Rantz: Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan insults illegal immigrants in dumpster-fire editorial
Apr 15, 2019, 6:01 AM
If you were wondering if Mayor Jenny Durkan, a former US Attorney that pretended to care about the law, has officially become the type of candidate we should all scorn, well, stop. Her weekend piece in The Washington Post manages to reject and welcome illegal immigrants, while inadvertently insulting them.
RELATED: Durkan is shockingly clueless on homelessness
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The editorial is a dumpster fire of embarrassing, pandering double-talk, and if the Washington Post wasn’t all-in with their anti-Trump sentiment, the contradictory propaganda piece would only have a home on Medium or a Patreon-funded blog.
Last week, President Donald Trump confirmed reports that he’d like to place migrants, caught illegally entering the US, in sanctuary cities. It’s a giant trolling maneuver that exposed folks like Durkan.
Durkan’s editorial manages the kind of doublespeak you expect from a politician who picks virtue signaling over sound policy. Woke Durkan writes, “Seattle is not afraid of immigrants and refugees.”
But then, she almost immediately criticizes the president’s plan:
What does scare us? A president and federal government that would seek to weaponize a law enforcement agency to punish perceived political enemies. A would-be despot who thinks the rule of law does not apply to him.
Why does Durkan view bringing illegal immigrants to Seattle as punishment? How would Seattle be punished, in her eyes, by welcoming folks in need of help — the kind she likes to play White Knight towards?
In her (or the staff member who wrote this) zest to attack Trump — while weirdly claiming she’s not a political enemy of his — she implies it would be bad to bring illegal immigrants here. One might say she committed a microaggression.
“He is demonizing immigrants and refugees to incite fear and to distract the American public from his own failures,” Durkan continues.
Why does Durkan think Seattle would be scared to invite illegal immigrants into this sanctuary city? Or is Durkan the one that’s scared?
Then, Durkan reminds us she’s looking for higher office now that she’s over this whole mayor-thing.
“The president’s threats won’t intimidate me as a mayor of a city with an open door, as a former federal prosecutor or as the granddaughter of a teenager who fled a war-torn, starving and impoverished country only to be welcomed in America.”
Oh, she’s such a hero.
She then spends a couple paragraphs laying on the pandering really, really thick, reminding us that our immigrant and refugee community are an integral part of our community.
But this isn’t in dispute and comes off as incredibly condescending, as if they need her approval. If she spoke this way about Jews (though given her inaction on local anti-Semitism, she might not), I’d be incredibly annoyed: I don’t need her telling me what I’m capable of. I don’t need your approval.
Not to mention, she would — and likely has — described every other demographic group in Seattle in the same way.
My favorite part of Durkan’s piece is when she tells Trump that his administration can learn from her own. She left out all the damning statistics of homelessness, traffic congestion, property crime, rape, robbery, and murder all trending in the wrong direction under her watch.
With respect to the turmoil in the White House, bragging about your administration while we’re under a national spotlight for “dying” is probably not a smart PR move.
All the way at the end of her campaign speech, she implies she’d accept illegal immigrants to the city — after spending 697 words feigning outrage by the plan.
She could have saved us all the time it took to read her piece and just say she welcomes all, but then she wouldn’t get to establish her Progressive bona fides on a national stage. And for all the talk about not being afraid of illegal immigrants, she buried the invitation — probably hoping you’d miss it.
If this is truly a sanctuary city, this move by Trump isn’t a threat — it’s a welcome policy change that should please us. We said we’d give sanctuary, so it should be uniformly welcomed with open arms. Unless you’re a fraud.
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