Greenfield: 3 ARTICLES THIS WEEK

Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle. 1,477 people live in this little corner of Quebec with its apple orchards, elderberry fields and small wineries. But now 400 migrants can cross the border in a single day.

On the other side of the border is New York. There the language is English. In Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, the language of choice is French. But these days you’re a more likely to hear Arabic, Urdu or Haitian French being spoken here as Roxham Road fills with clots of migrants scampering out of America.

They’re not the leftist American celebs who threaten to leave for Canada if their side doesn’t win the election. Instead they’re the illegal and dubiously legal who got the message from President Trump.

The overloaded Mounties at the border crossing are being forced to cope with the jabbering illegals, grifters and fake refugees of Trump’s migrant surge. But where Obama’s migrant surge swelled America’s southern border with incoming migrants, Trump’s migrant surge is expelling them north.

The Syrians, or anyone claiming to be, are coming. So are the Sudanese, Somalis and Haitians. This is an informal border crossing and so the rules that might protect Canada from this horde don’t apply. Quebec has become the weakest link in the Canadian border with the vast majority of border migrants invading the “True North” through vulnerable points like the dead end of Roxham Road.

The same thing is happening in Emerson, a town of 689 people named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Minnesota whose Somali settler population is invading and victimizing this peaceful community. At night Somalis can be seen walking up to Emerson to take advantage of a new country and her people.

In a town where once no one locked their doors, locals now check their bolts and turn out the lights. And then they wake up to the nightmare of migrant mobs pounding on their doors and peering through their windows in the middle of the night.

"They banged pretty hard, then 'ring ring ring' the doorbell," a mother of two young girls said. "It was scary."

Muhammad, a Somali migrant, heard that President Trump had deported a bunch of Somali asylum seekers. And so he headed for Emerson with ten others. He claims he no longer feels secure in America. And he wants to bring the rest of his family along.

Unfortunately, Muhammad and all those like him feel all too secure invading Canada.

At Hemmingford, a Quebec town near New York with less than 1,000 people, Syrians, Yemenis, Bangladeshis, Sudanese and Turks swarm to get across. Women in burkas and hijabs ignore the commands to stop. Before they used to furtively cross the border at night. Now they openly march across it in broad daylight. They know that the Canadian authorities can’t do anything to stop them.

“They heard Justin Trudeau on the radio saying Canada would continue to welcome people being excluded under Trump’s policies and they took it literally, and they came,” a lawyer for a Syrian migrant clan said.

Just as migrants had reacted to Obama’s signal to come, they are reacting to Trump’s signal by going.

The Border Patrol watches as a horde of illegal aliens from Syria, Haiti and anywhere else head for Trudeauland. "Our mission isn't to prevent people from leaving," an operator is quoted as saying.

There are plenty of Haitians heading down Roxham Road after the Department of Homeland Security told the 58,706 Haitians in the Temporary Protected Status program to move along. TPS is one of those gimmicks that the government uses to boost immigration in a backhanded fashion.

Seven years ago, Haiti suffered an earthquake. Obama’s DHS announced that there would be no more deportations. Haitian illegal aliens instantly and magically became “quake refugees” even though they had been living in America when the quake happened. Trump’s DHS warned that the free ride was over.

And so it’s on to Canada.

The number of Mountie interceptions in Quebec tripled since Trump took office. The Mounties may always get their man, but they’re getting far too many of them these days. More than they can handle.

"Our agents are in a state of crisis right now,” the president of the Customs and Immigration Union said.

But they’re the victims of a broken Trudeau regime that puts migrants first and Canadians last. And the Mounties have been turned into a delivery service for bringing illegals and their luggage to Canada. A hundred soldiers have been dispatched, not to stop the illegals, but to put up housing for them.

"Our role is limited to putting up tents with a rigid floor and installing heating and lighting," Major Yves Desbiens said. When that’s done, some members of the Canadian Amy will stay on as the maintenance crew for the invaders. So much for the Army’s proud motto, ‘We stand on guard for thee.’

Who stands on guard for Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, for Hemmingford and Emerson? And for Canada?

In days gone by, armies kept invaders out of a country instead of accommodating them. But under Prime Minister Trudeau, the Canadian military is there to facilitate the invasion of Canada.

The arrests are a formality. The invading horde ignores the signs and warnings by officers to turn back. They’re arrested, given food and put on a bus along with their luggage to Montreal. There they can expect free health care and a $650 check. And clamorous demands for social services and housing.

The Olympic Stadium opened in more hopeful times for the ’76 Summer Olympics. These days “The Big Owe”, the stadium that nearly broke Montreal houses an even bigger and more expensive disaster. The $1.5 billion Olympic debt was paid off a decade ago after a long thirty years. Now the doughnut shaped arena swarms with freeloading migrants sleeping, eating and hosing off in the team locker showers.

The stadium plan comes down to Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre. Coderre had blamed the migrant swarm on President Trump’s immigration policies. But it’s the fault of Trudeau and Coderre’s migration policies. If your neighbor locks his door and you don’t, is it his fault if squatters break into your house?

"The City of Montreal welcomes Haitian refugees," Coderre had tweeted. "You can count on our full collaboration."

Collaboration was all too appropriate of a word.

Quebec Immigration Minister Kathleen Weil insisted that everything was fine. "We can handle it. There is not one ministry that is concerned about that — the federal government is not concerned about it."

Weil was echoing Angela Merkel’s delusional mass migrant coping slogan of, “Wir schaffen das.”

And what is there to be concerned about? Except that the Canadian crisis keeps getting worse.

In July, 50 people were arriving a day. Now it’s between 250 to 300. At Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, there was a 1000% increase in under two months. 700 have been crammed into the Big Owe. And Quebec will be on the hook for them even longer than for the stadium they’re living in. It will always owe them.

"There is no work for people in Quebec," a native resident complained. "There are no good jobs and we don't have money for the old people."

Meanwhile Syrian migrants have become a burden on Montreal schools which have been forced to hire specialized teachers. While back in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, lunch had to be provided for 900 migrants. In Emerson, government officials wanted to house migrants in the town’s ice skating ring.

Trudeau’s government has dismissed the idea that there might be a problem. And for good reason.

When Trudeau took over he named the President of the Canadian Somali Congress as Minister of Immigration. Ahmed Hussen, the new Minister of Immigration, had come to Canada as a Somali refugee.

Hussen had consistently insisted that there was no crisis while ignoring reports warning that there was.

The door to Canada was pried open from the inside. And only Canadians can take it out of Trudeau and Hussen’s hands and close it again. Under the conservative Harper government, Canada had sane immigration policies while America was suffering under the scourge of Obama’s illegal border surge. Now the governments have changed and the surge has shifted with them.

Canada’s crisis reminds us that illegal immigration is not an inescapable problem. It’s a product of government policies. We can solve all. All it takes is leaders with the political will to do it.

Borders exist to protect a country. We see that in Europe. We see it in America and Canada. And leaders who refuse to protect the border are really refusing to protect the nation that it represents.

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom." Benjamin Franklin

"Whenever we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary." Thomas Paine

"It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains." Patrick Henry

Civilizations fall rapidly due to an inescapable catastrophe. Water sources dry up. A powerful empire invades.

Civilizations fall slowly due to a moral catastrophe. A moral catastrophe is not a failure of arms or food. It's a failure of the sustaining virtues of the civilization. As the society tumbles slowly downward, it will encounter defeat in battle, collapse of its infrastructure and food shortages. But these are symptoms, not causes. The cause is the degeneration of the society and its people.

A civilization is not a mechanical endeavor, but a moral one. The virtues that uphold a civilization, the ability to reason, to work hard, to study how to solve a problem, to sacrifice now for future gain, to cooperate with those outside the tribe, to value truth, beauty and goodness for their own sake are individual, but they are also social. A society that cultivates these virtues in people can prosper. As society loses these virtues, it grows dysfunctional. It loses winnable wars, it squanders vast wealth, it loses its work ethics, its ability to cooperate and to plan for the long term. It slowly dies.

