Twisted tongues: Beacons of light

The recent “separation” brouhaha has simmered down a bit now. President Trump signed an executive order stopping this two-decade-long immigration practice, but plans to continue his “zero-tolerance” policy of immediate prosecution along the southern border, not the fatuous catch-and-release program.

There’s always some common-sense thing that works leftists into a lather when it comes to immigrants. Whether it’s “depriving” foreign law-breakers of due process or the Supreme Court upholding Trump’s “immoral and dangerous” travel ban or “family detention,” the outrage-industrial complex is masterful at the ol’ bait-and-switch.

Why are so many otherwise intelligent and goodhearted people duped into believing a false narrative? It’s pure politics framed as ethics, tolerance, and mercy. It’s a grievous agenda, which pushes the peaceful principles of civilization (borders, language, culture) as hate and assimilation as un-American.

“A nation whose language is corrupted can no longer exist as a nation.” A country which forgets its own history “is like a beggar who knows neither his past nor where he is going.”
— St. Ilia the Righteous

It’s an Americana contrivance which depends on the widespread belief in malignant myths, serpentine speech, and heart-tugging do-gooderism. Let’s bring the deleterious devils of bad history and puritanical-progressive theology “out of the shadows.”

A city on hill

In a letter to Trump, Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America wrote, “let us embrace the vision of President Ronald Reagan who, in his farewell address, likened our country to a city on a hill, a ‘God-blessed’ city, a city that if needing walls, has walls with doors, doors ‘open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.'”

This “city on a hill” phrase was Reagan channeling John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay, in a 1630 Puritan sermon denoting these colonists’ “chosen” role as Christian reformers. Winthrop was referencing the Bible, of course, speaking specifically toward the Pilgrims as beacons in what they saw as the savage, but tamable New World.

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.”
— Matthew 5:14

As I’ve written before, the Puritans as examples of morally upright living didn’t having staying power. Simply put, their theology was too fluid, their soteriology too works dependent, and their ecclesiology nonexistent.

So what was Jesus talking about? He was personifying a town with His disciples, who would shine the holy light of Christ upon the dark world.

Obviously, “America” is not this outpost of Heaven as described in Scripture. That is the role of the Church, not government, not a nation, and certainly not an empire. It is Jesus’ followers who are to be God’s illumination.

Isn’t it ironic that a learned man such as Tikhon chose to quote Reagan of all people? I mean, it was the Gipper who signed the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986, granting amnesty to 3-4 million illegals.

This law set into motion the demographic scheme we have today of 12-30 million illegals residing in the U.S. (depending upon whose stats you use), not to mention the 1.5 million legal immigrants who are admitted annually. It’s untenable and unsustainable – a house of cards built on a city of sand, not on a sturdy cornerstone.

“Nation of immigrants”

This cunning misnomer is oft repeated as a way to undermine America’s foundations of federalism. The misconception by design is so prevalent that many people think of America as a “nation” whose tradition is democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And if your family has been in the U.S. for several generations, you’re not an immigrant. “You may have blood-ties to the Old World … (but) you are thoroughly an American,” says historian Brion McClanahan.

“No people have ever been able to maintain themselves when you have a situation of unlimited immigration. It’s never been done.”
— Brion McClanahan

This obfuscation is quite effective in guilting people (especially white folks) into supporting porous borders and mass demographic upheaval. Funny that the poster boy of this feel-good fiction is the rootless West-Indies-born, Alexander Hamilton, who claimed in word to support federalism, but lobbied against it tirelessly in deed.

In a speech when meeting with Menahem Begin in 1981, Reagan described both Israel and the U.S. “as nations of immigrants, yearning to live in freedom and to fulfill the dreams of our forefathers.” Peculiar that Israel is celebrated for defending its borders and sovereignty by some of the very same people who want to dismantle America’s.

For the U.S., this fantastical “nation of immigrants” vision persists. America isn’t exceptional; it’s the exception to the common-sense rule, which most other successful countries embrace.

American dream

The Pilgrims “dreamed of building a city upon a hill,” Barack Obama said in a 2006 speech in Boston. “And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed.

“I see students,” he concluded in addressing the diverse U-Mass crowd, “believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this city on a hill – that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places.”

Here, we see again the appropriation of Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” sermon, which is considered by some as the precursor to “American Exceptionalism.” The U.S. is thrust forward as a “land of opportunity” upon which anyone can make it.

On one hand, this “national greatness” theory is powerful in that simply stepping foot on the “magic soil” transforms one into a rugged, liberty-loving, self-sufficient American. Too bad it’s not true.

In reality, the ethos is not great enough to maintain common-law heritage, the inheritance of freedom for our progeny, or the English language, much less keep illegals off of welfare or have them assimilate. Theft, erosion of culture, and balkanization are the intended result instead.

The ideology feeds into the view of America as an “idea” – just a malleable blob, whose meaning is subjective, ever-changing, and inconsistent. It’s an entity which is borderless, universal, and infinite in scope.

It’s akin to Woody Guthrie’s Marxist anthem, “This Land Is Your Land, this land is my land … this land was made for you and me.” America’s for everyone, the whole daggone globe! Just as Rome once was.

“If you take away the belief in a greater future,” Reagan told CPAC in 1984, “you cannot explain America – that we’re a people who believed there was a promised land; we were a people who believed we were chosen by God to create a greater world.”

