You are the enemy

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, according to the sketchy rules of “journalistic ethics,” that makes me “fair game.”

At any rate, USA Today reported that I 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.

This is not journalism. This is character assassination with scarcely the pretense of reporting.

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 they 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 40 years ago was a combination of the New York Times and the 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 sight line, 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.

Point and sputter

As to the specifics of the charges against me, such as they are, I will 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.” 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 United States 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 Biden’s “unrelenting” and my “ceaseless” 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 will also address it again below.

Suffice to say, neither this USA Today attack dog nor the alleged “expert” he cites attempt to refute my argument. I maintain that the 14th Amendment neither authorizes nor requires birthright citizenship. The framers did not have birthright citizenship in mind, and the plain language of the amendment outright forbids the practice. To not see this requires willful blindness or 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 have a lower approval rating than even Congress, why Donald Trump calls them the “enemy of the people,” this is why: because they are.

Contemptible criticism

A few hours after this essay appeared at the American Mind last week, another leftist hack weighed in to continue the dispute over my contention that neither the text of the 14th Amendment nor the original intent of its drafters requires or even implies birthright citizenship. Everything I am going to say from here on I’ve already said, so if you’re already persuaded by the piece linked above, don’t bother. For the rest of you, here goes.

The particular section of the 14th Amendment under consideration reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The all-important clause is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which proponents of birthright citizenship demand be interpreted to mean, and only to mean, “subject to U.S. law.”

But if that is the case, then the clause is utterly superfluous, because as every legislator and lawyer at the time understood, any person physically present in the United States (with the partial exception of those with diplomatic immunity) are subject to U.S. law and hence, in this “understanding,” “subject to the jurisdiction [of the United States].”

One senator who participated in the floor debate over the 14th Amendment put it this way:

If a traveler comes here from Ethiopia, from Australia, or from Great Britain, he is entitled, to a certain extent, to the protection of the laws. You cannot murder him with impunity. It is murder to kill him, the same as it is to kill another man. You cannot commit assault and battery on him, I apprehend. He has a right to the protection of the laws; but he is not a citizen in the ordinary acceptation of the word.

Exactly.

So if the jurisdiction clause is not superfluous — if it actually has a purpose — why was it added? What was that purpose? To see that, we must turn to the ratification debate.

The core purpose of the 14th Amendment was to clarify the citizenship status of freed slaves. Recall that while the amendment was ratified in 1868, the Senate floor debate over the amendment took place in 1866, i.e., just one year after the end of the Civil War and the freeing of all slaves.

At this time, many Southern states asserted that because American citizenship had never been defined at the federal level — either constitutionally or statutorily — it remained a state matter, with states free not to extend citizenship to freed slaves.

The Republican-dominated Congress responded with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which stated in no uncertain terms that freed slaves were now citizens of the United States. Except that slaves were not defined as such. Rather, language was used that was intended to cover all freed slaves; i.e., “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power.” Virtually all freed slaves were born in the United States (the slave trade having been outlawed in 1808) and were not subject to any foreign power; i.e., they had never lived anywhere else, been citizens of any other country or subjects of any other sovereign, nor had taken any oaths to those effects.

But this led some in Congress to ask if that language included Indian tribes whose members were not citizens of the United States and which the U.S. government treated as foreign nations. Indians had, after all, been born into the physical territory of the United States and were not subject to any foreign power, except their tribes, which the United States regarded as “quasi-foreign powers”; foreign because not part of the citizen-body of the United States, “quasi” because resident within U.S. territory. So to address that concern, the clause “excluding Indians not taxed” was added to the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to clarify that the citizenship language did not include Indians.

Returning to the core issue — the status of freed slaves — some Southern politicians and lawyers replied that the 1866 Civil Rights Act, being a mere statute, did not override the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that no black person could ever be a citizen of the United States. Dred Scott being a Supreme Court decision (however erroneous or badly reasoned), it held the status of constitutional law and thus superseded a mere congressional law. So it was argued.

The same bewhiskered, frock-coated “racists” up to their eyeballs in white supremacy nonetheless decided to open America’s borders to the entire world? It’s an obvious lie of convenience.

In response, the Republican Congress said (in effect): Fine; we’ll make the law constitutional by making it a constitutional amendment. That way there can be no doubt or ambiguity whatsoever about the citizenship status of freed slaves and no loophole through which state legislatures can get around the will of the people as expressed through their federally elected representatives. This was the core impetus behind the 14th Amendment.

The early drafts of the amendment’s first section were identical with the language of the 1866 Civil Rights Act. But as the Senate debates reveal, when it came time to constitutionalize the law, some found the clause “excluding Indians not taxed” to be too narrow. They worried that if only “Indians not taxed” were specified as not being granted automatic birthright citizenship, did that mean that everyone else was granted such a boon?

They did not want the amendment to state or even imply that. Hence in the transmutation from statute to amendment, “Indians not taxed” became “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The latter clause quite clearly includes not only “Indians not taxed” but also categories of people well beyond — as it was intended to do.

This is all quite plain from the debates. One senator after another defines “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” as meaning “not owing allegiance to anybody else,” “not subject to some foreign Power,” “born of parents who at the time were subject to the authority of the United States,” “of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty,” and so on. All language that makes quite clear that simply being born on American soil does not, by that fact alone, make one an American citizen. One must be born of citizen parents, or else — at the very least — be born to parents who are not citizens or subjects of another sovereign. The children of illegal immigrants clearly do not meet the latter criterion because their parents are, by definition, not citizens of the United States but of some other sovereignty and hence not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States in the plain meaning of that clause as intended by the drafters and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment.

Beyond this, it is beyond absurd to insist — as the partisans of birthright citizenship do — that the drafters and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment not only intended birthright citizenship as its practiced today but even had it on their minds. No once has any birthright partisan ever cited any quotes stating as much from the drafters or ratifiers, for the simple reason that there are none to be found. No one ever said anything like that. To the extent that they talked about the issue, their position was the exact opposite: to maintain that the purpose of the jurisdiction clause was to exclude the children of noncitizens, not to include them. The idea that the framers intended to extend citizenship to anyone whose parents snuck across our border is absurd and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the 19th-century American mind.

I note, however, how convenient it is for leftists who constantly attack all past American statesmen for being implacably “racist” to suddenly discover this one instance of their openhearted liberalism. Really? The same bewhiskered, frock-coated “racists” up to their eyeballs in white supremacy nonetheless decided to open America’s borders to the entire world? It’s an obvious lie of convenience and should be dismissed with contempt.

All of this substance is studiously avoided in the latest attack, in favor of citations to “experts” who “say” that I am wrong. But those experts are partisan exponents of a false interpretation no less than the hack who wrote the article. If simple logic isn’t enough to demonstrate that — again, what is the jurisdiction clause there for if all it means is “subject to U.S. law”? — all one need do is read the Senate debate with even a moderately open mind.

Editor’s note:A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.