One silver lining in not having supported either major candidate in the race is that unlike many others I won’t be disappointed in my choice.
For example, some commentators had reluctantly backed Trump, hoping that he had learned his lessons from the many mistakes he had made in his first term. But just a couple of days before the vote, their candidate said that his likely choices for Secretary of Defense would include former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or Sen. Tom Cotton, both of whom were hardcore Neocons, and the subsequent names floated for Secretary of State and National Security Advisor have been Sen. Marco Rubio and Richard Grenell, who also fall into much the same category. These early indications suggested that the Trump Administration would likely continue the same very aggressive foreign policies of the Biden Administration, and some of Trump’s erstwhile supporters probably began grinding their teeth in frustration.
They surely recalled that during his original 2016 campaign Trump had regularly denounced his own Republican Party’s ruling Neocon establishment, famously declaring in one of the primary debates that the Iraq War of President George W. Bush had been a huge disaster for America, a statement that shocked and horrified all his Republican rivals but may have helped win him the nomination. However, once he actually reached the Oval Office, he soon placed our national security policies in the hands of Pompeo and John Bolton, both arch-Neocons of the worst sort, and they did whatever they wanted. Indeed, I’ve read that in the book he published after leaving the administration, Bolton bragged how easily he had tricked and manipulated his ignorant and detached superior, heaping insults and ridicule upon the president whom he once had served.
However, talk of such potential Neocon appointments may have provoked a political backlash, and by the weekend Trump had declared that neither Pompeo nor Nikki Haley would have any role in his new administration, thereby soothing some of those concerns.
It is widely accepted that in a presidential administration, personnel is policy, so as we learn the names of Trump’s senior appointments over the next few weeks, we will also discover the likely trajectory of the next four years.
Although it is unclear what use Trump will make of his new term in office, the mere fact that he regained the White House certainly ranks as the most spectacular political comeback in our nation’s nearly 250 year history, easily outdistancing the split second term of Grover Cleveland in 1893 or Richard Nixon’s political resurrection in 1968. Indeed, the challenges Trump overcame along the way to Election Day sound like something out of a satirical Hollywood film.
While in office, he had been impeached not once but twice, and after his outraged supporters stormed the Capitol in early 2020, he was widely declared an “insurrectionist” by the Trump-hating media. I doubt that any other major political figure in American history has ever been so massively and uniformly vilified by that media, which for generations had been recognized as having the power to make or break presidential candidates.
Then, as Trump geared up for his 2024 run, Democratic prosecutors across the country brought him up on a host of criminal charges, eventually convicting him of 34 felonies and fining him hundreds of millions of dollars, so for a time it looked like he might have to campaign for the White House from a prison-cell.
After successfully capturing the Republican nomination, Trump soon became the victim of two separate assassination attempts, one of which nearly succeeded. Rather than being shocked, I was puzzled that there hadn’t already been many more such incidents:
When I first heard that Trump had survived an attempted assassination, my surprise was not that it had occurred but that there hadn’t already been a dozen or more previous attacks. I doubt that any political figure in modern American history has ever been so massively demonized by our mainstream media as Donald J. Trump during the last eight or nine years. He’s been vilified as a fascist, a Hitler, a traitor, a Russian stooge, a rapist, a racist, a swindler. Trump was endlessly portrayed as a fiend absolutely determined to destroy American freedom and democracy, someone who represented our country’s deadliest human enemy.
Our media creates our reality and for most of the last decade, hundreds of millions of Americans have been completely blanketed by these unrelenting waves of ferocious anti-Trump propaganda, so surely many thousands of them would have been unbalanced enough to consider saving our country by taking the law into their own hands and patriotically risking their lives to eliminate that deadly human menace. The media had spent all these years painting a very bright target on Trump’s back, and I’ve been astonished that until a couple of days ago no American had yet taken aim at it.
- The Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 17, 2024 • 2,000 Words
Yet despite all those seemingly insurmountable challenges, Trump ultimately triumphed, winning the presidential race far more convincingly than most observers had expected, and even capturing a majority of the popular vote, becoming the first Republican to do so in twenty years.
With Trump now returning to the White House and likely to be dominating the headlines for the next several years, I’ve added a new section that groups together my articles regarding his policies and activities.
- Donald Trump Articles
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • 45,000 Words
Although Trump’s political triumph was quite remarkable, he certainly had a great deal of help in achieving that result, and I think that most of the credit goes to his political enemies in the Democratic Party, whose seething hatred had inspired efforts that completely backfired. In August 2023, I’d described how this had played out.
Media is the oxygen of political campaigns, and Trump’s totally unexpected primary and general election victories in 2016 were driven by the massive attention he received for his sometimes outrageous public statements, coverage greatly amplified by the unprecedented number of Twitter followers he had quickly amassed on social media. His bitter political enemies recognized the enormous, unfiltered power of that latter communication tool, and after he reached the White House, they exerted huge pressure upon Twitter to begin censoring him. The notion of an American tech company restricting the political speech of a sitting American President seemed like something out of a Monty Python sketch, but it actually happened. Meanwhile, many of his leading activist supporters and pundit allies were completely purged from that platform, blows that greatly hindered his reelection campaign. Then after his November defeat and Joseph Biden’s inauguration, Trump himself suffered the same fate, with his Twitter account permanently suspended.
With Trump banned from Twitter in early 2021, his political standing soon ebbed away as more and more of his low-information political base gradually forgot about him. This led many observers to conclude that his time had passed and some rival would likely capture the Republican nomination in the 2024 primaries.
However, that decline was quickly reversed when Trump’s bitterly self-destructive Democratic Party enemies launched a series of prosecutions against him on a variety of different charges, ranging from mishandling secret documents to paying hush money to a former girlfriend to election fraud, all rather dubious charges. With such exciting new topics, the endless Trump Political Reality show had suddenly returned as popular entertainment, regaining the very high ratings it had previously enjoyed. Trump once again became the great hero of his populist Republican supporters, with recent polls showing he was drawing far more support in the 2024 primaries than all his Republican rivals combined.
Indeed, some cynical observers even suggested that this outcome might have been intentional. Perhaps the Democrats regarded Trump as the weakest Republican candidate they might face in 2024, and sought to ensure his renomination. Such a deeply Machiavellian strategy might be possible, but all of these various prosecutions and trials will surely keep Trump at the top of the news cycle from now until November 2024, whether Election Day finds him still on trial or already serving time behind bars. It’s easy to imagine that the same tidal wave of backlash sentiment now propelling Trump to a landslide victory in the forthcoming primaries might also carry over into November, returning him to the Presidency, whether from the courtroom or the jail house.
We should consider that even a couple of months ago when Trump’s legal problems were only just beginning, he already began attracting strongly sympathetic remarks from unexpected ideological quarters.
Columnist Kevin Barrett is a Muslim convert friendly towards Iran, and in May he published a short item that opened by characterizing Trump as “an odious figure…A narcissistic semi-literate scoundrel.” But his piece was entitled “Why I’m ALMOST Ready to Vote for Trump,” and he explained that the totally unhinged campaign of vilification by our entire political and media establishment against the obnoxious former President had largely shifted him in that direction. He also cited the analysis of a popular progressive podcaster:
Jimmy Dore makes a good case that Trump’s civil trial for sexual assault and defamation was “A Pure Democratic Hit Job.” Dore points out that New York’s bizarre one-year repeal of the statute of limitations was specifically designed to grease the skids for Carroll-v-Trump. Since when did governments start temporarily repealing statutes of limitations so they can go after political figures they don’t like? The move seems especially egregious because it involved an almost three-decade-old case in which the alleged victim can’t even remember which year the alleged assault happened, and has no evidence whatsoever other than her word against his. If you’re going to do something as extreme as suspending the statute of limitations so you can prosecute a specific case, shouldn’t you at least have some evidence?
Around the same time, other influential progressive journalists such as Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate similarly ridiculed Trump’s indictment on hush-money charges by an NYC prosecutor.
- American Pravda: Donald Trump, Eugene Debs, and AMLO
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 7, 2023 • 4,900 Words
Most of the severe legal penalties levied against Trump and his top allies related to their angry accusations that the 2020 election had been stolen. But although the ferociously anti-Trumpist media would never admit that possibility and ruthlessly purged anyone who even mentioned the notion, the case was actually a very strong one.
In January 2021 I explained that contrary to the media narrative, the official statistics showed that Trump had actually lost that race by an extremely narrow margin:
Although hardly suggested by our mainstream media, the officially-reported results demonstrated that our 2020 presidential election was extraordinarily close.
All the regular pre-election polls had shown the Democratic candidate with a comfortable lead, but just as had been the case four years earlier, the actual votes tabulated revealed an entirely contrary outcome. According to the official vote-count, the Biden/Harris ticket ended up millions of votes ahead, having racked up huge leads in overwhelmingly Democratic states such as my own California, and also won by a very comfortable 306 to 232 margin in Electoral Votes. But control of the White House depends upon the state-by-state tallies, and these told a very different story.
Incumbent Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by such extremely narrow margins that a swing of less than 22,000 votes in those crucial states would have gotten him reelected. With a record 158 million votes cast, this amounted to a victory margin of around 0.01%. So if just one American voter in 7,000 had changed his mind, Trump might have received another four years in office. One American voter in 7,000.
Such an exceptionally narrow victory is extremely unusual in modern American history. For decades, the very tight Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960 had been a byword for close results, but Biden’s margin of victory was much smaller. More recently, George W. Bush won a narrow reelection over Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004, but Kerry would have required a voter swing nearly five times greater than Trump’s in order to claim victory. Indeed, with the sole exception of the notorious “dangling chads” Florida decision of the 2000 Bush-Gore election, no American presidential candidate in over 100 years had lost by so narrow a voter margin as Donald J. Trump.
If our incompetent or dishonest media had correctly reported these simple facts, perhaps Democratic partisans would have been somewhat more understanding of the outrage expressed by so many of their Republican counterparts, who believed they had been cheated of their election victory. Admittedly, Trump backers seem equally unaware of the historically slender margin of their candidate’s defeat.
Not only was the 2020 Presidential election remarkably close, but any objective examination of the facts clearly proved that it had been stolen from Trump. This explained and easily justified the widespread protests by his supporters in DC on January 6th, as I discussed a few days afterward.
I haven’t investigated the matter, but there does seem to be considerable circumstantial evidence of widespread ballot fraud by Democratic Party forces, hardly surprising given the apocalyptic manner in which so many of their leaders had characterized the threat of a Trump reelection. After all, if they sincerely believed that a Trump victory would be catastrophic for America why would they not use every possible means, fair and foul alike, to save our country from that dire fate?
In particular, several of the major swing-states contain large cities—Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that are both totally controlled by the Democratic Party and also notoriously corrupt, and various eye-witnesses have suggested that the huge anti-Trump margins they provided may have been heavily “padded” to ensure the candidate’s defeat.
Even leaving aside some of these plausible claims, the case for a stolen election seems almost airtight. I don’t know or care anything about Dominion voting machines, whether they are controlled by Venezuelan Marxists, Chinese Communists, or Martians. But the most blatant election-theft was accomplished in absolutely plain sight.
Not long before the election, the hard drive of an abandoned laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter revealed a gigantic international corruption scheme, quite possibility involving the candidate himself. But the facts of this enormous political scandal were entirely ignored and boycotted by virtually every mainstream media outlet. And once the story was finally published in the pages of the New York Post, America’s oldest newspaper, all links to the Post article and its website were suddenly banned by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets to ensure that the voters remained ignorant until after they had cast their ballots.
Renowned international journalist Glenn Greenwald was hardly a Trump partisan, but he became outraged that the editors of the Intercept, the $100 million publication he himself had co-founded, refused to allow him to cover that massive media scandal, and he angrily resigned in protest. In effect, America’s media and tech giants formed a united front to steal the election and somehow drag the crippled Biden/Harris ticket across the finish line.
The Hunter Biden corruption scandal seemed about as serious as any in modern presidential election history and Biden’s official victory margin was just 0.01%. So if the American voters had been allowed to learn the truth, Trump almost certainly would have won the election, quite possibly in an Electoral College landslide. Given these facts, anyone who continues to deny that the election was stolen from Trump is simply being ridiculous.
- American Pravda: Our Disputed Election
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 14, 2021 • 2,000 Words
Thus, the total tech and media suppression of the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop probably cost Trump an easy or even overwhelming reelection victory. Highly-regarded former longtime CIA Analyst Ray McGovern, certainly no Trump supporter, noted that it has now come out that current Secretary of State Antony Blinken—then a top Biden aide—had helped orchestrate the false public declaration by 51 former Intelligence officers that the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop should be disregarded as likely “Russian disinformation.”
Given their success in removing Trump from office in 2020, the oligarchs of the Democratic Party may have become overconfident that they would be able to defeat him again in 2024, and they therefore allowed other considerations to dominate their choice of nominees. The success of a presidential candidate often depends upon the political flaws of his opponents, and as I’d explained last year Trump was very lucky on that score in the 2024 general election.
First, in the wake of the continuing Israel/Gaza conflict, the donors and other Democratic Party power-brokers desperately sought to evade that issue by propping up incumbent President Joseph Biden during the primaries and using their media allies to conceal his obvious enfeeblement.
Democratic insiders had surely been aware of Biden’s incapacity for some time, yet they kept that information from the public and the voters, only choosing to replace Biden after he had already won all of the primaries and been assured of the nomination, a seemingly strange and embarrassingly undemocratic strategy. But as various individuals have suggested, this may have been their least bad option given the risks they might have faced in an open primary lacking President Biden on the ballot.
A large portion of the Democratic electorate has been outraged by Israel’s ongoing massacre of so many tens of thousands of helpless Palestinian civilians and the unwavering support of the American government for such appalling slaughter. As the incumbent president running for reelection, Biden faced no serious challenger, but if he had dropped out earlier, Harris and numerous other Democrats would have entered the race for an open nomination, and one or more of them might have been tempted to play to the party’s activists and actual voters by taking a contrary line on the Middle East, perhaps doing very well in numerous primaries as a result and thereby upsetting the party’s wealthy donors. So Biden was instead kept in place until the Democratic electorate had lost any remaining say in the matter.
With the Democratic primaries concluded, the party leaders recognized that Biden would be hopeless against Trump, and soon arranged an unprecedented last-minute substitution, but their choice was an extremely weak one.
Back in March 1968, the surprising strength of Democratic challenger Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary led President Lyndon Johnson to abandon his reelection effort, shocking the entire country by announcing that decision in a nationwide broadcast. But Biden’s withdrawal decision was far stranger, coming only after he had won every Democratic primary and received some 99% of all the Democratic delegates, already having become the de facto nominee of his party. Moreover, instead of announcing and explaining his decision in a public broadcast, his staff merely released a letter on Twitter, with some observers noting that the signature used didn’t even seem to match Biden’s usual one, leading cynics to wonder whether our mentally-challenged chief executive had actually been involved in the decision to abandon his reelection effort.
Biden’s departure quickly elevated Vice President Kamala Harris as the likely name to replace him on the ballot and within a few days she attracted enough pledged delegates to confirm her nomination. But although the main reason for Biden’s removal had been his perceived political weakness against Trump, polls during most of 2024 had shown that Harris was just as unpopular as Biden.
