Be Careful of the Ctrl-Left

For John, BLUF:  Yes, Immigrant Sarah Hoyt is more "American" than second generation Cuban-American Jim Acosta.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Mr. Acosta, Can You Hear Me Now?

From PJ Media, on 3 August, we had this tirade by American Author Sarah Hoyt.

Here is the lede plus two:

There is one thing the ctrl-left and the alt-right agree on: it is impossible to change cultures.  If you're born into a culture, all your genetic predispositions make it impossible to change your eating habits, your language, much less your manners, your planning, and your ability to think as a member of this new culture.

But the hardest of all is language, which is virtually impossible to change, which is why we pay for bilingual education for children of Latin immigrants born in the US and sometimes third generation in the US.

Because, you see, the best you can achieve in terms of learning a foreign language is the sort of halting, broken speech such as children and toddlers.  In fact, if your children and grandchildren don't mate with English speakers, your family will never learn to speak the language and will remain an undigested cultural lump in the midst of your adopted culture forever.

Here is where it gets both funny and pathetic;

This is so much an article of faith on the Ctrl-Left that I had to monitor my kids like a hawk, all through elementary school.  If I got caught up in a book and wasn’t paying attention, my kids got put in bilingual education.  In Spanish.  Since they’re half Portuguese, the “compassionate” teachers thought it would be easier for them to do their homework in a related language.  Note that even if I had taught them some words of Portuguese — since the only time they heard me speaking Portuguese was the weekly conversation with my mom on the phone — neither of them learned the little I tried to teach.  Oh, they can both swear fluently in Portuguese.  They heard that too — their father speaks no Portuguese, and they are utterly immersed in an English-speaking society.  Robert was reading books published for grown-ups when he entered kindergarten; Marshall complained that his teacher patronized him in pre-school.  Yes, in those words.  And yet, while I was finishing Darkship Thieves for its first round of submissions, Robert spent two weeks in Spanish as primary language classes before he got fed up enough to complain to me.

The only thing that finally made the befuddled products of our teacher training system stop inflicting Spanish on my children was my mock serious explanation that they were offending my culture, due to how often the Portuguese and Spanish were at war throughout history.  And I barely managed not to burst out laughing until I was outside the school.

Then she goes after the Alt-Right.

Finally, she winds it up with this flourish:

You have insulted everything I am and believe in, in every way possible.  Given any self-consistency in your beliefs, you want to eliminate the country and culture I moved to, the country and culture I chose for me and for all my descendants.

You’re not just wrong, Mr. Acosta.  You are the enemy of everything American, of the very idea of a melting pot, where people come to BE American and become part of the culture, and claim for them and their descendants the blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately for you there are people like myself from all parts of the world who came here determined to build and uphold America and all she stands for.  And we will even do it in English.

Can you hear us now?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff