¡Adios, America!

by Ann Coulter

  For one hundred years before the signing of the Declaration, and one hundred years after, America was extraordinarily un-diverse in ethnicity (British, Dutch, West African, and Germanic), in religious practice (overwhelmingly Protestant, 98 percent Christian), in language (English), and in cultural mores (no wailing at funerals or child rape). Even the few French settlers in colonial America were Protestants—they had fled France under threat of forced conversion to Catholicism. Pre-Revolutionary America allowed the naturalization of Jews—but not Catholics.5 Curiously, in contemporary America, Hispanic Protestants are majority Republican, while Hispanic Catholics are nearly monolithically Democrat.

  Harvard professor Samuel Huntington asks: “Would America be the America it is today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics?” Clearly not: “It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.”6 Author Richard Brookhiser writes: “The WASP character is the American character. . . . It is the mold, the template, the archetype, the set of axes along which the crystal has grown. Without the WASP it would be another country altogether.”

  For its 1976 bicentennial edition, Time magazine tried to cover up the Founding Fathers’ crime of non-diversity by making them look less WASPy.7 A photo display of eleven descendants of the Founders included Yukiko Irwin, born and raised in Japan,8 and an African American probation officer, Elmer Roberts, allegedly descended from Thomas Jefferson’s nonexistent sexual relationship with slave Sally Hemings. Time wanted to make absolutely clear that the United States was not the product of a bunch of Protestant, Anglo-Saxon men, if that’s what you were thinking. Except, the problem is, it was. And the country remained overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant right up until Teddy Kennedy decided to change it.

  A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS IS NOT A NATION

  Contrary to PC nonsense about America being a “diverse” melting pot, America has never been a “nation of immigrants.” Most Americans have always been born here. Even as late as 1990—a quarter century into Teddy Kennedy’s scheme to remake the nation—half of the American population traced its roots to the black and white populace of 1790.9

  Nearly the entire white population of America from 1600 to 1970 came from a geographic area of the world about twice the size of Texas. The entire black population came from an area of West Africa about the size of Florida.

  Until Teddy Kennedy struck, America was never less than 99 percent white Western European and West African black.10 That’s “bi-racial,” not “diverse.” African Americans are every bit as much a part of Anglo-Saxon America as the Anglo-Saxons themselves. Cheap-labor enthusiasts love to insult black workers with fulsome tributes to hardworking immigrants doing jobs that “Americans”—wink, wink—“just won’t do,” but you cannot understand America without talking about blacks. America is the only country to fight a revolution based on the principle that all men are equal before God, and it is the only country to fight a bloody civil war to end slavery and redeem that promise.

  African Americans’ contributions to the nation’s wars, and especially to its culture, make this country what it is. Blacks served with one of the most important outfits in the American Revolution, John Glover’s Marblehead Regiment, which provided the Continental Army with its first naval ship and also stood guard at General George Washington’s personal headquarters. In 1775 America, General Glover was perfectly at home with black Americans, who “served aboard vessels in Marblehead’s fishing fleet, lived in the same town that he did, and even attended the same church.”11 The Civil War might have ended differently if so many blacks hadn’t fled their Confederate masters—including the inspirational abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass—or without free blacks fighting with the Union army. Black Americans fought bravely in both world wars, even in an army kept segregated by part-French FDR.

  In addition to fighting its wars and helping shape its history, black Americans have an outsized influence on the nation’s style—the Christianity, the slang, the music. For half a century, every rock group in the world aspired to sound like Chuck Berry. No one has ever wanted to sound like a mariachi band. The nation’s most pressing social problems—principally illegitimacy—are also disproportionately black problems. Imagine if all the resources lavished on immigrants had gone to American blacks!

  Two centuries after the first Europeans settled America, the white population was 80 percent British and 98 percent Protestant.12 A century after that, the populace was still overwhelmingly English-speaking, British, and Protestant, but, for an exciting change, also included Germans and Scandinavians.13 The colorful immigrants at the turn of the nineteenth century were wildly different from the original settlers in the sense that they were white people from a different part of Western Europe. For vibrancy, America had the Puerto Ricans, whom President Woodrow Wilson made citizens in 1917, because Democrats needed bodies to fight World War I and employers needed—guess what? That’s correct: Cheap labor. By 1970, fewer than a million Puerto Ricans lived in the United States.14

  MY, OUR POST–WELFARE STATE IMMIGRANTS HAVE CHANGED!

  The entire time it was processing immigrants from 1892 until 1954, Ellis Island received only 12 million immigrants.15 Please stop weeping about your grandfathers arriving at Ellis Island. It’s irritating. And it bears absolutely no relationship to immigration today. Earlier immigrants proved their heartiness by vomiting all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to get here. There was no welfare, and certainly no welcoming committees of ethnic grievance groups.

