The deluge of outrage that followed this week’s Helsinki summit was as predictable as it was impotent, but one philippic stood out. New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow wrote President Trump “is right now, before our eyes and those of the world, committing an unbelievable and unforgivable crime against this country.”
The crime? “It is his failure to defend.”
“Simply put,” Blow sniffed, “Trump is a traitor and may well be treasonous.”
What Blow lacks in talent—and there is a considerable deficit there—he compensates for in victimhood as an affirmative action trifecta: black, gay, and progressive. Blow does not need to impress, he simply needs to exist and recycle a series of vogue nouns and adjectives: racist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, and so on.
Blow has made a career of pouring out his spleen against the country he now claims Trump has failed “to defend.” It therefore would be more accurate to say that Trump has failed to defend what Blow believes America ought to be, rather than what America is, which is precisely what Blow hates.
The president showed that he is willing to take a political risk in the pursuit of peace, rather than risk peace for the sake of politics. This can only benefit our country. What is good for our country, however, is bad for Blow and his paymasters, who have betrayed the cause and the trust of the United States to a foreign entity much closer to home than Moscow. One that is responsible for more American death and suffering: Mexico.
In 2009, faced with mounting debt, revenue in freefall, and a dwindling readership, the New York Times Co. welcomed a small loan of $250 million from Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim. A regular atop the Forbes list of billionaires, Slim went on to become the largest individual shareholder of the Times in 2015.
Slim’s spokesman and son-in-law said that his decision was “100% a financial investment,” and that Slim did not intend to get involved in the editorial process. But is that likely? Men like Slim do not make their fortunes by taking a back seat and they are certainly more inclined to get involved when their money is keeping the lights on.
In September 2014, three months before his acquisition of Times shares, Slim hosted Mark Zuckerberg as the keynote speaker for a charity event in Mexico. “There’s something broken that needs to be fixed,” Zuckerberg said. “We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants. And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.”
We have established that America is not a nation of immigrants. But men like Zuckerberg and Slim certainly want it to become that, and they have the wealth to throw behind the effort. With this in mind, it’s worth noting that following Slim’s purchase, immigration rhetoric from the Times changed noticeably.
We might consider an April 2015 Times editorial, “Senator Sessions, Straight Up,” as a point of departure. “America’s long success as an immigration nation is hard to argue against,” screeched the editors in a scathing attack on then Senator Jeff Sessions for his stance against mass immigration. Sessions responded in his own column, firing back that the editors “think it is ridiculous to believe that admitting tens of millions of immigrants has any effect on schools, hospitals and other community resources.” The attack on Sessions was noted by spectators at the time as a shift from meek liberal prattlings about a Utopian world without borders, and instead diverged into a vicious, unhinged diatribe against borders, immigration law, and, frankly, white Americans.
It all seemed to begin just three months after Slim’s acquisition of Times shares, too. Certainly, the money of Mexico’s richest man coursing through the veins of The Gray Lady had nothing to do with this.
It is true that Slim has since sold some part of his stock with the Times, but it is also true that his time as largest individual shareholder saw the publication take a plunge over the deep-end of the open borders argument. So, let’s say Slim did use his investment to effect a pro-open borders, anti-American editorial policy. What might Slim have to gain from mass immigration from Mexico to the United States? A look at Slim’s other ventures may suggest some insights.
Following Mexico’s privatization binge under ex-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Slim acquired Telmex, a Mexican national telecommunications company, with a price tag of $400 million. According to Mexican writer Diego Enrique Osorno in his biography of Slim, Telmex was worth over $12 billion at the time of the transaction. This and other peculiarities surrounding the Slim-Salinas relationship have led many to believe that Slim is a frontman for the Mexican ex-president, without whom Slim could not have amassed his vast fortune so easily. Indeed, Steve Sailer has noted that “Slim’s telephone monopoly was written into NAFTA, negotiated during Bush I, granting Slim a decade without foreign competition.”
Four years after the establishment of NAFTA, Slim’s Telmex launched “Mexico En Linea,” a program that allows Mexicans living in the United States to purchase phone lines for family and friends back home, starting then at $120 per line, with a monthly subscription fee of $45 (equivalent to $62 in 2018). By 2006, Slim’s Telmex owned 84 percent of landlines, 78 percent of mobile services and 70 percent of the broadband internet market. When Slim bought up shares of the Times in 2015, his other telecommunications venture, América Móvil, controlled 70 percent of the mobile phones in Mexico and 80 percent of the country’s landlines at the time.
