[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]
It looks as though, after twenty years of futility, two and a half thousand U.S. military deaths and twenty thousand wounded, along with a trillion dollars of spending (give or take a couple hundred billion), we may actually be disengaging from Afghanistan.
It’s been obvious for most of those years that our war in Afghanistan was of benefit to only a tiny fraction of Americans: defense contractors, the congressvermin who take their campaign donations, and senior military types wanting to put another colored ribbon on their chests and nail down another post-retirement company directorship.
For the rest of us it’s been money and lives down the toilet.
One consequence of the Afghanistan fiasco: a mighty flood of refugees. https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3NwYWNlX2NhcmQiOnsiYnVja2V0Ijoib2ZmIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1422673186169278464&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.unz.com%2Fjderbyshire%2F100000-afghan-refugees-coming-here-why-not-settle-them-amid-co-ethnics-in-the-stans%2F&sessionId=d64efd3b71d763c8970d4a0afedbe3d6d409bdfc&theme=light&widgetsVersion=1890d59c%3A1627936082797&width=500px
A key term here is “SIV,” which stands for “Special Immigrant Visa.” I went to the State Department website with the idea to do a deep dive into this SIV business, but I got lost in the bureaucratic Esperanto and had to give up.
I did at least learn, though, that there are two distinct visa programs in play here:
The State Department website, which is aimed at people applying for these visas, carefully cautions you to know which visa you’re applying for. The first category there talks of numbers of visas in the thousands and tens of thousands; the second one, if I haven’t mis-read the Esperanto, is limited to fifty visas a year.
The whole issue is further complicated by:
The Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2021, i ntroduced May 25th this year in the House, to “extend and modify the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa Program, to postpone the medical exam for aliens who are otherwise eligible for such program, to provide special immigrant status for certain surviving spouses and children, and for other purposes.” A far as I can figure, this bill is on hold in the House Judiciary Committee.
As you can see, the matter of visas for Afghans wanting to settle in the U.S.A. under some claim to having helped our war effort is deep and tangled in both legislation and litigation. You could get a Ph.D. in this stuff, if you had a lot more patience than I have.
When the media claims that we’re leaving Afghan interpreters to die, it’s lying. There are few actual interpreters actually applying for SIVs. The vast majority of applicants were just making money from the U.S.
On the other side are stories like this one from Chad Robichaux over at American Greatness. Robichaux is described as “a former Force Recon Marine and Defense Department contractor with eight deployments to Afghanistan as part of a Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Task Force.” He writes very eloquently of combat operations he was engaged in, helped by an Afghan interpreter he calls “Bashir.”
This Bashir, Robichaux tells us, saved many American lives and was unfailingly loyal to our troops there. Yet now he’s a Taliban target, in peril of his life:
He has been on the move with his wife and kids, relocating daily to stay safe. He has tried multiple times to get out, but for years the special immigrant visa process has been broken and now the U.S. embassy in Kabul is closed “due to Covid.”
Robichaux and his former teammates have raised $80,000 to help Bashir move to a safe country with a U.S. embassy where he can apply for asylum.
Has Chad Robichaux made up the Bashir story? Well:
I would be very wary about saying so in his presence or anywhere near it: his American Greatness byline also tells us he is a former professional mixed martial arts (MMA) champion; and
In the nature of our operations over there, there must have been a lot of actual Bashirs. There are many private efforts under way by our servicepeople and veterans to help these Afghans get out. Our newspapers have been running stories about them] [‘I’ll Never Forget You’: Veterans Push to Get Afghan Partners in War to the U.S., by Jennifer Steinhauer and John Ismay , NYT, July 22, 2021].
How many of those latter cases, the Bashirs, could there be? Not just Afghans who helped us unload a truck one weekend, but people who provided long spells of meritorious service in our cause, and can be identified and solidly vouched for by our people who worked with them?
I would guess a few hundred; certainly not tens of thousands.
So, what to make of all this? Are we handing out SIVs like candy with, by Daniel Greenfield’s count, a hundred thousand Afghans on their way to permanent settlement here? Or are we, as Chad Robichaux tells us, stiffing a few hundred Afghans who believed in our mission and put their lives on the line to help us?
My guess would be: both. Our immigration system is so intractably FUBAR, I’m perfectly ready to believe that we are letting in for settlement tens of thousands we shouldn’t while denying entry to a few hundred Bashirs to whom, as a matter of national honor, we should be willing to grant settlement.
Sound advice to Bashir, in fact, would be to get the heck out of Afghanistan, take a plane to Ecuador, and hike up through Central America to the U.S. border with all the rest of the Third World, who are chanting as they hike “We don’t need no steenkin’ visas.”
If we had a competent federal bureaucracy we’d sort out the Bashirs and give them settlement visas, then try to help the other hundred thousand applicants relocate to Muslim countries.
To neighboring stans, in fact, of which there is a good supply: Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and not forgetting Turkmenistan … [Opening bars of the Turkmen national anthem.] … yeah, yeah, thanks, guys. As well as having that friendly “stan” in their names, there is considerable ethnic overlap across the borders: Balochs and Pashtuns in Pakistan; Tajiks in Tajikistan; Turkmens and Uzbeks in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan etc.
If we had a competent federal bureaucracy, we could sort it all out.
