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Hate Group Turns DC Into 'Fascist Hellscape' With July 4 March
"Absolutely terrifying to have white supremacist hate group Patriot Front march through our streets today in Washington, DC," one human rights lawyer said.
Jul 04, 2026
Hundreds of members of the white nationalist hate group Patriot Front descended on Washington DC Saturday morning as the nation's capital prepared to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Members of the group, wearing masks and carrying Confederate and US flags, rode the DC metro and marched around parts of Capitol Hill before departing the city by train, as WUSA reported. Beyond the march itself, no other incidents were reported connected to the group.
"What kind of fascist hellscape is [happening] on Pennsylvania Ave at the Eastern Market Metro stop?" Georgetown Law professor Josh Chafetz wrote on Bluesky upon spotting the group.
Chafetz said the group appeared to be all white and all male.
What kind of fascist hellscape is happing on Pennsylvania Ave at the Eastern Market Metro stop? These guys—seemingly all white, all men—have their faces covered, are carrying shields, wearing brown …
[image or embed]
— Josh Chafetz (@joshchafetz.bsky.social) July 4, 2026 at 6:43 AM
"Absolutely terrifying to have white supremacist hate group Patriot Front march through our streets today in Washington, DC," human rights lawyer Mai El-Sadany wrote on social media. "Their manifesto calls for a white ethnostate, excludes people of color from their definition of citizenship, and is deeply antisemitic and xenophobic."
In one video shared by WTOP reporter Mitchell Miller, members of the group stood in a line outside DC's Union Station chanting, "Life, liberty, victory" and "Reclaim America."
A group of masked men gathered at Union Station today and called for reclaiming the country and getting rid of immigrants. Some held Confederate flags. They have been marching across Capitol Hill. pic.twitter.com/xTfaoJDHOO
— Mitchell Miller (@mmillerwtop) July 4, 2026
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Patriot Front split from Vanguard America after the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, at which white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into counterprotesters, killing anti-racist activist Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others
"Patriot Front is an image-obsessed organization that rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism. Patriot Front focuses on theatrical rhetoric and activism that can be easily distributed as propaganda for its chapters across the country," SPLC explains.
The group believes that democracy no longer functions and wants to transform the US into a "pan-European" ethnostate that excludes both citizens of color and new immigrants and refugees.
One image from a Reuters photographer shows the masked Patriot Front marchers standing around a Black woman sitting on the DC Metro.
"This image is from today. A Black woman sits on the DC metro as masked white nationalists prepare to march on our nation's capital. This is America's 250th anniversary," attorney Aaron Parnas posted on social media.
This image is from today. A Black woman sits on the DC metro as masked white nationalists prepare to march on our nation's capital.
This is America's 250th anniversary. REUTERS/Cheney Orr pic.twitter.com/eIO8XJwIuA
— Aaron Parnas (@AaronParnas) July 4, 2026
Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, blasted the group for carrying Confederate flags and embracing fascism while claiming the mantle of US patriotism.
"You have no right to call yourself a '[patriot]' while carrying the flag of one of America's enemies, and claiming victory on behalf of the ideology that fueled another—both of which the US defeated," D'Arrigo wrote on social media.
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Pete Hegseth's D-Day Remarks Prove the US Is No Longer an Ally to European Democracy
Hegseth has attempted to remind Europeans of how much the United States came to their aid during a time of crisis, and he has attempted to warn them of grave threats lying beyond their borders. Mr. Hegseth: You are that threat.
Jun 13, 2026
This week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was on hand in Normandy for the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion. He made the usual remarks about US dedication to defending freedom, just as he did last year on a similar occasion.
This time around, however, Hegseth veered off into controversial territory.
Not that you can figure this out from the War Department’s anodyne summary of Hegseth’s speech. Unlike last year, the US government hasn’t seen fit to provide a transcript of Hegseth’s remarks. You have to nose around the internet to find out what Hegseth said that raised so many eyebrows.
Did the Pentagon chief use the D-Day commemoration to denounce the current specter of fascism that is haunting Europe?
It’s hard to know if Europeans really take seriously the prospect of an invasion coming from the West. But they are certainly worried about the failure of the United States to honor its D-Day commitments in the future.
No.
Did he warn of the threat that Russia poses to the continent?
Hardly.
Hegseth denounced an invasion of an entirely different sort. “Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he said. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”
Between his speech last year and the one this year, Hegseth has evidently gotten his marching orders. Ever since JD Vance lectured his elders and betters at the Munich summit last year, the Trump administration has united around the theme that immigrants threaten European “civilization.” Vance wasn’t even being original. Both his and Hegseth’s talking points come straight out of the mouths of the European far-right. Unlike the usual game of telephone, where the message is garbled through misheard repetition, the fulminations of President Donald Trump’s henchmen are loud and clear.
The Trump administration is all about defending white “civilization” from the impertinent contributions of Black and brown people. At home, that means scrubbing all government websites, National Park inscriptions, and federal grants of any reference to “woke” ideologies, which used to be known as anti-racism, diversity, or just plain common sense. It has meant restricting refugee policy to the only group the Trump administration perceives as meeting the need-based criteria—white South Africans. It has meant an industrial-strength deportation campaign.
Abroad, the Trump administration is trying to “save” Europe from the immigrants that are in reality keeping European societies afloat in the face of demographic decline. In this effort, it has joined hands with the most repulsive extremists on the continent. Greg Bovino, who headed up Trump’s immigration crackdown in the United States as the commander-at-large of the US Border Patrol, recently showed up in Europe to headline an event in Portugal populated by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The era of covert alliances and dog-whistling is long past.
But the D-Day speech was something different: a historical commemoration that has usually avoided contemporary politics. Prompted to reflect on present-day “invasions,” the European heads of state listening to Hegseth’s speech might have been thinking of an entirely different group of men and boats. The Trump administration has talked about the possibility of storming the beaches of Greenland to seize the island, an eerie echo of Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg seizure of Poland in 1939. On this anniversary of D-Day, Americans in boats are the last thing Europeans want to see approaching the fringes of the continent.
“Different dangerous ideologies, indeed,” the Europeans in the audience must have been thinking. Having been warned on numerous occasions, European capitals are certainly doing something to prepare for the impact of the ideologies dominating the Trump administration. It’s hard to know if Europeans really take seriously the prospect of an invasion coming from the West. But they are certainly worried about the failure of the United States to honor its D-Day commitments in the future.
The Immigration Obsession
The European far right has made its name by playing up the “threat” of immigration. Keeping out immigrants was a central plank in Viktor Orban’s platform in Hungary as well as that of Law and Justice Party in Poland, both of which have subsequently lost power. No matter: Other parties are on the ascendant. The far-right Alternative for Deutschland, having weaponized the issue of immigration, is on the verge of taking control of its first German region in elections in September in Saxony-Anhalt. Similar anti-migrant far-right parties are in coalition governments in Finland and Croatia and dominate the parliament in The Netherlands.
Then there’s Italy. Although she has diverged from the Trump administration on a number of issues, including their views of the current Pope, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni remains vehemently anti-immigrant, pushing ahead with the country’s expulsion of migrants and asylum-seekers to detention centers in Albania, despite legal pushback from Italian courts and European Union bodies.
What might have once been a fringe opinion has now moved front and center in Europe. As a result of rising far-right influence, the EU is now using Italy’s detention centers in Albania as a model for “detention hubs” planned for Africa. “This deal will give governments much broader powers to detain and deport people,” Marta Welander of the International Rescue Committee told PBS. “It looks set to normalize immigration raids, expand the use of detention in prison-like facilities outside EU territory that are essentially legal black holes, and increase the risk of people being deported to countries where they could face persecution, torture or worse.”
