Newsweek Opinion Editor Slammed for Praising Professor Accused of Arguing U.S. Needs ‘Fewer Asians’

Newsweek’s Opinion Editor Josh Hammer raised eyebrows on Sunday night with a series of tweets that appeared to suggest he agreed with restricting legal immigration and “that the U.S. needs ‘fewer Asians.’”

Hammer responded to a tweet by the editor of Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson, calling out University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Amy Wax, who Robinson characterized as “praising the superiority of ‘European’ culture, now argues that the US needs ‘fewer Asians’ and we need to be asking ‘how many’ Asians are too many.”

Hammer wrote in response, “Amy Wax has bigger cojones than 99.9% of the GOP.” Hammer has since deleted this tweet.

He followed that tweet up, with a thread explaining his defense of Wax and expounding on his belief that the Republican Party needs to embrace a “restrictionist” immigration policy – following its base.

Hammer wrote:

The specifics of what Amy Wax says in any specific moment of any specific podcast are less important than her immense Overton window-shifting value in slowly helping to retire the long-standing GOP consultant class pablum of “illegal immigration bad; legal immigration good!”

There is no issue on which the base and the establishment are more at loggerheads than legal immigration. The base is restrictionist, and has been for decades now.

The sooner the party moves closer to that, and abandons the faux “illegal bad/legal good” dichotomy, the better.

There is no issue on which the base and the establishment are more at loggerheads than legal immigration. The base is restrictionist, and has been for decades now.

The sooner the party moves closer to that, and abandons the faux “illegal bad/legal good” dichotomy, the better.

— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) January 3, 2022

Wax has been a lightning rod of controversy since 2017 when she published an article titled, “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.” She has argued against the idea that all cultures are equal and was profiled in the New Yorker under the headline, “A Penn Law Professor Wants to Make America White Again.”

Stephen Gutowski, founder of the Reload, called out Hammer’s comments. “What a pathetic cop-out,” Gutowski wrote. “I’d like to know if he thinks the US should have fewer Asians. That’s literally what Amy Wax said.”

Here’s Josh’s explanation for why he thinks Amy Wax’s openly racist comments were so awesome. What a pathetic cop-out. I’d like to know if he thinks the US should have fewer Asians. That’s literally what Amy Wax said. pic.twitter.com/q0YxVioDvL

— Stephen Gutowski (@StephenGutowski) January 3, 2022