Described by a critic as “one of those rare movies you can say is perfect in every way,” “A Christmas Story,” directed by Bob Clark, debuted in 1983. Set in the 1940s, the film depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of 9-year-old Ralphie Parker, who yearns for that gift of all gifts: The Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

This was boyhood before the Nerf gun and “bang-bang you’re dead” were banned; family life prior to “One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads,” and Christmas before Saint Nicholas was denounced for his whiteness, and “Merry Christmas” condemned for its exclusiveness.

If children could choose the family into which they were born, most would opt for the kind depicted in “A Christmas Story,” where mom is a happy homemaker, dad a devoted working stiff, and between them, they have zero repertoire of progressive psychobabble to rub together.

Although clearly adored, Ralphie is not encouraged to share his feelings at every turn. Nor is he, in the spirit of gender-neutral parenting, circa 2020, urged to act out like a girl if he’s feeling … girlie.

Instead, Ralphie is taught restraint and self-control. And horrors: The little boy even has his mouth washed out with soap and water for uttering the “F” expletive. “My personal preference was for Lux,” reveals Ralphie, “but I found Palmolive had a nice piquant, after-dinner flavor—heady but with just a touch of mellow smoothness.” Ralphie is, of course, guilt-tripped with stories about starving Biafrans when he refuses to finish his food.

The parenting practiced so successfully by Mr. and Mrs. Parker fails every progressive commandment. By today’s standards, the delightful, un-precocious protagonist of “A Christmas Story” would be doomed to a lifetime on the therapist’s chaise lounge—and certainly to daily doses of Ritalin, as punishment for unbridled boyishness and daydreaming in class. Yet despite his therapeutically challenged upbringing, Ralphie is a happy little boy. For progressives—for whom it has long been axiomatic that the traditional family is the source of oppression for women and children—this is inexplicable.

Perhaps the first to have conflated the values of the bourgeois family with pathological authoritarianism was philosopher Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s formulations on authoritarianism have informed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In general, the consensus among these rights’ advocates has been that the traditional family’s hierarchical structure disempowers children. The solution: Let the State destabilize the parent-child relationship via policies that would define and limit the power of the parent, while increasing the power of child and political proxies.

While America’s founders intended for the family to be left untouched as “the major source of an orderly and free society”—Hillsdale College historian Allan Carlson’s words—politicians and jurists have decided to the contrary. What was once the economic and social backbone of American society has been inestimably weakened by both the welfare state and the Supreme Court—what with the latter’s redefinition of family and marriage, and the former’s incremental steps to trounce parents as the child’s primary socialization agent.

Culturally, the family has been demoted to what Charles Sykes once termed a “Therapeutic Family.” Having “adjusted itself to the new demands of the social contract with the Self,” wrote Sykes in A Nation of Victims, “the modern family has ceased to inculcate values.” Instead, it exists exclusively for the ostensible unleashing of “self-expression and creativity” in its members.

Progressives have triumphed. Very little remains of the unit that was once a vector for the transmission of values in American society. Women and children are less likely than ever to have to endure the confines of this bête noire of a family, with its typically “oppressed” mother, old-fashioned father and contained kids. Nowadays, women are more likely to be divorced, never married, or to bear children out of wedlock.

Unencumbered by marriage, women are also more prone to poverty, addictions and sexually transmitted diseases. Their children, a third of whom are being raised in households headed by a mother only, are paying the price in a greater propensity for poverty, and higher dropout, addiction and crime rates. Witness the black family. Having survived the perils of slavery, it was still intact until the 1930s, when the dead hand of the welfare state finished it off. As a social unit, the black American family is near extinct.

Contemporary America’s familial fragmentation—sky-high divorce rates and illegitimacy—has translated into juvenile crime, drug abuse and illiteracy. Yet despite all the State has done to “liberate” children from the strictures of the traditional family, ask any “emancipated” child and he’ll tell you: More than anything, he yearns for a mom and dad like Ralphie’s.

Indeed, lucky is the little boy who has such a family. Luckier still is the lad who has both such a family and … a BB gun.

©2020 ILANA MERCER
American Greatness
Dissident Mama
Quarterly Review
December 24

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THE topic: American lives snuffed out by illegal aliens.

The forum: The ubiquitous, Fox News, dual-perspective panel that never fails to dim debate.

Arguing in favor of letting potential killers come: Geraldo Rivera, a former daytime talk-show, bosom buddy of Sean Hannity, and a permanent fixture on Fox.

The Rivera “argument”: That some criminal aliens kill is incidental and immaterial to their status as uninvited, unvetted interlopers.  

