Political winds are giving The Donald the Trump bump, with the real-estate mogul taking second place in polls on the 2016 presidential race. But economic winds are a different matter, with the brash businessman becoming the latest American targeted for destruction by the politically correct powers-that-be.
Donald Trump (shown), who officially declared his White House run June 16, recently took second place in national, New Hampshire, and Iowa polling for the GOP nomination (in Iowa he’s tied with renowned physician Ben Carson). But after making comments about the criminal nature of far too many illegal migrants, he has lost a certain place: in the hearts of some business interests. NBC dropped The Apprentice franchise and the Miss USA and Miss Universe beauty pageants, Spanish-language network Univision has also dropped Miss Universe, Macy’s has kicked his clothing line to the curb, and Mayor “Bolshevik” Bill de Blasio announced that NYC was reviewing its contracts with Trump.
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The comments in question were made during the mogul’s campaign announcement. Here they are in toto:
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.
Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Trump has stood by his remarks, only issuing the clarification that illegal migrants from other nations enter the United States via Mexico as well. Yet given that we share a border with Mexico, 50 percent of illegals now hail from that nation, fully 67 percent of American Hispanics have origins there, and that the Mexican government has actually issued its citizens pamphlets on how to sneak into the United States and game our system, the nation will naturally draw focus when the subject is illegal migration.
Of course, Trump’s comment was not exactly politician-like; it was extemporaneous and a tad hyperbolic, more suggestive of boiling radio-talk passion than campaign-trail boilerplate. But aside from name recognition, that’s Trump’s appeal: He’s offering the plain talk for which so many hunger. If you want canned and carefully cultivated PC political statements, well, that’s why Jeb Bushes were invented.
Many would also aver that Trump’s statements were essentially true. It isn’t Mexico’s Carlos Slims furtively traversing the Rio Grande, and we can read stories almost daily about rapes and other crimes committed by illegals; moreover, while the numbers are disputed by some, it has been said that almost 30 percent of federal prison inmates are non-Americans. Of course, many of these felons are no doubt incarcerated for immigration violations (or at least were when Obama still enforced immigration law). Critics, however, would say this gets at the point:
All illegal migrants are by definition criminals. Illegal entry is just that — illegal.
In addition, as pundit Ann Coulter opined on the matter:
A curious media might also wonder why any immigrants are committing crimes in America. A nation’s immigration policy, like any other government policy, ought to be used to help the people already here — including the immigrants, incidentally.
It’s bad enough that immigrants, both legal and illegal, are accessing government benefits at far above the native rate, but why would any country be taking another country’s criminals? We have our own criminals! No one asked for more.
No one did, but it’s not the first time they’ve come. After the Mariel Boatlift brought 125,000 Cubans to Florida in 1980, it was discovered that the nation’s Marxist dictator, Fidel Castro, included perhaps as many as 40,000 criminals and mental-asylum patients among the refugees. This is the inevitable result of loose immigration policy.
Yet none of this may matter. As Coulter also said when addressing Trump’s comments, “The media’s response was to boycott him. One thing they didn’t do was produce any facts showing he was wrong.”
And that is the reality. Whether or not the Trump comments’ substance was true or the style tactful is irrelevant to today’s “elites.” He transgressed against their politically correct agenda, and for that he must be destroyed. And this is why his travails reflect an issue far larger than even Trump and his empire: The Left’s use of economic persecution to silence dissenters.
A while back the news was buzzing with stories of bakers, wedding planners, and other businessmen boycotted, fined, and otherwise persecuted for refusing to service faux weddings. Some were driven out of business. A Miami high-school principal was removed from his job early last month merely for disagreeing — quite soberly — with the conventional narrative on the McKinney, Texas, arrest incident. Also in June, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist was forced out of his position at the University College London for making an innocuous joke about women. In 2010, pundit Juan Williams was fired by National Public Radio for saying he gets nervous when seeing traditional-garb bedecked Muslims on airplanes. And this is just a small sampling of people crushed by the Iron Muzzle descending across the West.
Of course, the United States isn’t yet like most of the West, where one can be imprisoned for politically incorrect commentary under hate-speech law. But as ancient Chinese sage Confucius noted, social pressure can be more effective than law; when you know dissent can mean losing your livelihood and reputation, well, it has a way of stilling the tongue.
And that’s the whole idea.
As I’ve written before, the Culture War is long over. What we’re witnessing now is a “pacification effort”: The Left is in the process of stamping out the last vestiges of dissent because, if the Truth is never heard, a monopoly over future generations’ hearts and minds is made possible.
This is why “offensive” leftist comments rarely carry consequences. Boston University professor Saida Grundy said that white males were a “problem population” and viciously taunted a white rape victim on Facebook. Dalhousie University professor Jacqueline Warwick suggested in January that teachers should enforce an “explicit” rule stating that “men are not allowed to speak first” in class. And vile anti-Christian bigot and “sex columnist” Dan Savage told Christians at a high school conference to “ignore the bull[**]*t in the Bible” and called students who walked out on one of his speeches “pansy-a**ed.” All these individuals still have their jobs — and Savage can command $24,000 for one speech.
And Donald Trump is currently on the wrong side of the pacification effort. The difference is that he doesn’t face impoverishment and has the resources to strike back; in fact, he’s filed a breach-of-contract suit against Univision for $500,000 and plans similar action against NBC. But what of everyone else?
There is only one way to avoid being silenced (for now). In April I cited the case of Memories Pizza in Walkerton, Indiana, which was targeted for destruction after owners Kevin and Crystal O’Connor said they would decline to service a faux wedding. In this case, however, the couple was spared economic destruction: A GoFundMe.com campaign raised $842,000 for the O’Connors in just two days. I then pointed out that this effort needs to be consistently replicated, writing:
To this end, traditionalists need to create a quick-response organization that can provide material aid to any businessman persecuted by the [Left]…. For average traditionalist entities are small and can easily be picked off one by one. But unite them, ah — that’s a formidable force. And if this organization had 500,000 citizen members — precious few in a nation of 317 million — each pledging to donate a mere $2 to any targeted business, that’s $1,000,000. And it would send a message: “You want to ‘hurt’ Christians who disagree with you? You can try. But you’ll impoverish no one. Your actions will result in the object of your hate becoming rich.”
This would powerfully negate the Left’s strategy, as it uses their characteristic envy to neutralize the actuation of their characteristic hate. As this research shows, they cannot stand others having more than they do. And the prospect of their actions making a despised target wealthy is intolerable to them. This was evidenced, mind you, in left-wing websites’ comments sections after the Memories Pizza affair: Posters were absolutely livid that the O’Connors were making out like, uh, let’s say, global-warming/green-business con-artists or the Clintons. Some even accused the couple of orchestrating the whole incident as a scam.
In fact, if Trump and some other wealthy Americans organized and funded the above endeavor, they could probably do far more good than a presidential run would realize. We all should remember that tyrannical movements aggregate power by creating disunity and then picking off the isolated. And as Ben Franklin warned, “If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.”
Photo of Donald Trump: Gage Skidmore
