Showing posts with label #noamnesty. Show all posts

Monday, September 16, 2013

Editorial: The Roman Catholic Church only wants the U.S. to increase immigration!

Editorial

Last week was a recent attempt for the Roman Catholic Church to lobby in the U.S. immigration debate. Unlike their approach in pro-life legislation, and traditional marriage legislation, the Roman Catholic Church's position on immigration seems to focus only on the U.S. accepting an increasing amount of immigrants, this policy does not apply to other nations such as Mexico, or to the Vatican itself!

Again, consider contacting key Roman Catholic bishops about this, whether you are Catholic or not!

Friday, September 13, 2013

Action Alert: Contact Catholic Bishops, Even if You're Not Catholic BUMPED

Action Alert

Over the past weekend, and scheduled for the Next several Weekends, the Roman Catholic church will be giving Homily Sermon messages encouraging their parishoners to lobby for increased immigration. This comes at the expense of unemployed Americans. You can read an article from VDARE about it here. After that, whether you are Catholic or not, you can contact the closest Roman Catholic bishops and the following key bishops with the message that follows their contact information:

Your Closest Bishop
Bishop Dolan NY
Bishop Chaput Philadelphia
Bishop Olmstead Phoenix
Bishop Gomez Los Angeles

You can use or modify this message

Honorable Bishop,

I am asking you to make a public statement against S.744 and any “pathway to citizenship”.

This bill will allow 33 million new immigrants over the next decade.

The 33 million green cards offered by S. 744 in the first decade would go to:

• around 11 million for illegal aliens (could be millions more if the official estimate is wrong)

• around 11 million in continuation of elevated flows from 1990 surge policy

• around 5 million from end of numerical limits on people waiting in line (mostly chain migration)

• around 6 million from new and expanded categories

On the other hand,

Nearly every section of the Gang Amnesty bill seems to add more foreign workers to compete with unemployed and underemployed Americans. The Gang apparently believes that the way to help the 20 million Americans who can't find a full-time job is to give out another 20-30 million lifetime work permits to foreign citizens over the next decade.

This bill would further flood labor markets at the lower-skill levels where real wages have declined 10% to 22% since 1980.

If the bill becomes law, the chances of Americans with no more than a high school education entering the middle class may disappear.

But it isn't just the low-end where Americans are threatened. The bill would make huge increases in importing higher-educated workers at a time when around half of all recent American college graduates either have no job at all or they aren't working in a degree job.

The under-32 Millennial Generation already is in danger of being a lost generation. After this bill, we may see these young adults spend the rest of their lives only partly engaged in the economy as they depend on government and family.

None of this is the kind of economy or society most Americans desire. Surely a compassionate and thoughtful citizenry will put a stop to this nonsense and ask its Representatives to go back to work putting Americans back to work.

In appreciation of your consideration,

From Under The Rubble | Catholic Bishops On Immigration—Here We Go Again!

A very interesting post from www.Vdare.com about the Roman Catholic Church’s push on hurting America’s poor by encouraging more immigrants to compete with them for jobs and wages. This follows this post about GOP Representatives that FACEBOOK analyzes as leaning towards amnesty with all of their microtargeting. This follows this post about how to Report Illegal Immigrants! For more about what you can do click here and you can read two very interesting books HERE.

From Under The Rubble | Catholic Bishops On Immigration—Here We Go Again!

http://www.vdare.com/articles/from-under-the-rubble-catholic-bishops-on-immigration-here-we-go-again

By Christopher Manion

[See earlier Is the Rule of Law Immoral? Ask Archbishop José Gomez!]
According to the New York Times, America's Catholic bishops are counting on the persuasive power of the pulpit this month to push "comprehensive immigration reform"—also known as amnesty for illegal aliens.
Unfortunately, we've already seen this movie, and it has an unhappy ending. Back in January 2010, our beloved shepherds launched a similar campaign supporting another amnesty bill.
Bishop John C. Wester chaired the Committee on Migration of the bishops' conference (USCCB) at the time. He told the Catholic News Service that "the church will prod lawmakers take action on the issue, beginning with a postcard campaign to members of Congress and prayer vigils across the country." [CNS, January 8, 2010].
Hey, wait a minute. Wasn't something else going on in January 2010?
Oh, that's right—Obamacare! But Obamacare wasn't a problem. After all, it never would have gotten off the ground, had the bishops not supported "universal health care" as "a basic human right" for years.
So the confident bishops focused on amnesty, announcing a nationwide "Justice for Immigrants" campaign in January 2010. They planned to distribute millions of postcards to parishes throughout the country urging Catholics to demand that Congress "enact immigration reform as soon as possible."
Then ObamaCare passed with abortion funding intact. The betrayed bishops expressed shock and chagrin.
They had good cause. The Nobel Peace Prize winner with an honorary degree from Notre Dame—whose election so many of them had supported in 2008—had lied to them.
It's shocking, I know. Simply shocking.
Then the most pro-abortion president in history betrayed them again, directing HHS to issue its notorious "Contraceptive Mandate." And today, dozens of bishops, Catholic universities, businesses, and individuals—among them Notre Dame—find themselves suing Obama, whose "universal health care" regulations threaten to force thousands of Catholic institutions nationwide to close.
The Experts Flunk Out
"We want to try to pull out all the stops," says Kevin Appleby, [Email him] the director of migration policy at the bishops' conference.
But, to paraphrase Samuel Huntington, "Who Are We?"
Richard Doerflinger, [Email him] Appleby's colleague on the USCCB staff, answered that question in 2010. He said that "one organization in particular [the USCCB] has the role of speaking for the moral voice of the Church on these matters and also have [sic] the policy expertise of figuring out when legislation is acceptable to the Church's interests and our convictions…."
"We're not just an interest group that has an opinion," he continued. "We've actually researched the facts…. That's something that no other Catholic group can do in the depth that we've done it."
Oh, really?
On the face of it, this bluster blends in with the arrogant noise that echoes among the thousands of "experts" who populate Washington's bureaucracies.
The USCCB is, alas, "just another interest group," but Doerflinger has a point. It's different in one critical aspect: the laughable notion that no one else in America can do competent research reflects not just hubris—it represents a form of errant elitism unique to the Church that has been practiced, and condemned, for centuries.
It's called "clericalism."
Isn't This Supposed to be the "Age of the Laity"?

"I want to get rid of clericalism."
--Pope Francis at World Youth Day,
Rio de Janeiro, July 2013

Like the layman, the bishop has the right to hold private political opinions regarding issues on which good Catholics (and bishops) can disagree. The problem arises when the bishop attempts to elevate his personal agenda to the level of authoritative Church teaching. This constitutes an abuse of the prelate's authority and confuses not only the faithful, but the public as well.
Such theological errors have real-world consequences. Clericalism has diluted the genuine authority of the American Church to the point where most bishops are afraid to exercise it—as though they had lost the authority to teach anything at all.
Witness the Church's trying to oppose homosexual "marriage" or the Contraceptive Mandate without being able to address homosexuality or contraception on moral grounds.
USCCB President Timothy Cardinal Dolan is right—the bishops have had "laryngitis" regarding the magisterial teachings of the Church on sexual morality for fifty years. But they've filled the vacuum with the political agenda of the welfare state, and have used their "role of speaking for the moral voice of the Church" to pass off their opinions as official Catholic teaching instead.
As a result, America's bishops have inverted the Church's priorities. Eternal truths are ignored, while personal political agendas are canonized. They have become "just another NGO," lobbying on issues ranging from inflation, welfare, taxes, and budgets to the price of tomatoes in Florida.
Amnesty for illegal aliens fits right in with a clerical agenda that has become increasingly partisan, radical, and secular.
It is especially distressing to see politicized bishops cloak their agenda in religious language, as though no good Catholic—or good person!—could possibly disagree.
Catholics in my diocese are asking their pastors, in and out of the Confessional, "Is it a sin to oppose amnesty?"
Countless bishops would apparently like them to think so. Roger Cardinal Mahony once told an immigration rally that supporters of current law were "fanning the flames of intolerance, xenophobia and, at times, bigotry."
Curiously, the Rubble can find no record of Mahony or his successor, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez—or any other bishop or USCCB official, for that matter—condemning the blatant racism of La Raza—"The Race"—or that of many other pro-amnesty agitators who march alongside them in amnesty rallies.
Instead, the Cardinal implies that everyone who disagrees with him is irrational.
Such self-serving moral posturing is hardly pastoral. It ill serves—and even perverts—the Church's mission to "go and teach all nations"; it misinforms the public, scandalizes good Catholics; and is thoroughly lacking in charity.
It is also often lacking in truth. Good bishops and priests consistently refer to the Catholic Catechism's teaching that prosperous nations should strive to "welcome the foreigner" [CCC 2241]; however, they rarely mention what follows: "Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens."
The Church's amnesty advocates routinely criticize businesses for exploiting the immigrant; they rarely mention that lobbyists for those same businesses are swarming Capitol Hill, supporting amnesty because they want cheap labor.
The Church's amnesty advocates often bemoan the sins of amnesty opponents. But how many of them teach the immigrant that falsifying Social Security documentation is a federal felony as well as a violation of the 7th and 8th Commandments? That the same goes for "working the system" illegally to max out on education, medical, and food programs (among dozens of other welfare programs)?
Amnesty advocates want to bring illegals "out of the shadows." Shouldn't we bring the truth "out of the shadows"?
This refreshing approach would honor immigrants as fellow human beings, and not as mere incompetent wards of the Church or the State. It would affirm the immigrants' dignity, their worth, and their ability to be fully human. It would constitute an act of charity and justice, as well as simple common sense.
Towards A More Positive Pastoral Plan
Clericalism is condemned by the Church because it is an error in theory and a disaster in practice. In 2010, amnesty distracted the bishops and their "experts" until it was too late. Today, it distracts them from teaching the fundamental truths of Humanae Vitae regarding marriage and morality that our drowning culture is literally dying to hear.
The Vatican II document Lumen Gentium makes it clear that the layman, not the cleric, is responsible for the particulars of legislation.
Which brings up an important point. The bishops' clericalism would be just as egregious if they opposed amnesty and deficit spending and supported tax cuts for the rich.
Practical politics is the laity's responsibility. The responsible layman should just tell the bishops, "Please, do not endorse my legislation: politics divides us. Tell us the truths that unite us."
As Cardinal Dolan points out, since the bishops went silent on fundamental morality half a century ago, some thirty million Catholics have left the Church. Pope Francis wants us to reach out to bring them back. It's a slam dunk that preaching politics isn't going to do it—but preaching Christ crucified just might.

Christopher Manion, Ph.D., [send him mail] is Director of the Campaign for Humanae Vitae, a project of the Bellarmine Forum. He served as a staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for many years. He has taught in the departments of politics, religion, and international relations at Boston University, the Catholic University of America, and Christendom College.

This column is sponsored by the Bellarmine Forum, and distributed by Griffin Internet Syndicate and FGF Books.
Copyright © 2013 by Christopher Manion. This column is distributed by www.fgfBooks.com.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Action Alert: Contact Catholic Bishops, Even if You're Not Catholic BUMPED

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Action Alert: Contact Catholic Bishops, Even if You're Not Catholic BUMPED

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Action Alert: Contact Catholic Bishops, Even if You're Not Catholic BUMPED

Catholic Bishops Push Amnesty Sunday in Church

A very interesting post from www.Vdare.com about the Roman Catholic Church’s push on increasing immigration to hurt America’s poor. This follows this post about a Roman Catholic’s perspective on immigration lobbying during Mass. This follows this post about how to Report Illegal Immigrants! For more about what you can do click here and you can read two very interesting books HERE.

Catholic Bishops Push Amnesty Sunday in Church

http://www.vdare.com/posts/catholic-bishops-push-amnesty-sunday-in-church

By Brenda Walker

On this Sunday, many American Catholics heard sermons recommending that amnesty be given to lawbreaking foreigners who are here to steal American jobs. It’s part of a more aggressive campaign organized by the Bishops to press a “moral” argument for amnesty, despite the inherent ethical weakness of contending that scarce jobs should be taken from poor Americans and given to poor invasive foreigners, redistribution being part of Marxist “liberation theology”.
Remember: over 20 million Americans are unemployed, and the recently passed Senate bill would allow 30 million “immigrants” to attain legal status in the next decade, reduce wages and increase unemployment.
How then does the Catholic pro-amnesty position support morality?
It doesn’t. Catholic elites are serving their customers alone. The fact that the amnesty policy harms the most vulnerable Americans as a whole is overlooked entirely. (Catholic parishioners, on the other hand, prefer traditional sovereignty: according to a 2009 Zogby poll 64 percent preferred enforcement over amnesty.)
The Catholic church in the United States represents a foreign power, the Vatican, which is a sovereign city-state, albeit small, with a flag, bordered territory and ambassadors. The church acts against the well being of American citizens by lobbying for its lawbreakers, yet the church doesn’t pay taxes. Worse, our national government gives the Catholics millions of dollars to perform activities like refugee resettlement and advising illegals how to break immigration law more effectively.
The chart below comes from the 2010 edition of Catholic Charities at a Glance. FYI, 62% (the Government Revenue, meaning our tax dollars) of the total = $2,895,092,130.

In addition, the church has spent well over $3 million in the past year lobbying for amnesty.
Below are a few snips from the special amnesty sermons given to push the Catholic open-borders agenda:

● Green Bay Diocese supports immigration reform: “When one part of that community is suffering injustice – the whole community is suffering,” explained Rev. Andrew Cribben.
● LA’s Archbishop Gomez joins Catholic churches nationwide urging Congress to pass immigration reform: “It’s not normal for a country of immigrants to not have a good system in place to welcome immigrants,” Mexican-born Archbishop Jose Gomez said to reporters outside the cathedral.
● Atlanta Catholic church calls for immigration overhaul: “Our moral tradition based upon our Catholic social justice calls on all people of faith and good will to stand up in defense of life and human dignity,” Deacon Gerald Zukauckas said.

