response to a friend to questions and concerns about Trump and immigration

Hi Emily (fake name)

Good to hear from you.  I miss the days when we talked more often.  I enjoy seeing the pictures and updates of your family.  

The alt-right is a term used for a lot of different people.  I tried to find some specifics on what defined them and found that the term is used for a broad umbrella that certainly could include neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but it could also include people who just want to restore America to the country it was founded to be.  And that would include me.  We are constantly being told by the media and other people about “who we are,” but most of the time they are trying to lead us to new places rather than actually knowing and defending what we are supposed to be as a nation.

I have not spent too much time at Breitbart News, though I recently subscribed to their daily emails.  I constantly find that site cited for news articles, and none of them have anything to do with neo-Nazis and white supremacists.  The left is very quick to use labels to put people into boxes and brand them as evil, because they disagree with some of the things they say, and they don’t want you to read them for yourself.  I read a lot of news sources and hadn’t even heard of Steve Bannon until he was selected by Trump.  I suspect that most of what is being said about him is what has been fed to us by the media and not from those who have actually spent much time on the site.   I heard some people on the radio say that all this Bannon talk is not true at all.

The person who has probably influenced Trump the most on immigration is Ann Coulter.  He read her book Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn our Country into a Third World Hellhole shortly before he announced for President.

Trump’s focus on immigration and the wall has been on illegal immigration.  A country has the responsibility to know who is coming into it and the right to refuse someone.  We have diseases that had long been eradicated here which are on the rise again, like polio and tuberculosis.  We have a drug epidemic due to Mexican drug cartels.  We even have a lot of Middle Easterners who come through Mexico, and who have intentions of bringing death and destruction to our country.  The fact is that with illegal immigration, we just don’t know who is coming in.  Trump’s announcement came shortly after the murder of Kate Steinle at the hands of an illegal immigrant, someone who had been deported several times yet still was able to come back again and again.

Is the government is trying to bring minority immigrants into the country to the "almost entire exclusion of whites.?”  Actually, yes.  Prior to 1965, it was the policy of our government to try to retain the current demographics of the population of the United States with immigration.  There were even quotas on how many from what countries could enter, and they were primarily if not exclusively European. 

In 1965, immigration was opened to all the countries of the world, and it has been focused almost entirely on minorities.  Is this political?  You only need to look at the maps of the Presidential elections for evidence, but that is certainly not the only evidence, though you may not find somebody saying so much in public.

Trump, for example, won the majority vote in probably 95% of the counties in our country.  The 5% of counties he didn’t win were the large cities which are magnets for new immigrants.  A person from a third world country will vote for almost anything, because anything is an improvement over that from where they came.  And, yes, this is mostly the work of one political party, the one that favors government involvement (control) over as much of American life as possible. 

You mention a fear of minorities.  It’s not a fear of minorities per se, but they are visible reminders of what is happening to and in our country.

Our country is changing and has been changing for a long time.  These changes are intentional, and they are not good ones.  They include the rise of post-modernism, secularism, political correctness, revisionism, and deconstructionism, and, yes, these overlap at points.  Western Civilization itself is at stake, and it is losing as each generation knows less about what it is, how it started, and whether it should be preserved.  Has the West prospered because of inherent differences with other cultures, or did it prosper because it repressed, oppressed, and exploited other people?

The mantra of diversity is code for we don’t want what America used to be, and we are working to make it as different as possible.  Older people see how much our country has changed over the last 60 years, and they are not happy about it.  We remember when prayer, the Bible, and God were removed from our public schools and the public square, and it’s going to be a lot harder to try to bring that back when diversity has done its intended work.

Consider the refugee ‘crisis’ today.  There are between 19 and 55 million refugees in the world today, depending on who’s counting.  Almost all (over 99%) of the refugees brought to our country in the last two years have been Muslim, though Christians are being killed and driven out of their homelands throughout the Middle East. 

It’s not “that white people will lose out”, but we (not white people per se, but long time citizens) are losing our country, and these are all visible reminders.  We used to be the richest country in the world, the freest, with the best schools, the highest standard of living, very low crime, and the most Christian country in the world.  Even though people might question how many people were ‘true’ Christians, everybody respected and knew basic Christianity.  All the department stores played Christmas hymns during the Christmas season, schools sang Christian songs, Spring break was Easter break, and winter break was Christmas break.  The Ten Commandments were the moral code of our nation.  They were often displayed in schools and other public places, and more people knew and accepted them as being the right way to live.

Now we are arguably the poorest country in the world.  When our federal debt is $20 trillion, our state debt is over $120 billion, and the average credit card debt is over $10,000, we are living on borrowed money.

When people talk about our country being a nation of immigrants or that we are all immigrants, they are trying to cover the real issues.  Any person not now living here is potentially an immigrant, and they want you to think that one is as good as another, and we have no right to be picky about who comes here.

I have a government textbook from 1949 that lists 11 different standards that were applied to all immigrants before they would be accepted, including literacy, health, basic intelligence, good morals, job skills, and the expectation that they would not require government assistance. 

Now those standards are ignored for legal immigrants, and who knows about those who come illegally?

We are bringing into our country hundreds of thousands of people that we support for upwards of $35,000 a year at a time when our country is $20 trillion in debt, and we have more people out of the work force than at any time in probably the last 50 years. 

Yes, the Indians preceded the Europeans coming here, but they say that the Indians came from Asia through Alaska.  Did they displace anyone when they came?  My family has been here for a hundred years, so I wouldn’t think of myself as an immigrant.

You mention that most immigrants these days are coming from Central and South America, with China and India second.  Those pie charts are missing something.  They list the names of the individual countries with the most immigrants, but then there is the large blank of about 40% of the total immigrants from ‘other countries.’  This would be the Muslims that our President is so eager to bring over here.  There are almost 50 Muslim countries in the world, and it doesn’t matter which one they come from, just as long as they come.

The Christian response is to, as you say, welcome and help them.  But the government is not acting in the name of Christ, the Church, or the Christian.  It has been enabling the weakening and gradual destruction of our country. 

Right around the time all this was starting to happen, political correctness began emerging.  Among the ideas that came with that was that our country was founded as a secular nation and that of diversity.  Diversity is another way of diluting and diminishing the influence of the dominant culture, in this case, Christianity, white, and traditional. 

We used to have an American (Western) culture that we were proud of and taught our students in all of our schools.  Colleges used to have required classes on the history of Western Civilization.  That has all been rejected in favor of multiculturalism.  WestCiv has been branded the belief system of dead white people who became rich by oppressing people of color. 

One of the most important things that should be considered in answering any questions about immigration and everything else is the Constitution.  The most important part of the Constitution is the beginning.  That is the part that tells us the purpose of the whole thing, the goal of what government is supposed to work on, what it is exactly that our country fought a war in order to obtain.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

First of all, it is the people who are in control of the country, not the government.  The government doesn’t run the people.  We run the government. 

The first goal mentioned is to form a more perfect union.  We are constantly being told that diversity is our strength.  To me, diversity weakens and divides a nation.  But either way, our country is about forming a more perfect union.  If there are controversial issues about immigration, the government has no right to do something and then tell the American people to like it. 

Establishing justice is not referring to foreign or immigration policy.  It is about protecting the rights of the people of the United States.  The government has no right to put the welfare of people who are not of the United States above those who are.  It’s like a family.  You have three kids and a husband.  You take care of them first.  That doesn’t mean that you don’t care about the other kids on the block, but your focus is on these four people first.  Hopefully, those other kids on the block have parents who care about them.  The purpose of our government is to take care of the people of the United States first.  If individuals in the United States want to help people from other countries or if the United States votes to do something, that’s fine.  But most of what is happening with immigration today is not the will of the people, but the will of certain people in our government with an agenda that is far more than about helping people.

Number three is insuring domestic tranquility.  Tranquility.  I have read so many times where the Founders actually talked about the happiness of the American people as being the goal of government.  You don’t make people happy when you try to cram things down their throats, no matter how worthy it is or may seem to some people.

Provide for the common defense.  War isn’t really about killing people.  The goal is usually to change the government of the other country.  Killing people is usually just the means of doing that.  But if people can change our government without killing people, all the better.  There are a lot of people who are trying to change our country in innumerable ways that are contrary to what our country was intended to be.  If we don’t know what that is, we have no way to counter what they are trying to do.

Promoting the general welfare essentially means doing things that benefit everybody and not just a select group.  When the government gives free housing and thousands of dollars a month to certain people, that is not promoting the general welfare.  That’s for private organizations or individuals.  That’s not the role of our government. 

And lastly to secure the blessings of liberty to our posterity.  That means basically that we don’t live on borrowed money, where we jeopardize our children’s future for present gain.  All this money that we are spending on immigration frankly is borrowed money.  We have destroyed our middle class by sending millions of good jobs overseas, and we are spending money we don’t have.  We have changed the rules by which our country used to work, and too many people don’t know how it is supposed to work.

Sorry for taking so long to answer your concerns.  There is certainly so much more that could be said.

Wish you the best.

Larry

Which is more dangerous: Muslims or gun owners? response to a news article

Neil Steinberg asks the question of which group is more dangerous: Muslims or gun owners.  Using statistics isn’t helpful here, because we are spending billions of dollars keeping track of thousands and thousands of people hoping to stop them before they do something wrong.

But there is a bigger picture here.  Islam has a goal of making the entire world Muslim.  Not every Muslim is thinking about this, of course, but their leaders, their scholars, and imams are.  After failing to conquer Europe in the Middle Ages and being on the losing side of World War 1, they developed a new strategy: mass migration to the West and using its freedom and democracy to promote their cause. 

In a few generations, Europe will be a Muslim majority continent.  The United States will take a little longer.  No rush here.  Western people are not reproducing at replacement levels, so they see this a very doable.  In a hundred years, it will be The Islamic States of America. 

This isn’t inevitable, of course, but it’s a lot easier to prevent the earlier we recognize it and do something about it.

Christians and America

Christians came, actually fled, to America, because they wanted religious freedom.  Now they have lost it, and there is nowhere else to go.

A lot of you are reading this and wondering what I am talking about. 

Religious freedom, like all freedom, isn’t necessarily lost suddenly, violently, or completely.  It can happen slowly, like the proverbial camel’s foot in the tent, over generations.  Each generation loses a bit, learns to accept it and finds it not worth fighting for, and the next generation starts with less freedom as the new norm.  This new generation is easily swayed that this is the way it has always been or at least how it was supposed to have been, and they shrug their shoulders and think that Christians shouldn’t be concerned about these things anyway.

A lot of you are still wondering why I said that religious freedom is lost in America.  The First Amendment denies Congress the right to prohibit the free exercise of religion. 

But this right can only be guaranteed when religious values are consistent with the highest values of the country.  That is no longer the case.  We are told, over and over, that our nation was founded as a secular nation where all the different religions of the world can live together in blissful harmony free to do whatever they want inside their respective buildings, up to a point.

As a secular nation, there are secular values, and these values are higher than any religious ones.  First there was abortion.  Not only is your money now used to pay for them, but if you work in the medical, pharmaceutical, or pregnancy care fields, you may find that you are required to provide assistance for abortions in ways you would rather not.

As government confers or establishes rights for more kinds of human behavior, those rights supersede your religious rights not to participate.  You may even be compelled to do things against your conscience. 

Many of you are saying that it isn’t so bad.  Things are far worse in other parts of the world, and we shouldn’t complain.  But you would be missing the point.

The framework has changed.  The trajectory has moved.  The direction of the country is leading away from your religious, or Christian, values.  It’s only a matter of time, for example, before a pastoral candidate sues a church, because it found out that he or she is married to another person of the same sex, and since gay marriage is legal, you will lose your right to discriminate against him or her in a position of employment. 

