Media "logic"

 

Jack Hellner at American Thinker points out the sheer idiocy of the mainstream media:

This morning on the Today Show, White House doctor and Covid-19 “response coordinator” Ashish Jha was asked about the shortage of children’s medicine. He said there is plenty of supply, but demand is just too high. The hosts on the Today Show didn’t seem to have a problem with such a stupid answer, as they breezed on without even taking a moment to consider the absurdity of his statement. Why is this man treated as an expert on anything?

Using Jha’s “logic”:

• Last year there was not a shortage of baby formula, there were just too many darn mothers wanting to feed their hungry babies.
• There will not be a shortage of heating oil this year, there will just be too many people wanting to heat their homes.
• The economy is doing fantastic, if only real wages hadn’t been dropping for two years straight. 
• The border is closed and secure, there are just too many illegals wanting to cross.
• The Biden policies are working well; conservatives are just racist.
• Crime is under control in major Democrat run cities; there are just too many criminals on the streets.
• The Afghanistan exit went perfectly well, if not for the deaths, and weapons left behind for terrorists.

The media personalities that allow Jha a pass on his contradictions are the same people that have done little (if any) reporting on the outrageous collusion between government Swamp creatures and the leftwing activists at Twitter to squelch bad press on the Biden family corruption. They were not outraged that Trump and other conservative voices were silenced. They didn’t care that respected and renowned members of the medical community were banned from a social media platform for daring to offer alternative views on the Covid-19 narrative, or disagreeing with governments dictatorial edicts. . . .

The above is most of the column;  the last little bit is here.

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A great deal of ruin

Victor Davis Hanson does not like what he is seeing:

“Our Parasitic Generation”

Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?

We are $31 trillion in collective debt. The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits. The military is politicized and short of recruits. We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies’ cynical stereotypes. 

Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections. We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it. The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware—and hard-earned deterrence.

We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and baby formula. Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or stroll at dusk in many major American cities. Medieval London’s roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco. Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.

Lots more at American Greatness here.  It’s important.  And it’s grim.

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Vance vs Ryan: Big Debate Moments

 

Gary Bauer at Patriot Post considered Ohio Senate candidate J D Vance’s response to Tim Ryan one of the “Big Debate Moments”:

In some states, like Ohio, the Democrat is trailing in the polls and feels he or she must debate. Monday night, Republican J.D. Vance directly confronted Democrat Tim Ryan about racist smears against his family.

“Here’s exactly what happens when the media and people like Tim Ryan accuse me of engaging in the great replacement theory… What happens is my own children, my biracial children, get attacked by scumbags … because you are so desperate for political power that you’ll accuse me, the father of three beautiful biracial babies, of engaging in racism. We are sick of it!”

“You can believe in a border without being a racist. You can believe in the country without being a racist, and this just shows how desperate this guy is for political power.”

Source here.

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Prager: Leftism and liberalism have virtually nothing in common

We all have "nice" relatives and friends who always vote "D".  At American Greatness, Dennis Prager identifies the problem with "nice", and it explains a lot.  He concludes:

Specifically, why do millions of nice liberals support the Left? Leftism and liberalism have virtually nothing in common. Do liberals believe in all-black college dormitories; that America is a systemically racist country founded not in 1776, but in 1619; that Israel is the villain in the Middle East; that capitalism, the only economic system to lift billions of people out of poverty, should be replaced by socialism, whose moral record is horrific; that little children should be taught that “boys” and “girls” are subjective categories and that “nonbinary” is normal; or that defunding police reduces violent crime?

No, they don’t. Yet millions of nice liberals support those who believe those nihilistic, anti-American, anti-human ideas.

Many on the Left are neither nice nor good. But America is being destroyed by vile doctrines supported by a lot of nice people.

Postscript: After saying these things about nice people who support evil on my radio show, the Left declared that I think slave owners were nice people and that I support slavery.

One of the most popular left-wing podcasts, “The Young Turks,” spoke about me above the chyron: “Pro-Slavery Prager: Religious radio host argues slave owners were nice people.”

And the left-wing British publication, The Independent, headlined, “Far-right radio host Dennis Prager sparks outrage by saying there were ‘undoubtedly many nice slaveholders.'”

Intellectual honesty and morally sophisticated thought are not hallmarks of the Left.

Read the full column here.  (And it's not just liberals or Democrats. It's also Uniparty members with an "R" after their names.) 