Barbarians are not savages because they wear loincloths or bones through their noses, or even because they lack the majority of these virtues, but because they lack the ability to appreciate them. A barbarian who appreciates civilizational virtues can become civilized, but a civilized barbarian may wear a suit and tie, but is still a savage because he cannot even appreciate the virtues of his ancestors.

As a civilization declines, it becomes barbaric. Before the savages invade it from the outside, its own people have become savages. They enthusiastically welcome the savages. They are drawn to the culture and norms of the savages because these echo their own descent into barbarism. The cult of the noble savage is simply civilized barbarians glamorizing their own descent down the moral ladder.

Civilized men and women have principles. Such principles are the intersection of ideals and interests. Ideals on their own easily fall into an abstract nobility that can manifest as anything from sainthood to self-destructive aspiration. Interests on their own leave selfish people incapable of maintaining anything greater than themselves. Virtue negotiates between interests and ideals. This negotiation is expressed as a principle. A principle realizes an ideal and localizes it in an interest.

Utopians kill and die for ideals. The Nazis, Communists and Islamists are Utopians. Civilized men live and fight for principles. Utopianism is a civilizational degeneracy. It usually precedes barbarism. Sensing the decline, men and women embrace some pure ideal, they idealize equality or race, and set off on a quest to construct a new civilization around it by destroying the existing civilization. They are convinced that their ideal will create a civilization that can live forever. When their ideal fails, they revert to their barbarian roots by worshiping the shamanic personality force of their leader. And these new barbarians murder, scream and cavort around the fire convinced that their new god can stave off the fall of night. And when the fires goes out, all that remains is ash, horror and rubble.

Civilized men and women understood that nothing mortal is immortal. That which is best in us, is virtue. It is that, which in our flawed and humble way, makes us closest to the God that made us. Our principles are how we aspire to keep that faith. When we lose our principles, we destroy whatever it was we sought to preserve, we become our own worst enemies and bring about our own destruction.

Principles are defined at their farthest end by what we must do and what we would never do. But their soul is self-awareness. The essence of virtue is to know thyself. Few are so innately good that they can always do the right thing without ever examining and questioning themselves. It is this self-examination through conscience that is the great moral labor of all religion and philosophy.

Everyone is naturally inclined to believe in their own goodness. But goodness comes from questioning one's own worth and examining one's own deeds. It comes from transcending our emotions, our anger and our pain, our self-pity, jealousy, resentment and vengefulness to become better than we are. The essence of virtue is not doing what comes naturally, but controlling the natural impulse and rising above it. That is how civilizations are built. We build civilizations by transcending ourselves. We destroy them by giving and taking permission to fall to our worst impulses.

Interests and ideals tend to opposite ends. In war, ideals may say that one should never kill and interests counsel one to survive by fleeing the battlefield. Virtues guide us to principles that overcome the extremes by finding our higher responsibility in the intersection of ideal and interest.

Civilizations depend on responsible people. It is the people who come to work every day and do their best who keep a country running. It is the soldiers who advance to the enemy and return fire, who win wars. It is leaders who do the difficult things who leave their country better than they found it. It is the men and women who search their souls, who leave this world better people than they entered it.

In a declining civilization, there are few responsible people. There are many who will want a title, but few who will do the job. There are many who will shout, but few who will reason. There are many who will wave a flag, but few who will fight for a cause. There are many who would destroy, but few who will build. There are many who will lecture, but few who will do.

In a civilization on the verge of a moral catastrophe, the invocation of virtues and principles is met with contemptuous laughter. It is widely understood that irresponsible behavior is better, that decency is for weaklings and fools, that anger is the only true virtue that suffices to achieve all ends. Manners vanish like autumn leaves in a breeze. Moral compasses show nothing. Intellectual consistency ceases to matter. Men believe contradictory things at different hours of the day. Illusory victories are always being achieved even as real defeats follow.

