As we’ve long since learned, the Left always tells us what they fear most, by reacting to political developments or policy proposals like scalded vipers, hissing and spitting as they writhe around in agonized hysteria. Not for nothing is the word “catastrophic” one of their favorite descriptive adjectives, since it pretty much describes just about anything they don’t agree with and thus keeps them forever on the edge.

To rational people, their collection of tics, neuroses, and phobias may seem at first to lack a certain consistency, other than a tendency to go from zero to obscenities on Twitter in no time flat. They can easily be against gay marriage (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, et al.) before they were for it; against illegal immigration (Bill Clinton) before they were for it; and for the Russians (the entire Democratic Party) before they were against them.

Do they contradict themselves? Very well, then, they contradict themselves—after all, they contain multitudes. The only song they really know is Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

Their latest conniption fit has come over two apparently unrelated things. The first, of course, is guns and by extension the right to one’s own personal self-defense in a dangerous and (thanks to the second thing, about which more in a bit) rapidly destabilizing world. The American frontier of the late 18th century was similarly fraught, as the young country began both to deal with the mature, and often hostile nation-states of old Europe, and to push west, across 2,000 and more miles of unknown territory; the success of the American experiment was far from certain. Accordingly, the Framers bequeathed us the Bill of Rights, which although numbered as amendments are as much a part of the Constitution as the main document.

The Left—which is by turns both malevolent and cowardly, and therefore both tantalized by and fearful of firearms—has never made its hostility toward the Second Amendment a secret, but for decades it was able to keep it under wraps during the half-century or more between the effective closing of the borders to immigration in 1921 and the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as the Hart-Celler Act but today chiefly remembered as Ted Kennedy’s lasting gift to the American people.

That period saw the rise of urban ethnic gangsters (mostly Irish, Italians, and Jews, immigrants or children of immigrants, and thus “foreign” to largely Protestant America) and of the indigenous Midwestern bank robbers being chased around the prairies by the FBI, both groups long since tamed and romanticized. When, in 1939, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Miller that a certain kind of sawed-off shotgun could be banned, and cited the Second Amendment’s subordinate “militia” clause as its justification, few kicked about it, because by then gangland had been largely cornered and the country was at peace.

The Miller decision was effectively overturned in 2008 by the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which finally got around to adjudicating and establishing the individual right aspect of the amendment. Heller, not Miller, was correct, especially in light of the fact that sawed-off shotguns with barrels under 18-20 inches were, in fact, military weapons and thus applicable to militia use. Further, the law under which Miller was decided was the National Firearms Act, which was itself a direct reaction to the then-shocking 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Al Capone’s Chicago. Today, that body count—six gangsters and an unlucky bystander—seems quaint.

In other words, after having tamed its restive criminal element, “gun control” was a luxury that America could afford. And this was the world in which retired Justice John Paul Stevens, whose recent call to repeal the Second Amendment was greeted with huzzahs on the Left, grew up in. But that world is gone.

Which brings us to the cause of their second recent nervous breakdown: the Trump Administration’s decision to reinstate a question about citizenship on the 2020 census form. The movement against it is being led by former attorney general Eric Holder, the knave who was held in contempt of Congress over the Obama administration’s “Fast and Furious” gun-running program to Mexico, and is an unrepentant radical.

Ostensibly, Holder’s complaint is that by including the question in the constitutionally mandated census, some folks might be frightened off, the response rate might be lowered, and thus the count—which is used in part for apportionment of a state’s representatives in Congress—would be inaccurate.

“The addition of a citizenship question to the census questionnaire is a direct attack on our representative democracy,” said Holder, announcing a lawsuit. Woulda, coulda, whatever.

On the contrary, this question goes directly to the substance of our representative democracy by acknowledging the difference between citizens and non-citizens, a crucial distinction the Left is trying mightily to erase—and not just because the Democrats stand to benefit from the addition of millions of new dependent and culturally hostile voters.

No, it goes far deeper than that.

To remove citizenship from the equation is to abandon the notion of national borders, and thus the idea of America as a sovereign nation-state. Naturally, the Left is trying to accomplish this under one of its favorite false flags, “compassion,” sprinkled liberally with historical revisionism and social-justice animus. After all, who can be against “immigrants,” sainted ancestors to us all, except a bunch of heartless bigots who came by their birthright through force and violence?

Never mind that most of our immigrant forebears arrived here legally, were required to be sponsored or to quickly find employment, were shown not to be carrying infectious diseases, and judged unlikely to prove either an economic burden or a threat to public safety. The laws directed at gangland in the 1920s and ’30s expressly targeted foreign-born criminals such as Lucky Luciano (born Salvatore Lucania), who was deported to his native Italy, where he died. Also deported was New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, who had been born in French Tunisia to Sicilian parents, and was exiled to Guatemala in 1961—but re-entered the country illegally a few months later and died in Louisiana in 1993.

In other words, there are immigrants—folks who want to put aside the ways of the old country and become traditional Americans—and then there are “immigrants,” who view the United States as ripe for exploitation, criminal plundering, or Islamic colonization. And far too many of the current “immigrants” directly threat the lives, property, and livelihoods of legitimate American citizens. When MS-13 runs rampant on Long Island, we’re not in Dust Bowl Kansas anymore.

What the Left is really afraid of is that the census might be used to identify individuals or concentrations of illegals and thus alert the authorities to their locations. This is why the rogue state of California has declared itself a “sanctuary” (note the corruption of the Christian term) and is vigorously opposing the exercise of the federal government’s lawful authority within its state lines. Indeed, Xavier Becerra, the Golden State’s attorney general, has already filed suit against the move, even though California has no legal control over either immigration or the census.

So now you see what the Left is, at root, afraid of. Not simply guns or crackdowns on illegal immigration, but of something far more fundamental. They fear, and therefore hate, the Constitution of the United States.

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