The latest “caravan” community planning to crash borderless America is not part of Latin America’s problems; it’s escaping them. So say America’s low-IQ media.
And Latin America’s problems are legion.
The region, “which boasts just eight percent of the world’s population, accounts for 38 percent of its criminal killing.” Last year, the “butcher’s bill … came to around 140,000 people … more than have been lost in wars around the world in almost all of the years this century. And the crime is becoming ever more common.”
So writes the Economist earlier this year, in an exposé aimed at “shining light on Latin America’s homicide epidemic.”
As is generally the case with this august magazine, the shoe-leather journalism is high-IQ, but the deductions drawn therefrom positively retarded.
Tucked into these frightening facts about a killer culture is a timid admission: The Problem—Latin America’s murder trends—could be exported to the neighbors.
How? Do tell. By osmosis? Perhaps by “caravan”? Liberal louts never say.
By the by—and just so you know—Latin America’s crisis of crime “has been mounting.” El Salvador, for instance, had the highest murder rate in the world: 81 to 100,000. By the early 2010s, “the bloodshed in some cities had reached a pitch.”
Referred to by demographers also as a “youth bulge,” this “demographic bulge” is the crème de la crème comprising the caravans. Their exodus is from the slum-dog cities of Latin American, where the crime is heavily concentrated, and where “people are crowded into … shantytowns and favelas.”
Our young, strong caravanners hail from a culture of “extortion gangs,” “drug-trafficking,” badly trained, “often corrupt” police and prosecutors, marred by general “institutional weaknesses.”
War-like conditions in their countries force “Latin American governments [to] spend an average of five percent of their budgets on internal security—twice as much as developed countries.”
Since I reported on El Salvador’s murder rate … a paragraph or two back, the murder rate in that country has “rocketed to 104 per 100,000 people.”
Such is the power of the war lords there, that stationing “soldiers on the streets” and throwing “thousands of gang members into prison” only served to increase crime.
Only— and only—when government offered bribes to “El Salvador’s three main gangs” did murders halve “almost overnight.” The government gave “imprisoned leaders luxuries like flat-screen televisions and fried chicken if they would tell their subordinates to stop killing each other.”
But then “the gangs began to see violence as a bargaining tool,” and the peace died.
What do you know? Since telling you about El Salvador’s criminal pinnacle, a mere paragraph ago, Venezuela did one better. (Maybe the Economist isn’t so high-IQ, as the rather randomly yoked-together data I relay here are its own).
“Venezuela now has the world’s highest homicide rate.” The country “stopped releasing murder statistics altogether in 2005,” because these make South Africa seem an oasis of peace and prosperity.
To fanfare, Colombia announced the achievement of “a murder rate of 24 per 100,000 people, its lowest in 42 years,” in 2017. In the United States, it’s still 4.9 per 100,000, although in some spots, murder rates are higher than in South Africa.
When they aren’t in hiding, Latin-American leaders and their international helpers try to excite a reverence for life among their people with sexy sounding campaigns. “Value life” is one. Another is “Instinct for Life.” These attempts haven’t taken.
Still, when the most hated man in America, President Donald J. Trump, questioned the benefits to the U.S. of immigration from what he called "shithole" countries, the low-IQ media lost it.
The president’s brutal honesty masks a more vexing question:
What makes a country, the place or the people? Does "the country" make the man or does the man make the country?
To listen to the deformed logic of the president's detractors, it's the former: The "country" makes the man. No sooner will these Latin-American migrants crash into our borderless country—than the process of cultural and philosophical osmosis will begin. Big time.
In no time will American probity and productivity become second nature to the newcomers.
Quite the reverse.
Having chronicled and analyzed the fate of the dying Christian civilization at the tip of Africa, allow me to sound the alarm, straight from a book that predicted the demise of South Africa, due to the same, shared flippant attitude toward human capital:
“Human action is the ultimate adjudicator of a human being's worth. The aggregate action of many human beings acting in concert is what makes or breaks a society. Overall, American society is superior to assorted African [and Latin American] societies because America is [still] inhabited by the kind of individuals who make possible a thriving civil society.” (“Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” pp. 161-162, 2011.)