And, I was going to add, if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle; but I’m not sure that’s any longer true …
Brian Pallister Removes All Doubt: White Guilt, Weakness & Residential Schools
There is an old saw that goes “it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”. It has been attributed to pretty much everyone with a reputation for folksy wisdom of this sort from the last millennium or so, and is sometimes ascribed to sources of ancient wisdom such as Confucius. Indeed, it could be taken as a rough paraphrase of Proverbs 17:28. Homer, when confronted with it in an early episode of The Simpsons, promptly set about illustrating it. Internally, he asked himself “What does that mean? Better say something or they’ll think you’re stupid”, and then blurted out “Takes one to know one”, after which his inner voice applauds this supposedly witty comeback. Brian Pallister, premier of my province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, is either unfamiliar with the adage or he has decided to follow in the footsteps of Homer Simpson.
On Tuesday, the day his public health mandarin Roussin informed us that he would finally be lifting the vile and absurd requirement that we gag and muzzle ourselves with face diapers in indoor public places which tyrannical order ought never to have been imposed on us in the first place, Pallister ensured that this news would be overshadowed by issuing a poorly worded apology for his remarks of the seventh of July.
In those remarks for which he apologized, he had not said anything bad about anyone – except the Marxist terrorist mob that had vandalized the statues of Canada’s founding and reigning monarchs on Dominion Day and who deserved his rebuke. Nor had he said anything that could be reasonably interpreted as justifying historical wrongs that had been done to anyone. Note the adverb “reasonably”. The interpretations of the nitwits and nincompoops whose thinking has been perverted and corrupted by being infected with the academic Marxist virus of Critical Race Theory, a pathogen far more deadly and dangerous than the bat flu, don’t count. His comments were entirely positive and affirming, but because they were positive and affirming about the people who settled and built Canada, that is to say the very people whom the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoists wish to erase from history, they were met with outrage and outcry on the part of the same.
In other words he had said nothing for which he owed anyone an apology. Indeed, he owed it to Canada and to all patriotic Canadians regardless of their racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, not to apologize for his remarks. This is because to give in to the demand that he apologize for his remarks of the seventh of July is apologize for the very existence of Canada. Canada owes nobody an apology for her existence. Academic Marxists who think otherwise, and the far too many who speak for them in government and in the media, need to be slapped down hard, not coddled with apologies intended to appease.
Astonishingly, for someone who gives the impression of being a man who is quite proud of the fact that his only ethics are those acquired in the schoolyard, Pallister would appear to have forgotten one of the most basic lessons of the same – bullies cannot be appeased. Bullies feed off of the weakness of their prey. By appeasing them, people merely announce their own weakness and let the bullies know where their next meal can be found.
Surely Pallister must realize that those who have been demanding that he grovel and eat his innocuous words spoken in defence of the people who built this country are bullies. What other word could better describe those who make such irrational demands knowing that they can count on the Crown broadcaster, the “paper of record”, and most of the other public opinion-generating media to back them up, with nary a word of dissent?
Therefore, Pallister should have known that there was no apology that he could make that would have satisfied these wolves. The fact that he has spent the last year and a half throwing his weight around, telling Manitobans they cannot meet with their friends in either public places or their own homes, blaming Manitobans for when his own draconian policies failed to produce the desired effect of a drop in bat flu cases, berating and insulting the few of us who dared stand up for our constitutional rights and freedoms, and trying to blackmail us all into agreeing to take a hastily prepared, experimental new medical treatment, might help explain why he failed to grasp this. Having enjoyed playing the bully himself for so long he forgot what to do when on the receiving end of bullying.
In this situation, offering an apology of any sort, was the worst thing Pallister could have done. The people demanding that he apologize are not interested in receiving an apology from him, sincere or otherwise. They want to remove him from office and replace him with the one man in Manitoba who would have handled the situation of the last year and a half worse than he. Whereas the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is supposed to be to hold the government accountable to the elected assembly for its actions and to speak out when the government abuses its power, Wab Kinew, the leader of the provincial socialists, has spent the pandemic, not calling Pallister out for how his actions have trampled the most basic constitutional rights and freedoms of Manitobans, destroyed businesses and livelihoods, and done tremendous harm to our mental, social, and overall wellbeing, but saying that he should have locked us down harder, faster, and kept us in lockdown longer. When groups who have been speaking out about how our rights and especially our religious freedoms were endangered by the lockdown measures met with one of Pallister’s minister’s to express their concerns, Kinew condemned the government for agreeing to meet with them and hear their point of view. Those who want this man to become our next premier, either can see nothing wrong with a government strategy of closing all businesses and paying people to stay home for the duration of a pandemic, or don’t care about his policies and want him in power for no reason other than his race, while accusing those of us who do very much see something wrong with his political philosophy and strategy of being racists for opposing him.
If we limit the options to those of which Pallister is capable, the best thing he could have done would have been to follow the advice of the old saying with which we opened this essay. That was more or less what he had been doing for the previous few weeks and it had been working fairly well. The media was running out of things to say about his remarks and would eventually have moved on to something new, whereas Manitobans were given a respite from having to see his face on the news every day. It was a win for everybody!
If, however, we expand our options to include what Pallister might have done had he been a different person with a better character, the best thing he could have done would have been the following.
