By Conlan Salgado

Written by Conlan Salgado

There is a particularly vicious cartel, growing in size and number in the United States: I call them the “data gangsters.” These criminally idiotic people are a subset of the larger, more notorious “Trend Ing Da Wrong Way” gang, who traffic large numbers of lies over international and national airways; their narratives–AAAHHH RUSSIA, Trump is trying to kill your trans son, Jan 6, Constitutional Crisis LOOMS, the Faux Pas blue suit fiasco, Trump rigged the 2016 election, Jasmine Crockett is not dumber than the sole of your shoe–emerge across different platforms tightly coordinated in a manner I just can’t help feeling should be prosecutable under RICO laws.

Jasmine Crockett’s ascent to superstardom is definitely some sort of racketeering on the part of the Media, and threatening the American public with an AOC presidential bid should qualify as unlawful intimidation.

The Democrat Party has fallen upon juvenile times: really, really dumb adolescent times. Their current strategy is called “dark woke”, which I suppose is a riff on dark MAGA. Unfortunately, they fail to understand that dark MAGA is popular because MAGA is popular. Woke is wildly unpopular, but never fear, for a transformation is in the works. Imagine: person X is thoroughly hateful, and is rightfully despised by others. Got any ideas about how to make him more lovable? How about criminality and curse words? Doesn’t seem so despicable anymore, does he?

Speaking of despicable, let’s return to our main topic. What is a data gangster? These are the people writing articles such as “The economic case against deportation”. . . “Don’t you know that you wouldn’t have food on your table without Jose and Eduardo” . . . “Illegals built everything, even the Border Wall” and other leftist brain popcorn. They have the NUMBERS, CHARTS and GRAPHS which indisputably show how Trump is ruining the economy, murdering Lady Liberty, and moving his mouth or twitching his eyes precisely the way Hitler did.

Now, on any given topic, we MAGA data cops can whip out any number of flattering statistics:

-The growing China trade deficit cost 3.7 million American jobs between 2001 and 2018

-Jobs lost in every U.S. state and congressional district

-Trade deficit in computer parts industry has lost 1.3 million jobs in that sector over 2001-2018

-70,000 factories have closed over 20 years, condemning many millions to unemployment 

-Loss of manufacturing jobs in trade exposed industries corresponded almost 1-for-1 to long-term unemployment, meaning hundreds of thousands lost jobs and did not find and/or seek other ones. This increases government pay-outs as well

-The collapse of local labor demand has caused 7 million prime age working men to despair. They no longer even seek employment

-Americans will do every job. We don’t need a giant population of slave labor, or illegal labor. The Democrats cling desperately to their racist notion, antebellum in origin, that the economy will collapse if we don’t maintain a large class of laborers working for slave wages

-“The higher cost of all the services provided to immigrants and the lower taxes they pay (because they have lower earnings) . . . implies that on a year-to-year basis immigration creates a fiscal hole of at least $50 billion.” Read further here

You catch the drift. Your beliefs are certainly backed up by facts, and you should be able to quote some of them. But you ought also to be able to think of first principles, which necessarily condition the truth or falsehood of any data set. In the spirit of neighborliness, below I’ve written a list of sorts, not of data or statistics, but axioms–basic truths–which you ought to utilize in interrogating any data set for truth or falsehood.

1) As members of a national community, we recognize that national sovereignty is a basic good. Without national sovereignty, the national community does not exist. Consequently, even if it were true that deporting millions of illegal aliens caused some negative economic reaction (it will not), it would still be a good and essential task to undertake, because it protects our national sovereignty–itself a basic good.

2) As members of the American community, we prioritize the well-being of the American workers, even at the expense of non-American workers. In a particularly distasteful article, David Harsanyi argued that American manufacturing is at an all time high, thus it is very silly to want to onshore what he implies are “low-skill” manufacturing industries (think, textiles). Never mind the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have lower lifetime earnings, prosperity, quality of life, etc. because they lost their high-paying, great-benefits local manufacturing job. Human lives and well-being are not nearly abstract enough topics to interest academics, I grant. But this is a critical point: the economic health of the American worker is a basic good.

