‘Xenophobic' Fox News Pundit Gets Genealogical Tree Dug Up After Defending John Kelly's Racist Remarks About Immigrants
Fox News pundit Tomi Lahren is getting the John Kelly treatment after defending the White House Chief of Staff's racist remarks this weekend. And it turns out her family background is much like Kelly's: immigrants who came to America and refused to "assimilate," yet produced a family of successful Americans.
On Saturday Lahren took to Fox News and echoed Kelly's comments.
"You don't just come into this country with low skills, low education, not understanding the language and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice. That's not what this country is based on," she insisted.
.@TomiLahren: "You don't just come into this country with low skills, low education, not understanding the language and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice. That's not what this country is based on." @WattersWorld pic.twitter.com/Dux0cABHar
— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 13, 2018
"These people," Lahren told Fox News host Jesse Watters, "need to understand that it's a privilege to be an American and it's a privilege that you work toward – its not a right," she claimed, despite not having to work toward becoming an American, and apparently neither did her ancestors, according to journalist Jennifer Mendelsohn.
Earlier this week Kelly, a retired USMC general who has served as President Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security before becoming his Chief of Staff, told NPR he believes that undocumented immigrants don't deserve to be in the U.S. because they are "not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society."
"They're overwhelmingly rural people," Kelly insisted. "In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don't speak English; obviously that's a big thing. ... They don't integrate well; they don't have skills."
Mendelsohn took a deep dive into Kelly's background, finding Kelly’s great grandfather lived in America, undocumented, for 18 years and could not “read, write, or speak English.”
And now she's doing the same with Lahren's family tree, and, unsurprisingly, it looks a lot like John Kelly's.
According to Mendelsohn, "the 1930 census says Tomi's 3x great-grandmother had been here for 41 years and still spoke German."
Mendelsohn is the creator of what she calls #resistancegenealogy.
"Her 2nd great-grandmother had been here for 10 yrs. Spoke no English," she says, tweeting the documentation. "Her great-grandfather's 1895 baptism from MN? Recorded in Norwegian."
Except the 1930 census says Tomi's 3x great-grandmother had been here for 41 years and still spoke German. Her 2n… https://t.co/R7BBAJIq3S— (((Jennifer Mendelsohn)))🇺🇦 (@(((Jennifer Mendelsohn)))🇺🇦) 1526223708
There's also this interesting tidbit. (To be fair, Mendelsohn notes a jury acquitted him.)
Law-abiding citizens like her great-great-grandfather, indicted by a grand jury for forging naturalization papers?… https://t.co/lb3g7THlIf— (((Jennifer Mendelsohn)))🇺🇦 (@(((Jennifer Mendelsohn)))🇺🇦) 1504547531
Former Office of Government Ethics chief Walter Shaub weighed in, with a scathing nickname for Lahren:
Lahren, by the way, is a 25-year old ultra-conservative commentator who managed to make a name for herself quickly by spewing racist rhetoric. She now lives in Los Angeles, has a lucrative Fox News contract, and is worth an estimated $3 million.