We wonder why great civilizations fall. Couldn't the Romans see what was coming? The first thing that goes in a moral catastrophe is virtue, the second is reason, the third is foresight, the fourth is competence and the fifth is self-control. And by then you have barbarians in the midst of civilization.

When virtue goes, civilizations rationalize destructive behavior. When reason goes, they become unable to even think about a problem with any degree of consistency. When foresight goes, they no longer understand consequences. When all those are gone, competence is all but impossible. When there is no self-control, nothing matters anymore.

Civilizations are built on virtue. Without virtue, there is no civilization.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to cheer on Communists and Nazis punching each other in major American cities while civil society disintegrates around them.

In Dallas, a black nationalist activist shot and killed 5 police officers at a Black Lives Matter anti-police rally. Instead of condemning BLM, Barack Obama defended a racist hate group whose role model is Assata Shakur, a wanted black nationalist cop killer, at the funerals of the murdered officers.

The left killed civil rights and replaced it with black nationalism. The racial supremacism of black nationalism that killed those officers is everywhere. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi are lionized as brilliant thinkers instead of hateful racists, Amazon has ordered a black nationalist secessionist fantasy from Aaron McGruder and Showtime aired ‘Guerilla,’ a miniseries glamorizing Black Panther terrorism.

But racism is a two-way street. So is violence. Extremists feed into each other.

You can’t legitimize one form of racism without legitimizing all of them. The media may advance this hypocritical position. Obama used the shameful “reverse racism” euphemism that distinguishes between black and white racism. But propaganda and spin don’t change the physics of human nature.

Either all racism is bad. Or all racism is acceptable.

Charlottesville is what happens when you normalize racism and street violence. Every normalization of extremism equally normalizes the extremism of the opposite side.

A civil society depends on a consensus. ‘Racism is bad’ is an example of such a consensus. If you normalize black nationalism, you will get more white nationalism. If you normalize leftist street violence against Trump supporters, you will also get more street violence against leftists.

Extremists want to eliminate the consensus of civil society. They want to destroy the idea that there’s any solution except violence through confrontations that show the helplessness of civil society.

That’s true of black nationalists and white nationalists, of Communists and Nazis, of Antifa and Vanguard, of the tankies and hipster Nazis of the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right. They’re a set of evil twins and when you unleash one, you unleash the other. Their real enemies aren’t each other, but everyone in the middle. The bourgeois normies who don’t want to replace society with their totalitarian nightmare.

Street violence raises the bar so that only the violent will participate in protests. If you “no platform” campus speakers, then the only speakers you get will be those willing to face bomb threats, arson, and physical assaults. If you fire people for their views, political activism becomes the province of anonymous trolls and unemployed street thugs. Extremism limits political discourse to extremists.

If Democrats really want to stop the rise of Neo-Nazi violence, there’s a very easy way. Stop normalizing black nationalism and the Alt-Left. End the racist witch hunts for white privilege. Make it clear that street violence is unacceptable and that racism is bad no matter who it comes from. Allow people you disagree with to express their views without trying to destroy their lives.

But that’s the opposite of what the Dems will do. They don’t want fewer Neo-Nazis; they want more of them. They don’t want fewer attacks like Charlottesville and Charleston. They want more of them.

The Dems have become an extremist party run by the radical left. Obama, Holder, and Lynch made common cause with black nationalist hate groups against civil society. It began when Obama defended the vile racism of Jeremiah Wright and concluded with DOJ organized race riots. DNC boss Tom Perez addresses La Raza and his deputy Keith Ellison is a veteran of the Nation of Islam.

The radical left wants to see Neo-Nazis gain prominence on the right to polarize the country. It wants to see our values and norms drowned in violence so that it has an excuse to eliminate free speech. It seeks to eliminate democracy by making the other side appear nightmarishly dangerous. It plots to impose a totalitarian system on the United States by empowering extremists to destroy the current system.

And their opposite numbers waving swastika flags want the same thing. The difference is that they don’t control the Republican Party the way that the Alt-Left and black nationalists control the Democrats.

