No, I Don't Want to Kill Jesus With a Boat. I Just Want to Enforce Immigration Laws.

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I have a hair-trigger temper and a dark sense of humor. People who know me well know I have a tendency, when someone is really annoying me, to fire back with something cutting, just to shut them up.

There are moments when this can produce amusing results. There are times when I should probably just keep my mouth shut.

This was probably one of the latter times. (Although the histrionics I got in reply were actually pretty funny.)

The internet is forever, as they say, so I am putting an explanation out there for future reference. And for any of you who wind up hearing I said something horrible, I’d like you to hear from me what actually happened.

So. Context.

Calvin Robinson, a British cleric with the Old Catholic Church, is a conservative commentator from the UK who has become pretty popular in recent years. He recently announced that he is leaving England because “London is no longer safe.” He has been outspoken about the need to “remove Islam from Britain.”

He commented a few days ago about a video showing a Spanish coast guard boat trying to stop a speedboat with African migrants on it from reaching the shore. The African boat refused to comply with lawful orders to stop, and was trying to outrun the Spanish boat, when the African boat crossed paths with the Spanish boat and caused a collision.

Everyone on board the boat survived, were rescued, and were taken into custody. This is important, because the framing of my absurd hypothetical was based on the understanding that this was a non-lethal intervention.

Here’s a video of the incident. Since YouTube has age-restricted the original, it won’t let me embed, so here’s the source, and here’s a local copy of the same video:

Now, here’s what Robinson said about the incident:

Picking up on this, some guy who came up in my Twitter timeline (with a Hamas flag in his bio, natch) said that Robinson’s comments were “mortally sinful.” I found this utterly idiotic, so I reacted accordingly. Someone quoted Matthew 25 to me in response, as if to say, “Jesus supported illegal immigration and you should, too.”

I fired back, almost without thinking, “I would run Jesus’s boat over if he were migrating illegally too. No hesitation.”

Here’s the exchange in context:

You may have noticed this reply has 3.6 million views. And now, pretty much all of them hate my guts. Most of them have Hamas or trans flags in their bios, so definitely not my demographic, but still.

Infamy is…interesting.

In any case, I knew that what I’d said was transparently ridiculous. I thought it was so absurd it was actually funny. But I also knew it would piss people off.

I just underestimated how much.

Ironically, many folks out there have wished me dead or damned for saying what I did.

Unlike my comment, however, they actually mean it.

My goal was to use shock value to make an attention-grabbing rhetorical point: immigration laws are important enough that nobody should be above having them enforced.

It was not, in any way, supposed to be a stated desire to kill Jesus.

Look, I’ve been plenty angry at God over the past few years since losing my faith. I’ve expressed that in God’s direction in no uncertain terms (and per usual, get nothing but total stony silence in return).

But I have never, for one moment, thought, “You know, it was a good thing that Jesus was brutally murdered and I’d like to find some way to inflict that on him myself.”

Again: everyone on the boat I was referencing was rescued. I was merely thinking of the collision as a law enforcement action to disable a vehicle and apprehend suspects. Cops ram cars or throw down spike strips all the time. The intent is not to kill, but to apprehend. Which is why I said I’d run over Jesus’s boat, not Jesus himself.

A distinction too subtle for most, it seems. Ergo, a communication failure on my part.

In any case, my hypothetical Jesus is one that could never exist. Jesus’s second coming isn’t going to happen via migrant boat. And even if Jesus did come back incognito, rather than like lightning from the East (Mt. 24:27), he would never be on such a boat trying to illegally cross a border.

After all, it was Jesus who said, “render undo Caesar what is Caesar’s” and told Pilate he only had the authority to condemn him because it was given to him by God. He also purportedly authored the book of Romans by means of Divine Inspiration, in which believers are admonished to obey the law:

13 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.

² Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.

³ For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval;

⁴ for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority^[a] does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.

⁵ Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience.

⁶ For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, busy with this very thing.

⁷ Pay to all what is due them—taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.

What I was attacking was not Jesus, but this imagined caricature of Jesus dreamed up by Leftist ideologues who either distort their Christian faith for political purposes, or don’t even believe in Christianity but try to twist it into a weapon they can use to goad believers into feeling like they should support their social justice goals.

No version of Jesus was harmed (even in my imagination) because of my stupid tweet.

The nations of the West are, however, being actually harmed by unchecked immigration. In addition to the sheer cost of giving away public resources, increasing policing, dealing with housing and healthcare issues, and so on, in many cases illegals are being fast-tracked to citizenship, then bribed by taxpayer-funded benefits to vote for the very people trying to usher them in.

Here’s Nancy Pelosi last week supporting the idea of giving money to immigrants to buy homes, while working to fast-track their citizenship:

In many places — especially in Europe — locals are being overrun by migrant populations that do not respect the native culture or laws or make any real attempt to assimilate. Many Europeans no longer feel safe in their home countries. Still more are persecuted and imprisoned for making angry comments about the situation on social media, with people going to jail for years for things they said in Facebook posts. Or for words said at public protests. Speech that is still protected in America, but who knows for how long?