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Mac Donald: The Corruption of Medicine

 

Heather Mac Donald is a favorite of mine.  In her most recent column at City Journal, she comments on “The Corruption of Medicine”:

The post–George Floyd racial reckoning has hit the field of medicine like an earthquake. Medical education, medical research, and standards of competence have been upended by two related hypotheses: that systemic racism is responsible both for racial disparities in the demographics of the medical profession and for racial disparities in health outcomes. Questioning those hypotheses is professionally suicidal. Vast sums of public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy. The result will be declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress.

Virtually every major medical organization—from the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) to the American Association of Pediatrics—has embraced the idea that medicine is an inequity-producing enterprise. The AMA’s 2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity is virtually indistinguishable from a black studies department’s mission statement. The plan’s anonymous authors seem aware of how radically its rhetoric differs from medicine’s traditional concerns. The preamble notes that “just as the general parlance of a business document varies from that of a physics document, so too is the case for an equity document.” (Such shaky command of usage and grammar characterizes the entire 86-page tome, making the preamble’s boast that “the field of equity has developed a parlance which conveys both [sic] authenticity, precision, and meaning” particularly ironic.)

. . .

And so medical schools and medical societies are discarding traditional standards of merit in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession.  . . .

Read Ms. Mac Donald’s full article here.  Her sad conclusion: “The guardians of science have turned on science itself.”

Exit question: What criteria would you use to decide on which doctor to choose for your open-heart surgery?

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Nigel Farage at CPAC: video and extracts

 

File photo of Mr. Farage at Trump Tower

Shane Trejo at Big League Politics posted the video of Nigel Farage’s speech at CPAC-Texas.  Here’s most of Shane’s report with excerpts:

Brexit hero Nigel Farage gave a rousing defense of Western Civilization during his speech at CPAC Texas on Saturday.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are under attack, under attack as never before, and that threat is not external, no, not even Nancy Pelosi’s one-woman attempt to start the third World War is the biggest threat we face, and it’s not Putin. The biggest threat we face is from within. The biggest threat we face is the fifth column inside all of our countries,” Farage said.

Farage explained how “educational institutions” have been captured by this fifth column to wage war against families, Judeo-Christian values, and our very civilization.

“Kids are not being taught critical thinking, kids are not being taught there are two valid approaches to a problem. Our children are being indoctrinated. Our universities have become madrassas of Marxism, and it needs to change,” he said.

“White privilege did not exist as a term. You didn’t hear about white privilege 10, 20 years ago, and yet, mainstream media ram it down our throats every single day. And that’s just one little example,” Farage added.

He derided the divisive racial agenda from the far left that is meant to pit groups against each other and make young people hate their families and their country.

. . .

“This is a Marxist attempt to break Western Civilization, a Marxist attempt to destroy everything we are, and we are going to fight back hard against it, aren’t we?” he asked, to an overwhelming applause from the audience.

Farage refused to let modern conservative leaders off the hook for their weakness in pushing back against far-left extremism. He said conservative leaders have shown “cowardice” and “fear” in recent years, empowering the Marxists.

“. . . To save Western Civilization, this is the battleground. Because if America falls, we all fall!” he added.

Source link is here.  This Tea Party person loves Mr. Farage. 

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Medical Schools: The New Church of Woke

 

It keeps getting worse.  Here’s Jim Thompson at Red State on “Medical Schools: The New Church of Woke”:

The effort to turn medical schools into expensive schools of sociology started before 2022. In 2019, the effort for equity and inclusion was being added, ad hoc, to how professors taught medical classes. Nothing grips the mind like informing medical students that systemic racism is to blame for obesity and other medical conditions inherent with a person’s personal and unhealthy choices.

The push to blame everything on racism hit overdrive in 2020, when George Floyd, an addict loaded on fatal doses of illegal drugs, died. Medical schools went on strike. Students left their classrooms and headed to “church” — outdoors, wearing masks and kneeling with “Black Lives Matter” signs. It’s quickly becoming a traditional denomination for the left: Photos of medical students kneeling and heads bowed for protesting too much whiteness in white coats.

Now, there is a concerted effort to take up the time of medical students with religious indoctrination – a catechism of systemic racism, anti-racism, equity, diversity and inclusion.

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has released its official Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Competencies for medical students to commit to memory and practice. No longer is it good enough to be a good doctor; now, before a student, then resident medical doctor, can ply their trade, they must be full, card-carrying members of a cult.

. . .

The medical profession has already given itself a black eye for following the COVID protocols required by the CDC and NIH.  It’s getting worse.  Read the rest at RedState here.