As a moderate establishmentarian woman of mixed South Asian and black Caribbean ancestry with a Jewish husband, Harris seemed to check every diversity-box on the Democratic Party scorecard and after she easily won a 2016 U.S. Senate race in California, she was soon heralded as a top Democratic presidential prospect for 2020. Entering the presidential primaries in January 2019, she quickly raised more money than any candidate other than maverick socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. With Sanders considered totally unacceptable by the party leadership, Harris therefore seemed ideally positioned for the nomination.
But although Harris was enormously popular among the wealthy elite who dominated the party machinery, she proved so remarkably unpopular among actual Democratic voters that she abandoned the race after just ten months.
For decades, the byword for failed presidential candidacies had been the humiliating 1980 Republican campaign of former Texas Gov. John Connolly, who raised and spent $11 million—an unprecedented sum in that era—while only winning a single delegate. But Harris broke that longstanding record, with her dismal polling numbers leading her to drop out of the 2020 race before the first ballots were even cast in Iowa and thus gaining not a single delegate for the $43 million that she had raised and spent. So Harris ranked as perhaps the least successful presidential contender in all of American history.
But despite such monumental failure at the polls, those same Democratic elites who had hailed her as their ideal candidate soon resurrected her from the political graveyard by persuading the elderly Biden to put her on his ticket, leading to her election as vice president after the sharply disputed results of the 2020 race.
A similar group of Democratic Party billionaires and political operatives, presumably meeting in scrupulously smoke-free rooms, have now removed Biden from the ticket despite the 14 million votes he won in the presidential primaries, replacing him with Harris who won zero votes. Even the most corrupt party bosses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might never have dared attempt such a cynical political maneuver. This utterly anti-democratic process of selecting a nominee obviously belies the name of the Democratic Party.
- Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and the Tottering American Empire
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 29, 2024 • 4,400 Words
Winning a presidential race is much easier if you have the sufficiently weak opponents, and the power-brokers who control the Democratic Party gave Trump a couple of ideal ones. First, they whisked an obviously incapacitated Joseph Biden across the primary finish line, then suddenly decided to replace him at the last moment with Kamala Harris, who had previously earned her place in the history books as probably the least successful presidential candidate in American history.
Although Kamala Harris was a very weak candidate, she still possessed many important advantages, including the power of incumbency, a huge financial edge, numerous celebrity endorsements, and almost total support from the national media. According to the polls, a handful of issues dominated the minds of the voters, and abortion was one of these, breaking very strongly in her favor, so her strategists understandably made it a centerpiece of her campaign.
But another one of those issues was immigration, which greatly favored Trump, so much so that it’s fair to say that without the immigration issue, Trump would have likely lost his 2024 race. But immigration had been an even more important factor in his original 2016 campaign.
From the earliest days of his upstart 2015 candidacy, Trump had made immigration his signature issue. Although he often handled it rather poorly, in a crude, unsophisticated manner, it served him very well, allowing him to easily crush his rivals in the 2016 Republican primaries while serving as a major contributing factor to his narrow win against Hillary Clinton in the general election later that same year.
Just a few weeks before that November 2016 victory, I’d explained why immigration and the broader sense of racial beleaguerment had deeply resonated with so many conservative-leaning white Americans but been totally ignored or denounced by the establishment wings of both political parties and their media allies.
From everything I’ve heard Swedes seem like very pleasant people, rather agreeable to have around, while my personal experience with Mexicans leads me to a similar conclusion. But suppose so many millions of Swedes poured across the borders into our southern neighbor that within just a few decades Mexico City had become majority Swedish, while much of the rest of that country were following a somewhat similar trajectory. Under such circumstances, severe political problems would surely arise, perhaps even endangering social stability.
I think this one short paragraph provides a better clue to the unexpected political rise of Donald Trump than would a hundred footnoted academic articles.
In the year 1915 America was over 85% white, and a half-century later in 1965, that same 85% ratio still nearly applied. But partly due to the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of that year, America’s demographics changed very rapidly over the following five decades. By 2015 there had been a 700% increase in the total number of Hispanics and Asians and the black population was nearly 100% larger, while the number of (non-Hispanic) whites had grown less than 25%, with much of even that small increase due to the huge influx of Middle Easterners, North Africans, and other non-European Caucasians officially classified by our U.S. Census as “white.” As a consequence of these sharply divergent demographic trends, American whites have fallen to little more than 60% of the total, and are now projected to become a minority within just another generation or two, already reduced to representing barely half of all children under the age of 10.
Demographic changes so enormous and rapid on a continental scale are probably unprecedented in all human history, and our political establishment was remarkably blind for having failed to anticipate the possible popular reaction. Over the last twelve months, Donald Trump, a socially liberal New Yorker, has utilized the immigration issue to seize the GOP presidential nomination against the vehement opposition of nearly the entire Republican establishment, conservative and moderate alike, and at times his campaign has enjoyed a lead in the national polls, placing him within possible reach of the White House. Instead of wondering how a candidate came to take advantage of that particular issue, perhaps we should instead ask ourselves why it hadn’t happened sooner.