We are fools to believe that the West can continue to absorb migrants from the third world at the current pace without creating huge sources of societal conflict. This is even more true when they come from countries where the people hate us, or utterly fail to share any of our values.

The following video is a real eye opener. It shows British actor and television presenter Ross Kemp interviewing South African men about the country’s “rape epidemic.” They have no apparent concept whatsoever about why rape is truly evil or how it hurts their victims. Do we even know what kind of viewpoints we’re importing?

Not all cultures are equal. Not all cultures respect human dignity, or treat women or children like people, or animals with decency.

And we are reaping the consequences of uncritically importing them into the West.

Islamists targeted Christians at a festival in Solingen, Germany last Friday in a knife attack that killed three people and wounded eight.

In February, an Afghani immigrant who was given asylum in the UK despite a record of sexual assault and exposure, threw a strong alkali into the face of a woman who used to be in a relationship with him. Both she and her children were injured, and she may never regain the use of her eye. The perpetrator also tried to run them over with his car as he fled the scene. (His body was later found in the Thames, where he is believed to have drowned.)

In the UK, anti-immigrant riots have been ongoing after a 17 year old British-born son of Rwandan parents committed a knife attack on a summer vacation class of small children, killing three young girls under the age of 10, and injuring 10 others.

In Houston, a 12-year-old girl named Jocelyn Nungary was raped for two hours by two illegal Venezuelan immigrants before being strangled to death. Her body was discovered in a nearby creek.

In New York, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador raped a 13-year-old girl in Central Park, and even filmed the attack.

In Baltimore, Rachel Morin was assaulted, raped, and murdered by illegal immigrant Victor Martinez Hernandez, from El Salvador, where he had previously murdered another young woman. He was also involved in an attack on a 9 year old girl in a home invasion in Los Angeles.

In Michigan, the American-born Muslim cleric who is believed to have inspired the London Bridge attack in 2021 has called for American Muslims to wage jihad against the “infidel West.”

These are the more devastating consequences. But we have plenty of other reasons for concern:

In Iraq, they are trying to drop the legal age of marriage of girls from 15 to 9.

In Pakistan, a father recently shot and killed his seven-day-old daughter because he wanted his first-born to be a boy. “In some parts of Pakistan,” says the article in The Guardian, “tribal customs mean that baby girls can be considered an insult to manhood.”

On Quora, a Muslim man living in the West says he can’t control his lust because women don’t have their hair covered.

On Joe Rogan, Gavin McInnes reveals he just found out that a majority of Pakistanis and nearly half the Arab world are inbred, with the associated effects of consanguinity, and Rogan fact checks it on the air, and is shocked to find that it’s true:

In areas with large populations of Muslims, signs are beginning to pop up warning people not to walk their dogs. Here’s one in London:

Vancouver:

These are just a few examples. It seems we have new ones almost every day.

Even legal immigration is happening at levels that threaten to completely displace native populations. I was shocked when I returned to Northern Virginia after 8 years away, and found myself completely surrounded by foreigners everywhere I went. Over a very short time, in some locations, people born and raised in America have been almost completely replaced by outsiders.

As someone who has traveled extensively, loves discovering and exploring other cultures, is high in openness to experience, and who married the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and dislikes living in places that lack ethnic diversity, I’ve always considered myself a xenophile. But there comes a point where even I have to ask the question: how a nation can even be considered a melting pot when you’re jamming so many ingredients in that don’t even begin to soften and mix?

It’s surreal to drive through the rustic colonial downtown of a place like Leesburg, Virginia, and see people who look like they just arrived from the streets of Kabul.

They aren’t Americanizing. They’re just relocating.

How in the world are all these different cultures and languages and traditions and beliefs supposed to mesh? Out here in the Bible Belt, I’ve seen three Hindu temples in the area we just moved to, but only one Catholic parish. I don’t have a problem with people from India, or even with their completely natural decision to continue to engage in their traditional religious practices. Nevertheless, it’s strange to see a once predominately Christian nation experience a massive rise in something like overt paganism — not through an organic cultural shift, but through a large-scale importing of a completely foreign culture. How does that work in the long term? What does it do to national identity and character? Even more saliently, what does it do on the local level?

America has always been a land of immigrants, but they were people who came because they believed that America offered them something more than where they came from. They held onto their traditions, but they became Americans. My dad’s mother was the daughter of Irish immigrants. His father was the son of Slovak immigrants, and didn’t even grow up speaking English. My wife’s late parents both came from China. All of them adopted the American way of life.

My “Jesus on the migrant boat” hypothetical may have been in poor taste, but the point stands: Our failure to control immigration in a way that is actually favorable to our nations is positively suicidal. Jesus doesn’t want that, and I’d oppose him if he did.

Like Calvin Robinson, I celebrate active, aggressive enforcement of the law, and I flatly reject the distortion of scriptural admonitions to “welcome the stranger” into an open borders policy.

If that makes you want me dead or damned, so be it.