It’s bad enough PBS uses David “Poop-for-Brains” Brooks for regular commentary but today they had Jessica Vaughan from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) on as counterpoint in a discussion on immigrants. One researcher discussed how innumerable studies going back a century show Mexicans & immigrants in general, legal or undocumented, have lower crime rates than people born in the US. A tense, glum-faced Vaughan responded that everything Donald Trump said was true. Of course, Vaughan is on a mission: to vilify immigrants as uneducated criminal lowlifes. Because CIS is not a research institute at all but a right-wing propaganda apparatus.

CIS does lots of studies–most of which are regularly debunked by reputable researchers. One study they did was on “Third World gold-diggers” that claimed foreign women marry US citizens to get work permits so that means bogus marriages are prevalent among terrorists. Non sequiturs are inevitable when you’re racist & not working with a full deck–& when you’re getting paid big bucks to invent whole studies slandering immigrants.

This is still a democratic society so racists are free to invent & spew bile. That’s their right. But we have to ask PBS why they insist on treating right-wing lowlife ideologues like reputable research institutes & thinkers when they know damn well they are not. Could it be all that corporate funding PBS depends on?