By James Howard Kunstler
Kunstler.com, January 31, 2017: The most dishonest and damaging trope of recent years is the widely-accepted idea on the Left that illegal immigrants are merely “undocumented” — as if they were the hapless victims of some clerical error made by the government and therefore deserving of a pass. Language matters. The acceptance and repetition of this lie has in effect given permission to the left to lie whenever it suits their purposes about all kinds of things, for instance the delusion that Russia stole the election from Hillary Clinton. And it is certainly true that they are assisted by legacy media giants such as
The New York Times,
The Washington Post, and
NPR.
The Times, especially is keen to provoke a national crisis that might unseat Trump, by simply declaring it so in a three-column headline.
The furor seemed rather out of proportion to the people inconvenienced by Trump’s administrative blundering: about 300 green card holders out of 300,000 travelers admitted over the weekend — even after the White House walked back its green card miscue on Sunday. And it gives the impression even to someone who is allergic to conspiracy theory (yours truly) that some organizing principle is behind it. That principle may be the deep neurosis of the Dem/Prog Left reduced to virtue-signaling in their out-of-power echo chamber. Having no coherent ideas about the immigration issue besides resistance to it, they offer only sentimental narratives: tears on the statue of liberty, “dreamers,” sanctuary cities, nation-of-open-arms, we’re-all-children-of-immigrants, and anyway North America was stolen from the Indians. The hysteria is impressive, as if the Left has come down with ergot poisoning, seeing witches (racists, homophobes, misogynists, white privilege villains, and Russians) behind every juniper shrub in the land.