One of the loudmouths for amnesty is New York City’s Cardinal Dolan, who has the gall to suggest America is insufficiently welcoming in its immigration policy, even when this country admits more foreigners than the rest of the planet combined.
It’s funny how these well paid moral paragons aren’t concerned about the Americans who will be replaced by the millions of new workers freed up to work any job by the amnesty and brought in through the “increased flow” so desired by employers looking to save a nickel — 46 million in 20 years according to the CBO.
Dolan is also pretty nervy to bring up Martin Luther King in the context of compassion, when black Americans get the worst of it from the endless stream of exploitable Mexicans.
Here’s Cardinal Dolan’s recent opinion piece, exhorting the troops:

Immigration reform: A moral imperative, New York Daily News, by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, September 6, 2013
As Congress comes back into session, it has a once-in-a-generation chance to fix our broken immigration system.
We cannot let this opportunity pass. Immigration reform would help families, it would help our economy and it would improve our security. Most importantly, it’s the right thing to do.
Pope Francis recently reminded us that “the measure of the greatness of a society is found in the way it treats those most in need.” For generations, men and women have come to America’s shores in search of a better life for themselves and their families, and we’re justly proud of our heritage as a nation that welcomes people of good will.
But today, no one can be proud of the enormous underclass of undocumented workers that’s been allowed to form — millions of our neighbors who live on the margins, have their families fractured and are easily exploited.
We can’t be proud of the hundreds of migrants who die in the American desert each year in their quest to support their families back home.
We can’t be indifferent to these profound humanitarian problems. No wonder that, around the country, Catholics and citizens of other creeds are on the front lines in providing a compassionate response, as they were with Rev. Martin Luther King a half-century ago.
Every day, our parishes and charitable organizations encounter people struggling to make a new life for themselves and their families. We meet families who run the risk of being torn apart. We meet migrants who risked dangerous desert passages to get here. We meet young immigrants who want to get an education, find a job and raise a family like countless others before them.
Those who caricature these immigrants as “takers” couldn’t be more wrong. The plain fact is that immigrants, including those who are undocumented, make great contributions to our economy. They spend their wages on goods and services and also start their own businesses, driving economic growth and employment in their communities.
Studies have shown that by and large immigrant laborers complement the American work force by filling jobs in industries such as agriculture and service. And undocumented immigrants pay over $10 billion in federal, state and local taxes per year, according to some estimates; that number would rise if immigration reform moves forward.
Support for immigrant families multiplies these benefits. Families are engines of integration into American life, helping to root immigrants in communities. Families provide support for newcomers to get started and for those already on their feet to move forward, to start a business or to put aside money for an education. When families are united here, it means that immigrants’ paychecks get spent in the U.S. economy instead of being sent out of the country. Above all, keeping families intact gives people a full stake in American life.
Helping immigrants contribute to American life is what immigration reform is all about. Answering the Gospel call to “welcome the stranger” and looking to our teachings and our on-the-ground experience, the U.S. Catholic bishops have called for various reforms: a generous, earned path to citizenship; making family reunification a priority; protecting the integrity of our borders; securing due process for immigrants and their families; improving refugee protection and asylum laws, and addressing the root causes of unauthorized immigration.
We know that there’s room for disagreement on such a complicated issue, but we hope and pray for a law that moves us forward.
Just as Americans are proud of our immigrant heritage, we’re also proud of our can-do spirit. When we see a problem, we do our best to find a solution. There’s no doubt our immigration system is broken. Now’s the time to fix it.
Dolan is archbishop of New York and president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Monday, September 9, 2013

Walk Out? Argue? A Patriotic Catholic Ponders What To Do If His Priest Pushes Amnesty On Sunday

A very interesting post from www.Vdare.com about a Roman Catholic’s perspective on immigration lobbying during Mass. This follows this post about Syria and Immigration. This follows this post about how to Report Illegal Immigrants! For more about what you can do click here and you can read two very interesting books HERE.

Walk Out? Argue? A Patriotic Catholic Ponders What To Do If His Priest Pushes Amnesty On Sunday

http://www.vdare.com/articles/walk-out-argue-a-patriotic-catholic-ponders-what-to-do-if-his-priest-pushes-amnesty-on-sund

By Henry McCulloch

It has been widely reported that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is calling on U.S. Catholic bishops and priests to turn their prayerful pulpits into political bully-pulpits this Sunday, September 8^th. Patriotic American Catholics—of whom I count myself one—must think about how to respond to this indignity should they be subjected to it.
The USCCB’s immigration-mad professional bureaucrats want bishops and priests to harangue the faithful—who come to Mass to worship their God and Savior, not to be a captive audience at political pep-rallies—with stump speeches in favor of the nation-destroying Gang of Eight bill the Senate so recklessly passed and that now looms in the House.
Of course, the mass-immigration dogmatism of U.S. Catholic bishops is not the Magisterial teaching of the Roman Catholic Church on immigration and the right of countries to defend their national character.
A look at what the Church has consistently taught about nations and peoples—teachings grounded in Scripture and almost 2,000 years of tradition—must lead any honest reader to conclude that no nation is compelled as a Christian duty to throw open its borders to the point of seeing its distinctive culture and character drowned by a flood of foreign migrants.
The liberal fetish for diversity, something most of America’s Catholic bishops have adopted, is nowhere found in Holy Writ. Indeed, the dissolution of nations and their distinctive cultures into a monoculture—the end-state for Open-Borders fanatics, who see America as a “proposition nation” rather than an organic ethno-cultural entity—is exactly what we are warned against in Genesis’s story of God’s confounding the arrogance of the builders of the Tower of Babel.
No faithful Catholic is obliged to suffer in silence misguided proselytism for Amnesty and Open Borders from any priest, no matter how eminent. On the political, economic and, yes, racial issues that immigration raises, bishops and priests are not arbiters. Their pronouncements cannot bind the faithful. These are matters of prudential judgment, not of faith and morals.
A reading of the USCCB’s posted position on immigration makes that clear—it is far too incoherent and unintelligent to be an authoritative statement of Church doctrine. Others have dissected this mish-mash of fallacies and emotionalism, so I won’t belabor it here. One of its clauses, however, is particularly noteworthy as a remarkable combination of left-over ‘60s-style liberalism wedded to a peculiarly American arrogance:

Addressing Root Causes: Congress should examine the root causes of migration, such as under‐development and poverty in sending countries, and seek long‐term solutions. The antidote to the problem of illegal immigration is sustainable economic development in sending countries. In an ideal world, migration should be driven by choice, not necessity.
[Catholic Church's Position on Immigration Reform, The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, August 2013]

