Today’s topics are a little insight into some of the people on food stamps and Governor Tim Walz’s deeply dishonest accounting; Karine Jean Pierre’s victim-centric mindset and the dirty little anti-democratic secret her interviewer gave away; and the serious problem with elected politicians who were not born in America and have roots in cultures utterly alien to our own.

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UPDATE: My very kind friend, with remarkable speed, once again provided a transcript:

ANDREA: Hello everybody. It’s Andrea. Now that I’ve gotten the technical hang of this podcast thing, I can’t stop myself. For those who are worried that podcasting will take over reading at American Thinker, don’t worry. We will always be a written language site. These podcasts are an add-on. If you want to find out whether I’ve done a podcast, look at the home page and if you don’t see anything on the home page, I probably haven’t done one. But you can click on the “See More” or “More Blog” link at the very bottom of the blog site to see if there’s one hiding down at the bottom. But this will not diminish our written content. Perhaps one day we’ll have a tag… a heading for videos and audios but for now, don’t worry. I’m just doing this for the fun of it. So, speaking of fun, let me dive right in.

The big thing in the news right now is the fact that SNAP benefits are soon going to be expiring. And this may be one where the Democrats shot themselves in the foot because this is what they think is their ace-in-the-hole. They’re very certain that the American people, at the thought of starving children, will instantly demand that the Republicans cave to Democrat demands to fund illegal alien healthcare. To fund LGBTQ programs in Africa, to do all the other things that the Democrats want. Basically, the Democrats are trying to renegotiate the One Big Beautiful Bill. They lost the negotiations in the spring and they’re trying to get a do-over. What’s happening, though, is that people are learning more about the SNAP program. And what they’re learning, they don’t like. And Matt Walsh had a big thing about the number of immigrants and illegal immigrants who are on SNAP. I didn’t follow up on that because those numbers are debated. Technically, illegal immigrants aren’t supposed to get SNAP benefits although they’re funded through different programs that are subsets of SNAP that I don’t really understand. Also, legal immigrants are getting a lot of SNAP benefits and there are a lot of people who just should be working who are getting a lot of SNAP benefits. There’s also a lot of SNAP fraud. We’ve heard out of Minnesota’s Somali community for the last eight months stories of people who got arrested for SNAP fraud. It is ripe for fraud. There’s no limit on the kind of food they can buy, so Matt Walsh, again, it was a great show he did today about this. That they can buy massive amounts of junk food and sodas and non-nutritious food, which is why most adult SNAP beneficiaries are morbidly obese. That’s one of the reasons they claim they can’t work, because they can’t even walk. If you go on Amazon, you can see for the EBT card that they can get sodas and crackers and candies and junk food and charcuterie dishes. So it’s all insane. I don’t want to cover that, though, because others are covering it. So… oh, there, I did it. So. I’m trying to break the “so” habit. It’s my transitional phrase, the way other people use “um” and “uh”. So if you hear the sounds of slapping, it’s me slapping my face every time I say “so”. So… there. Slap. I will remember not to do it again. What I wanted to talk about is a certain subset of adults who are on food stamps. Last time I did a podcast, I talked about Obamacare because that’s one of the things that Democrats want to keep moving. And they’re trying to renegotiate the One Big Beautiful Bill. I mentioned that I have a friend who has made different life choices than I have, and lives in a world of people who are minimally gainfully employed. I pointed out that most of them just want to have enough from low-level transient jobs or through government benefits that they can do drugs and smoke beer and not work very hard. They don’t want a beautiful home, they don’t want 2.5 beautiful children, they’re not concerned about the future. For them, the future is the next joint. These people were very upset that they would be asked to pay $50 for unlimited medical care when they could go to the Emergency Room and get it for free. These same people, I happen to know, get SNAP. Most of them are on food stamps. My friend, actually, is not. But the rest of them are on food stamps. Adults who are capable of being gainfully employed, but they don’t want to be gainfully employed. I know of only one of them who’s actually a really, crazy hard worker. It was a long time before he developed that ethos. He came from a miserable home life. You could understand why he did not have that ethos. But be that as it may, as long as the government was funding him, he didn’t have to develop the ethos. So, if your… eh, “so” again. If you’re watching the screen, you can see a picture I had ChatGPT make of a bunch of twenty-something, thirty-somethings sitting around a kitchen table in a shabby room with beer cans and bottles on the table and some of them are smoking joints. These are the people who are often on SNAP. It is not a program that is serving widows and orphans and elderly people who have had hard times. It has become a program that is simply abused by people that nobody really feels should be deserving of charity. As always, I have slightly different insights because of the people I’ve gathered over my lifespan.

