Some are saying that Don Lemon’s meltdown while “interviewing” GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy may have contributed to his hasty exit from CNN. Ramaswamy talked about gun rights, and Lemon made it clear that no one — whatever ethnicity you are — is going to tell him, an African American man, about what rights blacks have and do not have. In case you missed it, the NRA posted the clip:
🔥@VivekGRamaswamy nails it! NRA championed civil rights and constitutional freedom for all Americans long before barriers were broken in sports, schools, lunch lines, water fountains, the media (@DonLemon's industry), or Hollywood.
For 152 years, NRA has welcomed and fought… pic.twitter.com/MDlclFgYTi
— NRA (@NRA) April 19, 2023
Lemon even scolded the producers in his earpiece for not shutting up and letting him grandstand. Boy, we sure are going to miss him.
Rep. Ro Khanna has weighed in and proclaimed Lemon to be right — the civil rights movement paved the way for immigrant rights.
Don Lemon was right. As an Indian American, I was profoundly embarrassed by Vivek lecturing a Black man about Black history. The truth is that the Black civil rights movement paved the way for the 1965 immigration act so that Vivek’s family or mine could come to America. We owe a… https://t.co/oprlEsxHAI
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) April 25, 2023
“We owe a huge debt” is how that ends.
Zaid Jilani argues that no, Lemon was not right.
No, this is the 1619 version, which falsely claimed the civil rights movement was behind the 1965 immigration reform to attack Asian kids who opposed racial discrimination in college admissions. The truth is more complicated: https://t.co/EbCBYdCJS8 https://t.co/uYxAnjood6
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
The groups of people who organized to reform the immigration laws in the 1960s had been at it for decades, they included Eastern Europeans, Jews and Asians. Nikole Hannah-Jones erased these groups of people for her revisionism but Khanna should tell the accurate story.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
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There's definitely an impulse in modern discourse to just erase any differences besides black/white. The original immigration laws to the U.S. privileged Northern Europeans who were descendants of the original settlers, even Eastern Europeans were badly screwed over.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
In fact in passing the 1965 immigration overhaul, many members of congress (including progressives!) swore up and down that the country wouldn't have a lot more Asians and Africans as a result. Critical theory revisionism has removed all this nuance.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
Click on the article: I wrote it. And my main sources were an Associated Press reporter who wrote a book about the history of the law and a New York Times reporter who wrote a book about the history of the law https://t.co/J67LZaZ219
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
This 1619 essay won a Pulitzer Prize and it had more than one glaring historical inaccuracy, and in this case the inaccuracy was intended to serve the author's modern political agenda. Now Members of Congress take up the same false history. pic.twitter.com/r6MIXWtjxj
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
The main congressman who pushed for the immigration reforms basically did it on behalf of Eastern Europeans. At one point he said during the debate: "There will not be, comparatively speaking, many Asians or Africans entering this country."
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
Not only is it false that the civil rights movement created the immigration reform act, but the people who actually created it didn't even do it on behalf of who we would today refer to as nonwhite migrants.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
That tons of Asians including Indian Americans ended up coming to the United States was a big surprise to the people who passed the law because that was not their intention, and it certainly wasn't the civil rights movement's concern at the time.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion of the Senate, said during the debate over the immigration law: "It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society." They were *not* acting in the same spirit as the civil rights movement.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
I'm not saying that the civil rights movement did not have synergy with the immigration reform movement nor help it, just that they were separate movements and they shouldn't be conflated into one.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
Jewish Americans assisted the Civil Rights Movement but it would be false to say that they then were responsible for its successes just as it would be false to say the CRM was responsible for the success of the mostly Eastern European/Jewish immigration reform movement.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
1619 project is an ethnonationalist telling of events that's why NHJ never mentions the Greeks, Italians, Irish, Jews who actually played the leading role in the immigration reform act. Let's tell the whole history not just bits that support a narrative.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
MLK spoke about this pull on the left side of the aisle a few days before his death: "There are some who are color-consumed and they see a kind of mystique in being colored, and anything non-colored is condemned." History is not so simple and neither is the present.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
It's not true that one group in American society committed all the evils and one group is nothing but valorous victims, that's a children's book version of it and it's unfortunate outlets like NYT and CNN have promoted it.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 25, 2023
What’s important to remember is that Joe Biden attended black churches and took part in the civil rights movement, marching in Selma and so on.
Yup.@VivekGRamaswamy was actually right here.
Not that it matters. Don Lemon should've been fired for lot better reasons any way.
— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) April 25, 2023
Ro Khanna is just trolling. He really isn’t that ignorant!
— What The Duck Just Happened (@stanweinberg1) April 25, 2023
But they’re teaching the “1619 Project” in schools, so it must be true. And Don Lemon doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.
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Related:
Don Lemon pulls the race card in argument with Vivek Ramaswamy over gun rights https://t.co/TK9qOiRRWw
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) April 20, 2023
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