“Driven by choice” indeed—but the bishops obviously believe that the native-born who must bear the influx of immigrants should have no choice about that.
Even more divorced from reality, and smacking of Americanist hubris, is the notion that “Congress should examine the root causes of migration … and seek long-term solutions.”
So the U.S. government, at Americans’ expense, should so enrich countries that send America immigrants that the locals won’t want to leave? And how is it the duty of the U.S. Congress to examine and solve the problems of scores of other countries? Isn’t that just what America’s Founding Fathers warned their fellow-citizens against?
Lord knows (Catholic bishops should too), America has problems by the score of her own—and none will be solved by inundating America with the indigent of the Third World.
We can’t know until after this Sunday’s Masses just how enthusiastically America’s Catholic priests will respond to this call from the United States’ Catholicism Central.
I am a member of the Pastoral Council of our Catholic parish in a Northeastern town. Our pastor is quite liberal; his number two less so. Our bishop has a reputation for being very liberal. I went to the diocesan website to see if there were any announcements about pro-Amnesty events for this Sunday. To my pleased surprise, I did not see any (although there are links to pro-Amnesty articles from the USCCB web site).
Neither of our parish’s priests has said anything about special homilies or events in response to the USCCB appeal. There is nothing on our parish web site.
I take those to be good signs. I hope to worship at Mass this coming Sunday undisturbed by pro-“immigration reform” politicking.
Nevertheless, heavyweight Catholic prelates are certainly out there right on cue beating the drums for Amnesty. Just today (September 6) Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York and President of the USCCB, has an overbearing column in New York’s Daily News: Immigration reform: A moral imperative. “Immigration reform” of course means the Gang of Eight’s disastrous scheme. In Dolan’s view, America must remain a “welcoming nation”; the cost to Americans doesn’t matter.
Dolan’s column is not really worth quoting. Anyone used to Open-Border propaganda could recite most of it sight unseen: America the nation of immigrants; the “undocumented” in “the shadows,” whom Dolan insists on calling our neighbors instead of more accurately describing them as trespassers; etc. Dolan even works in the “Rev. Martin Luther King.” (I’m surprised the Daily News editors let him get away without including the usually obligatory “Dr.”).
So what should a faithful and patriotic Catholic do this Sunday if the priest at Mass does insist on delivering a pro-amnesty pitch instead of a real homily?
Some suggest that congregants get up and walk out. That appealed to me at first, but I think it would backfire. The primary reason for attending Mass is to take Communion—and that happens after the homily. Should one walk out and then walk back in? Pretty awkward and not very respectful to our Lord, whose house a church is.
Also, it’s very likely one’s fellow-congregants would find such a move disrespectful—and those on our side of the issue should not be doing anything that might give offense and make the priest pitching amnesty appear the aggrieved party.
So I will not do that. Nor will I interrupt the homily—that would be a serious breach of etiquette and even more potentially alienating.
However, in our church, the priest greets the congregants individually as they leave the church after Mass—a receiving line in reverse. I believe is a nearly universal custom in American Catholic churches.
What I’ll do, should the need arise: politely yet firmly tell the priest that I disagree with the substance of a pro-Amnesty message and that I believe that the Mass is not the place for political activism.
I will not make restrictionist arguments. There won’t be time, and it would be rude to others waiting their turn to greet the celebrant. I will follow up with a letter to our bishop—in it I would state the basic restrictionist case—saying that I disagree with the message and the misuse of the Mass to propagate it. I will send a copy of that letter to the USCCB.
Catholic immigration patriots are not questioning the bishops in areas where they have legitimate authority. But we have the right and duty to protest an improper intrusion of politics into worship—and to defend our nation.
Henry McCulloch (email him) writes regularly for VDARE.COM.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

A Democrat’s Sermon: Catholic Bishops’ Treason Offensive Hits Next Sunday, September 8

A very interesting post from www.Vdare.com about Catholic immigration policy towards the U.S. (but no other nation). This follows this post about the reduction in immigration leading to the increase in Civil Rights. This follows this post about how to Report Illegal Immigrants! For more about what you can do click here and you can read two very interesting books HERE.

A Democrat’s Sermon: Catholic Bishops’ Treason Offensive Hits Next Sunday, September 8

http://www.vdare.com/articles/a-democrat-s-sermon-catholic-bishops-treason-offensive-hits-next-sunday-september-8

By Donald A. Collins

No American patriot should have failed to study the recent New York Times cheerleading reportorial Catholic Push to Overhaul Immigration Goes to Pews (by Ashley Parker and Michael D. Shear, August 21 2013). A huge offensive is about to be launched against US citizens by a (tax-exempt) church, led by a foreign power, for its own secular and selfish motives:

Catholic bishops and priests from major dioceses across the country will preach a coordinated message next month backing changes in immigration policy, with some using Sunday Masses on Sept. 8 to urge Congressional passage of a legislative overhaul that includes a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants.
The decision to embrace political action from the pulpit is part of a broader effort by the Roman Catholic Church and other faith groups that support President Obama’s call for new immigration laws…
"We want to try to pull out all the stops," said Kevin Appleby, the director of migration policy at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, who said the immigration issue was at a now-or-never moment. "They have to hear the message that we want this done, and if you’re not successful during the summer, you’re not going to win by the end of the year."
Catholic leaders, who have tried to wield their clout against Mr. Obama on issues like abortion, birth control and same-sex marriage, are betting that their congregations will be able to exert pressure on reluctant Republicans and wavering Democrats to support the president on immigration. They say they are motivated by the Bible’s teachings and by the reality that many Latino immigrants are Catholics and represent a critical demographic for the church.
[Emphases and links added throughout].

This Appleby point man [email him] makes clear the rhetoric will be emotional and manipulative:

Underlying an effort by U.S. bishops to coordinate messages on the need for comprehensive immigration reform is a profound sense of pastoral care, said an official at the bishops’ conference.
‘Sometimes [the bishops] are criticized that they're encouraging lawbreaking, but the fact is, these folks are here, and their families are getting separated, and what the bishops are trying to do is change the law so they can help them,’ said Kevin Appleby, director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' migration policy and public affairs office.
Bishops' immigration outreach based on 'pastoral' concern, by Carl Bunderson, Catholic News Agency, Aug. 30, 2013

Whoa! Come here illegally and that gives you the right to stay?
Pass this kind of legislation and the U.S. on the way to becoming a banana republic.
And note that there’s no discussion of overall numbers, of unemployment—or anything resembling a concern for America’s national interest.
CNA even tells us that the appalling Appleby implicitly concedes that patriotic American Catholics aren’t buying their Bishops’ baloney:

Appleby described a disconnect between the polling which has overwhelming support among Catholics for a comprehensive bill with a path to citizenship and action.
"We've had a hard time transitioning from 'I support the bishops on this issue,' to people picking up the phone, sending an email, writing a letter, being active on it? With this push we're trying to change that a bit, we'll hopefully get more Catholics to speak up, and say, 'we want this done.'

Maybe that “hard time” is because the “polling” was just pollaganda?
CNA also reports that Awful Appleby implicitly concedes that there’s actually nothing in Catholic doctrine to support the bishops’ position on the Schumer-Rubio Amnesty/ Immigration Surge Bill. It falls into the area of “prudential judgment,” where laymen can make up their own minds.
But Arrogant Appleby still tries to bluster a way out for the bishops:

He explained that it is important for Catholics to read Church documents, and the writings and homilies of bishops on the issues. While “we can sit here and have an argument over whether something is a prudential judgment versus a doctrinal issue,” he said, it is important to remember that a bishop’s teaching, even on matters of prudential judgment, “calls for careful consideration by Catholics.”

Wow, let’s get it from on high, ignore the secular reality, and vote for more unemployment and cultural disarray!
And don’t think the bishops won’t be pushing the guilt trip on their flocks.

To disregard—refusing to even consider—the bishops' position on immigration reform because it is a matter of prudential judgment is a disconnect, Appleby explained.
“Even under a prudential judgment analysis, someone is required to at least consider the arguments being put forth by the Church, to take them into consideration there is a responsibility to at least consider what the Church is saying, and then incorporate it into their position to the degree that they can."
He added that the tendency of Catholics in America to put their party affiliation, be it Republican or Democrat, ahead of their faith, means that “there's a lot of education to be done.”

Translation: Catholics in America are behaving like Americans—difficult for their Leftist church bureaucrats to manipulate.
You really have to be impressed by this slick attempt to use religious arguments for blatantly secular ends!
CNA quotes Kim Daniels, spokesperson for the U.S. bishops' conference president, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York:

“We support immigration reform as a response to Pope Francis' call to resist indifference and to regain a sense of 'fraternal responsibility' regarding the suffering of immigrants,” she told CNA Aug. 27….
In a July 21 homily, Archbishop José Gomez taught that “God comes to us in the person of the stranger,” that hospitality is a “sacred duty,” and that immigration is “not only a matter of politics,” but is “a matter of our relationship with God.”

