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Allison Gustavson's avatar

This was a great piece. One thing I haven’t heard much about, though, is how constrained she was. She had to be vague bc everything was a risk of loss rather than a potential gain, because our party is so ironically and it unbelievably intolerant of idea diversity. It seems we have set up a landscape littered with landmines, just waiting for any misstep, and have zero consensus on what even constitutes a misstep in the first place. That gives off a huge whiff of self-censorship papered over with vague platitudes, which are a self-evident turnoff. But I don’t blame her necessarily for that—it’s wise not to open a bag of beef jerky when you’re being followed by a pack of wild dogs.

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Nicholas Weininger's avatar

Why continue to call it a migration "crisis"? There are certainly problems with abuse of the asylum system and backlogs in the adjudication of asylum cases, and periodic scenes of local disorder that make easy fodder for GOP campaign ads. But what if any material impact, in your view, substantively justifies calling it a "crisis"? Forgive me if you think I'm quibbling here, but the "crisis" terminology has always seemed to me a hysterical misrepresentation designed to gin up evil, bigoted anti-immigrant sentiment, and I don't think you mean to do that here.

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