Here are some of the stories Geraldo dismisses as anecdotes sensationalized:

The latest in a string of bereaved parents to appear on TV are the parents of young Pierce Corcoran, 22, killed by Franco Cambrany Francisco-Eduardo (44), recipient of the U.S. Professional Drunk-Driver Immigration Visa. And in 2012, a man named Ramon Hernandez took the tiniest of victims. Dimitri Smith, of blessed memory, was killed in-utero by this recipient of the same visa. The deceased preemie was shown on CNN, in 2012, being held for the last time by young mother Aileen Smith, before being laid to rest.

“In the last two years,” said a solemn President Trump, in his Jan. 8 address from the Oval Office, “ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings. Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country and thousands more lives will be lost if we don’t act right now.”

It seems crystal clear that, were it not for Geraldo’s plucky, uninvited visitors—more American than a lot of Americans, sneered Comrade Ocasio-Cortez—there would likely be 100,000 fewer assaults in America, 30,000 fewer sex crimes in America, and 4,000 fewer murders in America.

It seems perfectly clear that young Pierce Corcoran would be alive, if not for a bad hombre who had no business being in the country.

Clear to you and me, but not to “brother” Rivera (Mr. Hannity’s appellation for this idiot).

With the same logical illiteracy that has been given sanctuary and sinecure on Fox News, Mr. Rivera proceeded to make his “case”:

“I would feel equally pained,” he roared, “were the killer Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican or Jewish, young or old.”

Could a killer illegal alien be “Irish, Italian, Puerto Ricans or Jewish, old or young”? Certainly. But these categories are irrelevant and superfluous to the central point. Rivera is mixing it up; mixing logical categories to the point of moral incoherence.

This studied stupidity led Rivera, in short succession, to his next point: American lives lost and recounted “sensationally” on television were “anecdotes.”

To be charitable, Geraldo here is following his own breaking-eggs-for-omelets argument—and it is that, since the murderers are statistical outliers, the murders they commit are the exception to the rule in what is an exceptional immigrant community.

The logic doesn’t add up, but the numbers of the dead do—each life lost is precious. Each loss comes with a world of hurt that never heals.

Death by illegal alien is not about group crime aggregates, as Geraldo contends. (In particular, his contention that illegal aliens commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, therefore, let them come.)

Wrong. Death by illegal alien is about this life-cherishing, immutable logic:

If alien X HAD BEEN REMOVED from the U.S., as the law dictates, innocent American Y WOULD BE ALIVE TODAY.

What Geraldo continues to claim is that the value of the community from which alien X hails cancels out the value of the life of Y, an innocent, American individual. The same goes for the 4000 lives lost and counted by the president.

My guess? If the individuals snuffed out by illegal aliens belonged to Geraldo Rivera, Rivera would lose his callous calculus.

The argument made by open-immigration fundamentalists, left and establishment right—from Tamar Jacoby to Geraldo Rivera—is that the illegality of the perp is irrelevant to the crime.

These advocates have routinely dismissed as redundant to the facts of the case the illegal status of “Carlos Martinelly-Montano, 23, whose Aug. 1 collision, in 2011, in Prince William, seriously injured two Benedictine nuns and killed a third, Sister Denise Mosier, 66, all of Richmond.”

Again: For this kind of conceit to fly, open-border fetishists would have to show that had Bob Clark’s killer (whose identity is still zealously guarded by media) been deported or jailed, his victims would have nevertheless suffered the same fate at the hands of another drunk driver (murderer, child molester, etc.)—a truly fanciful idea.

In case you don’t know, Bob Clark directed one of the most delightful, and most American, films ever made, “A Christmas Story.” He and his 22-year-old son would probably be alive today if not for a drunk, unlicensed, illegal alien careening down Pacific Coast Highway

As to Geraldo. He has been assaulting sensibilities for over a decade on the same Fox News shows, having modified his “argument” only slightly over time.

“It’s not an illegal alien story; it’s a drunk driving story,” he once asserted on “The Factor,” following the slaying of an innocent American in an oh-so familiar way.

Then as now, Geraldo was serious, although, then as now, he should not be taken seriously.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
Townhall.com, The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom
January 10

The post Dead By Illegal Alien? You’re Just An Anecdote appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

©2014 By ILANA MERCER 

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Junge Freiheit, Target Liberty, Quarterly Review,  Praag.org 

December 26, 2014

The post A Sad Christmas Story appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Open border fundamentalists seldom address devastating arguments against their case. Maybe they can’t. But they generally prefer to respond to philosophically limp positions. Immigration fetishists seem to like advancing positions not worth a straw.