Archbishop Gomez, now enthroned in Los Angeles, is an immigrant from Mexico. Why doesn’t he urge Mexico to show more “hospitality” to immigrants, and stop mistreating illegal immigrants?
Even more important: did Gomez truly “abjure foreign potentates” when he took the U.S. Oath of citizenship?
VDARE.com has for years exposed the forces advocating Open Borders for legal and illegal migrants: Big Business; ethnic advocacy groups; religious lobbies like the Catholic Church, the Evangelical Immigration Table etc.
Tellingly, that we are mired in the worst economic situation since the Great Depression simply does not to matter to those forces.
It’s obvious that many faithful Catholics have been deeply affected by their church’s ongoing pedophiliac scandals and (I believe as a long-time liberal Democrat) its inflexible views on family planning, abortion, gays and divorce. By evading these issues, and instead speaking from its pulpits all over the US about “social justice” a.k.a. Amnesty, these prelates show they are just the same sort of self-interested crooks as the Latino tribes and the greedy business types who want cheap labor.
The New York Times piece tells us how powerful this push will be:

"The political campaign by Catholic priests is certain to catch the attention of Catholic members of Congress. Catholics are the largest single religious group in Congress, making up just over 30 percent of the members, according to the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project. The current House has 136 Catholic members, including Speaker John A. Boehner and 60 other Republicans, according to Pew.
For some Republican members, vocal support by local priests and bishops could provide the religious rationale they need to support an overhaul in the face of criticism from conservatives.

The Catholic Church has what are supposed to be deep differences with Obama over abortion, homosexual marriage and other matters. But, paradoxically, the New York Times article noted:

"White House officials said they were counting on Catholics and members of other religious groups to help pass an immigration overhaul through a Republican-controlled House that is filled with members fighting against one. Cecilia Munoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said Catholic leaders had participated in outreach meetings at the White House.
"It’s pretty rare for the Catholics to take on an issue like this straight to the pews," said Ms. Munoz, who is leading Mr. Obama’s immigration effort.

When you add the fear, which I believe is vastly overrated, that Republicans must completely kowtow to Latinos, it adds up to trouble.
How can so many be so stupid, greedy, selfish—and blind to how this must inevitably appear to American patriots?
Donald A. Collins [email him], is a freelance writer living in Washington DC and a former long time member of the board of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. His views are his own.

Friday, July 19, 2013

Thinking the Unthinkable: Libertarian Matt Bracken Speculates on How Things Might Fall Apart in the Cities

A very interesting post from http://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com about a possible collapse of American society. This follows this post about the Senate filbuster surrender. This follows this post about Geroge Zimmerman as a White Hispanic. In the meantime, you can read an interesting take on society's problems HERE and the interesting book being shown HERE.

Thinking the Unthinkable: Libertarian Matt Bracken Speculates on How Things Might Fall Apart in the Cities, When the Federal Well Inevitably Runs Dry

Bracken’s CW2 Cube; click to enlarge

Bracken’s CW2 Cube; click to view

Posted by Nicholas Stix

Warning: The following essay runs 5,600 words. It is written in a very readable style, and I happen to think that every word is worth reading, but unless you’re a very rapid reader, this will take some time.

[Previously, at WEJB/NSU:

“Possibilities for How “the American Experiment” Will End; and

“A Reader Writes: ‘The Only Answer to the Destruction of our Republic is Revolution or Secession.’”]

When the Music Stops – How America’s Cities May Explode in Violence

By Matt Bracken

Western Rifle Shooters Association

In response to recent articles in mainstream military journals discussing the use of the U.S. Army to quell insurrections on American soil, I offer an alternate vision of the future. Instead of a small town in the South as the flash point, picture instead a score of U.S. cities in the thrall of riots greater than those experienced in Los Angeles in 1965 (Watts), multiple cities in 1968 (MLK assassination), and Los Angeles again in 1992 (Rodney King). New Yorkers can imagine the 1977 blackout looting or the 1991 Crown Heights disturbance. In fact, the proximate spark of the next round of major riots in America could be any from a long list cribbed from our history.

We have seen them all before, and we shall see them all again as history rhymes along regardless of the century or the generation of humankind nominally in control of events. But the next time we are visited by widespread, large-scale urban riots, a dangerous new escalation may be triggered by a new vulnerability: It’s estimated that the average American home has less than two weeks of food on hand. In poor minority areas, it may be much less. What if a cascading economic crisis, even a temporary one, leads to millions of EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards flashing nothing but zeroes? Or if the government’s refusal to reimburse them causes supermarket chains to stop accepting them for payment? The government can order the supermarkets to honor the cards, but history’s verdict is clear: If suppliers are paid only with worthless scrip or blinking digits, the food will stop.

STEP ONE: FLASH MOB LOOTING

In my scenario, the initial riots begin spontaneously across affected urban areas, as SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance program) and other government welfare recipients learn that their EBT cards no longer function. This sudden revelation will cause widespread anger, which will quickly lead to the flash-mob looting of local supermarkets and other businesses. The media will initially portray these “food riots” as at least partly justifiable. Sadly, millions of Americans have been made largely, or even entirely, dependent on government wealth transfer payments to put food on their tables.

A new social contract has been created, where bread and circuses buy a measure of peace in our minority-populated urban zones. In the era of ubiquitous big-screen cable television, the internet and smart phones, the circus part of the equation is never in doubt as long as the electricity flows. But the bread is highly problematic. Food must be delivered the old-fashioned way: physically. Any disruption in the normal functioning of the EBT system will lead to food riots with a speed that is astonishing. This will inevitably happen when our unsustainable, debt-fueled binge party finally stops, and the music is over. Now that the delivery of free or heavily subsidized food is perceived by tens of millions of Americans to be a basic human right, the cutoff of “their” food money will cause an immediate explosion of rage. When the hunger begins to bite, supermarkets, shops and restaurants will be looted, and initially the media will not condemn the looting. Unfortunately, this initial violence will only be the start of a dangerous escalation.

The ransacked supermarkets, convenience stores, ATMs and gas stations will not be restocked during this period due to the precarious security situation. A single truck loaded with food or gasoline would be perceived to be a Fort Knox on wheels and subject to immediate attack unless heavily protected by powerfully armed security forces, but such forces will not be available during this chaotic period. Under those conditions, resupply to the urban areas cannot and will not take place. The downward spiral of social and economic dysfunction will therefore both accelerate and spread from city to city. These delays, in turn, will lead to more riots with the constant underlying demand that hungry people be fed, one way or another.

Catch-22, anyone? When these demands do not bring the desired outcome, the participants will ratchet up the violence, hoping to force action by the feckless state and national governments.

The “food riots” will be a grass-roots movement of the moment born out of hunger and desperation. It will not be dependent upon leaders or an underlying organization, although they could certainly add to the sauce. Existing cell phone technology provides all the organization a flash mob needs. Most of the mobs will consist of minority urban youths, termed MUYs in the rest of this essay. Which minority doesn’t matter; each urban locale will come with its own unique multi-ethnic dynamic.

Some locales will divide upon religious or political lines, but they will not be the dominant factors contributing to conflict. In the American context, the divisions will primarily have an ethnic or racial context, largely because that makes it easy to sort out the sides at a safe distance. No need to check religious or political affiliation at a hundred yards when The Other is of a different color.

We Americans are all about doing things the easy way, so, sadly, visible racial and ethnic features will form the predominant lines of division.

Would that it were not so, but reality is reality, even when it’s is a bitch.

Especially then.

NEXT STEP: FLASH MOB RIOTS

In order to highlight their grievances and escalate their demands for an immediate resumption of government benefits, the MUY flash mobs will next move their activities to the borders of their ethnic enclaves. They will concentrate on major intersections and highway interchanges where non-MUY suburban commuters must make daily passage to and from what forms of employment still exist. People making a living will still be using those roads to get to where they earn their daily bread.

The results of these clashes will frequently resemble the intersection of Florence and Normandie during the Rodney King riots in 1992, where Reginald Denny was pulled out of his truck’s cab and beaten nearly to death with a cinder block. If you don’t remember it, watch it on Youtube. Then imagine that scene with the mob-making accelerant of texting and other social media technology added to stoke the fires. Instead of a few dozen thugs terrorizing the ambushed intersections, in minutes there will be hundreds.

Rioters will throw debris such as shopping carts and trash cans into the intersection, causing the more timid drivers to pause. The mobs will swarm the lines of trapped cars once they have stopped. Traffic will be forced into gridlock for blocks in all directions. Drivers and passengers of the wrong ethnic persuasions will be pulled from their vehicles to be beaten, robbed, and in some cases raped and/or killed. It will be hyper-violent and overtly racial mob behavior, on a massive and undeniable basis.

Some of those trapped in their cars will try to drive out of the area, inevitably knocking down MUY pedestrians and being trapped by even more outraged MUYs. The commuters will be dragged out of their cars and kicked or beaten to death. Other suburban commuters will try to shoot their way out of the lines of stopped cars, and they will meet the same grim fate once they run out of bullets and room to escape.

The mob will be armed with everything from knives, clubs and pistols to AK-47s. A bloodbath will result. These unlucky drivers and their passengers will suffer horribly, and some of their deaths will be captured on traffic web cameras. Later, these terrible scenes will be released or leaked by sympathetic government insiders and shown by the alternative media, which continue to expand as the traditional media become increasingly irrelevant.

Implausible, you insist?

This grim tableau is my analysis of age-old human behavior patterns, adding flash mobs and 2012 levels of racial anger to the old recipe. Early-teenage MUYs today are frequently playing “The Knockout Game” on full bellies, just for kicks, and proudly uploading the videos. They and their older peers can be expected to do far worse when hunger and the fear of starvation enter their physical, mental, and emotional equations. The blame for their hunger will be turned outward against the greater society, and will be vented at first hand against any non-MUY who falls into their grasp while they are in the thrall of mob hysteria. These episodes of mass psychology we will refer to as “flash mob riots”, “wilding”, or some other new name.

THE OFFICIAL POLICE RESPONSE TO FLASH MOB RIOTS

To gear up for even a single “Florence and Normandie on steroids” flash mob street riot, city police departments will require an hour or longer to stage their SWAT teams and riot squads in position to react. Ordinary patrol cars in small numbers will not venture anywhere near such roiling masses of hysterical rioters, not even to perform rescues. Those citizens trapped in their cars cannot expect timely assistance from local or state authorities.

Even in the first days of widespread riots, when the police forces are well rested, it might take several hours to mount a response sufficient to quell the disturbance and restore order to even one major street intersection riot. In the meantime, scores of innocent commuters will have been attacked, with many of them injured or killed and left at the scene. It will be a law enforcement nightmare to quell the disturbance, mop up lingering rioters, restore security, and bring medical attention to the living and get medical examiners to the dead. And each jurisdiction will face potentially dozens of such scenes, thanks to the ability for MUYs to cross-communicate at will using their wireless devices.

The far more difficult challenge for the police is that by the time they are suited in riot gear, armed and geared up to sweep the intersection, it will probably be empty of rioters. The police, with their major riot squad reaction times measured in hours, will be fighting flash mobs that materialize, cause mayhem, and evaporate in only fractions of hours. This rapid cycle time is a clear lesson taken from massive riots by immigrant French Muslim MUYs in their own religious enclaves and bordering areas.

The American flash mob riot will exist almost entirely inside the law enforcement OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop. In other words, the rioters will have a much quicker reaction time than the police. Until fairly recently, superior police communications meant that they could use their radio networks as a force multiplier. With their networking advantage and cohesive reactions both within a department and among cooperating local agencies, police could act as shepherds guiding or dispersing a wayward stampeding flock.

Today, the mob has the greater advantage, immediately spreading word of every police preparation by text and Tweet, even in advance of the police movement. Attempts by the authorities to stop the flash mobs by blocking and jamming wireless transmissions will have limited success.

It is at this point that the situation spirals out of control.

The enraged mobs in urban America will soon recognize that their spontaneous street riots cannot be stopped by the police, and then they will grow truly fearsome.

For the police, it will be a losing game of Whack-a-Mole, with riots breaking out and dispersing at a speed they cannot hope to match. The violence will spread to previously unaffected cities as an awareness of law enforcement impotence is spread by television and social media. After a few days, the police forces will be exhausted and demoralized. As the violence intensifies and spreads, and in the absence of any viable security arrangements, supermarkets and other stores will not be restocked, leaving the MUYs even more desperate and angry than before.

The increasing desperation born of worsening hunger will refuel the escalating spiral of violence.

Nor will violent conflict be only between the inhabitants of the urban areas and the suburbs. The international record of conflict in tri-ethnic cities is grim, making the old bi-racial dichotomy formerly seen in America seem stable by comparison. In tri-ethnic cities the perceived balance of power is constantly shifting, with each side in turn feeling outnumbered and outmuscled. Temporary truces, betrayals and new alliances follow in rapid succession, removing any lingering sense of social cohesion.

The former Yugoslavia, with its Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim divisions, comes starkly to mind. The Lebanese Civil War between the Christians, Sunnis, Shiites and Druze raged across Beirut (at one time known as “The Paris of the Middle East”) for fifteen brutal years. Once a city turns on itself and becomes a runaway engine of self-destruction, it can be difficult to impossible to switch off the process and return to normal pre-conflict life.

It’s not inconceivable that the United States could produce a dozen Sarajevos or Beiruts, primarily across racial instead of religious divides.

Vehicle traffic by non-minority suburban commuters through adjoining minority areas will virtually halt, wrecking what is left of the local economy. Businesses will not open because employees will not be able to travel to work safely.

Businesses in minority areas, needless to say, will be looted.

“Gentrified” enclaves of affluent suburbanites within or near the urban zones will suffer repeated attacks, until their inhabitants flee.

Radically disaffected minorities will hold critical infrastructure corridors through their areas hostage against the greater society. Highways, railroad tracks, pipe and power lines will all be under constant threat, or may be cut in planned or unplanned acts of raging against “the system.” As long as security in the urban areas cannot be restored, these corridors will be under threat. Even airports will not be immune. Many of them have been absorbed into urban areas, and aircraft will come under sporadic fire while taking off and landing.

In the absence of fresh targets of value blundering into their areas, and still out of food, MUYs will begin to forage beyond their desolated home neighborhoods and into suburban borderlands. “Safe” supermarkets and other stores will be robbed in brazen commando-like gang attacks. Carjackings and home invasions will proliferate madly. As I have discussed in my essay “The Civil War Two Cube,” so-called “transitional” and mixed-ethnic areas will suffer the worst violence. These neighborhoods will become utterly chaotic killing zones, with little or no help coming from the overstretched police, who will be trying to rest up for their next shift on riot squad duty, if they have not already deserted their posts to take care of their own families.

THE SUBURBAN ARMED VIGILANTE RESPONSE

In the absence of an effective official police response to the exploding levels of violence, suburbanites will first hastily form self-defense forces to guard their neighborhoods—especially ones located near ethnic borders. These ubiquitous neighborhood armed defense teams will often have a deep and talented bench from which to select members, and they will not lack for volunteers.

