Unmasking the Cucks

Vox Day and John Red Eagle, Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America, Castalia House, 2015, Kindle only, 190 pp., $4.99.

Cuckservative! A term for duplicitous, nation-betraying pseudo-conservatives, it was the Insult of the Year for 2015. It horrified the lefties at Salon and the Washington Post last summer, and appalled the faux-conservatives at National Review, all of whom denounced it as crude, offensive, and obscene.

Such a marvelous neologism was tailor-made for a book title, and here we are with the first one out of the chute, by Vox Day and John Red Eagle. Fresh as yesterday’s news–it mentions the Bataclan theater killings in Paris on November 13, and the San Bernardino shootings of December 2–Cuckservative is at once a book of trenchant political criticism, a detailed economic analysis of the costs of unbridled immigration, a historical survey of human migration and its perils, and a call to arms.

What does immigration have to do with cuckservatism? Right now, immigration, amnesty, and whether to admit Muslim “refugees” are the biggest issues in the national debate. Among so-called conservatives, they’re what divide the cucks–such as Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio–from those of a more nationalist or race-realist type of whom the most obvious example is Donald Trump.

And the immigration debate isn’t just another political squabble that will blow over in six months. It is a crisis of gravest historical significance. As the authors explain:

Cuckservatism . . . has already presented an existential threat to the United States of America in barely half the time it took communism to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union . . . . The 50-year mass migration into the United States [i.e., since 1965] is the single largest invasion in human history. At over 60 million, it dwarfs Operation Barbarossa, in which Hitler sent 3.8 million men into the Soviet Union. It is two orders of magnitude larger than the Mongol horde of Batu Khan, which conquered over 2.3 million square miles of territory from Burma to Bulgaria. It is one thousand times larger than the First Crusade. And it is twice the number of immigrants who entered the United States between 1870 and 1930 and, at the time, represented an estimated 60 percent of the entire world’s immigrants.

It requires a near-complete ignorance of history to assume, as cuckservatives do, that an invasion of this magnitude will not have an extraordinary impact on the long-term fate of the United States, or that it does not represent an existential threat to the very survival of America as a nation.

This gaze into the abyss comes from the final chapter, “A Challenge to the Cuckservative,” in what I describe as the call to arms. It’s such a shivering-cold look at our possible (probable?) future, it makes me grateful the authors chose such a whimsical, frivolous title for the book. If Mr. Day and Mr. Red Eagle had called their book Suicide by Immigration or How America Ends I think it would have been too painful to read.

Instead, the authors ease us into the nightmare gradually. We start with a friendly, sprightly foreword by blogger/Twitter personality and author of Gorilla Mindset, Mike Cernovich:

The word “cuckservative” triggers conservatives. As a prominent user of the word, I’ve seen the leading voices in mainstream conservatism react in horror when called a cuck. On Twitter, the very men who complain that society has been too feminized shriek like little girls and block anyone who uses the term. National Review, the leading publication of the mainstream conservative movement, has even begun to ban commenters who dare to use it . . . .

The Republican Party, as well as conservative media standard bearers such as National Review and think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, have sold out the American people. Not only do these “conservatives” constantly call for open borders despite their disastrous effects on most Americans, but they have appropriated the terminology of the Left in calling all those who oppose open borders “racists” or “xenophobes.”

So, cuckservatives are false conservatives who are thrilled to see real Americans get screwed over by immigration!

After that crisp précis of the cuckservative-immigration nexus, the authors move on to recent events. They remind us of the immigration crises of 2014-2015, beginning with the story of “unaccompanied children” from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras suddenly streaming across our southern border. Then there’s the broader crisis in the Middle East, as millions of refugees swarm into southeastern and finally western Europe. And yet this European “refugee” crisis–I use quotation marks because these migrants are mainly single young men and do not fit the UN definition of refugees–is small beer compared to what’s happening in our own country:

[I]n 2013 alone the U.S.A. took in 1,060,462 people, 280,276 of them Muslim. Those one million new U.S. residents are in addition to the 12 million illegal aliens who already reside in the United States, part of a demographic change that has seen the European-American share of the population decline to 62.1 percent, down from 87.5 percent in 1950.

And this explains the phenomenon of Donald Trump, the one Republican presidential contender who calls for the deportation of all 12 million illegals. It also helps explain the popularity of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, the lone Democratic hopeful who has dared to criticize unbridled immigration.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders are the only two presidential candidates who argue that immigrants, legal and otherwise, hurt employment and wages among Americans. Regarded as gadflies and flakes by the mainstream Republicans and Democrats, these two men seemed to connect with ordinary Americans, and their poll numbers skyrocketed. (Note: While Mr. Sanders supports a “path to citizenship” for illegals, he has repeatedly blamed Wall Street for the immigration problem, and implied that the numbers need to be curtailed.)

* * *

The subject matter of Cuckservative is much grimmer than that of Vox Day’s previous book, SJWs Always Lie, but the two bear a striking resemblance. They both have excellent, vicious cartoons by the pseudonymous “Red Meat,” and a foreword by a quasi-celebrity of internet culture (Milo Yiannopoulos wrote the foreword for SJWs). Both books’ opening chapters give us a quick overview, gradually leading into deep, sometimes abstruse background material. In Cuckservative, Messrs. Red Eagle and Day warm us up by demolishing the whole mythology surrounding the canard that America is a “nation of immigrants.”

