A lesson in what made Trump’s ‘shithole’ comments so racist
The ire directed Dreher’s way focused on one passage in particular. Admitting he’s sympathetic to the argument that “political correctness keeps people from saying things that are true,” Dreher presents an example: “If word got out that the government was planning to build a housing project for the poor in your neighborhood, how would you feel about it? . . . Do you want the people who turned their neighborhood [into] a shithole to bring the shithole to your street?”
.. And as Dreher restates his point, he makes that clear: “Some countries and cultures really are worse than others, but we can’t talk about it.”
.. Here is where Dreher’s argument falls flat. The night after The Post reported Trump’s comments, Tucker Carlson made a similar point on Fox News: Democrats, he said, can’t support preserving the protected status of Haitians, Salvadorans and others and at the same time condemn Trump for casting aspersions on those countries. If these places weren’t “shitholes,” Carlson claimed, liberals wouldn’t shrink from sending their citizens back there. So it’s dishonest not to say the word.
But calling the conditions in a country “shit” and calling a whole culture “shit” aren’t the same thing. Dreher lumps the two together, exposing how his and Trump’s thinking differ from the thinking of the liberals who would let Salvadorans stick around.
.. The “success stories” of immigrants who came to the United States and changed it for the better aren’t exceptions to some rule that dooms nonwhite people to failure because of their innate cultural flaws. They are examples of what can happen when someone enters an environment whose structures allow them to excel.
.. The problem is, as Dreher’s misbegotten defense makes clear, that isn’t what Trump was saying. He was saying that to live in a shithole is just what these people deserve.