The Shithole Debate

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, 13 January 2018

Even the libs know that Trump got it right.

President Donald Trump has been a disappointment in many ways. He’s inspired a fanatical leftist counter-reaction. The racial dissident movement is weaker after his first year in office than it was before he was elected. And the demographic transformation of America continues.

Yet we should not regret his election, for President Trump has the singular ability to reveal truths our opponents would prefer to leave unspoken. Sometimes, he bluntly announces these truths himself. Sometimes, the reactions of his foes speak more loudly than even he ever could. Both phenomena are at work in “Shitholegate,” a media firestorm that despite its crudity has sparked what may be the single most important debate on immigration policy since the Jordan Commission.

According to Senator Dick Durbin, President Trump questioned why the United States continues to accept immigrants from “shithole” Africa countries and Haiti. Senator Durbin took it upon himself to leak these comments to the press, which duly reacted with outrage. “Shitholegate” may be the single largest scandal of President Trump’s administration, at least in terms of media reaction.

It is revealing that Senator Durbin felt justified in releasing comments from a private conversation. Such an action, as Senate Republicans have pointed out, shows Democrats were never serious about negotiating an immigration compromise.

We don’t even know if President Trump used the exact words Senator Durbin says he did, since no Republicans seem to be backing his account, and the White House has denied it. But even assuming Senator Durbin’s account is correct, immediately repeating the contents of a private conversation to hostile outsiders is more than a breach of trust. It makes ordinary conversation impossible, since no one has the right to question orthodoxy, even in private.

Of course, that’s precisely the kind of country we live in today. And, as is entirely typical in these cases, the outrage over “Shitholegate” is over the term the president used, not whether what he said was true or false. Essentially, the President of the United States is being accused of blasphemy—dissenting from the unexamined contention that African nations are wonderful, and immigrants from them benefit us. Every screaming editorial, outraged TV journalist, and expletive-laden tweet can be summarized thus: He’s not allowed to say that.

What makes this maddening is that not only is President Trump right, but the immigration position of his opponents is dependent on his being right. Of course those nations are “shitholes.” If they weren’t, leftists wouldn’t have to argue that their citizens should be allowed to stay in the US.

One of the countries President Trump was supposedly referring to was El Salvador. Because of an earthquake back in 2001, 200,000 Salvadorans—whether here legally or illegally—got temporary permission to stay in the United States. Critics say they should not be sent back to a poor country plagued by gang violence. In other words, even though there is no extraordinary emergency in El Salvador, we shouldn’t send Salvadorans back home because it is, in fact, a shithole.

Read the rest at American Renaissance.