A Sunday Reid: 'Fourteen words' conservatism has gone mainstream in Trump's second term. Part one: an assassination in Denver
The MAGA movement has mainstreamed some of the themes of the white nationalist far right. That's frightening news for immigrants, racial minorities, women, and America.
I was in tenth grade when radio talk jock Alan Berg was gunned down in front of his home in Denver, Colorado. The crime hit particularly close to home due to its proximity. My family lived in a majority Black Denver suburb called Montbello, and Berg was a well known, popular local, liberal talk radio host. My family didn’t actually listen to talk radio. Instead, in the house, if one of us wasn’t playing records, we dialed into KDKO, the local R&B station, and in the car, my mom loved to tune into the soft rock station. Was Philomena a yacht rock person??? OMG I think she was a yacht rock person! … But when Berg was shot, I was rapt by the TV news reports, including the many connections to a Colorado branch of the Ku Klux Klan.
David Lane, the right wing nutter who orchestrated and drove the getaway car in the Lane drive by, had reorganized the Denver Klan in 1979, a year after the movie version of The Wiz came out, as the disco era was just starting to give way to the earliest age of roller skate-friendly hip-hop. And I say reorganized, because the Klan basically ran Colorado, back in the 1920s, when they took over both the state’s Republican and Democratic parties.
At its peak in 1925 , the KKK “controlled many members of the legislature, held the State Supreme Court judgeship and seven benches on the Denver District Courts, and had controlling majorities in several town councils. Some of the most notable Klansmen at the time included (Democratic) Denver mayor Ben Stapleton, Denver police chief William Candlish, and (Republican) Colorado governor Clarence Morley.” Stapleton’s name was even affixed to Denver’s international airport all the time I lived there, and it wasn’t changed until 1995. He’d earned the honorific by spending New Deal money during his third and fourth terms as mayor to get everything from that airport, to the Denver Civic Center, to expanding the state’s beautiful mountain parks, including the amphitheater at Red Rocks.
But Klan business wasn’t all convenient socialism.
In its heyday, the Klan used to burn crosses in the Colorado foothills because the fires could be seen by Blacks, Jews and Catholics who lived as far away as downtown Denver, including in the segregated Five Points section of the mile high city (now a gentrified, mainly white, upscale version of what much of Brooklyn has become.) The Klan’s dominance didn’t last long in Colorado. Their Grand Dragon got busted for tax evasion in 1925 after the local D.A. and a judge — both of whom were white — made it their mission to put the KKK out of business. Klan members in the police force were busted for bootlegging and vice, with Stapleton himself, under public pressure, ordering the raids over the objections of the Klan-approved police chief he’d hired to gin up Klan support when he faced a 1923 recall. Stapleton himself would be accused of corruption, including over what was then seen as his “folly” in the form of that “boondoggle” airport, opened in 1929, which as the Great Depression neared, was viewed by many Denverites as little more than a trifle for the rich.
Lane was born nine years later, in 1938. He grew up poor, in Iowa, as the son of an abusive, migrant worker father and a mother his father apparently pimped out for drinking money. He was eventually put in foster care and separated from his siblings; moving to Aurora, Colorado — literally the next town over from Montbello — with his new, Lutheran family. Apparently, as a kid, Lane would play the part of a “sieg heiling” Nazi storm trooper, with his foster brother playing the U.S. soldier. Sounds totally normal for an American child, right? Sheesh… He eventually enrolled at Central High School — later a football, basketball and track-and-field rival of my high school. Apparently, he wanted to become a professional golfer, but didn’t cut it. He tried his hand at being a real estate broker, but got fired for refusing to show homes in white neighborhoods to Black people. Somehow, he managed to take these biographical facts and experiences to mean that he was part of a “master race” that needed to be saved from the pernicious influence of the Black people and Jews who somehow kept making him into a loser.
In the 1960s, Lane joined the right wing John Birch Society — which was attempting a Colorado Klan-style takeover of the national Republican Party; echoing the efforts by the German American Bund, which operated in the U.S. during Lane’s childhood, hoping to steer the U.S. into an alliance with Nazi Germany, by influencing what was the largest or second largest cohort of white Americans, thanks to European natural and human disaster-prompted mass immigration: German-Americans, like Donald Trump’s family, whose original Bavarian name was Drumpf. Nazism was actually more popular in the U.S. during the 1930s than most U.S. historians typically admit. There was even a now largely forgotten plot, backed by a gaggle of very rich Americans, possibly including a progenitor of the Bush family, to overthrow FDR and replace him with an American Hitler (more on the alleged plot here, with JP Morgan even named as an alleged co-conspirator…) Little did they know, all they had to do to put a veritable American king on the throne was to heavily fund the presidential campaign of the right celebrity.
Read the Prospect article here.
The Birch Society’s efforts failed in large part because conservative intellectual elites at the time, shooed them away as an assortment of unhelpful kooks who were so obsessed with the apparent communistic influence of fluoridated water and Eisenhower’s alleged commie leanings, they would make Republicans lose elections. In reality, though, Bircherism never went away and has turned out to be really influential in pulling conservatism in their direction. Still, Lane agreed that the Birchers were too focused on commies and not enough on protecting the prerogatives of white people, so he moved on to organizing that Colorado Klan branch in 1979 — around the same time Black Colorado Springs police sergeant Ron Stallworth was infiltrating the KKK by sounding white on the phone, while his Jewish colleague literally took over the branch in order to dismantle it, as portrayed in the Spike Lee movie BlakkKlansman. In short, the Blacks and Jews kept winning, and David Lane kept being a loser. And so, our undeterred “master race man” joined up with a new white supremacist gang. And here’s how that went:
Survival of whites was David Lane’s central concern, for he believed that integration would ultimately destroy, through miscegenation, the “Aryan” race. To that end, The Order’s plan was loosely based on The Turner Diaries, a racist novel by National Alliance chief William Pierce that depicted racist revolutionaries destroying Jews, “race mixers,” government agents and other enemies in a nationwide race war. To raise funds, Order members took on a lucrative trail-clearing contract, but when the work became taxing, they sought other illegal means of raising money for the revolution: counterfeiting and bank robbery. On June 19, 1984, 12 members of The Order robbed a Brinks armored car of $3.6 million in Ukiah, Calif.; the group also robbed two other armored cars, but with less lucrative results. Later, as officials realized that a single group was behind these crimes and others, an intensive investigation began that ultimately led to the arrest on counterfeiting-related charges of Tom Martinez, who became an informant as part of the plea bargain.
The resulting FBI crackdown, dubbed “Operation Clean Sweep,” ended with the destruction of The Order and the death of Mathews in a fiery 1984 shootout with the FBI, and sent Lane and his partners to trial on three separate occasions. In 1985, he and 22 others faced charges of racketeering and conspiracy; he received a 40-year sentence. In October 1987, Lane and three others were charged with violating the civil rights of Alan Berg, a talk-radio host murdered outside his Denver home for speaking out against white supremacists on the air. Lane drove the getaway car. After receiving a 150-year sentence, to be served after his earlier 40-year sentence, Lane held up a sign that read, “Remember Whidbey Island”— a reference to the island near Seattle where Mathews fought it out with federal agents and was killed.
Other than holding up that sign, and helping to murder Alan Berg, what David Lane is mainly known for — to the extent he is known by anyone outside of those who either practice or study white supremacy, is a thing called “the 14 words”… From the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Although he died in prison in 2007 at the age of 69, David Lane remains one of the most important ideologues of contemporary white supremacy.
A member of the terrorist group The Order, which was responsible for the 1984 assassination of Jewish radio host Alan Berg and many other crimes, Lane became even more of a movement icon after penning what rapidly became the best-known slogan of the U.S. white supremacist movement, the so-called “14 Words” (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.”). Sentenced to a total of 190 years for his crimes as a member of The Order, Lane spent his time in prison industriously pumping out racist tracts and other propaganda. After his death, a number of small memorial rallies were held in the United States and several European nations.
The 14 words is a kind of cheat code for the entire white supremacist faith. It underpins a number of wild conspiracy theories that snake around conservative circles and right wing media in the U.S. and abroad. They include the “great replacement theory,” which posits that a group of murky, unnamed Jewish conspirators (led as always by Georg Soros, the man who haunts the dreams of right wing crazies like no one besides Barack Obama…) working through the Democratic Party and an array of socialists and communists, are plotting to dethrone the white race from power or even physically eliminate them, by flooding European countries and the U.S. with nonwhite immigrants from Africa, Asia and South and Central America, and particularly with migrants from Muslim countries, who presumably would over time eliminate or subordinate Christianity itself. This emphatic belief, which has zero proof to back it up, has led to violence and mass death for decades, from the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995, to the Mother Emanuel mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, the “Jews will not replace us” tiki torch marches and riot in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, and an array of racist ideology-driven mass shootings since.
This “great replacement strain” of white nationalism has even caught in mainstream right wing media, injected into Fox originally by Tucker Carlson, but soon picked up by others on the channel. It’s even become a familiar talking point for some Republican politicians, who repeat the conspiracy theory, often naming Soros personally, and fundraising eagerly off of his demonized name. Some of the people who promote or believe in this kook theory may not even view it as white nationalism, but that’s what it is.
Indeed, the January 6th insurrection.was a quintessential manifestation of “great replacement” conspiracism in action, in that many of the people who mobbed the capitol that day were motivated by both racial resentment and the false belief that voter fraud and cheating in blue and purple state urban metros with large Black and Latino populations, stole the election from Donald Trump, and by extension, from white voters who in their view, are the rightful owners of the United States and its democracy.
Attendant to all of this are complaints by people like Tucker, Elon Musk, and increasingly by Trump himself that white people been unfairly driven out of power in settler colonies on the African continent like Tanzania and South Africa, and that they are being illegally dispossessed of land in the latter former English colony today. White conservatives seem to genuinely believe this lie, promoted by the white colonial descendants who call themselves “Afrikaners” to convey a kind of indigeneity upon themselves, despite the fact that white South Africans currently own more than 70 percent of the arable farmland in the 80 percent Black African nation, due to the laws white settlers established before and during apartheid. In fact, it’s that disparity that current South African land reform policy is trying to address.
No matter. The current “great replacement” religion states that the discomfort some minority whites feel in a South Africa, where the indigenous Black population assumed presidential power in the 1990s when they finally secured the right to vote, is literal “genocide” (unlike the mass death and displacement being visited on Palestinians, using American bombs, which is … checks notes … not genocide, due to some passages in the Old Testament.) And whoever advises Trump on such things, was prepared to let him publicly lie about South Africa in embarrassing fashion, in front of the South African president and the world this spring.
And yes, some of the so-called “evidence” Trump was flashing, were articles from The Daily Mail. Such is the sophistication of the regime. And the soft-peddling journalistic reaction to the fact that the president of the United States, who apparently barely takes his intel briefings, is being handed stacks of bollocks to present to the world press and to the president of the actual country he’s yammering about, attracted this stinging rebuke from U.K. news man James O’Brien:
So why peddle this utter horse pucky?
Well do take a pause to read my previous pieces about the ways the white right wing parties in South Africa, particularly those representing the Afrikaners, have cozied up to U.S. Republicans, with a goal of creating a common cause.
What to Reid:
My September 2024 conversation with the South African foreign minister about their support of the Palestinian people
And to answer my own question: if you can get the lowest white man to believe he’s under threat from an international conspiracy to destroy his future and the future of his children, he’ll not only let a self-dealing crook of a politician and his billionaire friends pick his pockets, he’ll empty his pockets for them — to paraphrase LBJ.
Killing empathy
The point of all this madness is to convince a majority of white Americans that they are in mortal danger; and that if dispossession can happen in a place like South Africa, where white people enjoyed absolute power at just 15 percent population share, whites can and should assume they will be similarly victimized here if they don’t take urgent action to protect themselves and their children from the scourge of “Marxist” ideas like multiculturalism, diversity, equity and inclusion, critical race theory and history lessons that might make white children develop more complex feelings about slavery. After all, white Americans face losing their majority in the U.S. really soon, as the white majority ages out … and so the importance of lining up behind Trump and the billionaires who are devising an urgent scheme of mass deportation of nonwhite people, couldn’t be more urgent, so the pitch goes.