There’s something else I wanted to talk about, though. That’s, again, almost an obvious point. Governor Tim Walz, whom we almost had as a vice president of the United States, tweeted out yesterday- so that would be Tuesday, because I’m recording this Wednesday, you’ll probably hear it Thursday- what he tweeted is “Every $1 invested in SNAP generates %1.80 in economic activity. It’s not about the money, Trump just wants Americans to go hungry.” The implication is that SNAP isn’t costing taxpayers money, it’s making taxpayers money. This is nonsense. One of the rebuttals going around is about economists: one says to another, they’re walking in the woods, and he sees a pile of manure and he says to the other economist, “I’ll give you $100 to eat it.” And the other economist does. And then they see another pile of manure and the one who had already eaten the manure says to his friend, “Well, I’ll give you $100 to eat that manure.” Pardon me for not silencing my phone. So the original $100 person says, “Sure, I’ll eat it,” and he gets his $100 back. Both of them have a stomach full of manure and the $100 has just gone in a circle. But actually, this is a very old idea and I can’t resist sharing with you one of my favorite little articles, I’ll read it to you. I’ll try to read it in a mellifluous and interesting way to keep your energy up. It’s not that long. But in 1850, the French economist Frederich Bastia did a par- it’s something called “the Parable of the Broken Window”. It’s also about the difference what we see and what we don’t see. And this is exactly the same as Tim Walz’s claim that robbing taxpayers so that undeserving people can buy food somehow makes the whole world richer. I’m quoting here: “Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation- ‘It is an ill wind that blows nobody goods. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?’ Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions. Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the grazier’s trade- that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs- I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen. But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as it too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, ‘Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.’ It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them on another. It is not seen that if he had not a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.” So, fascinating parable. First of all, it talks about that this theory denies free choice in the marketplace. You spend on what you’re forced to spend rather than on what you want to spend. And of course, it also denies the creation of wealth because it simply replaces one thing with a precise other thing. It doesn’t add anything to the economy. I’ve also always found fascinating that phrase- I gotta go back this slide so I can see it precisely- “Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.” One of the things I’ve always said about the average leftist demand for gun control is that what they see is the news with the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality. They see the dead bodies. What they’re incapable of seeing is the people who are saved by guns. There was that study done during the Obama years which was very quickly stifled, which showed over a million I believe, something like 650,000 to a million annual uses of guns defensively. I’m not talking about the ideologues who want to take away guns so they can have unlimited power, because they know that a population armed with sporks, as is the case across Europe, is a helpless population. I’m not saying we should go around attacking the government. I’m saying it’s good for a government to recognize that its people cannot be abused. Every totalitarian- modern totalitarian government, the first thing it’s done has been to seize the guns. So, guns are our reminder to the government that we’re not patsies. I’m talking about the useful idiots who see every story of someone who died in a shooting, and mass shootings, transgender crazy people getting guns. Poor Charlie Kirk, gang shootings, that toddler who gets hold of his mother’s carelessly stored guns and announce that “we must do away with all guns because guns kill”. They do not see that the number of people who are saved by the defensive use of guns exceeds the small amount of killings- the number killed by an exponential amount. And I do meant a small number killed. Out of the population of America, it’s 340 million people, the average is around 40 thousand killed by guns. And of that average, something like half are suicides. So I should be deprived because some badly depressed person chooses to use a gun to kill himself. That’s cray-cray. That’s just not right. But again, it boils down to “your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.” So this parable attacks both the attacks on the Second Amendment and it exposes how either stupid or deeply dishonest Tim Walz is because what he said, very carefully phrased, is “Every $1 invested in SNAP generates $1.80 in economic activity.” Economic activity is not wealth creation. It’s just that dollar swirling around. Whether it’s a dollar exchanged for eating fecal matter or a dollar exchanged for fixing a window that, they’re not going to break- it wouldn’t have required that expenditure. It also reminds me of Milton Friedman when he was asked about shovel-ready jobs. I didn’t assemble that quote in front of me, but what roughly happened was someone said to him “these government jobs are of digging holes. We should give people shovels because at least it gives people work.” And what Milton Friedman said is “If you want to give people work, give them spoons, you’ll put more people to work. But you’ll still end up with a completely useless hole.” When it comes to the economy, Democrats are alternately really not bright because they don’t know what they’re talking about. Or really dangerous because they do know what they’re talking about but they don’t want you to know what they’re talking about.