The answer is that for various pragmatic and ideological reasons the ruling elites of both our major parties have largely either ignored or publicly welcomed the demographic changes transforming the nation they jointly control. Continuous heavy immigration has long been seen as an unabashed positive both by open borders libertarians of the economically-focused Right and also by open borders multiculturalists of the socially-focused Left, and these ideological positions permeate the community of policy experts, staffers, donors, and media pundits who constitute our political ecosphere.
Earlier this year, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an elderly individual with unabashed socialistic views, was interviewed by Vox‘s Ezra Klein, and explained that “of course” heavy foreign immigration—let alone “open borders”—represented the economic dream of extreme free market libertarians such as the Koch brothers, since that policy would obviously drive down the wages of workers and greatly advantage Capital at the expense of Labor. These notions scandalized his neoliberal interlocutor, and the following day another Vox colleague joined in the attack, harshly denouncing the candidate’s views as “ugly” and “wrongheaded,” while instead pointing to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal as the proper font of progressive economic doctrine. Faced with such sharp attacks by young and influential Democratic pundits less than half his age, Sanders soon retreated from his simple statement of fact, and henceforth avoided raising the immigration issue during the remainder of his campaign.
Only a brash, self-funded billionaire contemptuous of establishment wisdom would challenge this bipartisan immigration consensus among our political elites, and only a prominent celebrity could launch his campaign with sufficient visibility to achieve a media breakthrough. This seemed an unlikely combination of traits to find in one individual, but the unlikely occurred, and our national politics has been upended.
There had already been strong previous indications of this smoldering political volcano among voters, though these signs were repeatedly ignored or discounted by the DC Republican apparatchiks who spent their time attending each others’ receptions and fundraisers. During the 2014 election cycle, immigration was a key issue behind the stunning defeat of Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who lost to an unknown primary challenger whom he outspent 40-to-1, constituting one of the greatest upsets in Congressional history. Prior to that, anti-immigration Tea Party insurgents had ended the long careers of incumbent Republican senators Bob Bennett of Utah in 2010 and Richard Lugar of Indiana in 2012.
- A “Grand Bargain” on Immigration Reform?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 3, 2016 • 4,700 Words
Once Trump entered the White House, I published several long articles pointing out the confused and contradictory nature of the immigration policies that he and his ideological allies were unsuccessfully attempting to implement. But as I emphasized, the competing proposals of their establishmentarian adversaries were far worse:
Major political struggles are often decided by a battle of “competing incompetence” and if our anti-immigration movement is handicapped by being woefully ignorant and innumerate, it possesses the distinct advantage that many of its leading opponents—whose ideas permeate our ruling elites—are downright insane.
A few years earlier in 2011 I’d already pointed out the clear evidence of the total immigration insanity of the mainstream wings of both parties. This had been revealed during the 2004 race between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry, as both candidates had declared their support for an open borders immigration policy, which seemed so widely accepted in their elite political and media circles that it passed without notice.
The political reality is that both major parties are enormously dependent upon the business interests that greatly benefit from the current system and are also dominated by disparate ideologies—libertarian open-borders and multicultural open-borders—whose positions tend to coincide on this issue.
As an extreme example of the bizarre ideological views of our current political elites, consider a less-publicized element of the immigration reform plan that President George W. Bush trumpeted during his 2004 reelection campaign. This provision would have allowed any foreigner anywhere in the world to legally immigrate to America if he accepted a minimum-wage job that no American were willing to fill, an utterly insane proposal which would have effectively transformed America’s minimum wage into its maximum wage. Naturally his opponent, Sen. John Kerry, saw absolutely nothing wrong with this idea, though he did criticize various other aspects of Bush’s immigration plan as being somewhat mean-spirited.
This utterly bizarre situation was further demonstrated a couple of years later when I was invited to New York City as a participant in a nationally-syndicated television debate on such immigration matters.
Last week I took a brief break from two months of concentrated software development effort on my new publication The Unz Review to travel to NYC for a debate on a hypothetical “Open Borders” proposal for private employment, one in a long series of such public events produced by Intelligence Squared. The event was carried on NPR and rebroadcast on some television outlets, but may most easily be watched online at their website, with the organizers also making available a convenient transcript.
Although the debate was a useful discussion of an interesting issue and went well, I believe its greatest value came in some of the ancillary aspects, including the important insights it provided into the unchallenged assumptions of America’s insular ruling elites.
Under the regular operating rules, the organizers held before and after votes of the large New York City audience, regarding the winning side as being the team that shifted the margin in their direction. Given my two decades of past writing on immigration issues, I found it quite ironic and amusing that I had been selected for the “anti-immigration” side of the debate, together with Kathleen Newland, co-founder of the eminently pro-immigrant Migration Policy Center. This indicates how yesterday’s fringe ideas have now become the accepted mainstream perspective of American elites. The resolution under consideration was certainly as extreme and radical a formulation of the views of economic libertarians as might be imagined: “Let Anyone Take A Job Anywhere.”
Under the literal interpretation of such a proposal, one can easily imagine twenty or thirty million of the world’s desperate poor coming to America within the first few years of enactment, drawn from a global pool numbering in the billions. The resulting social and economic changes would be on a scale unprecedented in human history let alone America’s past, and the potential for an utterly destructive outcome leading to the collapse of our society seems completely obvious.
