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Everyone has moments of stupid.
Sometimes, we laugh about them and share them with friends and family so everyone gets a laugh. We might even share them on social media so others can get in on the joke. But those are cases when we realize we did something dumb.
Then we have the cases of where people say or do something dumb and it gets picked up and shared with the world. Those folks often didn’t realize they’d done something stupid and might not even after things went viral.
Yet this guy? This guy wrote something stupid for a major newspaper, which suggests he didn’t know it was dumb but he wanted the whole world to see it.
The election has been over for weeks and, honestly, reacting to it is starting to get boring. So, let us skip to the point of this column.
It's perfectly fine that people are out here blocking each other on social media or cutting each other off in real life as we head into the holidays and the new Trump administration.
More than that, it makes total sense, and I support it. Also, people ditching X, formerly known as Twitter, is long overdue. They’re not running to the dreaded “safe spaces.” They’re running to peace. Conservatives have been doing that for years.
But I’ll get to that later.
Well, yeah, we have. But we’ve also taken part in the general discussions on places like Facebook, Twitter/X, and elsewhere. In a lot of cases, we went to those “safe spaces” in part because we fought those battles and not just against fellow users. We had to do battle with those sites themselves, which had a pronounced bias and shut down literally anything that looked less than progressive.
What’s happening now, though, is that people are shutting out literally everyone who disagrees with them.
But that’s not the stupid in question.
See, this writer—who is apparently the director of opinion for the newspaper chain Gannett—actually wrote this:
People who look like me are those you want to mass deport
Let me put it another way. I am one generation from family members who came to America from Mexico. My family is here because of a guest worker program that today’s political climate would never allow, mostly because of Republicans.
I grew up, went to school and lived my life with the very people many of you think should be part of Donald Trump’s promised militarized mass deportation. I am them. They are me. We are who you voted against.
Why would I sit at the same table and pass the stuffing around with those voters on Thanksgiving?
I’m not even judging or dismissing people who voted for that. It makes sense to me that people who have no connection to that community would follow the Trumpian scare tactics and vote for that. It honestly does. It’s easy to dismiss members of a community you don’t know. Now, it makes no sense that people from that community would vote for it, but everybody had a decision to make.
But I’m not breaking bread with that. No chance.
First, you are judging.
That said, there’s a big difference that this dipstick has missed entirely. See, his family came as part of a guest worker program. In other words, they came here legally.
The people Trump says he’s going to deport? They’re not.
See, it’s not about who someone looks like, it’s about the actions they took. Why is this such a hard thing to understand? No one serious is talking about deporting Hispanics. They’re talking about people who entered this country illegally, all while a lot of people are still trying to work their way through the immigration system the right way. We’re talking about deporting them because they didn’t just jump to the front of the line, they slipped in the back door when no one was paying attention.
What’s more, this isn’t a difficult concept to grasp. In fact, those family members of his who voted for Trump? They grasped it just fine.
See, the left’s biggest problem isn’t that they’re interested in spending money the Constitution doesn’t permit. There are ways to get around that and do so lawfully, after all.
No, the problem is that they don’t see people as people. They see them as groups, and then they think everyone in that group is supposed to conform to the image laid down by others.
The idea of a black conservative or a Hispanic Republican boggles their minds, even though it shouldn’t.
As someone who sees people as individuals, there’s nothing to be surprised by. People are complex, so while a billionaire could be a socialist, a poor black man from rural Alabama could be a Republican.
And any point in between.
But if this guy isn’t going to show up to his family’s Thanksgiving celebration, I suspect the rest of the family will have something new to give thanks for. After all, no one needs to be bothered with humorless scolds who think you’re incapable of thinking for yourself, of reaching decisions on your own, and should have it all fed to you by your progressive betters—like people who write for Gannett, maybe?
It’s the holidays, after all. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve, all revolving around being with friends and family, celebrating, and feeling joyful in our lives. Having someone who thought “joy” was a campaign strategy and is now bound and determined to make sure you don’t have any of it since you voted otherwise isn’t really worth anyone’s time.
Especially when it’s their choice.
I think the dude’s family dodged a bullet.
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Politics, culture, a dose of snark, and a profound love of personal and economic freedom.