A Plea For Leadership to Mainstream Conservatives

Dear Professor Hanson and Mr. Steyn -

I read with great interest the Professor’s post “Where Dreams Die” and Mr. Steyn’s commentary on it at The Corner, entitled “Betting the Farm.” Both pieces moved me profoundly, which is what I wanted to write you both about today.



I grew up in California, in southeastern Los Angeles County, and attended university at Cal. I am, and always will be, a Californian.

I was given a great gift — but see below — to travel throughout California the last week, by land and by air over the state. It was hard to determine whether the natural beauty of the landscape or the ingenuity of our ancestors was the more impressive. The Sierra is still snow-locked and towers in white above a lush valley floor below. The lakes of the 1912 Big Creek Hydroelectric Project — Shaver, Huntington, and the still snowbound Edison and Florence above — belong in Switzerland. The squares of grapes and trees below look like a vast lush checkerboard from above.

I prefer the beauty of the Napa and Sonoma valleys to Tuscany; the former lacks only the majestic Roman and Renaissance history of the Italian countryside. Human genius in just a half-century has almost matched 2500 years of Italian viticulture. The California coast — the hills, beaches, and landscape — could be in the Peloponnese and easily stands the comparison. When early summer finally comes to the state in late spring, as it did last week, the result is almost divine: warmth and light without high humidity, daily rains, or high winds.

They say the Central Valley is the ugliest part of the state; I disagree. Last week from my great-great-grandmother’s upstairs balcony I could see snow capped mountains tower just thirty miles away; in-between were millions of green trees and vines and the water towers of small towns in every direction. Nothing in Spain or southern France is prettier. A man would have to be mad to leave such beauty, and the brilliant work of his predecessors who as artists built the dams and canals, laid out the agrarian patchwork, founded these communities that serve as bookends to the works of architectural and municipal genius in San Francisco, or Los Angeles and San Diego. Yes, a man would have to be mad — or quite rational — to leave paradise lost.

As a Californian, I don’t simply agree with this description, I feel it in my soul. In my mind’s eye, even now that I find myself so far away, I see and feel what has been described and it registers not just as a passionate description of a lovely countryside and an industrious people, but a soil and a blood that I instinctively recognize. Recognize, and wish above all else to preserve and to protect. And realize, that I am that mad, rational man who has turned his back on his homeland.

To the cause of this decision, and of the devastatingly sad picture the Professor paints, Mr. Steyn writes:

Border immigration on the scale of the south-west is not about people moving but about borders moving. Less enlightened regions of the world understand this as they understand the sun rising in the morning, but it all seems too complicated for Californian sophisticates.

I share this concern, for more reasons than one would expect. My paternal grandparents are Canadian, from Quebec. My mother is from Northern Ireland, from a city so divided that even the local authorities can’t figure out which of the two names should appear on its official correspondence.

Perhaps it is this family history that renders me so sensitive to the human tragedy that befalls a community when it becomes fundamentally divided by ethnicity, by identity. Wars and conflict, even political conflict, are ordinary matters when one side the aggressor, the other a defender. It’s when multiple claims over the same homeland that are valid but irreconcilable that real danger and depravity lie.

A long forgotten British politician (but not forgotten by you) one wisely warned his parliamentary colleagues that the true measure of statesmanship is to avoid preventable evils. To not do this, he argued, was to invite disaster, to bring to our children and grandchildren a world of conflict, where blood is shed.

Let me be frank with you gentlemen. You are both prominent members of the American conservative movement. You arrived at that position by wildly differing routes, yet here you are. And in your writing it has become painfully clear to this observer—this Californian, this refugee from sectarian and ethnic strife, this passionate believer in passing along to our posterity not simply job opportunities or cheaper X-Boxes but a real place with real beauty, real meaning and institutions worthy of the honor of what they represent—that you realize that the scope of what is happening is not simply yet another manifestation of the left-right divide that runs through modern Western history.

No, what is happening here is unprecedented in American history: it is the planned replacement of America’s historical European-American majority population with an alien people. It is a slow ethnic cleansing, a genocide with better fringe benefits and material comforts for the people scheduled for disappearance.

The occasion of the Professor’s essay was the Brown v Plata case, which will see some 42,000 criminals released on to the streets of California in the name of the Constitution of the United States. Issued three days later was the Supreme Court’s decision in the Chamber of Commerce of the United States v. Whiting, in which our nation’s leading body of private business was defeated in its effort to prevent the people of the State of Arizona from taking steps to stem the tide, to stop, as Mr. Steyn put it, “immigration on the scale. . .about borders moving.”

Note well the plaintiff here, gentlemen. It is not some La Raza group, some wild-eyed Ramparts leftovers, nor the ACLU, not even the Democratic Party that lead the charge against Arizona’s meager attempt to defend itself. It was the voice of American business, traditionally associated with the Republican Party.

