Another Banner Week for White Supremacists

The New York Times reports^[5] that the Trump administration is considering proposals to radically reshape the US refugee system, denying entry to Black and brown refugees the world over while opening up the borders for white people from South Africa and Europe who claim they are being politically persecuted. Trump is planning to slash the number of refugees admitted into the country each year to 7,500, a drastic decrease from the 125,000 let in under the policies of the Biden administration last year. Apparently, those few spots are now reserved for white people who espouse Nazi beliefs, as both Trump and Vance have made a point of defending neo-Nazis in Germany and have been apparently making plans to bring them over here.

None of this is surprising to anybody who has done the work of actually listening to what Trump and his MAGA supporters have been talking about for years. The Trump administration is an openly white supremacist regime, and they’ve been acting like it, in both word and deed, since he returned to office. These people are terrified of the browning of America, terrified that white folks will lose their numeric majority in this country in the coming decades, and terrified of the declining white birth rate.

Welcoming white refugees is all of a piece. It fits neatly with bombing boats full of innocent brown people, authorizing Gestapo-style tactics by ICE, taking away birthright citizenship from people actually born here, sending in the military to police brown cities, eviscerating the voting rights of non-white people, and trying to turn white women into brood mothers through the revocation of their reproductive rights. If you believe that America exists for the benefit and glory of white folks, and if you believe that non-white folks don’t “deserve” to be here unless they are working to increase the profits of white people, then every single thing the Trump administration is doing makes sense. It’s how you resurrect white supremacist rule over this nation if white supremacy is your one true calling.

I’ve just about lost my capacity to be horrified by any of it. It’s not that I’m numb to it. Instead, as Django said^[6]: “I’m just more used to Americans.” This is just what majorities of white folks do. This is what majorities of white folks have always done whenever their power is left unchecked. And the only reason they’re afraid of losing their majority is that they assume other people will do to them what they’ve done to everybody else, just as soon as we get a chance.

We won’t, of course. Because we’re better than that.

The Bad and the Ugly

• The government is still shut down. Trump is offering to bail out the country with $40 billion in federal spending. Wait, no, that’s Argentina^[7].
• Florida-man Representative Cory Mills had a restraining order taken out against him by his ex-girlfriend. Mills has long been problematic.^[8] But so have voters in Florida.
• “The Washington Post Is Running Out Of Readers Willing To Pay,” reports Forbes^[9]. I’m not mentioning this as a plug for the paper. I’m just putting this here to remind people to unsubscribe from The Washington Post (and, perhaps, subscribe to The Nation^[10] instead).
• Alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh’s endorsement of racial profiling—in a September shadow docket decision^[11] in which he affirmed the government’s ability to stop anyone who is brown and speaking Spanish on suspicion of being an immigrant—has Sheriff Joe Arpaio feeling vindicated^[12]. He should. His racism was both behind and ahead of its time.
• Speaking of Kavanaugh’s racial profiling decision, ProPublica reported that more than 170 US citizens have been detained by ICE^[13]. In his decision, Kavanaugh suggested that such illegal kidnappings would be a minor inconvenience, but the actual facts show that Kavanaugh was, as usual, lying.

Inspired Takes

• Like everybody else, I read the hell out of this Nation piece about the evolution of the Cybertruck^[14].
• In The Nation, Kate Wagner explains^[15] why the University of Chicago stopped admitting PhD candidates in the humanities.
• Liz Dye, who is one of my favorite legal writers, takes a deep dive^[16] into all the defects with the Comey indictment.
• This podcast makes a really good point^[17] about why the No Kings protest (another one is happening Saturday) bothers MAGA so much^[18]. Basically, they thought that Black people would be on the front line of protests—Black people they could brutalize while whites watched in satisfaction. It’s a little different when the Trump administration has to beat up somebody’s white grandma.

Worst Argument of the Week

Politico gained access^[19] to a text chain of “young” Republican leaders (some of them were 40) where they talked like… Republicans talk when they think only other Republicans are listening. They used racial slurs about non-white people and Jews. Denigrated women and the LGBTQ community. And, as is standard with them these days, praised Hitler.

Vice President JD Vance, who once likened Trump to Hitler but now has decided that’s a good thing, defended his young Republican bros. Vance dismissed all the sexism and bigotry as “edgy jokes” and said “I refuse to join in the pearl clutching.”

I… do not own pearls. As I said already, I am no longer horrified when white people act like white people. But giving these people license for their hate and vitriol is beyond gross. It’s not a defensible position; it’s just a racist one.

I was going to dance an entire tarantella on Vance’s head, but The Nation’s Joan Walsh beat me to it. I cosign everything she said here^[21]. Joan pointed out that Vance’s wife, Usha, is Indian, and Vance is defending people who are saying the worst possible things about Indian women like his wife.

But here’s the thing, Vance knows what Trump knows, which is also what Mitt Romney knew and John McCain knew and every other Republican since Richard Nixon has known: They cannot win without these people. They can’t make the numbers work any other way. And so every Republican, every single one, must play nice with these hateful neo-Nazis, if they want to win political contests.

Vance is willing to throw his wife under the bus to make sure there is no distance between him and his base of support. Thing is… so is his wife. Usha is not captured. She’s a partner in this. They have both decided that they’d rather throw in with the racists and win than stand against them and lose.

Couldn’t be me. I have this thing called “self-respect.” Apparently, it is a burden in American politics.

What I Wrote

• Welp, the Supreme Court seems just about ready to throw out Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and allow white state legislatures to gerrymander away Black political power. I spent two-and-a-half hours listening to their oral arguments and then wrote about it^[22] so other good people don’t have to.
• I also wrote about Trump’s accelerated timeline for taking away food stamps^[23]. I guess the thought of people having enough to eat this Thanksgiving just angered the ketchup man.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

If you ever wondered why I don’t stream or have a YouTube channel—and instead just try to do my job and go home—just take one look at what’s happening to Hasan Piker right now.

The popular YouTube personality ended up embroiled in controversy^[24] when his dog yelped during a video. Without more information, it looked like the dog had been outfitted with a shock collar (I believe shock collars are very bad and should not be used).

Piker later clarified that he does not use a shock collar for his dog. He does use a vibration collar (which is a different thing) for long walks, but was not using one that day. I have not looked into vibration collars (my dog stays mainly in the house, sitting on my feet, criticizing my sentence structure, and questioning how I can possibly be employed as a professional writer). I understand them to be OK, and I take Piker’s explanation at face value.

Of course, I am a normal, rational person. Many are not. Piker reports^[25] that since the incident, he has received death threats, as well as threats to kidnap his dog.

I understand that there is a lot of money to be made and influence to be had on the streaming circuit. But, at least as of now, I just can’t. Writing on the Internet is bad enough. But at least I have an editor. At least I have the time and repose to consider the words I’m putting out into the world and how I’m framing them and myself. Streaming is just… raw. Exposed. And you’re exposing yourself to a group of people primed to take everything you say out of context, with your enemies hunting around in bad faith.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go get my dog to stop barking at the squirrels outside our window with my preferred training technique of telling her to “shut the hell up.” Then I will feed my children a nutritious meal of pizza and mozzarella sticks. I will do it all while ingesting brown liquor and playing a video game that involves shooting enemies to death with a gun. But millions of people will not be watching me and judging me while I do these things.

*

If you enjoyed this installment of Elie v. US, click here^[26] to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Friday.

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Our Readers^[32]

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