Treason at the Dallas Morning News

The essay by the Dallas Morning News explaining why it has named “The Illegal Immigrant” as “Texan of the Year” is profoundly dishonest. It starts off justifying the choice by saying that “Texan of the Year” simply means the person (or in this case persons) having the greatest impact, for good or ill. Which implies that the TOY designation has nothing to do with good and bad. Which is absurd. Suppose a person living in Texas committed some criminal act that had an enormous impact on Texas, say, God forbid, a terrorist bombing that killed hundreds of people—would the News remotely contemplate calling him the Texan of the Year? Obviously the designation Texan of the Year implies approval, or at the very least legitimacy. Furthermore, the Morning News is most assuredly approving and legitimizing the illegal alien invaders—and doing so in the biggest way possible. This is made clear in the concluding paragraphs of the essay where the Morning News declares that the illegal aliens represent the future of Texas and America to which we must accede:

Historians say that the distinctly American democratic and middle-class ideals grew out of a specific cultural tradition—the Anglo-Protestant. Changed slowly over time by immigrants from the world over, it’s now challenged by a strong competing culture.

If critics are correct, we could be seeing the advent of the kind of fractiousness that bedevils public life in Canada and other nations where peoples who speak different languages, and come from different cultural backgrounds, live together only with mutual suspicion and unease.

On the other hand, perhaps the alarmists are wrong. Maybe these ambitious, hard-working immigrants, whatever their documentation, will write the next great chapter of a story that’s still deeply American, though with a different accent. If the optimists are right, much work remains to be done to incorporate all immigrants fully into new cultural traditions. [Italics added.]

We end 2007 no closer to compromise on the issue than when the year began. People waging a culture war—and that’s what the struggle over illegal immigration is—don’t give up easily. What you think of the illegal immigrant says a lot about what you think of America, and what vision of her you are willing to defend. How we deal with the stranger among us says not only who we Americans are today but determines who we will become tomorrow.

The italicized text represents nothing less than a call to abandon the historic American culture and to surrender to the multiculturalization of America, the illegal-alienization of America, the Hispanicization of America. It is of a piece with George W. Bush’s August 2000 speech in Miami in which he celebrated the spread of the Spanish language and Hispanic culture in the United States and said that by nominating him the Republican party had signed on to this new vision of America. The Dallas Morning News, once thought of as a conservative paper, has gone over to the cultural left.

Not only that, but the essay was written by none other than conservative columnist and DMN asssistant editorial page editor Rod Dreher. This is stated by Rodger Jones of the DMN, in a comment posted this morning at 9:05 a.m. in this discussion (the third comment from the top). This is pretty stunning. Dreher, whom I met about ten years ago and with whom I have been in occasional e-mail contact since then, in the past has been a fairly strong critic of immigration and of the spread of Islam. He told me a few years ago that he fully agreed with the “Lawrence Auster view of immigration.” Now he calls for the surrender of America to the illegal alien invasion.

According to a Morning News reader, this is a pattern with Dreher. In a comment posted at 9:14 a.m. this morning PaulC writes:

I would describe Rod Dreher as someone who begins by taking a strong stance on an issue, then starts to feel uncomfortable with it, and finally ends up coming out on the other side at the end. He did this on the Iraq War. He has done it with illegal immigration. He introduced the illegal issue on this blog several years ago by noting the impact of illegals on Irving, the lack of code enforcement, and the destruction of neighborhoods and property values. But I’ve seen the RodWalk move crablike away from this view steadily and stealthily over a couple of years. Often, on this blog, he even seems to avoid immigration issue altogether. Except for one single topic, moslem jihad, Dreher seems to me like a good “moderate” Supreme Court appointee who gradually “grows” into the position the rest of the mainstream media finds comfortable.

(Note: I expand on my analysis of the Dallas Morning News essay in my second comment posted at Rod Dreher’s weblog. Both comments are also posted here.)

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John D. writes:

The second to last paragraph of the DMN article states:

“On the other hand, perhaps the alarmists are wrong. Maybe these ambitious, hard-working immigrants, whatever their documentation, will write the next great chapter of a story that’s still deeply American, though with a different accent. If the optimists are right, much work remains to be done to incorporate all immigrants fully into new cultural traditions.”

