[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 84 (Thursday, May 18, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H2448-H2451]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1200
                     DESTROYING AMERICA FROM WITHIN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. 
Grothman) for 30 minutes.
  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

[[Page H2449]]

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.

                              {time}  1215

  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.

[[Page H2450]]

  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

[[Page H2451]]

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.

                              {time}  1230

  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.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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