Onto the next thing. Which is a both very funny and revealing interview that Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker had with Karine Jean-Pierre who’s shilling her book about the campaign and why she had to leave the Democrat party. Basically, she had to leave the Democrat party because as a black, lesbian, female, the Democrat party didn’t understand her,  and they were vicious to Joe Biden who wasn’t a black lesbian female, but is a victim the way a black lesbian female would have been, something something dot dot dot. More and more confuse-confuse. The interview that was, I said, is both funny and revealing, not just about Jean-Pierre but about the Democrat party. So it’s entitled “Why Biden’s White House Press Secretary is Leaving the Democratic Party”. Karine Jean-Pierre feels that Democrats were so mean to Biden that she’s becoming an Independent. The funny question is… the premise is that the party was undermining Biden in that three week period after the disastrous debate and Karine Jean-Pierre felt that was so heinous that she had to become an Independent. And he asked her, “but why were they doing that? Why were they asking Biden to leave?” And she says “To step aside”. That’s a bootstrapping statement. Of course, that’s why they were asking him to leave, they wanted him to leave! Such a brilliant press secretary. There’s more to this than just that period of time. This is very layered, right? There’s a period of time that I questioned what was happening and how do we treat our own, how do we treat people who are decent people? And then you also have to think about how I’m thinking about this as a black woman who’s part of the LGBTQ community and living in this time where I also don’t think Democrats right now, Democrats’ leadership is protecting vulnerable people in the way that it should. Is there any time when Karine Jean-Pierre doesn’t manage to put front and center the sole reason she became the press secretary which was that she was a black lesbian? And the other thing is this fascinating need, the only thing she can ever defend. She can’t defend the Constitution, the laws of the United States, the history, our nation, our values. All she can do is defend her victim status and anyone affiliated with her victim status. So funnily enough, now Joe Biden has somehow become analogous to a black lesbian female. I just found that enormously funny. What was more interesting to me was something further down in the interview. It was a question which Chotiner placed to her. “I’m just still trying to understand. You argue that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.” And remember, this is what all the Democrats say. Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy. He threatens our democracy. So that’s his predicate. “You argue that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. A lot of people thought that Biden was not the best person to go up against Trump in the summer of 2024- after his debate, with his approval ratings in the basement. Shouldn’t those people have tried to give Democrats the best chance to replace Trump? You’re talking about Biden like loyalty was owed to him. Isn’t loyalty owed to the country?” Think about that question. Democracy, that is, the primaries, made Biden the Democrat party candidate. But what- and so loyalty wasn’t owed to Biden. It was owed to the primary voters who made him the candidate. But according to Chotiner, from his perch at the New Yorker, loyalty to democracy isn’t loyalty to the people. It’s loyalty to the party. The party had an obligation regardless of the will of the people. If that’s not a threat to democracy, I don’t know what is. 

