Students Condemn 'Trump' Quotes, Watch Their Faces When They Find Out Progressives Said Them
If you’re not familiar with Campus Reform’s videos, you should be. The outlet has done a bunch of excellent work reporting on liberalism on campus, but it’s probably best known for hilarious video experiments in a correspondent goes out to colleges and universities and expose how deep and uncritical liberal bias can be.
The best of these, in my opinion, involve a feint in which students are asked their opinion on a quote from Trump or some other Republican — except it isn’t really from Trump. Instead, the quote will have sprung from the mouth of someone like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Chuck Schumer.
In this latest video, posted on Tuesday, all three figures got a bit of play. Campus Reform’s Cabot Phillips went to American University in Washington asked students about the president’s proposed border wall. He then gave them quotes about the wall, allegedly from Trump.
Except they weren’t from Trump:
The students had a pretty uniform reaction to the idea of the wall, with thoughts like, “Everyone has a shared reaction to this, it’s absolutely horrendous,” and “It doesn’t make any sense. Isn’t there pretty much already, uh, fencing?”
So then the quotes. First was Hillary Clinton: “We should spend money to build a barrier to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in.”
Then former President Obama during his days in the Senate: “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented and unchecked.”
Then Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: “Illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple. Until the American people are convinced we will stop future flows of illegal immigration, we will make no progress.”
So, thoughts on the quotes?
“It’s divisive. I think America is a land of opportunity, a place for inclusion,” the “Isn’t there pretty much already, uh, fencing?” guy said.
“I just think it’s really kind of hateful speech in general,” another student added.
Then there’s another student who thought that such talk about illegal immigrants was “rude.”
“In a word, I’d say it’s more jingoist,” another said.
And then came the big reveal — the quotes were from Democrats.
Fencing guy pretty much tapped out the moment he heard that. “How ’bout that?” he said.
There was laughter and a lot of pauses.
As for the student who thought it was “hateful speech in general,” she had a different take on it: “”I … I mean, um, yeah, Democrats and Republicans have said things about border control.” Which is technically true, but not necessarily helpful to the student’s point.
One older student actually wasn’t surprised, since she said, “I remember Clinton’s administration and what they did with immigration, and what the Democrats’ stance was then.”
You can come away with several things from this, the first being the reflexive nature of campus activism: Whatever Trump supports is bad, even if people from their own side have supported it.
It’s also good, however, to remind liberals that these are policies that — until very recently — the Democrats supported wholeheartedly. The reasons for their shift are multifarious and almost none of them, even in the most charitable light, have to do with the fact they were suddenly fed the milk of human kindness and the scales fell from their eyes.
Whatever your takeaway, the message of the video was probably best encapsulated by the student who refused to acknowledge where the quotes came from when Phillips broke the news: “I don’t know, they just, they wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, they did,” Phillips responded.
That sums it up, I would think.
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