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As the political power of Donald Trump diminishes and his behavior grows increasingly volatile, there has been an escalation in hostile rhetoric aimed at women in media and racial minorities, with Somali Americans as a recent focal point. These disparaging remarks gain traction stems from their malice and his platform, not their factual accuracy. Similarly, his administration's offensive against immigrants are poorly executed and driven by misinformation. The evidence makes it obvious that the goal extends beyond targeting those who have committed crimes. The true target is anyone with brown skin.

This includes Indigenous peoples with official tribal documentation to naturalized US citizens, from essential workers 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.

"ICE operations are brutal, inhumane and achieve nothing for community security," asserts a leading political figure from New York. Scenes featuring officers concealing their faces shattering windows and separating parents from children, instilling fear and hindering the function of institutions, achieves the opposite effect.

The cycles of orchestrated bigotry—focusing on people from Haiti in the 2024 campaign, Venezuelan migrants this spring, and most recently Somali Americans—lean heavily on defamatory falsehoods and insults. This is because: the truthful data about these groups of people cannot support the animosity.

The Imaginary Nation of White People Versus Actual History

This campaign of terror and demonization purports to aim at recreating a uniformly white United States that is a fantasy. Although America had a larger white population 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—some southern states were over one-third Black.

Following American expansion, taking Texas in the 1840s and acquiring northern Mexico in 1848, it incorporated a large community of Hispanic settlers long established in the modern Southwest and California. Historical records show the first African Muslim in this land came as part of a Spanish expedition nearly a century prior to the Mayflower's Puritan passengers landed in Massachusetts in 1620.

Demographic Realities Versus Coercive Fantasies

The persecution of huge populations of people of color and attempts at large-scale expulsion will not manufacture the all-white nation of extremist imagination. Los Angeles, for instance, is close to 50% Hispanic, and despite enforcement outrages, detentions and removals, its character persists. Its name itself is Spanish, an enduring reminder of its original inhabitants.

The entirety of this animus and oppression looks like the fear of bigots attempting to believe they can stop the coming changes of a country that is ceasing to be predominantly white by using pure cruelty.

This is paired with an attack on abortion access that is, at times, openly intended to prompt Caucasian women to have more children. The argument points to a below-replacement birthrate in the US, a phenomenon less severe than in some other nations because of a hard-working population of immigrant laborers which keeps the economy functioning. However, rather than providing the social support that could ease the burdens of parenthood, the approach is based on punishment and force.

A prominent journalist observes that the policies on childbirth of certain political figures—along with insults aimed at women without children—constitute a form of pronatalism. This philosophy "typically merges concerns over falling fertility with anti-immigration and anti-feminist viewpoints."

In a similar vein, reporting indicates that "attempts to raise the birth rate cannot make up for broader policies aimed at slashing federal support programs like healthcare for the poor and children's health insurance. This focus on families isn't merely about promoting having children. Instead, it is utilized as a tool to advance a conservative agenda that endangers women's health, bodily autonomy, and labor force involvement."

Contradictory Strategies and Public Rejection

Together, the anti-immigration and pronatalist policies represent an attempt to forcibly alter the country's population future. In the end, they represent senseless intimidation by proponents of hate who inadvertently reveal that their assertions of being better must be rooted in race and gender; without these constructs, their arguments collapse into meaningless idiocy.

Much of the justification put forward by the administration fails to align with tangible facts and real-world results. For example, maritime attacks in the southern Caribbean frequently focus on tiny boats which are not proven to be transporting drugs and not able of making it to the United States. Similarly, Venezuela's role in the fentanyl trade is negligible, and its involvement with cocaine is much smaller than that of other South American nations.

The government's position extends to climate issues, with a rejection of "the science of climate change" and "Net Zero goals." There is a sentimental attachment to fossil fuels, especially coal mining, resulting in measures that force communities to invest in outdated and polluting power sources while sabotaging cheaper, cleaner renewables. At the same time, health officials have promoted anti-scientific dietary schemes while weakening general public health safeguards.

The core premise of the attacks on immigrants 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, immigration enforcement personnel, whom local communities perceive as the unwelcome, violent invaders.

No symbol is more powerful of the broad repudiation of these tactics than the thousands of people organizing, protesting, facing danger and detention to defend their neighbors. City after city has risen up in defense of its residents. No amount of derogatory language and threats can alter this fundamental truth.