Month: November 2016

Oh, So Now You’re A Liberal? Part 2 – Maajid Nawaz Calls Out The Illiberal British Left

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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Maajid Nawaz warns about the rise of the “Control Left”, an authoritarian tendency which has left liberalism and liberal values far behind

Recently, this blog took to task those on the authoritarian Left who have reacted to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump by falsely draping themselves in the clothes of liberalism and hysterically mourning an idealised liberal past which they did as much as anybody else to knife in the back.

In that piece, I made the point that people who only weeks ago could be found arguing for greater censorship, the expansion of “hate crime” legislation, trigger warnings, safe spaces, higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco, national ID cards, longer pre-trial detention periods and even more intrusive government surveillance have absolutely no business calling themselves “liberal”.

Though the authoritarian Right are by no means innocent in this regard, it must be acknowledged that most of the recent assaults on liberty and liberalism have come from the Left, in America as well as Britain.

Picking up on this thread, Maajid Nawaz hits the nail on the head on his LBC talk radio show yesterday:

I suspect that the most vocal elements of the Left – and I don’t mean every single person who sympathises with left-wing views, let me make that very clear, I’m talking about the organised left, the most vocal elements of our Left, and the Left in the form of Momentum who have taken over the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn – my view is that that Left, today’s Left, today’s active, organised Left is no longer liberal.

What do I mean by that? Well let’s look at a few things that I don’t consider to be liberal. Let’s look at censorship, let’s look at being “post-factual”, let’s look at violence being seen as an option, let’s look at prioritising group identity over individual rights. None of these four traits are liberal.

Censorship is not liberal, so when today’s organised Left begins organising in campuses and across colleges across the nation, across the world, and says things like “you cannot say that here, this is a safe space, we will exclude you from speaking because your views offend us”, when they choose to take offence, when they become more sensitive, and so sensitive in fact that they want to shut debate down simply because they don’t like what somebody is saying, that’s not a liberal approach. A liberal will always prioritise free speech over offence.

What about being post-factual? Well I remember – and I hope many of you remember – at the beginning of this year, the way in which mass sex attacks were reported in the German city of Cologne. And what was known then as the liberal press actively conspired to cover up that news. Facts were known and they were not reported because they didn’t want to be accused of being racist. The German state television station had to come out and openly apologise, days later, when they realised that this story was not one that they could cover up. So being post-factual is also not being liberal.

What about considering violence as an option? When you have the Shadow Chancellor of the UK Labour Party, John McDonnell, being caught on video saying that it’s okay to riot, it’s okay to destroy property and to ruin people’s lives and their private property, that’s not liberal. That may be anarchist, it may be revolutionary hard-left socialist, as John McTernan suggested, but it isn’t liberal.

When people are prioritising group identity over individual rights, saying things like “kill all white men”, saying things like “black people can’t be racist because racism is about power and only white men have power” – Diane Abbott says that. Well I’m sorry Diane Abbott MP, go and walk into any council estate and speak to a white working class lad and try and have a rational, reasonable conversation with that young white working class lad and tell him that he has more power than you, and that’s why you can’t be racist towards him. Complete and utter rubbish. But when group identity is prioritised over individual rights in that way, when leftist activists think it’s okay to say “kill all white men” and that that’s somehow an empowering statement, when they think it’s okay to be racist to all white people as a group, and think somehow that’s what it means to be progressive, erasing the individual, stereotyping entire groups, that is not liberal.

So I have taken the view that this behaviour – censorship on the organised Left, post-factual behaviour, violence being seen as an option and prioritising group identity over individual rights, that isn’t liberal. And like the alt-right has emerged, we’ve now got this new group – it’s called the Control Left. They want to control our lives, control what we think, control how we behave, control how we even feel. And control what we think. That is not liberal. That is the Control Left.

So my message to you, Control Left, is stop telling us you are liberal. My message to the press: stop describing them as the liberal Left, they are no longer liberal. Call them for what they are – Control Left.

A devastating excoriation of the modern Left. And while I’m not sure that Nawaz’s preferred phrase “the Control Left” will catch on, it does describe quite plainly their new strategy of bringing about change not through persuasion but by coercion and force.

Maajid Nawaz has cause to be particularly aware of the new illiberalism gripping the Left, having recently been singled out by the fabled Southern Poverty Law Center in America for supposedly promoting anti-Islamic extremism, a ludicrous accusation given that Nawaz is himself a Muslim. (Nawaz’s real sin was to call for moderate Islam to take more responsibility for its violent, fundamentalist offshoots at a time when much of the Left is furiously pretending that “there is nothing Islamic about ISIS”).

We now need many more people to summon the courage and willingness to tell truth to power exhibited by Maajid Nawaz. It’s all very well having dyed-in-the-wool conservative, libertarian or conservatarian journalists and bloggers such as myself ranting on about the many ways that the modern Left has left liberalism behind. But we can only carry the message so far – since it is we who are most often the targets of this censorship and identity politics, it is too easy for the Control Left to accuse us of acting in our own self-interest rather than the national interest.

Therefore it is vital that more left-wing liberals like Maajid Nawaz stand up and call out these authoritarian tendencies, declaring “not in my name” to the censorship, bullying and control freakery of the modern Left. This is in their interest as much as anyone else’s – with the election of Donald Trump in America, we have seen that peddling a constant diet of authoritarian identity politics eventually provokes a similar identity politics backlash among those groups not marked out for special favour by the Left.

So for the country’s sake as much as their own, those on the Left must learn to renounce authoritarianism and seek to achieve their political agenda through persuasion rather than coercion. To continue on their present course is to plant the seeds of their own destruction, as well as ours.

 

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Triggered By Trump, Celebrity SJWs Go Deeper Into The Bubble

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Besides my weekly newsletter from hilarious SJW site Everyday Feminism, the thing which brings me most pleasure in American political life at the moment is reading twice-weekly dispatch from Lenny, Lena Dunham’s online collaboration with Jenni Konner which can best be described as “social justice for the 0.1 percent”.

Here you can find an surefire antidote to whatever scraps of self-awareness and contrition may be emerging from other, more humble parts of the American Left. Here, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were beyond reproach at all times, and it was America (specifically those ignorant, self-hating white, working class women who had the temerity to vote for Donald Trump) who let Hillary down, not vice versa.

The first thing you need to understand: commanded by their cult of identity politics, they were really deeply invested in Hillary Clinton as a person. As Lenny contributor Virginia Heffernan put it:

When people told me they hated Hillary Clinton or (far worse) that they were “not fans,” I wish I had said in no uncertain terms: “I love Hillary Clinton. I am in awe of her. I am set free by her. She will be the finest world leader our galaxy has ever seen.”

I want to reverse the usual schedule of things, then. We don’t have to wait until she dies to act. Hillary Clinton’s name belongs on ships, and airports, and tattoos. She deserves straight-up hagiographies and a sold-out Broadway show called RODHAM. Yes, this cultural canonization is going to come after the chronic, constant, nonstop “On the other hand” sexist hedging around her legacy. But such is the courage of Hillary Clinton and her supporters; we reverse patriarchal orders. Maybe she is more than a president. Maybe she is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself. The presidency is too small for her. She belongs to a much more elite class of Americans, the more-than-presidents. Neil Armstrong, Martin Luther King Jr., Alexander Fucking Hamilton.

Hillary Clinton did everything right in this campaign, and she won more votes than her opponent did. She won. She cannot be faulted, criticized, or analyzed for even one more second. Instead, she will be decorated as an epochal heroine far too extraordinary to be contained by the mere White House.

Yes, maybe Hillary Clinton is light itself. Anyway, you get the idea.

