President Trump on Monday night spoke about political elites and illegal immigration -- two themes he hits quite often. Two themes that help define the presidential race now in progress.
Kirsten Gillibrand is in that race and is not just a candidate, but really a living metaphor. Gillibrand is someone who has lived a remarkably fortunate life. Until about 10 years ago, she was a member of Congress. Virtually nobody outside the mostly rural 20th congressional district in upstate New York had ever heard of her. She was considered a thoroughly average member of Congress, maybe a little below average.
And then one day, Hillary Clinton decided to run for president and Gillibrand hit paydirt. She was plucked from obscurity and handed one of the safest Senate seats in America.
Overnight, Gillibrand became a national figure without even having to win an election. Amazing. It was the political equivalent of inheriting a billion dollars. Maybe not surprisingly, Gillibrand's views changed accordingly. She soon adopted the politics of the trust fund left. Before long, there wasn't a fashionable opinion she didn't have on any topic -- guns, abortion, immigration -- you name it. As her friends in Aspen and Martha's Vineyard became more decadent and more contemptuous of the country around them, so did Kirsten Gillibrand.
This past weekend, when she appeared on "Face the Nation," Gillibrand was arguing against continuing to operate the United States as a sovereign country. "Let everyone in," she demanded. "Detaining anyone is immoral."
Margaret Brennan, CBS News host:: But you oppose even what the Obama administration did in terms of keeping families together or keeping them together for a longer period of time in detention?
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., 2020 presidential candidate: I wouldn't -- as president of the United States, I wouldn't use the detention system at all.
Brennan: Homeland Security, they are saying hundreds of thousands of people are crossing the border, and they need to go somewhere before their asylum claims are actually heard. What would you do with them?
Gillibrand: They don't need to be incarcerated. They can, if they're given a lawyer and given a process, they will follow it.
Hundreds of thousands of people -- millions of people -- over time. Where will all those people go? Well, they won't go to Kirsten Gillibrand's neighborhood, obviously. They're not headed to Martha's Vineyard, or Aspen or Southampton, obviously. But they're going to dying industrial cities that Gillibrand believes could use more Democratic voters.
"What the state of New York does well is we teach," she said recently. "We actually take refugee families into our communities. We would be delighted to take refugee families into cities like Buffalo and Syracuse and Rochester, and Albany."
To [Kirsten] Gillibrand and her friends on the left, America is not a nation, it's a pinata filled with 200 years of treasure. "Get some quick before it's gone." That's what Gillibrand is promising the world.
So think for a minute about what Gillibrand is saying. She is arguing that anybody from anywhere in the world must be allowed into the United States, awarded a publicly-financed lawyer, given a free place to live, along with free health care and schools -- all of it you pay for -- and allowed to stay indefinitely, unless they lose a court case that, by the way, they will definitely show up for. That's her core assumption.
The people who have demonstrated contempt for our laws will arrive in court when asked. Gillibrand trusts them to do that. And why wouldn't you trust them? That's the base. That's the whole immigration argument that she's making -- which is that, unlike you regular Americans, who are lazy and stupid and not worth helping, immigrants are basically perfect. They're smarter, more industrious, and more creative than you or any of your American-born neighbors were or could be. That's what they believe
However, the facts suggest a more complicated picture. Recently, ICE launched a pilot program to conduct DNA tests of adults and children arriving at El Paso and McAllen, Texas, the border crossings there. When they checked, they found that nearly a third of the kids were not related to the adults they were with. It was fraud on a massive scale. It also revealed something far darker. It revealed that our deliberate failure to protect our borders has made our own government a party to the trafficking of children.
It would be hard overall to design an immigration system that's worse for a country -- our country. But Democrats don't care. To a party totally controlled by identity politics, everything is about race or gender or sexuality. Nothing else matters, including reality.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters recently tried to explain how giving preference to immigrants who speak English is -- can you guess -- racist.
Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calf.: Some of that is very racist. It is not keeping with what this country is supposed to be all about.
John Berman, CNN anchor: What exactly -- just so our viewers know -- are you saying as racist there?
Waters: Well, you know this business about you must speak English. We're going to give you points for speaking English,and we don't want poor people. We only want those people who are earning substantial wages already. I think that some of those policies are racist.
Imagine the CNN anchor asking of Maxine Waters, just to be specific, what is racist? Everything, of course. But in this specific case, she and virtually everyone else in her party is arguing that Americans have no right to want immigrants who speak English.
Americans have no right to want immigrants with job skills. Nancy Pelosi explained that last week. Americans have no right to decide how many immigrants come here or how long they stay. And yet, as Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and others have just told us, Americans are required to pay for free health care for everyone who comes, along with housing and education and lots of others. Got that?
You can see where all of this is heading and fast. In France, they're nearly there. This was the scene at Charles de Gaulle, the country's biggest airport on Sunday. Hundreds of illegal immigrants from Africa took over a terminal to make political demands. At one point, a leader of that demonstration chanted into a loudspeaker, , "France does not belong to the French. Everyone has a right to be here."
Kirsten Gillibrand would agree with that. "America for Americans"? That's racist. You don't deserve your own country. To Gillibrand and her friends on the left, America is not a nation, it's a pinata filled with 200 years of treasure. "Get some quick before it's gone." That's what Gillibrand is promising the world.
How long before groups of angry illegal aliens protest in this country? "Where's our share of the spoils? " they'll wonder. "The one that Gillibrand told us about?" That day is coming soon.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on May 20, 2019.
