Watch Look on College Students' Faces When They Condemn 'Trump' Quote, Then Learn Obama Said It
For these students, it was a learning experience they never expected.
Campus Reform, a conservative news site focusing on news in higher education, sent a team with media director Cabot Phillips to interview college students about a quote about immigration “making the rounds on social media.”
But the source of the quote wasn’t what the students suspected at all.
And the blank looks on their faces when they learned the truth were priceless.
Phillips buttonholed students with an introduction about the quote intended to get their minds on President Donald Trump (as though any discussion of illegal immigration would bring any other president to mind.)
He then read them a quote most assumed came from the man in the White House.
The quote, however, wasn’t Trump’s at all. It was a 2014 statement from then-President Barack Obama.
“We are a nation of laws, undocumented workers broke our laws and I believe they must be held accountable, especially those who may be dangerous,” Obama said then. “That’s why over the last six years, deportations of criminals are up 80 percent, and we’re going to keep focusing on threats to our security.”
Now, the reference to “the last six years” should have been a clue, but it’s possible that the collegians weren’t really listening until Phillips got to the red-meat words of “deportations” and “criminals” and “threats to our security.”
The reaction – at least as it was presented in the Campus Reform video — was unanimous and decidedly negative.
“I think that comes from a place of, like, white, American nationalism,” one young woman opined.
Another kindred spirit noted that “Donald Trump has kind of, like, embraced this rhetoric of racism and xenophobia that is not beneficial to our country at all.”
Obama, of course, wasn’t given to outbursts of “white, American nationalism.” He didn’t think the country was more special than any other, in fact.
So his words just might have been one of those rare occasions during Obama’s eight years in office when he was closer to the truth than not.
In the crucible years of the Trump presidency, though, Americans who follow events through the prism of the establishment media – as the students interviewed here likely do – are indoctrinated to believe that any crackdown on illegal immigration is a sign of “racism and xenophobia,” or is somehow not “moral.”
Social media reactions nailed the problem:
The term ‘racist’ has been rendered meaningless by Dems who use that as a retort for everything they dislike; rarely is it used responsibly.
— Bruce David (@poormansurvivor) July 19, 2019
Bring Civics back to our schools.
Teach critical thinking skills.— Carr *** (@carrnut) July 19, 2019
And this folks.. is our future! Their plan to #DumbDownTheMasses is working! #WakeUpPeople
— Jay Dubya (@jay48481789) July 19, 2019
Dismaying as the knee-jerk reaction of the students might be, there’s more to the United States than life on a college campus. And there are more sources of information than the chronically dishonest establishment media and its portrayal of President Trump.
Americans learned in November 2016 that the political establishment and its praetorian guard in the media does not have a stranglehold on American democracy.
The two-plus years of the Trump administration’s booming economy have been a lesson of their own — one that American voters aren’t likely to forget in 2020.
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