Five mega-issues facing America.

John Wohlstetter writes at The American Spectator,

While Americans enjoy the beach, the geostrategic world spins crazily on its increasingly wobbly axis. The Dog Days of Summer offer space to survey a number of pressing concerns and try to see where we stand and better anticipate where we might be going.

Selecting salient issues is made harder by the sheer plenitude of major events — several potentially tectonic — that populate the nightly news and, yes, the global cyberworld. I have chosen five issues centered on: (a) immigration and sovereignty; (b) charisma and personality politics; (c) identity politics and historical redress; (d) political correctness and education; (e) risks associated with the rise of de facto private governments.

...To date, the Supreme Court has held only that children of immigrants legally residing in America have birthright citizenship. Left unresolved is whether the same protection should be given to children of illegal aliens.

...Two other immigration “open borders” issues should be mentioned. One is the distinction between “migrants” and “refugees.” Whereas formerly only those with a credible fear of persecution for their beliefs, race, or ethnicity — refugees — were eligible for asylum, now migrants who merely live in unsafe, poor countries will be able to come in if the open borders crowd has its way. Ready for a billion or two new arrivals? America should look to Australia for guidance on handling a large influx of desperate migrants. As Laura Ingraham has quipped, the inmates now run (7 min.) the immigration asylum.

The other distinction centers on cultural compatibility. America faces the same dilemma as Western European nations: how to reconcile national identity and identity politics. The former rests on shared cultural and normative values; the latter rests on preferential treatment for favored groups within the national unit. Western Europe’s major leaders have rejected national identity in favor of a multicultural one; conversely, like Australia and Eastern Europe have embraced nationalism over open borders.

...self-styled socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Left’s newest charismatic politician-in-training, tells us that everyone is working two jobs, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics actual numbers show only a micro-fraction of the workforce does so. In June 2018, only 4.9% (7.6 million) of America’s 155.5 million workers held two jobs; and only 0.2% (360,000) workers held two full-time jobs (defined by BLS as 35 hours per week).

...As pundit P.J. O’Rourke once quipped: “If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until you see what it costs when it is free.” Perhaps America’s most glamorous socialist politician would like America to follow Venezuela’s socialist playbook, where inflation has reached one million percent.

...Big Tech: The Rise of Private Governments. Mega-corporations have become gatekeepers of the global cyberworld: Google’s search engine; Facebook’s “friending” networks; Twitter’s off-the-cuff barbs and musings; Apple’s and Samsung’s smart device wars; plus dominant “clicks” seller Amazon. The race is on to see who will become the world’s first trillionaire — yes, trillion-dollar magnate.

Such corporate power is akin to governmental power. This allows restrictions on free speech to be enforced by powerful private entities — powers clearly denied the government by the First Amendment.

...While Facebook’s financial deep dive appears primarily driven by alleged abuses of customer data privacy, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was caught on open mic discussing helping German Chancellor crackdown on “racist” hate speech, which it could lawfully do in America if Leftist “hate speech” censors prevail in government circles, if the Supremes do not intervene. The apparent bias in clandestinely censoring right-of-center postings on social media outlets is another red flag. The practice, known as “shadow banning” of disfavored posts, allows users to communicate with each other individually, but clandestinely removes their postings from search engine access. Twitter has expelled conservative posters with whom founder Jack Dorsey disagrees. Perhaps even worse, social media gatekeepers allowed more than one thousand jihadist videos to be posted at their websites.

...Today’s issue megatrends could doom, rather than save, Western culture, once and for all.

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