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Yes, we’re talking about Trump’s immigration comments but no, you don’t have to worry about your kids hearing bad language. Today, Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America cheer great news in the automotive industry as Fiat Chrysler announces it is investing a billion dollars in Michigan and planning to add 2,500 jobs to build Ram pickup trucks again. This follows earlier news that Toyota and Mazda will team to build a $1.6 billion plant in Alabama and employ up to 4,000 people. They also recoil at President Trump’s attitude towards people in deeply troubled nations, noting that it’s fair to point out there are many horribly corrupt and crime-ridden nations in various parts of the world and re-evaluate immigration policy but deeply wrong to suggest those people have no value. At the same time, many Trump critics suggest that diversity is what makes America great, and Greg and Jim set them straight. And they shake their heads as Nancy Pelosi dismisses congressional immigration negotiators as “five white guys” – including her top deputy among House Democrats – as she called for more diversity in the group.
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Published in: Domestic Policy, Economics, Entertainment, Foreign Policy, History, Humor, Immigration, Journalism, Podcasts, Politics
You both projected your stuff onto the president. You added a whole lot of things to what he said that he did not say.
“deeply wrong to suggest those people have no value….” Oh yeah, he didn’t say that. We look to alternative, right wing media as a respite from the cloying, crying “You’re a racist racist who uses RACISM!!” brand of “journalism” we get from 90% of the media. Stop virtue signaling.
And re “every group has gone through this…” Good. That’s the VERY necessary hazing process this country calls “assimilation.” That way, people can leave their bad habits back in the home country and become good “WASPy” Americans- regardless of their actual ethnic and racial background.
Don’t believe me? Compare American Catholicism & Judaism with the real McCoy back at The Vatican [as evidenced by contraception usage] or on the shtetl [“Reform” Judaism……it’s kind of like a hobby!]. Might it be that the Catholicism so despised and the Judaism so mistrusted in mid 19th Cent America was moderated- mostly to our benefit- by being surrounded by Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Unitarians and Congregationalists for a century?
Greg touched upon this but what is often left out of those misty-eyed recollections of Ellis Island is that MILLIONS of immigrants went BACK to their country of origin because they couldn’t hack it here and no doubt thought we were too mean and nasty.
Most people’s commitment to “diversity” extends no further than food.
@15:43……so the Balkans MIGHT deserve Trump’s moniker but Haiti’s off limits? Even at the height of their civil war[s] the Balkans were about 10X nicer than Haiti. Sarajevo > Port au Prince and it’s not even that close a call. White guilt shouldn’t work SO well on Ricochet…
Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi have been rivals. They ran against each other for Minority Whip in 2002, and apparently have never made up since. I wonder if Pelosi made the “five white guys” comment as a dig at Hoyer.
Regardless of her intention, Pelosi’s comment reinforced the meme that Democrats hate straight white males – just as Trump’s [outhouse] comment reinforced the meme that Republicans hate non-straight white males, regardless of his intention.
This might not have been the worst Three Martini Lunch Podcast ever, but it was surely in the bottom two. What a steaming pile of patting yourselves on the back, Greg and Jim..
That dreck Greg read from Comey, are you guys serious? Diversity is what makes America great? (I’m paraphrasing – I’d prefer to quote accurately, but I just ate, and if I have to listen to that moral preening virtue signaling pablum again, I’ll surely spew.)
America’s protection of individual liberty is what allows America to be diverse. Diversity is a pleasant side effect of America’s unique primacy of the individual – diversity is not a national motivation, it’s not a fundamental value. America wasn’t founded on the idea that we should go looking for as much diversity as we can find and invite it here. That’s the sort of backward thinking that got us the diversity visa lottery program, whereby we import terrorists.
Keep up the moral preening guys, and you’ll lose a longtime listener.
The American institutions that Greg and Jim extol exist only because the American colonists were not “diverse”; instead mostly coming from England: one of the very few places in the world where representative government was practiced and individual rights, recognized.
Significantly, the Spanish colonies and the Portuguese colonies and the French colonies created institutions of a much more autocratic character. Now, imagine what the US Constitution would have looked like if the English had been a minority in North America: no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom of religion, no representative government.
So far, we have managed to hold on to the essentially English institutions that the Founding Fathers bequeathed us because the rate of non-English immigration was low enough and the rate of assimilation, fast enough. I’m not sure if either of those things is still true, however.
On the one hand, the rate of immigration from countries without deep traditions of democracy was increased by the Democrats in the mid-1960s; on the other, progressives have taken over our educational institutions and mass media, and use them to oppose assimilation, not promote it.
After all, contrary to what Greg and Jim appear to believe, just crossing our border will not magically transform a foreigner into an American.
My parents were refugees who lived in this country more than 50 years before their deaths. To the end of their days, their primary loyalty was to the land of their origins, not the United States.