Since Barack Obama has been elected, gun sales and copies of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged have flown off the shelves. Meanwhile, there’s a Russian academic all over the news predicting that America will soon collapse,”tea parties” springing up all over the country, and the stock markethas been doing a great impression of Michael Richards’ career since heleft Seinfeld.
Is that because people have gone crazy? No, it’s the reaction of sanepeople to the crazy as a football bat insanity that has begun to passfor conventional wisdom in large swathes of America. Living in thiscountry today is like sitting in the back seat of a car that’s hurtlingtowards the edge of a cliff at a hundred miles an hour while the driverfiddles with the radio and the guy in the passenger seat mocks the veryidea of using brakes.
Although we have laws on the books designed to prevent illegalimmigration, they are systematically ignored or the people in charge ofenforcing them are deliberately understaffed so they can’t fulfilltheir duties. Bizarrely, people who merely suggest that the laws on ourbooks should actually be enforced are derided as racists and nativists.Worse yet, to suggest that tens of millions of uneducated foreigners,many of whom don’t speak the language or obey our laws, should not beable to benefit from breaking our laws by staying here permanently istreated as beyond the pale. Why, how dare we “break up the families” ofpeople who have been shamelessly breaking our laws for so long thatthey’ve had time to start a family here?