Friday, January 31, 2025
Science Is Not Dogma
"Settled science" is the product of scientism, which is yet another substitute for religion for the atheists. Dressing up your beliefs, your hunches, your identity as science is a belief structure. Certain scientists become your high priests, and you celebrate your "rationalism" when in fact you are living in a closed bubble of firmly held opinions.
Well Done, "Joe!"
There is much that one could say about this, starting with the fact that the ACLU—a worthless left-wing organization—gave the Biden White House a list of 2,500 “non-violent drug offenders” for Biden (or whoever) to pardon.
This is pretty revealing—a left-wing White House outsourcing the president’s constitutional pardon power to a left-wing policy organization. Sure, Joe Biden is senile. But was there ever any serious possibility that—forget about Joe—his staff would take the trouble to look into the ACLU’s list and verify that the people on it met the Left’s low bar for clemency? No. The ACLU provided the list, and Joe, probably not knowing where he was or what day it was, signed the document.
One wonders, too, about the role of the ACLU. Did the ACLU know about Peeler’s history as a killer? They may have. Peeler was sentenced to 25 years for the murders—not nearly long enough—but it was OK, since he was also sentenced to 35 years on the federal drug dealing charges, which would follow after the state incarceration. So the ACLU may well have thought that, as to the current sentence that would have kept the murderer in prison for another 35 years, Peeler was a “non-violent drug offender.”
This is the corrupt world, not just of the Biden administration, but of liberalism in general.
Because They're Evil
But I will make the same point I made here. These arrests could and should have been made long ago. Officials in the Biden administration didn’t round up these Venezuelan gangsters because they didn’t want to.Also, from David Strom:
Why didn’t they? It seems inexplicable. The Biden administration preferred to give a vicious Venezuelan prison gang free rein to terrorize Americans, deal drugs, and break pretty much every law. This was a conscious choice. On what theory was it a good idea? Diversity is our strength?
Occam’s Razor, in its broader version, suggests that the simplest and most straightforward explanation is probably correct: Biden and his minions hate America, and they were using Venezuelan gangs, among many other tools, to damage our country.
But one thing stands out to me as ICE sweeps up pedos, rapists, and other well-vetted model citizens: they are apprehending hundreds every day with the efficiency of an atomic clock ticking off milliseconds.
As the leftists whine about invading schools (not happening) and mamacitas being terrorized by Tom Homan chasing them with cattle prods (not happening), the real story is that ICE and law enforcement knew all along where so many of these bad hombres were.
Mayorkas, NGOs and churches, and local government officials were actively protecting the worst of the worst just because they preferred helping illegal aliens to protecting Americans.
Think about that and let it sink in: ICE isn't grabbing up these guys in large-scale dragnets, sorting the wheat from the chaff. They are making targeted raids on specific, known bad guys, and yet the people weeping and whining claim the mantle of decency and compassion.
Multiculturalism Is Awful
But beyond the legal arguments there is a pressing moral argument about citizenship and nationhood that lies at the heart of our current debates about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship. The moral argument engages a different and arguably more important set of questions. What is an American? Who is America for? What is the purpose of immigration? What do immigrants or would-be immigrants owe to the native-born population?
For a long time, conservatives didn’t want to talk about these things because doing so risked being labeled a xenophobe or a racist. It was easier to take refuge in platitudes about how we should crack down on illegal immigration but expand legal immigration, as if we were all agreed that mass immigration was a net positive, we just need to make sure it’s orderly. It was easier to affirm the conventional wisdom that America was a “propositional nation,” an idea, and that anyone could be an American if they adopted our idea.
This was a mistake, and not just because it’s a lie. This way of thinking and speaking prevented us from getting beyond the platitudes and coming to terms with some hard truths, like the fact that America is not in fact a merely propositional country. Contrary to what has been drilled into most of us since grade school, not everyone can really become an American. Being an American means more than simply assenting to live by our laws and paying taxes, because America is more than an idea. (As others have noted, if America is just an idea we can write it down and send it overseas, and foreigners need not come here at all.)
Simply put, America is a nation. We have a common language and a shared history. We have a certain way of life and customs. We have a distinctly American identity. Our system of government is founded explicitly on Christian claims about God and man. For most of our history, Christian morality has been the basis of our civic life. We are bound together by family ties, by our connections to the land, by shared experience, by what Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address called the “mystic chords of memory.”
Every foreigner who comes here understands what this means as it applies to their own homeland. It has been a grave error that we have insisted for so long that none of it applies to us. Making a case against birthright citizenship will mean making a case against the pernicious ideology of multiculturalism, which we have been taught makes us strong but in reality makes us weaker and poorer.
It will also mean asserting that it’s not actually the case that someone whose parents emigrated to America from a foreign country, and whose family has only been here a single generation, is “just as American” as someone who traces their ancestry to the American Revolution. It will mean admitting that America would be much better off not only with zero illegal immigration but with only a very low level of legal immigration, which would help preserve our cultural and community cohesion, and encourage the complete assimilation of all newcomers.
Via John Hinderaker.
DEI Vocab
But here’s the thing for the identitarians scrambling to find new euphemisms: It won’t work. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” are the holy trinity of this racket—their “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” This is literally true: like land acknowledgements, the invocations of DEI sound like an academic version of the Nicene Creed. Have you ever noticed that virtually every DEI proclamation sounds exactly the same? (In fact, Vanderbilt University’s DEI office got caught a few years ago using AI to compose some DEI messages.)
The point is: the DEI racket depends on a common vocabulary of cliches. If they have to modulate their language, the way Star Trek ships modulate their shields against enemy particle beams, the identitarians won’t know what to say. It is just like the scrambling of the languages at the Tower of Babel. They will need endless translations for everyone to understand that they are the same old comrades hating on white people. If you think the identitarian racket is absurd now, it will be even more comical when they have to speak in ever more esoteric and ridiculous coded language. The whole DEI racket was Orwellian already; now it will be beyond even Orwell’s imagination.
The Sense of Entitlement Is Off the Charts
Go back to that quote from above: "In interviews, many of the women said that citizenship would guarantee their children access to health care and other vital benefits during their childhood..." Exactly. I understand why these women want this for their children. I also understand that the way they get it is by making the people legally here pay for it.
Diabolical Nature
You are seeing here the core demographic that supported the Biden administration: vicious criminals, illegal aliens (often the same people) and those who think it is a good idea to harbor such people because they hate America.
What is striking about these apprehensions is that the government knew who these people are, what their criminal records are, and where they would be found. Under Trump, they were under arrest within 72 hours. Under Biden—or whoever was running the “Biden administration”—they were deliberately left alone, to terrorize American citizens. We have had bad administrations before, but have we ever seen anything to match the diabolical nature of the “Biden administration”?
This is not just some policy difference.
Add-Ons
If you can’t keep electricity flowing, people will die. Which means that every country has to assure itself of access to dispatchable (i.e., reliable) power sufficient to meet minimum needs. Wind and solar can never fit that description, and therefore will always be expensive and essentially irrelevant add-ons.
Energy Race
Scott Bessent:
Senator Wyden, just to frame this for everyone in the room, China will build 100 new coal plants this year. There is not a clean energy race. There is an energy race. China will build ten nuclear plants this year. That is not solar. I am in favor of more nuclear plants, and I would note that the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) as scored by the CBO is wildly out of control in terms of spending on the upside.
Via Steven Hayward.
This Idiotic Pro-Illegal Immigration Argument Again
A lot of my libertarian friends, especially at the currently drifting but once-great Cato Institute, like to defend their clueless open-borders disposition by pointing to statistics that purport to demonstrate that illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans. Even if you assume the crime statistics are complete and accurate these days (and usually it is libertarians who express doubt that our law enforcement bureaucracy reports accurately), it misses two points obvious to a first-grader, but not apparently to the pre-school mentality of some libertarians: if we actually controlled our borders, the crime rate from illegal immigrants would be near-zero, whatever the actual prevalence. (Just ask Laken Riley, who would be alive right now if we did have serious border control.) But second, the true illegal immigrant crime rate is 100%; it’s indicated in the title itself. Duh.