This is the situation we today find our people in. Despite poll after poll showing that Californians, Arizonans and indeed all Americans want real border controls, a stop to massive illegal immigration, a return to a rational system of legal immigration, for decades now nothing has been done. And when the issue comes to the fore as it does from time to time, we all get to enjoy the spectacle of a government which claims it can set education policy in Helmand Province, deliver anti-AIDS programs in Ghana, drops bombs over Libya, conduct counter-narcotics efforts in Colombia, mediate between Israel and the Palestinians, control the tempo of international finance then claim that it is unable to perform one of the most basic duties of a sovereign nation.

Everyone knows this is farce, a kind of Kabuki theatre that even those who write the script believe not a word. And yet it goes on.

The disgraceful conduct of the Chamber of Commerce gives us a clue as to why it is so. On the right in America is the party of business and it has spoken again and again and again that it will put short term profits and cheap labor over the honor of our nation and our future tranquility. This is beyond question.

The equally disgraceful conduce of the various race lobbies also gives us a clue. On the left in America is the party of government and it has spoken again and again and again that it, too, will put its short term interest and the needs of a new population for ever more government programs, initiatives and departments over the soul of our nation and our future lives. This, too, is beyond question.

And caught in between these two giant forces is my people. Slowly squeezed, they run to greener pastures, only to find the change moves faster than they can move. Seeking shelter, they work ever more hours to afford a home in a neighborhood with—as the code is spoken—good schools. Financially pressed, they shell out an ever-greater flow of taxes, even while it has become beyond obvious that local police are much more likely to pull over Mr. Middle Class for a petty speeding ticket and its associated revenue than risk a civil rights lawsuit and displeasure from the brass where they to pull over the car overloaded with eight young Mexican men.

I say this, but not to enlighten you. I know you, gentlemen. You are revealed in your writing.

You, Professor, already know what is happening to our California and what will be the result. We don’t even think of parks as places where children go to play anymore. Yes, you know this.

You, Mr. Steyn, already know what will be the result of this world-historical movement of people from the Third World to California and the rest of America. The best—the absolute best—we can hope for at this last stage is a Quebec-like situation where the majority buys off a half-hearted separatist movement with government money and never, ever stops apologizing. More likely scenarios get worse from there.

And I will go further: I think you both realize that the current situation is beyond remedy through our current, traditional politics. The traditional right has proved unable to stop this and its financial wing has no interest in stopping it. The traditional left encourages it and its traditional union wing has no influence in stopping it.

And then there is the judiciary. There is no need to go much further into this subject than to simply quote the opening view paragraphs of Justice Scalia’s dissent in the Plata case that roused the Professor to write:

There comes before us, now and then, a case whose proper outcome is so clearly indicated by tradition and common sense, that its decision ought to shape the law, rather than vice versa. One would think that, before allowing the decree of a federal district court to release 46,000 convicted felons, this Court would bend every effort to read the law in such a way as to avoid that outrageous result. Today, quite to the contrary, the Court disregards stringently drawn provisions of the governing statute, and traditional constitutional limitations upon the power of a federal judge, in order to uphold the absurd.

The proceedings that led to this result were a judicial travesty. I dissent because the institutional reform the District Court has undertaken violates the terms of the governing statute, ignores bedrock limitations on the power of Article III judges, and takes federal courts wildly beyond their institutional capacity.

Ordinary politics cannot stop this, our political parties have no inherent interest in stopping it and should any real move be made to stop it and out-of-control and increasingly imperial judiciary would put an end to it.

The masses of conservative Americans look to you as leaders. I understand very well that taking the step out of the mainstream and attempting to lead people to resistance to the destruction of our homeland and the disappearance of our people is fraught with consequences.

And yet, gentlemen, I beg you to do so. If there is one thing in this life I know, that I feel in my heart and soul, it is my people, my great, big, loud, boisterous, contentious Jacksonian lower-to-upper middle class people who love their country and play by the rules.

They are out there, looking, begging for leadership. Not a Limbaugh to entertain them, not a Palin to piss off the wankers at the New York Times, not some wonk to reform Medicare.

No, real leaders. Who can stand up and say with conviction and with passion that what has happened and what is happening is wrong, that it must end, that those responsible are no longer fit to lead and that there will be justice.

I beg you two good gentlemen to take that step.

Unless I miss my guess, and have misread your hearts, you already know that this step must be taken. The common folk out there are looking for proven conservative leaders to begin speaking what must not be said having thought what is forbidden to think.

It’s time for a real resistance to what is being done to us. I ask you to consider leading that resistance. I think you’d find no shortage of relieved supporters once the oppressive consensus is shattered with determination and, much more importantly, wit, passion, conviction and beauty.