So much for Europe stepping forward in the Trump era to uphold the rules-based order. At least on immigration policy, the EU is instead following Trump’s lead. Hegseth, in addition to his other failings, didn’t even read the newspaper before giving his D-Day speech. Even as he was channeling the rhetoric of the European far-right, European capitals have already been channeling Trump’s immigration policies.
The Real Threats
It’s frankly astonishing that an American politician could discuss D-Day and invasions at this historical moment without mentioning the single most destabilizing invasion since World War II.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a deliberate attempt to remake the European order. Violating international law by disregarding Ukrainian sovereignty was unsettling to be sure, but that was just a means to an end. The incorporation of as much of Ukraine as he could digest was designed to expand Russian power at the expense of the European Union and its cohesiveness.
On weapons, energy, and tech, Europe is groping toward a declaration of independence from America.
Although Russian President Vladimir Putin and his mouthpieces have droned on about the threats of NATO expansion—and, to be sure, rapid NATO expansion eastward was a mistake—the real threat to Putin’s dominion has always been the accession of Eastern European and then post-Soviet states into the European Union. A model of economic prosperity, democratic governance, and unrestricted travel, if extended to Ukrainians, Moldovans, and Georgians, would inevitably get Russians to thinking: why not us? Putin has always worried more about the threat from within, like a color revolution, than threats from without, like NATO expansion.
Against the liberalism of the EU, Putin has offered instead a vision of ethnic counter-expansion that appeals to the aggrieved Russian sense of self. Adoption of the euro, the right to work in Paris, the freedom to gather outside the Kremlin to protest: None of these can compete against toxic masculinity, blood and belonging, and the appeal of an iron fist.
Putin’s alternate conception of illiberalism, with its emphasis on conservative values and ethnonationalist triumphalism, is now threatening Europe in turn. Some of Putin’s allies have gone down for the count, but his rhetoric still resonates in the speeches of far-right figures throughout the continent. A number of leaders are scrambling to be the next Viktor Orban—Robert Fico of Slovakia; Andrej Babis of the Czech Republic; and, most ominously, the frontrunner in next year’s French presidential race, Jordan Bardella of the National Rally.
Putin is not so dumb as to double down on his Ukrainian blunder by sending military forces into Poland or even the Baltic states. Cyberattacks and clandestine operations can be more effective since they don’t cross the threshold that mandates a NATO counterattack. Meanwhile, influence operations—disinformation campaigns, strategic political alliances, and the marketing of illiberalism—are even more effective in undermining the ideological underpinnings of the EU.
This latter campaign has more than double the impact when it’s mirrored on the Atlantic side by the actions of Trump, Vance, and Hegseth.
European Response
Europe is not in full-fledged revolt against Trump. The shift in EU immigration strategy demonstrates that some European leaders don’t want to just flatter Trump; they want to imitate him as well.
Still, there are pockets of resistance. A number of European countries defied the Trump administration in 2025 to recognize Palestine. Spain’s Pedro Sanchez refused to toe the US line on Iran. Denmark has led the charge to beat back the administration’s efforts to secure Greenland.
European capitals are preparing in more institutional ways to address the much larger threat of Americans in boats, this time the ones that don’t arrive for a future battle as their counterparts did so reliably on D-Day. Trump has variously threatened to leave NATO or ignore US Article 5 commitments to defend fellow NATO members in the event of an attack. This month, the Pentagon announced a decrease in the forces that the United States will make available—aircraft, ships—during a crisis in Europe.
Europeans have gotten the message. They’re not just increasing their military spending. They’re building up their capacity to produce their own weapons rather than rely on the US military-industrial complex. They’re talking about creating an autonomous European army. They don’t want to be caught flat-footed by American ambivalence.
In the wake of Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran, Europeans are also eager to wean themselves of dependency on US fossil fuels. Fresh from their campaign to reduce imports of Russian fossil fuels, more far-seeing Europeans want to make sure that they’re not yoking themselves to American gas and oil. The better option: full speed ahead on home-grown renewables.
“The European Union can’t fully trust US President Donald Trump to keep Europe out of the cold next Winter,” writes Linda Aziz-Rohlje of Renew Europe. “We are risking our democracy, our prosperity, and our security if we do not take action. That’s why liberals and democrats call for an energy-independent Europe, with a more integrated energy market.”
Finally, Europeans are worried about their reliance on US technology. “European leaders have become increasingly alarmed by the reliance on American technology in areas like artificial intelligence, cloud computing and semiconductors,” reports Adam Satariano in The New York Times. “Many worry the dependence creates a ‘kill switch’ that the Trump administration or future US presidents could exploit to block access to essential tech services.”
On weapons, energy, and tech, Europe is groping toward a declaration of independence from America.
Against this background, Pete Hegseth has attempted to remind Europeans of how much the United States came to their aid during a time of crisis. And he has attempted to warn them of grave threats lying beyond their borders.
Mr. Hegseth: You are that threat.
Hegseth and everything he stands for, from the effort to grab Greenland to the attacks on European liberalism, should persuade the French to rescind any invitation to next year’s ceremonies in Normandy.
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Congress Is Funding The Trump Regime's Anti-Immigrant Violence
The ICE and CBP budgets are soaring at the same time that funding for legal immigration through US Citizenship and Immigration Services would get a 23% cut.
Feb 10, 2026
This week, members of Congress are negotiating funding levels for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, after public opposition soared when federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
As of January 25, ICE held more than 70,000 people in detention, and claimed more than 352,000 deportations. In 2025, at least 32 people died in ICE custody, and so far in 2026, at least eight people have died in the custody or at the hands of ICE and CBP, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti. ICE and CBP have targeted citizens, documented immigrants, and undocumented people alike. They have targeted adults and children. ICE is now holding an average of 170 children in detention each day.
They can do all of this because ICE and CBP are flush with money from last year’s Big Ugly Bill that stripped health insurance and food assistance from Americans while padding the budgets of ICE, CBP, and the Pentagon. The bill provided $170 billion for the Trump-GOP mass deportation agenda and $156 billion for the Pentagon, to be available through September 2029. That includes nearly $75 billion for ICE and more than $58 billion for CBP.
The “regular” annual budgets for ICE and CBP totaled about $33 billion in FY 2025. If legislators funded ICE and CBP at those levels for the current year, combined with funding from the Big Bad Bill, the annual budgets for those agencies would total $64.9 billion (assuming the Big Bad Bill funds are spent equally over the 51 months they’re available). That amounts to a 92% increase over the previous highest funding level for the agencies, which was $33.8 billion in FY 2019; a 209% increase since FY 2024; and a 441% increase since the creation of ICE in FY 2002.
(Sources: OMB, DHS, HR 1/ OBBRA)
This doesn’t even include additional funding to support mass deportations through the Department of Defense and local law enforcement agencies.
The ICE and CBP budgets are soaring at the same time that funding for legal immigration through US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) would get a 23% cut from FY 2024 to FY 2026. And the Big Bad Bill significantly increased fees across categories of legal immigration.
(Sources: OMB, DHS, HR 1/ OBBRA)
The message is clear: This regime is anti-immigrant. This was never about law enforcement, or else the legal paths to immigration would remain open. Instead, budgets for legal immigration are being cut while the Trump regime strips legal status from successive groups of formerly documented immigrants.
