PBS to Air Doc About Newt Gingrich-Approved Immigrants

Photo: Chance Yeh/Getty Images

Yesterday, PBS announced it has acquired a new 90-minute documentary narrated and produced by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his wife, former ambassador to the Holy See Callista L. Gingrich. Journey to America: With Newt and Callista Gingrich is written and directed by Kevin Knoblock and bills itself as a film that will celebrate “the achievements of nine individuals from diverse backgrounds who pursued the American dream and contributed to the fabric of our nation.” Gingrich, who failed to secure the Republican nomination for president in 2011 despite promising to build a fence along the southern border (much less cool-sounding than a wall) and withhold funding to sanctuary cities, makes it clear this is a documentary for people who like immigration when their ancestors did it. “We are and have always been a country of immigrants,” he says in a press release about the series. “Immigration has become such a loaded political issue that we often lose sight of the fact that, as a country, we’ve significantly benefitted from the hard work and creativity of generations of immigrants who legally migrated to our country.” Indeed!

The film will follow the journeys of nine immigrants, but if you’re with the incoming administration, don’t worry; none of the immigrants are from Africa or Latin America, and none of them immigrated after George W. Bush left office. These are the legal immigrants your deeply miserable grandfather would love, like Italian American Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, who immigrated in 1889, when anyone could legally enter the United States as long as you had 50 cents and weren’t disabled or Chinese. It will also tell the stories of Hedy Lamarr, Albert Einstein, and uh, Henry Kissinger, all of whom were fortunate enough to escape the Holocaust at a time when the United States had no refugee policy and left hundreds of thousands to die in Nazi-controlled countries due to American fears that even European refugees would steal jobs, spy, or be Jewish.

Also making this list of approved immigrants is Xi Van Fleet, who emigrated from China in 1986 (when it was legal again) and whose personal website prominently features her appearance on Tucker Carlson’s X show. There, she was plugging her book Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning in which “an inspiring survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China makes a passionate case that history is eerily repeating itself as the Woke Revolution spreads across America.” A lofty claim in a nation where Joe Rogan is a multimillionaire who gets to pick the president, but I digress.

The documentary is set to air Tuesday, January 14, at 10 p.m. ET, just six days before the inauguration of an administration that will surely now no longer seek to destroy the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Surely!