I recently returned from a Galapagos cruise, and the demographics of the other passengers got me to thinking about who can afford to travel these days and how that might reflect on the current state of political affairs worldwide. The other passengers on the M/Y Grace weren’t what I expected: three families, one of four from Australia, one of four from Miami, and one of five from Norway were aboard, plus a daughter/father team from New Mexico and Texas. Amazingly, two of the families (the Aussies and the Norwegians) had been traveling for months already, making their way through some of the most exotic (and expensive) itineraries on earth, from Antarctica to Iguazu Falls, confirming the fact that this wasn’t just an average group of people, and their professions confirmed it: both of the Norwegians were lawyers and the Aussie was a well-known architect. Rounding out the group was a plastic surgeon and a “silver spoon” real estate tycoon. That this level of travel has always been affordable for the rich I have no doubt, but what is different today is that, by and large, even when I travel in more modest circumstances, I don’t see as many Americans, which seems strange to me, given the fact that we are still supposed to be the richest country on earth.

My countrymen, even those with plenty of cash, don’t travel as extensively as most, and tend to keep to a small set of preferred destinations, while Europeans (especially Germans) and Australians seem to have plenty of leisure time and money to cavort their way around the world to the most obscure corners…and do so with gusto. Some of this may be due to the lingering effects of the Protestant work ethic in the USA, which serves to temper an enthusiasm for travel with the notion that work is the greater good, while some of it may be due to the fact that (other than government workers) most Americans barely get 2-3 weeks of annual leave, and their peers in other developed countries get twice that.

But I don’t think that’s the whole answer. I had a couple of conversations with some Australian elites (one aboard the “Grace”) recently that shed some light on it. They were complaining about the high wages in Oz, where the kids bussing tables in Sydney are making over $17US an hour. Yet despite the carping I heard about the “unsustainability” of their homegrown labor earnings (meaning it makes Australia uncompetitive on the world stage based on wage arbitrage), I’d imagine those kids are able to enjoy nice vacations abroad as a result. And the fact that they pay a living wage to the working classes has other salutary benefits. I would wager, for example, that Australia’s inner cities are quite a bit more livable than the more diverse communities I’ve seen in the USA and elsewhere. Would you rather be stuck in the wrong part of Adelaide, Rio, or Miami? I’ll take the Aussie city, mate, and the statistics prove I’m right.

Nor am I ever very sympathetic to arguments deploring the high wages of blue collar workers, because the arguments for low wages always seem to come from the same type of people: those who make in the top 1% of all salaries.  Yet, I never hear any talk about the “unsustainability” of the obscene and bloated salaries of the Bankster or lawyer classes, let alone the engorged pay plans of corporate CEO’s.

So I’m pretty sure that the reason I see lots of young Aussie backpackers all over the world is that they have plenty of disposable income…income that an American blue collar worker cannot hope to match. Thus, most of the US kids I see out and about are on vacation using Mom and Dad’s money, not earnings they saved for themselves because there is a healthy and living wage paid here. Au contraire, the median wages of non-governmental labor in the USA have stagnated for over 40 years now.  That is a full generation of our fellow countrymen who’ve had to do more with less, and it’s an injustice, given the growth in income of the top 1%.  This was a deliberate policy of our government that most developed countries didn’t follow.

Thus, the reason the German and Australian middle classes remain robust is because those countries have not followed the policies of the United States and imported vast quantities of subcultural gnomes who are taking jobs away from the native-born, nor have they engaged in ignorant free trade ideology to the extent that we have. There is no German equivalent to NAFTA, let alone the disastrous TPP that Hillary Clinton wanted to saddle us with, and the Australians turn away the boatloads of Africans seeking economic asylum there. Though Germany has famously opened the floodgates to the rapefugees that now metastasize in its largest metropolises, the influx hasn’t significantly impacted job prospects for German workers precisely because the invaders don’t have the job skills required to work in German industries (or in any industry, for that matter). Thus, they are no threat to the job security of the average BMW worker, who can and does take his 30+ vacation days of annual leave and spend them on leisure travel (never mind for the moment the huge cultural cost that the Muzzie miscreants impose on the host nation).

However, let us presume for the moment that Australia were to open the floodgates and accept a huge influx of foreigners in the same way that Germany did. In what way would they improve on the culture that they inherit? After all, Australia is now a low-crime, homogenous, high wage country with a strong commitment to democratic values and Christian ideals. It’s cities are gleaming monuments to the industry of its people, the environment is relatively pristine, and there is a strong emphasis on getting along with your neighbors.

The question any country should ask, and the question Australia should ask, when pondering an invitation to others to immigrate, is the question that Frau Merkel should have asked before she opened up Europe’s most important country to a million goatherds: What do the immigrants add? How do they improve the culture? In what way are things better on the whole should they be allowed to settle? What skills do they possess that cannot be homegrown? If that question is posed in an honest way by Australians towards the boat people they have so far wisely turned away, what would the answer be?

Had the question been asked of the so-called “Syrian refugees” coming to Germany, who have raped and pillaged their gracious hosts, the answer would have been that they do NOT improve the culture, that they have no skills beyond bomb making, that the religion they hold dear is anathema to the Western world, and that they have no intention of assimilating into their new home country. So, unless as the host you in fact HATE YOUR OWN CULTURE, why would you take such a poison pill?

The answer is obvious. When the Brussels Buffoons cite the glories of multiculturalism, what they’re really saying is that the West is evil and needs to change, and that the best way to do that is to import millions of agents of change from Africa and the Middle East, who will bring to Old Europe new values, customs, and mores superior to its own old, worn out decadence. The West, IOW, is committing suicide, and it is not because of Islam, it is because it has abandoned its own religion, family, and soil to embrace the alien, and has bought into the idea that all cultures are equal, except perhaps for Western Civilization, particularly that virulent strain carried by Evil White Men, which is something to be stomped out and eradicated wherever it may be found…

Nor is the death wish a purely European phenomenon. A good case can be made that the idea manifested itself first in the USA, which is the only country on earth which has made citizens out of tens of millions of law-breaking aliens even though (because?) they have lowered wages for the working men and women of this country and turned our greatest cities into detestable barrios where no one respectable dare tread at night.

And so, I would advise my erstwhile Australian friends: be careful what you wish for. Take a look at what free trade has wrought in America, and what unrestricted immigration has done to Europe. Is that really what you want?

When I hear multiculturalism is, ipso facto, a good thing, I ask: In what way is it good? For who? And why? Yet the only answer I ever get is, well, now we have a great Thai restaurant on the corner. Somehow, that seems a high price to pay for the destruction of my own culture, and while that may sound like hyperbole, the truth is, when you have displaced most of the native peoples with a polyglot population of nomads, you have destroyed the old civilization as completely as if you’d nuked it into a sea of glass, and the new one that takes its place will be suitable only for corporate consumer harvesting and tax collection, which is, indeed the end game…if we ever get there.

That last caveat is only because, deep within the breast of some people there lies a soul that is connected to the land of their fathers, and they are still proud of who they are and the country that they built, and will not give it up willingly to the Other. And it is those people who represent the real hope not just for America, but for the rest of Western Civilization, whose twilight is approaching so rapidly that sometimes it’s hard to be optimistic. Yet I am, not because the people are made of sterner stuff than their oppressors and usurpers, but because the new paradigms constructed by the ruling elites are not sustainable, and because the Magician can only play the same trick so many times before even the rubes catch on.

Well, 2016, with the advent of Brexit and Donald Trump, proved that the “rubes” have indeed finally awakened, and while the culture war will rage on, at least a line in the sand has finally been drawn, and the good fight is upon us. This war will not likely be fought with weapons (though that’s possible), but in the ideology taught our children in the schools, the accountability to which we hold our elected officials, the choices we make as consumers to support our local merchants, artists, and farmers, and the degree to which we uphold the institutions of our forefathers: marriage, family, and the church, because it is, in the end, in the local and particular that traditions are observed, values upheld, and cultures advanced, regardless of who currently occupies the White House or how much fiat you must render unto Caesar. And it is in those local schools, businesses, and homes that the battle will be won or lost, not in Washington, DC or NYC. Fight where you are, wherever you are, against the forces of progressivism, cultural fascism, and deceit. Start at the kitchen table, and carry it into the office, the PTA meetings, the church assembly, and the town hall. Speak up, man up, but never give up, because, I can assure you, the enemy will not. But we are armed with the truth, and that is a powerful tool, if only we have the courage to wield it. Do we?