Strangely, nearly to the last person, each writers seems to have been personally committed not to the Democratic Party or left-wing ideals, but to Hillary Clinton herself, as Meena Harris admits:

I joined the Pantsuit Nation Facebook group early on, when its simple but brilliant purpose was to get as many women as possible to wear a pantsuit on Election Day in support of Hillary Clinton. In the weeks preceding the election, Pantsuit Nation became more than a modest call for a show of solidarity on a single day — it became a vibrant and uplifting community of millions of women and allies demonstrating their commitment to Hillary. It truly was a “safe space,” something that seems increasingly rare on the Internet. It affirmed the hope, love, kindness, and support we all are capable of when we come together to fight for something we believe in. It elevated the values embodied in Hillary’s campaign and proved that, indeed, we are stronger together.

My emphasis in bold.

Perhaps this is why it is so hard for the Lennyists to come to terms with Donald Trump’s victory. The rest of America, not inducted into the Clinton personality cult, didn’t realise that they were supposed to base their vote on the blinkered hero-worship of a flawed candidate.

And so while some on the American Left are busy working their way through the five stages of grief and trying to accept that openly despising half the country is not a good route to electoral success, the people at Lenny are doing the opposite – surrounding themselves with likeminded people (even more than usual, if that were possible) and actively seeking out situations and social settings which in no way challenge their existing assumptions and beliefs.

As editor-in-chief Jessica Grose confesses:

It’s been two weeks now. I am falling asleep decently well, but I wake up around three each morning with a start, as if the specter of Trump is chasing me in my subconscious. Then I have trouble falling back asleep after I remember that yes, he really is our president-elect. While we must continue to stay on guard, to stay active, to stay angry, I wanted to write about the times I have felt peace: when I have been in the company of raucous women.

One was a meeting of fellow moms from my daughter’s preschool. We met to discuss a book at a bar, but we ended up talking about our dashed presidential dreams, how to teach our sons and daughters about consent, and who had done (or would do) ayahuasca (answer: would never; am not interested in hallucinating while having explosive diarrhea).

The other was at a shiva for the father of a dear friend. Five women — some of whom had never met before — sat around a living room in Queens, admired foxy photographs of the deceased from his Speedo-wearing youth, revealed our salaries to each other, and argued over whether a sincere belief in chemtrails was a relationship deal-breaker (answer: it depends).

What these meetings had in common was that I felt fully myself and utterly accepted in each grouping. Finding your people, and your solace, in moments of stress and strife is something we’re emphasizing in this week’s issue.

Yes. Reacting to Donald Trump’s election victory by retreating further into the bubble, seeking the company of fellow power moms who sit around discussing the latest fashionable hallucinatory weekend escape and giving their young sons “consent lessons” so that they are no longer tempted to embark on a raping spree across Manhattan, as they would otherwise doubtless be.

These people do not have the slightest interest in learning about the America they actually inhabit, and so when faced with a difficult outcome they simply refuse to accept it, cocooning themselves off with other like-minded people. As private citizens, that might be okay (if still an immature and fragility-creating way for adults to behave). But as supposed writers and journalists, it is an unforgivable dereliction of duty.

Into the bubble. Deeper and deeper…

Meanwhile back in the real world, president-elect Trump continues to wage war on the media and pick his cabinet.

 

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Time To Retire The Office Of First Lady?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

If American meritocracy and egalitarianism is to mean anything (and admittedly it often doesn’t mean much at all, especially considering the key protagonists in the presidential election we have just witnessed) then is it finally time to abolish the familiar but not-strictly-necessary official role for the spouse of the president?

Jack Shafer makes an undeniably persuasive argument in Politico for abolishing official roles or any expectation of service for first ladies (or future first gentlemen) altogether:

Melania Trump has done the nation a great service by deciding to maintain Trump Tower as her full-time residence and not to move to the White House any time soon. But her resistance shouldn’t stop there. Now is as good a time as any to eliminate the ceremonial office of the “first lady,” that abhorrent honorific we apply to the president’s wife, and encourage the first spouse to live like an ordinary citizen. All we need is for Melania to agree.

Yes, defund the ridiculously large staff that currently earns upward of $1.5 million a year serving Michelle Obama; abolish the federally funded bully pulpit from which the presidential spouses have historically advocated for healthy eating, literacy, child welfare, anti-drug programs, mental health issues and beautification of highways. The president’s spouse isn’t a specimen of American royalty. By giving her a federal budget and nonstop press coverage, we endorse a pernicious kind of neo-nepotism that says, pay special attention to the person not because she’s earned it or is inherently worthy of our notice but because of who she’s related to by marriage.

The hairstyles, fashion choices, vacation destinations and pet projects of the president’s spouse are newsworthy only to the mentally vacant. Other democracies, such as the United Kingdom, bestow no such honors upon the spouses of their leaders and are better for it. To use an au courant phrase, the office of the first spouse is a swamp in need of draining. Won’t somebody please dispatch a dredger to the East Wing?

The comparison made by Shafer between the modern conception of the role of First Spouse and the often more significant work carried out by other first ladies in history, particularly Eleanor Roosevelt, is quite stark:

Some contemporary presidential spouses have led active, involved political lives, providing more than a sounding board [..] Eleanor Roosevelt published books, magazine articles and newspapers advocating positions that routinely outwinged her husband, especially on civil rights. She testified before Congress. She had a regular radio program. She gave regular news conferences. She toured the country in support of migrant workers.

[..] But does any of this work require a staff of 15 or more? The spouses of senators and corporate chiefs provide advice and speechwriting help for their husbands and we don’t give them a budget or lavish them with attention. What’s so special about the first spouse that we should give them $1.5 million in mad money to serve as hostess and confidante, White House remodeling consultant, supervisor of china?

Even when it comes to the serious political work, Roosevelt did what she did with a staff of two and probably could have done without. If the first spouses’ causes are so admirable, the president should propose them and get the government to fund them via official channels instead of building a publicity machine for his spouse to advance them.

It is a compelling argument, one which sets the “conserv” and “-atarian” sides of my brain rather at war with one another. On one hand, if one were building the American democracy from scratch, it is hard to imagine that we would create role as wasteful and often patronising as that of the Office of the First Lady.

As Shafer rightly points out in his piece, most other advanced democracies do not feel the need to put the head of state or head of government’s spouse on a pedestal. While Britain, with our monarchy, may be in no position to give lectures on this particular subject, it is notable that there has never really been great public or institutional demand for the spouse of the prime minister to become some kind of supplementary Mother to the Nation.

And while the traditional, dismal obsession with what prime ministerial spouses choose to wear has not yet died away, the fact that Britain now has her second woman prime minister (and male consort) in 10 Downing Street will hopefully start to undermine the traditional obsession with the shoes and dresses worn by female politicians.

In fact, a deadpan article describing Philip May’s sartorial choices in the same breathless manner that the media cover women in politics shows – as well as making an excellent point about hypocrisy and sexism – just how foolish the idea of expecting somebody connected to an elected leader by accident of marriage should also be expected to play a leading role in the life of the nation.

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From the Metro:

Stepping into the limelight as First Man, Philip May showcased a sexy navy suit with a flourish of pinstripe.

A single fastened button at the waist helped show off his fantastic figure and a pale blue tie brought out the colour of his eyes.

Round glasses perched on his nose accentuated his amazing bone structure – no doubt one of the assets he used to help him to bag his wife.

The man behind the UK’s most powerful woman looked on fondly as she addressed the UK for the first time as leader.

Oh, and let’s not forget those shoes…

Philip elongated his pins with a pair of black brogues as he accompanied his wife to step over the threshold of their new home – 10 Downing Street.

In this context and these modern times, expecting First Ladies to take on a feel-good, universally popular softball social cause while tarting up the White House at taxpayer expense seems like the anachronism that it is. Yet there is some merit to the tradition, too. And numerous First Ladies have gone on to leave a lasting positive mark on America which otherwise may have been missed. One thinks of Jacqueline Kennedy’s style, Lady Bird Johnson‘s focus on national beautification or Betty Ford and her work for breast cancer awareness, substance abuse treatment and the arts.

If Melania Trump doesn’t want to come to Washington D.C. right away, so be it. As the National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson notes, reminding Washingtonians that they are not the centre of the universe is not necessarily a bad thing.

But I imagine that the institutional gravity of the White House will eventually pull Melania into some kind of role, which may be no bad thing. Melania Trump becomes a first-generation immigrant First Lady at a time when many people (rightly or wrongly) are concerned about the impact of a Trump presidency on immigration. With a bit of imagination, that fact could be used to quite a positive, calming effect.

 

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Bottom Image: Marc Nozell, Wikimedia Commons

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Television News Royalty Receive A Dressing-Down From Donald Trump

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Apparently the first post-election meeting between president-elect Donald Trump and the great and the good of America’s television news media did not go entirely smoothly.

The New York Post reports:

Donald Trump scolded media big shots during an off-the-record Trump Tower sitdown on Monday, sources told The Post.

“It was like a f–ing firing squad,” one source said of the encounter.

“Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ ” the source said.

“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down,” the source added.

A second source confirmed the fireworks.

“The meeting took place in a big board room and there were about 30 or 40 people, including the big news anchors from all the networks,” the other source said.

“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said.

“Trump didn’t say [NBC reporter] Katy Tur by name, but talked about an NBC female correspondent who got it wrong, then he referred to a horrible network correspondent who cried when Hillary lost who hosted a debate – which was Martha Raddatz who was also in the room.”

The stunned reporters tried to get a word in edgewise to discuss access to a Trump Administration.

Wait, and we’re supposed to feel sorry for them?

The pampered Washington television news aristocracy deserve absolutely no sympathy, and while I would much rather they received their dressing down from somebody more worthy of dispensing it than Donald Trump, I can only be glad that the shining ones from CNN and MSNBC were hauled over the coals and made to feel a little bad by somebody.

It was their greed, incompetence, fawning deference to power/celebrity and desperate search for ratings that brought us president-elect Trump in the first place. If CBS’s Les Moonves hadn’t slobbered at the thought of the ratings his network could get just from playing endless rambling footage from Trump rallies during the Republican primaries, if CNN hadn’t been so obsessed with their technical gizmos and determined to report on the presidential debates as though they were heavyweight boxing matches, if MSNBC wasn’t so blatantly in the pocket of the Clinton campaign, then we might not be in this position right now. But they did, and so here we are.

And consequently, Jeff Zucker, Wolf Blitzer, Martha Raddatz, George Stephanopoulos, everyone at CNN and MSNBC and most of the people at FOX (save Chris Wallace, who anchored by far the best of the three presidential debates) fully deserved to receive the hairdryer treatment from somebody (as in being yelled at and belittled, not having their ridiculous TV news hairdos volumized even further).

We need a media that will stand up to power and celebrity and ask difficult questions rather than allowing candidates to trot out rehearsed soundbites, not a bunch of slavish court reporters who instantly switched from curtseying around House Clinton to making an unseemly pilgrimage to Trump Tower to ingratiate themselves with their new overlord.

Like many people, I am gravely concerned about Donald Trump’s attitude toward the media (both in terms of press freedom and the access which his administration is willing to give journalists), but one still has to smile at the likes of Wolf Blitzer being sent packing from Trump Tower with a flea in their ear.

Apparently it is the turn of the print media tomorrow. As a group, they didn’t fall asleep on the job quite as badly as the television guys, but many of them deserve a roasting too. This should be fun to watch.

 

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The Mainstream Media Will Never Rebuild Public Trust So Long As It Covers Immigration With Such Overt Bias

Samuel Hooper16 Comments

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If the mainstream media really wants to rebuild public trust in their own reporting and editorial content, they should halt their their insidious campaigning for open borders and hysterical scaremongering about proper border controls and finally cover the immigration debate with impartiality and objectivity

For those who still do not quite understand why so many people are no longer willing to be spoon-fed “facts” and opinions from the mainstream media and their patrons within the establishment, I can do no better than give you this case study from the Sacramento Bee, and that newspaper’s editorial about president-elect Donald Trump’s likely policies on illegal immigration.

From the Editorial Board’s article:

When President-elect Donald Trump vowed at times during his campaign to expel 11 million undocumented immigrants upon taking office, Americans wondered whether he was just opening a negotiation or seriously telling the foreign-born that they should be very afraid.

The answer appears to be some of both. In his post-election interview with “60 Minutes,” Trump lowered his number, saying his administration would focus, at least initially, on “people that are criminal and have criminal records – gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million.”

“We are getting them out of the country,” he said, “or we are going to incarcerate.”

No one wants gang members and drug dealers to be out committing crimes, with or without papers. But beyond that, Team Trump has offered little to reassure this nation of immigrants.

My emphasis in bold.

The Sacramento Bee is utterly unable (or more likely unwilling) to distinguish between illegal immigrants – people who either entered the United States without permission or else deliberately overstayed their short term residencies – and “the foreign-born” in general.

To aid in that deliberate blurring of the boundaries, the word “undocumented” has been brought in to replace “illegal” as an attempt to bridge the gulf between people who join the back of the queue and emigrate to the United States through the lawful channels and those who (for whatever reason) choose to circumvent the process and make a mockery of those laws and the people who follow them.

(Indeed, elsewhere in the media there are people like despicable propagandist Jorge Rivas who ludicrously try to suggest that “undocumented” is somehow the neutral term while the more accurate “illegal” carries negative connotations that we should somehow swat away and ignore in the name of social justice).

But why should the “foreign-born” as a generic group be afraid of Donald Trump, as the Sacramento Bee suggests? Why should somebody who married a US citizen and completed the proper paperwork to become a legal resident or citizen of the United States fear? Why should somebody whose firm transferred them to the United States for a certain period of time, in compliance with the various visa requirements? Why should future US citizens such as myself – married to an American, with the ultimate intention of settling back in the United States – be concerned that Donald Trump intends to thwart our plans?

The answer, of course, is that none of these groups have any reason to fear the presidency of Donald Trump. The only people who may be immediately impacted by the new administration’s immigration policies will be those currently residing in the United States illegally. But the Sacramento Bee – together with nearly all of the mainstream print and television news media – are determined to suggest otherwise, to imply that the Evil Donald Trump intends to purge America of anyone with dark skin or a funny surname.

The media does this first by softening the language to downplay the lawbreaking aspect of the situation, re-branding illegal immigrants as merely “undocumented immigrants” – people who have every right to remain in the United States, but whose passports, visas and other documents proving their eligibility mysteriously disappeared in a puff of smoke, rendering them sadly undocumented. And then they falsely suggest that Donald Trump’s (and much of America’s) concern about illegal immigration is about immigration in general.

Of course, Britain has experienced a very similar phenomenon, most visible during the EU referendum in Britain. Since the previous Labour government’s refusal to adopt transitory controls on immigration (or even consult the people about such a measure) when the A10 Eastern European countries joined the European Union, net migration to the United Kingdom has increased at a rate far above the previous normal baseline, outstripping the growth of housing, the upgrading of infrastructure and (sometimes) the ability of communities to socially assimilate the new arrivals. Meanwhile, the government’s approach to those immigrants from outside the EU was equally “hands-off”, asking little by way of assimilation or community contribution from those who arrived, many of whom set up parallel communities based on ethnicity or religion, openly refusing the give-and-take of the melting pot in favour of a stubborn refusal to participate in the wider society.

But for over a decade, to even question the inherent virtue of fully open borders was denounced by the hysterical Left as being xenophobic at best, and deeply racist and fascistic at worst. Even when articulate explanations were made that the issue is not a hatred of foreigners but rather the absence of democratic consent and the fact that net migration continues to outstrip our present ability to manage without adverse side-effects, still the leftists roared that the people with concerns were racists hiding behind a thin veneer of respectability.

For me, the real low point came when a Sky News presenter interviewing schoolchildren for a feature about the rise of UKIP just prior to the general election, asked a credulous boy what he would think of an MP in Westminster who “says it is a problem” for people to have Polish or Bulgarian friends (neither of UKIP’s two MPs at the time were remotely racist or had ever expressed opposition to friendship between British people and legal immigrants).

Here was a reporter for a national TV news channel so utterly unaware of his own internal biases (I’ll be kind and refrain from accusing him of deliberate malevolence) that he thought nothing of suggesting to an innocent schoolkid (and millions of viewers watching at home) that the one party seriously committed at the time to controlling immigration volumes was racist and against anybody befriending people of other nationalities.

And this remark went completely unnoticed, unpunished by Ofcom (the regulator) because it was so utterly typical of the mainstream media’s approach to immigration.

And that approach can be described as follows: All immigration, legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled, is to be encouraged to the fullest extent possible. There is no moral difference between coming to live in a (Western) country legally and doing so illegally. If anything, illegal immigrants are to be praised and put on a pedestal for their courage in flouting the law. Any attempts to limit immigration volumes in response to popular concerns are inherently racist, and are to be ignored or shouted down as forcefully as possible, while those people daring to express such views should be publicly demonised and accused of harbouring intolerant, xenophobic opinions. Private citizens demanding controls on immigration are racist. Politicians seeking to respond to public concerns about immigration are irresponsible populists seeking to stir dark and malevolent forces of bigotry.

The thing is, eventually people get sick of being told that they are mean or intolerant or racist simply for wanting to see the law properly enforced, or for the integrity of national borders to be defended. And while half the country (Britain or America) seem happy to lap up the Kool-Aid and parrot the establishment talking points that unlimited immigration is a good thing – usually those Americans who only ever see the positive sides of immigration, and whose economic position insulates them from the negative sides – the other half of the country is increasingly unwilling to let itself be cowed into silence by the moralising minority.

Americans are fully aware that they are a “nation of immigrants”, as the Sacramento Bee insufferably sees fit to remind their readers. And none of those first-generation immigrants who respected the law have the slightest thing to worry about. But the mainstream media and other open borders cheerleaders cannot admit this fact, as their only hope of achieving their open borders dream is by mobilising a political movement based on the false idea that all immigrants are under threat. This is nonsense.

Most Americans are probably willing to be reasonable about illegal immigration. They would be receptive to the argument that were they in the position of poor or desperate migrants looking for a better life for their families, they would probably be tempted to flout immigration law too. Many Americans understand that it is neither feasible nor moral to deport up to 11 million people overnight, and that to attempt to do so would be bad for the people involved, bad for an economy which relies on their labour and bad for the federal budget which would have to burden the cost of increased deportations.

In other words, a reasonable compromise around immigration – involving greater border security, the deportation of those illegal immigrants who have committed other crimes while in the United States and a path toward permanent residency (if not full citizenship) for those involved – was within reach. At least prior to the election of Donald Trump.

But no – the media and their establishment backers overreached. They did not want reasonable compromise (not, it should be noted, that the Republicans presented a tremendously friendly face for negotiating such a deal), preferring to shoot for everything they wanted (de facto open borders, legalisation of all those currently illegally living in the United States and less stringent rules for newcomers) by demonising all of those who dared to oppose that agenda.

And even now they can’t stop. Even now their maximalist position on open borders has helped to deliver Donald Trump to the White House, media outlets like the Sacramento Bee are wringing their hands that Trump intends to persecute all immigrants, and suggesting that there is no moral difference between “undocumented immigrants” and those who seek to become new Americans the legal way.

At this point the mainstream media deserve their fate. The fruits of their hysterical demonising of anybody with doubts about uncontrolled immigration are staring back at them in the form of president-elect Donald J Trump, and even now they are unable or unwilling to change the script, or to concede that perhaps not everybody with qualms about immigration harbours a seething hostility to brown people.

The media’s overt, unapologetic bias on the subject of immigration has helped to deliver Brexit to the United Kingdom and President Donald Trump to the United States – both results which they absolutely feared and detested. So given that their current strategy of overt bias is not working, why do they still refuse to compromise and play it straight with the people? Why will they not realise that openly cheering for one side while demonising the other simply doesn’t work in the age of alternative media and the independent blogosphere?

This is going to get worse before it gets better, unless the mainstream media stops mindlessly reciting the propaganda of the open borders zealots and starts reporting on immigration more objectively and less manipulatively. And right now, there is very little chance of such a miracle occurring.

 

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