Hayward: Only the Left Is Allowed to Talk About Demographics

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) caused a firestorm of controversy by Tweeting praise for Dutch politician Geert Wilders:

Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO

— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) March 12, 2017

Lazy mainstream media reporters love squeezing headline news out of Tweets, almost as much as they love playing guilt-by-association games with Republicans. Here’s how USA Today reported on the King imbroglio:

U.S. Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who last July said white Christians have contributed more to Western civilization than any other “subgroup,” on Sunday found himself again the subject of criticism, this time for saying that Muslim children are preventing “our civilization” from being restored.

King, who was retweeting a message endorsing Geert Wilders, a far-right candidate for Dutch prime minister, said Wilders “understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

The original tweet, from the anti-European Union Voice of Europe media organization, displays a cartoon with an image of Wilders plugging a hole in a wall labeled “Western Civilization.” Nearby, bearded protesters hold signs that say, “Infidels, Know Your Limits” and “Freedom of Speech Go To Hell.”

The caption reads: “Hundreds of Islamists shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Wilders is right for over 10 years.”

King didn’t actually say anything about “Muslim children preventing our civilization from being restored,” and he didn’t mention “white Christians” or indeed any other “subgroup” in his Tweet. USA Today decided its readers needed 500 words of context to understand an 18-word social media comment. They didn’t bother asking the author of the Tweet what the context should be.

Because King once said something positive about the contributions of white Christians to Western civilization, everything he says about demographics must now be viewed as an eruption of “white nationalism,” even when he mentions no particular ethnic or racial group in his comment.

King’s Tweet was inartfully worded, but there is no way he could have worded it artfully enough to get past the gatekeepers of political correctness. Arguing about what he “really meant” is pointless. Because under the left’s rules, only the left is allowed to discuss demographics, culture, and immigration.

The left is constantly crowing that “culture and demographics are our destiny.” Every time a new study predicts the emergence of a “minority-majority nation,” in which white people become a dwindling minority group, we see a wave of op-eds about how American culture will be irrevocably changed by this demographic shift. This is usually portrayed as a very good thing, and never described as a problem.

Democrats regale each other with predictions of the date upon which they will achieve a permanent electoral lock on the White House, and then the Senate. Predictions that demographic shifts will soon dilute the white vote enough to turn Texas blue, and effectively end the Republican Party’s existence as a serious national political force, are standard fare on the left.

The left is very keen on the notion of forced integration, in everything from schools to housing, precisely because they do believe demographic changes are a vehicle for the transmission of culture. Moving disadvantaged children into a culture of greater academic achievement is supposed to help their grades improve. Moving people of different races around like pieces on a chessboard will purportedly bring greater cultural diversity to all.

The shape of our current immigration debate is proof positive that demography shapes our political reality. We wouldn’t be sitting through the absurdity of Democrats treating citizenship like a game and denouncing the arrest of illegal aliens as a human-rights violation if there were few such aliens in the United States, and if our national demography had not already been reformulated through decades of mass immigration.

The left works very hard to make legal citizens feel cultural solidarity with illegal aliens of vaguely similar ethnic background; the legal citizen who proudly immigrated from Mexico with full respect for American law 20 years ago is taught to view the enforcement of immigration law against an illegal alien from Guatemala as a personal insult to him. Politically-correct speech codes forbid us from even using terms like “illegal alien” – they’re all just “immigrants,” no matter how and when they came to America. This strategy implicitly acknowledges the truth of what King said about demography and destiny. That’s why the left melts down when anyone dares to speak the truth in a critical fashion, rather than applauding the population and cultural shifts they have worked so hard to engineer.

The left tries to forbid us from asking whether decades of immigration policy had anything to do with it. The demographic shift is seen as a force of nature. We can’t do anything to stop it. We can only talk about how our politics and culture will adjust to it. When skeptics join that conversation, they are immediately called racists and told to shut up.

Over in Japan, a frank discussion of demographics and immigration has been in progress for years, including blunt talk along King/Wilders lines. The Japanese explicitly discuss fears of cultural damage if they loosen up their tight immigration controls, even as they confront a demographic death spiral deeper (and weirder) than anything facing American subgroups. Somehow Japan avoids the kind of Internet flash-mob outrage that greeted Rep. King’s Twitter musings.

Some Japanese resist using mass immigration to resolve demographic collapse not because they’re worried about Japan being overrun by foreigners, but because they fear it’s an effort to treat a symptom rather than the underlying problem. The problem is a cratering birth rate. No civilization in history has ever recovered from a demographic slide as steep as Japan’s. Simply importing more people to fill up empty houses and take jobs might prop up the economy for a while, but it won’t resolve the problem.

It’s an open question whether anything can resolve the problem, for the Japanese or anybody else. Informing a collapsing demographic that they really ought to have more babies probably won’t work. Demographic growth can only be achieved through a sizable number of families with more than two children. Ideally those are stable and healthy families. It’s hard to reach such a growth state without a large number of people marrying and getting started on their families at relatively young ages. Just about every signal sent by the left-dominated culture in the modern United States argues against that, from abortion zealotry and the devaluation of marriage to “humanity is a virus” environmentalism.

Rep. King’s controversial remark is implicitly a critique of assimilation: if we bring in foreigners fast enough to cover for declining birth rates, we won’t have enough time to assimilate them. Left-wingers criticizing King in the most strident terms would actively work to ensure that outcome. They do everything they can to Balkanize Americans into identity groups. They want immigrants clumped in little enclaves where they can be tapped by Democrat community organizers. They relentlessly denigrate American culture. No one who takes them seriously would want to assimilate to the unjust, exploitative nation full of greedy racist killbillies depicted by the left.

Democrats are now driven entirely by identity politics. They even tell women they must all think the same way, as though half the human race were a hive-mind linked by its chromosomes. Of course they’ll labor night and day to make each new wave of immigrants feel like “somebody else’s babies.” They work hard to make people born in the United States feel that way.

The King meltdown was another battle in the war over defining “nationalism.” Merely arguing that America is a nation-state with legitimate interests, and the American government should be absolutely loyal to its own citizens, is now denounced as brutish nationalism. We are called selfish and xenophobic for insisting on immigration policy that serves the needs of existing citizens. We can only prove our globalist virtue by bringing in vast numbers of people from other nations, with the lowest possible qualifications for entry, and refraining from demands that they come to see themselves as Americans.

And if that pushes generations of native-born people into long-term unemployment, despair, and drug addiction — well, it’s a small price to pay for letting our elites see themselves as noble citizens of the world. Is it really so surprising that the designated losers in that scheme rebelled against the establishments of both major political parties?