I am running for President in 2020 1.








So, treat the Church as a criminal conspiracy.



The United States began limiting immigration in 1924.  The United States currently has an estimated 11-12 million illegal immigrants living in the country.  The United States admits 950,000-1 million legal immigrants each year.  Both of those realities have become the centers of political contention.  Pro-foreign-life people argue that immigration is vital for America’s society and economy, that the illegals should be granted some kind of legal status (often phrased as a “path to citizenship”), and that the United States has some kind of humanitarian duty to welcome everyone who has been the victim of one of life’s hard knocks.  Pro-it’s-our-choice people argue either that the immigrants are a bunch of undesirables from failed societies who will wreak havoc, or that immigration is good, but we need to pick and choose while recognizing that massive immigration will disrupt American society.  Various combinations of the two views either make the most sense or are a recipe for disaster.[1]

There are about 7.7 billion people in the world.  They live in 195 countries.  Gallup polled people in 152 of those countries.  They report that 15 percent of adults in those countries, an estimated 750 million people, would migrate to another country if they could.  Of that estimated 750 million people, about 158 million people want to move to the United States.[2]  Obviously, the real numbers could be much higher.  For one thing, many adults have children.  For another thing, there are the 43 countries where Gallup did not poll.  One can imagine virtually every single person in North Korea or Syria wanting to bolt.

One distortion in the contemporary debate arises from geography.  The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans bar most foreigners from getting to the United States except by sea (rare) or air travel.  You can’t get on an international flight from most places in the world headed for the United States unless you already have a visa.  That’s not the case for Central America.  People willing to run the risks of traveling the Lawless Roads can end up at the southern border of the United States.  Where political stunts by all sides provide something for cameramen to do.

The 2017 population of the United States has been estimated at 325 million people.  Can we take in 158 million people from foreign cultures—many of them very different in values from that of the United States—without any impact on American society?  If so, at what pace?  A million a year?  Five million a year?  Ten million a year?  All of them at once?  No?  Then the pro-foreign life people accept the idea of immigration restriction.  They just want to set the threshold at some undefined higher level.  And they don’t want to talk about the social, political, and financial costs.

As for the pro-it’s-our-choice people, there are 158 million people who want to come here, but you think there aren’t any among them who would make a vital contribution to America?  Red China wants to take over Taiwan, just like it did Hong Kong.  So, many people from a leading Far East industrial nation are going to want to migrate.  Russia and Iran are going to add Lebanon to the bag, just like Syria.  Lots of Lebanese Christians will want an out.

It’s an important debate.  It would be nice if we had it.

[1] I don’t have a ‘source” for this statement.  It’s just my sense of all the stuff I’ve been reading for years.  While there may NOT have been “good people on both side” in Charlottesville, there are idiots on both side of this debate.  Just hoping that I’m not one of them.  No need to tell me if you think I’m an idiot.  That’s what my sons are for.

[2] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 21/28 December 2018, p. 17.

My Weekly Reader 19 December 2018.

What we think of as the British Empire of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries did not yet exist in 1763.  It was aborning, however.  Britain had defeated France in the Seven Years War (1756-1763).  Britain then took possession of French North America between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.  British North Americans saw their long-standing hopes of expanding beyond the Appalachian Mountains fulfilled.  These hopes failed at first.  The British Empire’s managers in London saw themselves juggling a diverse American community.   British “America” contained largely Protestants, mostly of Anglo-descent; Canada contained Catholic former French subjects; and in the Wilderness, the Native Americans offered access to the riches of the fur trade.  Containing the British North Americans offered the best path to peace and prosperity, especially after Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763) showed how difficult it might be to conquer the Native Americans.

The conflict crystalized in two remarkable figures.[1]  George Croghan (1718-1782), an Irish immigrant fur trader and land speculator, had become the vastly influential deputy to Sir William Johnson, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs.  James Smith (1737-1813), a Pennsylvania farmer, had been an Indian fighter and then became  a charismatic figure.  Both had lived among the Indians, and knew their languages and culture.  Their fundamental dispute gave human faces to the essential difference between the Anglo-American colonists and the British government.  Croghan saw the path to prosperity for himself and for the Empire running through peaceful trade with the Indians.  Smith saw the path running through driving away the Indians and expanding farming settlements.

