French:
It’s enough to make your head spin. Tashfeen Malik — the Pakistani immigrant jihadist who helped carry out the deadliest terror attack on American soil since 9/11 — passed three background checks without a single American official discovering that she openly supported “violent jihad” on social media. Moreover, this was no oversight. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security has an actual “secret policy” that prohibits immigration officials “from reviewing the social-media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas.”
This is
sheer insanity. In an era when jihadists are extraordinarily active on social
media and often count on supporters’ sharing and retweeting jihadist messages
to help spread Islamist propaganda, our government decided it would create a
“civil liberties backlash” if it were known that America actually reviewed the
public social-media posts of immigrants and visitors.
Immigrants
don’t have a civil-liberties interest in their public postings. No one does.
Any decent employer looks at potential employees’ public social-media pages
before making a hiring decision. Any competent law-enforcement officer knows to
comb through social media when investigating crimes. And any semi-sentient
immigration official should know that social media can be key to evaluating
visa applicants, including by helping determine whether they’ve lied on their
application or whether there is evidence that they intend harm when they come
to the United States.
While
it’s important to condemn the idiocy of our governing elite, it’s vital to
understand why they are so foolish. After all, the senior leadership of this
country includes many of our best-credentialed and most-experienced civil
servants, yet not only do they keep failing, they’re failing at an
ever-increasing rate. Why is this? I can think of three related reasons.
First,
mankind has always been plagued by yes-men and craven power-seekers, and the
American political system is no exception. No human system is immune from the
tendency for subordinates to seek advancement by affirming their superiors, regardless
of the facts. In our political culture, it’s common for a leader’s inner circle
to be dominated by people who think you’re brilliant, that your contributions
are indispensable. Even intense public criticism can be disregarded if it comes
from the wrong kind of people. If you’re a liberal politician or bureaucrat, an
attack from the Right is a badge of honor, not cause for self-reflection.
Second,
we’ve magnified the natural problem of craven political and bureaucratic
conformity by insulating our civil servants from accountability for failure. In
the American bureaucracy, each new position functions as a floor for your
career — there is nowhere to go but up. Firing a civil servant is such a
complex and difficult process that there are entire federal bureaucracies where
employees are more likely to die than be fired. Thus, not even reality can
function as a check on bureaucratic incompetence. It goes unpunished, while
blind loyalty to the system is rewarded. And thus bureaucrats just keep failing
up.
Third,
to the extent anyone is truly held accountable in the modern bureaucracy, it is
only to the monstrous lies of political correctness. Thus you see an actual fear
of a “civil liberties backlash” and “bad public relations” for examining
whether an immigrant might hate the country he’s seeking to enter. But a
backlash from whom? The hashtagging readers of HuffPo? The squeaking
editorialists of the New York Times? Is there a significant American
constituency outside the readership of Salon or the faculty lounge at Brown
(but I’m being redundant) that supports admitting openly anti-American Muslim
radicals into the United States?
One of
the great lies of political correctness is that no policy is truly “fair” if it
has a “disparate impact” on any “marginalized” identity group. Scrutinizing
social media for anti-American sentiment would expose the extent to which
millions in the Muslim world are captured by the most bizarre anti-American
conspiracy theories, the extent to which disturbing numbers idolize the most
violent terrorists, and the shocking amount of celebration of American and
Israeli deaths. Let them hate us overseas. Only a nation intent on committing
intellectual, spiritual, and cultural suicide would allow immigrants in its
borders who despise the very nation they seek to inhabit.
No
government can change human nature, but we can stop rewarding its worst
impulses. Our present system rewards conformity — a dubious enough trait — and
magnifies that fundamental flaw by demanding that our civil servants believe a
series of lies about the world and — especially — our most vicious enemies. Our
leaders are worse than foolish. They’re cowards. And Americans are paying the
price for their failures.
