SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
anti-immigrant
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular