The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan

> The Democrats were happy to keep importing voters

I think it's important not to discount the difficulty of securing the border because of the size of it. And as you mention, American companies (like Smithfield) are happy to create incentives for border hopping because they can use the threat of calling INS to keep wages low and prevent unions from forming.

The problem with the idea of widespread voting fraud is the data doesn't support it, at all. Bush's DOJ came up with an estimate of %0.00000132 of fraudulent votes in federal elections, for instance. Note that by then it was explicitly illegal for aliens to vote in federal elections.

> We take for granted just how much Christianity has shaped our secular culture and morality.

I'd argue that across peoples and times you see more variation in theological doctrine than moral teachings in the various religions. Hinduism, for instance, is practiced by different people differently and encompasses polytheistic, monotheistic, and even atheistic traditions. But morality remains a feature, specifically the concept of karma. Sweden is by some counts 85% atheist, but I'm not aware of anyone calling it a den of iniquity. Certainly my Muslim-American friends are moral.

In other words, people tend to be recognizably moral regardless of their very divergent beliefs about other things. That points to a general human capacity for morality, rather than one specific to any one religion (that the others, even those predating it, were presumably lucky enough to develop independently).

Certainly moral codes differ. But they also differ within the same religion across time -- for instance, the modern Christian view of divorce vs. the ancient one.

Christian orthodoxy varies. Ancestor worship is common in African Christian sects. Protestant and Orthodox churches abhor the Roman Catholic practice of praying to statues. Unitarians discount the trinity. Sure, there's a common thread of Christian morals there, but I'd argue that it's the same thread you find everywhere, modulo views on homosexuality and a couple of other things.

I don't mean to be cruel but I find the assertion that America gets its morals from Christianity to be somewhat narrow in that it presupposes that Christians got theirs from on high, and ignores the similar moral teachings you find throughout the world and throughout history.

It also runs contrary to the founders' explicit intentions for the role of religion in government, and I would argue that it does a large disservice to your fellow Americans who aren't Christian.

Wow... that's an easy one, but since you asked.

Black US unemployment went from 15% (peaking at 16% a year later) in 2008 back down to 9.1% in 2016 (close to the 2007 pre-recession low).

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20111005.htm

I encourage your fact based discovery of the economic condition of this country and it's citizens.

Alternatively, we can all live in total fear of ISIS taking over the country.

http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-isis-will-take-over-us-...

Just want to throw this out there for folks who don't realize the origins of this argument: Google "Judith Jarvis Thomson violinist critique"

Based on what I know about folk music - at one time I listened to a bunch of it and learned about its traditions, but I'm hardly an expert - that's not true.

By that tradition, folk songs are for everyone to play and sing, not only for a professional to perform for you. There's a communal, shared, DIY philosophy behind it; it's art by and for regular people (folk art), to be shared; it's not about profit, and intellectual property is almost an opposed concept. To a degree, it's like free/libre software and makers.

IIRC, folk music legend Woody Guthrie kept his songs simple so that anyone could play them. And a more recent folk singer printed (maybe still prints) on all her recordings, where the copyright info usually appears, Unauthorized reproduction, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing.

There's nothing new about the current 'disconnect' between American elite and others; people pull out the same rhetoric every few years, it seems. And there is no long-term adherence of others to populism (which is being expressed by you as nationalism).

It's not a social truth, despite attempts to raise above reproach its horrible behavior and worse consequences, it's just an old political technique used by some political leaders for their own purposes, as Bob Dylan pointed out, a brushfire they set which now has turn into a raging, out of control forest fire. We can do something about it.

> These are just facts of nature

We can say murder and rape are facts of nature; is it 'elitist' to outlaw them? I don't feel they are 'facts' of my nature, in that they somehow inevitable, and neither is racism.

There are far better angels of our nature, and America was founded on them. 'All men are created equal' and liberty for those men (and women), not just people you happen to like. That has resonated with people's natures for centuries now; I think we can say it's not longer an 'experiment', as Lincoln called it, and it's attracted immigrants from every culture and inspired many more around the world. A lot of those populist 'white' people, as they call themselves, used to hate each other as Irish and Italians and Germans and Poles, Catholics and Protestants and Jews. It turned out those divisions weren't in their natures after all.