Thursday, July 25, 2019

How To Deal With Family Members Who Have Have Crossed Over To History's Dark Side.

AllTheirIslandsLeadBackTo
EllisVille


Stephen Miller is one of the main architects of Donald Trump's punitive immigration policy.

Mr. Miller is also an out-front public defender of Mr. Trump's xenophobic racism. He's even proud to fulfill this role on, get this, Fox News:

...In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace pressed Miller on Trump's history regarding race. "There’s a long record here," said Wallace, after playing a clip of some of Trump’s most infamous racist moments. "When he questioned whether or not Barack Obama was an American citizen, when he said in his announcement that the people Mexico was sending to this country were not their best, they’re 'rapists,' they’re 'drug dealers,' and some are 'good people,' when he called for a 'total and complete shutdown'—the Muslim ban, something I know you were very involved in. That’s not protecting the American people. That is playing the race card."

Miller, of course, said that he "couldn’t disagree more," and defended Trump's history of birtherism.

"If you want to have a colorblind society, it means you can criticize immigration policy, you can criticize people’s views, you can ask questions about where they were born, and not have it be seen as racial," he said.

"And can you also say, ‘Go back where you came from?’" asked Wallace.

"With the 'send her back' chant, the president was clear he disagreed with it," said Miller, referring to the racist and xenophobic chant directed at Omar by the crowd at Trump's North Carolina rally Wednesday.

But Wallace shut him down. "He was clear after the fact. He let it go on for 13 seconds, and it was only when the chant diminished that he started talking again," the host accurately pointed out. "And he said nothing there or in his tweet after the rally that indicated any concern about the chant."...


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So, how to deal with the good Mr. Miller and his ilk?

Well, his uncle, Dr. David Glosser, has done a pretty good job of it:

Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.

It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.

He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.

What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister.

I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country...



Gosh.

One can only wonder how many fine folks of a certain bent back then thought that the eldest Mr. Glosser was fleeing a 'sh*thole country'?


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Tip 'O The Toque to longtime reader Lew who noted yesterday that Dr. Glosser was likely one doctor who who not be signing up for that loyalty oath(ish)-requiring private prison/immigration detention center job.
And why, exactly, would the good Mr. Miller go on FOX News to continue fanning racism's flames?...I have a theory about that...Stay tuned.



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2 comments:

Lew said...

Ironic that Stephen Miller is the black sheep of his family...

RossK said...

Ha!

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