America’s greatest achievement, the deed for which future generations will remember it, is the landing on the moon’s wonderfully named Sea of Tranquility by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on July 20, 1969. Armstrong and Aldrin were two of the three American astronauts constituting the crew of the Apollo 11 capsule and module, which had been launched into space atop an enormous Saturn V rocket three days before. Michael Collins piloted the capsule while Armstrong and Aldrin landed the module on the moon and then walked on and explored the lunar surface.

When Apollo 11 was launched, “America” and even “American” meant something concrete, identifiable, and positive. There were no major disagreements about the essential goodness of America between the first man to walk on the moon, the WASP Neil Armstrong, and the last, Gene Cernan, the son of Slovak Catholic immigrants. Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972 shows that most Americans felt the same way.

No one has landed on the moon since 1972 and America gave up on manned spaceflight for a time. It would be as if Christopher Columbus had reached the New World, but no one followed him, all subsequent caravels were inferior to his, and most Spaniards had come to believe that they needed to focus on erasing the memory of Spain’s misdeeds rather than laying the groundwork for future achievements. Such a Spain would have remained an inconsequential backwater and never become a world-shaping empire.

Similarly, it is impossible to reconcile the concrete achievements of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs and the demands of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” As a friend of mine quipped long ago, in the 1960s, diversity at NASA meant white guys with crew cuts coexisting with white guys without crew cuts. (The American space program, just like its Soviet rival, even made use of the work of former Nazi rocket scientists.)

There is no going back to that America, as remarkable as it was. America then was able to meet the challenge of incorporating millions of immigrants with names like “Cernan” and “Piatak.” It became the center of world achievement by drawing on its past rather than repudiating it.

Today’s America still has a chance to escape the fate planned for it by the ideological descendants of the McGovernites who voted against America in 1972. They plan to make America’s historic white Christian majority a minority through mass immigration, to demoralize that population by presenting America’s history as a cavalcade of oppression, and to gradually sever all remaining connections to the past by convincing Americans of how evil they and their country have been.

It is difficult to see how any serious person can deny this is happening. The death of George Floyd in police custody led to mobs attacking monuments to all kinds of American heroes who also happened to be white males. The mob was encouraged, openly or sub silentio, by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and virtually everyone else with an opinion deemed “respectable.”

As president, Joe Biden has intensified this strategy by opening up America’s southern border to anyone from anywhere who claims to have been persecuted. Very few of these supposed asylum seekers are white. His desired result: a nation in which opposition to leftism is impossible, and the norms growing out of America’s European and Christian heritage become defunct.

A mass movement of people crossing borders they have no right to cross, with the goal of remaking the land they’ve entered, is an invasion—pure and simple. Increasingly, Americans agree that is what is going on at their southern border: a harmful invasion. A recent Pew Research poll showed that the overwhelming majority of Americans—80 percent—believe the Biden administration is doing a bad job of managing the refugee crisis. Those polled included a wide cross-section of America, including whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics, as well as Republicans, Democrats, and independents.

Of course, the political establishment is adept at sidestepping, coopting, and neutering such majority opinions. But there is at least one reason to believe this time may be different. One of America’s white immigrants, who wants his new home to again be a center of achievement and a leader in space exploration, now owns what used to be called Twitter.

Before that immigrant, Elon Musk, bought Twitter, it was part of the high-tech conspiracy to suppress all opposition to the left. Now “X” is a haven for free speech, with Musk himself regularly exposing the aforementioned high-tech conspiracy and denouncing the “invasion” of America’s open southern border. Maybe a lasting return to the Sea of Tranquility, or something equally remarkable, isn’t off the table after all. ◆