Put differently, it is the individual who creates the collective, not the other way around. The Man makes the country what it is.
South Africa ceased being great once enough good people were expunged from state and civil society.
The tipping point is coming. A sufficient number of bad people admitted into the Unites States of America will make America great no more.
One of many cringe-making moments in Christine Blasey Ford’s protracted complaint before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and the country—was an affectation-dripping reference to her hippocampus.
“Indelible in the hippocampus” was the memory of supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulting her, some 36 years back, asserted Ford.
With that, the good “doctor” was making a false appeal to scientific authority. Ford had just planted a falsity in the nation’s collective consciousness. The accuser was demanding that the country believe her and her hippocampus.
All nonsense on stilts.
We want to believe that our minds record the events of our lives meticulously, and that buried in the permafrost of our brain, perfectly preserved, is the key to our woes.
Unfortunately, scientific research negates the notion that forgotten memories exist somewhere in the brain and can be accessed in pristine form.
Granted, we don’t know whether She Who Must Never Be Questioned recovered Judge Kavanaugh memory in therapy. That’s because, well, she must never be questioned.
Questioning the left’s latest sacred cow is forbidden. Bovine Republicans blindly obey.
I happened to have covered and thoroughly researched the “recovered memory ruse,” in 1999. Against the prevailing trend, one of my own heroes is not Christine Ford, but a leading world authority on memory, Elizabeth Loftus.
Professor Loftus, who straddles two professorships—one in law, the other in psychology—had come to Vancouver, British Columbia, to testify on behalf of a dedicated Richmond educator, a good man, who had endured three trials, the loss of a career and financial ruin because of the Crown's attempts to convict him of sexual assault based on memories recovered in therapy.
I attended. I was awed.
Over decades of research, Loftus has planted many a false memory in the minds of her research subjects, sometimes with the aid of nothing more than a conversation peppered with some suggestions.
"A tone of voice, a phrasing of a question, subtle non-verbal signals, and expressions of boredom, impatience or fascination"—these are often all it takes to plant suggestions in the malleable human mind.
Loftus does not question the prevalence of the sexual abuse of children or the existence of traumatic memories. What she questions are memories commonly referred to as repressed: "Memories that did not exist until someone went looking for them."
Suffice it to say, that the memory recovery process is a therapeutic confidence trick that has wreaked havoc in thousands of lives.
Moreover, repression, the sagging concept that props up the recovered memory theory is without any cogent scientific support. The 30-odd studies the recovery movement uses as proof for repression do not make the grade. These studies are retrospective memory studies which rely on self-reports with no independent, factual corroboration of information.
Sound familiar? Dr. Ford (and her hippocampus), anyone?
Even in the absence of outside influence, memory deteriorates rapidly. "As time goes by," writes Loftus in her seminal book, “The Myth of Repressed Memories,” “the weakened memories are increasingly vulnerable to post-event information."
What we see on TV, read and hear about events is incorporated into memory to create an unreliable amalgam of fact and fiction.
After an extensive investigation, the British Royal College of Psychiatrists issued a ban prohibiting its members from using any method to recover memories of child abuse. Memory retrieval techniques, say the British guidelines, are dangerous methods of persuasion.
"Recovered memories," inveighed Alan Gold, then president of the Canadian Criminal Lawyers Association, "are joining electroshock, lobotomies and other psychiatric malpractice in the historical dustbin."
Not that you’d know it from the current climate of sexual hysteria, but the courts in the U.S. had responded as well by ruling to suppress the admission of all evidence remembered under therapy.
Altogether it seems as clear in 2018, as it was in 1999: Memories that have been excavated during therapy have no place in a court of law. Or, for that matter, in a Senate Committee that shapes the very same justice system.
Note: This piece is also published on Ilana Mercer.com.
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa”(2011) & “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Facebook, Gab & YouTube