The danger is that large numbers of legislators in both parties appear likely to approve relatively even baseline funding levels for ICE and CBP with limited procedural safeguards, while leaving the Big Bad Bill funding intact. The deaths and violence in detention centers and on our streets mean that any additional funding for ICE and CBP will only enable more violence.
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At the Super Bowl, Bad Bunny's Defiant Joy Beat Trump's Knockoff Eugenics
Understanding America's eugenic history helps us see the present more clearly, and why the vibrant Puerto Rican presence on America's biggest stage was an act of resistance.
Feb 10, 2026
When Bad Bunny took the Super Bowl halftime stage, he performed one of the most beautiful examples of refusal I have witnessed in a long time.
In a moment when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are conducting mass raids in American cities designed as a spectacle for social media, when families are being torn apart and warehoused in cages in hastily constructed concentration camps, when President DonaldTrump calls Somali immigrants “garbage,” Bad Bunny showed up as the embodiment of flourishing. Vibrant. Alive. Unapologetically present, resulting in the most watched Super Bowl halftime in history.
And that presence, those enormous ratings, and that contagious joy was too much for some white supremacists to bear. I do not recommend you waste your time on Trump's knockoff social media to understand his eugenic ideology. You know what he wrote without looking, and Fox News will parrot it for him anyways.
As a psychologist who studies the roots of my discipline in eugenics, I recognized immediately what made this performance so threatening, so necessary, so brilliant. While Bad Bunny was leaving us speechless at America's most-watched sporting event, he was refusing the fundamental premise of a resurgent eugenic ideology that has always been about one question: What should America look like?
Trump Is a Knockoff Eugenicist
The resemblance between our current moment and the height of the eugenics movement is striking, and it is very intentional. Donald Trump is driven by the same goals as those who shaped American policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eugenics was a pseudoscientific movement aimed at "improving" the human population by deciding who was worthy of reproducing and who deserved to live in America. Through forced sterilizations (that famous Buck v Bell case that you may have heard about allowed for this), immigration restrictions, and pseudoscientific classifications, eugenicists worked to eliminate people they deemed genetically inferior, always targeting immigrants, people of color, the disabled, and the poor. The movement operated by equating non-white and certain immigrant groups with violence and insanity.
In the US, the struggle to fuse whiteness and being American has been central to our national politics.
In the 19th century, academic psychiatrists shamefully claimed that Black people were psychologically unfit for freedom. Medical journals described "drapetomania" as an alleged illness that caused enslaved African Americans to run away from their white masters. Another fabricated condition, "dysaesthesia aethiopica," was characterized as a form of madness manifest by "rascality" and "disrespect for the master's property," supposedly cured by "extensive whipping."
Today, we see carbon copies of this dehumanization. Trump shares videos depicting the Obamas as monkeys. His administration unconstitutionally deports our neighbors to Venezuela, treating human beings as disposable contaminants. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stages photo ops at concentration camps, transforming sites of human suffering into backdrops for political theater.
Manufacturing Exclusion Through "Science"
My discipline of psychology, under the guise of rationality and objectivity, has been able to cause tremendous harm. This is the trick of eugenic projects: By cloaking racist ideology under the seemingly objective rubric of biological science, it becomes nearly impossible to discern or critique. Psychology created the institutional infrastructure that made them policy. IQ tests are one of these manufactured tricks. In 1912, immigrants arriving at Ellis Island became the first group to have these tests administered to them. And like today, different classes experienced different encounters with justice, as the Epstein Files make so palpable for us. Back in 1912, only those in steerage were subject to examination; those who could afford more posh accommodations were exempt. According to the supposed "scientific" results produced by psychologist Henry Goddard, over 80% of all Jewish, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, and Russian immigrants were "feeble-minded defectives."
Carl Brigham, one of these eugenic psychologists, went on to develop the SAT. The direct line from eugenic IQ tests to college gatekeeping runs straight through to today. Current "merit-based immigration" proposals echo this same logic: using supposedly objective measures to determine who deserves to be American, who gets to stay, whose children get opportunities.
And these psychologists have frequently collaborated with the US government, including in recent decades when they helped the government devise the most effective torture methods, breaking many ethics codes along the way. Lewis Terman, a psychologist who worked on the Army intelligence tests in the early 20th century, bragged that the exam "enabled psychology to become a beacon of light in the eugenics movement" and was especially proud of how these tests could be used to reshape national policy on immigrants. Terman’s wish was unfortunately granted, and these eugenic legacies were braided into the fabric of American policy including immigration law, education, criminal justice, voting rights.
Deportation as Eugenic Self-Defense
Between 1875 and 1924, Congress entertained many immigration bills and if we study them we can see the strategies that are playing out today with more clarity as well. For instance in 1915, Assistant Attorney General LE Cofer was openly advocating deportations on eugenic grounds. Another legislation in 1917 allotted a five-year period for deportation of immigrants who were later found to be in "excludible classes." Deportations were considered by these eugenicists as self-defense. In 1928, Eugenical News listed as a priority "the deportation of all aliens illegally entered." They wrote: "The man whose introduction to American life comes through breaking the quota act is prima facie an undesirable."
The eugenic resurgence fueled by the terror of losing dominance fuels the crises we are living through today.
This is sounding eerily familiar, isn't it? Listen to current administration officials. Trump. Pam Bondi. JD Vance. Karoline Leavitt. This exact rhetoric is being repeated today. Equating people from other countries with criminals is a basic eugenic principle. Today's "border crisis" framing, the claims that undocumented immigrants are inherently criminal, the mass deportation plans, these are old-school eugenic principles with a fresh coat of white paint.
In the US, the struggle to fuse whiteness and being American has been central to our national politics. Immigrants during the height of eugenics were viewed as interlopers; along with Black Americans, they were seen as less pure bodies polluting the well-being of the entire country. Psychologists and other supposed experts made these sentiments appear scientifically valid and politically viable by arming themselves with photographs, charts, statistics, and quantified statements.
The Great Replacement, Then and Now
The goal of these eugenicists was "bettering and protecting the white race," the same obsession we see in the Great Replacement Theory today. This is not fringe conspiracy anymore. In 2022, a white supremacist murdered 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, explicitly motivated by Great Replacement ideology. In 2019, another killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart, targeting Latinx shoppers with the same beliefs. Tucker Carlson promotes this theory every chance he gets. Congressional Republicans now use this language openly, warning about "demographic replacement" and the need to preserve "Western civilization."
History has taught us that progress toward justice can be met with pushback, and the burden of this pushback is often heaviest on those who for various reasons have fewer resources to defend themselves. Eugenics never left us. It transmuted, it became absorbed into insidious institutions, into redlining, into the school system, into the carceral state. But there were also real movements toward justice, civil rights organizers, community activists, families, and advocates who fought for decades to untangle eugenic legacies from our policies and institutions. They won important victories. And it is precisely these gains that white supremacists cannot bear. When the status of their imagined racial hierarchy is questioned, when their power is genuinely threatened, they respond with violence and state power. The eugenic resurgence fueled by the terror of losing dominance fuels the crises we are living through today.
Economic Scapegoating as Eugenic Strategy
Eugenicist Robert Ward, influential in getting the Immigration Act of 1924 passed, said with awful transparency: "We constantly speak of the need of more hands to do our labor. We forget that we are importing not hands alone but bodies also." Eugenicists repeatedly claimed to champion American workers while actually protecting white supremacy. It was never about labor, it was about bodies, about whose body was to be protected and whose body was to be disposable.
Where Trump represents all-consuming exclusion, Bad Bunny embodied refusal, joy, and reunification.
Today's anti-immigrant rhetoric follows the same script. Trump campaigned on protecting working-class jobs from immigrant "invasion," despite no evidence of that happening. But his administration's actual policies tell a different story: Mass deportations intensify the already overwhelming labor shortage in the construction industry, creating labor shortages that hurt local economies as farms and business are forced to close. Meanwhile, the administration busts unions, enriches billionaire donors (under Trump billionaires have gotten $1.5 trillion richer in the past year) and himself, and imposes tariffs that drive up prices for working families.
Many voted for Trump because they desperately wanted someone to address economic inequity. Instead, they got eugenic scapegoating, blaming immigrants for problems caused by the wealthy and powerful. The claim is protecting American workers. The reality is a war on poor and working people of all backgrounds, while the rich face zero accountability for devastating our communities.
Bad Bunny's Counternarrative
Which brings us back to the Super Bowl halftime show. The great American sport. The NFL. And there, at the center of it all, was an unabashed celebration of the Americans who are very much the target of ICE's raids today.
Bad Bunny didn't offer a speech or a slogan. He offered his entire being. The visual references to Hurricane Maria were unmistakable, the storm that killed nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans while Trump threw paper towels and claimed they "want everything done for them." The ongoing refusal of statehood. The deliberate undercount of the death toll. This is eugenic neglect: the decision to let "undesirable" populations suffer and die because their lives are deemed less valuable.
The whole performance was dynamic, alive, vibrating with joy. It refused the fusion of whiteness and American identity that eugenics has always demanded. This is resistance through presence braided with brilliant critical analysis. Resistance through flourishing in his full humanity, in the full humanity of his community, on the biggest stage in America. Where Trump represents all-consuming exclusion, Bad Bunny embodied refusal, joy, and reunification. Not just saying but doing. His presence was an embodiment of flourishing that the eugenic imagination cannot accommodate.
The only thing stronger than hate is love.
What This Moment Demands of Us
Understanding eugenics helps us understand the present. It reveals that what we're witnessing is not an aberration but a recurrence, a resurgence of an ideology with a long life, an ideology that has been picked up by many political agendas over the decades. Trump has never been original once his entire life.
In my studies, I look at who is considered criminal or immoral. It has always been the immigrant. The disabled. It has always been Black people and people of color. Studying eugenics teaches us that policies presented as common sense, as economic necessity, as protecting American workers, as maintaining order, they are often merely covers for racial elimination.
He showed up and said: This is America too.
Our communities cannot be eliminated. "Seguimos aquí"—we are still here—Bad Bunny ended the performance with those words. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio refused to be erased, refused to shrink, refused to disappear. Showing up with joy is indeed a form of power, and gorgeous, infectious resistance. While the administration builds concentration camps, rips apart families, and unleashes violence against communities exercising their constitutional rights, Bad Bunny danced, swaggered, made us all fall in love with freedom itself. He showed up and said: This is America too.
That kind of presence, that kind of refusal, that kind of joy, it's too much for the eugenicists to bear.
Let's do more of this, America.
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Somalis, Haitians, and Trump’s Crusade to Make America White Again
In the name of “defend[ing] your homeland” and “defend[ing] your culture,” his administration will arrest, detain, cage, traumatize, tear-gas, use children as bait, deny people their rights, deport, murder US citizens, and terrorize communities across the nation.
Feb 02, 2026
Not finished terrorizing Minnesota, the Trump administration is seeking to open a new front in their war against America. This time, the battlefield will be Ohio, and Haitians will be the scapegoat.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it would end Temporary Protection Status (TPS) for Haitians, with an effective termination date of February 3, 2026. According to a federal notice issued by DHS in November 2025, “Based on the Department's review, the Secretary [Kristi Noem] has determined that while the current situation in Haiti is concerning, the United States must prioritize its national interests and permitting Haitian nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to the US national interest.”
Per this federal notice, “there are Haitian nationals who are Temporary Protected Status recipients who have been the subject of administrative investigations for fraud, public safety, and national security.” No specifics are offered with regards the scope of this problem, or even the number of Haitians on TPS who have been charged or convicted of any crimes. Instead, they offer a few specific examples. This includes people like Wisteguens Jean Quely Charles, who importantly was not a TPS recipient.
Nevertheless, DHS argues that Charles’s “case underscores the broader risk posed by rising Haitian migration,” especially in the context of a “high-volume border environment” with poor vetting. They allege that the “inability of the previous [Biden] administration to reliably screen aliens from a country with limited law enforcement infrastructure and widespread gang activity presents a clear and growing threat to US public safety.”
The actions we take today will determine whether America embraces multiculturalism or becomes an ethnostate that treats diversity like a plague to be eradicated.
In short, DHS offers no concrete evidence that Haitians on TPS pose an actual threat to public safety or national security—only that they might pose a threat because their potential for being a threat was not properly assessed. Moreover, this potential cannot be properly assessed now because Haiti’s “lack of functional government authority” makes it too difficult to access “critical information” (e.g., criminal histories).
As per usual with the Trump administration, fearmongering replaces facts. In 2021, President Donald Trump claimed that all Haitians have AIDS—this is false (obviously). In 2024, he claimed that, “In Springfield, [Haitians] are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live there.” There were no credible reports of this occurring.
Trump describes immigrants as dangerous criminals. Yet, studies have repeatedly shown that immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—commit far fewer crimes than US citizens. Haitian immigrants are no exceptions. Undocumented Haitian immigrants, for instance, have an incarceration rate that is 81% below US-born Americans.
The situation in Ohio is also no different. In Springfield, home to one of the state’s largest Haitian communities, “Haitians are more likely to be the victims of crime than they are to be the perpetrators in our community. Clark County jail data shows there are 199 inmates in our county jail this week. Two of them are Haitian. That’s 1% (as of Sept. 8).” The thousands of Haitians with TPS protection living in Ohio have made themselves indispensable to the state. As Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, remarks, “If you took Haitians away overnight, I will tell you that the business people there will tell you that’s going to be a big problem for the economy of the community.” In Springfield alone, Haitian immigrants have contributed to higher wage growth while reversing the city’s population decline.
Despite this, DHS will deliberately send Haitians back to a country that they themselves describe as being currently unsafe. So, the question is: why? The answer is because they are Black and foreign. This is also why his administration is so aggressively targeting Somalis.
For Trump, both Somalia and Haiti are “shithole countries”—“places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” At the 2026 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, Trump ranted: “The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the West cannot mass import foreign cultures, which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own. I mean, we’re taking people from Somalia, and Somalia is a failed—it’s not a nation.”
In Trump’s view, Somalia and Haiti are dirty and crime ridden because their people are dirty and prone to crime. Places and people are inextricably tied to him—bad people will always produce bad places; bad places are always the byproduct of bad people. If the US is failing, it’s because we have “imported” too many bad people. This is why, for Trump, almost every social problem from housing affordability to low wages to employment to high crime rates can be solved by mass deportations. From healthcare to election integrity, immigrants are the problem for his administration.
This sentiment is explicitly expressed by US Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller. He remarks, “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Mass migration for Miller is a cross-generational problem. In his view, if Somalis come to America, then they and their children will cause America to fail just like they caused Somalia to fail. For Miller and Trump, this is a problem of cultural and biological determinism. It is a problem of “bad genes” that determine behaviors like criminality, as well as “toxic” ideologies like diversity, equity, and inclusion and ‘hateful’ beliefs like Islam that impede American progress.
