Destroying America From Within

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, it is the time for authorizations, and one of the topics of discussion today, of course, is our armed services authorizations, military bills, as we get briefings on what is necessary to defend our country from our external enemies.

However, let us not forget that when Nikita Khrushchev spoke to the American public in the 1960s, he said:

We will take America without firing a shot. We will bury you. We can't expect the American people to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of socialism until, one final day, they wake up and find they are living in a communist government.

Now, how could our great country, the strongest country in the world, be destroyed from within?

I also point out that when the KGB was active in this country in the seventies and eighties, the majority of agents were not spies. They were not engaged in looking for our military secrets. They were, apparently, out in the open, trying to corrupt Americans into how they understood our country should be operating. They were taking advantage of our freedoms in what is supposed to be a constitution made for a moral and religious people.

How would you go about destroying America from within? First of all, briefly, we would try to destroy the currency. We know there has been wild and reckless spending recently, to the degree that our debt-to-GDP ratio is the highest it has been since the end of World War II. Our debt to gross national product is almost 100 percent.

We were there at the end of World War II, but we knew at the end of World War II, millions of people were going to be laid off from the military. We were going to stop building ships, planes, and tanks that we needed. Sure enough, we dropped from about 100 percent of GDP to a little over 20 percent during Nixon until we began to slowly creep up again.

More recently, in part because of irresponsible legislation like the American Rescue Plan or the successor to Build Back Better, which were able to pass because the Democrats had the House, the Senate, and the Presidency and were able to use something called reconciliation to get it done, we have now shot back up near 100 percent, near an all-time high.

This time, we don't see an area in the future in which hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors are going to be laid off or that we are going to stop building weaponry. Contrary to that, we do see an aging population in which the amount we spend on Social Security and Medicare is going to continue to go up.

I think you could say getting ahold of these people in this House and persuading way too many of them that spending doesn't work, we have approached an area, a crisis area, which could result in the end of the United States.

Secondly, I think if I were going to destroy America, I would try to destroy the family. Beginning in the 1960s, we had a welfare program that was largely conditioned upon keeping one parent, usually the father, out of the house.

This goal was made more apparent when Black Lives Matter, which played such a big role in the 2020 elections, outright came out and said they were opposed to the Western-prescribed nuclear family. Of course, there was a tight alliance between Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Party.

Within a few years of the Great Society in the sixties, it was apparent that the welfare system was destroying families. Patrick Moynihan, who eventually became a Senator up here, made it clear, by 1970, we were destroying families with this welfare program.

Apparently, because some people wanted to destroy families, his warnings went unheeded. We worked our way toward a higher and higher percentage of children being raised without a father in the home.

We also worked our way toward too many men not having families and not having a necessary purpose in life. Therefore, the crime rate went up, this sort of thing.

I think another area in which you can see people working toward communism were the people who wanted to expand this welfare state. We all know, to get so many of the programs the welfare state offers, be it low-income housing, medical care, Pell grants, all of these things, it is kind of conditioned upon not having a man in the house.

The next area that I think we have to look at if one is destroying America from the inside is unlimited immigration across our southern border. Right now, on legal immigration, we swore in about a million people last year, which is the highest it has been since 2006.

It varies from month to month, but in a normal month right now, there are about 10 times the number of people coming into this country as were coming in under the prior administration.

Why in the world would you allow--completely unnecessary. This was not a problem 2, 2\1/2\ years ago. Why would you allow virtually unfettered immigration across our southern border unless you want to destroy our country?

These people who come here are not necessarily educated in what it means to be an American. They do not receive a background check that includes their home countries. It is a recipe for disaster. Like I said, it is at a time when we are near record numbers of legal immigrants.

We also know that the Biden administration is deporting people who commit crimes at a rate of about one-quarter that Donald Trump was. Not only are you allowing more people here, but even if you catch them doing something wrong, you don't evict them. I think one way to destroy America is just to let unlimited numbers of people come here, in this case, across the southern border.

The next area that I think has to be looked at is Joe Biden's obsession with blurring the differences between the sexes, which, after all, is the foundation for the family. We can see the push toward transgenderism throughout all areas of society.

There is a hospital near my district in which they remove the breasts of teenage girls, 15-year-old girls. They put people on puberty blockers. They give people other medications. They put it in people's minds--in boys' minds that they might not be a traditional man, in girls' minds that they might not be a traditional woman. This is another way, I think, to eat away at the moral fabric of America.