What the hell does that mean? How does one bring immigrants into a culture that the immigrants themselves must inevitably create, and yet remain “deeply American”?

LA replies:

Yes, it’s standard liberal jive, having it every which way. The “immigrants” will “write” the next chapter of the American story, in a “different accent.” The story is changing to something radically different, but somehow it will still be the same story, so don’t worry. This is nonsense. It’s telling readers to surrender to the transformation of America, while telling them to feel ok because even though America is being changed into a different country, it will still be the same country.

Then it says that we must “incorporate all immigrants fully into new cultural traditions.” Meaning, we are going to incorporate them into the traditions that they have brought here? The News has completely given up on the idea of an America that immigrants join; it has signed onto mass illegal immigration and the cultural transformation that results from that; it’s admitting that the immigrants are destroying the historic American culture. Then, having said all that, it says that we must incorporate the immigrants. But what is there left to incorporate them into, since the News has accepted the disappearance of the historic culture into which the immigrants would have been incorporated? The News resolves the contradiction by saying that immigrants will be incorporated into “new cultural traditions.” Translation: America will become Mexico-America, and we will incorporate the immigrants into this Mexico-America. It’s like Mark Steyn saying that the West must assimilate the Muslims even as the Muslims are taking us over.

John D. continues:

The last paragraph states:

“We end 2007 no closer to compromise on the issue than when the year began. People waging a culture war—and that’s what the struggle over illegal immigration is—don’t give up easily. What you think of the illegal immigrant says a lot about what you think of America, and what vision of her you are willing to defend. How we deal with the stranger among us says not only who we Americans are today but determines who we will become tomorrow.”

This is a prime example of what you stated in Huddled Cliches a decade ago regarding the “conservative” position “that immigration is morally strengthening America; that immigration fulfills the idea of America as a universal nation transcending all human particularities; and that immigration is propelled by irresistible historical forces carrying us forward to some millennial vision.” DMN seems to use the same tired argument.

John D. writes:

I was unaware that Dreher authored this piece. It’s a bit unsettling given the fact that Dreher endorsed the Mark Krikorian immigration plan and bashed Huckabee a couple of weeks ago for his flip-flopping on the issue. The commenter “PaulC” that you quoted seems spot on in regards to Dreher.

LA replies:

Hmm, maybe Dreher bashed Huckabee not simply for flipping, but for flipping from open borders to immigration controls?

It would sure be interesting seeing Dreher reconcile his support for the Krikorian plan with his DMN essay touting illegal aliens as the most important “Texans.”

Paul C. writes:

Here’s another thing about Dreher that I find disconcerting. He started out as a Protestant. But found it lacking and converted to Roman Catholicism. Recently, he converted to Eastern Orthodox—presumably because of the priest pedophile issue. [LA replies: Yes, I think Dreher said specifically that he left the Catholic church over that issue.]

I’m a Protestant, so maybe that colors my views. But I find it disturbing when someone changes his religious beliefs as if he were changing clothes. I understand you have an association with Dreher. But he seems like someone easily influenced by others around him. First, in NYC, where he wrote for the NY Post and National Review, I believe. Now, in Dallas, amongst Keven Anne Willey’s open borders editorial board.

As for Iraq, I’ve always opposed the war, because I knew we would never have the nerve to fight it fully and ruthlessly and that it would blow back on us. But I have never been as obsessed with opposing it as Dreher, who now exhibits an unhealthy extremism just as instense as his prior support FOR the war.

This guy just appears to be a flake to me. Sort of like those 30 and 40 something year old women I used to meet 10 and 20 years ago who were always trying “to find themselves.”

LA replies:

I wouldn’t call him a flake, but I agree with you about his changeableness. The way I see him is, he’s led by emotion, not by reason. So there’s this squishiness at his core. I noticed this when he began writing for the NY Post in the late ’90s. Then in the way he decided to move away from NYC after the 9/11 attack. Then in his “Crunchy Conservatism,” a phrase that, like “compassionate conservatism,” suggests a softness that would tend to undermine any genuine adherence to conservatism. In recent years he has become a pretty serious critic of Islam, but then he wrote a column saying that the problems of Islam began as a result of Sayid Qutb’s teachings in the late 20th century, as though Islam was not a problem before that. I wrote Dreher a note pointing out how Sayid Qutb’s teaching was consistent with that of historic Islam, but didn’t hear back from him.

