Years-old, fully grown normalcy bias is a tricky animal, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D) latest smorgasbord of socialist sobriquets in favor of California housing loans for “undocumented migrants” is a perfect example.
Appearing Friday with Bill Maher on his HBO program “Real Time,” Pelosi succeeded in not only avoiding the touchy matter of her role in perpetuating the centrally-controlled and utterly messed-up federal “immigration” system, she perpetuated the corrosive idea that government has an ethical role in providing home loans to people even as she invoked Ronald Reagan to fatuously add what she seemed to think was a patina of patriotism and Americana to the fantastic feast.
Maher appeared to want a serious discussion about the new legislation, California’s AB 1840, which the state Assembly passed Wednesday. It’s a statute that, as the Daily Caller noted August 18, will:
“…amend the California Dream For All Shared Appreciation Loan program, an initiative launched last year that provides first-time homebuyers with a loan of up to 20% of the house’s purchase price for down payment or closing cost. If passed and signed into law, illegal migrants living in California would be eligible to apply for a piece of the pie.”
The Daily Caller also noted in that piece that, now that the CARES Act federal handouts to states have dried up, California is $60 billion in the RED.
But that isn’t stopping the panderers like Governor Gavin Newsom (D) from not only promoting the idea that it’s perfectly fine to have taxpayers subsidize loans for “first-time” homebuyers, it’s also not stopping Pelosi from widening that insane normalcy bias to imply that it’s only fair to expand the toxic, state-tax-funded loan idiocy to migrants who have moved here contrary to her central government’s immigration statutes.
Which Maher rightly questioned. Here was that moment:
Nancy Pelosi states that the goal of the Democrat party is to convert undocumented immigrants (illegals) into documented immigrants:
— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) August 31, 2024
Bill Maher: "The CA lawmakers giving government assistance to undocumented immigrants to buy houses.
That's kind of a different place than the… pic.twitter.com/pfeG9ngZUE
Maher introduced the topic to her by correctly stating:
“The California lawmakers just passed a law – it hasn’t been signed by Governor Newsom, but – giving government assistance to undocumented immigrants to buy houses. That’s kind of a different place than the Democratic Party used to be on immigration, isn’t it? And I’m not going to say that’s what the country’s going to do, but that’s certainly where California is.”
Pelosi, like a palomino of platitudes, burst from the corral.
“Well, let me just say, immigration has always been a bipartisan issue,” she tried.
But Maher kept focused on the matter at hand.
“But not free housing.”
“Well, it’s not free housing,” Pelosi claimed. And then she avoided the reality of what it is, which is tax-supported loans that will artificially pump homebuilding and direct resources where unmanipulated market participants normally would have not put them, which could see recipients default, and, as we have witnessed in the 1990s and with the 2008-2012 so-called “Great Recession” (which, technically, was an economic depression) could see numerous banks count the loans as assets, see the mortgages become unpaid and toxic, and see wider systemic problems throughout the state economy.
Yes, she avoided all that. It’s not about tax-subsidized, unnaturally-pumped-up housing demand from “undocumented” migrants. Instead, Nancy spoke about… dreams.
“It’s… It’s…” she seemed to fish for something. “The American Dream being available to more people.”
Did you know that? As with most normalcy bias reinforcers, she kind of skips essential parts of the “American Dream” – those aspects being self-reliance, self-achieving, work, merit, investment, and NOT BEING A PARASITE, regardless of whether one is a migrant or one was born here.
And she made things even more offensive, trying to add a shine of Americana to her pablum by mixing Ronald Reagan into her dreamworld.
“But, understand this about immigration. The best speech on immigration was by President Ronald Reagan. ‘This is the last speech I will make as President of the United States. I want to communicate a message to the country I love.’ And he talks about the Statue of Liberty and the beacon of hope it is to the world, and what – America was preeminent to the world because our door was always open and we will cease to be preeminent when we shut the door.”
And she even pretended to respect Mr. Reagan, adding:
“Now, I don’t do justice to the Great Communicator. Google it. It’s a fabulous speech.”
And Pelosi observed that George H. W. Bush continued “in that respect for the diversity of America…”
Which has nothing at all to do with tax-backed home-loans.
Mr. Maher appeared to be very aware of Pelosi’s grandiloquent attempt to deflect from the actual point, so he offered one final attempt to get a real answer from her.
“So, you’d vote for this law…?”
Pelosi appeared flustered, and, of course, deflected, again, invoking her position as a federal politician in order to avoid answering about the ethics of the California statute, then claiming that the state was trying to help people achieve that wondrous “American Dream.”
“Making the American Dream of home ownership available to all people is something we have to do for people who are here now."
She also implied that those people are “undocumented migrants” and the feds have to come up with a way to fast-track citizenship for them.
So this is our opportunity to get some important points into memory, to avoid normalcy bias.
First, just because California, or any other political gang, hands out tax-backed home loans does not mean that such a baseline action is proper on a moral or economic level. I have no more right to make my neighbor pay to back another person’s home loan than I do to force my neighbor to pay for anything. Taxation is theft, period.
Related: California's Zero-Down, Zero-Payment Home 'Loan' Program May Soon Extend to Illegals
And, as noted above, when the government engages in such activity, it warps the market, seeing monetary, human, temporal, and other resources pushed into those new homes when the homes normally would not have been built, and the resources would have gone elsewhere, based on honest market decisions made by what should be FREE people.
And, finally, Pelosi’s attempt to claim that migrants should be on the same socialist “get a government-subsidized home loan” footing as “legal residents” mixes into it the idea that she wants the feds to create a way to grant more migrants legal status and not be deported.
This brings us to the final, and very important, level of normalcy bias, about which I have written numerous times for MRCTV. It is the fact that immigration is not a federal issue. The word doesn’t even appear in the US Constitution. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both noted in 1798 that it was a state purview. Texas had a “Bureau of Immigration” in its state constitution when approved in 1869, and it was only with an errant and disastrous 1875 Supreme Court ruling in the case called “Chy Lung v Freeman” that the justices invented the “federal control” over immigration.
The system has been a central-planning, rhetoric-backed, unconstitutional albatross ever since.
People who support federal control over immigration support central planning, federal hegemony over state matters, and political intervention in what should be matters of free association. Just as I have no right to take someone’s land to put up a wall where I want it to be, I have no right to stop two, or more, other people from freely associating, talking, or working together.
And, just as I have no right to make someone pay for a wall to be policed somewhere or to take someone's property to create a "border" zone, I certainly have no right to make my neighbor pay to offer anyone – be he a “legal” or “illegal” resident – to get a subsidized home loan.
This dark fantasy world is where normalcy bias has brought many Americans, and Nancy Pelosi perpetuates many of the myths as she spouts more foolish rhetoric in front of Bill Maher.
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Joe Biden furious after judge pauses his Executive Order granting illegals a path towards citizenship. https://t.co/SzsB5GvaLL
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