Finally, I want to talk about immigrants who enter politics. On the one hand, it seems very laudable that scrappy immigrant who comes to this country and becomes involved in our political process, what could be more American? But is it American if these people come from places with values utterly alien to traditional American values? Which, as our founders made clear, are embodied in English common law, the Constitution and the Bible. Those are the sources of American values. And for a long time, those were the immigrants who came here. But this recent batch of immigrants come from very different values and very significantly aren’t taught American values. So let me spell out this theory of mine. I’ll start with a… an AI- yes, AI- assembled list of current politicians who were not born in America. And with two exceptions, all of them were born in countries that not only don’t have the Anglo-European values we have, but have really very- I’m sorry, three of them- were born in countries that don’t have Anglo-European values but have very alien values and even if they came here as children, they were raised by parents who came from those countries. I’m going to rush through this list. Every last one of them, I just had ChatGPT assemble a list, every last one of them is a Democrat. In the senate you have Michael Bennet from New Delhi, India, Tammy Duckworth from Bangkok and Mazie Hirono from Japan, or the Land of Stupid, whichever you want to say. It’s very rare to have someone that stupid from Japan. And she really is a sport of nature. In the house, you have Becca Balint from Germany, so she’s one of the ones from at least a European background, but Germany is very hard-left. Don Beyer from the Free Territory of Trieste, I guess that’s sort-of European, Salud Carbajal of Mexico, Sean Casten of Ireland, so Ireland is from the Anglo tradition, although the Irish would probably deny that. Sharice Davids from Germany, and then everybody else I’m going to name is not from any country with a tradition related to Western culture. Diana DeGuette is from Japan, and the name “DeGuette” suggests that maybe she was born in a military base, so some of these people, it’s a compiled list, some of these people were clearly born on military bases. Adriano Espaillat, Dominican Republic, Jesús G. “Chuy” García, Mexico, Robert Garcia, Peru, Jim Himes, Peru, Pramila Jayapal, India, Raja Krishnamoorthi, India, Ted Lieu, Taiwan, Ilhan Omar, Somalia, Raul Ruiz, Mexico, Marilyn Strickland, South Korea; that again might be an amry family, Shri Thanedar, India, Norma Torres, Guatemala, Eugene Simon Vindman, Ukraine; one of the most corrupt countries in the world, Rob Bonta, Phillipines, Aruna Miller, Hyderabad, India, Sabina Matos, Barahona, Dominican Republic, Lily Qi- I never know how that’s pronounced- Shanghai, China, Kathy K.L. Tran, Vietnam, Ghazala Hashmi, India- now she’s running for the Virginia state senate. She refused to show up for a debate opposite her Republican candidate. Zohran Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, Salman Bhojani, who’s running for the Texas house from Pakistan, Suleman Lalani, Texas house, Pakistan. As I said, some were born in Europe or Ireland, some clearly were born on military bases but most of these people serving in politics come from countries unrelated to Western and American values.

I want to share a little of my history with you. My parents… I always say I’m boring. My parents were very interesting. My mother came from a mixed marriage. Her father was a very assimilated, very, very upper-class Jewish man. His sister studied with Jung and Freud and things like that. That was her father’s family. Her mother’s family was a wealthy German Protestant banking family. Her parents met after World War I in Holland. It was not ultimately a happy marriage, but they stayed together for a while. They had my mother and another child. When they got married, there was no work for an architect in Holland, and my maternal grandfather was not prepared to support them so the young couple went to the Dutch East Indies which was still a Dutch colony. It was a good life there, if you didn’t mind the heat and the deadly bugs and the deadly snakes and the isolation. My Mom was born there. My grandmother was very unhappy, coming from Belgium, you could imagine it didn’t suit her. And so the young couple returned to Holland where my mother’s younger sibling was born and they remained in Holland until 1933 when the parents’ marriage, they temporarily separated. My grandfather was… may have been a secular, assimilated Jew but he was an ardent Zionist. He was inspired by Theodore Herzl. He went to British Mandate Palestine, which had been created out of the old, collapsed Ottoman Empire after World War I. And my grandmother took the two girls to Insberg, Austria, where they lived for a couple of years. In ’35, the parents decided to have another attempt at the marriage which held together for about four years. So my grandmother took the kids to British Mandate Palestine where they settled in Tel Aviv with their father and that went along for a few years. So my mother, although she’s been raised in European household, then an Austrian household, and now she is in a Jewish household, in British Mandate Palestine. She’s going to school, she’s learning Hebrew, she’s being imbued with Biblical principles, but she’s still in a very secular home. Marriage broke up, my grandmother went to Istanbul, where she hung out with… buddies, Andrew Pasha was already dead, but she was in that social circle. My Dad kept the girls. 1939, the war starts, eventually it goes to North Africa, the whole Rommel thing. The British need infrastructure in the area around Tel Aviv, which is their hub. And my grandfather the architect gets hired, it’s a good time. There’s finally money coming in. He was a terrible breadwinner. But the British confessed to him that they can’t hold out against Rommel, and as it turned out they were wrong about this. They prevailed, but my grandfather panicked and he sent my- the two girls to Indonesia to get them as far away from the war as he possibly could. He sent them there a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, which also encompassed the entire Malayan peninsula and large parts of Southeast Asia. So we know about the Philippines, but also Malaya, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, all of those came under Japanese control. And my Mom and her sister were in concentration camp in Indonesia until the end of the war. It was a Dutch concentration camp, so that’s now my Mom’s gone from Dutch culture to Austrian culture to Jewish culture to Dutch culture, after the war she is repatriated to British Mandate Palestine, where she meets my father. My father’s story, his mother came from a very, very wealthy assimilated