The problem with the drivers of the Trump candidacy is that it really is a mishmash of deplorables. Whether it is the nationalist screeds of Breitbart.com (an anti-Reaganist outlet that Andrew Breitbart would have personally reviled), the rise of the racialist alt-right, or the initial support of anti-immigrant organizations such as FAIR, CIS, and Numbers USA — all of whom have connections to former Planned Parenthood executive John Tanton.
Tanton and his allies are the ones who fueled the anti-immigrant movement. Former Planned Parenthood executives — not content with merely dropping abortion clinics inside minority neighborhoods — have an agenda and mission to drive out minorities altogether. Those familiar with the writings of Margaret Sanger, the eugenicist founder of Planned Parenthood, will not be shocked in the slightest.
[The most penetrating thinkers] are coming to see that a qualitative factor as opposed to a quantitative one is of primary importance in dealing with the great masses of humanity.
Yes, Sanger actually wrote that. The problem is that too many on the political left and the political right believe this as well.
Tanton is not the only problem with the arise of Trump and the anti-immigrant movement. Others directly attached to FAIR such as Donald Collins have made their feelings well known about who the targets are:
Collins is also an Anti-Catholic with a capital ‘A.’ He sees the pro-immigration reform movement in the U.S. as a plan by the Vatican to infiltrate our country with Catholics and further control the government by placing more Catholics in government, more Catholics on the voter rolls and more Catholics on the Supreme Court. Like the know-nothings before him, Collins is determined to remove Catholic influences from every major field. Unless, of course, those Catholics agree with him about contraception and abortion.
Is it any small wonder why you’ve seen so many Catholics hold back? Or worse still, certain Catholics flock to the banners who have either used the pro-life movement as a cash cow or worse, simply aren’t pro-life in a Catholic sense?
There are several others involved in financing this operation, known as U.S. Inc — an umbrella organization that funds groups such as:
American Immigration Control Foundation
American Patrol
Californians for Population Stabilization
Center For Immigration Studies (CIS)
Numbers USA
Population-Environment Balance
ProEnglish
U.S. English (founded by PP executive Tanton)
The Social Contract Press (which produces anti-Catholic screeds)
These organizations have all at one time or another aligned themselves with the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) — a successor organization to the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan –founded in part to oppose:
“the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into the United States that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority in our lifetime. We believe that illegal immigration must be stopped, if necessary by military force and placing troops on our national borders; that illegal aliens must be returned to their own countries; and that legal immigration must be severely restricted or halted through appropriate changes in our laws and policies.”
Sound familiar?
All of these organizations — ProEnglish with American Renaissance being a classic example, VDARE and Amerika being others — are in their own ways fueling the rise of what is termed the Alt-Right.
At first, you could find their infiltrators out there denying its very existence. That is because on Stormfront — the website for the American neo-Nazi right — those were their instructions dating as far back as 2009… to infiltrate the Tea Party movement and occupy leadership positions over the course of time:
“Don’t go there [Tea Parties] with flags and uniforms, and don’t try to preach the truth,” advised one Stormfront writer. “Go in civil, meet people with whom we might do things later, and try to get into the organising [sic] circles.” Another writer said in response that white supremacists shouldn’t “fail to push to envelope” but cautioned them to “dress inconspicuously.”
Even in Virginia, a fourth aggregate new media website has aggregated itself calling itself Virginia’s Underground Railroad. What do they believe? A total rejection of Kirk’s 10 Conservative Principles and an embracing of the “14 Words” which read:
The Alt Right believes we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children.
The ultimate question then becomes whether or not Donald Trump himself believes all these things. Whether or not a man who takes the counsel of anti-Catholics picks a fight with Pope Francis, who is ambivalent on life, who takes the active assistance of Alt-Right media, who advances an anti-immigrant line borrowing from the very dregs of the anti-immigrant movement, who defends Planned Parenthood publicly, who takes the advice and support of those who advocate “mild strain of white nationalism” — is this really what masquerades as conservatism today?
As a Catholic, as a conservative and deeply committed pro-lifer who believes in the vision of Reagan, I cannot assent my conscience to a movement that replaces Christian values with ideological principle, conservatism with nationalism, freedom with falangism. America is supposed to be a shining city on a hill, not a fortress.
