Category Archives: Donald Trump

… be it Africa or Arabia, the Left labors under the romantic delusion that the effects of millennia of development-resistant, self-defeating, fatalistic, atavistic, superstition-infused, unfathomably cruel cultures can be cured by an infusion of foreign aid, by the removal of tyrants such as Robert Mugabe or Jacob Zuma, or by bringing the underdeveloped world to The West. (Left-libertarian Katherine Mangu-Ward actually told Tucker Carlson that, “If we had a billion people in America, America would be unstoppable. That would be amazing.”)

Alas, bad leaders are not what shackle backward peoples. Not exclusively, at least. And Africa’s plight is most certainly not the West’s fault. Rather, Africa is a culmination of the failure of the people to develop the attitudes and institutions favorable to peace and progress.

However, while human behavior is mediated by values, we’d be intellectually remiss to deny that the cultural argument is flawed. It affords a circular, rather than a causal elegance: people are said to do the things they do because they are who they are and have a history of being that way. See what I mean by flawed?

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? …

… READ THE COMPLETE COLUMN. “Why Trump Pooh-Poohed “S-ithole” Countries (Part 2)” is on Townhall.com, where you can read Part 1: “Trump’s ‘Shithole’ Controversy Deconstructed.”

Sign up to receive my weekly column, now in its 19th year, here: http://www.ilanamercer.com/mailing-list/. Catch up @ ilanamercer.com.

SOTU UPDATED (2/1/018): Droolius Kennedy The Third

Celebrity, Democrats, Donald Trump, Family, IMMIGRATION

Droolius Kennedy the III. What a hackneyed, weak, dumb rebuttal Rep. Joe Kennedy delivered to President Trump’s SOTU. Essentially, We Are The World. Via Fox News:

“And to all the Dreamers watching tonight, let me be clear: You are a part of our story. We will fight for you. We will not walk away.”

Kennedy was referring to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. Those immigrants were protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was eliminated by the Trump administration in September. The administration, however, offered Congress a six-month window to create legislation to protect dreamers.

As for the personal charm:

UPDATE (2/1/018):

Melania compared to Pelosi and her posse of crows.

Nancy Pelosi chewing the cud, moving the Polident, smoothing the collagen, the Botox—what do you think?

“Pathway To Citizenship”: What Will Happen If President Trump Says Those Words, Tomorrow

Bush, Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Neoconservatism, Republicans

A source who shall remain anonymous writes:

If tomorrow night President Donald Trump utters the words “pathway to citizenship,” it will mark one of the biggest betrayals of the modern era and the effective end of his presidency.

1) He will cause the 2018 midterms to be a Democratic victory as a significant part of the demoralized and disillusioned base stays home and we lose the House – and perhaps even the senate.

2) Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats will impeach him in the House.

3) A Democrat-controlled Senate will proceed with a trial. A Republican-controlled Senate will not proceed with trial but nothing Trump wants will come out of the House and his “America First” agenda will be neutralized.

4) Trump will be challenged from the Right in the 2020 presidential primaries.

My well-connected source’s own sources tell him that, “Trump is proceeding down this road of self-immolation”:

The Koch brothers successfully infiltrated their agent, Marc Short, into the inner sanctum. Short, who led the Koch’s Never Trump movement in 2016, has teamed up with Establishment lackey Kirstjen Nielsen [with whom I was actually quite taken] and the princess regent Ivanka [whom I’ve grown to detest] to sideline and neutralize Stephen Miller, the last remaining voice for immigration sanity. [First they came for Steve Bannon, now it’s Steve Miller’s turn.]

Trump is being pushed off the cliff with all the happy talk from this cabal, buttressed by Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio, Jeff Flake and Paul Ryan. In summation, the entire rabid Never Trump partisans are now in control of POTUS and are succeeding in getting him to do their immigration policy:

Amnesty now. Enforcement later, maybe.

No effectual changes to chain migration for at least ten years since all pre-existing applicants for green cards are grandfathered in . That’s at least a ten-year backlog.

This is the 1986 Bill on steroids.

The headline, all over conservative and populist media on Wednesday morning will be one word: betrayal.

We who want Trump to succeed have been trying to head this off all week, since this country killing plan was first floated in the press. Seemingly to no avail. Trump is cocooned, just as he was and continues to be on foreign policy. He’s captive to the neocon interventionists AND now to the open borders, cheap-labor lobby as well.

It’s as if we had elected JEB Bush.

This is NOT America First.

What a colossal disappointment. On Wednesday morning Trump supporters will be in disarray, the Conservative movement will be fractured and, once again, Republicans will be at each other’s throats – as the Kochs, the Bushes, Bill Kristol and all the other members of the Never Trump cabal are filled with glee and satisfaction as they celebrate the beginning of the end of his presidency.

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.