When Trump remarks that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our country,” the poison in question is the people themselves and the threat their mere presence represents. Put another way, for Trump, all immigrants from poor countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are akin to tumors in the body politic. Whether they are malignant or benign makes little difference, the safest and most effective response is to surgically remove (deport) them. Even if it turns out that those growths are helping the body politic, they are still foreign agents that should not be present. They are not part of the “very special culture” that built the West—“the precious inheritance that America and Europe have in common.” An inheritance that must be protected from “unchecked mass migration" and “endless foreign imports.” Whether it’s MAGA’s racism or MAHA’s anti-vaxxerism, the Trump administration will reject anything it arbitrarily deems a foreign toxin.
While the Trump administration has deployed federal agents across the nation, we should not be surprised that the “largest immigrant operation ever” has targeted Somalis, a community of predominantly Black, Muslim, and immigrant people. Whiteness and Blackness have always been direct polar opposites within the Western racial imaginary—the former signifying all that is good, the latter all that is bad. For Trump, it is whiteness that “abolished slavery; secured civil rights; defeated communism and fascism; and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history.” Of course, none of this is true: Haiti was the first nation to end slavery, Black and other people of color fought for civil rights, and the Trump administration is a fascist regime.
None of these facts will stop the Trump administration’s crusade against “foreign invaders” spawned from “hellholes” who threaten “civilization erasure.” In the name of “defend[ing] your homeland” and “defend[ing] your culture,” his administration will arrest, detain, cage, traumatize, tear-gas, use children as bait, deny people their rights, deport, murder US citizens, and terrorize communities across the nation. No cost is too high in this Holy War to save the proverbial soul of America.
We are at a critical juncture. The actions we take today will determine whether America embraces multiculturalism or becomes an ethnostate that treats diversity like a plague to be eradicated. We must continue to protest nationwide against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration. We must continue to monitor and observe ICE’s tactics. We must push elected officials to fulfill their obligation to the people and use their authority to keep Trump in check. At a time when the Trump administration wants nothing more than to divide us, we must come together and resist.
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Beware the Rise of JD 'Just-as-Dangerous' Vance
With Trump a distinct question mark and while the Trumpian current ebbs and flows, one wave is pushing the 2028 candidacy of Vice President JD Vance, but this shouldn't be a relief.
Jan 18, 2026
Donald Trump may, of course, be the Republican candidate for president in 2028, the US Constitution notwithstanding. Although it is clearly written in the 22nd Amendment that “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” it may well be a majority vote of the Supreme Court that determines whether that applies to Trump.
In the past, that court has gotten around the Constitution without a single word of it being changed. Rather, its judges have let an innovative interpretation prevail. In 1896, for instance, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the court ignored the unambiguous language of the 14th Amendment that demanded “equal protection” and so upheld racial segregation by creating the fiction of “separate but equal.” It would take 58 years before that lie would be overturned.
Harvard law professor and Trump legal whisperer Alan Dershowitz has told the president that “it’s not clear” if it is constitutionally settled whether he can serve another term, even if elected. Reportedly, Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer is working on a book on the subject to be published in March 2026. And MAGA world—from the White House to members of Congress to far-right media figures—is stirring the pot on Donald Trump’s potential fourth bid for president.
Trump is also clearly worried about his legacy. Branding federal buildings and institutions with his name, building an outrageous ballroom, pimping out the Oval Office in gold, and constructing an unnecessary “Triumphal Arch” are all desperate attempts to be remembered as “great” at any cost. Yet, he has to know that the next Democratic president will be under tremendous pressure to remove most, if not all, Trump-brand edifices as quickly as possible. In the end, his real memorials will undoubtedly be the authoritarian policies and conduct that will label him as one of the worst, if not the worst, presidents in American history.
Keep in mind that Trump will be 83 by the time of the 2028 election and he’s already exhibiting so many of the behaviors generally attributed to the fabled “crazy old man” down the street.
That said, Trump remains a question mark when it comes to a third term. There are a number of reasons he might not try for one, not the least being his deteriorating mental and physical health. It didn’t take the New York Times to question his capabilities, not when anyone watching him could hear him slurring his words, dozing off in front of the cameras, barely moving even on a golf course, and sounding more incoherent than ever.
His manic putting up of sometimes hundreds of posts a day or in the wee hours of the night—although his staff may be responsible for some of it—should be considered a cry for help, if ever there was one. And it’s not just the volume of his postings, but their increasing extremity. The hate has become more hateful, the taunts more vicious and racist, and the fabrications more outlandish and divorced from reality. And keep in mind that Trump will be 83 by the time of the 2028 election and he’s already exhibiting so many of the behaviors generally attributed to the fabled “crazy old man” down the street.
Finally (should it get to that point), a majority of the Supreme Court—I certainly don’t think all of them, no matter the situation—could follow the Constitution and rule against a third term. It should be considered ironic at this point that the 22nd Amendment was proposed and passed in response to a Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, winning his fourth consecutive presidential race.
The Vance Option
With Trump a distinct question mark and while the Trumpian current ebbs and flows, another wave is pushing the 2028 candidacy of Vice President JD Vance. Trump found his avatar in 2024 when the junior senator from Ohio and former harsh Trump critic joined the crew of Republican senators fighting to be the most sycophantic to the party’s new Führer. Like his compatriots Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio, there were no morals or principles that superseded Vance’s ambition and lust for power. Under the circumstances, that “JD” could easily have stood for “just as dangerous.”
As Vance confirmed at the recent Turning Point USA gathering, not only are White nationalists like Nick Fuentes and unrepentant conspiracists like Candace Owens not denounced, but they are welcomed and embraced. Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with Fuentes roiled MAGA, but before that he was interviewed by Owens on her podcast. Again, there are no discernible objections from GOP leaders, including Vance.
While Vance opportunistically inserted himself into the Charlie Kirk martyr-building project—he was a pallbearer and spoke at his memorial—he has yet to call out Owens for her wild and unfounded claims that Turning Point USA staff, Israel, the French Foreign Legion, and God knows who else were somehow involved in Kirk’s assassination.
If Trump doesn’t manage to run a fourth time and Vance wants to be president, he’ll be more dependent than ever on the MAGA base and the far-right, especially since he has little to no chance of winning over many Democrats or independents.
Vance’s most eye-raising statement at the TPUSA event was when he said, “You don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” First, it is a pretty sure bet that no one at the event (or in MAGA) ever apologized for being white. Second, Vance reinforced the view that white supremacy will not be a barrier to any future campaign of his.
Vance’s message is clear: Every imaginable far-right extremist, from white supremacists and technofascists to offensive fabulists, is welcome in his coming 2028 campaign. And he will assumedly have Trump’s blessing (if the president doesn’t indeed decide to try to run again himself).
Poor Secretary of State Marco Rubio has as much chance of getting Trump’s support as Black GOP Congressional Representative Byron Donalds did of becoming his vice-presidential candidate in 2024. Trump 2.0 is wholly built on racial profiling, especially of Latinos, and asserting White power. Merely “looking” Latino is enough in these Trumpist times to attract armed masked men and a trip to an immigration hellhole. Rubio has vigorously defended such illegal arrests and detentions and the racist demonization of immigrants of color that’s gone with it, but he’s rolling the dice if he thinks the MAGA base will see him as the exception to their rule.
