A Schmitt-Load of Nonsense

Maybe "endless immigration" should have ended in 1840.

In winding down his National Conservatism Conference speech on September 2, 2025, Missouri’s Republican U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt declared, “He built it [Mount Rushmore] so that Americans thousands of years from now would still look in awe at the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.” That line is important in analyzing the speech as a whole. It's important because the entire speech is built on a straw man—a straw man those great historical figures can help us to refute before we wrap up this dispatch.

Shortly before the above-quoted statement, Schmitt began erecting his straw-man argument: “For decades, the people in power sought to turn our past into a repressed memory—something so awful that we would prefer to forget it altogether. They made self-hatred and shame our new civic religion.” He gave no examples to support that statement. If he’d looked hard enough, he might have found a few instances of such extremist views, but he’d have been unable to find any legitimate support for that view in any of the writings or speeches of any of our nation’s leaders—from either political party.

I tried in vain to recall some anti-American speeches or writings from past Presidents or other prominent American leaders. So, I consulted two AI programs to help me with that task. The only things they could come up with were speeches by the likes of Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Barrack Obama. After deep deliberation, I finally saw a connection between those five radical dissidents: all were/are of a darker-than-white skin hue. Hmm.

And what was the essence of those “radical” speeches?

• Frederick Douglass was condemned for his effrontery in explaining how the nation’s Fourth of July celebrations appeared to African slaves and their descendants. Anti-American!

• Martin Luther King “argued that the Vietnam War was a ‘demonic destructive suction tube’ that pulled money and resources away from anti-poverty programs at home. He noted that a disproportionate number of Black men were being sent to fight and die for freedoms in Southeast Asia that they did not have in the U.S.” Anti-American!

• “Malcolm X viewed patriotism as a veil hiding systemic injustice. He urged his audience not to be ‘so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality,’ asserting that ‘wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or who says it.’” Anti-American!

• In his speech on America’s race relations, President Barrack Obama said, “The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.” Anti-American!

The lesson here? Speaking publicly about America’s faults is anti-American and must not be tolerated. Continuing to build his straw man, Schmitt added,

If America was a universal proposition, then everything we inherited from our specific Western heritage had to be abolished. So the statues come down. The names are changed. Yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains. The story of the nation has to be rewritten to align America with its true creed.

Here, Schmitt was referring to a speech in which former President Clinton said, "In their stories we see a reflection of our parents' and grandparents' journey, a powerful reminder that our America is not so much a place as a promise, not a guarantee but a chance, not a particular race but an embrace of our common humanity." He said nothing about abolishing our Western heritage.

That Clinton quote seems pretty tame and traditionally American to me. I think most Americans would agree with that sentiment; it’s exactly what I was taught in my junior high and high school classes in the 60s and 70s.

But if you deceitfully reframe it as Schmitt did here­—"The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism and endless immigration. In a speech in 1998, Bill Clinton said that the continuous influx of immigrants was—and I quote—a ‘reminder that our America is not so much a place as a promise’”—it’s no surprise that the MAGA crowd would be enraged.

According to Schmitt, America’s true enemies are “liberalism, multiculturalism and endless immigration,” which, by the way, is not what Clinton referred to. Even so, let’s look at how Webster’s Dictionary defines each of those concepts.

Liberalism: “inclination to be open to ideas and ways of behaving that are not conventional or traditional.” A common American idiom for that definition is “thinking outside the box.” Being open to unconventional and non-traditional ideas is how America was “built by the most adventurous, the most courageous, the most curious and innovative and risk-taking sons and daughters of the West.” That quote comes directly from the very same speech in which Schmitt condemns liberalism.

Multiculturalism: “cultural pluralism or diversity (as within a society, an organization, or an educational institution).” Uh oh, it’s the first trait in MAGA’s loathed policies of DEI: Diversity. Diversity is un-American. Uniformity is patriotic, as long as the uniformity conforms to my standard (white Christians who adhere to my belief system).  

Endless immigration: Webster’s does not provide a definition for “endless immigration,” but here’s its definition for immigration: “travel into a country for the purpose of permanent residence there.” So, if Senator Schmitt sees “endless immigration” as a problem, it seems logical to conclude that he wants to end “endless immigration.” Perhaps we should have ended the endless immigration prior to the 1840s, which by his own admission is when his ancestors arrived in America from Germany.

So, how did the Mount Rushmore icons Schmitt extolled feel about “endless immigration”?

• George Washington: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”

• Thomas Jefferson: “Expatriation [is] a natural right, and acted on as such by all nations in all ages.”

• Abraham Lincoln: “I regard our immigrants as one of the replenishing streams appointed by providence to repair the ravages of internal war and its waste of national strength and health.”

• Theodore Roosevelt: “In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American.”

While Roosevelt’s views are more focused on assimilation than the views expressed by the other three, all four clearly saw immigration—with no expiration date—as being a net positive.

Schmitt’s nationalistic, xenophobic straw man cannot stand up to the truths about the benefits America gains through ongoing—“endless”—immigration.