by Matthew Boose
America is one of the most welcoming nations on the planet, but you would never know it listening to our mass media. An unceasing avalanche of contempt for Americans and their “racist” and “backward” ways flows from the mouths of liberal talking heads on cable news. It is particularly maddening to listen to this talk from recently arrived immigrants in positions of power and influence. The likes of U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ana Navarro on “The View,” and MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan have done very well for themselves in the United States, but they don’t do a very good job of showing their gratitude.
Imagine if you invited someone over for dinner and they spent the night making snide comments about your out-of-date kitchen. It’s just not polite.
Many of these figures wear the “child of immigrants” and “hyphenated-American” labels like honorifics (“I love hyphens,” Navarro says), a wise career move in a time that treats borders as arbitrary lines and those who cross them illegally as more worthy than Americans. These super-citizens are not shy about exercising their privileges. They never stop talking about their foreign background, which they use as a cudgel against the native-born. They tend to become particularly voluble in the aftermath of politically charged events with the potential to transform the culture and laws of the United States.
With gun control back in the news, we have heard an awful lot of unsolicited complaining from these people – who probably would not be here if not for the 1965 Hart-Celler Act that opened the nation up to millions of Third World immigrants and their descendants – about everything they think needs to be changed in the country that generously gave them and their families a new home. After first noting she is a “child of immigrants” for etiquette’s sake, New York Times journalist Farnaz Fassihi laments that because of gun violence, “everyone I know wishes they could raise their children outside of America.”
Can you believe it? Naughty, gun-toting Americans have lost the approval of transients with no respect for the American way of life.
Mehdi Hasan is a British man of Indian ancestry who became a naturalized American citizen within days of the 2020 election. Naturally, he’s using his MSNBC show to call for the repeal of the Second Amendment:
But Mehdi, you’ll say . . . conservatives will accuse liberals of wanting to take away their guns. They already say that! . . . If this is how they respond to background checks, then part of me wonders, why don’t Democrats go further? Why not put the Second Amendment on the table for negotiation? If that’s what they’re using to block the mildest, most basic, most popular of gun control measures, why not put it on the table? Why not make the Constitution a living document again by, you know, amending it? We’ve done it before.
Hasan raises a number of interesting points. Here’s another one for us to chew on: how did somebody with such overt hostility to the liberties enshrined in our Bill of Rights get citizenship in the first place? And why has he not been deported yet?
New York Times contributor and first-generation American Wajahat Ali, who is of Pakistani descent, wonders in a recent article whether the time has come for him to flee the United States. He is the real victim of generations of rapid demographic and cultural change that Americans never requested. America, he writes, has become too hostile to nonwhites and Muslims like him. (Pakistanis are among the wealthiest ethnic groups in America. Another example of white supremacy in action!)
Ali proffers a laundry list of banal grievances about guns, “mass incarceration,” QAnon, “white supremacy,” the “Big Lie,” and of course, the Great Replacement “conspiracy theory.” Blah, blah, blah. America is “number one in all the wrong categories,” he writes. “Our democracy” is under threat by uppity conservative white people who rejected the “free and fair” 2020 election.
“It’s pretty clear that this country and its democracy aren’t trending in the right direction,” Ali concludes.
Ali lays it on thick. “It’s tough to love a country that doesn’t love you back, and even tougher to fight for it as it’s trying to kill you,” he writes. Surveying his escape options, New Zealand catches his eye: they take gun violence seriously there and there are “a lot of halal options.”
Setting aside the quality of Ali’s witless writing, it’s clear that he doesn’t actually like America all that much. Like many of the same stripe, he has an idea of what America should be. He just doesn’t like America as it really is. The free republic of our founders, or what is left of it, offends and repels him. Until 1965, America was not even a legitimate nation: it “has always been a land of violence, hypocrisy, and contradictions,” but starting about 60 years ago, “it’s also been a country that has often slowly and painfully trudged forward towards progress.”
We use the term “refugee” (or used to, anyway) to describe a person fleeing genocide or war, not whatever it is that Ali is complaining about in his article. Those who abhor the folkways and values of the United States are free to leave at any time. They are not being held against their will. They can always find some other place to call home that is more suitable to their political and racial preferences. This is one luxury that most native-born Americans do not have. If things go south, they have nowhere else to run. It is they who are being displaced, who have had their nation transformed without their consent and who are mocked over this fact on a daily basis by the likes of Wajahat Ali.
If anyone should be angry, it is they, not ungrateful interlopers who are just now finding that they don’t want to live here. And let’s be honest, we know they’re bluffing. We know because on most days, Hart-Celler Americans with MSNBC jobs can be found gloating about the “Great Replacement conspiracy theory.” They know which way the country is shifting. They could at least be polite about taking possession of the land others have called home for generations.
But why should they be, when our country treats them like nobility? Our founders abolished the privileges of European aristocracy when they established a free and equal democracy, but America today is becoming more like an Old World caste society: every day, the media, politicians, entertainers, and innumerable ordinary “folx” under the boot of a repressive woke culture bow and scrape to flatter “people of color” and prop up their self-esteem.
But this compulsory ritual humiliation is not enough to satisfy the Navarros, Alis, and Hasans of the world. America is still too “racist,” which is to say too white, for their liking. There are too many guns floating around in the hands of law-abiding Republican voters. There is still too much freedom to spread “hate speech” on social media. There isn’t enough centralized control. MSNBC contributors ranting about “disinformation” don’t get enough sway over the public square. There are still too many maskless faces and unvaxxed bodies, too many blue-collar white guys in gas guzzlers on the highways.
America is still too American.
Many recent arrivals come with an expectation that their new home will become more like their old home, and they make little effort to help maintain the things that made their new home a great and prosperous nation. The overwhelming majority of Hispanic and Asian voters support the policies of the Democratic Party, which more and more resemble those of a Third World dictatorship: mass censorship, rigged elections, ethnic patronage, using the justice system for retribution, and disarming the population.
Why do Americans tolerate this? Why does our country put up with abuse from foreigners who exploit the goodwill of our people to destroy the things we hold dear, who exult in spitting on our home day after day from positions in media and government that they would not have, if not for the benevolence of the country that took them in?
If you wanted to convince Americans that it was a mistake to open up our borders to the Third World, the Mehdi Hasans of the world are doing a splendid job.
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Matthew Boose is a Mt. Vernon fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter @matt_boose.
Image “Rep. Ilhan Omar” by Rep. Ilhan Omar.
