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This is what a white supremacist administration looks like
Also: Can Democrats pull off a huge upset tonight in deep red Tennessee?
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For many years, conservatives’ chief complaint about race was that liberals were constantly and unfairly accusing them of racism.
They believed only in equality and not special favors for anyone, they insisted; why, they even liked to quote that Martin Luther King line about the content of your character! So why couldn’t liberals stop shouting “Racism!” every minute, when we as a society had already solved that problem? Can’t we just stop talking about it?
As absurd as that argument always was, what’s striking about it today is not that it imagines a post-racial future we haven’t yet reached, but that it has come to describe a Republican Party of the past. The party of today, embodied as it is in Donald Trump and the administration he leads, is no longer so worried about being called racist, because it has unashamedly taken white supremacy as its cause.
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In some cases, that has meant putting into action what Trump only talked about in his first term. In others, it has meant exploring entirely new frontiers of racism and xenophobia, of a kind we thought we left behind decades ago.
This appears to be an attempt to prove that the arc of history does not bend in one direction, but can double back and reverse course. Just a few years ago, conservatives struggled to navigate a world in which everyone was expected to pay fealty (whether sincerely or not) to the idea that the United States could be a multi-racial democracy in which equality was the goal toward which we all strove. But now, they’re pretending nothing of the sort.
Here are some recent developments from the president and his administration:
Using the killing of a National Guard soldier by an immigrant from Afghanistan as a pretext, Trump announced that he “will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the US system to fully recover.”
The administration has embraced the concept of “remigration,” a watchword of far-right and white supremacist groups in Europe to refer to mass deportation of non-white immigrants.
Trump has essentially shut down the refugee program, with the exception of one group: white South Africans. Trump has also said that South Africa will not be allowed to attend the 2026 G20 summit, apparently in response to the imaginary oppression of its white citizens.
Vice President JD Vance, who falsely blames high housing prices on immigrants, said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with.’” This is precisely the argument made by segregationists when opposing the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which made it illegal for landlords to refuse to rent to someone based on their race, religion, or national origin. Vance also insists that Canada is “stagnating” because it has too much diversity.
The Department of Labor is using creepily Aryan imagery in its social media, while the Department of Homeland Security implores us to “Protect the homeland. Defend your culture.”