Right-Wing Zealots Lose Their Minds Over Selena Gomez Expressing Empathy For Immigrants
Nice people!
Republicans, including a former candidate for the US Senate who is way too old to worship Nick Fuentes as much as he does, have spent the last day and a half or so harassing actress Selena Gomez for committing the horrific crime of having empathy for immigrants, which they have decided is not allowed.
Monday, in a now-deleted Instagram story, Gomez cried, saying “I just want to say that I'm so sorry. All my people are getting attacked, the children. I don’t understand. I’m so sorry, I wish I could do something but I can’t. I don’t know what to do. I’ll try everything, I promise.”
Gomez has long been open about the fact that her own grandparents crossed the border illegally in the 1970s and became citizens later — which, let me just say, was also the case for a very large percentage of immigrants who came here from 1924-1965 from any place other than northern Europe. You know, because the United States literally implemented an ethnic quota system to keep them out? She also produced “Living Undocumented,” a Netflix series about the struggles of undocumented immigrants in the United States.
As the granddaughter of people who took that risk and made that sacrifice so she could have the opportunities she did, she is deeply affected by the current climate. I get it! It’s horrible to watch and terrifying to think about. I don’t want to see my neighbors being pulled from their homes in the middle of the night, and I sure as hell don’t want to see schools and churches raided.
Naturally, instead of understanding why she might feel this way and perhaps even reconsidering their own xenophobia, many on the Right decided that bullying was the best possible way to handle this situation. It’s funny when people cry or care about other human beings!
“Selena Gomez picked illegals over America b/c she's the 3rd gen descendent of Mexican illegals who received citizenship in the '87 Amnesty. She has an entitlement attitude toward America, like her illegal g'parents. Maybe Selena should be deported, too?” said the aforementioned failed senate candidate Sam Parker.
So now they think that they can just deport any person they like, regardless of their citizenship status? I guess so, considering that Georgia Congressman Mike Collins also wanted to have Bishop Mariann Budde deported for daring to ask Trump to have empathy towards LGBTQ+ people and immigrants.
Gomez, for her part, was not having it.
Of course, when they weren’t bullying Gomez for having human feelings, they were trying to spin it around and claim that she was actually the bully, as Charlie Kirk did.
“Where was the sobbing over the 100,000 Americans dead from fentanyl poisoning? Where were these tears over the 340,000 children who went missing after being trafficked over our border? Why wasn't there a breakdown for Rachel Nungary, Rachel Morin, or Laken Riley? I guess those Americans weren't ‘your people?’” he wrote on social media.
On Hannity Monday night Trump’s border czar repeated the same nonsense.
“I met with hundreds of Angel moms and dads who are separated from their children because they buried them because they were killed by illegal aliens,” Homan said Monday on "Hannity."
“We got a half a million children who were sex trafficked into this country, separated from their families, put in the hands of criminal cartels to be smuggled into the country. This administration can't find over 300,000. Where's the tears for them?”
Just so we’re clear — there are not “340,000 children who went missing after being trafficked over our border.” That is not a thing.
What actually happened? A paperwork issue, plus some unaccompanied minors not showing up for their court dates.
Via the BBC:
According to immigration experts and attorneys, the claims largely stem from an August report from the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general's office, which found that 32,000 unaccompanied minors failed to show up for court dates at immigration courts from 2019-23.
The report noted that 291,000 migrant children received no court notices at all. It also called on the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to “take immediate action to ensure the safety” of unaccompanied migrant children in the US. […]
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, a migrant advocacy group, told the BBC the figures are indicative of a bureaucratic “paperwork issue” rather than “anything nefarious”.“When you hear the phrase ‘missing’, you think that there is a child that someone is trying to find and can't,” he said.
“That's not the case here. The government has not made any effort to find these children.”
So, just to be clear, the Department of Homeland Security didn’t send out court notices to a large number of migrant children for whatever reason, and the conclusion these geniuses reaches was that the children were sex trafficked.
And this time there wasn’t even any pizza involved!
Other social media users accused Gomez about not caring about Americans who have “suffered at the hands of” undocumented immigrants, at least in their own imaginations, because none of them actually live in places where there are too many immigrants of any status.
They’re really, really trying to push this line that opposing these horrific ICE raids is unempathetic, and means that one just simply does not care about the hypothetical Americans who could hypothetically be murdered by someone’s hypothetical abuelita.
People who don’t live in sanctuary cities (and who, again, have probably never been to one, or met an immigrant) have been hysterically claiming that our elected officials are somehow hurting us by refusing to allow the police to assist ICE in deporting our friends and neighbors.
This all goes along with a trend I’ve been noticing in which people on the Right are more or less trying to co-opt “woke” language to promote their not-so-woke ideas.
Nearly any pro-immigrant (of any kind) post one sees on Xitter is immediately and completely overwhelmed by hundreds of accounts desperately and frantically trying to twist everything around in order to frame their xenophobia as somehow humanitarian, or done for the protection of women or to prevent crime (even though undocumented immigrants are far less likely to commit any kind of crime than are American citizens) or for the benefit of American workers, or for the American citizens who aren’t getting all the “free stuff” they believe undocumented immigrants are taking.
Of course, if they actually believed in any of these things or cared about them, they probably wouldn’t have voted for an adjudicated rapist whose main priorities are killing jobs and cutting the social safety net.
It’s clear that what they fear the most is actual empathy and compassion for immigrants (or for anyone other than white American citizens), because they know that once ICE is done rounding up those who have committed or been arrested for crimes, they will be coming for children, the elderly and adults who haven’t done anything wrong — they already are — and once they’re done there, they’ll be going after refugees and asylum seekers — and they know it’s going to look bad. They’re hoping that this part will inure people to the sight of it, that they can get those who are capable of empathy and human feeling on their side, but the more disgusted we are, the less likely it is that things will go that way.
OPEN THREAD.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Sam Elliott level whiskers.
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-89260308?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
The Empire State Building in red in celebration of the Lunar New Year.
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-89374053?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc