Don’t Challenge People Who Own Books
Remember John Kelly saying that immigrants don’t assimilate well because they are uneducated, don’t speak English, and don’t have any skills.
Well, you know what comes next, right?
Jennifer Mendelsohn, looked up Kelly’s ancestry to prove to him and the rest of America that we all come from immigrants. Mendelsohn found out through a 1900 census bureau that Kelly’s great grandfather lived in America undocumented for 18 years and could not “read, write, or speak English.”
She adds —
The 1930 census shows those great-grandparents living with their daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren, one of whom was Kelly’s mother. John DeMarco had been here for 47 years and was not an American citizen (“AL”). Crescenza had been here for 37 years and spoke no English.
He won’t acknowledge it. For him this story will not exist.
This is the same as Trump will pretend the surname “Drumpf” doesn’t exist. Even after he upbraided John Stewart for using a stage name different than his own legal name.
The American right-wing conservative has no conscience. No principles. And ultimately no decency.
1Aww, SNAP!
2Reading the text and comments continue to be a learning experience. Thank you.
3Alan, they also have no history. Or, for that matter, science. I don’t think they’re too big on math or literature either. They claim to be big on religious studies but show little Bible knowledge and next to zero knowledge of any other religion.
I have no idea what they find to talk about.
4Is it a cautionary tale?
5Is he saying that immigrants will lead to a future that includes more people like him?
Undocumented, non English speaking greatgrandparents?
Can we deport him?
6@slipstream
7I think they have a light to dark color chart on which they base deportation (and all other injustices). I’m sure he lands on their “keep” end of the spectrum.
The most interesting assimilation Kelly can claim that he fully blended into the toxic atmosphere of the White House.
8Rhea:
9Us.
They talk about liberals, and how much we’ve screwed up the country.
In other words, they project a lot.
It has been reported that John Kelly has a headache today. After breaking up a chick fight in the communications office, he found Mike Pence & Nick Ayers measuring for new drapes in the Oval Office, or as we sane people would say, a coup in progress. It’s only Monday, so prepare for a major dumpster fire.
10I just luvs poking around my own family’s Ancestry.com pages, census reports, military records and all the other stuff.
It’s just fascinating, and if you learn to interpret the census forms, they are a huge resource, and lead to more births, deaths, and marriages, etc.
Every census was different too, recording different types of information beyond the basics, some of it extremely useful, some not so much.
You can also learn a lot by going beyond just your immediate kinfolk, and searching through an area or neighborhood and turning up all kinds of other stuff, including kinfolk otherwise missed (found one early county where some ancestors settled as pioneers and there were a bunch of them from 1800 on). Also pinned down my mom’s actual dad vs. the stepdad we were most familiar with; grandmom had divorced him pretty quick, but he had a history of such ‘quick, short-lived’ marriages, who knew there were such cads back then, stuff like that was usually hidden away?
I filled in a lot of genealogical holes by carefully studying dozens of US, Canadian, UK, German, and etc., census forms (or equivalents).
One of the amazing things to me was the degree of immigration that was occurring in certain periods (like 1870-1920). It was very interesting to find 30-40 different nationalities listed in just a few blocks of some neighborhoods, some of them from places you would never have imagined. The same with the surnames.
I highly recommend y’all get a subscription, at least for six months, then using it like crazy. They periodically offer discount ‘sales’, so keep an eye out and jump on a deal. I bit for an expanded, full-on all comprehensive plan finally, it was a ‘deal’, but the renewal will break the bank I think. The military histories alone have been worth it, naval logs, vessel War History’s, Action Reports, Musters, etc, damn…just amazing stuff (I could write a book now, srsly, have the outline).
Their DNA tests are cool too (and go ‘on sale’ too). A funny result: my ex, sort of a super Mex-Tex, near LaRaza-type at times, found out that she’s dang near 50% mixed Anglo, not 100% NA/Aztec/Mayan/mestizo! Nobody even suspected that (ESL after 5yo, parents on back spoke little/no English, en La Frontera, dos/ambos lados). Those danged surviving San Patricios must have ‘got around’…
11It has been painfully obvious that Gen. Kelly disdains minorities, women and immigrants. He continues to show a lack of intelligence and honesty in his off-the-cuff comments, fitting right in with the Dump Circus.
12Since the mid-1980s Marines come in one color: green. One gender: Marine.
What stopped Kelly from get the f-ing message?
13Micr, back in the ’60’s we called it the ‘Big Green Weenie’, or ‘The Crotch’ (wuz a sweaty hellhole type thing, crawling into a returned RF-4B, etc), neither of which terms I ever hear anymore… Semper Fi
14I meant to mention that that image of a (1910) US Census sheet shown above (within a tweet I guess, I couldn’t load it on another page) is actually from the “Ancestry.com” website.
15That is the way Ancestry presents those pages, usually after searching a name.
The desired person will be highlighted in yellow, and other people at the same address (kinfolk, lodgers, etc) are highlighted in green, you can zoom and pan around the census pages. As you move your cursor over the various fields a detail box will zoom out with the OCR’ed and sometimes enhanced/explained contents of that field; sometimes helpful for clarification and spelling, since the census takers all hand-wrote the information, and some of it may be nearly illegible, or unintelligible to us moderns (really, some of the columns are for data that we have no concept of today).
Bottom line: Never equate education experience with intelligence. Or at least not when access is restricted.
Or, ignorance is a curable condition; stupidity, not so much…
16My favorite one of these was when she looked up Tomi Lahren’s ancestors and found that her great-great-grandfather faked his immigration papers.
17I relish the proven facts that among all of the immigrants to this country, social scientists did actually discover that Germans and Irish amalgamated amazingly fast and well into the larger mass of society. Hence they became elected politicians! Take that right in the seat of the pants of your reverse snobbery, John=boy!
18@Sandridge
I guess what I meant was that in 1985 or so my sainted father and I paid a visit to the Marine Recruit Depot San-der-eggo-Cally-fornya to see if it remained up to his high standards given his absence of 20ish years. A still serving Marine from the 1970s shared that message with msF. This message was loud and clear in the E-4 through E-7 ranks. There are no Marines except Marines. Marines come in several sizes but in only one color: Green.
19expect Gen. Kelly to start whining about his family being “stalked” in 3, 2, 1………………………
20Here’s the link to the other ignorant commenter and the reality of her immigrant ancestors.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tomi-lahren-immigrants_us_5af9b26ae4b09a94524ac468
21Knowledge is power…
22I would like to know if Tomi Lahren, in addition to having had uneducated and non-English-speaking immigrant ancestors, has any actual “skills” at all. (“photogenic” is not a skill. Neither is “talking.”) Can she bake bread? Can she sew clothes? Can she grow food? Can she operate heavy machinery, fly an airplane, pick crops, pour concrete, assemble machines, put on a roof, replace a door, lay a floor, paint a house? Does she have a plumbing license? Does she have *any* skills other than being white, blonde, and ignorant?
23One thing tomi has proven good for is as a comedic target for the great Charlie Pierce. He calls her “Walking Clothing Allowance” and often comments on her inane utterances. Hilarity ensues.
Satan himself couldn’t devise a worse torture than to be relentlessly satirized by Pierce.
24Elizabeth Moon, Ms. Lahren is certainly no Susan Oliver:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Oliver
(woof woof…, one of my fav actresses, and extremely accomplished in other fields, including piloting her own Aero Commander, and Learjets.)
25