Just ask Vance. As hillbilly-centric and pro-white working class as he has tried to portray himself, despite being a millionaire many times over, the fact that he is married to Usha Vance, a woman of color and a non-Christian, has generated lots of racist blowback. Fuentes, for example, called Vance a “race traitor” for marrying Usha. Many MAGA adherents were shocked to discover Usha was not white. One report found that, between January and August 2024, there were at least 1,800 racist, gender, or religious-based attacks on Usha that reached an audience of an estimated 216 million.
While Vance has pushed back against such threats and insults, he’s ignored any possible relationship between Trump’s and his racism against Haitian and other immigrants of color and the blowback he’s experienced against Usha. His default position (rather than directly challenging MAGA bigotry): Usha is “tough enough to handle it.” In addition, instead of defending Usha’s right to practice whatever religion she chooses, he pandered to the religious extremist crowd by stating that he hoped she would convert to Catholicism and “eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church.” He then added, “I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”
Vance Courts the Extremists
If Trump doesn’t manage to run a fourth time and Vance wants to be president, he’ll be more dependent than ever on the MAGA base and the far-right, especially since he has little to no chance of winning over many Democrats or independents. Few will forget that he personally led the outlandish racist claims that Haitian immigrants were stealing pets and eating them in Springfield, Ohio. When busted on that fabrication, he admitted that he had known the truth, but didn’t care as long as it served his interests. He stated in an interview during the 2024 election campaign, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”
Vance’s “stories” were blatant lies about immigrants (of color) and their role in US society. According to him, undocumented (and perhaps, maybe, kinda legal) immigrants are to blame for high medical prices, rising housing costs, education crises, crime, antisemitism, and illegal voting. In other words, there isn’t a problem in the United States that can’t be linked to undocumented aliens.
A Time When Vance Was Truthful
The next time around, Democrats would be wise to highlight Vance’s past criticism of Donald Trump. After all, he referred to Trump as “Hitler” and as a “morally reprehensible human being” in emails that plausibly were not supposed to be publicly seen. However, he did publish an article in The Atlantic only weeks before the 2016 election that he clearly wanted to be on the record. In a piece entitled “Opioid of the Masses,” he called Trump “cultural heroin.” He argued that, while Trump’s blather might make people feel good, he was anything but the answer to the deeply rooted causes of the multiple crises facing poor whites, particularly and ironically, opioid drug addiction. Like heroin, he wrote, its poison “enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.” Vance’s own mother, as he noted in the article, abused heroin and prescription opioids, giving him a highly personal stake in the issue.
What he wrote then is no less true today: “Trump offers an easy escape from the pain… Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.” Continuing with that addiction metaphor, he added, “Perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of ‘Make America Great Again’ for real medicine.” That Vance is long gone.
It’s a maxim of today’s politics that all relationships with Trump end badly.
Of course, his most important pre-Trumpian links weren’t to his largely made-up hillbilly upbringing—he was born and raised in Ohio—but his ties to far-right billionaires in Silicon Valley. They have been dubbed “techno fascists” for their reactionary, racist, misogynist, and anti-democratic views. His bids for the Senate and then the vice presidency weren’t just supported by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and other big names in the billionaire tech world, but opened the door to their increasing role in shaping policy, especially but not exclusively in relation to the artificial intelligence and technology industries.
Vance has, of course, also been in lockstep with Trump’s imperialist and self-serving foreign policy. He crudely sided with the president when he attempted to browbeat Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in their infamous Oval Office meeting on February 28, 2025. He also defended, and even cruelly joked about, the deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean by the US military. He justified Trump’s illegal abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, echoing all the false claims of Trump, Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about drug trafficking and stolen oil.
It’s a maxim of today’s politics that all relationships with Trump end badly. Will Vance abandon Trump as he deteriorates yet more? The main lesson Trump learned from his late lawyer, the notorious Roy Cohn (of McCarthy-era fame), was to use people until they are no longer useful. Cohn counseled Trump in his early years and introduced him to influential and important people who facilitated his rise in New York City. They became “friends” until Trump (of course!) abandoned Cohn in his time of need once he contracted AIDS and was dying. Trump simply brushed him aside when he was no longer useful and reportedly did not even attend his funeral. Can Trump expect the same treatment from Vance?
Or will the vice president be like Kamala Harris and, as she did with President Joe Biden, pretend Trump is well when he clearly is not? As Trump struggles to make it for three more years, Vance will be questioned about his cognitive state and physical health. Will he gaslight the public and hope for the best?
Given what we have seen and that Vance has demonstrated no loyalty to principles or ethics, no one should be surprised if he turns on Trump at some point, should he determine that it is in his interest to do so.
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Why the Trump Admin Can't Investigate Minnesota Fraud Without Scapegoating Somalis
By framing what’s occurring in Minnesota as ‘the Somali fraud network,’ the Trump administration is looking to legitimize its months-long attack on the Somali community and distract from its own unpopularity.
Jan 03, 2026
On December 26, YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video entitled, “I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal.” So far, the video has amassed over 2 million views and has been lauded by major conservatives including Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance. Via Twitter, Vance posted that, “This dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 @pulitzercenter prize.”
In response to the outcry from this video, the Trump administration is reportedly freezing federal childcare funding across all states. Deputy Health and Human Services Secretary Jim O’Neill called the measure necessary given the “blatant fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country.” While each state will face new requirements to regain funding, Minnesota will be subject to stricter scrutiny.
This is a drastic response, especially since Shirley’s video didn’t reveal anything new. The Department of Justice (DOJ)—under both President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden—was already investigating fraud in Minnesota. In 2022, 47 people were charged for their role in a $250 million fraud scheme that exploited a federally funded nutrition program during the Covid-19 pandemic. Several news outlets had reported on allegations of fraud regarding federally funded childcare centers in Minnesota months prior to Shirley’s video.
Shirley also doesn’t discover any new evidence. This is unsurprising given his deeply flawed approach. For instance, in the video, Shirley and his crew visit several Somali-owned daycare centers and ask the workers: “Where are the children at? Are there children here today?” Even if fraud was occurring at the sites he visited, the workers’ refusal to take a stranger with a camera to see the kids reveals nothing. Maybe there were no kids present. Or maybe they are simply responsible workers protecting the safety of the children from a potential creep.
This is not about fraud. It’s not about justice. It’s poor political theater from a battered and desperate administration.
Ultimately, if widespread fraud is occurring anywhere, then the people responsible should be held accountable. The problem, however, is that this outrage is being manipulated by the Trump administration to further scapegoat the Somali community.
Consider for instance this comment made by Attorney General Pamela Bondi via Twitter-X. She writes that the DOJ has been investigating this alleged daycare fraud case for months. Thus far, the department has “charged 98 individual—85 of Somali descent—and more than 60 have been found guilty in court.”
There is no reason whatsoever for Bondi to draw attention to the ethnic or racial background of any of the people being charged. She is emphasizing that information in order to help fuel and justify the Trump administration’s xenophobia.
By framing what’s occurring in Minnesota as “the Somali fraud network,” the Trump administration is looking to legitimize their months-long attack on the Somali community. In December alone, President Trump remarked: “We always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.” Vice President JD Vance said that Democrats “are not sending their best” in reference to Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh. He claimed that Fateh was Representative Ilhan Omar’s “candidate for mayor of Mogadishu. Wait, I mean Minneapolis.” US Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller shouted, “If Somalians cannot make Somalia successful, why would we think that the track will be any different in the United States?”
