The most hilarious part of Sam’s ranting in that thread was IMHO this bit:
I can’t figure out if Sam really believes that the rate of illegal entry into the US two decades ago was orders of magnitude smaller than it is now, so that the entry of a mere 19 undesirables would have been numerically significant, or if he’s just hoping that we’ll be dumb enough to believe it.
Yeah, I know. The funny part was that the way Sam put it, it sounds as though he thinks that the entry of a mere nineteen people back then would have been perceived as some kind of anomalous breach of otherwise robust border security, in contrast to the massive cross-border influx of “800 people per day” nowadays.
Nobody was freaking out over how the hijackers got into the US. That was known almost immediately. They arrived legally. The only people freaking out then are the same racists freaking out now about the “impure” getting into the country.
People were freaking out about how they got on the planes and were able to hijack them and cause so much destruction. But the least of concerns was them getting into the US itself.
Well, I’m sure TFG’s Muslim ban would have protected us from those 19 hijackers who nobody was wringing their hands trying to figure out how they got into 'Merica since hey did it legally.
Oh wait, it would only have kept the impure from polluting the blood of the white race from certain Muslim countries, Saudi Arabia notably not being on that list. Oh well, back to making shit up to imply that illegal immigration makes us vulnerable to another 9/11 by pretending they were illegal immigrants. Hey, maybe we could use that as the plot to an incredibly tasteless novel. Oh crap, spoiler warning, it’s already been done. Well maybe Sam can use it for his reading list, assuming he hasn’t already read them.
I mean, I’m sure he would back-pedal it to point out that he wasn’t actually claiming that the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were the only questionable entrants to the US that year. Fair enough.
But that rhetoric sure sounds like it’s trying to suggest the reaction “wow, back in 2001 illegal immigration was such a non-issue and the border was so comfortably secure that we thought a mere nineteen people sneaking into the country with nefarious intent was a huge deal, and now we’re getting hundreds of illegal border crossers every day, geez, things are so much worse now!!”
Which, as I noted, is complete bullshit as far as the actual facts of illegal migration trends are concerned.
What’s stupid about it is the suggestion that people were upset about them crossing the border and not, you know, the other stuff they did. People were freaking out by the terrorism more so than the border crossing.
I think our, not at all racists, Sam is also trying to suggest that those immigrant crossing the border are all (or mainly) a bunch of criminals.
What I actually meant was that after 9/11 there was an uproar anout how terrorists got into the country. We quickly discovered they were here on visas, and the discussion switched to how they could be allowed to learn to fly.
Where I was going to go with that was to say that there is a risk that, if there is a terrorist attack between now and the election and it can be traced back to people who walked across the border. public attitudes will turn very dark about the border and the party in power will suffer for it.
It would be crazy to assert that the border was so secure that 19 people coming across was unlikely. That’s why I never said it. But in the heat of the moment, people were very angry that they got into the country and learned to fly. If there is another rerrorist attack, the border situation will become an even larger liability.
But thanks for refuting all those words you put in my mouth. It must be hard to set 'em up and knock 'em down like that.
Yeah, and no, that’s just fantasy. There was no uproar about how they got into the country.
Americans had other things on their mind at the time.
Again, that’s false. I’m an actual American, I remember 9/11, and you’re talking out your ass again.
People were angry about how they got onto planes and hijacked them. This is like insisting that people were upset about how a guy illegally crossed the street to murder someone. Frankly, your argument isn’t just wrong, it’s stupid. You are making a really dumb argument here Sam. Which is disappointing, because I disagree with you often, and you have problems with facts frequently, but rarely do you come off as lacking intelligence.
There’s no need to “put words in your mouth”, and anyway there’s no room to do so around the bullshit that you already put there.
The biggest terrorist threat to this country comes from stupid fucking nazi wannabe American motherfuckers. When a terrorist attack comes first from southern border immigrants, I’ll eat my hat.
Fuck off Sam Stone.
We remember it a bit differently. Of course I remember all the other reactions as well, but there WAS a significant debate over how all those foreign nationals managed to get into the countryband take flight lessons.
In any event, I think it’s bizarre that we go through all the security theater rituals we do, while letting thousands of people per day just walk across the border. I’m talking about Canada too.
For example, we have no idea how many of the young men coming from Venezuela are members of Hezbollah.
Do you know that there are Hezbollah training camps in Venezuela? America is letting in thousands of unvetted military age men from that region, while literally fighting against similar Iranian proxies in the Middle East. Does this not worry you?
This is by far the Democrat’s weakest issue right now. The polls show it too.
I’m just saying there is an additional risk of attitudes getting much harder if we see a terrorist attack traced to a ‘gotaway’ at the border, or a significant rise in crime attributable to border jumpers between now and then.
Well, let this be a lesson to you to be a little more careful about saying what you mean, then? Because, as I noted, your rhetoric came across as a very clumsy attempt at a very misleading contrast between border security issues then and now.
The fact is, for decades there have been hundreds of people daily walking across the southern US border. And for decades, it has always been the case that if one of those unauthorized migrants committed some kind of horrific major attack, American public opinion would go full on batshit-bloodthirsty-paranoid about immigration issues. None of this is new.
Why the right-wing commentariat is microwaving its nuts over border-security fears at the moment is simply because the floundering Republican Party has latched onto the issue as its current election-year Desperate Crisis du jour.
See above. There’s nothing specifically “Democratic” about immigration issues, and in fact the Republicans have been far more counterproductive and ineffective in actually dealing with border security than Democrats have.
But Republican propaganda, which you and many others are dutifully parrotting, is that the current situation is somehow an unprecedented crisis and that Democratic policy is somehow directly to blame for it. None of which is true. Does this not worry you?
The controversy regarding the flight lessons wasn’t that they were allowed take them. Hey, it’s a free country it was a free country. The issue was that they way in which they took the flight lessons was very suspicious, e.g. they wanted to learn how to control a plane in flight but didn’t seem to care to learn how to take off or how to land. This was reported to authorities but weren’t acted upon.
To your larger claim that if a band of terrorists manage to sneak into the country and commit an act of terror, people will lose their collective shit, the answer is no shit Sherlock. This would be exactly the event that the right has been having wet dreams about for the last decade or so. Heck they would probably orchestrate it if they thought they could get away with it. They have been priming the pump nonstop about the dangers of immigrants, but the immigrants keep failing to cooperate and instead seem to be more law abiding than the average American. Not that they haven’t dredged the bottom of the barrel until they could find some. If this happened it would be non stop racist bullhorn for the next several years, just the same way they targeted Muslims after 9/11 and Asians after Covid.
But that doesn’t mean that Biden should stop treating migrants humanely just because the other side is going to propogandize the hell out of it if something happens to go wrong.
Why you might as well ask the Republicans to stop criticizing the government in case someone decided to blow up a federal building, or to stop claiming that election was stolen and Congress is to blame just in case 2,000+ people decide to storm the capitol.
9/11 happened in Canada? I mean you keep talking about ‘we’ discovering they were ‘here’ and in ‘the’ country. I think the word you’re looking for is ‘there,’ 'Merica isn’t an extension of Canada. Or shit, are TFG and Elmo worried about the wrong border when it comes to trying to poison our blood and take over our country?