Nonetheless, at the pre-debate vote the supporters of this proposal outnumbered opponents by a landslide margin of some twenty-five points, 46% to 21%, while one-third of the audience remained undecided. Indeed, during the televised pre-debate discussion between the moderator and the Intelligence Squared chairman, some doubts were expressed that any intelligent person could oppose such a sensible free market policy in labor mobility.
Once the debate began, I focused on the obvious point that the law of supply and demand ensured that a huge increase in the number of willing workers would greatly reduce their economic bargaining power against their employers. Wages for ordinary Americans have been stagnant for forty years and it is probably more than pure coincidence that the last forty years have witnessed one of America’s greatest waves of foreign immigration. Adopt a proposal that immediately increases such immigration levels by a factor of five or ten, and America’s minimum wage would be transformed into its maximum wage, with the natural outcome being economic devastation for most working Americans.
Certainly America’s affluent and highly-educated urban elite—the sort of New Yorkers attending the debate—would benefit in the short run from enacting a policy that drastically cut the share of the national income going to shopkeepers, nannies, construction workers, and probably 90% of all other Americans. But the eventual social consequences of the total impoverishment of the American middle and working classes might lead to the sort of extreme political reaction we sometimes read about in the history books.
Such points might seem totally obvious to me, but many of the audience members had seemingly never encountered them before, and the results were striking. After ninety minutes of hearing both sides of the issue, there was a swing of thirty-two points toward our opposed position, and we won handily. As a point of comparison, at the reception prior to the show we had been told that the largest previous swing at any Intelligence Squared debate had been the shift of eighteen points that occurred during a 2006 debate on the nature of Hamas in the Mid East conflict.
I have little doubt that those many hundreds of earnest New Yorkers who decided to spend their time and money to attend an evening policy debate rather than see a Broadway show or watch Gravity in 3-D, consider themselves well-informed people, who regularly read The New York Timesand many of the leading liberal opinion magazines. But such purportedly “liberal” outlets studiously avoid mentioning that a massive influx of foreign workers would be an economic catastrophe for the bulk of the American population. Hence the apparent surprise of so much of the audience at the notion that a huge increase in the supply of workers might produce a sharp decline in the market value of their labor and the income they receive…
When a country’s ruling elites have become totally insular in their outlook and unwilling to examine the implications their policies would have for the bulk of their citizenry, the future seems rather bleak.
- Open Borders, American Elites, and the Minimum Wage
Views change about massive immigration once both sides of the issue are heard
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 11, 2013 • 1,700 Words
Although the extreme immigration enthusiasm of our bipartisan political elites certainly has a variety of different motives, economic self-interest is obviously one of them.
In that national 2013 debate, I’d emphasized that although I’d never taken an Economics course in my entire life nor even read an Economics textbook, the law of supply and demand seemed a matter of basic common sense.
Capital and Labor are the two most important factors of production, and if the supply of the latter were to greatly expand, Capital would naturally become much more crucial and valuable, financially benefitting those who possessed it.
Immigration-driven population growth would also inevitably expand the demand for housing, thereby raising the value of real estate and rental properties, and automatically increasing the wealth of major land owners.
So if ruling elites are sufficiently greedy, self-interested, and “extractive,” we would expect them to advocate heavy immigration and population growth, whether or not those policies benefit the rest of their society.
Consider an extremely crude economic model, in which a tiny class of ruling elites skims off 10% of all the income annually generated in their entire country. Now suppose that the population doubles and as a result, the economy expands by 50%. The average per capita income of the population would fall to 150/200=75% of what it had previously been, so most non-elites would suffer an average drop of 25% in their standard of living. But meanwhile, the extractive elites perched at the very top would have seen their income rise by 50%, probably being very pleased at such changes.
Thus, when the ruling elites of a society fail to identify with the population they dominate and control, heavy population growth through immigration is quite likely to occur. Furthermore, if the new immigrants are sufficiently different from or even hostile to the natives they would be unlikely to join together in any sort of broad political coalition, more easily allowing their masters to practice the politics of divide-and-rule and thereby maintain their power over the population that they exploit.
Although the immigration debate of the last couple of years has been framed as being fought over the issue of illegal immigrants, I actually think that this is rather misleading.
As I’ve explained, for decades the elite political establishments of both parties had advocated something much closer to an open borders policy, including the removal of many existing restrictions on immigration. But despite the overwhelming financial support they contributed to the project, they had repeatedly failed to pass any such legislation in Congress.
However, the powerful ideological backlash against Trump’s harsh immigration rhetoric and his efforts to strengthen border enforcement gave them an opening to circumvent existing policies. Using a series of judicial rulings and administrative decisions, they gradually managed to eliminate legal restrictions against immigration by reclassifying most migrants as protected asylum seekers, who must be allowed to remain in our country after crossing the border.
With millions of foreigners casually entering the U.S. and only a small fraction of them ever being deported, the enforcement of laws against unauthorized entry largely disappeared as a matter of practical federal policy. And by effectively eliminating the notion of illegal immigration and allowing migrants to remain here, our country naturally began attracting more and more eager entrants from all across the world.