The Trump administration is exploiting public outrage to further its assault on immigrants and their families. Already House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) has called for deporting all Somalis linked to fraud in Minnesota, including naturalized citizens. He further adds, “Our nation will not tolerate those who take advantage of our charity and refuse to assimilate into our culture.” Putting aside that most fraud in the US is committed by white Americans, stipulating that the US will not tolerate those who fail to embrace US culture has far wider implications than punishing criminals. This is about punishing diversity.
This is also why the administration has moved to freeze all federal childcare funding. Again, this fraud was already known and is still being investigated. To implement a measure that so indiscriminately and callously harms Americans—during an affordability crisis—is meant to redirect people’s genuine frustrations with the Trump administration onto the Somali community.
They will be the scapegoats for Trump’s violence. And they are only the beginning. On December 31, Trump posted on Truth Social: “There is more FRAUD in California than there is in Minnesota, if that is even possible. When you add in Election Fraud, then they are tied for first. Two Crooked Governors, two Crooked States!”
Trump will capitalize on the public’s legitimate concerns about fraud to attack his political opponents, like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. He will use it to further villainize immigrants. After all, California is the state with the nation’s largest immigrant population—guess who will be blamed for fraud there?
Trump has regularly insisted that Democrats “use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.” These fraud allegations provide him with the perfect opportunity to extend this false narrative. The fact that the DOJ’s investigation thus far has charged less than 100 people is irrelevant. Most of them are of Somali descent, and Minnesota’s governor is a Democrat (who just ran against him as Kamala Harris’ vice presidential pick). That’s all Trump and his allies care about.
This is not about fraud. A truly anti-fraud president would not commute the sentence of David Gentile, a private equity executive convicted for his role in a $1.6 billion Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of investors. As part of his pardon, Gentile will no longer be required to pay $15.5 million in restitution to his victims. Perhaps if Gentile were of Somali descent, then Trump would be more concerned with justice and respect for the law.
There is no legitimate rationale for withholding childcare funding from the entire country because of the actions committed by so few. Trump supporters might argue that this extreme measure simply demonstrates President Trump’s unwavering and firm commitment to law and order. That he is simply rooting out fraud from the system in the most direct way possible.
But if this is true, then why only take these measures after a YouTuber posts a video about it? Why wait until there is public outcry?
It’s because that outcry; these extreme measures; and this anti-Somali, xenophobic framing are all politically useful for the Trump administration. This is not about fraud. It’s not about justice. It’s poor political theater from a battered and desperate administration.
2025 was a difficult year for the country, and 2026 is starting off on a rough foot. As the midterm elections approach, the Trump administration will likely resort to more drastic and violent measures. We cannot give into despair. Trump is waging a battle of attrition against the American public. He wants us stressed, afraid, and divided. The only remedy is for us to remain vigilant, unyielding, and united.
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Trump Intensifies His Crusade to Re-Whiten America
In the past two weeks alone, we’ve witnessed Trump’s racist rants against the Somali community in Minnesota, the freezing of all non-white asylum bids, and denial of citizenship rights for long-time legal immigrants from non-white majority nations.
Dec 11, 2025
As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence nears, President Donald Trump’s escalating attacks on immigrants of color has made his administration the most globally racist, hostile administration for non-white immigrants in US history, on top of its aggressively implemented racist policies in the US and around the world.
In the past two weeks alone, we’ve witnessed Trump’s racist rants against the Somali community in Minnesota, the freezing of all non-white asylum bids, and denial of citizenship rights for long-time legal immigrants from non-white majority nations. These come on top of the increasingly violent assaults and deportations of mostly brown and Black people, including citizens, solely based on skin color, language, and where they work.
The November 26 shooting, one fatally, of two National Guard members in Washington was the pretext for the latest intensification of Trump’s anti-non-white immigrant crusade. The shooter was a troubled Afghan former member of the CIA’s notorious “Zero Unit” death squads in Afghanistan who was resettled in the US after the war’s end. But the context is clothed in years of Trump’s demonization of immigrants from what he called “Third World”—and even “shithole”—countries, that has been a centerpiece of Trump’s political career. It has accompanied “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories of Democrats allegedly organizing immigrants of color to flood the US to supplant white voters, and an increasing normalization of racist rhetoric by the far-right.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Trump posted on his Truth Social his intent to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the US system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions… and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk.”
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.
On December 2, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt verified that "refugee admissions into the country right now are essentially at 0, with the exception of Afrikaners fleeing persecution in South Africa." Many sources have debunked Trump’s promotion of the myth of a “white genocide” in South Africa, while he has also stated preference for white Europeans who oppose migration.
That same day Trump launched his vile denunciation of Somali residents, calling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and “her friends” “garbage,” adding “when they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from.” Omar had a strong rebuttal: "When I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremacist rhetoric, it reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany." And, she warned, “It's also really important for us to remember that this kind of hateful rhetoric and this level of dehumanizing can lead to dangerous actions by people who listen to the president."
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."
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We Must Protect Birthright Citizenship From Trump’s Xenophobic, Eugenic Ideology
If the Supreme Court rules in his favor, it could pave the way for any president (or wannabe-monarch) to redefine citizenship at their discretion.
Dec 09, 2025
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit regarding the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order to restrict the right to birthright citizenship. If the Supreme Court rules in Trump’s favor, then children born in the US would be denied citizenship if their parents are undocumented or residing in the country under temporary legal status.
Let’s not mince words here: Trump’s executive order is cruel and xenophobic. Children born of undocumented immigrants or visa holders have committed no crimes. They are not responsible for the circumstances of their birth. There is also no legitimate legal basis. The 14th Amendment is clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
None of these facts matter to Trump. His administration would readily tear families apart and see children born into a second-class status simply because their births were not to his liking.
This is only the beginning of the cruelty that his birthright ban would unleash. If the Supreme Court rules in his favor, it would pave the way for any president (or wannabe monarch) to redefine citizenship at their discretion. After all, if simply being born in the US is not enough to guarantee citizenship, then what is? Where do we draw the line?
Trump cannot be allowed to define who is a citizen.
Well, if you’re Trump, then it’s the color line. For the Trump administration, not all babies are created equal. Restricting birthright citizenship is their way of preventing “hundreds of thousands of unqualified people” from acquiring the “privilege of American citizenship.” It is about dissuading the wrong kinds of people from having the wrong kinds of babies.
Sound far-fetched? Well, consider this: Trump, the self-proclaimed “fertilization president” (gross!), has sought to expand access to in vitro fertilization (IVF). As Trump puts it, we want “beautiful babies in this country, we want you to have your beautiful, beautiful, perfect baby. We want those babies, and we need them.”
Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, champions the future of “Trump babies.” Vice President JD Vance literally says he wants “more babies in the United States of America.” The Trump White House insists that they need “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”
But, if that’s true, then what is the purpose of Trump’s executive order? If they want more babies to be born in this country, then why push to deny babies their legitimate birthright? It’s because Trump is pro-baby so long as it’s the right kind of baby.
Beautiful, healthy, strong and perfect—those are the babies Trump wants. And those are the babies that, in his view, migrants do not have.
Trump has explicitly said that migrants have “bad genes” that cause them to commit crimes. That they are “not humans, they’re animals.” He has said that migrants from South America, Africa, and Asia are “poisoning the blood of our country”—a view that parallels Hitler’s own rhetoric about “blood poisoning” and race mixing. He calls Somalis “garbage” and says that “I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you… their country is no good for a reason.” He believes this about migrants, and he believes it extends to their children. This pseudoscientific eugenic drivel is at the core of his executive order.