He would have held another press conference in which he flat out refused to apologize for his comments. He would have said that his words had been directed towards the mob of Maoist radicals who attacked Canada, her constitution and institutions, and her founders and history in their criminal and terrorist acts on her national holiday. He would have then pointed out, correctly, that throughout history, any time a mob like this has been allowed to get its way it has turned out very, very, bad for everybody, and that therefore this sort of thing must not be tolerated but rather nipped in the bud. He would then have reiterated his comments and insisted, quite rightly, that Canada owes nobody an apology for her founding, history, and very existence as a country.
He would then have directly addressed the media and the phoniness of their manufactured moral outrage. He would have pointed out that they themselves carried the lion’s share of the blame for stirring up the Marxist mob whose actions he had rightly condemned. They had completely abandoned even the pretense of journalistic ethics, integrity, and responsibility when they spun the discovery of graves on the sites of the Indian Residential Schools into a web of exaggerations and outright lies about murdered children (1) which has incited not only the aforementioned mob actions but the largest wave of hate crimes this country has ever seen.
Finally, he would have addressed the Indian chiefs who took offense at his remarks – note the distinction the late Sir Roger Scruton liked to make between “taking” and “giving” offense – and issued rude and arrogant demands for his resignation in which they insulted and demonized other Canadians in a most racist manner. He would have told them that if they persist in their crummy attitude then they can take it and their “reconciliation” and stick these where the sun don’t shine, to which location he would be happy to provide directions.
Of course, the Brian Pallister who would have done this would have had to have been a very different and very better Brian Pallister than the one we actually have. The same would have to be true of the Brian Pallister who would sincerely apologize to those whom he actually owes an apology – all Manitobans, of all races, cultures, and creeds – for the way he has bullied us all with his lockdowns, masks and other such draconian nonsense.
(1) That thousands of graves could be found on these sites has never been a secret. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission discussed these at length in the fourth volume of its final report. They are not “mass graves” – the media falsely labelled them such and the bands that had announced the finding of the graves corrected them and while the media eventually switched to talking about “unmarked graves” they issued no retractions. “Unmarked” refers to their present condition, it does not mean they were always unmarked. The TRC Report says that graves in the Residential School cemeteries were usually marked with wooden crosses. Students were not the only ones buried in these cemeteries – school staff were buried there as well, and often the school shared the cemetery of the church to which it was related and the nearest community. There is no reason to think that the graves contain murdered children. No bodies have been exhumed, no autopsies conducted, and the TRC Report itself indicates that disease was the cause of most of the deaths of children buried in the school cemeteries, tuberculosis alone accounting for almost half. The huge gulf between what the actual known facts are and the narrative imposed over the facts by the media, arises entirely out of the anti-Canada, anti-Christian, hatred and malice of the latter. — Gerry T. Neal
Brian Pallister Removes All Doubt: White Guilt, Weakness & Residential Schools
There is an old saw that goes “it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”. It has been attributed to pretty much everyone with a reputation for folksy wisdom of this sort from the last millennium or so, and is sometimes ascribed to sources of ancient wisdom such as Confucius. Indeed, it could be taken as a rough paraphrase of Proverbs 17:28. Homer, when confronted with it in an early episode of The Simpsons, promptly set about illustrating it. Internally, he asked himself “What does that mean? Better say something or they’ll think you’re stupid”, and then blurted out “Takes one to know one”, after which his inner voice applauds this supposedly witty comeback. Brian Pallister, premier of my province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, is either unfamiliar with the adage or he has decided to follow in the footsteps of Homer Simpson.
On Tuesday, the day his public health mandarin Roussin informed us that he would finally be lifting the vile and absurd requirement that we gag and muzzle ourselves with face diapers in indoor public places which tyrannical order ought never to have been imposed on us in the first place, Pallister ensured that this news would be overshadowed by issuing a poorly worded apology for his remarks of the seventh of July.
In those remarks for which he apologized, he had not said anything bad about anyone – except the Marxist terrorist mob that had vandalized the statues of Canada’s founding and reigning monarchs on Dominion Day and who deserved his rebuke. Nor had he said anything that could be reasonably interpreted as justifying historical wrongs that had been done to anyone. Note the adverb “reasonably”. The interpretations of the nitwits and nincompoops whose thinking has been perverted and corrupted by being infected with the academic Marxist virus of Critical Race Theory, a pathogen far more deadly and dangerous than the bat flu, don’t count. His comments were entirely positive and affirming, but because they were positive and affirming about the people who settled and built Canada, that is to say the very people whom the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoists wish to erase from history, they were met with outrage and outcry on the part of the same.
In other words he had said nothing for which he owed anyone an apology. Indeed, he owed it to Canada and to all patriotic Canadians regardless of their racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, not to apologize for his remarks. This is because to give in to the demand that he apologize for his remarks of the seventh of July is apologize for the very existence of Canada. Canada owes nobody an apology for her existence. Academic Marxists who think otherwise, and the far too many who speak for them in government and in the media, need to be slapped down hard, not coddled with apologies intended to appease.
Astonishingly, for someone who gives the impression of being a man who is quite proud of the fact that his only ethics are those acquired in the schoolyard, Pallister would appear to have forgotten one of the most basic lessons of the same – bullies cannot be appeased. Bullies feed off of the weakness of their prey. By appeasing them, people merely announce their own weakness and let the bullies know where their next meal can be found.
