Liberty Cooch

The Trump administration announced it will expand the “public charge” rule, punishing poor LEGAL immigrants by making it harder for them to obtain green cards and remain in this nation. The idea here is that only well-to-do immigrants should be allowed into this nation, and not any that may require public assistance. This flies in the face of the United States being a nation of immigrants that grants asylum to anyone seeking refugee status from political persecution, as most refugees don’t bring large bank accounts with them.

In defending this policy shift, Ken Cuccinelli the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, presented a twisted version of Emma Lazarus’s ‘The New Colossus” poem, which is displayed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Where the actual poem reads, “Give me your tired, poor and huddled masses,” The Cooch presented it as, “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.” Basically, give me your white Europeans.

Cooch argued on CNN and NPR yesterday that the public charge doctrine a “140-year tradition in this country,” a “central part of our heritage as Americans.” He defended his position further by stating the poem was “referring back to people coming from Europe, where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class.” The actual poem reads, “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The refuse of your teeming shore/ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

I read it more than twice and I didn’t see anything in there about coming from the “right class,” unless maybe Europeans who can’t get into country clubs are the “refuse of the teeming shore.”

In defending his position, Cuccinelli argued that the poem was about people from Europe, thus giving his game away. The policy is racist and designed to reject the kind of people Donald Trump sees as coming from “shithole countries,” nations in Africa, Central America, and Haiti.

And, once again, the Trump administration is creating policy based on conspiracy theories. This one is the “Great Replacement Theory” which is very popular amongst white nationalists. The idea behind the theory is that white people are being replaced with non-European people.

The neo-Nazis based part of their chant in Charlotteville, “Jews will not replace us,” on the theory. Tucker Carlson has been a big advocate of it on Fox News while also claiming white supremacy is a hoax. Racist Iowa congressman Steve King is a fan and has argued, “If we continue to abort our babies and import a replacement for them in the form of young violent men, we are supplanting our culture, our civilization,” and that George Soros is the perpetrator. Donald Trump, who has called for a ban on Muslims, a wall on the Mexican border, has said Mexico is sending “rapists and murderers,” and has described them as “invaders,” was identified by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue as one of the top-ten proponents of the “Great Replacement” theory on Twitter. It’s a conspiracy theory created and used by white racists.

The Trump administration is creating policies based on racism. And in Ken Cuccinelli, they have found the hitman.

Since he’s the former attorney general of Virginia, I have experience covering Cuccinelli. He was a revisionist long before he crapped on Lazarus’ poem and in 2010, he covered an exposed breast on the state seal. SMUT!!!

Cooch spent his entire time as attorney general working as a right-wing operative. He wasted his time and the state’s money defending anti-sodomy laws and prohibitions against same-sex marriage. He called on the state’s universities to remove LGBTQ people from nondiscrimination policies. He said homosexual acts are “against nature and are harmful to society.”

He wasted more money investigating climate scientists at the University of Virginia and accused them of fraud. He fought the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama era. But it’s with immigration where we see his true soul. Cooch is a racist just as much as Donald Trump.

He fought to keep undocumented immigrants from attending state universities. He wanted to repeal birthright citizenship. And, with a touch of xenophobia, tried to force employees to only speak English in the workplace.

He filed an amicus brief opposing the federal government’s lawsuit challenging an Arizona immigration enforcement statute, which was a law authorizing police in that state to check anyone’s immigration status. He tried to copy that law by authorizing Virginia’s police to check the status of anyone whom they stopped, ignoring that the General Assembly writes state laws, not the attorney general.

If you’re a person who values our nation’s freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, take comfort in the fact Cuccinelli loses most of his legal fights. The guy’s a loser and another example of Trump hiring the best people.

If you need a better idea of what kind of worm Cuccinelli is, he once compared our immigration policy to pest control, and he was a supporter of Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign (ironically enough, Cruz would be ineligible to be a citizen under Trump’s new policy).

The xenophobic racist policies of the Trump administration are anti-American. Ken Cuccinelli is anti-American. He and Trump are two white guys who should be hit by a “Great Replacement.”

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