  People weren’t allowed to come to America and just hang out. Towns provided for their own infirm and elderly, and they definitely didn’t want deadbeats wandering over from the next town. In 1797, for example, Vermont state law required each community to “prevent the poor, resident within their respective towns or places, from strolling into any other town or place.” When a new family showed up, the town clerk would promptly investigate, and if it looked as if the newcomers might become a burden, the family would be sent a “warning out” letter, telling them to leave.16

  About a third of pre-1965 immigrants went home—except British and Jewish immigrants, less than 10 percent of whom returned.17 Now no one goes home, they go on welfare. Today’s immigrants aren’t coming here to breathe free, they’re coming to live for free. Most of them wouldn’t come at all if they had to survive in the work-or-die America that existed when we got all those relatives being wept over. What are Mexico’s policies on that? If my money runs out and I have a few kids with my equally non-Mexican boyfriend, do we get free money from Mexican taxpayers? What about the babies! They didn’t do anything wrong!

  Today, any immigrants who didn’t come expressly for the welfare have the Ford Foundation to acquaint them with their rights. If the Ford Foundation is busy, there’s always the National Council of La Raza, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Migration Policy Institute, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, the National Immigration Law Center, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration Policy—all working to transfer money from the American taxpayer to poverty-stricken immigrants from primitive cultures. Not only are immigrants taught to live off the American taxpayer, but they are counseled in resentment toward their benefactors. The vast majority of children of Mexican, Filipino, Haitian, Vietnamese, Laotian, and Jamaican immigrants complain about being discriminated against.18 We take fewer immigrants from Britain than from any of these countries, except Haiti, Laos, and Jamaica—all of which have populations about the same size as, or much smaller than, the city of London.19

  DARFUR IS THE NATURAL STATE OF THE WORLD

  America is not the natural state of the world. The natural state of the world is Darfur. The British Empire spread Anglo-Saxon culture around the globe—Protestant morals, individualism, and the rule of
law. Most British colonies rejected those values. Only the ones populated by actual British people—America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—managed to hold on to them and, as a result, prospered. The empire’s most successful experiment was the United States. Anyone who hesitates for a moment to recognize that some groups have it over other groups in producing free and prosperous nations has been brainwashed beyond reclamation.

  The UPI syndicate puts out a weekly almanac column listing important world events that happened on given dates in other years. I happened to come across the one for the week of April 9 and noticed something about the rest of the world. From UPI:

  In 1992, a federal jury in Miami convicted deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega on cocaine trafficking charges.

  In 1997, a government of unity was launched in Angola, three years after the end of the country’s 19-year civil war, with the seating of 70 members of the rebel UNITA party in parliament.

  In 1999, the president of the African nation of Niger was assassinated, reportedly by members of his own guard. A military junta led by the commander of the presidential guards took over.

  In 2000, Peru’s President Alberto Fujimori failed to win a first-round election victory, forcing a run-off in May, which he won. However, a vote-fraud scandal forced him to step down later in the year.

  In 2003, the mood in Iraq became exuberant as Iraqis, with help from Americans, toppled a 20-foot statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square.

  In 2004, authorities in Bulgaria said at least 40 people were injured, some seriously, in a toxic gas attack on a police station in Sofia.20

  While most of the rest of the globe is a cesspool of civil war, revolution, drug dealing, military coups, and assassinations, UPI’s almanac entries for America are things like “first American to circumnavigate the globe” (1790) and “William Hunt of New York patented the safety pin” (1847). Immediately following an entry for 1916—“Professional Golfers Association of America was founded”—is this one: “In 1919, Emiliano Zapata, a leader of peasants and indigenous people during the Mexican Revolution, was ambushed and killed in Morelos by government forces.” And that particular week was short on Muslim entries, thus avoiding any noteworthy beheadings.

  That’s how the lists looked until fairly recently, anyway. Lately, the almanac has been acquiring events in America like this one: “In 2006, an estimated 500,000 people protested in Los Angeles against proposed U.S. legislation that would make it a felony to be in the United States illegally.” Thanks to our new we-assimilate-to-them strategy, angry immigrants seem to be in a constant state of protest. After Professor Huntington wrote a book warning that America could not survive the cultural onslaught from Latin America, Hispanics responded with a flurry of scholarly papers and academic critiques countering his thesis. Just kidding! They called for national protests against Huntington, his publisher, and Harvard University.21 These are not the descendants of the Magna Carta.

  Edmund Burke, Britain’s most eloquent defender of the American Revolution, attributed Americans’ love of freedom expressly to the dual facts that they were British and they were Protestants: “First, the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen. . . . They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles. . . . The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it.”22 As Huntington says, all religions come to America and become Protestant. Catholics, for example, were not fully accepted into American society until the church became less “Roman Catholic” and more “American Catholic.”