Surely Pallister must realize that those who have been demanding that he grovel and eat his innocuous words spoken in defence of the people who built this country are bullies. What other word could better describe those who make such irrational demands knowing that they can count on the Crown broadcaster, the “paper of record”, and most of the other public opinion-generating media to back them up, with nary a word of dissent?
Therefore, Pallister should have known that there was no apology that he could make that would have satisfied these wolves. The fact that he has spent the last year and a half throwing his weight around, telling Manitobans they cannot meet with their friends in either public places or their own homes, blaming Manitobans for when his own draconian policies failed to produce the desired effect of a drop in bat flu cases, berating and insulting the few of us who dared stand up for our constitutional rights and freedoms, and trying to blackmail us all into agreeing to take a hastily prepared, experimental new medical treatment, might help explain why he failed to grasp this. Having enjoyed playing the bully himself for so long he forgot what to do when on the receiving end of bullying.
In this situation, offering an apology of any sort, was the worst thing Pallister could have done. The people demanding that he apologize are not interested in receiving an apology from him, sincere or otherwise. They want to remove him from office and replace him with the one man in Manitoba who would have handled the situation of the last year and a half worse than he. Whereas the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is supposed to be to hold the government accountable to the elected assembly for its actions and to speak out when the government abuses its power, Wab Kinew, the leader of the provincial socialists, has spent the pandemic, not calling Pallister out for how his actions have trampled the most basic constitutional rights and freedoms of Manitobans, destroyed businesses and livelihoods, and done tremendous harm to our mental, social, and overall wellbeing, but saying that he should have locked us down harder, faster, and kept us in lockdown longer. When groups who have been speaking out about how our rights and especially our religious freedoms were endangered by the lockdown measures met with one of Pallister’s minister’s to express their concerns, Kinew condemned the government for agreeing to meet with them and hear their point of view. Those who want this man to become our next premier, either can see nothing wrong with a government strategy of closing all businesses and paying people to stay home for the duration of a pandemic, or don’t care about his policies and want him in power for no reason other than his race, while accusing those of us who do very much see something wrong with his political philosophy and strategy of being racists for opposing him.
If we limit the options to those of which Pallister is capable, the best thing he could have done would have been to follow the advice of the old saying with which we opened this essay. That was more or less what he had been doing for the previous few weeks and it had been working fairly well. The media was running out of things to say about his remarks and would eventually have moved on to something new, whereas Manitobans were given a respite from having to see his face on the news every day. It was a win for everybody!
If, however, we expand our options to include what Pallister might have done had he been a different person with a better character, the best thing he could have done would have been the following.
He would have held another press conference in which he flat out refused to apologize for his comments. He would have said that his words had been directed towards the mob of Maoist radicals who attacked Canada, her constitution and institutions, and her founders and history in their criminal and terrorist acts on her national holiday. He would have then pointed out, correctly, that throughout history, any time a mob like this has been allowed to get its way it has turned out very, very, bad for everybody, and that therefore this sort of thing must not be tolerated but rather nipped in the bud. He would then have reiterated his comments and insisted, quite rightly, that Canada owes nobody an apology for her founding, history, and very existence as a country.
He would then have directly addressed the media and the phoniness of their manufactured moral outrage. He would have pointed out that they themselves carried the lion’s share of the blame for stirring up the Marxist mob whose actions he had rightly condemned. They had completely abandoned even the pretense of journalistic ethics, integrity, and responsibility when they spun the discovery of graves on the sites of the Indian Residential Schools into a web of exaggerations and outright lies about murdered children (1) which has incited not only the aforementioned mob actions but the largest wave of hate crimes this country has ever seen.
Finally, he would have addressed the Indian chiefs who took offense at his remarks – note the distinction the late Sir Roger Scruton liked to make between “taking” and “giving” offense – and issued rude and arrogant demands for his resignation in which they insulted and demonized other Canadians in a most racist manner. He would have told them that if they persist in their crummy attitude then they can take it and their “reconciliation” and stick these where the sun don’t shine, to which location he would be happy to provide directions.
Of course, the Brian Pallister who would have done this would have had to have been a very different and very better Brian Pallister than the one we actually have. The same would have to be true of the Brian Pallister who would sincerely apologize to those whom he actually owes an apology – all Manitobans, of all races, cultures, and creeds – for the way he has bullied us all with his lockdowns, masks and other such draconian nonsense.
(1) That thousands of graves could be found on these sites has never been a secret. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission discussed these at length in the fourth volume of its final report. They are not “mass graves” – the media falsely labelled them such and the bands that had announced the finding of the graves corrected them and while the media eventually switched to talking about “unmarked graves” they issued no retractions. “Unmarked” refers to their present condition, it does not mean they were always unmarked. The TRC Report says that graves in the Residential School cemeteries were usually marked with wooden crosses. Students were not the only ones buried in these cemeteries – school staff were buried there as well, and often the school shared the cemetery of the church to which it was related and the nearest community. There is no reason to think that the graves contain murdered children. No bodies have been exhumed, no autopsies conducted, and the TRC Report itself indicates that disease was the cause of most of the deaths of children buried in the school cemeteries, tuberculosis alone accounting for almost half. The huge gulf between what the actual known facts are and the narrative imposed over the facts by the media, arises entirely out of the anti-Canada, anti-Christian, hatred and malice of the latter. — Gerry T. Neal
Liberals and leftists are absolutely apoplectic about Tucker Carlson’s week-long visit to Hungary. His shows featured views of the border as well-fenced (built after the 2015 attempted invasion) and peaceful, with migrants from Serbia being turned back—a far cry from Biden’s unofficial policy of welcoming migrants and putting them on planes and buses to be sent around the country to dilute any remaining places that are seen as too White, with the assumption that they will eventually vote Democrat when they get amnestied or they change the voting laws. (The NYTimes recently published an op-ed arguing there is no good reason why illegals can’t vote, so it’s definitely on the left’s wish list.)
