politics

It's just how propaganda works.

At any given time, there are a few different anecdotal-type "talking points" that are the new thing everyone's talking about. You're going to be hearing about Biden saying "an illegal" for a little while, even though as your transcript notes, it wasn't even him that chose the wording. People form their picture of the world through these little gestalt-facts, and if you can pick one that will shape the narrative you want to present, and arrange for people to hear it over and over from a variety of sources, and do that in a constant stream that all points to the same types of conclusions, it actually does a pretty good job at controlling how they'll perceive the totality of the situation.

It's almost exactly the same as how you will hear over and over that:

• We broke a record for fossil fuel extraction in 2023
• Biden's climate bill includes giving money to oil and gas companies

... and then all this weight of emotion behind how bad Biden is for the climate, how he's just the same, how it's such a shame that I as a good climate-change person can't support him... etc etc. Because the little factoids are in fact accurate, and properly sized and shaped to stick in your brain, they count as "supporting evidence" for Biden being bad on the climate.

The reality is, the way to analyze Biden's performance on the climate is to ask what's the total content of the climate bill he got passed, and what impact it's expected to have. That's it. Just like the reality is that how he performs on immigration has nothing at all to do with whether he said "an illegal" in this specific context.

If you hear someone repeating one of these specific little factoids, or if you start to see one specific one that is commonly repeated, my advice is to become suspicious of the message on top of which it is being placed, like a little evidence-cherry.

The only real problem is he gave them a sound bite.

Which, I mean, even if he didn’t, they’d try and manufacture something anyhow.

Didn't he say something about a 2 state solution being the eventual goal?

This article and, from the sounds of it, Biden's interview from yesterday both sound like a great refute to trump's putting down / making fun of Biden for "apologizing" for referring to the man as "an illegal".

Correct. I'm pretty sure that "illegal" is just the short form of "illegal alien". And is that the accepted legal term for a foreign national who is in the US illegally, right?

Honestly, all of this language policing just turns the average person right off. I mean, I suppose it wouldn't be necessary if the Republicans weren't constantly sneering at people, but still. It is better to reclaim terms the Republicans abuse rather than try to language-police hundreds of millions of people. It is very, very off-putting.