestors. That would serve only to embitter and divide the population. It might make your job easier in the short term. But over time it would wreck your country. The ruling class once understood
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generations, school integration was the one issue that united every right-thinking person in America. The educated class fought segregation everywhere they found it. They celebrated when the Brown v. Board of Education decision abolished “separate but equal” schools nationwide. They supported James Meredith when he integrated the University of Mississippi. They despised George Wallace and other political leaders who fought to keep black and white students apart.
Segregation divided people on the basis of things they couldn’t control. It suggested that a person’s race, an entirely immutable characteristic, was the most important thing about him, and should determine how he was treated by others. Segregation was dehumanizing. It reduced the individual to a faceless member of a group.
Michael said she finally concluded “that I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically.”
In a single year, 2017, news organizations ran stories about how the following objects, icons, trends, or consumer products were effectively racist: Credit scores Ice cream truck songs Car insurance Halloween costumes Milk Disney movies Dr. Seuss books The antisegregation novel To Kill a Mockingbird Tanning Mathematics Makeup Science Shakespeare English grammar Facial recognition technology SAT test Bitcoin Wendy’s
Pornography Military camouflage The nuclear family The song “Jingle Bells” Lucky Charms cereal Pumpkin spice latte Lacrosse Star Wars Legalized marijuana Being on time Coca-Cola White babies The Oscars Wal-Mart Background checks Art history Founding Fathers McDonald’s The Bible Craft beer
This is collective race guilt. Emphasizing it eases the conscience of a certain sort of white elite. It’s cathartic. It feels like an exercise in virtue, a small way to even the score. Powerful white elites secretly love to hear they’re naughty. That’s why Ta-Nehisi Coates is their favorite intellectual.
Admit you’re bad, Coates says. Gladly, they reply. Nothing changes except how elites feel about themselves. Coates is their confessor. His books are their penance.
“Your beliefs threaten to alienate your son from his country and afflict him with a sense of moral inefficacy and impotence,” Hill added. “This could squash his chance of being an engine of change in the course of history.”
“Your accusations have made for interesting dinner talk among the cognoscenti and literati in liberal bourgeois enclaves, where some believe moral masochism and symbolic self-flagellation are signs of virtue,” he wrote.
interracialism and popular social struggle have been central to improving the civic and material circumstances of African Americans.”
“eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice.”
Listening to Obama, it was easy to forget that the killer was a black man, and that the cops he murdered had been protecting a Black Lives Matter protest.
you want to know what people really care about, take a look at where they live, especially if they could live anywhere.
But it does make for effective electoral politics, and that’s the point. There’s no faster way to mobilize voters than to stoke their racial fears, while promising to deliver for their particular tribe. It’s irresistible. At the moment, the coalition of identity groups has held together because it is united in single purpose against white male power. But rapid demographic change makes this unsustainable. When the traditional scapegoat becomes insufficient, various factions will turn on one another. Chaos will ensue.
“There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” Obama said to the cheering stadium. “We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” Before the decade was out, race baiter Al Sharpton would be a regular in the White House. Obama invited Sharpton more than seventy times to seek his advice on domestic policy.
They’ve discovered a lot of interesting things, but maybe the most striking is this: women have become dramatically less happy over the past forty years.
“Intersectional feminism does not include a pro-life agenda,” explained writer Roxane Gay. “That’s not how it works! The right to choose is a fundamental part of feminism.”
But this is missing the point entirely. Gore and DiCaprio and Hillary Clinton and the rest feel fine about flying on private planes not because they’re hypocrites, but because they’re entirely sincere. They care deeply about carbon emissions, much more deeply than you do. Caring deeply is the only measure that matters. That’s why their consciences remain untroubled, no matter how many times they violate the standards they demand of others.
researchers re-created one hundred peer-reviewed psychology studies in the field’s three most prestigious journals to see whether their results could be replicated. The findings were grim: 65 percent of studies failed to replicate. Of those that did, many had far less conclusive results when they were re-created.
pushed deeper. How did the hard sciences hold up to scrutiny? Not well. Pharmaceutical companies now assume that about half of all academic biomedical research is false. Wilson cites one experiment in which scientists at the drug company Bayer attempted to replicate sixty-seven drug discovery studies that had appeared in top journals like Science and Nature. Bayer’s scientists were unable to replicate the published results three-quarters of the time.