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The Government From Hell

 

David Solway at PJ Media is writing about Canada, but his words apply to America today as well:

. . . The fact is that the government from hell is working to transform a democratic nation into a police state and normalize totalitarian rule without having to mobilize the military and scramble its jet fighters. It moves subtly, insidiously, through legislation, decree, deception, legal subterfuge, financial penalties, and targeted defamation. It divides a country into sectarian belligerents, employs tested techniques of misinformation and disinformation, prevents the free expression of opinion (Bill C-11), and impoverishes and segregates its perceived adversaries. It manipulates a strategy of covert control which, in the long run, may be more effective than overt physical repression. It doesn’t need tanks; a few RCMP horses will do. Slander and sanctimony are excellent weapons.

The truckers were never a menace, bore no resemblance to the volley of epithets hurled against them: white supremacists, racists, misogynists, antisemites, and the like. A Liberal MP is convinced that “honk honk” is code for “Heil Hitler.” Reviewing Paul Gottfried’s must-read Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade in American Greatness, Christopher Zeeman writes, “Organizing a state around a nonexistent threat is a novel approach to governing…the lack of proof is confirmation that they must redouble their efforts to thwart the threat”—a threat, be it said, not to the nation but to the impious power of the managerial elect. In other words, our political elites must conjure their enemies in order to maintain their own compromised existence. The dumbing down of a supine population, still wearing their badges of conformity across their faces, completes the task.

Of course, as noted, there will be the inevitable casualties. The truckers who protested the draconian and useless vaccine mandates have been crushed and their lives ruined. And the majority of Canadians do not care. Some believe the truckers got what they deserved, gloating over the misfortune of their betters. Others do not give them a second thought. The feeble-minded claim to be suffering from “phantom honking.” Some hover over the top like a helicopter pilot surveying rush hour traffic and move on: nothing very significant to see here. Their sympathies go out to the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression. The victims of government oppression in their own country are an afterthought. Stupefying indifference to the fate of their nation is the order of the day. The government from hell remains solidly entrenched. . . .

Mr. Solway’s entire column is here. 

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Understanding vaccine hesitancy

 

Konstantin Kisin has a lengthy piece on Tablet Magazine tracing years of government and media deception, malfeasance, and complicity.  Here’s Mr. Kisin’s big finish:

. . . It is at this point that vaccines become the main focus of government policy and media commentary.

The same people who told you Brexit would never happen, that Trump would never win, that when he did win it was because of Russian collusion but also because of racism, that you must follow lockdowns while they don’t, that masks don’t work, that masks do work, that social justice protests during pandemic lockdowns are a form of “health intervention,” that ransacking African American communities in the name of fighting racism is a “mostly peaceful” form of protest, that poor and underserved children locked out of shuttered schools are “still learning,” that Jussie Smollett was a victim of a hate crime, that men are toxic, that there is an infinite number of genders, that COVID couldn’t have come from a lab until maybe it did, that closing borders is racist until maybe it isn’t, that you shouldn’t take Trump’s vaccine, that you must take the vaccine developed during the Trump administration, that Andrew Cuomo is a great leader, that Andrew Cuomo is a granny killer, that the number of COVID deaths is one thing and then another … are the same people telling you now that the vaccine is safe, that you must take it, and that if you don’t, you will be a second-class citizen.

Understand vaccine hesitancy now?

The full story is here.

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Martin Luther King Jr. and Critical Race Theory

 

MLK memorial in DC

A report at Big League Politics presented some information about MLK and Critical Race Theory – information that was news to me.  Here’s an extract:

A popular talking point from conservatives is that critical race theory (CRT), the racist pseudo-historical doctrine being pushed throughout society by the Radical Left, would be rejected by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. if he were alive today.

However, King’s own daughter vehemently disagrees with that assessment.

. . .

Conservatives may be triggered by Bernice King’s comments but they are historically accurate. The facts show that MLK Jr. was a communist-affiliated huckster who paved the way for blood libels like CRT to take root in America and destroy the country. What few people understand is that many of MLK Jr.’s seminal speeches and writings were either plagiarized or written by Soviet pawn and Communist Party USA organizer Stanley Levison. Levison knew that the notion of civil rights for minorities would eventually be expanded by left-wing attorneys to tear at the Bill of Rights and make America completely unrecognizable. His vision has now been realized.

. . .

“There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy,” King Jr. said in an Aug. 1967 speech, demonstrating his incredible ignorance on basic economics.

. . .