3) Cheap prices are good, but they are not a basic good. It is an excellent thing that America manufactures cutting-edge technology; it is also incidentally good that our prices are cheap because products are made by enslaved Chinese people, but it is not essentially good. The good of dirt-cheap prices pales in comparison to the good of employing millions of non-college educated workers in manufacturing jobs with superb wage premiums and benefits. Who cares that manufacturing is “at an all time high”? I am not talking about statistics, but about human lives.

The millions in the heartland are not part of this all-time high; many thousands of American lives have cratered into an all-time low after their manufacturing jobs were lost to China. My argument is simple: if there is a solution which involves those people once again having premium-wage manufacturing jobs, that solution ought to be implemented. It never ceases to amaze me that this truth escapes us, even as we claim to live in a country “of, by, and for the people”: what of an economy of, by, and for the people? Products for Americans made by Americans? A good politician recognizes that well-being is local; individuals matter, especially when together they rank in the millions. To dismiss the need for on-shoring the industries we outsourced to China mocks the basic good that constitutes the health of the American worker.

4) As members of the American community, we recognize American citizenship as a basic good. In recent years, there has been a cheapening of citizenship, not merely in the widespread theft of it by foreign illegals, but in the notion and reality of what it is. Citizenship is, of course, belonging to a particular geography. More importantly, however, it is belonging to a particular history, form of government, set of values, economic situation, etc.

An American citizen is self-governing both locally and nationally, both personally and communally; he values the virtues of freedom, self-reliance, friendship, hard-work, gun-ownership, the right openly and viciously to criticize his government; he is aware of the origin of his country, its heroes and the appropriateness of trying to model them; he is also aware of its darkest moments and periods, and knows the policies and persons who most damaged its integrity and so can actively guard against such policies and persons in his own day. Most importantly, an American citizen shares these values, practices and awarenesses with other citizens and therein lies his bond with them, his love for them, and his willingness to sacrifice for them.

It is only in this definitional context can we understand the true intent of multiculturalism and its supplier: illegal immigration. Mass immigration was not only an attempt to import a cheaper labor force, or a new Democratic base, or an indigent and therefore compliant population, or any of the other retail theories of pundits and analysts. It was more properly an attempt to import a different history, a different set of values, a different form of government, and therefore to destroy, in whole or part, the American community.

It was an attempt to destroy citizenship and the possibility of feeling neighborly, or loyal, or self-sacrificial respecting your fellows. Why? Because limited government or any semblance thereof, as well as any population who values a limited government, poses a repugnant danger to those who seek to make the state–and their own power as its stewards–total. The elites never intended to adopt the values of their new subjects; they merely intended to foment a crisis of values and national coherence in order to justify a total state.

A population which does not value together, sacrifice for each other, protect each other, know and love the same stories, despise the same villains, admire the same heroes will instead hate each other, prey on each other, vandalize each other’s homes, cars, and houses of worship, and come up with histories which villainize each other while valorizing themselves: nation shall rise against nation, sister against mother, son-in-law against father-in-law.

Mass illegal immigration was supposed to be the apocalypse which called forth the total state under the guise of savior, rather than oppressor. After all, it is only a state which is big enough to control all human activities and invasive enough to supervise your thoughts which can prevent a population of enemies from engaging in constant warfare.

It is perhaps the peculiar privilege of the American citizen that his citizenship requires him to be a Christian in practice to be an American in practice, for it was Christ who established a community of friends, not on the basis of sex, or race, or color, or class, but on love and loyalty to the best good. It was Christ who told them: love one another. It was Christ who said: No greater love hath a man than to lay down his life for his friends.

If I could identify the textual basis of American citizenship, the moment when it was established, I might recognize the final line of the Declaration of Independence, which demands that “greater love” of all Americans for each other: “For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Sourced from PRICKLY PEAR