America is a racist country that, in the 21st Century, elected a loud and proud bigot twice, not to lead a unified nation, but to serve as a reflection of U.S. white nationalism in all its glorious racism, xenophobia and white grievance disguised as patriotism.
President Donald Trump wants a United States of Whiteness, and that’s the only reason travel bans exclusively against non-white nations have been his default strategy for keeping out those whom white conservatives consider undesirable.
So, before we get into the Trump administration’s latest travel ban, one fact needs to be pointed out: only one man is accused of shooting and killing National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and injuring Guard member Andrew Wolfe.
White Americans have always subscribed to a “lone wolf” narrative whenever a mass shooter or domestic terrorist is a white man — or at least that was the case before the death of Charlie Kirk and the assassination attempt on Trump, when MAGA cultists figured out they could politicize these tragedies and play the victim by blaming “far-left rhetoric” while ignoring their own constant inflammatory language, including that of the president. A white terrorist has always been an individual by default, which is why Kirk’s death and Trump’s (probably staged) shooting won’t result in any policies that affect those shooters’ entire demographic.
If the shooter is Black, he’s just another violent thug who proves Black people are inherently violent and gives white people every reason to decide Black lives don’t matter. If he’s Hispanic, he’s the reason Trump’s racist, dehumanizing mass deportation agenda was always necessary. If he’s Muslim or Middle Eastern, he’s a 9/11 terrorist, and every single person who looks like him is also to blame. However, when the maniac killing people at random is a white man — which he is far more often than not — the most white America will do is argue back and forth about whether he’s a Democrat or Republican, and all the other white men in the country get to go on about their days feeling unimplicated.
Anyway, let’s talk about this travel ban.
Since the shooting of National Guard members in Washington, D.C. — where they should never have been deployed to in the first place, because the order was unlawful — Trump has been on his campaign to blame and ban all Afghan nationals, and all people from “third-world countries” and “failed nations,” including Somalia, which he seems to have special contempt for, as he has repeatedly gone out of his way to trash the country, as well as Black Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a common target for the president’s hate speech just because she happened to be born in Somalia.
In between attacking Omar for where she was born and lying about her coming into the country illegally and marrying her brother for a green card (she hasn’t lived in Somalia since she was eight, and has been a U.S. citizen since she was 12), Trump took to social media on Thanksgiving day to wish “a very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our Country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the World, for being ‘Politically Correct,’ and just plain STUPID, when it comes to Immigration” — and to announce his latest travel ban of people who had absolutely nothing to do with the National Guard shooting.
Then, on Monday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem laid out her own recommendation for the ban, equating immigrants to “foreign invaders” and urging Trump to enact “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.” In other words, she leaned fully into the white nationalist propaganda that immigrants are receiving welfare and causing spikes in crime, neither of which is true.
From the New York Times:
It was not immediately clear what countries could be targeted by such a ban, or how broad it would be, and Mr. Trump would have the final say. The president reposted Ms. Noem’s statement on his own social media account later Monday night, without offering any comment.
Ms. Noem’s statement, which demonized immigrants as “foreign invaders,” came amid a wider crackdown on legal pathways of immigration after the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., by a gunman identified by the authorities as an Afghan national last week. Afghanistan is already on a list of 12 countries, primarily in Africa and the Middle East, that Mr. Trump instituted a travel ban on in June.
Late on Thanksgiving Day, Mr. Trump, who has used derogatory language to describe immigrants since the shooting, had said on social media that he intended to “permanently pause migration from all third world countries.” He also spoke of “reverse migration,” floating the possibility of stripping naturalized American citizens of their citizenship and vowing to deport all immigrants that he saw as “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
And there it is…
MAGA Republicans would never admit out loud that “non-compatible with Western Civilization” just means white — as illustrated by Trump’s affinity for white Afrikaners from South Africa, his dedication to lying about the “white genocide” they don’t really face, and his gutting of refugee admissions to exclude virtually all but white migrants — but that’s exactly what Trump meant, and what they all mean when they say similar things.
The White House referred questions on the travel ban to the DHS, which has said it would “be announcing the list soon.” Meanwhile, the Trump administration has “halted the asylum process for all migrants in the United States, begun a review of green cards for people from 19 countries, mostly from the Middle East or Africa, and barred Afghans from entering the country,” according to the Times. Trump told reporters on Sunday that he planned to pause asylum for “a long time” because “we don’t want those people.”
Again, we don’t have to ask who “those people” are, or who they are not.
It’s worth mentioning that during Trump’s first term, he banned immigration and travel from seven Middle Eastern and African countries and limited it from an eighth nation. Here’s what the CATO Institute said about that ban and how it compares to travel bans to the U.S. implemented by other presidents:
Unlike President Trump’s travel ban, 98% of prior presidents’ proclamations banned individuals based on their personal conduct, and almost always—93% of the time—they required that the targeted person be specifically identified and named by the Department of State. Only 2% of the time—one case—was nationality alone the requirement for the ban, and in no case was every visa applicant with that nationality subject to the ban. Under the Trump ban, all visa applicants from Syria and North Korea are subject to the ban based on their nationality alone, and most applicants are banned from Iran, Chad, Somalia, and Yemen.
Making America great again always meant restoring it as a nation of the white people, by the white people and for the white people. This couldn’t possibly be clearer than it is now.
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