Kerry Tells Grads We’re in a ‘Borderless’ World
Based on the content of John Kerry’s Friday commencement speech at Northeastern University, one might have expected that those in attendance threw away their passports after the event ended.
That’s because the Obama administration’s Secretary of State told those in attendance: “You’re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world.” Kerry’s extraordinarily dense, naive and dangerous contention — the key soundbite of his speech — was ignored in coverage of his address at the Associated Press, Reuters, and almost everywhere else.
Kerry also described that school’s graduating class as “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare.”
The video excerpt below shows how Kerry set up his “borderless” comment by claiming that the real lesson of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was that “There are no walls big enough” to prevent such atrocities, and then concocting another gratuitous dig at opponents like Trump, whom he described as “soundbite salesmen and carnival barkers” who would prefer “hiding behind walls” (HT Washington Examiner):
Transcript (full speech transcript is here; bolds are mine):
And many of you were in elementary school when you learned the toughest lesson of all on 9/11. There are no walls big enough to stop people from anywhere, tens of thousand miles away, who are determined to take their own lives while they target others. Not in a clash of civilizations, but in an assault, a raw assault on civilization itself.
So I think that everything that we’ve lived and learned tells us that we will never come out on top if we accept advice from soundbite salesmen and carnival barkers who pretend the most powerful country on Earth can remain great by looking inward and hiding behind walls at a time that technology has made that impossible to do and unwise to even attempt. The future demands from us – (applause) – the future demands from us something more than a nostalgia for some rose-tinted version of a past that did not really exist in any case. And I think that everyone here, especially the class of 2016, understands that viscerally, internally, intellectually. You’re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world.
The Secretary of State apparently believes that since we can’t “stop people” from committing terrorist massacres, we have to somehow accommodate them. How does one do that? Kerry’s answer, found later in his speech:
So our mission – your mission – is to create jobs not just in a few places but in many places. And that’s going to require the deep involvement jointly of the private sector, civil society, academic institutions, international organizations, and governments everywhere, and still there will be no guarantees. And let me make it clear: Doing this is not about charity. It’s not about giving something for nothing. It’s about building our own security and preventing the conflicts of the future that may inevitably see us having to become involved.
While there are compelling reasons why raising worldwide employment and living standards should be a high priority, preventing terrorism isn’t one of them. Unfortunately, “Poverty and Low Education Don’t Cause Terrorism.”
The stories at AP and Reuters both highlighted Kerry’s “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare” comment, a blatant example of opposition stereotyping. Kerry and the ace reporters involved either didn’t know or didn’t care to inform their audiences that the Trump Hotels Collection has hotel and resort plans which include Rio de Janeiro, Lido (Indonesia) and Bali, all of which would involve the very job creation the Secretary of State claims to want to see both as they are built and when they begin operations.
A Google News search on “Kerry Northeastern” (not in quotes; sorted by date, with duplicates) done shortly before midnight on Sunday returned roughly 350 items, including scores of listings of the AP and Reuters reports.
Adding the word “borderless” to that search reduced that number to 11 — and only two, Time.com’s posting of the entire speech transcript and a two-sentence squib at the center-right New York Post, were from national establishment press outlets.