The area I am going to focus on today is the Biden administration's obsession with race and trying to divide Americans by race. In his inaugural speech, I believe he mentioned racism four times and white supremacy once.

In other words, if you have to say what is the theme behind Joe Biden's inaugural speech, and different Presidents have different themes, it is racism. He has continued along that path.

When he gave his State of the Union speech here a couple of months ago, he talked about racism with the police.

Over the weekend, he gave a speech--I believe it was at Howard University, but at some university, a graduation speech. One more time, his emphasis was that we have a major problem with white supremacy in this country.

First of all, let's look at the facts. Even his premise isn't true. Then, we will look at the damage that can be done as we try to have Americans look at themselves racially or look at themselves by where their ancestors were born five or six generations ago.

If you look at countries around the world, people who come here from other than European countries, you see people succeeding wildly. By this, I mean succeeding wildly financially. I realize finances aren't the most important thing in the world.

Right now, the ethnic group that makes more money than any other in the United States--and I had this pointed out by a friend of mine who was very proud of it because he is Indian--is Indian Americans who come here, many of them, most of them, not even knowing the English language. They are mostly not Christian. They are Hindu, a few Muslim. They come here and are wildly successful.

Many other groups--Filipino, Sri Lankan, Cuban--all come here and make more money than the average American.

It is so obvious that racism does not prevent people from living the American Dream.

Over the weekend, I spent some time with the Hmong. The Hmong are an ethnic group from Laos that helped the United States in the Vietnam war, and because they helped the United States, many of them immigrated to America.

Wisconsin happens to be the State in which we have the third highest number of Hmong, and I always enjoy talking with them to see how wildly successful they are. Again, this is a group that is not European and many did not know English when they came here.

When I look around my district, Hmong are, almost uniformly, living the American Dream. Interestingly, when I talk to them, almost all of them have formed old-fashioned nuclear families, which, I think, helps emotionally and spiritually with their children.

Like I said, educationally, economically, across the board, the Hmong from Oshkosh and Neenah, Wisconsin--I spent the weekend in Manitowoc, Wisconsin--are succeeding wildly, and that is consistent with the statistics of other ethnic groups.

So, what is Joe Biden and the Democrats' response to this wild success of people from around the world, and people, by the way, who are not of European heritage?

I should also point out that a couple of times I do something that I enjoy doing. I go down and watch the swearing-in ceremonies of people coming here legally and becoming American citizens. They have them in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

When I go down there, almost none of the new citizens coming here are from Europe. Overwhelmingly, it is Asia, Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, all coming here. When you talk to them, because they have had to be around here a few years, they all already are successful, all so proud to be Americans. None are running away from this country, and none of them mention racism as a problem.

Again, it is further evidence that we shouldn't have a problem.

Now, how has the Biden administration met with this situation? How has our government as a whole, over the last 50 years, dealt with this situation?

First of all, at the beginning of Joe Biden's term, 2 or 3 months in, we had two Democratic Senators, Tammy Duckworth and Mazie Hirono, at a time when the Senate was 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats, so every vote was necessary for Joe Biden to get his nominees appointed. They came out and said that they were not going to vote for any more White men who are nominated to positions--kind of a shocking thing.

Then, they met with Joe Biden, who, I assume, held their hands. By the way, they said they would accept White men if they were gay. I would assume he held their hands and said there were a few White guys who he had to allow in his administration.

Nevertheless, an obscure legal journal did some studying after the first 2 years of the Biden administration. They looked at the 97 new judges, which are some of the appointments a President has to make. When they looked at the 97 judges, I would have expected maybe 25 or 30 being White men, which would have been, I think, lower than if you just picked a number of lawyers across the board, say, over the age of 35 to be judges. I would have guessed 20 or 25, and I would have thought that is clearly too low. It was five.

Only 5 of 97 judges appointed in Joe Biden's first year were White men and two of them happened to be gay, which is something that has been hidden by the American press corps.

I am not sure how typical this is of his other appointments, but clearly Joe Biden is using this as a tool to discriminate or to divide Americans. He is also, in his proposed budget, adding new employees in every agency--Commerce, Interior, Education, wherever you look--to enforce this sort of racial identification.

I am sure he plans on them weighing in as to who gets new jobs. I am sure he plans on them weighing in on who gets grants as businesses around the country compete for grants. This is another way in which Joe Biden's actions are meeting his words. He wants to turn America into a country of competing ethnic groups.