Charlottesville is what happens when civil society fails. And those who set the terms of permissive discourse, who control the media, academia and social norms, are responsible for the failure.

Conservatives don’t have that kind of power. It’s the left that does.

Liberals, if there are any left on the left, can shut down racism and extremism. Or they can continue normalizing it until it’s mainstream and meaningless.

If you want to understand how we got to Charlottesville, the events at Evergreen State on the other side of the country are as good a place as any to start.

Evergreen’s President Bridges, the progressive who had called for safe spaces and allowed intersectional left-wing racists to terrorize his campus over their demands for racial segregation, was asked in an interview about accusations that he is a white supremacist.

Bridges replied that he doesn’t believe that he is a white supremacist. And then added, “It depends on what you mean by white supremacist.” He concedes, “I am a white person in a position of privilege.”

White privilege is how the intersectional left defines white supremacy. Any white people who aren’t allying with them to destroy Western civilization are defined as white supremacists. And even those who do, like Bridges, can always be accused of white supremacy for not destroying it hard enough.

When you spend enough time accusing everyone who doesn’t share your politics or even your race of racism, you make the term meaningless.

That’s what the left did over eight years of Obama. By the time the election rolled around, Hillary was defining all Trump voters as racists and sexists.

When you spend enough time crying wolf, eventually a real wolf appears. A real wolf showed up in Charlottesville.

The left spent eight years dismantling any meaningful definition of racism for political reasons. The practical effect of their actions was to eliminate social sanctions for actual racists.

And the real racists were happy to take advantage of the new climate.

When the left insists that everyone with white skin is part of white supremacy, that Shakespeare, Beethoven and all of Western civilization embody white supremacy, it’s echoing the actual talking points of white supremacy.

If you tell all Obama critics and Trump supporters that they’re racists often enough, some will decide that maybe they are racists.

If you tell a student who objects to racially segregated areas on campus that she is a white supremacist, she will be more likely to become one.

When you marginalize everyone to the right of you, some of the marginalized will accept the definition.

And when that happens, the left wins, the extremists win, and it becomes harder to maintain any kind of functioning civil society in which we settle conflicts through compromises rather than street violence.

Compromises are uncomfortable.

After the Civil War, the Union was preserved, but Southerners were allowed to honor their cause. It was an uncomfortable compromise, but it helped limit the violence from a conflict that had claimed the lives of 2% of the population. The Taliban campaign by black nationalists to tear down Confederate memorials was a deliberate effort at shattering a compromise that kept civil society working.

And that too led to Charlottesville.

Uncomfortable compromises are how we learn to live with each other. It means that there can be memorials of Robert E. Lee and streets named after Malcolm X. Tolerating people whose views we don’t like is one of the best ways to marginalize domestic extremists. When one set of extremists is empowered to wipe out the other, we end up with a civil war. Just ask Edmund Ruffin and John Brown.

Democrats claim a mandate from the “Right Side of History” to eliminate all the compromises. Catholic nuns must pay for abortions and birth control, Christian bakers and florists must participate in gay weddings, every white person must confess their racism, and every left-wing extremist must get their way.

That’s how you tear a society apart.

The Bill of Rights is an uncomfortable compromise. It says that we have to put up with people we don’t like. The Democrats, under the influence of the left, are rejecting that idea. But that goes both ways too.

You can have a liberal society or an illiberal one. But you can’t have a society that is selectively liberal when it comes to your bigotry, but illiberal of the bigotry of others, that believes you have the right to say anything you please without consequences, but that no one else does, that you can punch, but not be punched. That’s a totalitarian state. And the only way to realize it is through violence.

Democrats need to take an honest look at the street violence in Seattle, in Portland, in Berkeley and Charlottesville, and decide if this is what they really want. If they don’t, it’s time for them to stop normalizing left-wing extremism. If they do, then they are to blame for the next Dallas or Charlottesville.

(This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine)

Friday, August 18, 2017

The Invasion of Canada

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Virtue and the Moral Fall of Civilization

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Weimar America