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As Donald Trump's influence wanes and his public demeanor becomes more erratic, he has intensified vitriolic attacks aimed at female journalists and ethnic communities, with Somali Americans as a recent focal point. The impact of these insults stems from their malice and his platform, not any basis in truth. Similarly, the government's actions against immigrants are haphazard and founded on falsehoods. The evidence makes it obvious that the objective is not targeting those who have committed crimes. The true target is people of color.

From Native Americans with official tribal documentation to naturalized US citizens, individuals performing critical jobs in construction and healthcare to those who served, college students, residents asleep in their beds, and toddlers: a broad cross-section of the country's population is under siege.

"Immigration enforcement raids are cruel, unjust and do nothing for public safety," asserts a prominent New York City official. Scenes featuring officers concealing their faces shattering windows and dragging parents away from infants, instilling fear and hindering the function of institutions, achieves the opposite effect.

The cycles of orchestrated bigotry—directed at Haitians during the election, Venezuelan migrants this spring, and now Somalis—lean heavily on defamatory falsehoods and slurs. The reason is simple: the truthful data about these groups of people do not justify such hostility.

The Imaginary White Nation Versus Actual History

The strategy of frightening and vilifying purports to aim at rebuilding a uniformly white United States which is a fiction. While the US was demographically whiter in the youth of today's white supremacists, it never constituted a purely white nation. At the nation's founding, the thirteen founding colonies included a significant percentage of Black and Indigenous peoples—certain states in the South were over one-third Black.

Following American expansion, annexing Texas in 1844 and seizing Mexico's northern territories in 1848, it incorporated a large Spanish-speaking population long established in the modern Southwest and California. It is documented that the initial Muslim of African descent in this land arrived with a Spanish expedition almost one hundred years prior to the Mayflower's English Puritans reached the shores of New England in 1620.

Demographic Realities Against Forced Dreams

The persecution of vast numbers of brown-skinned individuals and even mass deportations will not manufacture the all-white nation of extremist imagination. Los Angeles, for instance, is nearly half Latino, and despite enforcement outrages, arrests, and deportations, it remains so. The city's very name is Spanish, an enduring reminder of its original inhabitants.

The entirety of this animus and oppression resembles the panic of racists attempting to believe they can stop the coming changes of a country that is ceasing to be majority-white by using pure cruelty.

This is paired with an attack on abortion access that is, at times, explicitly designed to prompt Caucasian women to have more children. The argument points to a below-replacement birthrate in the US, a trend less impactful than in some other nations due to a hard-working population of immigrant laborers which keeps the economy functioning. Yet, rather than providing the societal assistance that might make raising children easier, the strategy has been punitive and coercive.

A prominent journalist notes that the policies on childbirth of certain political figures—along with insults toward childless women—constitute a form of pronatalism. This ideology "typically merges worries about declining birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist viewpoints."

In a similar vein, analyses show that "efforts to bolster the fertility rate do not compensate for wider administrative priorities designed to cut government assistance initiatives like healthcare for the poor and insurance for kids. The so-called 'pro-family' focus isn't merely about encouraging procreation. Instead, it is utilized as a tool to push a right-wing political program that threatens women's health, bodily autonomy, and economic participation."

Contradictory Strategies and Public Rejection

The combination of anti-immigration and pro-birth policies represent an attempt to artificially redirect the nation's demographic trajectory. Ultimately, they represent foolish bullying by individuals filled with hatred who inadvertently reveal that their claims to superiority must be rooted in race and gender; absent these categories, their arguments collapse into meaningless idiocy.

Much of the justification offered by the Trump team fails to align with tangible facts and actual outcomes. For example, naval operations in the Caribbean Sea often target small vessels which are not proven to be carrying narcotics and incapable of reaching US shores. Similarly, Venezuela's role in the fentanyl trade is negligible, and its role in cocaine trafficking is far less than that of other South American nations.

The administration's stance extends to climate issues, with a rejection of "climate change ideology" and "carbon neutrality targets." There is a sentimental attachment to coal and oil, particularly coal, leading to policies that compel localities to spend money on obsolete and toxic power sources while sabotaging affordable, clean alternatives. At the same time, public health leadership have advanced unscientific nutritional plans while eroding general public health safeguards.

The foundational assumption of the anti-immigrant offensive is that non-white individuals not born in the US are threatening outsiders. Yet, from coast to coast—from Los Angeles to Charlotte, Chicago to Portland—the government's own forces, the ICE and Border Patrol officers, whom many residents view as the dangerous and hostile interlopers.

No symbol is more powerful of the widespread rejection of these tactics than the thousands of people organizing, protesting, risking safety and arrest to protect their communities. City after city has stood up in defense of its residents. No amount of derogatory language or intimidation can change that reality.