That is the real danger of Trump’s birthright ban. As it stands, birthright citizenship provides a clear-cut metric. Aside from two niche exceptions, if you were born here, you are from here. There’s no loophole to exploit. There’s no definition to reevaluate and abuse. There’s no place for prejudice, discrimination, or bigoted understandings of what it means to be an American. There’s no ambiguity regarding who belongs. The simplicity of birthright is precisely its strength.
It’s also precisely why the Trump administration wants to undo it. Birthright citizenship is a strong barrier against the administration’s most fascist impulses to recreate “the meaning and value of American citizenship.” As he said on the campaign trail, “If I win, the American people will be the rulers of this country again. The United States is now an occupied country.” His current administration similarly claims that Europe faces “civilizational erasure” if it does not restrict migration and preserve its “Western identity.”
If Trump’s mission is, as he explicitly says, to liberate the US and protect Western values threatened by migration, then he won’t stop with the children of undocumented immigrants. Trump cannot be allowed to define who is a citizen. For the good of the nation and for future generations, we cannot let him succeed.
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Trump's Anti-Immigrant Violence Is a Message for the Rest of Us
This is how it always starts, this process of getting citizens used to the government using violence that will one day be turned against them.
Oct 13, 2025
For the Trump regime, the brutality is the point. It’s the means to the end of a violent, single-party state that they’re openly proclaiming, even though our media insists on turning away from it.
Back in the 1980s, I lived with my family and worked in Germany for a bit short of two years. The international relief agency I worked for (and lived at the HQ of) jumped through all the necessary hoops to get me a work permit, but if I’d overstayed my permit or visa nobody would have kicked in my front door or invaded my home with flash-bangs and automatic weapons drawn.
Nobody would have smashed in the windows of my car, or shot me with pepper balls or rubber-coated bullets, or snatched our three children and put them into a privatized “Christian” foster care system from which thousands of kids simply vanish.
Instead, a polite fellow from the Ausländerbehörden (“Immigration Office”) would have dropped by, perhaps with a local police officer, to tell me how to navigate the system to either acquire the right to stay, or work out how I’d be leaving. He’d give me a few weeks, or possibly even a few months, to get everything together and leave the country.
The brutality, in other words, is the point. It’s not an accident, a side effect, or the result of poor training. It’s intentional. It’s a signal of their broader intentions. Following the classic dictator’s playbook.
I knew a few German police officers; they’re incredibly professional, having to have graduated from a three-year college program and undergone what’s typically a yearlong probationary period before they can publicly handle a firearm.
This is how civilized countries handle “illegal immigration.” So, why are Border Czar Tom Homan, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, President Donald Trump, et al., engaging in and celebrating such wild violence against people here?
There are now so many videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs unlawfully beating, kidnapping, and terrorizing brown people, their supporters, protesters, and journalists—even maliciously spraying pepper gas at peaceful protesters in inflatable animal costumes—that it’s getting impossible to keep track of them all.
From ICE agents smashing a car window to pull a man from his vehicle in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Apr. 16, 2025), to an ICE agent shooting Eric Díaz-Cruz in the face in Brooklyn (February 2020), to masked agents breaking a car window during an arrest outside a Beaverton, Oregon preschool (July 21, 2025), and even pepper balling a Chicago pastor in the head during a protest (September 2025), the videos keep piling up.
Add to that a viral clip of a cuffed Portland protester being wheeled away on a flatbed cart (October 2025), neighbors in Nashville forming a human chain to stop an ICE pickup (July 2019), and the on-camera violent throwing to the ground and arrest of a WGN journalist during a Chicago raid last week, and you get the picture.
This is how it always starts, this process of getting citizens used to the government using violence that will one day be turned against them.
When a regime wants to turn the police powers of the state—with all the brutality and violence they can legally wield—against its political opponents, it never starts with the members of the opposition party. But it always ends up there, be it in Germany in the 1930s or today’s Russia, Hungary, China, Turkey, Iran, etc., etc.
Hitler didn’t start by arresting and imprisoning lawmakers from or supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Centre Party (Zentrum), or even the Communist Party (KPD) even though all of the three major German parties openly and outspokenly opposed his Nazi Party.
ICE doesn’t need to rappel from helicopters, smash windows, zip-tie shivering naked American citizen children, and terrorize their parents to get noncitizens to leave the country.
German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer people.
A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.
In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.
Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people—with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people—across German media.
German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.
Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled over 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire. It was followed by open and widely publicized violence against gay men and trans women.
It was the first major Nazi book burning and violence against an “other,” and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation. It wouldn’t be the last: Soon it spread to libraries and public high schools.
Having established the legal precedent for dragging people from their homes and imprisoning them, Hitler then began arresting members of the non-Nazi political parties and their followers.
But first, he knew he had to get Germans used to the idea of authorities of the state kicking in doors and dragging screaming people into the street.
When the only victims of this brutality were queer people and “non-Aryans,” ethnic Germans let him and his Stormtroopers get away with it because the objects of the violence were “them.”
But it never ends with “them.”
Fascist regimes always turn their police powers against their own people, first going after those who ridicule, oppose, or have turned away from support for their leader.
ICE doesn’t need to rappel from helicopters, smash windows, zip-tie shivering naked American citizen children, and terrorize their parents to get noncitizens to leave the country.
Instead, like in Germany and most other civilized nations, they could simply give people the equivalent of a speeding ticket with a certain amount of time to get their affairs in order and leave the country before a next step—arrest and forced deportation—takes place. And they could threaten their employers with large fines, like my employer in Germany would have faced had I overstayed my visa.
But not here in America. Here, the agenda is quite different and involves explicit and highly publicized violence against undocumented people and their property.
For a reason.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told us, when talking with Sean Hannity on Fox “News” in August, what that reason is, what their ultimate goal will be:
“The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” (emphasis added)
Immigrants are just the Trump regime’s warm-up act, just like trans people and Gypsies were in 1933 Germany. The real goal of this administration—by their own declaration—is to turn America into a one-party-rule nation.
To get there, though, they first must get us used to Trump’s masked secret police using violence on the streets and in our homes, right in front of us.
This is why DHS is proudly producing videos showing people being brutalized to upbeat music, why their agents are concealing their identities to increase the terror and minimize the possibility of accountability, and why complicit Republicans refuse to even use the correct name for their ultimate target, members of the Democratic Party.
Back in the 1950s, Joe McCarthy advised Republicans never to use the actual name of the Democratic Party, but instead to slander them with a slur.
Never say Democratic Party, that sounds too nice, too democratic. Instead, always say "Democrat Party," with an emphasis on the "rat."
It’s why they’re flooding social media with celebrations of their violence, and why the millionaire talent on billionaire-owned Fox “News” are cheerleading them. It’s why Trump is openly talking about arresting Illinois’ Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson. It’s why his masked thugs tackled a US senator, arrested a congresswoman, and imprisoned the mayor of Newark, all with great fanfare.
If you think Democrats—including registered Democratic voters—aren’t next, you’re not paying attention. They’re already trying to make sure our votes aren’t counted; when that fails they’ll proceed to Miller’s step two and start dealing with us as “domestic extremists.”
The brutality, in other words, is the point. It’s not an accident, a side effect, or the result of poor training. It’s intentional. It’s a signal of their broader intentions. Following the classic dictator’s playbook.
And if we ever get used to it, G-d help America.
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