Love Quote by Tom Tancredo

Tancredo’s line is built like a prosecutor’s question and delivered like a verdict. The opening “Now how many” pretends to invite measurement, but it’s a trap: the answer is already loaded into the premise that a “community” harbors treasonous desires. By shifting from observable behavior to “heart of hearts,” he moves the charge into a realm that can’t be disproven. You can’t produce evidence of what someone privately “cheers” for. That’s the point. It turns suspicion into a political asset.

The key rhetorical maneuver is the double hedge: “not out loud maybe” performs a kind of fairness - he’s not claiming public celebration - while licensing the more inflammatory claim that people silently welcomed mass murder. It’s a convenient way to sound cautious while escalating the accusation. The blunt payoff, “it’s a majority among them,” doesn’t just stigmatize; it converts fear into arithmetic. Suddenly the threat is not a fringe but a demographic inevitability.

Context matters: post-9/11 American politics rewarded certainty, especially certainty that sorted the public into patriots and internal enemies. Tancredo, a hardline immigration voice in the mid-2000s, often treated cultural difference as security risk. The subtext here is an invitation to collective punishment: if the “majority” is disloyal, then surveillance, exclusion, and cracked-down belonging can be framed not as prejudice but as self-defense. It’s less an argument than a permission slip for mistrust.