As well-intentioned as police in Mexico or corporate executives in China may seem to some, they’re not giving their all to make sure our team comes out on top. They naturally have other priorities. We have our own, and if you call them nationalist, you’re not describing something terribly strange, dangerous, or alien. You’re describing the same natural impulse that animates and bonds a typical sports team. Maybe that’s why, to the horror of America’s liberal intellectuals and journalists, nationalism and patriotism come as naturally as watching the Super Bowl to vast swaths of Middle America.
The nineteenth-century Scottish anthropologist John Ferg-uson McLennan argued that even as societies progress from more primitive to more complex forms, they retain rituals that have “totemic” power because they connote the very formation of the society itself: its people. The people cannot and should not try to replicate the exact conditions of their founding. No going back to living in caves or, in the case of the United States, in cabins without floors or running water. But it is natural to revel in the ceremonies, the victories, the informal quasi-religion that reminds us we are still one people.
Newcomers are not always to be shunned, but they will have to prove themselves, like new teammates on a top-tier sports team. Don’t tell me that’s hard to understand, that it doesn’t jibe with some of your most basic intuitions. Don’t tell me that it’s hateful. It’s respect for that which has been built over long years by tacit partnership among a very large and dynamic team of collaborators. It is normal to want that team of some 330 million to thrive and perfectly normal to be peeved at those who insult it, tear it down, or don’t really want to be a working part of it at all.
No team is perfectly homogeneous. It shouldn’t be. But we should not be so reductive as to equate team “diversity” with race or gender alone. Humans are diverse based on how they grew up, where they live, how they solve problems, how they learn, and how they process information, among many other things. A functioning team has to be flexible, has to make use of the differing capabilities and perspectives of its members. There is room for dissent even on a loving and cooperative team. But if you’re there to sabotage it, and there are times when some activists give that impression, I will be there to call you out.
I was fighting for a team called America when I made that first Tucker Carlson appearance. If you saw it and heard a hint of anger, I’m sure you also sensed the love. If you’re a sports fan, you’re familiar with that combination.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Birthright Worth Defending
“Restricted immigration is not an offensive but purely a defensive action. It is not adopted in criticism of others in the slightest degree but solely for the purpose of protecting ourselves. We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America be kept American.”
—Calvin Coolidge, accepting the Republican presidential nomination, August 14, 1924
I’m often asked how I juggle the responsibilities of functionally being a Fox News volunteer contributor with that of a congressman. It’s easy to go on Fox. It’s work to go on CNN, but it’s pure joy to go on MSNBC. Where else is every question about how racist you are? Predictable TV is boring TV. And I don’t do boring.
And so it was with MSNBC host Chris Hayes who, on January 16, 2018, tried to pigeonhole me as—wait for it—a racist for thinking that America should have an immigration policy that puts American needs ahead of foreign ones. Immigration, unique among political issues, reveals just how out of touch the radical Left really is. Of course, it’s hard to be in touch when you never touch the public. The Left’s coalition is increasingly high tech, high finance, and higher education—institutions highly unlikely to be displaced by illegal immigrant labor.
The way it works on MSNBC is that the host has to simultaneously virtue signal to his viewing base while trying to cause drama between you and the president. They stopped reporting the news long ago and seek instead to make news through opinion. Hayes or Maddow—to be honest, it’s hard to tell them apart—will furrow his/her brow and shake his/her head and ask you why it was that the president was so hurtful, so offensive, so beyond the pale, so [insert focus-group-tested word du jour].
The standard Republican shtick is to agree with the president without necessarily agreeing with his language or his tone. You know the drill. We agree without endorsing. The host sputters and putters and then breaks for commercial. Lots of heat, not lots of light. The moment is over so fast that it’s sometimes as if it never happened. I try to make every unforgiving minute count.
I gave the standard reply, at least at first. I was new and still learning.
“I would not pick those terms, but I would say that the conditions in Haiti are deplorable, they are disgusting,” I said. “I mean, everywhere you look in Haiti, it’s sheet metal and garbage when I was there.”
Hayes hit back, stuttering from my candor. He wasn’t used to it. “I would suggest that people would find that kind of characterization, where people live, have pride, and love the place they’re from, as derogatory.”
“Look, there are very bad conditions in Haiti. It’s accurate,” I replied with a smile. “Go there. Look around.”
Look around. Draw your own conclusions. Use your own mind. After all, as President Trump said, we don’t have time for political correctness. The first duty of being an intellectual elite is to tell the truth, but it isn’t that hard when you can easily see the truth for yourself. We’ve all seen the videos of illegal aliens streaming across our borders. We’re not streaming across
