Nationalism is a complex, multidimensional concept involving a shared communal identification with one’s nation. It is a political ideology oriented towards gaining and maintaining self-governance, or full sovereignty, over a territory of historical significance to the group (such as its homeland). – Wikipedia

George Rebane

The Dutch voted yesterday in high numbers to determine which brand of populism they favor to stop the Muslim onslaught of their country.  Of course no one, save Geert Wilders of the Party for Freedom, speaks of it in such terms, but they all hold that in their minds as the major issue to support or ignore.  The media continue to confound the issue by calling those who oppose illegal migration across borders of being “anti-immigrant”, which is the smelly red herring nowhere near the truth here or abroad.  But such is politics combined with a broad-based linguistic deficit.

The voters in Holland are watched by their EU neighbors because all of them will sooner or later have elections addressing the same populist and nationalist issues.  Center-right leader Mark Rutte “has portrayed the election as the quarterfinal round in Europe’s effort to stem a populist tide, with the French presidential elections in April and May the semifinal and the German parliamentary elections in September the finals. Polls in France indicate that anti-Islam right-wing politician Marine Le Pen will win the first round of voting, while Germany has been rattled by the influx of over a million refugees and migrants since 2015.” (15mar17 WSJ)

Most RR readers know that I am a dyed-in-the-wool American nationalist, a term denigrated by the Left since the Bolshevik Revolution.  I believe in the Westphalian world order of sovereign-nation states with secure borders engaged in vigorous commerce with each other, and each learning from the others’ successes and failures in governance and social organization.  I am a devout opponent of globalization as prescribed in the UN’s Agenda 21, and promoted by our domestic naïfs who believe that more and more comprehensive government benefits humanity.

I am also a proponent of global multi-culturalism that nurtures a worldwide environment in which people of distinct cultures can thrive, celebrate their own cultures, evolve at their own pace, and teach their children to honor and appreciate their heritage as the prime bond that forms communities of free people who freely support each other because such behaviors also support shared values and mores.  My studies of how people live together have confirmed the belief that social disorder and grief is maximized when un-assimilating people of markedly different cultures attempt to live in each other’s proximity within the same jurisdictional bounds and governance.  The evidence for that stretches back into the mists of time and overwhelms us today.

It is also clear to me and mine that those who seek a different human condition based on global collectivism must first destroy all viable mono-cultural societies.  We witness this onslaught daily.  Early 20^th century communists shared that goal and devised successful stratagems to achieve such an end.  This consisted of a two-pronged approach of 1) weakening internal institutions that maintained cultural cohesion, and 2) promoted the migration (by immigration and illegal entry) of counter-cultural populations that are encouraged not to assimilate into the target culture to be destroyed.  As Lenin advised, gaining control of and subverting a nation’s educational apparatus is the most rapid and reliable way to undermine a culture – “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

America’s success has been based on three factors – assimilation, assimilation, and assimilation.  The important thing to know about assimilation is that any host nation can only assimilate at or below a maximum rate of influx that depends primarily on the relative size of the host population, its level of wealth, its geographical resources, and the strength/stability of the host culture.  Secondary factors such as how liberal is the host culture enter into the mix, but are mostly subsumed by the listed primary factors.

Today the progressives have an historic challenge here in the US, but also a little splash over to the EU.  The downward spiral of America into second world status has been fomented by our Left since President Jimmy Carter’s day.  Their progress had been slowed by President Reagan, the USSR collapse, and the advent of the WWW until Barack Obama arrived and cleverly used the 2008 financial panic to reestablish the country’s downward spiral.  Enough Americans saw through this purposeful degradation that they voted in Republicans over the full spread of political offices in the land.

The bottom line of all this is that the Democrats in utter disarray cannot afford to have the Trump administration succeed, no matter how much the country will benefit, for such a success will give lie to everything that the Left has been preaching here and abroad.  Hence we are seeing our ‘loyal opposition’ wield the wrecking ball in Washington with a yet to be witnessed vigor.  The Democrats will oppose and undermine EVERYTHING that can remotely have originated by Team Trump or the Republican Congress.

To show the depth of their panic and the straws they are clutching, witness Schumer’s attempt to denigrate the release of Trump’s one year tax return showing he paid a laudable 25+% taxes on $153M of gross income.  The only thing left for Schumer to impugn, that his double dummy constituency would be bamboozled by, was to question, ‘Yes, but we don’t know where he got the $150M from.’  Now you have to be pretty stupid not to realize that such an income for someone worth in the $10-15B range represents less than what he could get putting his money into US Treasury bonds.  Yet Schumer’s accurate assessment of the Democrat voters’ anemic acumen and then taking cynical advantage of it indicates the level at which the current game of Washington politics is played.

Let me end this little litany by once more expressing my wonderment at how awesome is capitalism as a means of generating and distributing wealth in the world.  And it is doubly so in America not only for what it has built and the so many who have benefitted, but also that even in its current hobbled state it has withstood the repeated assaults of socialist policies designed by the feds to bury it.  We really do need to find a workable separation between those who understand the manifest splendors of liberty, constitutional constructivism, and capitalism, and all the others who worship the yet to be demonstrated glories of collectivism.

Exciting times indeed, and always more so for those of us who still live in the People’s Republic of Kalifornia.

[18mar17 update] This afternoon Jo Ann and I attended what was initially scheduled as a town hall gathering with our Congressman Doug LaMalfa.  The meeting was instead co-opted by the Left to become a venue for the next demonstration designed and organized to disrupt the Trump administration and elected Republicans wherever they dare to show their public face.  Today’s event at the Nevada County Fairground’s Amaral Center was of a piece.  The hall was packed and overwhelmingly so with people summoned from far and wide who didn’t want anything to do with LaMalfa, and were there only to shout down the congressman and demonstrate ideological solidarity with each other.  Their utter distaste (hatred?) for conflicting opinions was palpable enough to cut with a knife.