To seal the deal with the Native Americans, in February 1765 the British dispatched a huge column of gifts to a peace treaty ceremony with Pontiac in the Ohio country.  Croghan added in many of his own trade goods from a desire to revive trade after the war and Pontiac’s Rebellion.  The Pennsylvania settlers[2] saw the presents—including rum and gunpowder–as the basest form of appeasement and as likely to provoke another Indian war as to forestall one.

Smith formed many of the settlers into an impromptu militia called “The Black Boys” after their use of bunt cork to disguise their faces.  The “Black Boys” tried to stop the caravans.  The 42nd Highlanders provided the hard core of the British escort, so the rebel settlers tended to steer around them.[3]  For a time, the rebels even blockaded Fort Loudon.  The British, short of supplies, abandoned the fort in November 1765.  Then peace with the Indians came and the “Black Boys Rebellion” died down.

In “Patriot,” Mel Gibson’s character announces that “the [coming] war [with England] will be fought not on the frontier or on some distant battle-field, but here among us…”  In truth, it was fought everywhere.  The wars on the frontier played a vital role in determining the American victory.  However, the frontier fights began well ahead of the formal “Revolution.”

[1] What follows is a part of the story told by Patrick Spero, Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 (2018).

[2] Now in central Pennsylvania near Gettysburg, but then the far West.

[3] The 42nd had seen a good deal of service in North America, having fought at the first—disastrous—and second battles of Fort Ticonderoga, in the siege of Montreal, and in the bloody Indian fight at Bushy Run during Pontiac’s Rebellion.

My Weekly Reader 18 December 2018.

Today New England is a great place to go to college: stone walls, church graveyards full of famous men (and the occasional famous woman—repressive gender roles having been what they were), the leaves turning, “Whitey” and “Billy” Bulger of lore, the smart-mouth waitresses at “Legal Seafood,” Boston and Cambridge, with the Red-Line trains crossing from one to the other on a snowy night.  Then, in the 18th Century, New England was a hard place to make a living; the stone walls came from rocks dug out of fields with poor soil, churches reined-in human pleasure, people often died in the first few years after birth, the leaves turned because Fall came early and brutal winters followed close behind, Boston merchants would trade in anything (slaves, lumber, cod, rum) to make money and Boston fish-wives had famously sharp tongues, thugs had their uses for the better sort, and Cambridge’s college—Harvard–trained sour-puss Calvinist ministers.

No wonder then that many New Englanders were hard-bitten, judgmental, fond of pulling a cork, and avid for a better chance.  In a chiefly agricultural society, a better chance meant farmland, especially if they got to log-off and sell the timber first.  New England’s settlements spread along the coast and inland in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.  Then westward toward New York, “down east” into Maine, and northwest from New Hampshire into the “New Hampshire Grants” (which would become Vermont).

Pioneers advancing into ground until recently commanded by the Native American allies of the hated French, the settlers of Vermont despised all authority that was not earned.  Before the Revolution, they resisted the colonial governments of both New Hampshire and New York.  The “Green Mountain Boys” began as the “militia” of those settlers who held land titles from Connecticut or New Hampshire rather than from New York.  They chose leaders like the ruffians Seth Warner and Ethan Allen.[1]

Came the Revolution.  Britain remained in control of Canada and might attack southward along a line that ran from Montreal as far as New York City.  Fort Ticonderoga—built by the French–commanded the invasion route along Lake Champlain.  Connecticut’s governor commissioned Ethan Allen to seize the fort from its British garrison.  Allen recruited 140 men after his own liking and headed toward “Fort Ti.”  He soon encountered Benedict Arnold and 70 men sent by Massachusetts on the same purpose.  Suppressing their mutual dislike in the interest of the common cause, the two men led their troops in storming the fort on 10 May 1775.[2]

Americans both despised the Catholic French Canadians and imagined that they wished to become “Americans.”[3]  Allen proposed an invasion, but the command went to another.  He free-lanced a coup to seize Montreal and spent three years in a British prison.  As a result of his imprisonment, Allen missed the Saratoga campaign (1777) in which Seth Warner played a notable role at the head of the “Boys” originally led by Allen.  Surrounded and cut off, British General John Burgoyne surrendered his army.   Saratoga was one of many decisive moments in the struggle for American independence.

In 1789, Allen died; in 1791, the “Grants” became the state of Vermont.

[1] Christopher S. Wren, Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom (2018).

[2] Later, the artillery captured at the fort provided the siege guns that drove the British out of Boston.

[3] It didn’t end there.  See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMEViYvojtY