By DEXTER DUGGAN
“See EU Later!” shouted the front-page headline on the 6 a.m. print edition of the London-based Sun newspaper on June 24.
Bursting forth with the dawn, the surprising results of Britain’s vote the previous day on whether to leave the European Union left the professional know-it-alls staggered.
The headline was, of course, a play on words, with the initials of the evolving European superstate being read as “you” — See You Later.
That meaning wasn’t to be taken literally, because the British majority hadn’t voted to take a short vacation from the EU then return, but definitively to chop off the tentacles of Brussels’ bureaucrats and assert Britain’s independence. They didn’t intend to retie the knot later.
Coincidentally, on the same day of Britain’s “Brexit” vote, June 23, a 4 to 4 tie by the U.S. Supreme Court had the effect of negating the imperious Barack Obama’s invalid executive order to rewrite immigration law and keep U.S. borders wide open to unvetted invaders.
Like the British, Americans were more than restive under their own elite’s schemes promoting unfair globalist trade and unlimited immigration.
Moreover, under EU membership Britain had to receive and bear the expense of migrating workers from elsewhere in the EU — the very dream of borderless “labor mobility” that U.S. schemers ache to impose, too, through misguided Latinos’ movement and Catholic bishops’ naiveté.
The success of Brexit encouraged activists in other European countries to hope for the day when they, too, could have a public vote to depart the EU.
History isn’t the straight line from primitivism to secular paradise that liberals tend to envision. History has cycles and repetitions. Maybe one day, under different circumstances, the British people would want to renew a similar link with the Continent, but certainly not right now.
After European nations dragged themselves into two monstrous wars in less than the first half of the 20th century, it probably looked like a good idea to some leading political theorists and economists awhile back to weaken their individual countries’ freedom of action while binding them closer with freer trade — even replacing their historic currencies with stateless euro money.
What was to take shape as the EU would super-govern from Brussels, weakening borders and imposing its legal will on a whole bundle of countries.
And how handy, as traditional morality was being redefined out of existence by the elite, that activists didn’t have to trouble themselves to re-fight the same battles for immorality time after time, in one nation after another.
Should Britain remain in the EU or leave? A United Kingdom pundit noted that the question wasn’t whether Britain should retain its membership and remain just as it was, or else leave. If it remained, it would continue to be sucked ever-deeper into the superstate. Many found that frightening.
But the UK elite had been so comfortable atop the heap, they had difficulty perceiving the rumbles coming from below. They were astounded at the voting result, as was well illustrated in the news photo of a few young EU backers looking aghast at a table as their fine crystal glasses presumably awaited fresh champagne. Those champagne bubbles were popped by a revolt of the masses.
Not only were many conservative-minded voters eager to cut the ties constricting the sovereignty of their nation. It also made sense that working-class supporters of the liberal Labor Party turned against their leaders’ aloof internationalist trade and border policies hurting them.
Indeed, red-and-blue maps of the UK voting results easily reminded observers of U.S. election maps where limited blue urban and coastal areas went to the Democrats, surrounded by a sea of red Republican triumph.
Unlimited “immigration” had pushed people past the breaking point in both the UK and U.S.
Admitting that “the elites in some large degree brought this on themselves,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said on the June 24 PBS NewsHour that “I’m as pro-immigration as the day is long, but we have asked a lot of people who are suffering…to accept extremely, radically high immigration levels. And we have probably overflooded the system.”
Brooks added that “a little humility is in order on the part of the establishment, frankly, that we have flooded the system with more than it can handle. And, secondly, we have not provided a good nationalism, a good patriotism that is cosmopolitan,” so “inward-looking (Donald) Trumpian nationalism has had free rein.”
Syndicated U.S. columnist Mark Shields, Brooks’ fellow NewsHour panelist, added:
“I think the forces and the advocates of globalization have been primarily obsessed with the well-being of the investor class and the stockholders and the shareholders, and been indifferent, oftentimes callous, to the dislocation and the suffering that people in countries affected by this trade, the expanded trade, the larger economy, who have been victimized by it.”
There’s “no spin you can put on this,” Shields said, “that in any way comforts Democrats today.”
The U.S. dominant media’s continuing blinded worship of Obama, whose flailing arms they mistake for the fluttering of angel wings, makes it hard to gauge the exact depth of voter desperation. But voters are plenty unhappy.
The discontent only has been increased by the results of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ belief that the way to address problems throughout Latino countries is to bring unauthorized entrants to the U.S. in unending numbers.
Like the European political theorists who couldn’t foresee the damage lurking in the EU project, the USCCB’s limited vision didn’t extend to situations from inconvenience to deadly dangers overwhelming the U.S., as unvetted crossers are welcomed by the open-borders Obama administration hungry for new voters for Democrats.
That way, the Democratic Party’s Culture of Death can be further empowered, not only against U.S. citizens generally, but also striking out with a political fist against the core morality of Catholic, Christian, and other traditionalist teachings.
It should go without saying that it’s better and wiser to help people where they are rather than lure them illegally, along with their problems, thousands of miles into unfamiliar territory. But the USCCB continues its errors rather than learn from or apologize for them.
Breitbart News reported on June 19 that six diseases near eradication in the U.S. are reappearing due to different aspects of migration — tuberculosis, measles, whooping cough, mumps, scarlet fever, and bubonic plague.
“The near eradication of these diseases in the United States during the 20th century was a remarkable accomplishment of American civilization,” Breitbart reported. “Until recently, most Americans believed these diseases were gone from our shores for good.
“But a politicized public-health system and a rise in the subsidized migration into the United States . . . have combined to reverse a century of progress,” the report said.
In related news, the number of recent measles cases in Arizona, centered on an immigration-detention center in the town of Eloy, had grown to 20 as of late June. Eloy is a little more than halfway down the main highway that goes southeast from Phoenix to Tucson.
Meanwhile, the popular Seeing Red AZ conservative blog posted on June 27 about high poverty and unemployment rates in some Arizona and California cities, linked to illegal immigration.
“The ongoing influx of uneducated and unskilled illegal aliens and accompanying crime rates continues its chokehold on American cites,” Seeing Red AZ said.
“Taxpaying citizens are footing the bill for the numerous benefits they receive in addition to health care, schooling for their children, and the costly burdens on the criminal-justice system.”
The blog report also linked to a complex investigation by Indianapolis television station WTHR, channel 13, an NBC affiliate far from the southern border, about illegal aliens profiting off U.S. taxpayers.
The WTHR website said: “Millions of illegal immigrants are getting a bigger tax refund than you. Eyewitness News shows a massive tax loophole that provides billions of dollars in tax credits to undocumented workers and, in many cases, people who have never stepped foot in the United States. And you are paying for it.”
If the problems appear daunting in both the U.S. and Britain, the Brexit vote seemed to show that an energized citizenry can rise in successful rebellion against elitist politicians, media. and clergy.
Heaven’s Gate
Tim Stanley, a youngish conservative commentator, was among Brits celebrating the vote result.
Under the headline “This was the day the British people defied their jailers,” Stanley posted at the London-based Telegraph site early on June 24:
“What happens now? We drink. We be happy. We sing a song. Then we piece back the country and get on with the great project of building the British century. We voted the right way because we’re a nation with a sense of destiny. The world is ours now. Go get it!”
Of interest to Wanderer readers, Stanley described his conversion to the Catholic Church this way in a 2012 personal blog post:
“I will definitely die a Catholic. No doubt about it. A Catholic doesn’t just die — they reconcile. They accept their mortality and submit to the will of God, trusting that He will forgive them for all the evil that they have done. Like the Prodigal Son, they come home.
“I have accepted the teachings of the Catholic Church and I have faith that the Last Rites, honestly sought and validly delivered, will see me to Heaven’s gate. In the final analysis, it is this faith that makes me a Catholic.”
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