On Tuesday's New Day, as CNN's Alisyn Camerota hosted a debate between far-left former MSNBC contributor Michael Eric Dyson and former Donald Trump advisor Steve Cortes over what the word "breeding" was referring to in a recent tweet by the President, Dyson at one point asserted that "you can be a white supremacist in brown skin" as he argued against his fellow guest defending Trump.
Additionally, Camerota repeated the discredited myth popular on the left that illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than American citizens.
Shortly past 8:30 a.m, Eastern, Camerota introduced the segment by describing President Trump as being "on the defensive" about his tweet which complained that sanctuary cities that protect illegal immigrants are a "crime infested & breeding concept." She then showed clips from CNN correspondent Jim Acosta and CNN commentator April Ryan at a White House briefing asking whether Trump was referring to immigrants "breeding" as in reproducing, and therefore having a tinge of racism.
Cortes began by arguing that Trump meant that illegal immigration "breeds crime" rather than meaning to refer to actual biological reproductive breeding, with the former Trump advisor conceding that it could have been worded more clearly. He also correctly recalled that Trump has previously stated that sanctuary cities "breed crime" in a February 2017 interview with then-FNC anchor Bill O'Reilly.
At one point, Camerota complained about Cortes's suggestion that illegal immigrants are disproportionately more likely to commit crime as she incorrectly claimed: "Wait a minute, you're talking about undocumented immigrants. They haven't shown themselves to be any more dangerous -- in fact, less dangerous than native-born Americans in terms of crime rates."
After suggesting that white American citizens have a higher crime rate than illegal immigrants, Dyson bristled at Cortes for referring to his own Hispanic background as Dyson suggested that he could still be a "white supremacist" even if he is not white. Dyson:
Latino people are subjected to vicious forms of bigotry. The President has been chief among those who have been bigoted toward that community. And your being a brown person cannot exempt you from the kind of horrible inside acknowledgement that there's something going on here that you can't justify a white supremacist's logic. You can be a white supremacist in brown skin.
On Thursday last week, CNN's Chris Cuomo had hosted a segment on the same show with liberal New York Times columnist Charles Blow to fret over the same issue of whether Trump's tweet was suggesting that Hispanic immigrants "breed" too much.
Both CNN hosts behaved as if they were oblivious to the expression "breeds crime" even though Cuomo himself used it on the same show a few years ago. On May 26, 2015, while interviewing the Reverend Jamal Bryant of Empowerment Temple Church in Baltimore about the issue of police excessive force and crime, Cuomo posed: "You talk about government responsibility, police responsibility -- and what about personal responsibility, Reverend? What is your message to people about raising their kids and about what the element is in these communities that winds up breeding crime?"
Also of note, on the August 30, 2007, Lou Dobbs Tonight on CNN, correspondent Casey Wian not only used the expression "breeds crime," but he even related statistics suggesting that illegal immigrants were committing a disproportionately large share of crime in El Paso, Texas. Wian: "Sheriffs say illegal immigration breeds crime in their communities. In 2004, 45,000 suspects were booked into the El Paso County Jail -- 16,000 of them, or more than a third, were illegal aliens previously convicted of other state crimes."
But, when Cuomo and Blow discussed the "breeding" tweet last week, it was not suggested that Trump might have been using the word the same way Cuomo had used it in the past. After Blow suggested Trump was comparing illegal immigrants to animals, Cuomo fretted: "Once you define somebody as less than, then there's an expectation that they will be treated as less than."
