Author and researcher Heather Mac Donald joined Breitbart News Deputy Political Editor Amanda House on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Sunday to discuss the fracas over “family separations” among apprehended illegal aliens.
Mac Donald had just penned an article for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, where she serves as a contributing editor, titled “Who’s Really to Blame at the Border?”
“The hysteria over the separation of illegal-alien asylum-seekers from their children (or their purported children) was in large part pretextual,” Mac Donald accuses the Left in her article. “Underlying this episode were several cardinal principles of left-wing activism: that favored victim groups must never be held responsible for their actions, and that policy should be made based on immediate claims of need, with no regard to long-term consequences.”
Mac Donald explained to House that the immediate shift in focus from separation to detention in all cases reveals that the real issue the Left had was enforcement of immigration laws.
“It is the absolute principle of liberal ideology to deny agency to favored victim groups, to ignore behavior that causes misfortune or poverty, and to inevitably shift blame onto institutions rather than on individual actors,” Mac Donald told House.
“I was being to generous in saying barely literate. I couldn’t believe it,” Mac Donald said, citing an open-borders advocate featured in a National Public Radio report, “not only are they illiterate, they don’t even speak Spanish. … These are stone age peoples that are flooding the country.”
Mac Donald addressed a Breitbart News Sunday caller who stressed concern about the effect on America of mass immigration. “People like your previous caller are living with the results, they can see the stress that this is putting on social service systems, schools, transforming our culture, and yet you’re not allowed to say that,” Mac Donald said.
Mac Donald, whose new book The Diversity Delusion is due out in September, then expanded on her theory of how leftists assign blame and assess solutions with reference the world of higher education in which she has done much of her research.
“The larger principle here that we see at work, I think, in American culture most perversely is the idea that any disparity in representation of any different group — whether its a sexual group, males and females, or ethnic or racial group — is by definition due to discrimination,” Mac Donald told House. “And, therefore, the solution to any disparity in representation is a racial or a gender quota.”
“The liberal looks out over the world and is committed to the belief that America remains a profoundly bigoted, profoundly oppressive place that systematically denies opportunity to these favored and ever growing victim groups,” Mac Donald surmised. “And the result is we’re living through a massive attack on meritocracy.”
Breitbart News Sunday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern.