Cuccinelli is a White Supremacist
Ken Cuccinelli isn’t confused about his remarks:
"Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge," Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Tuesday, twisting Emma Lazarus' famous words on a bronze plaque at the Statue of Liberty.
Ingber, Sasha, and Rachel Martin. “Immigration Chief: 'Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor Who Can Stand On Their Own 2 Feet'.” NPR, NPR, 13 Aug. 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/08/13/750726795/immigration-chief-give-me-your-tired-your-poor-who-can-stand-on-their-own-2-feet.
He knows what he’s saying. He knows he’s pushing America to be a land not much different that the dreams of Nazi Germany.
It’s just OK because his kind’ll be on the top, this time.
This ties right back into the Birthright Citizenship fight Trump wants to have. He, and his ilk, fear the change coming to the American diaspora, and have convinced far too many — a too many with guns and a lack of self-discipline — that they way is The Future…
…because it is certainly not The American Dream.
That’s not to say America hasn’t been utterly racist, in the past, around immigration. Those laws were real, and hurt millions of people who only wanted a safe place to live, to grow. Who knows how many contributions to the best America has could have been made, er we opened up the way our lofty words and dreams align?
For we have had these dreams of openness, and the blessings thereof, for a long, long time:
The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent & respectable Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights & previleges, if by decency & propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.
Washington , George. From George Washington to Joshua Holmes, 2 December 1783, https://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-print-01-02-02-6127.
I again submit to your consideration the expediency of establishing a system for the encouragement of immigration. […] While the demand for labor is much increased here, tens of thousands of persons, destitute of remunerative occupation, are thronging our foreign consulates and offering to emigrate to the United States if essential, but very cheap, assistance can be afforded them. It is easy to see that under the sharp discipline of civil war the nation is beginning a new life. This noble effort demands the aid and ought to receive the attention and support of the Government.
Lincoln , Abraham. “State of the Union 1863.” State of the Union 1863 < Abraham Lincoln < Presidents < American History From Revolution To Reconstruction and Beyond, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/abraham-lincoln/state-of-the-union-1863.php.
These two quotes struggle with the realities of their moments. Washington wrote that while owning slaves — people who desperately needed relief from oppression and persecution from him, and other Founders.
Lincoln’s words are shaped by the realities of labor shortages and, at best, luke-warm interest in freeing slaves, much less making African-Americans free from the simmering oppression that would, in decades, come to utterly consume the American psyche.
However, in both the American Dream is clear, and we guide our modern values by that — not by the flaws and horrors our ancestors perpetuated. By insisting that those older, hate-filled values have meaning today, Cuccinelli shows the limits of his White Supremacist values.
White supremacy, much like it’s “labelmate” Facism, can never truly dream of the Future. Rather, it embeds itself in fear of The Now, and demands mythology — hate-filled in every case — shore up that fear, fueling it.
Because it’s given life via myths, the fuel of innovation — the real power of America — is lost. Fascism, and White Supremacy, will never create the vast array of great art and entertainment; it’s bones are too brittle, it’s Leadership too scared and thin-skinned, to survive that effort, to allow those ideas to blossom.
And creativity in technology is paralleled, is part and parcel, of creativity in the arts. To stifle one in unhealthy ways is to stifle the other. To demand that only Certain People can contribute to America’s creative force, is to stop being a force on the world stage.
Cuccinelli is one of many growing cancers in the American body politic, ones that can and will choke out every bit of power from this country. It will leave us a bloated husk of a land, unable to fend for ourselves.
Rather than lauded, we will be pitied. And we will have done it, to ourselves.
Time to fight back.
(This Essay was born from the following tweets, my thanks to Matt Yglesias for bringing them forward!)
But maybe Ken Cuccinelli & Donald Trump are the guys to have really figured this out. 