During the Immigration Wars of the 1990s, activists had warned that our country would soon be swamped by endless waves of immigrants from Mexico and the rest of Latin America, but I’d always regarded this as total nonsense. Mexican birth-rates were rapidly declining toward replacement levels during those years, with most other countries of the region following that same trajectory, and according to official estimates, the population of Latin America will peak and begin to decline within another generation. America’s wrong-headed efforts to sanction and destroy the Venezuelan economy has produced a heavy outflow from that country, but we are obviously the ones responsible for that particular problem.
However, one very surprising recent development has been the large influx of migrants from Africa, something we had never previously experienced in such numbers. For many years, blogger Steve Sailer has publicized what he calls “the Most Important Graph in the World,” showing that the population of Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to grow by 700% from 1990 to 2100, rapidly approaching half of the entire world’s population and thereby providing an almost unlimited source of future migrants.
So the combination of effectively eliminating our restrictions on immigration together with Africa’s exponential population growth might easily lead to unprecedented demographic changes in our society, with the sudden recent wave of African migrants being merely an early warning of what might eventually come.
Although it’s unclear how much of the voting public explicitly recognized this dystopian scenario, it may have quietly circulated in attenuated or euphemistic form, provoking the sort of uneasiness that shifted support towards Trump, who was promising a policy of large-scale deportations if elected.
Towards the end of the campaign, Republicans had focused on the recent inflow of African-ancestry Haitians, claiming these immigrants were eating family pets, and perhaps this was partly an indirect means of raising such concerns.
For about a dozen years beginning in the early 1990s, one of my main political issues had been immigration, and during that period I worked very closely with the Neocons, publishing widely in their leading outlets. Indeed, at the time I regularly served as their go-to guy on that contentious topic:
- Immigration or the Welfare State
Ron Unz • Policy Review • September 1994 • 4,100 Words - The Right Kind of Outreach for the GOP
Ron Unz • The Weekly Standard • March 1, 1999 • 2,500 Words - California and the End of White America
Ron Unz • Commentary • October 1999 • 8,600 Words - The Right Way for Republicans to Handle Ethnicity in Politics
Ron Unz • The American Enterprise • April 2000 • 3,200 Words - How the Republicans Lost California
Ron Unz • The Wall Street Journal • August 28, 2000 • 1,300 Words
None of my underlying views have much changed since then and I’d still stand by virtually every word I wrote in those many articles and columns. But by 2011, our country’s ideological and economic landscape had shifted so drastically that the policy-proposals I advocated shifted as well, as I explained in a long article that I published in the American Conservative:
- Immigration, Republicans, and the End of White America
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • September 19, 2011 • 12,200 Words
A central theme of all my writing had been the strong likelihood that America’s newest waves of immigrants—mostly Hispanics and Asians—should and would become assimilated into the white mainstream much as had happened to all the previous immigrant waves from Europe a century or more ago. I emphasized the importance of supporting policies that would strongly encourage this, notably including always teaching English in our public schools.
Such advocacy of assimilation and amalgamation naturally provoked intense hostility from racially-focused white activists, but I think that over the last couple of decades my predictions have been almost completely borne out, as demonstrated in the trends of ethnic voting patterns. As I explained in an article following the 2022 mid-term elections:
Although a single election result can easily be dismissed as an outlier, several in a row have now revealed a new American political landscape that must be recognized. According to the exit polls, white voters favored Republican candidates by a 60-40 margin, while Hispanics and Asians leaned in the opposite 40-60 direction, certainly a clear difference but hardly an unbridgeable ideological chasm.
And even these figures may considerably exaggerate the influence of ethnicity in such voting patterns. Although Texas is solidly Republican and Florida is evenly divided, the bulk of Hispanics and Asians live in heavily Democratic states such as California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey. Moreover, both these groups are considerably younger than whites, and youthful voters skewed very heavily Democratic. So their overall voting patterns may not have differed so greatly from whites of the same age and region.
The increasing political amalgamation of these non-white populations with the existing white majority is a development of enormous consequence for our country’s future. If these trends continue, the voting behavior of members of these rapidly-growing groups will become much less determined by their ethnic ancestry than by the same set of factors that influence the choices of their white counterparts, not only the aforementioned impact of age and geography, but also characteristics such as education, affluence, occupation, and religiosity. And if this occurs, then from a political perspective Hispanics and Asians would become little different than Americans of Irish or Italian heritage.
These trends have continued and they even accelerated in last week’s remarkable results, in which exit polls revealed that Trump won nearly half the Hispanic vote, the largest share of any Republican candidate in modern American history. Indeed, Trump actually did slightly better with Hispanic men than he did with white women.
Once again, I believe that even these dramatic results considerably understated the actual degree of political convergence between Hispanics and whites since the former are so heavily concentrated in overwhelmingly Democratic states, and probably voted much like their white neighbors. Someone also noted that on a national basis there was virtually no difference in voting between between Hispanics and whites who were under thirty.
Similarly, the much smaller Asian population is even more heavily concentrated in Democratic states, while disproportionately being well-educated and affluent, so their substantial skew against Trump was probably little different from that of whites of the same income, education, or geographical location.
Meanwhile, despite widespread media suggestions to the contrary, Trump showed virtually no improvement whatsoever in his black share of the vote, which rose only a single point from 12% in 2020 to 13% in 2024, with a full 85% of blacks favoring his Democratic opponent.
Donald Trump was certainly the most divisive political candidate in modern American history, regularly vilified by our mainstream media as a white racist intensely hostile to non-whites. Yet these results suggest that if Hispanics and Asians—who together represent more than a quarter of our total population—had instead been white, their presidential voting patterns would have been almost unchanged, a result with tremendously important political implications for our country’s future. This momentous development was recognized not merely by mainstream conservative media organs such as the New York Post, but also by a prominent White Nationalist writing under the name of Gregory Hood.
I think that all of this further supports the broader ethnic analysis with which I had closed my 2022 article:
In late 2020 I published a lengthy survey on the intellectual history of American white racialism and one section discussed The Dispossessed Majority, a seminal text written a half-century ago by Wilmot Robertson, which revived that ideological movement after its post-World War II eclipse.
Despite the passage of several decades, I argued that Robertson’s general framework seemed surprisingly relevant in today’s America, but required certain important redefinitions of his “Majority” category, with that crucial transformation having been facilitated by the successful outcome of the English Wars.
Running some 200,000 words, Robertson’s opus soon became the ur-text of modern American White Nationalism, reestablishing the ideological basis for a movement once anchored in the writings of men such as Lothrop Stoddard but which had largely disappeared in the aftermath of World War II.
From its earliest days, America had been run by its Anglo-Saxon core along with the assimilated descendents of closely-related Northern European immigrant groups, who together constituted both the bulk of the population and a large majority of its ruling elites. But Robertson argued that during the previous generation or two, a quiet revolution had steadily shifted political and social control into the hands of America’s tiny Jewish minority, thereby transforming the country’s huge white Gentile population into “the dispossessed majority” of his title, even as the heavily Jewish media ensured that very few members of that group had recognized this ongoing transformation.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the central fault line in American society had almost invariably been that separating black from white, with few scholars exploring any residual conflicts between different white ethnic groups. Large scale European immigration had been halted in 1924, and it was widely believed that decades of action by America’s powerful melting-pot had mostly eliminated the sharp differences between the various flavors of whites, a perception strongly encouraged by the media of that era. In fact, I suspect that one reason Beyond the Melting Pot by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan had attracted so much attention and became such a sociological classic in 1963 was that it focused on a subject otherwise so little-discussed and one that went against the prevailing ideas of the period.
By contrast, The Dispossessed Majority marked an ideological return to the early decades of the twentieth century, when intra-white conflict along ethnic lines had been the central issue. Indeed, Robertson reverted to the old-fashioned separation of Europeans into the Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean sub-races, a usage long since fallen into disrepute and popular disuse. Although blacks, Asians, and other non-white groups were given some attention, his primary focus was on differences between American whites.
In particular, the author sharply distinguished between “assimilable” and “non-assimilable” white minorities. By his reckoning, America’s so-called “Majority” population—the Old Stock Anglo-Saxons and other fully assimilated Northern European ethnic groups—constituted just under 60% of our total population. An additional 12% fell into the category of “assimilable white minorities,” including the Irish, Poles, and French Canadians. But another 8% of the population consisted of white ethnicities he considered sufficiently alien as to be classified as “non-assimilable,” including Jews, Southern Italians, and Greeks, which was quite an intellectually scandalous position to take in the early 1970s.
A book first published in 1972 is now nearly a half-century old, and must be evaluated in that light, so its numerous references to the threat of Communism and the Soviet Union are obviously quite dated. But taken as a whole, I think the text holds up very well, probably remaining more relevant to the domestic problems of our own present-day American society than all but a sliver of the works published around the same time. Indeed, although I had found it quite interesting a decade ago, the events of the last few years—and especially the last few months—seem to have enormously increased its contemporary relevance. Robertson—whose real name was Humphrey Ireland—died in 2005 at the age of 90, but I think he would have found our current domestic problems an almost straight-line extrapolation of those that he had first laid out several decades ago.
Most remarkably, I think an updated version of his central ethnographic framework might be a useful means of analyzing the fault-lines in today’s American society. Although Robertson might not necessarily have agreed, I believe that the last two generations have succeeded in fully merging virtually all of America’s white Gentile ethnic groups—whether “assimilable” or “non-assimilable”—into what he had defined as the Majority population, with few if any sharp distinctions remaining. So by that standard, today’s Majority is almost exactly the same fraction of our national population as the somewhat different Majority that he had defined fifty years ago.
And I would argue that an even more profound change has been that the bulk of America’s non-whites—most Hispanic and Asian groups—have now clearly shifted into Robertson’s category of “assimilable minorities,” or perhaps in many cases have already even become fully-assimilated members of our Majority population. Such major revisions obviously do violence to the ideological beliefs of an author who was born more than a century ago, but I think they much better reflect the realities of today’s American society than do his sharp distinctions between Europeans of Nordic and Alpine racial ancestry…
And oddly enough, under this revised ethnic framework a case can be made that the vast demographic changes of the last fifty years have ultimately resulted in an America whose Majority and assimilable minorities together now constitute a much larger fraction of our national population than they did when Robertson’s book first appeared.
- Hispanics and Asians Join the White Political Mainstream
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 14, 2022 • 6,400 Words
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