Texas Third

Texas

Texas has become the third state this month to pass a restrictionist immigration law.

Last night, the Texas Senate passed the “controversial” Voter ID law, 19 to 11. It only took six hours of debate and getting past 40 Democratic amendments.

In 2009, Texas Democrats defeated the Voter ID law. The sweeping Republican victories in the Texas state legislature in the midterm elections changed that dynamic.

Democrats are already crying “racism” and claiming the new law “violates” the Voting Rights Act. They claim it will disenfranchise their voters – black felons and illegal aliens – who are unable to produce photo identification.

“System politicians” at work:

The mainstream media is also making the ridiculous claim that voter fraud in Texas is “non-existent” and that the new law is “useless.” Leftwing journalists are in full spin mode trying to talk down the bill before it becomes law.

As we tend to see everywhere, the lemmings in Texas aren’t buying it. They generally don’t trust the media anymore.

The Voter ID law now heads to the Texas House where Republicans hold a 101 to 49 supermajority.

Gov. Rick Perry is eager to sign it because he wants to get off the hook from having to sign the tougher restrictionist laws coming down the pike.

Small Steps

This Voter ID law probably doesn’t sound like much to White Nationalist ears.

White Nationalists prefer to focus on ends, not beginnings. They find mainstream politics utterly boring. Their preferred model is sweeping, transformative, cathartic revolutionary change.

They tend to ignore anything that falls short of that unrealistic measuring stick. I attribute this to growing up in a culture that has been so heavily influenced by Hollywood movies.

VDARE has started to the use the glacial metaphor of incrementalism. A glacier slowly flows across a landscape. Its speed is determined by weight, temperature, friction, and gravity.

We are seeing something akin to political glaciation at the state level on immigration

The Voter ID law in Texas was defeated in 2009, but was rammed through in 2011. White attitudes on immigration are slowly hardening again. More restrictionist laws are introduced every year now.

Even a state like Maine, which is further removed from the Mexican border than almost any other, now feels compelled to flirt with restrictionist immigration laws.

Arizona passed a Voter ID law in 2004. Georgia and Indiana passed their own Voter ID laws in 2005. The Georgia and Indiana laws have survived multiple court challenges.

Arizona, Georgia, and Indiana have since progressed from Voter ID laws through SB 1070 copycat laws and most recently to birthright citizenship laws.

There are now over 36 proposed restrictionist immigration laws in the Texas state legislature alone. This one is only the first to pass.

These state representatives and senators represent small constituencies and serve shorter terms than federal congressmen and senators. Their feet are much closer to the fire. They are always the first to boil.

This is a preview of Congress a few years from now.

More Voter ID Laws

This “glaciation” can be seen going on everywhere across the Southern and Western states.

North Carolina is right behind Texas this year. Republicans are pushing for another Voter ID law in the Tar Heel state.

A nearly identical story is developing there with Republicans pushing for restrictionist state laws to impress their conservative base while progressives, non-Whites, the mainstream media, and “civil rights” organizations howl with outrage.

The NAACP is accusing North Carolina Republicans of “taking a step backwards” and “pandering to fear and prejudices.” The charge is not without merit.

We have already seen Georgia and Alabama returning to the racialized one party system of the Jim Crow era. The White Southern Democrat is now an endangered species.

Every Southern and Western state is entertaining some kind of restrictionist immigration law. Several Midwestern and New England states are following them.

Yesterday, Minnesota Republicans unveiled their Voter ID law:

South Carolina Republicans discuss their Voter ID law:

Final Thoughts

I’m growing more and more convinced that we are in the earliest stages of a return to the Jim Crow system.

These trends are very reminiscent of the Jim Crow South:

(1) First, the precipitous decline in the legitimacy of non-White advocacy groups like the NAACP and NCLR. These groups speak exclusively to their own constituencies now.

This represents a return to the pre-MLK era when the NAACP was widely seen in the South as a subversive, leftwing partisan organization.

(2) Second, the growing segmentation of the media. The major reason that Southern racial attitudes were so much stronger in the Jim Crow South is because Southerners didn’t read the national newspapers and magazines.

The growth of television and radio and the growth of corporate newspaper conglomerates nationalized the liberalization of racial attitudes going on in the North.

This trend has since reversed.

No one has to sit plastered before the television listening to Walter Cronkite anymore. It doesn’t matter that the mainstream media in Texas is unanimously opposed to the Voter ID law. White Texans and White North Carolinians are tuning into their own media now.

(3) Third, changing racial demographics and economic decline are reviving White racial consciousness.

Americans could feel highminded in the 1950s and 1960s because the nation was whiter than ever before and basking in material prosperity.

We are headed back to a time when Whites are less financially secure and are forced into ever greater contact and competition with non-Whites.

(4) Fourth, social media has upset the power relationship between entrenched party elites and access to mass media.

In the Jim Crow South, the typical White Southerner got his news from a local newspaper controlled by a segregationist editor.

In the post-MLK era, his descendants watched Hollywood movies, the three major networks on television, and read newspapers owned by huge conglomerates from his suburban home.

Instead of being talked down to by experts and elites, Americans are spending ever more of their time talking to each other, especially to their friends through social networks, creating their own media and less time following the national political conversation.

This is similar to the Jim Crow South when friends and neighbors spent much of their time hanging out and talking about politics on the front porch. Facebook acts in a similar way to affirm local prejudices.

As Whites spend more time talking to each other to form opinions, they will correspondingly use the same resources to put more pressure on their elected officials and run around the mainstream media and party elites.

(5) Fifth, the Second World War had a catastrophic effect on White racial attitudes.

With each passing year though, fewer and fewer Whites can remember a time when White nations engaged in armed conflict. America and Europe had been at peace for generations before the World Wars.

As in the Jim Crow era, this works to our advantage.

(6) Sixth, the cumulative effect of the above trends has been to weaken established taboos and make the political system more permeable than it has been in the recent past.

When Mark Potok appears on Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss the Arizona shooting or James von Brunn attacking the Holocaust Museum, he talks only as an “expert” on “hate groups” to his fellow progressive ideologues.

Now anyone can surf their favorite blogs or discuss the news on Facebook and have all their prejudices reaffirmed by talking with friends. There is no longer the expectation that “everyone believes this” because someone with credentials happens to be talking about it on television.

The objective conditions which White Nationalists live under have improved somewhat in recent years. At the same time, White Nationalists have yet to fully adapt to this new environment. We need take advantage of all these trends to ensure that America turns the corner on race.

As we have seen in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Texas, it makes no sense to “reject the system” when we can work within the system to find common ground with our audience and advance our agenda.

Update: The South Carolina House has passed a Voter ID law.