Comments Elsewhere

Kennedy: “I don’t see how you can criticize LRC for punting Wallace. What reaction would satisfy you?”

Well, punting Wallace is for the best but the memory-hole treatment is not really an appropriate way to deal with embarrassing fascists. A public statement that they’d no longer be carrying Bob Wallace’s columns and the reasons for it would have been more honest.

Stefan: “How is the argument that open borders exacerbate terrorism a bigoted argument? Or the argument that since different groups can never get along, they should be separated in order to make everybody happier? Those don’t seem like bigoted arguments.”

Neither argument for immigration restrictions can succeed except on the presumption that it’s OK to use violent means to control the movement of individual foreigners, without any evidence of actual or threatened wrongdoing, in order to stop some vaguely-specified group of other foreigners from committing or threatening some vaguely-specified wrongdoing. That seems pretty bigoted to me. (It also usually requires some further forms of bigotry — e.g. the baseless idea that foreigners, as such, pose any greater threat to your safety than God-fearing Americans, or the similarly baseless idea that you can do whatever you like to innocent individual people in order to safeguard the Volkisch purity of your neighborhood. But even without these further premises, the position itself requires bigotry to justify itself.)

But Lopez is right to point out that he specifically mentioned racism, not bigotry at large. The reasons you cited are examples of reasons that are bigoted but not racist.