Of course, Hillary Clinton is equally dangerous in different ways. Clinton’s lack of any serious policy accomplishments, her commitment to furthering the cause of social democracy and eroding the constitutional restraints that have already been weakened by a ruling class desperate to preserve their position, her willingness to continue along the path of “fixing” Obamacare, eroding American prestige around the globe, her commitment to interventionism, and a dangerous policy of antagonizing the Russian Federation and destabilizing the Middle East all give one pause.
The problem here though isn’t that we face some sort of Manichean choice between good and evil. Neither are especially good; neither are especially evil.
The problem is that politics follows culture. Right now, American culture is sick to its core, washed in a sea of materialism, debt, consumerism, and certifications that demonstrate the trappings of an education without its wisdom. Once we made things, now we consume. Once we were a nation of farmers and shopkeepers, now we are a nation of fast food and shopping therapy. Our grandparents understood men like Dostoevsky, Niebuhr, and Solzhenitsyn, while we occupy our time with adult coloring books.
Our grandparents went to church. We barely do.
Our grandparents joined civic associations. We go to complain.
Our grandparents were charitable. We just cut checks.
Our grandparents owned their homes. We mortgage and flip.
Our grandparents experienced the Depression. We bought iPhones and called ourselves poor.
Is it any wonder why the vast majority of the American republic, starved for substance, can so easily be distracted and convinced by the flattering few that tells them that — no matter how unprepared your culture and education have made you for the world — that there is something intrinsic about you that makes you better than the rest?
…and that is your race? Your ethnicity? The tradition of the Christian West that the secular West (both left and right) is so viciously attempting to steal as their own patrimony, when in fact they are and remain bastards?
It is almost humorous to watch as the Alt-Right borrows from the past and extols men and women who would have rejected everything they claim to prize about the West. I am always amazed at how Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia is so often quoted, even though he rejects the totality of the alt-right as alien, ideological, and opposed to the Christian West.
Chaput wrote critically of the latest e-mails from Podesta et al. regarding those unthinking, backward Catholics — a sentiment apparently shared by secularists of both the right and the left. Chaput concluded marvelously:
In the meantime, a friend describes the choice facing voters in November this way: A vulgar, boorish lout and disrespecter of women, with a serious impulse control problem; or a scheming, robotic liar with a lifelong appetite for power and an entourage riddled with anti-Catholic bigots.
In a nation where “choice” is now the unofficial state religion, the menu for dinner is remarkably small.
I could not agree more. Sometimes, you just have to push the plate away.
So one is left with the only option remaining to a free people — refusal. A refusal to participate in the farce. A refusal to participate in a moral order that is neither moral nor ordering. A refusal to bend the knee to ideologies that borrow virtue so they can practice viciousness. A refusal to bow before any institution that does not respect the fullness of human life. A refusal to respect institutions that do not respect human freedom. A refusal to be forced into the false choice of two evils. A refusal to accept that this — this election — is the best Americans can do. A refusal to accept that those who disagree with us are enemies. A refusal buy into the lie that all criticism is disloyalty.
That act of refusal — that single act of conscience — is an act more powerful than all the media, all the advertisements, and all the rhetoric in the world. It is the one thing that terrifies tyrants more than anything, and perhaps among the terrible and deplorable it is the one unpardonable sin. So be it.
In that light, we Catholics have a fine tradition of recusancy in the face of immoral choices. In this instance and with this religion “choice” as Chaput puts it? J’refuse.
Let me be very clear about this as well. I do not blame those who feel as if Trump is the only option left for them. I blame no one for supporting Trump. What I do ask is that one realize that those in power huddled around Trump are doing so for reasons you may not like, will not work in your interest, and may produce outcomes you will not want to see happen. It is not a question of whether Clinton will produce outcomes and Trump might produce others… Trump is the same problem of government action, only working for other interests — not the interests of human freedom.
The decision here is simple. To paraphrase Wilberforce, one can choose to look away from Trump’s connections with Planned Parenthood, the eugenics movement, white nationalism, and all the other poison pills embedded in this candidacy.
…but one can never again say they did not know.
For myself, if voting is the act of assenting one’s conscience to another, then my conscience simply cannot assent to Donald Trump.