I think the problem with Dreher is that he does not grasp things at the level of principle. He responds to things emotionally. As a result, he might be on the conservative side on this or that issue, but it’s never firm.

Paul K. writes:

You wrote: “I think the problem with Dreher is that he does not grasp things at the level of principle. He responds to things emotionally.”

He has admitted this himself. In a blog entry on July 24 on things he has learned from the Iraq war, entitled “Once upon a time, I believed…”, he writes, “Having been absolutely certain that the war was the right thing to have done, and that we would prevail easily, I am no longer confident that I can discern when emotion is affecting my judgment unduly.”

When I first read that article, I remember being taken aback at the naivete to which Dreher was confessing. For example, his second insight is “I no longer implicitly trust governmental institutions, including the military—neither in their honesty nor their competence.”

Does any real conservative “implicitly trust governmental institutions”? I have not since I was 20 years old. I am surprised that someone who makes his living as a political observer, and who occasionally has intelligent things to say, would only recently have arrived at that realization.

Ray G. writes from Dearborn:

Dreher and his “crunchy conservative” pablum. We should have known he was behind this nonsense in the Dallas Morning News.

What Dreher, Bush, McCain, Clinton, and most media figures and political leaders have yet to appreciate fully is the righteous, and I repeat, righteous, anger of the American people who do not want to see their hometowns turned into Tijuana, Mexico in a few short years. They’re tired of having Spanish language shoved down their throats on every product they purchase, in every business environment—from dealing with your cable company, bank, even automobile dealerships, pandering to customers in Spanish, Arabic and other languages.

Why does our nation exist? It would appear we exist for no other reason than for Mexico. A nation that can’t even agree what language to teach kids in at public school, is a nation that will likely lose its sovereignty and dissolve into some nebulous “free-market continental zone.”

Unless Americans turn up the volume and the heat even higher than we did this past spring, the spineless politicians will sell this country out bit by bit.

Robert B. writes:

The Dallas Morning News’s position, of course, flies in the face of David Hackett Fischer, author of “Albion’s Seed.” As yet, no one has debunked his rather large work on the four main waves English immigrants to America and their folkways—that to wit, shaped all subsequent American immigrant groups and assimilated them. (See this and this.)

Thus, if Mexico’s culture (or even some half-Mexican, half-American culture) replaces ours, it is the death of the United States, its historic people and their culture.

Sam B. writes:

Rod Dreher wrote:

“How we deal with the stranger among us says not only who we Americans are today but determines who we will become tomorrow.”

Where have we heard that before? It contains two cliches:

“Deal with the stranger among us”: ” for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt,” Exodus 23:9.

“Says not only who we Americans are today but determines who we will become tomorrow”: A defense of a “stranger” who, with some rare exceptions familiar to me, isn’t interested in being anything else but a stranger, thank you very much!

Has Dreher looked across the Atlantic lately to see what his poor little “strangers” are wreaking in the host European societies, the UK being a prime example of “loving the stranger as yourself”? Another scriptural quote he might have employed.

Ploni Almoni writes:

I think that accusing even open-borders types of treason is name-calling, besides being inaccurate, and I don’t think it meets the usual high standards of your site.

LA replies:

As I showed in my article, “The Second Mexican War,” Mexico is waging a war of demographic expansion against the United States to take us over demographically and culturally.

As I demonstrate in my initial article on the DMN essay and then in my second comment replying to Dreher, the essence of the DMN essay is to get Texans and Americans to surrender to the Mexican and Hispanic invasion of America. I call that treason.

Mark E. writes:

A simple but important point: “Illegal immigrants,” by definition, cannot be Texan of the Year, because they are not Texans. So, it is not merely that this newspaper designates them “Person of the Year” (a la TIME magazine), but it awards them citizenship as Texans. Would the editorial board call tourists Texans? Would it call illegal immigrants “American of the Year”?

