January 27, 2025

I’D LIKE TO REPORT A MURDER: JD Vance Just Killed Margaret Brennan on Live TV.

Granted, I wouldn’t want to go up against Vance in a debate, so getting spanked by Vance is not prima facia evidence that you are low IQ, but Brennan is supposedly the best that the Pravda CBS has to offer, and she comes off looking like an angry idiot. If I were her I would call in sick any time Vance is scheduled to come on her show.

Brennan had many embarrassing moments on yesterday’s show, but by far the worst was her attempt to go for the jugular in the issue of “refugees” Biden has let into the United States. Brennan is passionate about the issue of illegal immigration, and thinks she holds the moral high ground on the issue.

As you can see, the veil of “impartiality” has been lifted. She doesn’t even try to look anything but hostile. Instead she looks angry and ignorant.

You can imagine Ms. Brennan having a nice discussion with Alejandro Mayorkas about genius Joe Biden personally smelling the hair of migrant children out of compassion while discussing the need for cheaper lawn care workers during the previous administration, and she clearly resents Vance’s belief that the American government should be promoting the interest of the plebs born here.

Related: Samuel P. Huntington in November of 2000: “A Nation of Immigrants:” Only a Partial Truth.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth. We have all heard people say, again and again, that all Americans, except possibly the Indians, are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. My colleague at Harvard, Oscar Handlin, began his classic book, The Uprooted, by saying, “the immigrants were American history.” That’s overstating it. Yes, immigrants and immigration have been an important part of the American history. But they are not all American history. There are at least three critical points that need to be made in this connection.

The first is a basic distinction between immigrants and settlers. Immigrants are people who leave one country, one society, and move to another society. But there has to be a recipient society to which the immigrants move. In our case, the recipient society was created by the settlers who came here in the 17th and 18th centuries. They came in groups to create new societies up and down the Atlantic seaboard. They weren’t immigrating to some existing society; indeed, they often did whatever they could do to destroy whatever existed here in the way of Indian society. They were establishing new societies, in some cases for commercial reasons, in more cases for religious reasons. They had an image of what they wanted to create and they came and formed a settlement to try to realize their image. They also had to come together and agree as to how they were going to define their community. The archetypal case of this was the Mayflower Compact.

A fundamental difference thus exists between settlers and immigrants. With immigrants the process of moving is to a much greater extent a personal process involving individuals and families, whereas with settlers there is a much more collective process of a group of people moving and saying, “we’re unhappy where we are for one reason or another, and we want to move elsewhere and form our own society.” The society that the settlers created on the Eastern seaboard was shaped in terms of their values and cultures, among which there were significant differences, as David Hackett Fisher emphasized in his superb book, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. But there are also tremendous similarities, and they basically created a society defined by what I think can be described succinctly as an Anglo-Protestant culture.

It was this society and culture that among other things including economic opportunities here and repression in Europe attracted subsequent generations of immigrants to this country. Some 55 million people left Europe in the century or so from the beginning of the 19th century until the 1920s, with 34 million of them coming to America. They came in considerable measure because they were attracted by what they saw here and by what the settlers created.

As Glenn quoted from Ann Althouse earlier today: “Brennan seemed keyed up from the start. Her desire to get Vance was ludicrously obvious. Meanwhile, Vance was perfectly even-tempered and articulate, prepared for everything she had hoped to flummox him with. Brennan’s style of constant interruption failed to throw him off. It backfired, making him look steady and rational and her look afraid of what he might have to say.”

To get a sense of how well Vance did, we leave you with a photo montage of his interlocutor:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll