[See also: Joel Kotkin’s 1995 review of VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster]

Joel Kotkin has been a prominent cheerleader for more Third World immigration—but now he’s wondering why Third World-style repression has come to the United States. [Watch What You Say, The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent, The Daily Beast, June 7, 2014]. Kotkin accurately points out that contemporary PC enforcers are stamping out free speech. But Kotkin doesn’t realize that he wants a First World polity with a Third World population – and ultimately, you have to pick one or the other.

Kotkin wrote:

In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets.

But who empowers this new “Clerisy?” It must have never occurred to Kotkin that immigrants from repressive countries don’t magically transform when they cross the border, but bring their politics with them.

This is unfortunate because Kotkin is sometimes brave enough to notice reality. In 2012, Kotkin wrote of “the gentrification of the Democratic Party” [Barack Obama’s New Chicago Politics Abandon Bill Clinton’s Winning Coalition, The Daily Beast, Sept. 4, 2012].

After decades of fighting to win over white working- and middle-class families, Democrats under Obama have set them aside in favor of a new top-bottom coalition dominated by urban professionals—notably academics and members of the media—single women, and childless couples, along with ethnic minorities. (emphasis, and links added).

How could the man who wrote this fail to mention a single word about race or immigration when discussing the “progressive Clerisy”? Nonwhite minorities are both the justification and the shock troops for enforcing repression.

For example, one North Carolina man put a sign in his front yard saying, “Illegals are criminals. No amnesty. Close the border.”

That upset Ashley Arellano, who is Hispanic and has to look at the sign every day.

Arellano says grouping all illegal immigrants together and calling them criminals is not accurate. She says her husband and other close family members came to America from Mexico, illegally. Arellano says they're all now taking the proper path to citizenship.

"You cannot single out just one you know, one group of people just because of their status whether they're legal or not legal," said Arellano. "It's not right." [Apex Man Defends His Sign After Calls to Take it Down, by Andrea Blanford, WDTV, July 23, 2014].

The latest wave of illegal aliens already enjoy special privileges denied to lowly American citizens. The TSA admitted that new illegals are boarding airplanes without the proper ID that other travelers have to produce. [TSA admits lying about illegal aliens flying without proper ID, by Kristin Tate, Breitbart, August 22, 2014]

What did Kotkin and the “pro-immigrant” crowd think would happen when we admitted never ending waves of non-white immigrants from the authoritarian, lawless chaotic kleptocracies of Africa and Latin America?

Did no one expect that the immigrants would bring their style of government with them wherever they go, along with the rest of their enriching qualities, like drunk driving, gang membership, honor killings, genital mutilation, and rampant out-of-wedlock birth? [Between Crime, Separatism, and Racial Tensions, Can Spain Pull Through? By Malcolm Bieth, The Atlantic Monthly, July 24, 2013]

This color-blind idiocy of liberal (and too many “conservative”) Americans is astonishing. Since 1965, America has admitted the poorest, most ignorant, most anti-white immigrants we can find.

Kotkin’s surprise is particularly odd because just a few days prior to publishing his piece on the “progressive Clerisy,” he wrote an article, Pandering to the Minority Vote, in which he talked about “the overwhelming commitment minorities have to the Democratic Party.” [New Geography, June 2, 2014]

Kotkin wrote:

…[U]nder the current regime, well-educated, affluent and well-connected minorities stand at the pinnacle of power, including the presidency and attorney general’s office. Culturally, the impact of African Americans and, increasingly, Hispanics has arguably never been greater… [Links added]

Yet somehow, the connection between this demographic shift and the end of free speech in America never occurs to Kotkin.

And he doesn’t mention the race-based and immigration driven example of the worst act of totalitarian speech control in recent American history—a ban on the American flag itself.

In 2010, students who called themselves “Mexicans” apparently regardless of where they were born threatened American students for wearing the flag on Cinco de Mayo. The school decided that the American students were to be sent home or told to change their clothes, while the “Mexicans” were free to celebrate their national flag. Ominously, school officials made this decision in the same year that Hispanic students first outnumbered whites in California.

Thus far, the courts have upheld the school’s ban. Why was it permissible for the school to get away with restricting the Americans’ speech but not the Mexicans’ speech? The American Freedom Law Center, which represented the patriotic students and is appealing, described the double standard:

The Ninth Circuit held that this [restriction] was permissible because school officials were not concerned about any of the American students engaging in violence against the Mexican-flag wearing students.

[Ninth Circuit Upholds Ban on American Flag Shirts in a California High School, American Freedom Law Center, February 27, 2014]

Only the “Mexican” students threatened violence, so the school only targeted the American students’ speech. [Dariano v. Morgan Hill Unified School District. P. 14 PDF]This is the epitome of multicultural tolerance: minorities threaten violence to get what they want, and whites go home.

The problem is that at the national level whites are running out of places they can call home.

There’s more minority thuggery of this sort in store for us. The progressive Clerisy is gaining power because we have growing number of non-whites who come from nations with no tradition of peaceful political debate and free speech. And thanks to non-white immigration, the Clerisy gains a larger following with each alien who crosses our border.

As a result, the Stupid Party and its hapless leaders like Jeb Bush and Rand Paul are pandering themselves into oblivion. Hysterical pseudo-libertarian Shikha Dalmia crows: “anti-immigrant fervor is destined to become a relic of the past.” [Why Anti-immigrant Fervor is Destined to Become a Relic of the Past, The Week, June 5, 2014] But really, what is happening is that the West and the classical liberal political order it can support is going to be a “relic of the past” if mass non-traditional immigration continues.

Whatever clueless libertarians, conservatives, and “Christian” leaders believe, there’s nothing to suggest that embittered minorities are eager to accept the leadership or political traditions of whites.

This extends even to the “model minority” of Asians. Who can forget Brown University student Jenny Li organizing a protest against Commissioner Ray Kelly? And who can fail to recall her Orwellian pronouncement that this expression of diverse mob rule was a “a powerful demonstration of free speech.” [Ray Kelly Heckled Off Stage At Brown University By Protesters, Huffington Post, Oct. 20, 2013]

Jenny Li: “Free speech” means Minorities Silencing Debate

Li and other diverse immigrants are the lemmings propping up Kotkin’s “progressive Clerisy.”

Kotkin can’t have it both ways. It’s not a surprise that free speech is dying in the Anglosphere countries that created it. It’s a predictable result of mass immigration.

And if Kotkin is unwilling to make that connection, than he’s not really defending free speech at all.

Email Thomas Martel.