LA replies:

By the same logic by which the DMN editors call the illegals Texans, they would also have to call them Americans, since Texans are Americans. And of course, that’s exactly what the illegals called themselves, in their massive marches in spring 2006. “WE ARE AMERICA,” their signs said. For non-Americans illegally in this country to call themselves Americans was an aggressive act of attempted conquest against this country. The DMN, by calling the illegals “Texans,” has thus now joined with the illegal alien invaders in calling the illegal aliens Americans.

Which further supports my calling the DMN essay an act of treason.

Robert in Nashville writes:

I can hardly believe that a newspaper announces what is in effect the overrunning and surrender of our nation as if it were just an interesting story. And the reason why we should not respond to the invasion? Thank you for pointing out the stunning contradiction in the article. Because the dissolution and replacement of our national existence by another nation will also be our nation? Is there no national voice willing to point that this process of national dissolution is defended by a contradiction, but yours?

Laura G. writes:

I agree with your entire critique, and it makes me sick, just as it apparently does you, too. I wonder how much influence TIME had on the Dallas choice, with their similarly corrupt decision to have the crypto-terrorist Putin as Man of the Year. Same general trajectory of excuses were made. Same we-are-not-taking-a-stance-on-wherther-or-not-he-is-a-force-for-good-or-evil ballyhoo. Same he-is-a-big-influence b.s. Same reason for anyone who cares about the future of our nation to do whatever we can to strengthen alternative streams of communication and weaken the traitorous mainstream media.

That is a New Year’s way of thanking you again, as always, for what you do, and to wish you great successes in 2008.

Patrick H. writes:

To add to the comments about Rod Dreher: He reminds me, oddly, of Andrew Sullivan. They’re both highly labile personalities, emotionally driven, prone especially to fits of deep moral outrage. These expressions of moral dudgeon are often accompanied by declarations of shock, surprise and a sense that they, personally, have been betrayed by the offense in question. Then follows an indication (or many) in word (and sometimes deed), of a change in loyalty or affiliation. Andrew Sullivan is no longer a conservative in any sense of the word I understand, and his peregrination leftward has been going on for some years now. Perhaps we are witnessing something similar with Dreher (whom I admit I find personally appealing in many ways, much more so than Sullivan).

Howard Sutherland writes:

I hope you are having a very merry Christmas (remember it runs through Twelfth Night!)

I was going to reply that I figured crunchy-con Catholic convert Dreher had drunk the U.S. Catholic bishop’s open-borders kool-aid. Then I saw he had quit Catholicism over pederast priests. He does seem easily swayed and governed by emotional responses to things.

What Dreher and the Morning News propose is the worst possible solution. It would be one thing, and a bad one, to replace American culture with Latin American. That would at least be a surrender to something known. Dreher proposes surrendering to an unknown: whatever would result from the mingling of American trash culture, white and black, with mestizo peasant culture—for it is the lowest common denominator of each culture that would predominate in such a bastard offspring.

We can begin to see what it would look like in the culture of the Mexican and Salvadoran gangs that have invaded America. Once here, these alien mercenaries, to the extent they adopt anything American at all, ape the worst of the rap anti-culture.

An America that is all MS-13, all the time. That’s the future the Morning News demands we welcome, by celebrating its “Texans” of the year.

Mark Jaws writes:

I posted the below paragraph to Dreher’s website. I read his book, Crunchy Cons, and thoroughly enjoyed it. But his pathetic excuse mongering on behalf of his producing the DMN Texan of the Year (TOY) sounds very Quislingish to me. The good news is the reaction this TOY has stirred up. More and more the masses are becoming alienated from the elites who are pushing Hispanization with its catastrophic demographic consequences.

“What is never mentioned in this discussion about illegal immigration is the demographic burden Hispanics nationwide impose due to their high drop out rates, high illegitimacy rates, high welfare usage rates. How any group can “write the next chapter of American history” when 50% of its young people drop out of high school is a mystery to me. Perhaps the apologists at DMN and the liberal Christians who selectively pick and choose from the New Testament can explain this to me.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 30, 2007 12:44 PM | Send