This how every single argument for mass immigration goes.
Step 1: "Oh, you have concerns about [X group] coming into your country? Well, here's one person from that group who's good. What do you think of that, huh? Do you hate this person, too??"
[when presented with evidence that said person isn't representative of said group writ large]
Step 2: Actually, all those bad things you just mentioned are America's fault. And anyways, it's good for them to come here. I don't have to explain why. It just is.
[no, I think that would probably be bad for us]
Step 3: Honestly, who even is "us"? Who is "we"? Does America even exist? Do you know what America is? Because other people think America's something else. So how can you be so sure that America is anything at all?
Step 3.5: Actually, America is a real thing. But that real thing is just values—values that just so happen to require us to accept unlimited amounts of people from every single place in the world. And if you disagree, you actually hate America.
Step 4: Statue of Liberty quote. Obligatory.
Pro-tip: At this point, you start really layering the moral condescension on thick. You can't believe that anybody would be so stupid as to not want infinite Haitians. It's insulting. It's outrageous. Frankly, it's un-American. Does your interlocutor know anything about America?
Step 5: Google "quotes about why immigration is awesome."
Try to find one from somebody that you think the guy you're arguing with might like and/or respect. Boom. Owned.
Step 6: Alright, you know what? None of that worked. Change of plans. Pivot to just googling pictures of the guy you're arguing with and posting them in his mentions.
Step 7: Double down. Then bizarrely claim at the end that you're not saying the thing that everyone knows you're obviously saying. (At this point you're not even talking about immigration anymore, which is good, because you know you lost that argument).
Anyways, none of this is actually an abstract thought experiment—as much as the other side wants it to be. Real people. Real consequences.
@America_2100 is going to Charleroi, PA next week to report on what’s happening on the ground. Follow our account to keep up with the story.
The authorities were so committed to denying that any one group was to blame for this behavior—and so determined to smear anyone who suggested otherwise—that people's "fear of being seen as racist" actually "hindered the detection of and intervention in abuse."
Here's the (left-wing!) British journalist who did one of the first investigations into the scandal, writing in 2017:
"Despite the quality of material I had amassed, it took me until 2007 to get my first piece published because some editors feared an accusation of racism."
This is a serious—even existential—problem in red America.
Any conservative who's done work at the state level knows that the deep-red states often have the most egregiously liberal Republicans. This is something @RMConservative talks about a lot:
This is true across the board, on any number of key issues. It's something I discovered almost immediately after getting into politics. My first few big breaks were investigative pieces about the mind-bogglingly bad state of local GOPs in the deepest-red parts of the country.
Nestled in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley—about 30 miles from Pittsburgh—Charleroi is a poor, primarily white working-class community.
Less than 18% of the residents have a bachelor’s degree, and the median household income is less than $45,000 a year.
The town was once fed by the region’s booming steel industry, and a glass-making plant based in Charleroi itself—a creation of the Belgian immigrants who settled there.
As late as the 1990s, locals say it was still a wonderful small town to grow up in:
The Guardian's Jason Wilson just wrote a hit piece about me and @America_2100.
Just to give you a sense of how sloppy it was: It's only been up since this morning, but they’ve already had to issue two corrections.
These are the questions he emailed me yesterday. Beyond parody:
The hit was supposed to be about our reporting in Charleroi, Pennsylvania—where we've spent the past week, on the ground, reporting on the consequences of a flood of Haitian immigrants into the small working-class town. (See below).
But Wilson couldn't even do the bare minimum research for his reporting. For example—this morning, when the piece went live, it claimed that we had "only recorded interviews with older white residents of the town."