Another thing he is doing that has been underpublicized right now is for the purpose of determining whether a group needs preferences or not. We look at Asians, and by Asians, we mean people coming all the way from Japan around Asia, all the way through Pakistan, but not Iran. We mean people from sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria, Tanzania, countries like that. We mean Latin America, which could mean Cubans, it could mean Colombians, could mean Haitians, whatever, these people get preferences.

By the way, they get preferences over the native born. If somebody shows up here from Nigeria, if somebody shows up here from Bolivia, for the purposes of the forms that American businesses have to fill out or that universities may fill out, these people who just arrive here get preferences over the native born, and that is true even if they are already wealthy when they come here.

If I am a Cuban who comes here worth a million dollars or well off in Cuba planning to be a doctor in the United States, I will right away get preferences on these forms over Americans who have been here for generations.

President Biden, however, wants to add another group that can walk around with a chip on their shoulder and be told they are discriminated against. Those are people from the Arab world. Because right now, people from Syria, people from Algeria, people from Egypt are not considered minorities. They don't get special treatment. Well, President Biden has made it clear that in the future he is taking the first administrative steps to say this group should identify by their ethnicity, identify by where they come from. Of course, when the bean counters in the universities, the bean counters doing the hiring in the Federal Government, when they get hold of these people, they will look to give them preferences because they are supposedly picked on by not being of European heritage.

I think a lot of Americans do not realize that this affirmative action has been around for quite some time. Affirmative action, in general, really was promoted a lot beginning 1965, which is to say about 57 years ago. Thomas Sowell has written about affirmative action around the globe and, of course, affirmative action was originally supposed to be temporary for people of African-American descent.

Well, like affirmative action programs all over the world, it was not temporary. We have had it for 75 years. And not only is it not temporary, but you have a bureaucracy growing up promoting this affirmative action. As it expanded from where it initially was to include other areas, it was expanded to include Asians, it was expanded to include Latin Americans, it was expanded to include women.

Right now, for the purposes of forms, having talked to people who deal with this in human resources departments around the country, all these other groups are supposedly or sometimes advised to get preference.

The first time I ran across this--and I will digress for one second-- you are supposed to fill out a form called the EE01 if you have either 100 employees or less than that and you contract with the government. I first ran across this when I was contacted by a human resources woman and they had to fill out the EE01. I think they had 100 employees, but they also sold some of their product to the Federal Government. They were a manufacturer.

She said the firm that they hired to see how to deal with this relationship with the Federal Government--there was a situation in which they had four or five engineers, they wanted to hire a fifth or sixth engineer and they were advised by this group that they should hire a woman. They didn't have to hire a woman, but if they didn't hire a woman and the Federal Government looked at them, they may get in trouble for not hiring a woman. So they gave them a card of some group somewhere referred to as the Wisconsin Society of Women Engineers and they were told you should hire a woman.

Then they wanted to hire another member of management and the same group told them, you don't have to hire a minority, but if you don't hire a minority, you might get in trouble. You should look around and see what you can do to hire minorities.

About 20 years ago, I dealt with this situation. It has been around for over 50 years. Again, a goal apparently of which--since we don't have a big prejudice problem in this country--is to try to encourage people to walk around with a chip on their shoulder or ask for something because of their ethnicity.

There are a variety of what I think are ridiculous rules that, in addition to the fact that it is wrong on its face, that we should look at regarding this affirmative action program.

First of all, you self-identify. Now, an extreme example of that is the Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, she felt that she was a 64th or 128th Native American, so she should get preferences. But it is more common to have somebody who is maybe one-quarter something to self-identify as, let's say, Latin American or something.

In this new world in which we have all these overpaid bureaucrats, both in private industry and in the government, by identifying as one- quarter Cuban, you have the potential to get preferences.

Now, that is just divisive. It is ridiculous on its face. It also doesn't matter how wealthy you are. Like I said, you could be Barack Obama's daughters worth millions and millions of dollars, but you fill out the form and for the purposes of university admissions, for the purpose of Federal employment, you are treated as somebody put upon, somebody who should walk around with a chip on their shoulder, somebody who should get preferences.

In any event, I think it is something that the American public should be aware of and look to end. These programs were originally designed only for Black Americans and when they began well over 60 years ago, it was supposed to be something that was temporary.

Instead, Joe Biden, I believe, is using it, the progressives are using it to try to divide America, to try to create a situation in which our future elections are contests between ethnic groups.