We are told that we live in a diverse country and must accommodate and embrace this diversity.  But what we are not told is that this diversification of our country is intentional.  It is meant to dilute and diminish any Christian influence in our country.  And the very idea of diversity today has come more and more to mean the Islamization of our country.  The government supposedly isn’t keeping track of the religious affiliation of immigrants, but Muslim countries are providing the bulk of our new immigrants. 

In 50 years of less, Europe will become a continent of Muslim countries.  What the Muslim world could not do in a thousand years through war, it will now do peacefully, relatively speaking, through immigration.

Christians in general have not seen political involvement as something that they should do.  Yet Christians own businesses and houses, pay taxes, have investments, hire lawyers to protect their interests, and send their kids to public schools.  What happens politically affects all of these things.

Christians may give 10 % of their income to God as an act of being a good steward, but they probably give 50 % of their income to the government in the form of taxes, fees, licenses, and fines.  If we care where that 10 % goes, shouldn’t we care where that 50 % goes?

Christians are often taught that they must be submissive to government.  But they forget that the kind of government we have today is not the kind they had in Bible days.  We don’t have kings, Caesars, or rulers; we have representatives.  If our leaders do things we don’t like or agree with, we have the right and the responsibility to remove them and replace them with ones who will see to our best interests.  And sometimes that will mean that we will have to try to become those leaders ourselves.

We forget that the right to exercise our religion was won by a war that we initiated.  I have often said that if the Christians alive today were alive at the time of our nation’s founding, there never would have been an American Revolution.  And if the Christians alive then were alive today, there already would have been a second one.

Where do we start?  I would say that we first need to know and understand more about the origin of our country.  And to do that you need to read not the history of our founding but the writings of our founding.  History books can be very selective on what they talk about and what they omit. 

David Barton, founder of the organization Wallbuilders, is probably the foremost authority on writings in American history as they pertain to religion and our country.  His books make the case for a Christian founding of our nation, but more importantly they gather together the primary sources so that you can read the Founders for yourself.  You can read The Federalist Papers, which were written to explain the Constitution so that people would vote to ratify it. 

Everybody’s busy.  I know.  I have put a lot of things on hold in my life while I try to get my country back.

You want to win the world, but if you lose your own country, the country you are living in, the country that used to embrace your Christian values, then I think we are missing something very important.

Some Final Thoughts on the 2016 Presidential Campaign

This is easily the most important Presidential election of my lifetime.  With every political cycle, the two major political parties become more different, each wanting to take the country in very different directions.  The biggest examples might be the ones regarding the First and Second Amendments.

Now these differences are not some legal hairsplitting involving some finer points of law, but basic differences of understanding as to what kind of country we were meant to be and what kind of country we are going to be.

The First Amendment guarantees among other things the right to free exercise of religion.  This can only be guaranteed when the country, including the government, courts, and schools, regards religious values as being consistent with the highest values of the land.   That is no longer the case.

This, by the way, is proof that our country was indeed founded as a Christian nation.  You can’t guarantee religious values if you now recognize higher values that can conflict with that.

Being founded as a Christian nation did not mean that people were compelled to adhere to the Christian religion, but it does mean that it was respected and the Ten Commandments reflected the basic moral code for our nation.  They were prominently displayed in schools, courtrooms, and on government property throughout our country.

Now we are told that our nation was founded to be a secular nation, and there are secular values that supersede all religions ones.  These values are tolerance, equality, diversity, and fairness.  And these values will be strictly imposed.  Defy them or even unintentionally break one, and you risk being sued, arrested, harassed, shamed, fined, or fired.

The First Amendment also covers freedom of speech.  Are there to be no restraints on what people can say?  I contend as I just noted that the Founders assumed a religious foundation for our country. 

After all, they had the Bible taught in all the public schools.  And it was only in 1962 that that practice was banned by the government.  

They expected that Christian values like loving your neighbor would temper people’s speech.  But many of them came to this country because they were denied the right to freely speak in their home countries on matters of politics and religion, and they didn’t want the government telling them what to believe or what they could or could not say.  They wanted people to be free to express their opinions. 

