Making Citizenship Meaningless: Thoughts on the Coming Great Electoral Fraud

Our progressive friends make many predictions and promises. Most, of course, fall flat. Look, for example, at Obamacare. Where are those millions of deprived uninsured Americans yearning to have health insurance so they can get that desperately needed medical care now denied them? Where are those healthy youngsters desperate to get off their parents' insurance dime and to fork out their own cash for the high premium and high deductible plans offered by Obamacare? Wherever they are, they are not overwhelming the Obamacare exchanges with their plaintive petitions. We have a mystery worthy of Hercule Poirot.

The multi-decade, trillion-plus-dollar war on poverty was another great promise. According to the progressives' own numbers, however, more Americans are now poor or near-poor than ever with more than ever dependent on taxpayer largesse. This is the result of fifty years of war on poverty. The progressive solution? More of the same policies that have produced the current disaster, with the added twist of addressing a "new evil," i.e., unequal income distribution. It seems that more progressivism means more poverty--except for the bureaucrats and academics plugged into the programs.

There exists, however, one promise on which the current gang of progressives running and ruining our nation will deliver. We will see a massive electoral fraud in the 2016 elections, at the latest. The signs are there. This will be much beyond the ACORN phony voter registration, "vote early and often," and having the deceased cast ballots. This will be much bigger than that; it will be on a scale never seen in the US.

The plot underway is nothing less than to make US citizenship meaningless.

Before we get into that let's realize that that a hallmark of progressivism is to degrade any institution over which it obtains power. Be it in the name of fairness, equality, or the all purpose "righting of old wrongs," once progressive ideology and ideologues grab an institution, that institution becomes transformed and degraded as to make it almost unrecognizable. We have many examples of this, but perhaps none illustrates the process better than what has happened to higher education in the US and the West. A university degree has become as worthless as the education it certifies. Throughout the Western world we have legions of university graduates unqualified for anything gainful. They, however, are full of self-righteousness, arrogance, and a sense of entitlement. I doubt that today's average university graduate has the level of basic knowledge of the average high school graduate of 60-70 years ago.

Most universities have fallen under the rule of progressives, who reject the traditional canon of higher education and replace it with a mishmash of politicized courses on feminism, sexism, racism, whacky environmentalism, and so on. A good example is my old school the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA.) This once noble institution has eliminated the requirement for its English department grads to read Shakespeare for which they may substitute gender/race classes. In fact, they can now can graduate as UCLA English majors without reading Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton. You can read here the snarky defense of this absurd change by a progressive "education expert," who notes helpfully, that "single-author courses are tough to teach, and can be murder to take (guess what? Not everybody likes Chaucer enough to spend 15 weeks on him, and that’s OK.)" In other words, Chaucer is hard. Now, therefore, when ordering coffee at Starbucks, you will find that the "highly educated" barista operating the espresso machine cannot quote from "The Pardoner's Tale."

The universities underwent the classic progressive two-pronged attack now used on other institutions.  The progs bemoan the elitism and the bias against certain "victims" by the institution. The progs try with legislation, court rulings, street agitation, any means really, to modify admittance practices, and then once that is achieved to transform the institution into something else. Remember, for example, the debate over the voting age? "If you're old enough to get drafted, you're old enough to vote!" I always noted, of course, that women did not get drafted so that meant they either should or should not get the vote at eighteen. And what if you didn't get drafted? Anyhow, eighteen-year-olds got the vote; the draft got eliminated--eighteen-year-olds, however, still have the vote, as do women and draft-dodgers, one of whom even became President. The same process is underway with other traditional institutions such as marriage, the Boy Scouts and, of course, the military which is being subjected to social experimentation that has nothing to do with its core mission of defending the nation.

Now we see US citizenship under the same assault.

The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security tells us that the eleven million or so illegal aliens in the US have earned the right to be citizens. Secretary Johnson states,

“An earned path to citizenship for those currently present in this country is a matter of, in my view, homeland security to encourage people to come out from the shadows, to be accountable, to participate in the American experience, the American society."

The good Secretary cannot tell us what exactly these people who have broken our laws have done to earn citizenship except to demonstrate an ability to defeat the half-baked efforts of our Keystone Kop immigration services to apprehend and deport them. It seems that being a successful outlaw did not form part of the citizenship test when my parents and my wife took it.  We see calls for amnesty and "pathways" to citizenship coming not only from the usual Democrats and their crony capitalist allies and lobbyists, but from the RINOs which populate the ranks of the GOP. We see lachrymose speeches about how an illegal alien who fought for our country in the military should have the right to become a citizen--these speakers "forget," of course, that, for now, it is illegal for an undocumented or a nonresident alien to enlist in the US military. We do not have Gurkhas. This is just a variation on the "if they're old enough to fight, they're old enough to vote." Bogus.

It gets worse. If it were "just" an effort to get citizenship and the benefits and obligations that go with it, it might earn a little more respect from me. It is nothing of the sort. It is a smokescreen for electoral fraud. Citizenship is under assault from another direction, as well. Voting I.D. Yes, that is the main weapon being used and the one which reveals what is really going on. Our Attorney General Eric "Fast and Furious" Holder tells us that his agency will be very vigilant on attempts by states to use voter identification requirements to "suppress" voter turn-out. The DOJ has been filing lawsuits against states with voter I.D. requirements, for example.) The justification? The progs conjure up an imaginary poor rural black too stupid, too poor, and living in such a remote place that he or she just cannot get valid state identification. Nonsense. First off, many states offer free identification cards, and, more important, poor, middle class, and rich black people have been getting valid identification documents for driving, buying property, getting bank loans, and voting for decades and decades--just like everybody else.  Progs have a Hollywood version of race in America which they sell to the willing media.

I have been an electoral observer in several elections overseas: Guyana, Guatemala, Bolivia, Panama, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia.  In addition, I have seen elections in other countries where I was living or temporarily working, e.g., Spain, France, Switzerland, Mexico, India. In all of them, voters had to prove their identity and citizenship. Only in the USA is this a controversy. The progs, as noted, use a two pronged attack; one seeks citizenship for illegal aliens and the other seeks ways for them, and resident aliens, to vote even without citizenship. The already lax regulations on official identification are being furthered loosened. In California, for example, the state now issues I.D. cards and driver's licenses to illegal aliens; in California, of course, as in many other states, one can register to vote when applying for a license or I.D. card. In addition, in California the state now licenses illegal aliens as lawyers and allows them to serve on juries. In virtually every state I can think of, illegal aliens already receive public benefits, including food stamps which the USDA advertises in Mexico. When I lived in northern Virginia during the 2008 elections, I can tell you from personal observation that ineligible people were voting without challenge. I also can say as a former election observer that I would have a hard time certifying US elections in much of the country as free and fair. Basically, almost anybody can vote, and it is getting easier and easier to do so.

We are going to see an effort at massive electoral fraud by 2016, at the latest. The manufactured "controversy" over voter I.D. and "pathways" to citizenship is really about getting millions of new Democratic voters casting ballots. It has nothing to do with black Americans, who demographically are in decline vis-a-vis other minority groups. To get this result, the progressives are more than willing to degrade the concept of citizen by making it available to just about anybody, while at the same time giving people without it the same rights and benefits.