Before conservatives stopped trying to understand the truth behind issues, they understood that MLK Jr. was a communist figure promoted by the globalist establishment to undermine American unity. This is why former president Ronald Reagan had serious reservations about creating MLK Jr. Day as a national holiday in the 1980s.

. . .

In recent years, MLK Jr.’s lascivious exploits have been revealed to the public as well, showing him as being involved in countless orgies with prostitutes, coercing his own parishioners into illicit sex affairs and laughing as a colleague raped a woman in a hotel room. The fact that this individual has been deified by conservatives, most of whom refuse to address any of the facts about MLK Jr.’s true character, shows exactly why the movement has failed to conserve much of anything over the years.

Read the full article here.  (I added the link to the Wikipedia page for Mr. Levison and silently corrected the spelling.)  

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My Kind Of Pushback

Brett T at Twitchy:

‘I won’t be pathologized for being White’: Man resigns from school district over ‘white privilege’ training

This is quite a letter to the Manchester School District, aka “The Temple of Equity,” from Daniel Concannon, who addresses his resignation letter to “Human Wedgie McGee,” the program director of something called the 21CCLC Program.  . . .

 

And here it is:

Click to embiggen or go here to read on the Twitchy link.  Wow.  Posted here for inspirational purposes.

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Wokeness erasing America

 

Most excellent commentary from Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

. . .

Full article is here.

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She Says it All

 She gets it.  And in less than a minute.

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VDH: Radical new rules for post-America

 

At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson identifies ten ways in which America is changing, “maybe permanently.” Below are his “rules” summarized as bullet points.  Click on the link to read his full article;  he elaborates on each rule, and it’s not a pretty picture.

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much. 

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore.  

3) Racialism is now acceptable. 

4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. 

5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. 

6) Hypocrisy is passé. Virtue-signaling is alive. 

7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it.  

8) McCarthyism is good. 

9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. 

10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity itself. 

VDH concludes:

Americans privately fear these rules, while publicly appearing to accept them.

They still could be transitory and invite a reaction. Or they are already near-permanent and institutionalized.

The answer determines whether a constitutional republic continues as once envisioned, or warps into something never imagined by those who created it

VDH is an historian and scholar -- hardly a rabble-rouser.  For his full take on these scary rules, click here.

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President Biden’s Words of Division

 

Heather Mac Donald watched President Biden’s inaugural speech so you didn’t have to.  Her commentary at City Journal begins:

It’s an odd way to seek national unity: call a significant portion of the American public white supremacists, racists, and nativists. Welcome to the Biden presidency.

Joe Biden’s inaugural speech as 46th president is predictably being hailed for its “unifying” message. And just as predictably, his invocations of the divisive bromides of the identitarian Left are being swept under the rug.

According to Biden, we are a “great nation” and a “good people.” But we also oppress minorities with an ever-rising fervor. “Growing inequity” is among the greatest challenges facing the country, according to Biden, along with the “sting of systemic racism” and encroaching “white supremacy.” Only now are we confronting “a cry for racial justice, some four hundred years in the making.”

One might have thought that more than 50 years of civil rights legislation; the banishing of Jim Crow segregation; the ubiquity of racial preferences throughout corporate America, higher education, and government; trillions of dollars of tax dollars attempting to close the academic achievement gap; and the election of black politicians by white voting districts would have reduced inequity, not increased it. But to Biden’s speechwriters, steeped in academic victimology, racial inequity is always with us, requiring constant remediation from government.

Ms. Mac Donald’s full commentary is here. 

Note:  When this blog makes reference to President Biden’s speech, or decision, or agenda, or whatever, I assume he is delivering whatever his masters require.

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Destroying our heroes and culture: coming to Cleveland

photo credit from Portland: pamplinmedia

Daniel Greenfield is an associate of David Horowitz at the Freedom Center, and he blogs at Sultan Knish.  Several days ago, he posted a sobering essay, “Here Are the Heroes Whose Statues Black Lives Matter Has Attacked,” about the destruction and defacement of monuments.  Highly recommended, pretty upsetting, but a must-read. Here are a few extracts:

The statue of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, stands at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly in Los Angeles. When the racist mobs swept through the area, looting Jewish stores and defacing synagogues with "BLM" and "Free Palestine" graffiti, the statue of a man who risked his life to resist fascism and bigotry was one of their targets.

The racists and leftists vandalizing statues across the world claim that they’re fighting hate, but their targets have often been the men and women who courageously stood up to racism and hatred.

. . .

In Washington D.C., the Lincoln Memorial and the National WW2 Memorial were both defaced. This is not the work of anti-racists, but of racists. It’s not the work of anti-fascists, but of fascists.