On Monday Carlson opened his show with this:
If you care about Western civilization and democracy and families, and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by the leaders of our global institutions, you should know what is happening here right now.
That quote appeared in an article in The Daily Beast where the author, Jared Yates Sexton, couldn’t resist referring to “so-called ‘Western Civilization.’” You definitely know where that train of thought is going.
At the beginning there is a clip from an interview with Victor Orbán who reasserts the right of Hungary to decide who comes into their country, and that they have a right to decide on their culture. If they want a family-friendly culture and oppose LGBT+ propaganda and Critical Race Theory in their schools, they should be able to do that. If they would rather not have a post-Christian society or a Muslim counter-culture, it’s their right. Their culture is up to them, not globalist elites residing in Brussels or Washington dictating what they must do. And that’s what they have done.
Mr. Orban’s party recently adopted a law restricting depictions of homosexuality; critics said it was being used to target the country’s L.G.B.T.Q. community. And the government-aligned media regularly rails against the destabilizing effect that Western “woke” culture has on traditional society. (Benjamin Novak & Michael M. Grynbaum in the NYTimes)
One can only imagine the horror at such things among our ruling class. “Authoritarian!” they’ll say—while happily mandating their own totalitarian ideology in America.
As Orbán notes, the globalists basically want to force other societies to be multicultural—to admit Muslim communities, for example—in the belief that these disparate groups will get along just fine. But, he says, it’s “obviously risky.” So true. Multiculturalism is a utopian ideology, and what evidence we have thus far is not encouraging—even apart from the argument from ethnic genetic interests. As Orbán says, Germany has gotten what it deserved for bringing in millions of Muslims. Now Europe has no-go zones and organized crime by family-based cartels. You can import people out from of the Middle East, but the magic dirt of Europe doesn’t obliterate their clannishness or their criminal tendencies. And minimally, the multicultural United States has never been more polarized, with the polarization essentially along racial lines.
Carlson’s comment on the effect of immigration on crime infuriated Salon. All they had to do was quote him commenting on a case where an illegal beheaded a woman in broad daylight in Minnesota after authorities did not deport him:
The Biden administration did this on purpose, and they’re still doing it. And that is exactly why Democrats become hysterical when you mention the obvious successes that are on display here in Hungary on the immigration question. They don’t want you to know that there is an option to the chaos and filth and crime growing all around us.
“Chaos, filth, and crime.” But the idea that there are globalist elites seeking to impose multiculturalism and massive non-White, crime-prone (and low-IQ) immigration on European societies is a complete fantasy in the eyes of the Daily Beast writer:
Using fellow Hungarian [???] George Soros as a catch-all bogeyman, Orbán prides himself as a champion against a massive global conspiracy that involves wealthy and powerful liberals, and international organizations determined to undermine the authority of the state and break the back of nationalistic thought.
The idea that there is no globalist, wealthy, liberal elite that opposes nationalism is absurd. But this elite doesn’t generally undermine the authority of the state. Only if the state is trying to enforce nationalism.
The left loves authoritarianism. It’s a recurrent theme that globalists want to force conformity and obedience on any dissenting entity to produce a homogeneous culture of the left. Later in the show he interviews the always interesting Michael Anton, who notes the same thing about the U.S.: Blue states want to impose their values and way of life on the red states, but the red states just want to be left alone to decide on their own culture, whether it’s energy policy, mask mandates for schoolchildren, or teaching White students to hate themselves (here).
But as I said, the left is apoplectic about seeing such ideas in the conservative mainstream. A recurrent theme is that Hungary under Orbán is authoritarian—that he has dismantled democracy so that there are only sham elections. Here’s Zach Beauchamp at Vox:
Fidesz justified its power grabs by demonizing a series of outgroups and external enemies. If you read the state-aligned press, you’ll learn that only Viktor Orbán can save Hungarian civilization from the threat posed by Muslim immigrants, liberals in the European Union, the LGBT community, and the Jewish billionaire George Soros.
Orbán won reelection in 2015 and 2018, in votes that were formally free but in no sense fair. Fidesz benefitted from massive resource advantages, backing from government-aligned media, and rules designed to tilt the playing field. Though Orbán’s party won less than 50 percent of the vote in the 2018 election, it still won a two-thirds majority in parliament — thanks in part due to gerrymandering.
Today, political scientists see Hungary as a textbook example of something called “competitive authoritarianism”: a kind of autocratic system where elections happen and aren’t formally rigged but are so heavily stacked in the incumbent party’s favor that the people don’t have real agency over who rules them.
