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Are you less concerned about the fraud then the possibility that people might be racist?
No. I think that the president's racism and the racism of most of his supporters is beyond a mere possibility at this point. I'm concerned that, guilty or not, in a free society we shouldn't be targeting criminal investigations based on race, especially when we've already shown a willingness to excuse the exact same behavior when it's done by someone we like.
I'd agree with you of the foreign born population were under 10% instead of over 15%, and if those foreigners were of compatible people instead of Muslims and Hindus. The Italians and Irish were bad enough, and they still haven't naturalized enough over a hundred years later.
America is for Americans, and if that's racist then racism is good. I don't want Muslims in my home, I don't want Hindus in my home, I don't want to be inundated with foreigners because of slavery or white guilt or whatever excuse you care to proffer.
Enough. No more. By any means necessary.
Never mind how you propose to build a free society out of Muslims. I don't think there are many examples, and I don't see any reason to think it possible.
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I can see the discomfort around this particular case since it feels far enough out on a tree branch and blatant enough that it might actually move the Overton Window back to allowing for explicit judgement of immigrants on race/country of origin.
Also a decent chunk of the discomfort/reaction here seems to be along the lines of shock at how blatant, stupid and low-grade this fraud is. An organized sophisticated fraudster is one thing, but this feels like essentially willful ignorance in the favor of people who don't even present a real bull case for why they're in the country.
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You said "no", but the following text looks a lot like "yes".
If a racist motive leads to uncovering genuine fraud, should that fraud then be ignored or tolerated so as not to embolden racists?
How many 0's worth of underaged British girls should we tolerate being gang-raped to avoid the appearance of saying that Pakistanis are gang-rapists?
Have we?
So, I actually read all of that meandering, incoherent, emotionally manipulative PBS article you linked earlier. It has a single mention of Phil Bryant that makes nothing remotely resembling an effort to justify your take on the topic. His wiki article does mention that he was a potential target of investigation, though no charges were filed. It also notes that he purportedly reported the misuse of funds himself. That's just the man's word, but given Wikipedia's general high level of partisanship, I would consider that decent evidence in his favor.
Following the link to the original source (because, contra-Hanania, I actually read), I see that we're talking about the misuse of $77 million, and the Pulitzer-prize winning reporting on the topic. And I see that the indictments were brought by another one of Bryant's appointees.
Which is good, as far as it goes. Bryant's personal culpability over the pharma company looks like he's either an utter idiot or the indictments luckily hit right before he could sign off on real corruption. That behavior is very bad, and also very endemic to our political class in general.
The Minnesota fraud case looks to be something in the ballpark of a hundred times worse.
Are you excusing that behavior because condemning it would hamper people you like and embolden people you dislike?
How would you respond to someone blithely dismissing the entire Mississippi scandal as you just being an irrational bigoted monster who hates the Packers for no reason except that you're evil?
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