"Do You Hear Yourself?"

Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance has also articulated another question that frames so much of this election, especially with mass immigration at our southern border a top-tier issue.

Only a few people watch the Sunday morning news shows. I gave them up years ago when I realized they had become a pale imitation of what they used to be when real journalists asked serious policymakers direct, even tough questions.

However, they attract an influential audience of inside-the-beltway and Acela Corridor (DC to Boston) influencers. Their reach grows when interviews make the news and get passed around on YouTube.com, X, and elsewhere.

CBS’s Face the Nation is currently the top-rated show. Meet the Press, in particular, fell into irrelevancy when the legendary Tim Russert suddenly passed away from a heart attack in 2008. It’s never recovered. ABC’s “This Week” has become a partisan propaganda outlet. But there is no denying that the legacy media - the major networks (including Fox News and CNN) and primary news services and outlets (Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, and a few others) play an outsized role in influencing how the voting public frames the issues and influences their decisions.

Sometimes not the way they intend, or realize. Sometimes, they tell us who they really are in ways that catch the public’s attention. Two examples come to mind. Let’s start with last Sunday (October 13) “This Week” with substitute host Martha Raddatz quizzing GOP vice presidential nominee and US Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). I’ve teed this up at the 3:05 mark when Raddatz almost demands Vance to repudiate Donald Trump’s remarks about Venezuelan gangs invading and conquering apartment complexes in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado.

Raddatz’ arrogantly claims to know precisely what is happening in Colorado based only on the claims of the local mayor, former GOP Congressman Mike Coffman, a well-known anti-Trumper. The infamously said, “The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes. . .” Vance now famously responded, “Martha, do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes in America were taken over by Venezuelan gangs?”

That immediately brought me back to 9/11. I guess you could say that only a handful of buildings were destroyed by Al Qaeda operatives. And by the way, stories of Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment complexes aren’t limited to Aurora, Colorado. From the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail:

A dangerous Venezuelan gang has taken over at least four apartment complexes in San Antonio, Texas, as it expands its reach in yet another America city, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Dubbed the 'epitome of evil', Tren de Aragua (TdA) is known to run drug smuggling, child prostitution and human trafficking rings in South America, with its members crossing over into the US in recent years amid a wave of Venezuelan migrants. 

The tattooed mobsters have since unleashed a wave of crime across the country from Miami and Texas to Denver and New York. 

The gang's activities in the American cities are back in the spotlight after ABC News’ Martha Raddatz claimed the instances of gang members' presence in apartments was limited to a 'handful' of complexes in Aurora, Colorado. 

Just last week a small army of police officers raided an apartment complex in San Antonio and arrested 19 individuals - including four gang members.

Meanwhile, Raddatz need not worry about Venezuelan gangs invading her $2 million single-family home in Arlington, Virginia, a close-in DC suburb. There are reports that these violent gangs have made inroads in five states.

Evidence of the media’s disconnection from Americans' lives continues to grow unabated. It's no wonder people outside the media bubbles don’t trust them.

But let’s not leave out CNN and especially Catherine Rampell, one of the lefties on the Washington Post’s editorial page (they do have a few conservatives, but none appear on CNN’s NewsNight broadcast), despite some evidence of improvement in their news operations. The debate they hosted with Donald Trump and Joe Biden on June 23rd was the best of the election cycle. Joe Biden’s performance, leading to the coup that replaced him at the top of the Democratic ticket, wasn’t CNN’s fault.

Rampell was very upset in this clip over CNN contributor and conservative Scott Jennings (a Kentucky native with solid connections to Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell) on how Donald Trump would curb illegal immigration to the benefit of American workers. To which Rampell replied, “he is going to deport 20 million people, who pick your crops, process your meat, the people who, you know, care for your grandmother, the people who serve all sorts of critical functions in your country?”

This is one of those issues with gallons of nuance, which often confuses the press. Yes, illegal aliens are picking crops and processing meat. But perhaps not as many as she would have you believe. I know nothing about immigrants taking care of grandmothers. But are they asking why? What’s really going on here?

Immigrants, legal and “undocumented,” the preferred term of the politically correct (the correct legal term is “illegal alien”), are significant in American agriculture and other parts of the economy. Nearly half of those in production agriculture are undocumented, and about 30 percent are native-born American citizens. The H2A (agriculture) visa program allows migrants to work temporarily in the US for many crops that must be harvested by hand. Some 371,000 visas were issued in 2022, compared to 48,000 in 2005. And H2A visa employers want even more, even as they have to provide transportation and housing and pay the local prevailing wage under federal labor law, anywhere between $13 to $20 per hour. There’s an H2B visa program for non-agriculture migrants. Most don’t travel around and are considered “settled.”

But the largest group of crop farmworkers isn’t authorized. They’re outside the protections and guarantees of the H2A legal immigration system. They’re often being paid under the table at slave wages and worse.

This explains why some in the agribusiness world is all for more immigration, no matter the source, with the Wall Street Journal editorial pages in tow. Many will assert that Americans won’t do the work these immigrants will, and they have a point. Have you ever visited a slaughterhouse? But the way the media talks about it, they make it sound like we need our serfs and slaves to landscape our lawns, watch our kids, and work in nursing homes and our special underclass, just the way southern states did it a couple of centuries ago.

Do they hear themselves?

Radio talker and writer Erick Erickson recently discussed the first case he handled as a newly minted lawyer. His first client was an illegal alien who made enough money to buy a new double-wide trailer. He was delivered instead a used single-wide in poor condition. He hired Erick to make things right.

In short, Erickson did. But the story he tells of how illegal aliens were, and are, often treated as subhuman serfs and slaves helps explain another side of our immigration saga. Erickson:

What Rampell wants and demands is that we continue to prop up a system of serfs who get paid below minimum wage, under the table, bypassing E-Verify because she wants things cheaper than the minimum wage she advocates for.

All Democrats do. It’s the thing they dare not say out loud. Trump isn’t deporting legal immigrants, but the illegal ones who employers are not supposed to hire. But Rampell says the quiet part out loud — those are the ones getting jobs and she thinks they are necessary and even desirable.

The Biden-Harris Administration has become complicit in a corrupt bargain to entice desperate people to flock dangerously to America, often at the risk of death, rape, and more. They’re used by criminal Mexican cartels to divert Customs and Border Patrol away from illicit drug traffic. Many wind up being sexually trafficked, often through phony massage parlors as fronts. I wrote about this here.

This gets to the heart of the immigration debate. It’s not about illegal aliens taking jobs from Americans, although some do. It’s not about jacking up rental rates and house prices, although it can and does. “But we need them to build the houses,” they claim.

Do they hear themselves?

Maybe we still are prosecuting the Civil War. Just not in the way we think, with the “slave trade” taking on an all-new look. We conclude with Erickson:

I say all this to say the Washington Post’s and CNN’s Catherine Rampell is a progressive racist who wants, needs, and demands an underclass of serfs to maintain her standard of living as do most Democrats. It is no wonder the party of slavery now favors a underclass of people to still, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Four, pick their cotton — they just went from black to brown.