While the media has upheld the racist narrative justifying the Taliban campaign against America by focusing on confederate memorials, the vandalism has been extensive, targeting both sides in the Civil War, and spilling over to vandalize statues that have absolutely no relevance to contemporary politics.

. . .

As every statue falls, is defiled, and disgraced, a part of America dies. When Democrats and even Republicans collude in the desecration and stand aside for the mob, a part of America dies.

The soul of a nation lies with its heroes. The radicals and racists tearing down our statues are out to destroy that soul. They want our heroes to be Karl Marx and Angela Davis, they want terrorists, totalitarians and criminals celebrated, and heroes, explorers, founders, officers and soldiers condemned.

They aren’t just coming for the “controversial” statues as the media likes to tell us.

They are coming for all the statues, for our entire history, for every great man and woman who sacrificed, strove, and struggled to move the course of human history forward by even one inch.

They are coming for America. And they intend to destroy it, one statue and one city after another.

When the history of this period is written, we will learn whether we had any heroes in our time.

Mr. Greenfield full article is here.

The Cuyahoga County Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument honors Civil War soldiers and sailors from Cleveland and Cuyahoga County.  It is located at Public Square. And it was defaced during the recent riots.  

How much longer before it is destroyed? 

To make matters even worse, Cuyahoga County is considering “declaring racism a public health crisis.” This blog already reported that Cleveland Council unanimously approved a ‘Black Lives Matter’ mural outside City Hall   All this support for an organization that is utterly destructive to our way of life.

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Andrew Sullivan on the Democrats’ Immigration Bubble

 photo credit: washingtontimes.com

I run hot and cold on Andrew Sullivan, but his analysis of U.S. immigration, refugee status, and asylum is worth the read. The full article is here. This extract is via Instapundit:

Take the tragic tale of Oscar Ramirez and his young daughter Valeria, the father and daughter captured in death in that heartbreaking photograph. Ramirez’s widow explained to the Washington Post why her husband wanted to move to America: He wanted “a better future for their girl.” This is an admirable goal, but it is classic economic immigration, and it would appear, based on what we know, that it has absolutely nothing to do with asylum. Here again is the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services definition: “Refugee status or asylum may be granted to people who have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, and/or membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”

But somehow the courts have decided that you qualify for asylum if there is simply widespread crime or violence where you live, and Ramirez was also going to use that argument as well. A government need not persecute you; you just have to experience an unsafe environment that your government is failing to suppress. This so expands the idea of asylum, in my view, as to render it meaningless.

Courts have also expanded asylum to include domestic violence, determining that women in abusive relationships are a “particular social group” and thereby qualify. In other words, every woman on the planet who has experienced domestic abuse can now come to America and claim asylum. Also everyone on the planet who doesn’t live in a stable, orderly, low-crime society. Literally billions of human beings now have the right to asylum in America. . . .

This is in a new century when the U.S. is trying to absorb the largest wave of new immigrants in our entire history, and when the percentage of the population that is foreign-born is also near a historic peak. It is also a time when mass immigration from the developing world has destabilized liberal democracies across the West, is bringing illiberal, anti-immigration regimes to power across Europe, and was the single biggest reason why Donald Trump is president.

I’m told that, as a legal immigrant, I’m shutting the door behind me now that I’ve finally made it to citizenship. I’m not. I favor solid continuing legal immigration, but also a reduction in numbers and a new focus on skills in an economy where unskilled labor is increasingly a path to nowhere. It is not strange that legal immigrants — who have often spent years and thousands of dollars to play by the rules — might be opposed to others’ jumping the line. It is not strange that a hefty proportion of Latino legal immigrants oppose illegal immigration — they are often the most directly affected by new, illegal competition, which drives down their wages. . . .

When I’m told only white racists favor restrictionism, I note how the Mexican people are more opposed to illegal immigration than Americans: In a new poll, 61.5 percent of Mexicans oppose the entry of undocumented migrants, period; 44 percent believe that Mexico should remove any undocumented alien immediately. Are Mexicans now white supremacists too? That hostility to illegal immigration may even explain why Trump’s threat to put tariffs on Mexico if it didn’t crack down may well have worked. Since Trump’s bluster, the numbers have measurably declined — and the crackdown is popular in Mexico. I can also note that most countries outside Western Europe have strict immigration control and feel no need to apologize for it. Are the Japanese and Chinese “white supremacists”? Please. Do they want to sustain their own culture and national identity? Sure. Is that now the equivalent of the KKK?

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