Category Archives: Donald Trump

NEW COLUMN: Trump’s ‘S-ithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)

Africa, Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Race, The West

“Trump’s ‘Shithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)” is the current column, now on Townhall.com (WND.com, Storia.me, Constitution.com, etc.):

President Trump’s questioning of immigration into the United States from what he crudely called “s-ithole” countries masks a more vexing question:

What makes a country, the place or the people? Does “the country” create the man or does the man make the country?

To listen to the deformed logic of the president’s detractors, it’s the former: the “country” makes the person. No sooner does an African or Haitian immigrant wash up on American shores—thanks to random quotas and set-asides, lotteries and other government grants of privilege and protection—than the process of cultural and philosophical osmosis begins. American probity and productivity soon become his own.

As an African libertarian—an ex-South African, to be precise—I took the liberty of addressing the matter in the book “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in which a Cameroonian scholar, Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, among others, is extensively cited.

Easily one of the most controversial thinkers on the causes of underdevelopment in Africa, Etounga-Manguelle, a former adviser to the World Bank, contends that “What Africans are doing to one another defies credulity. Genocide, bloody civil wars, and rampant violent crime suggest African societies at all social levels are to some extent cannibalistic.” Why so? In part, because of the inveterate values held by so many Africans.

Etounga-Manguelle and scholars like him, cited in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot,” are responding to an “explanatory vacuum” that has opened up among honest academics.

All have been willing to admit that constructs like racism, discrimination, and colonialism no longer serve as credible causal factors in divining underdevelopment and delinquency.

None has been called upon to enlighten the greater public.

In such intellectually candid circles, the intellectual “vacuum” is being filled with reference to culture, namely the “values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society.”

The idea that culture is benign and harmonious if not disrupted is a delusion, argues anthropologist Robert B. Edgerton, who also believes that in Africa, “traditional cultural values are at the root of poverty, authoritarianism, and injustice.”

By taking account of culture, posits David Landes, a Harvard economic historian, and author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, one could have foreseen the postwar economic success of Japan and Germany. The same is true of South Korea (versus Turkey), and Indonesia (versus Nigeria).

Before the end of free speech on American campuses, Etounga-Manguelle, aforementioned, attended a symposium on “Cultural Values and Human Progress” at Harvard, circa 1999. He had come to bury and not praise the cultures of his Continent. …

READ THE REST. “Trump’s ‘Shithole’ Controversy Deconstructed (Part 1)” is the current column, now on Townhall.com.

Read the weekly column on WND.com, The Unz Review, Storia.me, Constitution.com, and other outlets. Sign up to receive my weekly column, now in its 19th year, here: http://www.ilanamercer.com/mailing-list/.  Catch up @ ilanamercer.com.

UPDATED (2/2/018): Reversion To The Neoconservative Mean On Immigration & In Commentary? Sure Looks Like It.

Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Israel, Media, Neoconservatism

Look, the establishment has never been on the same page as the people when it comes to immigration. So, to talk about a reversion to the neoconservative mean is probably slightly inaccurate. But in 2016, when Candidate Trump was in full Deplorable mode, Fox News would have been less neoconservative on immigration. However, as Fox News shifts back to its neoconservative happy place, no discussion of an immigration moratorium will percolate through the noise on that channel (other than on the great Tucker Carlson’s show).

Duly, on January 9, I believe it was, neoconservative broadcaster Tammy Bruce insisted that not sending home Salvadorians temporarily in the US prevents others—Mexicans, Filipinos, Yemenis, in Bruce’s words—from entering the United States. LEGALLY. All this unfolded on The Story with Martha MacCallum.

No doubt, President Trump has shifted the immigration debate immeasurably. But I suspect the consensus in the immigration debate will begin to shift back to the pre-Trump era, as Bruce’s imbecilic quip indicates.

Although an immigration moratorium is desperately needed, at one million individuals a year—legal immigration will continue to be touted as the American Way. The ONLY way. The objection being to illegal immigration only, and not to the transformative powers of mass immigration.

Foreign policy has certainly seen the normalization of neoconservatism, echoed in the hiring by Breitbart of Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick. Glick, whose writing I’m unable to plow through, is hardly an America Firster. However, Deplorables, apparently, need schooling from an Israel First, war-war-monger.

I say this as the quintessential (probably the original ), pro-Israel,  America First, libertarian, Jewish writer. See “The Titan is Tired,” for an example.

Here’s my critique of Glick’s weak One-State solution gibberish: “One State: Is It The Solution Or The Final Solution To The Jewish State?“

UPDATE I (2/2/018): It’s spreading, or taking hold again: the neoconservative blight, evinced in “Trump Is Echoing Talleyrand In His Middle East Diplomacy. That’s Right. Talleyrand”:

Talleyrand? Wasn’t he a slightly diluted, cunning Jacobin, responsible for anti-clergy moves during the French Revolution, which was 100 percent the antithesis of the American Revolution? Indeed, conservatives are duped by and enamored of the modern-day Jacobins.

UPDATE II (3/26):

Bolton:

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UPDATED (6/15): Japanese Leaders Are Patriotic, Rejecting Mass Immigration As An Answer To Declining Birthrates

Asia, Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Nationalism, Nationhood

It’s shameful—treason, if you are a politician—to suggest that an aging and shrinking population is REASON TO FLOOD A COUNTRY WITH IMMIGRANTS, bringing about the near extinction of the native population.

This I’ve said in all my writing on immigration, and in response to the “demographics are destiny crowd” (Mark Steyn being among them). See: “Beck, Wilders, and His Boosters’ Blind Spot” (2010)

Not being traitors to their own, Japanese leaders are having none of it.

Japan will not accept mass immigration, says Masashi Mori, the mayor of Toyama. Efforts to raise the birth rate have had little success, although there are a few exceptions (see article). The only alternative is to learn to live with far fewer people. That implies great upheaval, which Toyama hopes to minimise.

MORE: “A small Japanese city shrinks with dignity.”

UPDATE (6/15):

Trump tells Shinzo Abe, “You don’t have this (immigration) problem, but I can send you 25 million Mexicans and you’ll be out of office very soon.” Brilliant audacity.

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NEW COLUMN: ‘Shithole Countries’: What Makes A County? The Place Or The People?

Africa, Donald Trump, Human Accomplishment, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Race

“‘Shithole Countries’: What Makes A County? Place Or People?” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

President Trump’s questioning of immigration into the United States from what he crudely called “shithole” countries masks a more vexing question:

What makes a country, the place or the people? Does “the country” create the man or does the man make the country?

To listen to the deformed logic of the president’s detractors, it’s the former: the “country” makes the person. No sooner does an African or Haitian immigrant wash up on American shores—courtesy of random quotas, lotteries and other government grants of privilege and protection—than the process of cultural and philosophical osmosis begins. American probity and productivity soon become his own.

As an African libertarian—an ex-South African, to be precise—I took the liberty of addressing the matter in the book “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in which a Cameroonian scholar, Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, among others, is extensively cited.

Easily one of the most controversial thinkers on the causes of underdevelopment in Africa, Etounga-Manguelle, a former adviser to the World Bank, contends that “What Africans are doing to one another defies credulity. Genocide, bloody civil wars, and rampant violent crime suggest African societies at all social levels are to some extent cannibalistic.” Why? In part, because of the inveterate values held by so many Africans.

Etounga-Manguelle and scholars like him, cited in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot,” are responding to an “explanatory vacuum” that has opened up among honest academics.

All have been willing to admit that constructs like racism, discrimination, and colonialism no longer serve as credible causal factors in divining underdevelopment and delinquency.

None has been called upon to enlighten the greater public.

In such intellectually candid circles, the intellectual “vacuum” is being filled with reference to culture, namely the “values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society.” …

…  Human behavior is, indubitably, mediated by values. Nevertheless, we’d be intellectually remiss to deny that the cultural argument affords a circular, rather than a causal, elegance: people do the things they do because they are who they are and have a history of being that way.

What precisely, then, accounts for the unequal “civilizing potential,” as James Burnham called it, that groups display? Why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwifed Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control?

Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place?

Such an investigation, however, is verboten …

READ THE REST. The essay, “‘Shithole Countries’: What Makes A County? Place Or People?” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.