This week we tackle the expanded reality of philosophical error in legislation, and you get a really deep peek into my analysis process that often yields libertarian-eske outcomes despite my being very much not a Libertarian.
Text Version:
“It’s been a long couple weeks of legislative activity, and, while most of the work went well, there were some hiccups. I also had the opportunity to discuss much with legislators, and a wide range of items at that. Some of the conversation was friendly, humorous, in fairly inconsequential. Much of it, however, was oriented towards the work at hand, and that means talking about politics according to the full range of political philosophy considerations, as well as argumentation towards achieving the understanding and votes necessary to achieve goals.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone, and neither should the methods of argumentation that I tend to employ – I’ve discussed these at length here for years. This last week something hit me right square in the face that I’ve been trying to skirt for all these years in developing strategy and apologia for my positions: there’s many more ways to get things wrong than I’d care to admit.
Much of the volume of words expended in this Counterspell effort have proceeded from a simple premise: people, generally, hold a foundational set of beliefs (occupying a position of “faith,” or “first principles”), spanning knowledge creation (epistemology) to ethics, from which they proceed to reason out answers to real problems that confront them in a manner that is of reasonable consistency. In other words, two people with the same foundational beliefs ought to be able to use like reason to achieve roughly the same answers to questions given the same circumstances.
However, I think I need to adjust the degree to which I assume consistency, good reason, and the ability to generalize principles to similar, but marginally different, situations. I’ll give you an example that will be at some length.
In discussing a matter in which the question of government treatment of citizens versus noncitizens was of paramount importance in achieving the correct solution to a problem, I ran into problems. With these several persons, with views ranging from vaguely libertarian to moderate conservative to populist, the errors mounted quickly and, strangely, from the same unexpected source.
These several legislators, though all being reasonably pro-Trump, patriotic, scoring fairly high among various vote-tallying orgs, and, importantly, each affirming the conceptual difference between an American citizen and a noncitizen, had extreme difficulty, in some cases prohibitive difficulty, coming around to the ethical conclusion that there is a circumstance wherein the government ought to treat these groups differently. What was the basis for this difficulty? The dreaded “D” word, “discrimination.”
For all the affirmed similarity in applicable first principles, and for all the demonstrated capacity for exercising reason with fidelity, and for the clear knowledge that there are times and places where “discrimination” is both good and necessary, it was nonetheless the presence of this dreaded “D” as a thought-stopping cliché that did in their capacity to reach a correct conclusion. More than just “correct,” and far more than a mere thought experiment, this was a necessary conclusion to reach to affect the safety and security of their own people and fulfil their oath of office. Yet, they couldn’t get there.
The issue at hand was the presence of People’s Republic of China nationals at our colleges and universities. Now, mind you that these persons also do acknowledge the scale of intellectual property theft that has occurred in this manner. They also recognize, though probably to a more limited extent, the weaponization of these ties by the Chinese Communist Party to develop, import, and deploy biological and chemical weapons against America. But, then there was that “D” word again. We wouldn’t want to be called “racist” after all (spoiler alert, I was, in fact, called racist, and by a rogue Democrat writing in the House calendar).
So, I’m still formulating how to respond to this situation, but I think I need to work on developing my argumentation and persuasion at every conceivable point of entry for error from A to Z, where previously most of my argumentation has been pointed at arguing for A under the assumption that, once A was affirmed, we could arrive at Z together with just a little reason. Let’s begin by trying to do exactly that: a full walkthrough of the ethical and, where necessary, practical argumentation for this exact issue.
The first necessary preconception in this chain of reason is that there is a fundamental difference between a citizen and a noncitizen. Coupled with this necessary preconception is another preconception: nations are a legitimate category. The Christian perspective on this is fairly straightforward and not too difficult to make. God ordains the nations, sets their geographic boundaries, and scattered the peoples and languages at Babel. God ordains their civil government rulers as jurisdictionally limited to the respective national boundaries, ethically limited to their given sphere and scope of action, and their very telos (reason for existing) is given as the protection and justice for the people of that nation (Biblically, “nation” is “ethne,” and that has some importance here in defining a “people” group).
The next necessary preconception is around the goodness of living in peace, and the goodness of the use of both violence and tools of coercion generally in defense of the innocent. This is also a case made readily Biblically – the Bible is full of accounts of obtaining, carrying and utilizing armaments defensively, from Nehemiah’s wall builders and David’s sling, to the “buy a sword” instruction from Christ to those without, to the myriad wars waged in accordance with God’s Law and commands. Scripture identifies man as “made in the image of God,” and for he who would shed man’s blood (murder) to be put to death by the civil authority as retribution. Numerous iterations of Christian “Just War Theory” have been formulated utilizing varying degrees of Scriptural fidelity. There can be no doubt that war is not outside of the Christian worldview, after all, Proverbs identifies both “…a time for peace and a time for war…”
The heart of the Christian ethical perspective towards violence and war is identified as the necessity of taking actions – actions that would be undesirable in the conditions of Eden – that represent a positive good under the conditions of the curse, in order to restore a state of peace and law that has been breached by an offender. As such, Scripture identifies civil police powers, retributive justice, and war all in the same realm of legitimate action by the civil authority, and defensive use of violence as legitimate by the individual.
To help identify and define these points let’s take a couple brief thought experiments up. Let’s say we are citizens of a hypothetical large, powerful nation functioning as a constitutional monarchy. Let’s say things are reasonably good for us here at home. However, there is an island nation off the coast where things are not so good for their people. It’s an utter tyranny. They traffic children as slaves. They regularly execute men in the towns to instill terror and forestall uprisings. Their secret police have raped virtually every woman on the island. Do these facts warrant defensive use of violence to affect the overthrow of that evil, despotic island regime? Yes, they very much do. Do those facts legitimize our nation in undertaking a defensive war against the government of the island nation on behalf of the genuinely oppressed citizens of that nation? No, it does not.
You see, according to the basic Biblical worldview, nations and their civil authorities being geographically bounded and existing for the justice of their own people, it would be an affirmative evil to coercively withdraw the necessary blood and treasure of our people for that purpose, because our civil authority has no ordained role in justice for the inhabitants of that island.
Now, would it be wrong for individual citizens of our nation to take it upon themselves to risk their own blood, and finance using their own treasure, the overthrow of such a regime on behalf of those islanders? That’s a much more difficult question where competing interests of the rightness of individuals to intervene with violence in defense of innocence toward peace, versus the jurisdiction of a civil authority to limit the war-like actions of their own citizens against foreign nations to prevent conflagration to war between nations. I suppose a hearty “maybe” is in order.
Would it be right for either our nation or the citizens of our nation to recognize the plight of these islanders, recognize it formally, and take actions below the threshold of war to enable these islanders to affect their own defense? That is, again, a complicated question given the possibility for such events to spiral into open warfare between nations, but, all things considered (which is outside the scope of this lesson) it would be a lot easier to get to “yes” under this paradigm than those prior – a nod to the work of the Special Operations Forces guys is due here.
However, such events do not occur in a vacuum. Let’s now add the nuance that his particular Island nation is formally allied to several other hostile nations whose actions, collectively, could be categorized as placing them in a state of war with our nation. That changes the moral calculus significantly. By implicating this island nation now as an enemy taking actions that imperil the peace and justice of our own citizens we enter into a situation where our own civil authority is justified in enacting defensive violence – not on behalf of the citizens of the island nation, but on behalf of our own citizens.
That last caveat is important because the objective of the use of violence should always be that which restores a state of peace and law for our citizens. It may be that it also works out to the considerable benefit of the islanders – perhaps our best course of action is recognizing some contingent of those islanders as the legitimate government to empower them and provide us with an ally going forward, but, perhaps for any number of reasons the best course of action is to simply topple the regime and infrastructure of the island, even though it would certainly not be in the best interest of those oppressed islanders. The point is that the best course of action for our citizens is that which should be pursued, regardless of the effect that may have on foreign nations and their citizens – subject to basic Christian ethics, of course.
Next up, we have the basic applicability of laws to those within the geographic boundaries of a nation. Here, too, the Bible is quite clear that there is to be one civil code that is applicable to both the citizen and the (authorized) foreigner. This is a basic application of the impartiality of law within the context of nations, borders, citizens, and so on. However, the Biblical scope of law in this regard is primarily to do with criminal law – you must not have different types of crimes for the native and the visitor.
However, the Biblical scope of law in this regard is primarily to do with criminal law – you must not have different types of crimes for the native and the visitor. This does not mean the civil magistrate is forbidden from making any distinctions whatsoever between citizen and non-citizen, or between authorized visitor and hostile alien. Quite the opposite. Right reason and Scripture both require the magistrate to exercise precisely this kind of wise discrimination (the original, non-taboo meaning of the word) in every area outside strict criminal adjudication: immigration policy, visa issuance, access to public institutions, national security measures, military contracts and conscription, land ownership (especially in strategic or border zones), voting and civic participation, holding public office, access to public benefits or welfare, and especially higher education that touches intellectual property, dual-use research, or strategic technology.
Scripture itself draws this line unmistakably. Leviticus 24:22 commands, “You shall have the same law for the stranger and for the native-born; I am the Lord your God.” But the immediate context is a blasphemy trial and the principle of talionis (eye for eye) — purely criminal and judicial. The verse guarantees equal criminal punishment, not equal civil rights. In actual practice, foreigners who sojourned in Israel received that criminal equality and basic protections, yet faced sweeping civil exclusions for the protection of the nation. Most notably, land was not inheritable by strangers. Leviticus 25:23 declares, “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me.” The permanent tribal land allotments in Numbers 26 and the book of Joshua were reserved exclusively for the citizens of the nation. Jubilee laws returned every inheritance to its original Israelite family line. Certain foreign nations were barred from the assembly of the Lord forever (Deuteronomy 23:3-6), and broader restrictions applied to holding office, full covenant privileges, and national security access. These distinctions were not sinful partiality — they were required for the magistrate to fulfill his God-ordained duty to protect his own nation and people.
To suggest the opposite — that the magistrate must treat citizens and non-citizens with total civil equality in every area — quickly descends into absurdity even on purely secular grounds. Imagine a nation that allowed citizens of a hostile foreign power to own strategic border land, vote in its elections, hold public office, or receive the same military contracts and welfare benefits as its own nationals; that nation would cease to exist within a single generation. Or picture a university system that granted nationals of an adversary state unrestricted access to every research lab, intellectual property pipeline, and dual-use technology program under the banner of “impartiality,” then acted shocked when the adversary’s military gained every technological advantage. History is littered with such self-inflicted disasters: empires that opened their gates, their treasuries, and their institutions to unvetted foreigners under the delusion that discrimination itself was the sin. The result was never justice — it was conquest or collapse. Scripture simply forbids us from making the same suicidal error.
Discrimination and exclusion from certain things must occur to the benefit of the citizen — for whom government is ordained — in order to avoid partiality toward the visitor (or invader). The civil magistrate’s telos is the protection and justice of his own nation, not the equal treatment of all humanity under his jurisdiction (Rom 13:4; 1 Pet 2:14). Partiality that favors the stranger at the expense of the citizen is the very sin Scripture condemns in civil judgment (Deut 1:16-17; Lev 19:15). God Himself discriminates constantly — between Israel and the nations, between clean and unclean, between covenant people and strangers — and commands His magistrates to do likewise in their sphere.
National civil authorities possess the Biblical capacity and right to wage defensive warfare, to conscript citizens for that effort, and — when another nation is waging war of any sort against our nation — to discern that reality and analyze whether any given citizen of the warring nation should be viewed as a threat, a combatant, or an arm of the enemy civil authority. Scripture affirms this: nations are real and bounded (Acts 17:26), the magistrate bears the sword for the good of his people (Rom 13:1-7), and defensive war is legitimate (Prov 20:18; Eccl 3:8). Israel censused only its own citizens for military service (Num 1), excluded certain foreign nations from covenant privileges and land inheritance (Deut 23:3-6; Lev 25:23), and treated hostile foreigners as perpetual threats to be kept at arm’s length or removed (Ex 23:33; Deut 20). The magistrate owes no equal access or benefit to those whose governments are actively working against his own people — and in multi-domain conflict, any citizen of the hostile nation may at any moment become an active agent of that enemy power, much as in The Matrix any bystander could suddenly reveal themselves as an agent of the system.