  EARLIER IMMIGRANTS WERE CHAMPS AT ASSIMILATION

  Obviously, members of other ethnic groups can be great Americans, but that doesn’t mean America is an “idea.” It means America’s distinctively British Protestant culture can be acquired. Earlier immigrants were, as a rule, fantastic assimilators. While WASPs seem embarrassed about their own culture, Jewish Americans have taken to it with gusto. Ralph Lauren is the ne plus ultra celebration of WASP style. Harold Koda, curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called Lauren—born Ralph Lifshitz to Jewish immigrants from Belarus—“the greatest ambassador of American style.”23 The quintessential American garment, blue jeans, was invented by a Jewish immigrant, Levi Strauss. Another tribute to America’s British roots is the profusion of American Jews with adopted Anglo-Saxon names like Jon Stewart, David Gregory, Lorne Michaels, and, of course, Ralph Lauren himself.

  Hollywood is the only major American industry that was largely built by immigrants. Jewish directors, writers, and producers celebrated their new country with wildly patriotic films such as The Yankee Clipper; Rally ’round the Flag, Boys!; and Plymouth Adventure. A big part of their patriotism was the reverence they exhibited for specifically WASP America. Scores of movies were set in Connecticut—Christmas in Connecticut, Holiday Inn, The Talk of the Town, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House—as well as in other WASP redoubts such as Newport, Boston, Vermont, and Main Line Philadelphia (The Philadelphia Story). Bing Crosby, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Donna Reed, and Spencer Tracy were all uber-WASP inventions of the Jews. Jewish immigrant Irving Berlin wrote “God Bless America,” “White Christmas,” “Easter Parade,” and “This Is the Army.” Try to imagine an immigrant in La Raza doing any of that.

  Nearly all immigrants who arrived before Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act were like this. America used to get “educated, Westernized” immigrants who “assimilated with relative ease,” as Margaret Talbot put it in the New Republic, referring specifically to Muslims.24 Today, instead of educated Lebanese and Iranian Muslims, we’re getting Muslim refugees from tribal societies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, thunderstruck by indoor plumbing.

  Stage One: Make it harder for immigrants to assimilate by admitting only those from cultures wildly divergent from ours.

  Stage Two: Stop asking immigrants to assimilate.

  Stage Three: It is hate speech to ask them to assimilate.

  It’s still possible to meet a Honduran or Bosnian immigrant more completely imbued with Anglo-Saxon values than a tenth-generation American WASP. But they’re the exception. To keep bringing in waves of foreigners hostile to the native population in hopes of getting a few good ones is like draining the ocean to find a ring you lost.

  DIVERSITY: THAT CULTURE YOU RISKED YOUR LIFE TO FLEE FROM

  The companion lie to the “America is a nation of immigrants” lie is “diversity is a strength.” Praising diversity is simply part of the PC dogma, a mantra constantly being pounded into our heads. Repeat after me: Diversity is a strength. Diversity is a strength. Diversity is a strength. It’s like the shrieking radios permanently attached to bright people’s ears in the Kurt Vonnegut story “Harrison Bergeron,” to prevent them from using their superior intelligence. Contrary to everything you’ve heard, never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a disaster.

  Look at Ireland with its Protestant and Catholic populations, Canada with its French and English populations, Israel with its Jewish and Palestinian populations. Or consider the warring factions in India, Sri Lanka, China, Iraq, Czechoslovakia (until it happily split up), the Balkans, and Chechnya. Also review the festering hotbeds of tribal warfare—I mean the “beautiful mosaic”—in Third World disasters like Afghanistan, Rwanda, and South Central LA. If diversity is their strength, I’d hate to see what their weakness is. The fact that we have to be incessantly told how wonderful diversity is only proves that it’s not. It’s like listening to a waiter try to palm off the fish “special” on you before it goes bad.

  In response to the wanton slaughter of thirteen American troops at Fort Hood by a disgruntled second-generation Muslim immigrant, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey went on Meet the Press and said: “Our diversity, not only in our army but in our country, is a strength.”25
Then a few years later, after two Chechen immigrants bombed the Boston Marathon, former CIA director Michael Hayden told a Fox News Sunday panel: “We welcome these kinds of folks coming to the United States.” Really? The kind that launch murderous attacks on Americans? Do people even listen to themselves when they spout these bromides, or is it just background music? Saying he was speaking “as the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency,” Hayden added: “Immigration to this country contributes to our national security.” The 9/11 attacks must have been fantastic for national security!

  Hayden also made the strange announcement that America is “required to look like the world.” Is that in the CIA charter? I know it’s in the Democratic Party’s platform and also in the wedding vows of John Kerry and Teresa Heinz. This wasn’t some nut from the ACLU. It was a former government official—the head of the CIA. At least it becomes less of a mystery why no one at the CIA saw 9/11 coming.

  A few days later on MSNBC, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff of California responded to Muslim immigrants’ bombing the Boston Marathon by saying, “The American-Muslim community is a source of great strength to us . . . our strength in America has always been our diversity.”26 Do these people have a silicone chip in their brains that makes them say that? How about a rousing chorus of: “Four legs good, two legs bad!” This is the sort of brainwashing Americans are relentlessly subjected to, day after day, from every major news outlet. The good news is, even after years of wall-to-wall propaganda, Americans still aren’t sold on the idea.