[See also, at WEJB/NSU, on William Kristol:
“Has the Republicans’ Capitulation on Homosexualization of the Military Guaranteed the Democrats’ Victory in 2012?”;
“Bill Kristol and the New Anti-Trump Conspiracy (Pat Buchanan)”;
“NeverTrumper William Kristol, of the weekly standard: It’s the Most Wonderful Time for a Coup!”; and
“Neo-Con Chameleon Bill Kristol on Immigration, over the Years.”]
By David in TN
Here are two threads from our late friend Larry Auster blasting Bill "I'm a liberal on immigration" Kristol. This (http:www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001998.html) from 2003 and this (http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005363.html) from 2006.
The latter has a comment about Ben Stein's two homes.
Immigration has pushed America leftward, Kristol now admits
Howard Dean could beat President Bush, says William Kristol in the Washington Post. One of the reasons: “[D]emographic trends (particularly the growth in Hispanic voters) tend to favor the Democrats going into 2004.” Hey, Bill, what happened to all those “conservative” Hispanic immigrants that you and your fellow Republican strategic geniuses have been drooling over for the last ten years while you pushed for open borders, even as you contemptuously dismissed and marginalized the people who were making the very warnings about immigration that you now, the damage being done, off-handedly admit to be true?
If there is any justice in this world, some day the irresponsible, destructive, and perfidious role played by Republicans, establishment conservatives, and neoconservatives in the U.S. immigration debate will be known to history—with names named, and with quotations quoted.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 09, 2003 03:56 P.M.
What about their irresponsible, destructive, and perfidious role in American foreign policy? :)
Posted by: Chesterfield on December 9, 2003 4:35 PMNeocons were hardly alone. On the right there were libertarians too. The left supports immigration for ideological and tactical reasons.
Big Business supports immigration, because it provides a subsidized workforce.
I’m not speaking about the left here. The left’s aims are openly anti-American. As for the libertarians, they are also so opposed to the necessities of any stable social order that one doesn’t expect anything rational or useful from them. No, I’m speaking about Republicans and the center-right, who professed to care about preserving the unity of our culture yet pushed unassimilable immigrants on us; who professed to care about keeping American politics “conservative” yet pushed populations into this country that will make American politics vastly more big-state and left-wing than they otherwise would have been. Conservatives are more guilty than the left, because they professed to know better and should have known better, and because they were the natural intellectual and political leaders that could have turned the immigration issue around but instead did their utmost to make that impossible. From the endless stream of “I love immigration” articles in mainstream conservative publiations to the Republicans’ shafting of immigration reform in 1996 to Bush’s love affair with radical Moslem groups, it has been the right more than the left who has enabled the immigration disaster.
Note that I changed the last sentence of the original blog entry to read “Republicans, conservatives, and neoconservatives” instead of just “neoconservatives.” However, I do believe that the neoconservatives are more guilty than other conservatives, because they were the most articulate and active critics of multiculturalism and group rights, and were supposedly concerned about the disintegration of American culture by the diversity ideology, and yet they refused to make the connection between the diversity ideology and diverse immigration; on the contrary, with their race-blind universalist ideology they made it impossible to oppose the immigration that was the chief driving force behind the multiculturalism that they opposed.
I guarantee you that the same offhand admission that Kristol now makes about the effect of Hispanics in moving the country leftward, he or other neocons will make some day (again, completely casually, with no hint of a mea culpa) about the effect of immigration on our culture. They’ll come out and say, “Well, it’s true that mass third-world immigration has destroyed our common culture, but there’s nothing we can do about it now, and besides, to oppose a radical change in society once it has been broadly accepted is not conservative but radical. Indeed, it means being as bad as the radicals themselves. So let’s just move on to the next issue.”
Isn’t that what they did in their defense of individual rights against affirmative action? After crusading against group rights for 25 years as a threat to the essence of America, they just gave the issue up after Grutter, as though it didn’t matter after all.
And look at my recent article about Mark Steyn. He openly says that the presence of Moslems among us is going to bring us down, and says there’s nothing to do about it but laugh. Well, where was Steyn five or ten or fifteen years ago, when an articulate mainstream conservative writer criticizing immigration could have made a difference? He was nowhere. He never wrote about the subject. He’s only writing about it now, AFTER it has reached a point where, according to him, it’s too late to do anything about it.
And that’s the general neoconservative pattern. They set the tone of so much conservative debate, but, time after time, it turns out that they are not serious people. They take positions that suit themselves and their careers.
Posted by: Lawrence Auster on December 9, 2003 5:25 P.M.
What Steyn said follows a familiar pattern. Certain people, often playing a leading role in political discourse, ignore or dismiss a problem for years, and in some cases they actively stop other people from trying to do something about it. Then, at a certain point, when the problem has gotten really bad, they finally admit that it exists, but instead of saying, “I was wrong, I’m sorry for being so blind, this really is a problem, we’ve got to take action,” they say, “There’s nothing we can do about it, it’s too late.”
To summarize, in the first stage, they deny that the problem exists and refuse to lift a finger about it. In the second stage, they admit that the problem exists but they say that it’s too late to do anything about it, indeed they insist there’s no point in even talking about it. Either they deny the threat, or they surrender to the threat.
At no point in this process do they ever confront the threat and allow a debate to occur.
Posted by: Lawrence Auster on December 10, 2003 2:11 A.M.
[Many intelligent comments follow at Auster's site.]
William Kristol’s repulsive arrogance on illegal immigration
On Sunday morning on Fox Five News with Chris Wallace, William Kristol said:
I’m a liberal on immigration…. What damage have they done that’s so great in 20 years [since the 1986 amnesty]?… What’s happened that’s so terrible in the last 20 years? Is the crime rate up in the United States in the last 20 years? Is unemployment up in the United States in the last 20 years?Isn’t that something? The neocons, and in particular the Jewish neocons, have been long seen by the paleo right as people who only care about spreading an American democratic empire abroad and who, in their pedal-to-the-metal support for open borders, are indifferent to the actual well-being, and even the long-term survival, of America as a distinct country. The neocons, of course, see such suspicions as nothing but irrational bigotry against Jews. And so what does Kristol do? He comes right out and says on national television that he couldn’t care less about the mass invasion of this country by illegal aliens. He looks at 500,000 illegals and their co-ethnics demonstrating in Los Angeles,—illegal aliens demanding rights from the government of this country while carrying Mexican flags and signs saying that this continent belongs to them, not to us—and it has no effect on him. He’s pleased to inform us that personally he’s not bothered by it. Even Brit Hume was put off by Kristol’s smiling demeanor.
And they’ve been contributing to the U.S. economy and not damaging U.S. society. There have been marches with Mexican flags, which conservative talk radio is up in arms about. I mean, are these people serious? Are these people—what, are they going to be traitors to the U.S.?
… I am pro-immigration, and I am even soft on illegal immigration.
It would be one thing for Kristol to disagree with those who want to stop illegal immigration. It’s another thing to act as if he’s never read the arguments against it, has no knowledge of the profoundly disruptive effects it has had on the cities and regions most affected, and has no awareness of or sympathy with the anguish millions of Americans people feel about it. He is also ignorant of the vast contribution illegals make to crime. As with President Bush, it is simply not a part of Kristol’s makeup to have any critical thought about mass Third-World immigration (“I’m a liberal on immigration, I am even soft on illegal immigration”), so he can’t bother taking in what his colleagues on the other side of the debate are saying, or noticing the most basic facts about the issue.
I’m reminded of an interview in the early 1990s with William Kristol’s parents, Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. At the time, they were living in an apartment on New York’s Central Park South where they had lived for ten years. They told the interviewer that they had never gone for a walk in Central Park, right across the street from their apartment. They seemed quite pleased with themselves in the way they said this.
What this stunning confession represented to me was: these people have their careers, they write their articles and books, but they themselves are completely apart from and uninterested in the actual America they live in, even as, from their aerie, they advise it on its politics and culture. And now the Kristols’ son puts his parents’ dégagé attitude toward America into practical, political expression: faced with an ongoing mass invasion of this country by hostile cultural aliens, he tells us, with a smug smile, that he couldn’t care less.
Stephen writes:
Did you catch Ben Stein doing the debate segment on CBS Sunday Morning? The subject was illegal immigration and if you had tuned in during the middle of his spiel, you might have thought he was talking about some race of supreme beings from a far superior planet. Typical of neo-cons, most of his advocacy was focused not on the reality of the coming Mexican annexation of California, but more restricted to rhapsodic paeans to the illegal immigrants themselves.
It was the old “Mexicans aren’t equal to Americans—they’re actually much BETTER!” spin.
Another thing should be noted about Stein. He has two homes: one in Beverly Hills, the other in Malibu.
Neither are noted as primary destinations for squatting hordes from the third world. The Malibu residence is not a gated home, nor a gated neighborhood, it’s a gated MOUNTAIN.
Wildflower-plucking hikers who inadvertently stray off the trail in public lands near Ben Stein’s neighborhood can expect to be confronted by grim-faced private security guards riding ATVs and carrying Glocks on their hips. I think its safe to assume that Mr. Stein doesn’t have a lot of multi-families of illegal Mexican nationals crammed into the single-family residences in (either of) his neighborhoods, blasting the block with music, covering every inch of vertical surface with graffiti, and firing guns into the air to announce their victories in post-midnight cock fights.
I guess they’re a lot easier to appreciate from a distance.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 02, 2006 09:46 P.M.
