Chronicles Blog 
Electing A New People
A bill that the media is touting as providing “comprehensive immigration reform” is currently making its way through the Senate. In essence, the bill will provide amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants and vastly expand legal immigration, while doing nothing to prevent future illegal immigration. In fact, we know from past immigration amnesties that they only encourage more illegal immigration. The bill has bipartisan support, meaning, as Sam Francis liked to say, that it is both Stupid and Evil. It gives the denizens of the Stupid Party plenty of new cheap labor to drive down wages and denizens of the Evil Party lots of new Democratic voters. It promises continued radical demographic change, in line with Bertolt Brecht’s satirical poem advising the East German Communist Party that it should dissolve the people and elect another after the 1953 uprisings against Communist rule. This bill is supported by elite opinion and elite money. All that can stop it is popular outrage. Mickey Kaus has an excellent piece analyzing the politics behind the bill and what can be done to stop it at the Daily Caller. It is well worth reading, despite the unfortunate use of profanity at the end. (Hat tip VDARE.com)
Another White House Globalist
Whenever it is polically expedient, Barack Obama criticizes free trade. He did it in 2008, when he told Ohio primary voters that he would renegotiate NAFTA. He did it in 2012, when his campaign saturated the industrial Midwest with ads criticizing Mitt Romney for outsourcing jobs to China at Bain Capital. But these noises are forgotten as soon as the political danger has passed, and today Barack Obama appointed another globalist, Jason Furman, to be the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. In 2008, Furman sang the praises of free trade in the Harvard Law & Policy Review and warned against a “growing protectionist backlash against global economic integration” that he saw as “a serious threat to our economic well-being.”
Last week, the Atlantic ran a piece on the loss of industrial jobs in Milwaukee that showed why Obama’s ads on outsourcing worked so well. Between 1961 and 2001, Milwaukee lost 69% of its manufacturing jobs. The article notes that this massive job loss was the result of several causes, including increasing automation. But free trade and the commitment to what Furman termed “global economic integration” also played an enormous role in this economic devastation. As Sophie Quinton noted in her Atlantic piece, new plants built by Milwaukee’s Rockwell Automation “could just as easily be in Shanghai or Singapore as in Oconomowoc.” That was not true, of course, when America had the tariff. As Ian Fletcher notes in his magisterial Free Trade Doesn’t Work, “the pain experienced by the Midwestern manufacturing areas of the U. S. . . .since the mid-sixties” is the direct result of America’s abandonment of the tariff as a result of John F. Kennedy’s Trade Expansion Act of 1962.
The commitment to “global economic integration” has led part of America to become what our elites derisively term the “Rust Belt.” And America will continue to shed manufacturing jobs until that disastrous commitment is reversed.
Vive la France
Last weekend, Paris saw the third march of roughly one million people against gay marriage. Those in attendance heard an amazing speech from Ludovine de la Rochere, the president of the organization that has been sponsoring the marches. In it, de la Rochere echoed de Gaulle’s famous words from June 18, 1940: “The law is today in effect: so isn’t the last word already spoken on this? Shouldn’t hope disappear? Isn’t your defeat definitive? No!”
When the French elites told the French people that gay marriage was inevitable, hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen came together to say “No!” When our elites tell us gay marriage is inevitable, all too many of us meekly agree, and some “conservative” publications even join in the chorus. I think American conservatives can learn something from the supposedly defeatist French.
The War on Christmas Comes to Spain
Every Christmas, we are instructed that there is no War on Christmas. But the hostility to Christianity and Western culture that motivates the War on Christmas is in fact widespread. The latest reminder came in an online piece this week in La Stampa, describing how the education minister in the Spanish province of Asturias had ordered schools there to replace references to Christmas and Holy Week with references to “winter holidays” and “end of second term holidays.” The rationale given for this nonsense was the need to “not to hurt peoples’ sensitivities,” driving home the point that those of us who enjoy the public celebration of Christian holidays simply don’t have “sensitivities” worth considering. The article also noted similar efforts in Belgium, where All Saints Day has become “autumn leave” and the Carnival preceding Lent is now “relaxation leave.” According to the article, the Belgian bureaucrats justified this attempt to sever Belgian culture from its roots by citing the need not to offend non-Christian immigrants. The offense given to Christians or those who simply like tradition is, once again, simply not worth considering. Indeed, anyone who objects to the concerted effort to remove all references to Christianity from the cultures of countries that were formed by Christianity now risks being labeled a “racist” or a “xenophobe” or the like.