German Jewish family, and she married so far down. She married a very poor shopkeeper, also Jewish, from Romania. Her family partly disowned her. They said, “You made your bed, you sleep in it, we’re not giving you any money but we will… you can still socialize with us. We’re not cutting you off entirely.” World War I hits, and my father’s not yet born, he has an older brother and sister. My grandmother and my grandfather were already living in poverty when Germany collapsed after World War I. So my grandfather, while my grandmother was pregnant with my father, went to America to try to seek his fortune. He didn’t make a fortune, he did make money, which he kept sending back to my grandmother. She, being very foolish, instead of hoarding the dollars and carefully converting them to Deutschmarks during hyperinflation, would take all the money she got, bring it to the bank, get a wheelbarrow full of Deutschmarks during hyperinflation and by the evening there was no money left. It wasn’t a happy marriage, she would not follow him to America with the children. Eventually, in 1933, he was killed by a streetcar. There ended up being a lawsuit about his estate because the German government was trying to get its hands on his minute estate and by 1938 the New York court had blocked the government from doing that because they said that the government would just seize all the benefits, and in any event by that time, my grandmother was in a Belgian convent, my older aunt and uncle had been spirited out from communist party lines into Denmark, and my father had gone to British Mandate Palestine. That was in the ‘30s. But after he was born, my father, until he was five, was raised in one of the worst Jewish slums in Germany, in post-World War I Germany. And at the time, you were either, if you were Jewish, you might be middle class, and you were kind of reform Jewish and kind of religious. Or if you were poor, you were a communist or Orthodox. His brother and sister were communists, his mother’s family who he still remembers visiting were assimilated but Jewish, observant and everything. His mother by the time he was five couldn’t cope with having a five-year-old and she put him in an Orthodox orphanage, so my father at that point was imbued with Biblical precepts. He was in the orphanage for ten years. In ’35 he saw which way the wind was blowing, so when one of his teachers got passes, visas for himself and his wife, and a child which they did not have at this time, to go to British Mandate Palestine, to lead a group of Jewish students to British Mandate Palestine, the parents remained behind and all died in the camps, they asked my father to go with him because the teacher was very fond of my father. So in ’35, my father bid farewell to Germany. He and Mom coincidentally both arrived in British Mandate Palestine in ’35. They didn’t meet until ’47. Mom was in a camp in a war in Indonesia, my father was in the RAF, he served at Crete and El-al-Ahmein, and was shell-shocked out. He was invalided out after El-al-Ahmein. He just was broken. He was still able, though, to fight in the Israeli war of Independence. He was an infantry man and my mother, she wore a uniform. Like Dr. Ruth Vestheimer, she knew how to field-strip a rifle. She was a cartographer. They were a happy young couple but Mom wanted a family and my Dad was, like many basically communists a malcontent, and he always thought the grass was greener. Why he thought the grass would be greener in the capitalist world of America, I don’t know. But they were sharing an apartment with a young couple with a child. They were sharing a small, one-bedroom apartment and they didn’t see their way to having a family. So they started applying to come to America. They did it legally. My Dad, even though born in Germany, was a Polish citizen because his father was a Polish citizen, although somehow he was born in Romania, never quite gotten that. And Germany, of course, had no birthright citizenship so Dad was on a waiting list. Mom is a Dutch citizen, could’ve walked across the border anytime, but they waited and waited and they got a sponsor who would guarantee they would never become a public charge. And they were not. And they came to America. And I’ve got a picture on the screen that ChatGPT did of a young European couple coming to America in the mid-‘50s. I was born some years later. My parents never felt comfortable in America, and this is where I’m getting to the point. All these people who come from countries that not only are not American, but are antithetical to America in their core values. I grew up, even though my parents spoke only English, so I never learned Yiddish, or German, or Hebrew, or French, or any of these other languages. It was a very European household. My parents never fully assimilated to America. They never understood America. They always considered America inferior. And because we lived in San Francisco, all my friends were Asian. Their parents had escaped communism. Their parents were grateful not to be in a communist country but they never got America, either. So even though I grew up in America, I was never “of” America. It was a very long journey for me to become an American. But the advantage I had was that I grew up in a home that was imbued with classical European Enlightenment Biblical values. Both my parents brought that to me. They were the values of individual liberty. My parents were, of course, opposed to the Second Amendment, but they embraced all the other values of the Constitution. They came from places without slavery and in fact, you could say that I am the child of a slave, because my mother ended up doing slave labor in the concentration camp. So they came with these European Enlightenment Western values. And I had the core value of hard work, no welfare. My father, the one-time communist there became a Democrat, then voted for Reagan. He voted for Reagan because he recognized that Jimmy Carter was an ardent anti-Semite, but he also did so because he hated welfare. He worked like a dog. He had two jobs my entire life, and as he said, “I don’t mind supporting the widow and orphan, but we’ve got a system that pays women to have babies out of wedlock”. I absorbed that value. I absorbed legal immigration because that’s how my parents came, and they were deeply opposed to illegal immigration. Also, even though I grew up in a European home, with Chinese friends, my classroom, we were the last gasp of pro-American education. My social studies book was copyright in something like 1956. So no matter what it was happening in the classrooms, I was still learning America. I was able to become American, even though I had been born an American, I was not born into feeling American. And I am now the most ardent American you’ll ever meet. I’m not a redneck, but I try. I try.