To suggest otherwise — that the magistrate must grant equal civil access to nationals of a nation at war with his own — descends into absurdity even on secular grounds. Imagine allowing citizens of an enemy state to own strategic land, vote in elections, hold public office, receive military contracts, or access sensitive research labs during active hostilities; such a nation would be conquered from within before the first shot was fired, and that’s precisely what is occurring to us. History records empires that collapsed under refusal to discriminate when the enemy was already inside the gates. The magistrate’s duty is to protect his people first, and Scripture forbids the suicidal delusion that impartiality toward the invader is virtue.
This brings us directly to the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese National Intelligence Law of 2017, Article 7, states unambiguously: “Any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law.” This is not optional. Combined with the much longer-standing practical reality of CCP control — the social credit system, the “United Front” work, and the total absence of any meaningful private sphere — the situation is exactly as you described: like in The Matrix, any given PRC national can become an agent of the system at any given time. Every Chinese citizen, student, or researcher must therefore be reasonably categorized along the threat-agent-combatant gradient as an unacceptable risk to our own citizens. This is not racism; it is the same prudent analysis any magistrate must perform when his nation is under sustained, multi-domain attack (intellectual property theft on an industrial scale, biological weapons research ties, espionage in universities). Treating them as neutral visitors would be the real partiality — favoring the interests of a hostile nation over the safety of our own.
We see the same Biblical pattern of exclusionary laws and regulations applied to foreigners across the spectrum — from the average foreign citizen all the way through the preposterous welcoming of the alien invader. In Scripture: ordinary sojourners (ger) received basic legal protections and one criminal code (Ex 12:49; Lev 19:33-34), but were still excluded from land inheritance, certain offices, military conscription, and full covenant membership unless they converted and integrated. Hostile foreigners (nekar) faced outright exclusion, perpetual enmity, and no right of residence (Deut 23:3-6; Ex 23:33; Neh 13:23-30; Ezra 10).
In the American context under the same covenantal logic: ordinary friendly foreigners have always faced visa restrictions, background checks, and limits on sensitive activities (historical precedent from the Alien and Sedition Acts through modern export controls). Nationals from hostile powers have faced outright bans on sensitive research access (e.g., the 2020 Presidential Proclamation suspending entry of certain PRC students and researchers tied to military-civil fusion strategy; 50 U.S.C. § 2652 restricting foreign visitors from sensitive countries at national labs; the ongoing Data Security Program barring adversary access to bulk sensitive American data). Welcoming the “alien invader” — mass illegal migration from hostile or incompatible nations without vetting, assimilation requirements, or regard for national security — is the precise inversion of the magistrate’s duty. It is not compassion; it is dereliction and partiality against our own citizens.
Here is the complete A-to-Z walk we must now fortify in every argument. Even when first principles are verbally affirmed, derailments still occur at multiple stations downstream from those foundations for many reasons. The “D-word” is only the most obvious among them. Every single link—linguistic, categorical, jurisdictional, incentive-driven, courage-dependent, and threat-gradient-specific—must be fortified in advance.
Applying the full chain to the issue: The civil authority of the United States has both the right and the duty to restrict or entirely prohibit People’s Republic of China nationals from enrolling in American colleges and universities—especially those engaged in any research with national-security implications. This is defensive action in the same category as Nehemiah posting guards or a just war: love of the American nation, obedience to the magistrate’s ordained role, and preservation of peace, security, and justice for our own citizens. Any incidental effect on Chinese nationals is irrelevant; our telos is not their telos. To fail in this task is a dereliction of duty for which magistrates will answer.
We can no longer argue only the first principles and assume the rest will follow. The legislative conversations that prompted this reflection showed exactly why: capable, patriotic men who affirm the difference between citizen and non-citizen, who recognize the scale of CCP theft and weaponization, still freeze at the point of necessary discrimination because downstream error points remain unaddressed. Until we close every possible exit, we will remain stuck in the pattern of managing decline rather than achieving victory. Enabling defeat is anathema to the Christian magistrate.”
