New York Times reporter turned left-wing Times columnist, filed "Not Like Us " for Saturday's paper, portraying the Republican field as avidly chasing the "red-faced" "immigrant-hatred vote," calling out not only Donald Trump but Ted Cruz, a Cuban-American.
But first, Egan unveiled a supposedly clever historical sleight of hand designed to shame conservatives:
They were criminals -- thugs and thieves -- a single ethnic group that filled the jails of big cities. “Scum unloaded on American wharves,” one speaker in Philadelphia said of them. Dirty, filthy, foreign. As for their children, they were “utterly ignorant of a place such as school,” The New York Herald reported.
Mexicans? No, the Irish of the 1850s, then pouring into Anglo-Saxon America at such a rate that it gave rise to a political party founded in opposition to immigration -- the Know-Nothings. At one point, it was second largest party in the United States, complete with a paramilitary arm called the Wide Awakes.
....
Donald Trump -- we’ve found your century. The xenophobes have always been with us, sometimes in power, usually not. It’s the mother of all ironies that a nation where all but about 2 percent (the Native Americans) of the population can trace its lineage to some distant land is now going through another of its anti-immigrant moments.
But good news: The 2015 version is a weak strain of the earlier tea. It will flush out those camped in the Republican Party who have long used code words and fabrications to hide their loathing of people who “are not you,” in Trump’s phrase.
Those immigrant haters include Ted Cruz, Texas senator, Republican presidential candidate....and a Cuban-American.
“I salute Donald Trump,” said Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, one of the first to be flushed , and also one of the jillion candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. Cruz wants some of the immigrant-hatred vote , at least 10 percent of the primary audience, that has catapulted Trump to the top tier in polls. The other candidates are afraid of Trump. And Democrats, even the atheists, have become devout believers in a benevolent God, as Trump keeps delivering on their prayers.
It will only get better as Republican primaries move into all-white, anti-immigrant strongholds. Here, you can expect to see clusters of red-faced older men clutching copies of “¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole,” by the polemicist Ann Coulter. Here’s a sample line: “Today’s immigrants aren’t coming here to breathe free, they are coming to live for free.”
And for a liberal so exquisitely sensitive about slights against those who are different, Egan certainly had no qualms about portraying Alaskans as odd, if it meant getting in shots against Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign.
Egan actually does call San Francisco's "sanctuary" policy for illegal immigrants "inane," only to lapse back into long-established Times-speak of cowering "undocumented" immigrants "living in the shadows."
Well, then, if they aren’t leeches, Mexicans are still rapists and criminals, as Trump claimed. What about the oft-deported illegal held for murder in San Francisco? That killing looks more like a result of bureaucratic negligence, in part because of San Francisco’s inane sanctuary policy, than a reason to go after job-seeking Latinos living in the shadows. Still, in conservative media circles, one murder proves the narrative.
After decrying racial stereotyping, Egan again shows his liberal hypocrisy by engaging in the same thing, from the anti-white side, in a manner he would surely call racist if done by conservatives about crime rates.
In fact, first-generation immigrants have a much lower crime rate than the overall population. As to the rapists claim, whites accounted for 71 percent of all sexual assaults in 2013, even though they are only 63 percent of the population, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Latinos, though 17 percent of the population, committed 9 percent of sex crimes.
Timothy Egan, liberal New York Times reporter turned left-wing Times columnist, filed "Not Like Us" for Saturday's paper, portraying the Republican field as avidly chasing the "red-faced" "immigrant-hatred vote," calling out not only Donald Trump but Ted Cruz, a Cuban-American.