Slim’s near monopoly comes with a high price for Mexicans, and not just in the form of extortion level rates. Slim stamped out competitors to the point that he managed to suppress the overall economic growth of Mexico, resulting in “not enough jobs to keep workers from migrating to the United States and investment . . . being driven to countries like Brazil and China.” But Slim’s monopoly comes with a high price for Americans, too.
Larry Luxner reports that by 2002, Telmex USA received one million applications from Mexicans, of which 70 percent were approved, amounting to approximately $85 million in revenue for Telmex. But Slim’s profits don’t stop there, not if we consider all the cash illegal aliens send back to Mexico from the United States.
In 2016 alone, non-citizens from Latin American residing in the United States—legally and illegally—sent $69 billion back to their countries of origin. Around 40 percent of all that money sent out of the United States by non-citizens ends up in Mexico. Considering that, as Ann Coulter has pointed out, Slim’s various businesses account for 40 percent of all publicly traded companies on Mexico’s main stock market index, there’s a very good chance that the money sent back to Mexico ends up in Slim’s pockets—”i.e., to buy Carlos Slim’s telephone service, shop at Carlos Slim’s department stores, and eat in Carlos Slim’s restaurants.”
True to form, Slim found a way to profit from the push for illegal immigration to the United States that he fomented in Mexico.
All this considered, is it a stretch to think that Slim may have, from his position as a big shareholder for the Times, nudged the publication in a way that is good for his business? We know that in 2007, Slim denounced the American border fence, and by extension our immigration laws, as “illegal and absurd,” a criticism he has repeated for Trump. Yet never before had the Times featured such overt calls for Reconquista against America until Slim stepped into the picture.
After Slim’s rise to largest individual shareholder, we see David Brooks utterly dismiss any and all concerns over mass immigration as—you guessed it—racist. “Of course,” said Brooks from his perch at the Times, “[Americans] react with defensive animosity to the immigrants who out-hustle and out-build them. You’d react negatively, too, if confronted with people who are better versions of what you wish you were yourself.” Never mind the depressed wages, Malthusian conditions, the problem of non-citizen voting, violent crime, imported narcoculture (complete with human sacrifice), and did I mention the violent crime? At any rate, you’re a racist for even entertaining the notion that these are valid concerns, so says Brooks.
Following Brooks, Enrique Krauze, a Mexican national, argued in a 2017 column that “the best and most just reparation would be American immigration reform that could open the road to citizenship for the descendants of those Mexicans who suffered the unjust loss of half their territory.”
“For us Mexicans,” says Krauze, “this is the chance for a kind of reconquest. Surely not the physical reconquest of the territories that once were ours.” Surely, not. Krauze does not mean to say that Mexicans are entitled to a Reconquista of this “stolen land.” Rather, Krauze merely believes that Mexicans should be allowed into our midst, in unlimited numbers, and should be encouraged to import their culture and certainly not be bothered to assimilate. Carlos Slim undoubtedly will provide the lines of communication for this euphemized invasion.
Bret Stephens, however, has been the most forthcoming. In “Only Mass Deportation Can Save America,” Stephens describes those who should be deported as white middle class Americans, rather than illegal aliens:
Bottom line: So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future. In other words, just the kind of people we used to be—when “we” had just come off the boat.
Again, Stephens fired off another salvo in 2018 against whites and more broadly, any American citizen who might disagree with his contention in “Our Real Immigration Problem.” Put simply, Stephens believes that we need to shove foreigners into every square foot of this country, because “immigrants—legal or otherwise—make better citizens than native-born Americans,” and concludes: “I plead guilty to wanting more-open borders.” It should be noted that Stephens has yet to respond to the dressing-down Michael Anton served him.
Blow, Stephens, and the editors of the Times hate this country and its people. They will deny this, but they cannot demonize the historic demographic of America as deserving of either extinction or deportation, and then claim that they do not hate them. Likewise, the people at the Times do not love America, they love what they believe America ought to be. It is this hatred that has them wittingly or unwittingly working against America to the benefit of a foreign entity. The policy and rhetoric being drummed out steadily from publications like the Times is fundamentally anti-American and explicitly in favor of foreigners over Americans.
We don’t have to look hard to find turncoats, nor do I and a growing number of Americans believe that our greatest enemy lives in the Kremlin, or the White House for that matter. A far greater threat to our way of life can be found on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. I wager that the reason Americans are being implored to turn their eyes toward Russia, is because the traitors in our midst know that the day they are seen for what they are—adversaries—the peasants with pitchforks will come for them.
Photo credit: Kimberly White/Getty Images for New York Times