The contrast is… and I have on the screen, I had ChatGPT make for me a modern immigrant family, a Muslim-Eritrean family. It’s a very nice picture of a mother and a father and little baby and little boy. And they look all clean and nice, she… he’s got his little cap on, and she’s wearing her hijab and her enveloping garments. They are not like my parents. When you come as a Muslim from Eritrea, your first loyalty is to the Quran and to Sharia law. Those values are antithetical to the Constitution and they are antithetical to Western culture. I don’t care how lovely these people are. What nice neighbors they are. How they help out when someone in the neighborhood falls ill. Their core values are not American and the children raised in that household will not have American values. And this is true for immigrants and their children who have been coming in for the last 40 or 50, 60 years. Latin American, not the same values. Africa? Not the same values. Indian subcontinent? Not the same values. But how do you deal with this? The largest bolus of immigration in America wasn’t now, although maybe the illegal immigration. But the greatest population explosion in America was between 1880 and 1920. People coming came from Eastern Europe. This wasn’t the Americans and the French Hugenots and the Germans and all these Western Europeans who had come before. These were people were utterly alien to Americans. They were the Italians and the Greeks and the Eastern Europeans and all these Jews who might have been People of the Book, but they weren’t nice Protestants. There was a fair amount of discrimination against them. They were Catholics, they were Jews, they were utterly alien. Why did it work? And the answer is because this system was set up for it to work. I have on the screen a picture of an American classroom in 1919. I’m sorry, 1899. And it shows the students saluting the flag. It was a funny kind of salute, instead of having their hands on their heart, they took their right hands and held them over their heart as if they were doing a salute on their forehead, only over their heart. And up until the Nazis, there are pictures of American students in the ‘20s and ‘30s doing what looks like a Heil Hitler to the flag because until the Nazis perverted that symbol, that was how you did salutes, going back to the Roman times. If you’re saluting the flag, you do that salute. It was a… then the Nazis who perverted it. American education after 1880 and until the 1960s, encompassing my old 1950s textbook, was aggressively assimilationist. The pressure was on every child of an immigrant to absorb American values, to absorb the Constitution, reverence for the rule of law, reverence for the founding fathers, reverence for American history. America was a great place and they were told how lucky they were to be there. Beginning in the 1960s, that vanished. The point at which now, American education is aggressively anti-American. So American-born kids are being taught to hate their own country. All these children of immigrants are being taught that they’ve left their paradise hellholes of starvation and repression and disease and come to an even worse country where black lesbians like the press secretary of the United States are discriminated against. You can’t have a country this way. Unless our education system changes, we’re broken. American schools must go back to the foundational thing of teaching students to be Americans. If you’re going to have immigration, and we will continue to have legal immigration at the very least, you need to teach the kids that they are the luckiest people in the world to come to the most wonderful country in the world. I learned it in school and I figured it out finally at a visceral level later in life. But my parents gave me a foundation and for that, I am very grateful.

With that, I’m done. Thank you so much for once again, giving me your time and listening to me do this podcast. I’ll keep doing it until I figure out I have an audience of zero. Then maybe my ego will keep me going. Until next time, this is Andrea signing off with the American Thinker Takeaway.