Jo Ann along with some other friends arrived very early to start setting up the hall with chairs and tables for the event.  The Left for days before had been putting out the fake news that the event would be reserved for Republicans only with all others left outside to stand by the door.  Sadly, our own Bob Crabb was among the purveyors of this garbage on his website (see below).

The reality was quite different.  We sat there in the midst of a sea of leftwing progressives all duly outfitted with their red and green little placards which they were constantly waving and shouting to show approval or disapproval of what was said.  It was obvious that there was not a smidgeon of thought that preceded their hip-level reactions to what was said by Congressman LaMalfa or the comment/question lines which were completely filled with the Alt-Left attendees.  LaMalfa’s responses were almost all drowned out by the shouts, screams, chants, and yells from the audience.  Some of the Left’s leaders tried to calm their vociferous co-protestors, but to no avail.

Were I to go into the details of the responses, it would first be unbelievable that Americans in a public forum would act that way, but also to witness their level of (mis)understanding they had of the issues brought up.  As an example, all of them were of necessity adherents of consensus science.  The ancestors of this mob burned, tortured, and imprisoned scientists of yore who dared to go against the dreadfully erroneous consensus science of their times.  And their progeny of this afternoon would do no less given the power to do so.

To all of them, by their every responses of jumping to their feet and shouting with their green and red signs held high, nothing that shrank government or gave individuals or localities more freedom to determine their own course was acceptable.  To them all such was simply an abomination to be shouted down.  Looking into their eyes, it was clear that these people were dedicated beyond reason to their beliefs.  For them, social life was best organized from on high by an omnipresent and omniscient government that issued reams of laws and regulations to guide every facet of life so that all potential conflicts of individual decisions could be avoided.  Princeton’s Julian Jaynes once described such a world of ‘pre-conscious’ humanity that existed in the Levant prior to the Dorian invasions (1200-800 BC).  Today they are with us again.

A major contributing factor to the progressives’ display of public ignorance is their narrow sampling of news outlets, most of which have now become the purveyors of fake news.  As an example we noticed the overwhelming acceptance of the notion that federal defunding of ‘Meals on Wheels’ would starve the elderly and infirm.  It would not be a stretch to say that not a leftwinger of the thousand or so in attendance knew that the feds contribute only 3% of that program’s funding – the remainder being made up from local state and private sector sources.

In sum, sitting there in their midst we felt as if we were strangers in a strange land watching people who had little in common with us beyond walking on two feet and breathing the same air.  They didn’t come to hear LaMalfa, they came to demonstrate that they shared no common beliefs with President Trump and the Republicans, and that here in California they have the power to disrupt the traditional course of public affairs.  And the Republicans hereabouts have now assumed their traditional role as the silent and perennially pissed minority, preferring to gather themselves in small enclaves, grumble in their beer, and celebrate an America that they don’t want to bother themselves too much to bring back.  Why?  Because they drank the kool-aid of the Left which teaches that bringing back the values and mores which made America great also means that you have to bring back Jim Crow, because we are told they were one and the same connected at the hip.

[20mar17 update]  The Left’s fake news factories have been cranking overtime to cover LaMalfa’s NC town hall, representing it as some kind of spontaneous turnout of just plain folk who happened to disagree with everything the congressman had to say.  Our own leftwing readers agree that this was just the typical outpouring of spontaneous democracy, and that the Right is woefully out of touch and outnumbered here and elsewhere.  I would agree that the event confirmed that we still can congregate as we will and oppose our elected leaders without fear of retribution by the state – in short, it was indeed democracy in action.  But that doesn’t mean that it was spontaneous and not meticulously organized; it’s OK to organize and assemble like-minded people in a democracy.

The one-sided fake news by lamestream outlets was led locally by SacBee’s Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist Jack Ohman, who attempted to convince his readers that the Republican leadership in Nevada County hearkened back to Hitler’s brown shirts and issued a strict dress code for their participants.  The truth is a bit different.  Yes, county GOP chairman Bob Hren did send an email suggesting that Republicans wear something with flag colors, and show up in numbers to answer the intensely organized large attendance by the Left.  But what our intrepid leftwing cartoonist and his local lackeys failed to describe were the detailed preparations, including specified dress code, that have exercised the disruptive Democrats here and elsewhere.

These progressives followed to the letter the now notorious manual – Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda (also in Spanish, of course) – that instructs attendance at Republican town halls, how Democrats should disperse themselves in the audience, how they should deport themselves when dis/agreeing with the speakers, and generally how to disrupt the planned event to show their displeasure with the Trump administration and the Republican Congress.  And as reported above, the Dems’ behavior at LaMalfa’s townhall was executed with military precision.  

However, if you expose yourself only to the lamestream outlets, you have no sense of what really is going on across the country – witness the recent election.  As further examples, this morning NPR did their job reporting nationwide that the LaMalfa townhall was the scene of a spontaneous protest against Republicans.  The segment also included audio snippets illustrating the shouting and chanting as LaMalfa tried to answer questions (denied by the local Left).  A reader sent me the link to a similar report on the town hall delivered by ‘public media’ outlet KQED of San Francisco – ‘Republican Congressman Faces Hostile Crowd in Nevada County Town Hall’.

Missing from all of these ‘news’ reports is that these are not spontaneous outpourings of public sentiment, but instead highly organized and nationally coordinated protests designed to assemble and amplify the leftwing base to feed the narrative that the entire country is angry about the failed election, and getting angrier by the day.  Was it all that long ago when the Democrats were hyperventilating nationally about how un-American the Republicans would be were they to protest the assured election of Queen Hillary?