USA Today recently published a piece excoriating Project 2025 and all who worked on it as (you guessed it) “racist.” I had very little to do with Project 2025—I was asked for some thoughts on how best to organize the National Security Council Staff, provided those thoughts, and then was never contacted again—but my name ended up on the thing, so I suppose that, according to the sketchy rules of “journalistic ethics,” that makes me “fair game.”
At any rate, USA Today reported that did not respond to a request for comment. In fact, I did not receive any word that USA Today wanted a comment, but I guess that doesn’t really matter since I wouldn’t have commented anyway. It’s obvious from the resulting article, and would have been obvious from the inquiry, that this was just another example of “murderous gutter journalism,” which I previously described here.
Both the paper and the writer were and are acting in bad faith: they had a narrative all pre-cooked, they looked around for things they could twist to fit that narrative, and proceeded to slap together a paint-by-numbers “story” to smear their enemies as “racist.”
Make no mistake, that is how they see us: as enemies, and how they see their own role: as righteous avengers destroying the wicked. This is not journalism; this is character assassination with scarcely the pretense of reporting.
I’m old enough to remember the founding of USA Today. Al Neuharth’s creation was immediately denounced as “McNews” for its short articles, short on detail, easy to read in the shortest time, placing minimal demands on the reader. But Neuharth’s USA Today was a combination New York Times-Wall Street Journal compared to what it is today. Like all third-tier (or lower) institutions, USA Today has concluded that since it can’t even come close to competing with the big kids, it will remain relevant by sucking up to ruling elite opinion and out-woking everyone else. Not that I read USA Today much, but whenever it pops up in my sightline, every story is some DEI howler about alleged systemic racism in America and how whites are somehow inherently evil. Most written, naturally, by white writers desperately seeking elite approval.
As to the specifics of the charges against me, such as they are, I shall focus on two. First, I am quoted as saying that unrelenting immigration, especially from countries formerly known as “Third World” (this Cold War term apparently being verboten now), is a regime priority. The truth of my statement is not disputed, nor are any of its particulars. Instead we have a classic “point-and-sputter” attack: just quote the line and know that your brain-dead readers will gasp in horror, without any reflection or analysis.
More tellingly, this charge is an example of something I call the “celebration parallax,” which is explained here. In brief, the celebration parallax holds that the same fact pattern is either true and glorious or false and scurrilous depending on who states it and, crucially, the perceived intent of the speaker.
So if someone says that the U.S. is experiencing levels of immigration that are unprecedented in human history, if it’s presumed or suspected that he might have doubts, then he is an evil racist. But when Bill Clinton or Joe Biden makes exactly the same point, well, that is A-OK! Because they are “good guys” who welcome “an unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop” (Joe Biden’s words). By the way, I leave to readers to intuit the difference between “unrelenting” (Joe’s word) and “ceaseless” (my word) and the reasons why the former is A-OK but the latter is somehow “racist.”
As for the controversy over birthright citizenship and the clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the 14th Amendment, I explained all this at length here. I won’t go into it all again, if for no other reason than that I have nothing to add.
Suffice it to say, neither this USA Today attack dog, much less the alleged “expert” he cites, even attempt to refute what I argued (and still maintain), viz., that not only does the 14th Amendment not authorize or require birthright citizenship; not only did the framers of that amendment not have birthright citizenship in mind; but the plain language of the amendment itself outright forbids the practice. To not see this, one needs to be willfully blind and/or have shaky reading comprehension (see the Senate floor debates, quoted in my above article, which make all this quite plain).
In any case, how opposing birthright citizenship is somehow “racist” is also not explained. It’s just taken for granted (no doubt correctly) that USA Today’s woke readership, perpetually salivating for fresh slanders against their perceived enemies, will lap it up uncritically.
Which brings me to my final point. If you want to know why the media has a lower approval rating than even Congress, why Donald Trump calls you the “enemy of the people”: this is why. Because you are.