One thing that’s obvious about the left these days is that they are not self-aware. They routinely project what they are doing throughout the West onto their enemies. It’s quite reasonable to argue that the left stole the 2020 U.S. election, certainly via biased media coverage, and at least partly by changing the voting laws under cover of the Covid crisis. And quite possibly much worse. Now the left is going all out to continue those laws, rejecting voter ID laws and other election security laws as Jim Crow 2.0. And, despite several of the articles cited here condemning Orbán for imposing a gerrymandering regime favorable to his party, they don’t seem to notice that it’s very mainstream among them to want to get rid of the electoral college, pack the Supreme Court with leftist judges, and get rid of two senators per state. Their entire program promoting maximum levels of legal immigration, amnestying illegals, allowing illegals to vote, disbanding the border patrol, distributing migrants to red states, and pathologizing criticism by Whites that they are being replaced is aimed at creating permanent hegemony—the sort of hegemony that they already have in blue states. Yes, the left loves authoritarianism.
But here’s Vox: “Competitive authoritarian regimes survive, in part, by tricking their citizens — convincing enough of them that democracy is still alive to avoid an uprising.” Exactly what’s happening here. We still have the flag (although even that is in jeopardy) and we have the illusion of free elections. In fact, the vast majority of the media in 2020 was propagandizing for one candidate, demonizing the other, and ignoring anything unsavory about the one they like—Hunter’s notorious laptop.
The left loves authoritarianism, but only when they have power. When they were out of power during the 1950s, they were all about the civil liberties of communist professors and how evil Joe McCarthy was. There developed a whole literature on the evils of suppressing free speech, such as Arthur Miller’s The Cruciblewhich implicitly condemned the House Un-American Activities Committee by comparing it to the Salem witch trials. But now that they have power, they have used their power to basically end free speech at universities and for anyone in the private sector who they might be able to get fired from their job by calling him a racist or anti-Semite. As this recent article by Glen Allen of the Free Expression Foundation shows, there is already a double standard of justice where the system throws the book at right-wing protesters, including solitary confinement for January 6 protesters awaiting trial, while leftist rioters from last summer who burned and pillaged a great many American cities and attacked police have gotten off scot-free. But here’s Sexton in The Daily Beast complaining that Hungary now is hostile to free speech, impartial law, and representative government:
Within this system [i.e., the former regime], certain rights were considered inalienable and automatic. Expression. The press. The right to representative government and the rule of theoretically impartial law.
The left is now firmly in charge of the entire federal bureaucracy, including the FBI and other national security organs. Dissidents are being purged from the military. It’s gotten to the point that even if, by some miracle, a real populist was elected, he or she would have to direct a massive purge of the federal bureaucracy, from top to bottom, to get their policies implemented and to prevent these agencies from actively working against the administration—as certainly occurred at the FBI with Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
And the media. Vox complains that 90 per cent of the media is in government hands, and The Daily Beast complains about lack of press freedom in Hungary. From the perspective of the dissident right, it’s more like 99.9 percent of the media in the U.S. is in hostile hands, and for mainstream conservatives, 90 percent is probably a good estimate. Here the left benefits from the wokeness of the corporate media, including social media. But the result is the same. A façade of democracy in which most people are simply unaware of what’s really going on. And dissenters from the left, such as Carlson, who have a significant media following, are subjected to activist campaigns against their advertisers.
And The Daily Beast complains that the government is pushing its nationalist ideology in schools, completely ignoring the left’s push for everything from holocaust education to Critical Race Theory and LGBT+ propaganda in public schools. Same outcome, slightly different way of getting obtaining it in the U.S. while paying lip service to liberal democracy.
But for The Daily Beast, in order to make their argument, all they have to do is claim that Orbán, Carlson, et al. are nothing more than lunatic conspiracy theorists.
There is importance in western civilization, they maintain, that must be protected at any and all costs, particularly from evil, criminal traitors determined to undermine it. They are in league with foreigners and constantly manipulating people of color. Behind the scenes lies a shadowy threat pulling the strings. They control the media. They control culture. And liberal democracy, with its freedoms, its espoused equality, with its acceptance of diverse identities and ideas, brings with it the contagion of the very populations and creeds that will dilute the country and undoubtedly destroy it.
If you are on the left, there’s no need to really make an argument that liberal elites are not in control of the media or culture, or that they are not really interested in bringing in in people of color in order to further their agenda. The fact that non-Whites vote Democrat is complete happenstance. And the people who run the media are of no discernable ethnic group, and they are nothing but truth seekers. When you have the kind of power the left has today, all you have to do is just accuse those evildoers of believing in conspiracy theories.
Vox quotes Rod Dreher, Senior Editor at The American Conservative:
The unhappy truth is that liberalism as we Americans have known it is probably dead. Our future is almost certainly going to be left-illiberal or right-illiberal. The right-of-center thought leaders who want to figure out how to resist effectively will be coming to Budapest to observe, to talk, and to learn.”
Vox condemns this because Dreher sees a role for the state in creating a right-wing regime, but, as usual, the author seems blissfully unaware of the obvious authoritarian trends on the left—trends they are doing their best to enshrine with state power. I’m afraid Dreher is right. It’s going to be an authoritarianism of the left or of the right, take your pick. The old conservative values of limited government are non-viable. The old America is dead. And right now, I certainly wouldn’t want to bet on the right eventually winning. While the left is pretty much united around a program of authoritarian control—they love censorship, whether by government or corporations, and would embrace prison terms for thought crimes, as they already do in Europe—the right remains fractionated between idiotic libertarians, traditional country club, business-friendly conservatives (even though corporate America hates them), and religious fundamentalists.