The Melting Pot: This wasn’t some traditional watchword of American democracy and equality. It was the title of a 1908 play by Israel Zangwill about recent immigrants from Tsarist Russia to the Lower East Side of New York.

“Give me your tired your poor . . .“: This Emma Lazarus poem, inscribed on a plaque affixed to the Statue of Liberty, has been used for 130 years to advance the nation-of-immigrants idea. After Ellis Island became a processing center in the 1890s, the poem was even used to imply that the purpose of the statue was to welcome immigrants. In fact, the statue’s real name is Liberty Enlightening the World, and commemorates the 100th anniversary of the founding of the United States as a land of liberty.

The United States was founded, intentionally, as a nation of immigrants. This is one of those soft propaganda lies invoked to justify mass immigration. In fact, the U.S.A. was founded by and for English-speaking inhabitants mostly from the British Isles. There were immigration restrictions from the very start, and the first American citizenship law allowed naturalization only of “free white persons of good character.” There were no “anchor babies” and no automatic spousal-citizenship provisions.

The Magic Dirt theory: This is the notion that a plot of earth can magically change indelible traits: culture, DNA, whatever. You can plant a Canary Island palm in Nova Scotia and it will turn into a Douglas Fir. Change the nationality of Guatemalan indios to “American” and they will become Ozzie and Harriet. This “theory,” which Vox Day says he coined himself, is of course a joke. What isn’t amusing is that its premises are accepted by most of our politicians and public-policy makers. We’re not supposed to discriminate between people of different races, cultures, or national origins because once they are blessed by our Magic Dirt, they are all Americans, same as us.

 American exceptionalism; American freedom: the U.S.A. attracts immigrants because it is unique in its level of freedom and restraint of state power. That’s what we still tell ourselves, even though abuses of state power have grown enormously in the past century:

Today, in many parts of the Unites States, police can smash in your door in the middle of the night with a battering ram, lob flash-bang hand grenades inside, drag you and children out of bed or bath at gunpoint, kick or rifle-butt you to the ground if you fail to obey quickly enough, and shoot your dog if it barks too much . . . . Similarly, the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies can target private citizens on the basis of their political views, without any consequences for those who ordered it to be done . . . .

By whatever combination of cultural decay and demographic changes in the electorate, today’s Americans already tolerate impositions greater than those that triggered the Revolution. Leftists, particularly since they made their decisive break with the white working class in the 1970s, enthusiastically support the importation of people for whom the above abuses are not new and unwelcome changes, but the normal experience of government throughout history.

The authors then vivisect both our disastrous immigration policy and the follies of cuckservatism, and include a “field guide to identifying the American cuckservative:”

The cuckservative:

• Thinks the United States’ problems can be solved by tax cuts for billionaires.
• Believes that the historical culture and political traditions of an immigrant’s homeland have no bearing on that immigrant’s future opinions and voting patterns in the United States.
• Insists the Republican Party needs to cater to recent Hispanic immigrants to stay relevant.
• Supports “a path to citizenship”–amnesty–for illegals.
• Asserts that “diversity is our strength.”
• Is white, but has adopted a nonwhite child.
• Claims the word cuckservative is racist.

The authors also provide a history of the 1965 Immigration Act, which took away our traditional restrictions on nonwhite immigrants, and they deflate myths about immigration.

For example, we are often told by both liberals and cuckservatives that immigration is good for the economy. Last summer, the leftist site ThinkProgress.com took Bernie Sanders to task for saying that immigrants take American jobs. ThinkProgress cited a study “proving” that each new immigrant created 1.2 jobs for local workers, and had the potential for adding 2.5. The authors of Cuckservative traced these claims to the source, and found that the paper on which they were based had excluded most of the country, and most immigrants.

The authors re-analyzed the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and found that immigration between 1980 and 2013 cost American workers about one-fifth of a job per immigrant. It’s an intellectual loss as well. In the U.S., and in Britain, the average I.Q. of teenagers dropped two or three points between 1980 and 2008, partly due to immigration of relatively low-I.Q. nonwhites.

* * *

Both authors claim American Indian heritage, and they try to draw analogies between the dispossession of the Red Indians and what is now facing white Americans. For example, they offer the Shawnee chief Tecumseh as a kind of nativist prototype who decided to fight the white invader.

These comparisons are inaccurate, and are among the few false notes I found in the book. There never was any unitary Indian Nation; the various tribes of North America fought each other at least as much as they fought the white man. And the political effort to reverse illegal immigration is not seeking to reclaim a nameless patch of soil in North America, but rather to save and preserve the nation known as the United States of America.

Still, the Indian card is a useful one to play when engaging in this debate, since it shuts down the usual attack favored by immigration hucksters: Your people were once immigrants, too! So I can’t blame John Red Eagle and Vox Day for waving their feathers. It gives them a nice rhetorical device: “We’ve seen it all before! Don’t let this happen to you!”