Since 9-11, hundreds of thousands of young men (and more than a few women) have acquired graduate-level educations in various aspects of urban warfare. In the Middle East these troops were frequently tasked with restoring order to urban areas exploding in internecine strife. Today these former military men and women understand better than anyone the life-or-death difference between being armed and organized versus unarmed and disorganized.

Hundreds of thousands if not millions of veterans currently own rifles strikingly similar to those they carried in the armed forces, lacking only the full-automatic selector switch. Their brothers, sisters, parents, friends, and neighbors who did not serve in the military are often just as familiar with the weapons, if not the tactics.

Today the AR-pattern rifle (the semi-automatic civilian version of the familiar full-auto-capable M-16 or M-4) is the most popular model of rifle in America, with millions sold in the past decade. Virtually all of them produced in the past decade have abandoned the old M-16′s signature “carrying handle” rear iron sight for a standardized sight mounting rail, meaning that virtually every AR sold today can be easily equipped with an efficient optical sight. Firing the high-velocity 5.56×45 mm cartridge and mounted with a four-power tactical sight, a typical AR rifle can shoot two-inch groups at one hundred yards when fired from a steady bench rest. That translates to shooting eight- to ten-inch groups at four hundred yards.

Four hundred yards is a long walk. Pace it off on a straight road, and observe how tiny somebody appears at that distance. Yet a typical AR rifle, like those currently owned by millions of American citizens, can hit a man-sized target at that range very easily, given a stable firing platform and a moderate level of shooting ability.

And there are a far greater number of scoped bolt-action hunting rifles in private hands in the United States. Keep this number in mind: based on deer stamps sold, approximately twenty million Americans venture into the woods every fall armed with such rifles, fully intending to shoot and kill a two-hundred-pound mammal. Millions of these scoped bolt-action deer rifles are quite capable of hitting a man-sized target at ranges out to and even beyond a thousand yards, or nearly three-fifths of a mile. In that context, the 500-yard effective range of the average semi-auto AR-pattern rifle is not at all remarkable.

So, we have millions of men and women with military training, owning rifles similar to the ones they used in combat operations overseas from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Many of these Soldiers and Marines have special operations training. They are former warriors with experience at conducting irregular warfare and counter-terrorism operations in dangerous urban environments. They are the opposite of unthinking robots: their greatest military talent is looking outside the box for new solutions. They always seek to “over-match” their enemies, using their own advantages as force multipliers while diminishing or concealing their weaknesses. These military veterans are also ready, willing and able to pass on their experience and training to interested students in their civilian circles.

Let’s return to our hypothetical Florence and Normandie intersection, but this time with hundreds of rioters per city block, instead of mere dozens. Among the mobs are thugs armed with pistols and perhaps even AK-47s equipped with standard iron sights, and except in rare cases, these rifles have never been “zeroed in” on a target range. In other words, past a medium distance of fifty to a hundred yards, these MUY shooters will have little idea where their fired bullets will strike—nor will they care. Typically, most of the rioters armed with a pistol, shotgun or an iron-sighted rifle could not hit a mailbox at a hundred yards unless by luck. Inside that distance, any non-MUY could be at immediate risk of brutal death at the hands of an enraged mob, but beyond that range, the mob will pose much less danger.

Taking this imbalance in effective ranges of the firearms most likely to be available to both sides, certain tactical responses are sure to arise, and ranking near the top will be the one described next.

THE SNIPER AMBUSH: THE NEW TACTIC OF CHOICE

The sniper ambush will predictably be used as a counter to rampaging mobs armed only with short- to medium-range weapons. This extremely deadly trick was developed by our war fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking advantage of the significant effective range and firepower of our scoped 5.56mm rifles. Tactics such as the sniper ambush may not be seen early in the civil disorder, but they will surely arise after a steady progression of atrocities attributed to rampaging MUYs.

Street intersection flash mob riots will not be the only type of violence exploding during periods of civil disorder. As mentioned earlier, the number and ferocity of home invasions will skyrocket, and they will be very hard to defend against.

Neighborhood self-defense forces will be able to protect a group of homes if they are located on cul-de-sacs or in defensible subdivisions with limited entrances, turning them overnight into fortified gated communities. Individual homes and apartment buildings located in open grid-pattern neighborhoods with outside access from many directions will be much more difficult to defend, and the home invasions will continue.

Carjacking and other forms of armed robbery will proliferate to previously unimagined levels, leading to a total loss of confidence in the government’s ability to provide security across all social lines. Stray bullets striking pedestrians or penetrating houses will take a frightening toll, even in areas previously considered to be safe. The police will be exhausted by constant riot-squad duty, and will not even respond to reports of mere individual acts of violent criminality. They will simply be overwhelmed, and will be forced to triage their responses. The wealthy, powerful and politically well-connected will demand the lion’s share of remaining police resources, further diminishing the safety of average Americans.

In that context, neighborhood self-defense forces will form the nucleus of the armed vigilante direct action groups which will spring up next in the progression.

Suburban anger will continue to build against the MUYs, who are perceived to be the originators of the home invasions and gang-level armed looting raids.

Survivors of street ambushes, carjackings and home invasions will tell blood-curdling tales and show horrific scars.

The neighborhood defense teams will evolve into proactive suburban armed vigilante groups (SAVs) out of a desire to preemptively take the violence to their perceived enemies, instead of passively waiting for the next home invasion or carjacking. The SAV teams will consist of the more aggressive and gung-ho members of the self-defense forces, who met and compared notes. Often they will be young men with recent combat experience in the armed forces, who will apply their military training to the new situation. Major intersections and highway interchanges where ambush riots have previously occurred will be among the SAV targets. The SAV reaction times will be measured in minutes, compared to the hours required by major police department SWAT teams and riot squads.

A SAMPLE SNIPER AMBUSH SCENARIO

When word is received that a flash mob is forming at one of their pre-reconnoitered intersections or highway interchanges, the SAV team will assemble. Sometimes cooperating police will pass tactical intel to their civilian friends on the outside. Some clever individuals will have exploited their technical know-how and military experience to build real-time intel collection tools, such as private UAVs. Police will have access to urban security camera footage showing MUYs moving barricade materials into position—a normal prerequisite to a flash mob riot intended to stop traffic. Tip-offs to the vigilantes will be common, and where the networks are still functioning, citizens may still be able to access some video feeds. Sometimes, police will even join the SAV teams, incognito and off-duty, blurring the teams into so-called “death squads.”

The operation I will describe (and it’s only one of dozens that will be tried) uses two ordinary pickup trucks and eight fighters. Two riflemen are lying prone in the back of each truck, facing rearward, with removable canvas covers concealing their presence. Their semi-automatic, scoped rifles are supported at their front ends on bipods for very accurate shooting. A row of protective sandbags a foot high is between them and the raised tailgate.

In the cab are a driver and a spotter in the passenger seat who also serves as the vehicle’s 360-degree security. The two trucks don’t ever appear on the same stretch of road, but coordinate their movements using one-word brevity codes over small FRS walkie-talkie radios. Each truck has a series of predetermined elevated locations where the intersection in question will lie between 200 and 500 yards away. Each truck is totally nondescript and forgettable, the only detail perhaps being the non-MUY ethnicity of the suburbanite driver and spotter driving relatively near to a riot in progress.