However, it’s somewhat encouraging that 23 percent of Republican men have a favorable view of White nationalists, and actually shocking that 17 percent of Democrat men have a favorable view; and discouraging that only 7 percent of the electorate have a favorable view of White nationalists—again highlighting the problem of White women, especially unmarried White women, being more likely to buy into the contemporary zeitgeist of White guilt and the left generally. I’d be interested in a poll where they also asked about attitudes toward Carlson. I suspect that Republican men with favorable views of White nationalists overlap to a large extent with those who are fans of Carlson.
I realize Carlson is not ideal. But there’s no one else even close to him in continuing to hit on the issues that vitally affect White America. It’s no surprise that his trip to Hungary set off a firestorm on the left, or that the ADL was furious when he referred to White replacement. I think he’s waking a lot of people up, and that terrifies the leftleft%2FWhatsAppEmailPrintFriendlyShare
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todd hupp says: Orban is upfront-very direct. Great interview. He wants Hungary reserved for the indigenous white people.Interestingly he pointed out : the central european countries -who recall Russian communism- largely agree with the Hungary policies.Poland in particular.They were pro Trump. BTW: The Russian takeover as sole gas provider to Europe(via Nord Stream) is a very dangerous situation.From Germany pipelines will distribute Russian gas to most of Europe and the UK.Trump had negotiated a portion natural gas would be USA LNG.Biden has dropped this requirement-inexplicably and against USA policy.The left US press is not reporting on this.Russian control of energy=Russian control. The equity for Nord Stream @ 30% comes from European pipeline operators and Gasprom.70% is debt from large European banks.It is reported that a well connected/well funded DC lobby group made this happen against US interests , Reply
Tim Folke says: It is encouraging to see a few bright spots in this darkening world, such as Hungary, Russia and to some extent Poland. These countries know that, in order to survive, their folk, culture and children must be protected. Courage is contagious, and I am grateful for people like Tucker Carlson, as well as the writers on this and other sites. There are still good places in America as well. Last June we went to the Bigfoot Festival in Metaline Falls, WA (NE corner of Washington State). I would guess there were several thousand people there. No weirdos, no unnatural hair colors, no rainbow flags, kids were well behaved and the women wore the jewelry. Just a lot of our folk having a good time and telling Bigfoot stories, some of which may have even been true! Reply
Jo says: The Right is divided. Their most charismatic and articulate spokesman, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, ignores the JQ entirely. Whether that is for pragmatic reasons — why take on another powerful enemy — or out of conviction is unclear. The most firmly held assumption of postwar morality, that the Nazis were irredeemably evil, has led us ad absurdum. They adopted policies in extremis to overcome a similar predicament to the one we now face. The assumption must be dropped. Reply
Tom says: I’ve been watching Tucker’s broadcasts from Hungary and they are fantastic indeed, not to mention a big F#*k You at the American Left also. The guy’s got balls, but of course he also knows how to choose his words and targets carefully so as to avoid something along the lines of the sacking of Pat Buchanan from mainstream media. The mind-boggling thing about the American Left is its hippieish, totally adolescent conception of morals. For a modern leftist, EVERYTHING is a human right, from defecating on sidewalks to illegal alien voting “rights” to free food and college. Basically, if you want something, they see it as a duty of the state to either deliver it or safeguard it. Those who disagree are then considered “illiberal” and “authoritarian”. This stupidity is the reason for the Left’s cocksure confidence in their visions for a new society. It literally is like dealing with rotten children who demand anything and everything from their parents. In this case however, the “parent” now becomes the state. Reply
tito perdue says: I urge Carlson to get into elective politics Reply
CM says: Thank you for reviewing this program segment from Tucker Carlson. I’ll take his faults to have the benefits of the really good coverage Carlson gives topics like this. Especially interesting to me is that Orban is a member of the Calvinist Hungarian Reformed Church connecting him to the movement of Calvinists – Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, French Huguenots – which formed the US. Calvin advocated for the republic as the best form of governance and to support it also instituted schools which educated all the people, men, women, and children since he was fully aware that only an educated populace would be capable of self-rule. Hungary’s most recent Constitution also asserts that Hungary is a Christian nation. I regret that our Christian founding fathers let Jefferson and others get away with not including such a statement in our US Constitution. Reply
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VANCOUVER STILL SUFFERING FALLOUT FROM ‘STUDENTS’ BUYING MANSIONS
National Post (Latest Edition)
31 Jul 2021
Douglas TODD dtodd@postmedia.com
Vancouver has been one of the favourite targets of wealthy people in other countries looking to sink some of their money into real estate in a safe country through the purchase of large homes for members of their families, often with the help of Canadian banks.
One of the more shocking examples was the University of B.C. “student” who bought a $31-million house a few years ago in Vancouver.
There were also the nine different international students who snagged $57 million in mortgage money from Canadian banks to buy posh dwellings across Metro Vancouver.
This is not to mention the countless other proxies who somehow obtained gigantic mortgages from Canadian banks without having to provide evidence they earned an actual income.
How can this happen even as ordinary Canadians find it a challenge to prove to banks they earn enough to secure a mortgage? Understanding how people serve as proxies for the real (or beneficial) owners of properties is a key to unravelling why Canadian house prices have spun out of control.
At least two questions stand out about this inflationary phenomenon.
Are such proxies still able to get whopping mortgages from Canadian banks?
