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As Donald Trump's influence wanes and his behavior grows increasingly volatile, he has intensified vitriolic attacks aimed at women in media and ethnic communities, including Somali immigrants as a recent focal point. The impact of these insults stems from the animosity behind them and his position, not any basis in truth. In a parallel manner, the government's actions against immigrants are poorly executed and driven by misinformation. It is abundantly clear that the objective is not targeting those who have committed crimes. The assault is directed at people of color.

This includes Indigenous peoples with official tribal documentation to American citizens by choice, individuals performing critical jobs in building sites and hospitals to those who served, university attendees, residents asleep in their beds, and toddlers: a wide array of the country's inhabitants are being threatened.

"ICE operations are brutal, inhumane and achieve nothing for community security," asserts a prominent New York City official. The spectacle of masked agents breaking car glass and separating parents from children, terrorizing entire communities and disrupting schools and businesses, undermines safety entirely.

The cycles of calculated hatred—directed at people from Haiti in the 2024 campaign, Venezuelan migrants this spring, and most recently Somali Americans—lean heavily on defamatory falsehoods and insults. The reason is simple: the actual facts about these communities do not justify such hostility.

The Mythical Nation of White People Versus Actual History

This campaign of terror and demonization purports to aim at rebuilding a uniformly white United States that is a fantasy. While the US was demographically whiter in the mid-20th century, it never constituted a purely white nation. In 1776, the thirteen founding colonies contained a substantial percentage of Black and Indigenous peoples—certain states in the South had Black populations exceeding a third.

When the United States expanded, taking Texas in the 1840s and seizing Mexico's northern territories in 1848, it incorporated a large Spanish-speaking population already living across the modern Southwest and California. It is documented that the first African Muslim in territory that became the U.S. came as part of a Spanish exploration party nearly a century before the Mayflower English Puritans reached the shores of New England in 1620.

Population Truths Versus Forced Dreams

The systematic targeting of vast numbers of people of color and even mass deportations will not manufacture the all-white nation of far-right dreams. A city like Los Angeles, for instance, is nearly half Latino, and despite enforcement outrages, detentions and removals, it remains so. The city's very name is Spanish, an ongoing testament of its original inhabitants.

All this hatred and persecution looks like the fear of bigots attempting to believe they can stop the coming changes of a country no longer majority-white by using pure cruelty.

It is coupled with an attack on abortion access that is, at times, explicitly designed to encourage white women to bear more babies. The rationale cites a fertility rate below replacement level in the US, a phenomenon less impactful than in other countries due to a young, industrious immigrant workforce that sustains the economy. However, instead of offering the social support that could ease the burdens of parenthood, the strategy has been punitive and coercive.

A prominent journalist observes that the policies on childbirth espoused by figures like JD Vance—along with insults aimed at women without children—amount to pronatalism. This philosophy "typically merges concerns over falling fertility with opposition to immigration and anti-women's rights viewpoints."

In a similar vein, reporting indicates that "attempts to raise the birth rate do not compensate for broader policies designed to cut federal support programs like healthcare for the poor and insurance for kids. The so-called 'pro-family' focus is not just for encouraging procreation. Rather, it is utilized as a tool to advance a conservative agenda that threatens the health of women, bodily autonomy, and economic participation."

Contradictory Strategies and Public Rejection

Together, the anti-immigrant and pronatalist policies represent an attempt to artificially redirect the country's population future. In the end, they represent foolish bullying by individuals filled with hatred who unintentionally demonstrate that their assertions of being better 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 does not match up with observable realities and actual outcomes. For example, maritime attacks in the southern Caribbean often target small vessels which are not proven to be transporting drugs and not able of making it to the United States. Likewise, Venezuela's involvement in the fentanyl trade is minimal, and its role in cocaine trafficking is far less than that of other South American nations.

The government's position extends to climate issues, with a dismissal of "climate change ideology" and "carbon neutrality targets." An emotional attachment to fossil fuels, particularly coal, resulting in measures that force communities to invest in obsolete and toxic power sources while undermining cheaper, cleaner renewables. Concurrently, health officials have advanced anti-scientific dietary schemes while weakening broader health protections.

The core premise of the anti-immigrant offensive is that people of color not born in the US are dangerous intruders. However, across the nation—from Los Angeles to Charlotte, Chicago to Portland—the government's own forces, immigration enforcement personnel, whom many residents perceive as the dangerous and hostile interlopers.

There is no clearer sign of the broad repudiation of these tactics than the thousands of people mobilizing, demonstrating, risking safety and arrest to protect their communities. Municipality after municipality has stood up in defense of its residents. All the insults or intimidation can change that reality.