Like EmperorIng I know that staying out of this thread is good for me...still, every now and then I try to come in and shake things up a bit.
It is worth asking "why are you a Republican?" If the answer is "because Democrats want to steal our jobs" then it is worth considering
why the Republicans lie to you, repeatedly about where the money goes: Paul Krugman has a nice and short article here about that issue. We have nothing but a pile of lies, which is so large that some parts of it rot in neglect, other parts are on fire, and all of it is toxic.
Of course some people with a (D) by their names have repeated the lie, but who is promising growth in shitty, dead industries; throwing 40-years-and-maybe-a-profit giveaways to foreign companies; arguing that it's absolutely vital to give tax giveaways to the people and corporations who do not need it? You know who that is.
So Rob said some things which I thought were interesting and worth another look:
The easy one: Us Dems are not sitting around thinking about ways to make ourselves poorer, hand our women off to foreigners, change the electorate as if Dems aren't the majority already, etc. That's fever dream material, and not based on reality. You say "but isn't that what it's about?" No, it's about keeping America from renouncing the world (and its opportunities), and from being stale. Even that most American of achievements, the atom bomb, was reliant on the research of immigrants (as well as foreigners who helped lay the theoretical frameworks needed). So was the development of the bomb's delivery system. Even today, read the names of authors on important academic papers and you find the fruits of diversity. How many great ideas came from people saying "get your filthy foreign influence out of here, MAGA?"
The issue here is simple balance. Saying that ethnic or racial strife is the cause of most of the world's troubles is a simplification (at best). What about the dictators, who put their own family interest ahead of "their people?" Dynasty-building has often been a winning strategy in genetics - which tends to require everybody but the king's family is cannon fodder. Evolution is a dynamic process and you should not blindly think that you "win" by killing off all genes but yours (or "I don't mean killing them, let's put them all in a fence somewhere else") . This kind of worldview ignores the kinder parts of human nature in favor of sheer bloodthirstiness and treachery, a view that always ends in tears. Knives in backs, also.
There's another part of Rob's argument which seemed to be an unspoken assumption - we shouldn't let "Them" in because doing that leads to Strife. Again: What of the Jews? Did they bring it on themselves to bring their culture and genes to Europe? If you know a minimal amount of history you realize that's not true. You realize that Hitler's solution, and all the other pogroms for that matter, were built on a whole series of lies and promises that did not bear fruit. And in the end, Hitler decided that His German People failed Hitler. If anything, they failed by being so gullible as to believe that all their problems were caused by a minority group in their country, rather than by all the predictable forces - unbridled greed and naked ambition to power at any cost. They failed by putting blind faith in an unstable madman whose major skill was in public relations.
What modern "leader" spends his days craving "loyalty," and making proclamations that people who fail do it because they do not have blind faith in the Cause?
We report, you decide.
btw, not even Trump's judicial appointees buy his argument that randomly banning people you don't like on fake pretexts is in compliance with the Bill of Rights or due process, so I'm eagerly awaiting the next showdown between Jim Acosta and Trump