On last Thursday's Fox News Primetime, I mentioned a small but telling news item on the latest benefit accorded to illegal aliens. Whenever you fly anywhere in America, you require picture ID - so that, when you get to the head of the great endless security line, the TSA agent can get out his jeweler's loupe and examine how the ink lies on the paper. And, when he's finished doing that, he can fish out his UV light to study the watermark on your ID.
Which is all bollocks even by the standards of American security-state bureaucracy. Why bother going to all the tedious trouble of fake ID when real ID is so easy to acquire? On September 11th 2001, four of the terrorists boarded the flight with genuine, valid picture ID issued by the state of Virginia and obtained through the illegal-immigrant day-workers' network run out of the parking lot of the 7-Eleven in Falls Church.
If that didn't get Americans mad about the cosseting of the undocumented, I doubt they'll care a fig about this latest privilege. But I thought it worth mentioning anyway: While you're stuck with the Loupe & Light guy poring over your ID, the federal government announced last week that migrants crossing the southern border will be permitted to fly within the United States without any valid ID. You're on orange alert now and forever, they're in the express check-in.
This is where selective enforcement of the laws always leads - to a broader contempt for all law, and an end to equality before the law. In 2021 no developed nation needs mass unskilled immigration. Some have it for historical reasons - a hangover of empire, as in Britain and France; some have it for sentimentalist pseudo-humanitarian reasons, as in Sweden and Norway. But neither of these rationales account for what the laughably misnamed Department of Homeland Security is doing at America's southern border.
I had no idea where Tucker would take this, but he decided to go big picture:
As CNN would later tut:
Steyn did not object to Carlson's comments.
No, I didn't. Because I agreed with almost every word.
But, even if I hadn't, I'd still have let him say it - because, as a general principle, I'm philosophically opposed to narrowing the bounds of public discourse on any topic. And, in the case of mass illegal immigration, they've been narrowed to the point where there is virtually no language with which it is permitted to discuss this subject honestly.
And thus, as Tucker pointed out, you can't use the word "replacement" on American television - unless, of course, you're calling for the replacement of Tucker Carlson. So the pajama boys at Media Matters had their usual fit, and The Washington Post et al all piled on, and then Jonathan Greenblatt, the Obama hack who now runs the Anti-Defamation League, demanded that Fox fire Tucker. Lachlan Murdoch stood by his host, although in his letter to Greenblatt he was rather more polite than I would have been:
'Fox Corporation shares your values and abhors anti-semitism, white supremacy and racism of any kind,' Murdoch wrote ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt on Sunday. 'In fact, I remember fondly the ADL honoring my father with your International Leadership Award, and we continue to support your mission.'
Lachlan may remember it fondly, but Greenblatt shoved it right back down his gullet:
'Although I appreciate the sentiment that you and your father continue to support ADL's mission, supporting Mr. Carlson's embrace of the "great replacement theory" stands in direct contrast to that mission,' Greenblatt wrote. 'As you noted in your letter, ADL honored your father over a decade ago,' Greenblatt continued, 'but let me be clear that we would not do so today, and it does not absolve you, him, the network, or its board from the moral failure of not taking action against Mr. Carlson.'
If I were Rupert Murdoch, I'd return that worthless bauble to Greenblatt and tell him to f*ck off - because of the sub-text of that response: He's saying that a decade ago Rupert was a controversial global figure but nonetheless sufficiently powerful that one was obliged to treat with him and occasionally honor him. Now, by saying "we would not do so today", he's sneering: We think you guys are on the way out, and we're happy to pile on and accelerate that.
As for "supporting your mission", I have no idea what the ADL's "mission" is these day: They're either rubes or just the usual American "activist" grifter racket. But at any rate they had no difficulty giving a genuine Jew-hater, Ilhan Omar, the full hagiographic tongue-bath in an ADL book of "inspiring stories". If you're interested in committing immigration fraud, Ms Omar's story is certainly inspiring - because it doesn't get more all-in than being willing to marry your brother.
Here's how Tucker responded to the umpteenth call to eighty-six him. You won't want to miss a minute of this:
As Tucker says:
If you heard prominent people talk like this in any other country, you'd be confused. A nation's leadership class admitting they hope to replace their own citizens seems grotesque. If you believed in democracy, you would work to protect the potency of every citizen's vote, obviously. You wonder if people even debate questions like this in countries that don't hate themselves, like Japan or South Korea or Israel.
He's right on that last point. Until the Covid ended freedom of movement, one of the reasons I liked visiting, say, Slovenia or Finland is because when the chit-chat gets going nobody's wasting their breath on utterly fraudulent "national conversations" on race and the merits of undocumented immigration - which frees up an extraordinary amount of time to talk about other, truer things.
Tucker also took pains to point out that on "replacement theories" Greenblatt is a humbug:
Go to the Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) website sometime if you'd like a glimpse of what an unvarnished conversation about a country's national interest might look like. In a short essay posted to the site, the ADL explains why the state of Israel should not allow more Arabs to become citizens with voting rights:
"With historically high birth rates among the Palestinians and a possible influx of Palestinian refugees and their descendants now living around the world," the ADL explains, "Jews would quickly be a minority within a bi-national state, thus likely ending any semblance of equal representation and protections. In this situation, the Jewish population would be increasingly politically -- and potentially physically -- vulnerable.
"It is unrealistic and unacceptable," the ADL continues, "to expect the State of Israel to voluntarily subvert its own sovereign existence and nationalist identity and become a vulnerable minority within what was once its own territory."
Now, from Israel's perspective, this makes perfect sense. Why would any democratic nation make its own citizens less powerful? Isn't that the deepest betrayal of all? In the words of the ADL, why would a government subvert its own sovereign existence? Good question. Maybe ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt will join "Tucker Carlson Tonight" some time to explain and tell us whether that same principle applies to the United States.
Indeed - although the prioritization of progressive pieties above their "mission" is so advanced, I wouldn't be surprised to see the likes of Greenblatt abandon Zionism as a practical matter in the years ahead. His contemptible predecessor certainly had no difficulty abandoning the remnants of Europe's Jewish community, as I wrote a few years back in "Hath Not a Jew, Eyes?" - after Abe Foxman blamed the Continent's new Jew-hate on "neo-Nazis" and "neo-Fascists":
I would like Foxman to go to Toulouse, a city the size of Jacksonville, Florida, where in recent years one synagogue has been firebombed, another set alight when two burning cars were driven into it, a third burgled and "Dirty Jews" scrawled on the ark housing the Torah, where a kosher butcher's was strafed with gunfire, and a Jewish sports association attacked with Molotov cocktails, and three Jewish children murdered outside their grade school, I would like Foxman to go to Toulouse and tell any Jew he finds there (they are advised by their rabbis not to wear identifying marks of their faith) that it's all the work of "anti-government people".
I would like him to go to Malmö - once the first Christian city in Denmark and soon to be the first Muslim city in Sweden - and tell such Jews as he can find (they are abandoning the town) that the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and the ugly reinforced steel doors at the Jewish kindergarten and the rocket-proof glass in the windows of the synagogue are all the fault of "neo-Nazis"...
I would like him to go to Villiers-le-Bel, where a Jewish girl was brutally attacked by a gang shouting "Jews must die!", or to Odense, where the headmaster says his school can no longer take Jewish pupils for security reasons, and tell them it's the fault of Danish "nationalists" and French "neo-Nazis".
But I don't suppose Abe Foxman will go anywhere outside his bubble, will he?
As Laura Rosen Cohen writes of this contemptible nothing of a man:
'Shame on you, Abraham Foxman. Shame on you.
'These Jews are a danger to the Jewish people...
'It's so cozy to be a professional Jew, fighting the ghosts of WW2 over and over and never facing the real threats to the Jewish people.'
That's another thing the ADL will never debate on telly.
~Mark is scheduled to join Tucker on the telly tomorrow coast to coast across America. Also on Wednesday, the above-mentioned Laura Rosen Cohen will be here at SteynOnline with her indispensable guide to the real world in Laura's Links.
Laura's Links is made possible by The Mark Steyn Club. You can find more details about our Club here - and we also have a great gift membership.