The intellectually honest, however, will try to reply to a valid opposing argument, no matter who makes it. Unless he can’t. Then he must concede defeat. Alas, among the open-border claque, intellectual honesty is as scarce as unskilled labor is abundant across the land. The scrappy Tibor Machan is one exception. A scholar and a friend, Machan possesses the intellectual energy and honesty to address the hitherto unchallenged arguments I’ve put forward in opposition to mass immigration.

First some background. While he is no Tamar Jacoby (for one, he’s prettier), Tibor has expressed, in a column for the Orange County Register, doubts about the findings that, overall, immigrants cost taxpayers more than they contribute. Jacoby just denies facts such as those released by the National Academy of Sciences and relayed by the Heritage Foundation. Accordingly, “each immigrant without a high school degree will cost U.S. taxpayers, on average, $89,000 over the course of his or her lifetime.” Having tallied the number of illegal and legal low-skill, uneducated immigrants, the NAS has estimated that “in total, all immigrants without a high school education could impose a net cost on U.S. taxpayers of around one trillion dollars or more. If the cost of educating the immigrants’ children is included, that figure could reach two trillion dollars.”

It’s not clear why clever people consider these facts counterintuitive. The immigration “reforms” of the 1960s launched an era of egalitarian policies, which gave preference to Third World immigrants, who were then selected not for their skill or education, but for their family ties to a principal sponsor. Such a policy guaranteed the importation of masses of poor, less accomplished, dependent individuals. A finding to the contrary would be newsworthy.

Missing from the current debate about illegal immigration, argues Machan, is a recognition that “the welfare state is the underlying fundamental problem. Until that system is abolished, until a revolutionary change occurs and no Peter is looted for the sake of any Paul—whether poor, rich, legal or illegal—there will be no solution to the illegal immigration problem.” In the column “Welfare State and Illegal Immigration,” Tibor repeats an uncontested, standard libertarian stance: “the immorality begins not with putting illegal immigrants on the welfare rolls or transferring to them costly services at the expense of American citizens. The immorality lies in the welfare state itself, in the government’s policy of coercive wealth redistribution.”

The problem with so many libertarian formulations is that they do not respect reality. Rather, they hold up the libertarian ideal, lament its unattainablility, and refuse to debate the issue until the ideal is achieved. That’s intellectually lazy. It’s also an affront to reality, the rational man’s anchor.

And the reality is that the American welfare state is accreting, not shrinking. The reality is that the more libertarians support the importation of impoverished minorities, with a tradition of aggressively manipulating the political apparatus to obtain property not theirs—the more intractable the welfare state will become. How better to diminish property rights and accelerate wealth distribution and, with it, the death of the republic, than to add to the “union” each year the equivalent of a New Jersey, powered by identity-politics, and peopled predominantly by tax consumers seeking to indenture taxpayers? Witness how, when thousands of non-voting illegal aliens poured into the streets recently to demand their positive, man-manufactured, bogus rights, their elected officials and El Presidente (Bush) came up with a bill that would grant the protesters their wishes.

To the meat of my argument: From the fact that taxpayer-funded welfare for nationals is morally wrong, as Machan rightly avers, why does it follow that extending it to millions of unviable non-nationals is economically and morally negligible? Or that it remotely comports with the libertarian goal of curtailing government growth? How is this stock-in-trade, truncated argument different from positing that because a bank has been robbed by one band of bandits (welfare-dependent nationals), repelling or arresting the next (welfare-dependent non-nationals) is unnecessary because the damage has already been done?

This craven indifference to property proponents of mass immigration extend to the lives snuffed out in crimes committed by illegal aliens. Bob Clark, director of one of the most delightful films ever made, “A Christmas Story,” and his 24-year-old son were both killed by a drunk, unlicensed, allegedly illegal alien. Geraldo and Jacoby, the teletwits of amnesty, both asserted that the illegality of the perp is irrelevant to the crime. “It’s not an illegal alien story; it’s a drunk driving story,” Geraldo noodled on “The Factor.”

Geraldo was serious, although he should not be taken seriously. So here’s my next question: For the Geraldo/Jacoby crushingly stupid claim to stick, they would have to demonstrate that had this drunk, allegedly illegal alien been stopped at the border or been deported, his victims would have nevertheless suffered the same fate. If you leave the door to your home intentionally open (as Bush has), and advertise your hippie habits around the hood (as Bush does), can you honestly claim that the robbery, abduction, rape, or murder of your charges was unavoidable? (And that you are unimpeachable?)

I’ll let professor Machan do the work libertarians won’t do.

©2007 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
June 15

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