By the time the two SAV pickup trucks arrive at their firing positions on different streets and oriented ninety degrees to one another, the flash mob riot is in full swing. A hundred or more of the rampaging youths are posturing and throwing debris into traffic in order to intimidate some cars into stopping. The riflemen in the backs of the pickups are waiting for this moment and know what to expect, trusting their spotters and drivers to give them a good firing lane. The spotters in each truck issue a code word on their radios when they are in final position. The tailgates are swung down, and the leader among the riflemen initiates the firing. All-around security is provided by the driver and spotter.

Lying prone and using their bipods for support, the shooters have five to ten degrees of pan or traverse across the entire intersection. Individual rioters are clearly visible in the shooters’ magnified optical scopes. Each of the four snipers has a plan to shoot from the outside of the mob toward the middle, driving participants into a panicked mass. The left-side shooters start on the left side and work to the middle, engaging targets with rapid fire, about one aimed shot per two seconds. Since the two trucks are set at ninety degrees to one another, very complete coverage will be obtained, even among and between the stopped vehicles.

The result is a turkey shoot. One magazine of thirty aimed shots per rifle is expended in under a minute, a coded cease-fire is called on the walkie-talkies, and the trucks drive away at the speed limit. The canvas covering the truck beds contains the shooters’ spent brass. If the trucks are attacked from medium or close range, the canvas can be thrown back and the two snipers with their semi-automatic rifles or carbines will add their firepower to that of the driver and spotter.

Back at the intersection, complete panic breaks out among the rioters as a great number of bullets have landed in human flesh. Over a score have been killed outright, and many more scream in pain for medical attention they will not receive in time. The sniper ambush stops the flash mob cold in its tracks as the uninjured flee in terror, leaving their erstwhile comrades back on the ground bleeding. The commuters trapped in their vehicles may have an opportunity to escape.

This type of sniper ambush and a hundred variations on the theme will finally accomplish what the police could not: put an end to mobs of violent rioters making the cities through-streets and highways impassible killing zones. Would-be rioters will soon understand it to be suicidal to cluster in easily visible groups and engage in mob violence, as the immediate response could come at any time in the form of aimed fire from hundreds of yards away. Even one rifleman with a scoped semi-auto can break up a medium-sized riot.

Many citizens will take to carrying rifles and carbines in their vehicles, along with their pistols, so that if their cars are trapped in an ambush they will have a chance to fight their way out. If their vehicle is stopped outside the immediate area of the flash mob, they will be able to direct accurate fire at the rioters from a few hundred yards away. Inside the fatal hundred-yard radius, unlucky suburbanite drivers and passengers pulled from their cars will still be brutally violated, but the occurrences of large mob-driven street ambushes will be much less frequent once long-range retaliation becomes a frequent expectation.

THE GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TO VIGILANTISM

Where they will be unable to respond swiftly or effectively to the outbreaks of street riots by MUY flash mobs, the police and federal agents will respond vigorously to the deadly but smaller vigilante attacks. These sniper ambushes and other SAV attacks will be called acts of domestic terrorism and mass murder by government officials and the mainstream media. A nearly seamless web of urban and suburban street cameras will reveal some of the SAV teams by their vehicles, facial recognition programs, and other technical means. Some early arrests will be made, but the vigilantes will adapt to increasing law enforcement pressure against them by becoming cleverer about their camouflage, most often using stolen cars and false uniforms and masks during their direct-action missions. Observe Mexico today for ideas on how this type of dirty war is fought.

Eventually, the U.S. Army itself might be called upon to put out all the social firestorms in our cities, restore order and security, pacify the angry masses, feed the starving millions, get vital infrastructure operating again, and do it all at once in a dozen American Beiruts, Sarajevos and Mogadishus.

Good luck to them, I say.

A few hundred “Active IRA” tied down thousands of British troops in one corner of a small island for decades. The same ratios have served the Taliban well over the past decade while fighting against the combined might of NATO. Set aside for a moment the angry starving millions trapped in the urban areas, and the dire security issues arising thereof. Just to consider the official reaction to vigilantism separately, it’s unlikely that any conceivable combinations of local and state police, federal law enforcement, National Guard or active-duty Army actions could neutralize or eliminate tens of thousands of former special operations troops intent on providing their own form of security. Millions of Americans are already far better armed and trained than a few hundred IRA or Taliban ever were.

And the police and Army would not be operating from secure fire bases, their families living in total safety thousands of miles away in a secure rear area. In this scenario, there is no rear area, and every family member, anywhere, would be at perpetual risk of reprisal actions by any of the warring sides.

In this hyper-dangerous environment, new laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in vehicles would be ignored as the illegitimate diktat of dictatorship, just when the Second Amendment is needed more than ever. Police or military conducting searches for firearms at checkpoints would themselves become targets of vigilante snipers. Serving on anti-firearms duty would be seen as nothing but pure treason by millions of Americans who took the oath to defend the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. Politicians who did not act in the security interest of their local constituents as a result of political correctness or other reasons would also be targeted.

A festering race war with police and the military in the middle taking fire from both sides could last for many years, turning many American cities into a living hell. Remember history: when the British Army landed in Northern Ireland in 1969, they were greeted with flowers and applause from the Catholics. The Tommys were welcomed as peacekeepers who would protect them from Protestant violence. That soon changed. Likewise with our tragic misadventure in Lebanon back in 1982 and 1983. Well-intended referees often find themselves taking fire from all sides. It’s as predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise. Why would it be any different when the U.S. Army is sent to Los Angeles, Chicago or Philadelphia to break apart warring ethnic factions?

For a long time after these events, it will be impossible for the warring ethnic groups to live together or even to mingle peacefully. Too much rage and hatred will have been built up on all sides of our many American multi-ethnic fault lines. The new wounds will be raw and painful for many years to come, as they were in the South for long after the Civil War. The fracturing of the urban areas, divided by no-man’s-lands, will also hinder economic redevelopment for many years because the critical infrastructure corridors will remain insecure.

Eventually, high concrete “Peace Walls” like those in Belfast, Northern Ireland, will be installed where the different ethnic groups live in close proximity. That is, if recovery to sane and civilized norms of behavior are ever regained in our lifetimes and we don’t slide into a new Dark Age, a stern and permanent tyranny, warlordism, anarchy, or any other dire outcome.

Dark Ages can last for centuries, after sinking civilizations in a vicious, downward vortex. “When the music’s over, turn out the lights,” to quote Jim Morrison of The Doors. Sometimes the lights stay out for a long time. Sometimes civilization itself is lost. Millions of EBT cards flashing zeroes might be the signal event of a terrible transformation.

It is a frightening thing to crystallize the possible outbreak of mass starvation and racial warfare into words, so that the mind is forced to confront agonizingly painful scenarios. It is much easier to avert one’s eyes and mind from the ugliness with politically correct Kumbaya bromides. In this grim essay, I am describing a brutal situation of ethnic civil war not differing much from the worst scenes from recent history in Rwanda, South Africa, Mexico, Bosnia, Iraq, and many other places that have experienced varying types and degrees of societal collapse. We all deplore the conditions that might drive us toward such a hellish outcome, and we should work unceasingly to return America to the path of true brotherhood, peace and prosperity. Race hustlers of every stripe should be condemned.

Most of us wish we could turn back the calendar to Norman Rockwell’s America. But we cannot, for that America is water long over the dam and gone from our sight, if not from our memories. John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” If that is true, judging by current and even accelerating cultural shifts, we might already have passed the point of no return.

The prudent American will trim his sails accordingly.

Matt Bracken is the author of the Enemies Foreign And Domestic trilogy, along with his latest novel, Castigo Cay.