Scheming partisans catch wave

(This is an abbreviated reprise of earlier essays.)

In August 2017, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell told an interviewer that he wished for a president who, unlike Donald Trump: “would not give his daughter to a Jew.” Cantwell then sneered: “I don’t think you can feel about race like I do, and watch that Kushner bastard walk around with that beautiful girl. Okay?”

I shared those detestable words with a purpose. That is what genuine bigotry sounds like.

Calls to maintain national borders and enforce citizenship laws are hardly of a piece with that horrific prefatory citation. In fact, they are not within philosophical miles of it.

Splentic anti-Trump expositors diminish the horrors of Nazism and race hate by falsely linking them to legitimate defense of national sovereignty.

But their attempts are crippled by logical flaws.

In historic instances, national citizens were denied rights due them by virtue of existent citizenship. The Rev. Dr. King, for example, argued persuasively that the US government needed to live up to promises our Constitution makes to citizens. He didn’t advocate that non-Americans be elevated.

And there is another pivotal distinction. Each Jew and every black was included because of group membership. But legal immigrants are not the people at issue, here, nor are they the objects of immigration enforcement. Illegal immigration is an action, a behavior, and not a religion or immutable characteristic. 

Advocates of granting legal citizenship to illegals sometimes argue that such has become their rightful due, as illegals may have lived for years in the United States.

Consider the principle of legal status in another context:

Five years ago, Roy stole a blue car, in Philadelphia. Today, he is still driving it. Because five years have passed, is the car now legitimately Roy’s, or does it remain stolen property?

Voices demanding that citizenship be extended to scofflaw non-citizens point to possible past economic contributions. They further insist that illegals brought into this country when they were children are without culpability, and know no other life, no other country.

Consider, then, another hypothetical:

After having stolen the blue, Philadelphia car, Roy gives it to Pete. Though initially unaware that Roy had stolen it, Pete later realizes that. It is the only car Pete has ever had. And over the course of several years of driving it and enjoying its benefits, Pete spent considerable cash on gas, oil, and general mechanical upkeep.

Do those factors make the car no longer the bounty of criminality, and somehow Pete’s rightful property? Should the original owner of the blue Philadelphia car simply absorb the loss, and exempt Roy and Pete from applicable laws against theft?

No, and no.

Anti-Trump activists would twist our common political and social cultures to drastic unreason, until no innocent citizen dare utter any words but condemnatory ones about national, heraldic, historic, and politically conservative subjects.

Passion for combating divisive racial and religious hates is admirable. And when sincerely acted upon, it can be an effective realization of America’s finest moral quality.

But when opportunistically leveraged with intended political ambition, it allows animation to true hatred of the type enunciated by the cretinous Cantwell.

Trump assailants exploit border enforcement to spew hatred at the President of the United States and his patriotic supporters. The genuineness of their claimed anti-bigotry interest is dubious.

As they do not accurately characterize the plague, they cannot be productive agents in its eradication.

They are reprehensibly surfboarding to political agency atop the suffering of others.

Iowan DC Larson is an author, freelance writer, and blogger. His latest book is Ideas Afoot (Bromley Street Press). His essays have run in Daily Caller, American Thinker, USA Today, and numerous others.