The central premise of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was that America wasn’t so great. The mogul has described the United States as “the suckers of the world.” He’s called our infrastructure “an embarrassment,” our intelligence agencies untrustworthy, our government’s moral character unexceptional, and entire swathes of our citizenry “horrendous.” By Trump’s own account, the animating purpose of his political career has been to make America live up to promises it betrayed.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar says that the United States is plagued by racism and economic inequality. “I grew up in an extremely unjust society, and the only thing that made my family excited about coming to the United States was that the United States was supposed to be the country that guaranteed justice to all,” she recently told a group of high-school students. “So, I feel it necessary for me to speak about that promise that’s not kept.”
For his incendiary criticisms of the United States, Tucker Carlson has hailed Donald Trump as a teller of hard truths. For her critiques of American racism, the Fox News host just called Omar “living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country.”
“Tucker Carlson said something nauseatingly racist last night” is a statement roughly as newsworthy as “the sun rose again this morning.” Still, the host’s latest diatribe against America’s first Mulsim congresswoman merits examination. And not merely because it is exceptionally hateful, even by Tucker’s formidable standards. Rather, Carlson’s monologue also serves as an object lesson on the right’s intellectual bankruptcy and moral cowardice.
Like most racist demagogues nowadays, Carlson fancies himself an iconoclast. The Fox host stands athwart a culture of political correctness yelling, “Gypsies have little regard either for the law or public decency.” And yet, for all their chest-thumping denunciations of liberal “snowflakes,” few human beings feel more entitled to substitute their own self-serving intuitions for reasoned arguments than reactionary infotainers.
Unlike Carlson, I feel an obligation to fairly represent the perspectives of my political opponents. So, before cataloguing the cowardly evasions and racist lies in Tucker’s monologue, I’ll quote it at length:
The Democratic candidates for president are on the road this week telling voters that the United States is an awful country. “America’s institutions are built on white supremacy,” squeaked Beto O’Rourke at an event yesterday. Of all the lies these people tell, and there are many, this is the most absurd. In fact, the United States is the kindest, most open-minded place on the planet. The U.S. has done more for other people, and received less in return, than any other nation in history by far. Americans like to help, it makes us feel good. Some of our deepest satisfaction as a country comes from watching penniless immigrants arrive on our shores, buy into our values, and thrive. We call it the American dream and nothing makes us prouder.
It was in that spirit that in 1992, the United States welcomed 10-year-old Ilhan Omar and her family. Omar was born in Somalia, one of the world’s poorest countries, which was then ruled by a Marxist military dictatorship. When Omar was six, she and her parents and their six siblings fled a worsening civil war and wound up in a refugee camp in Kenya. They spent four years there until America offered the family asylum here and let them settle in Minneapolis. Omar’s father drove a taxi at first, then got a job at the Post Office, working for the government. Omar meanwhile grew up free in the world’s richest country with all the bounty that implies … Omar is now, at the age of only 36, one of the most powerful women in America. It’s an amazing story really. Only in this country could it have happened.
Ilhan Omar has an awful lot to be grateful for, but she isn’t grateful, not at all. After everything America has done for Omar and for her family, she hates this country more than ever.
In a recent piece in the Washington Post, the reporter put it this way, quote, “In Omar’s version, America isn’t the bighearted country that saved her from a brutal war and a bleak refugee camp. It wasn’t a meritocracy that helped her attend college or vaulted her into Congress. Instead, it was the country that had failed to live up to its founding ideals, a place that has disappointed her and so many immigrants, refugees, and minorities like her,” end quote. If anything, that’s an understatement.
Omar isn’t disappointed in America, she’s enraged by it. Virtually every public statement she makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism. This is an immoral country, she says. She has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people. That should worry you, and not just because Omar is now a sitting member of Congress.
Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country. A system designed to strengthen America is instead undermining it. Some of the very people we try hardest to help have come to hate us passionately.
Maybe that’s our fault for asking too little of our immigrants. We aren’t self-confident enough to make them assimilate, so they never feel fully American. Or maybe the problem is deeper than that, maybe we are importing people from places whose values are simply antithetical to ours. Who knows what the problem is, but there is a problem, and whatever the cause, this cannot continue. It’s not sustainable.
No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and expect to survive. The Romans were the last to try that, with predictable results. So, be grateful for Ilhan Omar, annoying as she is. She’s a living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately, or else.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar says that the United States is plagued by racism and economic inequality. “I grew up in an extremely unjust society, and the only thing that made my family excited about coming to the United States was that the United States was supposed to be the country that guaranteed justice to all,” she recently told a group of high-school students. “So, I feel it necessary for me to speak about that promise that’s not kept.”
For his incendiary criticisms of the United States, Tucker Carlson has hailed Donald Trump as a teller of hard truths. For her critiques of American racism, the Fox News host just called Omar “living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country.”
“Tucker Carlson said something nauseatingly racist last night” is a statement roughly as newsworthy as “the sun rose again this morning.” Still, the host’s latest diatribe against America’s first Mulsim congresswoman merits examination. And not merely because it is exceptionally hateful, even by Tucker’s formidable standards. Rather, Carlson’s monologue also serves as an object lesson on the right’s intellectual bankruptcy and moral cowardice.
Like most racist demagogues nowadays, Carlson fancies himself an iconoclast. The Fox host stands athwart a culture of political correctness yelling, “Gypsies have little regard either for the law or public decency.” And yet, for all their chest-thumping denunciations of liberal “snowflakes,” few human beings feel more entitled to substitute their own self-serving intuitions for reasoned arguments than reactionary infotainers.
Unlike Carlson, I feel an obligation to fairly represent the perspectives of my political opponents. So, before cataloguing the cowardly evasions and racist lies in Tucker’s monologue, I’ll quote it at length:
The Democratic candidates for president are on the road this week telling voters that the United States is an awful country. “America’s institutions are built on white supremacy,” squeaked Beto O’Rourke at an event yesterday. Of all the lies these people tell, and there are many, this is the most absurd. In fact, the United States is the kindest, most open-minded place on the planet. The U.S. has done more for other people, and received less in return, than any other nation in history by far. Americans like to help, it makes us feel good. Some of our deepest satisfaction as a country comes from watching penniless immigrants arrive on our shores, buy into our values, and thrive. We call it the American dream and nothing makes us prouder.
It was in that spirit that in 1992, the United States welcomed 10-year-old Ilhan Omar and her family. Omar was born in Somalia, one of the world’s poorest countries, which was then ruled by a Marxist military dictatorship. When Omar was six, she and her parents and their six siblings fled a worsening civil war and wound up in a refugee camp in Kenya. They spent four years there until America offered the family asylum here and let them settle in Minneapolis. Omar’s father drove a taxi at first, then got a job at the Post Office, working for the government. Omar meanwhile grew up free in the world’s richest country with all the bounty that implies … Omar is now, at the age of only 36, one of the most powerful women in America. It’s an amazing story really. Only in this country could it have happened.
Ilhan Omar has an awful lot to be grateful for, but she isn’t grateful, not at all. After everything America has done for Omar and for her family, she hates this country more than ever.
In a recent piece in the Washington Post, the reporter put it this way, quote, “In Omar’s version, America isn’t the bighearted country that saved her from a brutal war and a bleak refugee camp. It wasn’t a meritocracy that helped her attend college or vaulted her into Congress. Instead, it was the country that had failed to live up to its founding ideals, a place that has disappointed her and so many immigrants, refugees, and minorities like her,” end quote. If anything, that’s an understatement.
Omar isn’t disappointed in America, she’s enraged by it. Virtually every public statement she makes accuses Americans of bigotry and racism. This is an immoral country, she says. She has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people. That should worry you, and not just because Omar is now a sitting member of Congress.
Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country. A system designed to strengthen America is instead undermining it. Some of the very people we try hardest to help have come to hate us passionately.
Maybe that’s our fault for asking too little of our immigrants. We aren’t self-confident enough to make them assimilate, so they never feel fully American. Or maybe the problem is deeper than that, maybe we are importing people from places whose values are simply antithetical to ours. Who knows what the problem is, but there is a problem, and whatever the cause, this cannot continue. It’s not sustainable.
No country can import large numbers of people who hate it and expect to survive. The Romans were the last to try that, with predictable results. So, be grateful for Ilhan Omar, annoying as she is. She’s a living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately, or else.