Great White Hope Update...
Trump Intensifies His Crusade to Re-Whiten America
smirkingchimp.com
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Trump’s racist demagogy against immigrants of color is not new, but this tirade went further, noted Joanne Freeman, professor of History and American Studies at Yale University in a Jon Stewart podcast. “On the one hand, saying Somalians are a horrible people is a horrible thing to do. To go the next step and say, so we should throw them out, so they shouldn’t be here. That’s the part that suddenly not only moves into hatred and ugliness… and I’ve got my guys in masks… (and am) willing to enforce them in a way that isn’t constitutional.”
What’s also new is the administration denying citizenship to immigrants taking the final step at naturalization events, as occurred on December 4 in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, despite their having spent years “acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes, and a citizenship test.” Instead, “as they lined up, some were told by US Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin”—19 countries from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
“Officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled,” Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship, told Boston’s WGBH. It comes as the administration is “detaining applicants at citizenship appointments—an escalation that blurs the line between immigration processing and enforcement, leaving families completely unprepared.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol raids continue to terrorize immigrant communities, enabled by the Supreme Court’s authorization of the selective targeting of people based on racial profiling, as well as the indifference to assaulting legal immigrants and even American citizens. Among the latest targets for harassment and detentions, following Trump’s threats, were Somalis in Minnesota, even though more than 70% of Somalis are American citizens. The New York Times reaffirmed on December 4 that less than 30% “of the people arrested in any of these operations had been convicted of a crime,” despite Trump’ claims that his secret police would only target the “worst of the worst.”
For Trump, racism has long been a fundamental belief, illustrated again December 6 by the decision to eliminate free entrance days to national parks on the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King and Juneteenth, while adding Trump’s birthday. Additionally, Trump and other MAGA politicians have normalized a yearning to maintain the historic “culture” of the US and make the US the protector of “European civilization”—both an openly racist appeal to reverse the increased racial diversity of the nation. In a Twitter screed attacking NATO members December 6 following a trip to Brussels, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared, “Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not.”
All of which is directly tied to the vision of a Make America Great Again movement that fantasizes a return to eras of Jim Crow segregation, even antebellum, policies in a nation more dominated by white, Christian populations. As Florida Republican Rep. Kat Cammarck framed it December 2 in a not very subtle message: “Today, 1 in 6 people in the US is foreign born. That quite frankly is not sustainable to maintain a culture that we are known for here in the United States. |