And what have been the long-lasting real-estate repercussions of this practice, especially for sought-after markets like Vancouver and Toronto?
Before answering these questions, let’s look at just how unregulated things were in real estate and banking six to 10 years ago, when hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign capital were pouring into the country.
In evidence before the Cullen Commission into money laundering in B.C., a UBC geography professor emeritus laid out how offshore capital has streamed into Canadian real estate.
Up to 2016 “banks in Vancouver were giving preferential loan terms to foreign home-purchasers without full disclosure, effectively practising deregulation for non-canadian clients,” said David Ley, author of Millionaire Migrants: Trans-pacific Life Lines.
“At one bank, international students who could put down cash for 35 to 50 per cent of a house price needed to provide no further financial evidence to qualify for an uninsured loan. Such easy credit access facilitated real estate investment and speculation.”
Bankers turned a blind eye by failing to report such questionable transactions, Ley says, noting Vancouver, Richmond and West Vancouver contained disproportionate numbers of addresses included in the Panama Papers’ database of offshore tax haven accounts.
Canadian banks earned big profits through such “dubious activities” as “providing generous mortgage terms to foreign students and other local proxies fronting for investors wishing to conceal their status as beneficial owners,” Ley said. “In each instance the consequence was to liberate more frothy capital for use in real-estate investment.”
Stephen Punwasi, a Toronto-based real estate analyst, has shown how Canadian banks were eager to give loans to foreign students with no jobs. He even published a photo of a bank branch poster, complete with a dragon-like Pokeman figure, telling international students to sign up for mortgages with “no income verification!”
The phenomenon of using proxies to buy property contributed to some of Vancouver’s newly minted mansion owners declaring povertylevel incomes, Punwasi said, citing Postmedia stories about tax avoidance. “The reason is widely believed to be that those earning income overseas just aren’t declaring their incomes locally.”
North Vancouver-raised Ron Butler, who now heads one of Canada’s largest independent mortgage brokerages, says Metro Vancouver has “shown the most insanity in the mortgage business.”
Going back to the 1980s, when wealthy Hong Kongers fearing the return of their enclave to China first began looking for an offshore haven, international students and homemakers could buy mansions with large down payments from unverified sources, said the head of Butler Mortgages.
And then, Butler said, the foreign investors or their proxies would often secure the multi-million mortgages by buying large amounts of mutual funds with the same bank, in a process known as “hypothecation.” The banks loved it.
China, Iran, the Middle East and, in the past, Russia, have probably been the biggest source countries for such investment in Canadian housing, says Butler. But the money has flowed in from almost anywhere.
“It’s the whole concept of ‘outpost families,’ ” said the mortgage broker, in which the family breadwinner stays in the homeland earning money while using proxies to invest in housing in a more stable nation.
The somewhat good news is that the trade in absurdly easy-to-obtain Canadian mortgages was cut back around 2016.
Canada’s superintendent of financial institutions quietly brought in new regulations, known as B20 and B21, that made it much harder for proxies with no incomes to get multi-million mortgages in Canada.
The changes have been helpful. But the damage, Butler suggested, has already largely been done. Canadian house prices have now been inflated by the unregulated money.
“The real key to understanding the billions that have come here already is this: They never go back. The most important thing to understand about foreign capital is it never goes back. It just sloshes around.”
Butler estimates roughly one-quarter of a trillion dollars — or $250 billion — has poured into Canada in recent decades through offshore investors, many of whom have used proxies.
That’s distorted higher local prices, which are now being exacerbated by “ridiculously” low interest rates inspired by the pandemic. “If I was to emphasize anything,” Butler said, “it would be that, since the money never goes back, it has created a long continuum.”
Housing investments by so-called marginal players also pushes values higher, Butler says, because many wealthy investors don’t care about getting the best price. They’re mostly looking for a long-term haven. Locals, especially young people, can’t compete in bidding.
While the superintendent of financial institutions clamped down against the most egregious mortgages, in part to combat money laundering and international terrorist financing, Butler said many schemes still exist for foreign investors to transfer large amounts of money into Canadian dwellings.
Ottawa, for instance, still allows 15 per cent of a bank mortgage security to come from what it calls “nonconforming” sources, Butler said, explaining how a person from Cyprus who invests $40 million in Canadian real estate thus doesn’t have to explain the origins of $6 million of it.
Another widely used technique for pumping huge amounts of speculative money into Canadian housing, Butler said, is by putting down payments on five to 10 presale condo units at the same time, typically in towers that are five years away from being constructed.
The trick, the broker said, is to sell the condos to someone else by so-called “assignment” just before a mortgage is required. By then the speculator, offshore or domestic, has already made a handy profit in Canada’s growing market.
“I could spin this stuff all day,” Butler said, explaining the numerous ways global capital has skewed housing affordability.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT FOREIGN CAPITAL IS IT NEVER GOES BACK.
The mind-boggling thing about the American Left is its hippieish, totally adolescent conception of morals. For a modern leftist, EVERYTHING is a human right, from defecating on sidewalks to illegal alien voting “rights” to free food and college. Basically, if you want something, they see it as a duty of the state to either deliver it or safeguard it. Those who disagree are then considered “illiberal” and “authoritarian”. This stupidity is the reason for the Left’s cocksure confidence in their visions for a new society. It literally is like dealing with rotten children who demand anything and everything from their parents. In this case however, the “parent” now becomes the state. Reply