The Great Communicator and other politicians have long understood that wrapping progressive rhetoric in biblical language and ahistorical ignorance can propel forward the reform ideal. It’s an extremely effective strategy, which works on audiences on both the left and right.

“American values” have become inextricably linked to egalitarian campfire songs, nihilism, and white guilt. But boy do its proponents like to co-opt dead white guys.

Immigration is about power

“[A]s long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours,” Reagan continued in his final presidential speech in 1989. So, what exactly was the Founders’ position on immigration?

They, as did subsequent generations of presidents and politicians, understood that immigration is about power. Immigrants equal votes either for you or for your opponent. Period.

“The Federalists feared the impact of French and Irish immigrants on elections so they sought to restrict immigration,” wrote McClanahan. “For those that insist this was ‘racism,’ last time I checked most of these people were white Europeans. Religion is not a race.”

Careful and controlled incremental immigration is as American as apple pie. Now, Thomas Jefferson did think the issue was for the States. But still, “Like his Federalist counterparts,” McClanahan explained, “Jefferson knew that these immigrants would vote for his faction, and thus allowing them into the United States earned political points.”

Grover Cleveland “certainly feared Chinese immigration, not because of race, but because … he thought they were ‘incapable of assimilation,'” McClanahan continued. He was skeptical if “the Chinese would adopt Anglo-American principles of government and society. Everyone in the founding generation thought this was essential, but that is not even discussed anymore.”

Now Abraham Lincoln had other concerns. He encouraged immigration, since they were to be the divine cannon fodder for conquest. In fact, one-quarter of the Union army were immigrants, a much higher proportion than was in the general population.

“I regard our immigrants as one of the replenishing streams appointed by providence to repair the ravages of internal war and its waste of national strength and health,” Lincoln said in 1864. Indissoluble Unionism by bayonet is God’s will, you see.

Immigrants, many of whom were Germans who’d fled the failed socialist revolutions of Europe in 1848, came to America with a love of centralized democracy, not states’ rights. They had no respect for regional heritage or Jeffersonian federalism. They were allies in Lincoln’s remaking of America, from limited-government republicanism to despotism.

Lincoln also used immigrants as a hedge against possible loss to the Confederacy and its farm-rich resources. “There is still a great deficiency of laborers in every field of industry, especially in agriculture,” he articulated in 1863. We need the mass importation of unskilled workers to help the economy. Sound familiar?

“Proposition” nation

Speaking of Dishonest Abe, he was a master at twisting language and distorting history. It was his “rhetoric for continuing revolution,” as cultural commentator and professor M.E. Bradford called it.

“Ours are loyalties to an ideal, not to a revelation, and this must have been the reason … why Lincoln referred to the American ‘proposition,'” wrote commentator William F. Buckley. Jr. These “perpetual loyalties” are then intrinsic in immortalizing America’s new identity as created by Lincoln himself. So much for conservatism, eh, Bill?

“Lincoln’s selective reading of the Declaration of Independence [in the Gettysburg Address], with an unduly emphasized and distorted interpretation of the concept of equality, injected into the American body politic a messianic style and disintegrative ferment that still bedevil us,” explains historian Clyde Wilson.

The Declaration is a historical document, which was crafted by a people rooted in British legal tradition. It wasn’t radical. Rather, it was conservative – a call to uphold Anglo-American liberties and to restore the colonists’ rights as Englishmen.

To the Founders, it was King George who was the revolutionary. American secession from the Crown, from their point of view, was simply a return to ancestral governmental customs.

Their “new Government” and “new Guards” were security measures to preserve “Free and Independent States” and to dissolve “Tyranny over these States.” But it wasn’t to birth something brand-new; it was to build upon the old, safeguarding tradition and virtue.

“Lincoln begins the Address with language that is directly patterned on the King James Bible so familiar to his audience,” writes Wilson. “’Four score and seven years’ rather than ‘eighty-seven;’ ‘brought forth’ rather than ‘established.’ Thus he invokes the ancient and sacred: the American Union as a special manifestation of God’s plan for the improvement of humanity.”

Lincoln speaks mystically of “a new nation,” “unfinished work,” and “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” As the late Straussian historian Harry Jaffa remarked, through Lincoln’s crusade against the South and 700,000 dead, “… the rule of law as an expression of human equality was vindicated.”

To Jaffa, as with so many ill-informed Americans, the proposition was and is just. Forget that the proposition is utterly dystopian and dishonest, though.

“Let us not forget that [the Address] is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense,” commented journalist H.L. Mencken. “The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth.

“It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue,” he continued. “The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.”

The same people who think the Emancipation Proclamation “freed the slaves” are the same people who buy hot air like this. It’s like reading the Bible out of context. Lincoln is to statists as Martin Luther is to some radical Protestants: the real America didn’t exist before 1860, neither did true Christianity exist before 1517.

I suppose we all have our saints, but truth should be at their core. That’s one of the things that makes them holy. So if we cannot untwist our tongues, how can expect to have a productive dialog and hopefully avoid the suicidal path on which we find ourselves?

I say we practice the words of Psalm 34:13, “Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.” That’d be a good start in shining a little light in the darkness.

Be sure to check out my follow up: “Twisted tongues: Salt of the earth.”