CNN’s NewsNight, hosted by Abby Phillip, has become the network’s equivalent of an in-person Piers Morgan screaming fest, pitting a handful of Democrats against Scott Jennings — which still is nowhere near a fair fight. And on nights when Jennings needs a break, another person who doesn’t think President Donald Trump is the Antichrist steps in. Of course, the appeal is that it routinely produces viral interactions, and usually in the form of a Democrat saying something really silly, and then Jennings schooling them for it.
The latest example came when Cameron Kasky, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting who is running for Congress, made the laughably libelous claim on live television that Trump is a sex trafficker.
“I would love it if he was more transparent about the human sex trafficking network that he was a part of, but you can’t win them all,” declared Kasky during a panel discussion on Greenland. It was an “off-the-cuff” comment he clearly practiced at least a dozen times in the green room beforehand. Jennings called him out, pressuring stand-in host John Berman to note that “Donald Trump has never been charged with any crimes in relation to Jeffrey Epstein.” Kasky then took to social media to (apparently) offer a full retraction and apology.
“I would like to retract my comments from CNN last night and truly apologize,” Kasky wrote. “Donald Trump was obviously not involved with a giant international child sex trafficking ring where women and children were systematically raped by elites. I said that by accident and didn’t mean it.”
But whether or not this was a sincere apology — motivated, obviously, by the threat of Trump launching a lawsuit whose demands would make Dr. Evil proud — this actually provided cover for the more insidious and dangerous comment by Kasky that same evening.
“You can’t say ‘illegals’ anymore.”
And again, Jennings pushed back, asking the 25-year-old how he planned to enforce such an edict. But that also misses the point.
Why is Kasky’s argument that “you can’t say ‘illegals’ anymore” not only important but crucially important? Well, because it is the latest example of a yearslong strategy by the Left to manipulate our politics and culture through our language.
The Democratic Party understands, beneath all of the virtue signaling nonsense, that the people want secure borders. They oppose the proliferation of murderers, rapists, and drug dealers throughout their country while politicians in Washington, D.C., hide behind their armed security and cheer for welfare-addled citizenship for all.
To put it bluntly, they are losing this fight.
So, instead of convincing the people of a policy that they will never accept, they’re playing the long game. By making “illegals” a taboo term, Kasky and others aren’t looking to protect the feelings of illegal immigrants. All they’re doing is trying to erase the notion of illegal presence in our country from our language and, as a consequence, our understanding. This has nothing to do with empathy and everything to do with a generational Orwellian strategy to erase everything that stands in their way.
If they succeed, future generations won’t refer to illegal aliens as illegal or aliens, and instead use partisan terms such as “undocumented” in whatever is left of our country that long since forgot the notion of sovereignty, all while not having the vocabulary to understand what happened.
Ian Haworth is a syndicated columnist. Follow him on X (@ighaworth)or Substack.