America is unique in that so far in our existence, people view themselves as Americans above all, and when they go to vote, they vote on issues: How much should we be spending on the military?

How much should we be spending on transportation, maybe social issues?

Abortion has recently been a big issue. Taxation, how we should deal with taxation.

However, the people who push this, I think, are causing people to vote and say which politician is giving me more because of where my ancestors are from. I think that is motivation. It is very dangerous. It has always been a problem in other countries where we have affirmative action.

I mentioned before Thomas Sowell wrote a book about affirmative action, an older book today, but it is as fresh today as when he originally wrote it. In it he talks about when governments don't treat people equally but when they are supposed to pick between different groups, those countries break down.

I have always felt one of the problems with Canada getting together a decent government is, of course, they are divided by language. They have got a French part of Canada and English parts of Canada, but there are other areas in which outright civil war breaks out.

In Nigeria, where you have different ethnic groups, different religions, Muslim in the north, Christian in the south, they have always had problems. I remember when I was in high school, there was a war over Biafra in which there tried to be a breakaway in Nigeria, and to a certain extent, the hard feelings in Nigeria were encouraged by affirmative action sort of programs.

Same thing in Sri Lanka, a country before they had affirmative action, they had different ethnic groups. They got along fabulously. Once the idea got in there that the government should pick and choose people based on their ethnicity, they had a civil war, and for a relatively tiny country, over 30,000 people died.

India, one of the difficult things that these incredibly smart and resourceful people have had in getting together a good country is it is divided between dozens of ethnic groups, certainly there is a big religious divide between Hindu and Muslim, and that has really hampered India. They are trying to deal with it. They sometimes deal with it through affirmative action programs and, of course, that just increases the hard feelings they have in that country.

Same thing is true with Malaysia, another country. They have to deal with the Chinese and the native Malays and only results in trouble and hard feelings when we go down this affirmative action path.

There are other areas, for whatever reason, in society, even without prompting from the government in which we are judging people where their ancestors came from. There is a good book out there right now by Heather McDonald talking about efforts being made to get rid of standardized testing to get into medical school.

Well, I had always thought that the smartest kids are the ones who became doctors, but it seems some of these bean counters don't like that. They would rather focus on where people's ancestors came from rather than how good you do on the standardized tests.

As a result, there are medical schools which are getting rid of standardized tests altogether. So we are no longer getting the smartest kids to be doctors, or in some medical schools we aren't. Instead, we wind up with kids getting into medical school in part based on an essay, maybe the more woke the essay the better. But, again, this idea about judging people by their ancestry is not only going to be unfair to people, but it is going to result in doctors who are no longer the best in their class. It is going to be doctors who filled out the essay the most or who did the most volunteer work or something and it is inevitably going to result in the decline of the quality of American medicine.

Just like as we push more affirmative action in American manufacturing, push it more in important Federal jobs, push it more in the judiciary instead of just merit, we are going to wind up with a less competent judiciary, less competent manufacturing firms, less competent professors, and will result in decline in America. I do believe it is being pushed by the same people who are pushing our welfare state, the same people who are for unfettered immigration, the same people who are trying to destroy the nuclear family, the same people who are trying to blur the differences between the sexes, and each one of these things is a march toward destroying America from within as Nikita Khrushchev warned us and promised us 50 years ago.

I encourage our negotiators, when it comes time to negotiate the appropriation bills, to take out the provisions that Joe Biden has to increase the amount of racial enmity around the country. I encourage the colleges and universities around the country to not fall for this idea that people's identity is based on where their ancestors came from many years ago.

I mean, think of this: I can grow up next to a Cuban family. I can have my best friend be the son of a Cuban family. We can go to the same schools together. We can play on the same basketball team together, but somehow these bean counters say you are all such different people because your great great-grandparents lived in Cuba and your great great-grand parents lived in Germany.

We see such a diverse group of people. We encourage our negotiators to take that out. We encourage the benefactors of the universities around the country to not allow this to happen there. We encourage people to get rid of these affirmative action programs.

One other way, by the way, that they hurt America is they encourage what I think of as lying. I ran into a guy recently from my district who had a business--and he knew a lot of other people in a similar business--who had their wives named as the owner of the company. They lied. My friend, a good honest Christian, wasn't going to lie and pretend that his wife owned the company, so he didn't get the advantage of this.

Mr. Speaker, those are my requests--things that the American press corps should be paying attention to but aren't.

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