Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” conservative commentator Mark Steyn hammered CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta for what he deemed to be “showboating.”
Earlier in the day, Acosta had a heated exchange in a back-and-forth dialogue with White House aide Stephen Miller about U.S. immigration policy.
Partial transcript as follows:
TUCKER CARLSON, HOST “TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT”: Joining us now, a noted kind of sewer of awkward moments, author and columnist Mark Steyn. Did you see this exchange today, Mark?
MARK STEYN, COLUMNIST: Yes, I did. And first of all, I don’t understand why Jim Acosta is allowed to hijack a White House press conference for this kind of show boating. You know, one of the reasons why we need immigrants to come here and do the jobs that Americans won’t do is because of how anyone the jobs of Americans won’t do is drag Jim Acosta out of there, kick him to the sidewalk and say if you want to do the Jim Acosta show, there is a rusting boxcar around the back of the freight yards with free semi-comatose hobos who are interested in it.
But nobody else here is. And that would have been the healthy reaction to that. As for the range of cliches he brought up, there are — the French gave the Americans a pretty good Statue of Liberty. And then the Americans hammered a lousy poem by M.L. Lazarus on to it and turned a pretty great Statue of Liberty into a statue of immigration. I regret that. But the fact is that Steven Miller was quite right in his point about oh, do you only want English men and Australians. There are 60 countries in the world, including mine, that have English as an official language. For example, just a few years ago, after the genocide, Rwanda, a Belgium colony joined the British Commonwealth.
And as part of it, even though it’s never been a British colony. And as part of that, they began, they stopped teaching French in schools and began teaching English. So you can have Rwandans who are fluent in English. You can have Papua New Guineans who are fluent in English. You can have — who are fluent in English. And Singaporeans who are fluent in English. And the idea that this is just some pasty white man’s language is so deranged, almost a third of the members of the United Nations are proficient in English more or less.
CARLSON: Jim Acosta thinks English is a race.
STEYN: Yes. Yes, he does.
CARLSON: Which is troubling.
STEYN: By the way, Tucker, there is plenty of people in the United Kingdom who speak Welch and Gaelic. I was driving through the Scottish islands with my daughter and we heard the BBC’s Gaelic rap station in which these delinquent Scotts’ men are rapping in Gaelic. So, I protest on behalf of the non-English speakers of the British ills of this outrageous racism from this Acosta buffoon.
(LAUGHTER)
CARLSON: I don’t know if I can improve on that. I do think though on some level liberals, Jim Acosta, the network he works for, all of Washington are offended by the idea that America would craft an immigration policy that helps America. Why is that so offensive to them?
STEYN: Right. Yes. Basically, until half a century ago, it was thought perfectly normal for countries to decide the immigrants that were of most use to them, which tended to be the immigrants who could assimilate the easiest. And suddenly it’s become a point where there is seven billion people on the planet. And you are not allowed to make value judgments about any of them.
So, that — and in the case of the United States, we have wound up with the most extreme immigration policy of all, where we actually advantage unskilled illegal immigrants who don’t even have the couple of hundred bucks for the paperwork. I mean, don’t forget, what Jim Acosta is complaining about is that Trump wants to move to a Canadian style immigration policy. These are the same people who were wetting their knickers over Justin Trudeau on the cover of Rolling Stone saying oh, why can’t we have a dream boat president like the Canadian prime minister.
And Trump is saying, well, I will meet you halfway. Let’s start with Canadian immigration policy and suddenly Justin Trudeau is this white supremacist and Trump is trashing America’s immigration policy to turn himself into another maple infused Ku Klux Klan moose hunting ground like Canada. This is ridiculous.
(LAUGHTER)
CARLSON: The best thing about this debate though is you really do get to learn how much the ruling class hates itself and hates this country. This will continue. Mark, thank you. You just put that all in perspective as usual.
STEYN: Thanks a lot, Tucker.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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