But isn’t teaching the Bible some kind of government indoctrination in a certain belief system?  Certainly.  The problem is that every person and every government has a belief system that guides and directs their behavior.  And it is the Christian belief system that is the guarantor of our freedoms and rights.  That would take another article to prove if you don’t agree with that statement, but at least recognize that schools and governments have to work under some basic belief system to function.  Where it used to be Christianity, it is now political correctness, or secularism, with its new values of tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.

While Christianity has a commandment against lying, which, by the way, political correctness does not, it embraces it, Christianity, promoting freedom of conscience, was the driving force behind your freedom of speech.

That is all now increasingly in jeopardy of being lost.  The thought and speech police are everywhere monitoring what you say and think in case you might offend somebody.  Hate speech it is called.

And the Second Amendment is not just about guns.  The bigger issue is whether we as a nation want to trade our freedoms for security.  Security means that the government gains more power and control over our lives to protect us from everything that could go wrong.  Secularism gives the government the responsibility to protect us from all manner of bad things, whether it is being shot, being poor, or getting fat.  You give up your freedom of choice so that the government can try to minimize the risk of bad outcomes in your life. 

The large and grave responsibility of government also comes with another huge price: money.  Lots of it.  It requires a huge government work force generously compensated, to get the best people, of course, and you trade personal wealth for government oversight and protection.  How great a deal is that?

This new responsibility also finds the government looking for new ways to extend its protective power, new things that it can guarantee to people, all in the interests of improving their lives.  This also comes at great expense, so we have gone from being the richest nation in the world to the most indebted nation in the world.  Some people might find ways to dispute that, but I think if you include all the state and local debt incurred in pursuit of this perfect society, we are easily now the poorest nation in the world.  We still have our color TVs and cell phones, but when the share of federal government debt alone is over $50,000 a person, we are not rich, we just owe a lot of people a lot of money.

Where the Christian worldview gave us a moral system that has been in existence for thousands of years, secularism is relatively new, and it is making things up as it goes along.  Gender equality morphs into gender fluidism, where it can be chosen and changed at will.  In the attempt not to offend, we change our methods of labeling things to create neutrality, fireman to first responder, and slowly we even change definitions of what things mean. 

Where marriage was once the uniting of a man and woman such that children are created and raised in a nurturing environment by the two parents, marriage is now simply a legal connection of two people for certain legal and social benefits.  And even the idea of being a parent has been redefined.

Another morphing of its values is globalism.  Globalism sees all nations as equal.  All their various cultures and religions were found equal under diversity, tolerance, and equality, so now all nations have the same status.  This makes borders irrelevant, because they become arbitrary.  Why would or should a country be able to prohibit anyone from entering it who wants to?  People are people.

It becomes wrong for a country even to seek its own interests above that of the world community’s.  How can one nation justify being rich when so many others are poor?  Not only is that unjust, but the mere fact that one nation is rich while others are poor can only be due to that one nation oppressing or exploiting the others.  Ultimately this means that the rich nations become poorer, and the poor nations stay poor.  Who gets rich?  Individuals who know how the play the game by the new rules, many of whom work in government.

But back to the election. 

Everything I have said here is basically the current philosophy of the Democratic Party.  While the Republican Party has some very serious problems of its own, those are issues that need to be sorted out in the primaries where the Republican candidates are chosen, not in the general election where the choices are down to basically two. 

Our political leaders have given us a system that only realistically gives us two choices.  Voting a third party candidate may make you feel better, but it won’t change the system and will only make the results of the election worse.  That is an issue that you need to deal with between elections, not in an election.

You thought the election was about Trump and Clinton, the lesser of two evils perhaps.  Actually it is, but it is also quite a bit bigger than that.  However, they do epitomize the choice.  And the choice has never been clearer or more significant than in this election.

Trump wants to put America first.  This is what people do everyday when they put their family first over everybody else.  It doesn’t mean that you hate everybody else.  It does mean that if you try to take care of everybody, you end up taking care of nobody.  And if you read the Constitution, especially the beginning, taking care of its citizens first is precisely the role of government in our country.