More Misinformation from the Media
“Kansas Republicans appear to have thumbed their noses at the party establishment on Tuesday in the primary for governor, failing to persuasively back the sitting governor, Jeff Colyer, and instead leaving room to elect Kris Kobach, the state’s secretary of state — and quite possibly the most pernicious public official in America.
“This distinction is not conferred lightly. Mr. Kobach has labored for it long and hard, notably in the areas of voter suppression and nativism. . . .
“A former constitutional law professor with degrees from Yale, Harvard and Oxford, Mr. Kobach’s specialty is concocting creative legal arguments to achieve controversial political ends — such as, say, forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall. (His plan: use a provision in the Patriot Act to track and tax the remittances that undocumented immigrants send home to family members.) He was the brains behind the self-deportation proposal for which Mitt Romney was widely mocked in his 2012 presidential run.” – Kris Kobach Is the GOP at Its Worst, The New York Times, 8/8/18 [Link]
Fact Check of Quote: This article is an excellent example of the kind of denigration and smear language that the pro-mass immigration media commonly deploy against genuine immigration reformers. To call Mr. Kobach “a pernicious official” is verbal overkill, and to say he supports “voter suppression” is flatly dishonest.
What he does support is adequate oversight of voting procedures to eliminate fraud and ensure that only citizens vote. This should not be a problem for anyone truly concerned about the integrity of our elections. But that, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to include much of our mainstream media. They maintain that voting fraud by non-citizens is not a problem because it seldom happens. A great deal of evidence suggests otherwise.
As for Koback’s alleged “nativism,” this is a smear term the media commonly hurl to disparage Americans who have a special love and affection for their native land. Nativism, as they use it, is another word for patriotism. Maybe the editorialists of the Times think that’s “pernicious,” but most Americans would disagree.
This article sneers that Kobach “[concocts] creative legal arguments,” even as it admits his impressive legal credentials. And what is really so “controversial” about his political goals?
Opponents of President Trump’s border wall say it is too expensive. So why would they object to having illegal aliens pay for it by taxing the remittances they send home? The article further declares that Kobach’s “self-deportation” proposal was “widely mocked.” But just who are the mockers, other than immigration enthusiasts, in and out of the media?
A standard argument they use for giving amnesty to 11 million illegal aliens is that there are too many of them to deport at once. Self-deportation provides an answer to this problem. It proposes a slow but sure tightening of immigration law enforcement so the illegal aliens will feel pressure to go home on their own, i.e., self deportation. It’s a strategy that could work—which is why mass immigration advocates want to discredit it.
If the Times editors really want to find something “pernicious,” they might consider their tactic of character assassination.