Saturday, December 03, 2005
Yelling “racist” as an “argument” in the immigration debate
By The Mighty Greenwald

All in a single one-line post, Oliver Willis manages to perfectly illustrate the cheapest, most intellectually dishonest — and, for those who wield it in the immigration debate, the most self-destructive — form of argumentation.

Willis references a post by Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly, which quotes a letter from anti-illegal-immigration Congressman Tom Tancredo to his supporters in which Rep. Tancredo asks for help in what Tancredo calls the “struggle to preserve our national identity against the tide of illegal immigrants flooding the United States.” In response to Tancredo’s letter, Willis snidely writes:

Hey, Tom Tancredo … Just say “white power” and get it off your chest.

So, there’s Willis’ self-satisfied decree, in its vapid entirety. According to Willis (and many of Drum’s commentators, if not Drum himself), anyone who believes that it’s important for a nation to be comprised of citizens who have at least some joint national allegiance and a minimal common foundation — never mind a common language in which they can communicate with one another — is a White Supremacist bigot…