And to get people to accept this level of cruelty on a daily basis:
You have to remove one key component of the human spirit: empathy. Some conservatives hate empathy so much, they’ve launched a war against it. They’re writing whole books opposing it. And these are the self-proclaimed Christians. Why would they do that?
Well … if young white minds are allowed to rethink immigration, deportation and American history; let alone their own inherited privileges, that might make them more empathetic to Black people, poor people, nonwhite immigrants, foreigners, gays, trans people or women. Such empathy could cause white children to grow up to be politicians or voters who give away group power, and who might also tax the overwhelmingly white billionaire class. And the billionaires certainly can’t have that.
Killing empathy is a goal and a necessity in “white Christian nationalism,” as is maintaining group solidarity against the rising tide of every other demographic group — and if possible, coopting members of the other groups to also side with white Christian nationalism, even against people like themselves (a trick that has gained traction among some Latinos, particularly those who fled communist countries and thus fear socialism and who may even resent more recent immigrants, and with some nonwhite men who resent the forward march of women.)
Richard Spencer had a dream
After the O.G. of seeking to mainstream the Klan, David Duke, finally faded away (endorsing Trump instead, as the so-called savior of white people,) came a newer, younger version: Richard Spencer — whose reaction to Trump’s first presidential victory was to update the “seig heil” to “Hail Trump. Hail our people.”
Spencer, who coined the term “alt right,” which was later picked up by Steve Bannon, who bragged that he was making Breitbart.com the “home of the alt right,” was at Duke with key Trump adviser Stephen Miller, where they worked together to bring anti-immigrant zealot and white nationalist VDARE Foundation founder Peter Brimelow to the campus. Spencer, much like David Duke, had a dream of mainstreaming white nationalism among white Americans. He didn’t get much farther than Duke did, since unlike the olden days when being a member of the Klan or the White Citizens Council was considered as normal and socially acceptable as attending a lynching, most modern white Americans want no part of formalized extremism. But in some ways, Spencer’s and Duke’s ideas have become mainstream inside the Republican Party and the European and Christian right anyway; as working class Americans, mainly white but also in some cases Latino and even Black, turn hard against immigration. And you know who else has sought to mainstream the idea that diversity and inclusion is an attack on white families? Right wing South African Christian nationalists, like the people Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks came from…
In fact, ideas that used to be considered part of far right extremism have become so normalized among some U.S. Republicans, Fox’s most popular host, Greg Gutfield of The Five, recently joked about calling himself a Nazi, while his cohosts giggled along…
… after which he was rewarded with a seat on The Tonight Show…
The normalization of the far right is how you wind up with the sitting vice president, JD Vance being a mentee and former employee of possibly apartheid-era nostalgic, anti-democracy, anti woman’s suffrage, technofeudalist surveillance state impresario Peter Thiel (who literally lived in a South African city that venerated Hitler) and it not being the least bit remarkable anymore. Vance, who once texted a friend that Trump could be America’s Hitler, has openly shouted out slavery-excusing monarchist Curtis Yarvin as an intellectual influence. Here’s a quick explanation of the Yarvin-Thiel-Vance “new right” connection:
This while whole swaths of state and federal policy, particularly in the far right laboratory that is Florida, are being crafted by Christopher Rufo, who like Vance is a rather ironically-married far right wing faux intellectual, whose anti-Critical Race Theory crusade seems bent on dismantling any structural improvements to the historic lack of access Black Americans have faced to educational and economic opportunity; and forcing educational institutions and corporations to stand down on any form of diversity, equity and inclusion. Oh, and he once kind of recommended a Substack that pushes race science…
The renormalization of white nationalism in America is how you get Ann Coulter saying something as insane as “we didn’t kill enough Indians” and it not even seeming abnormal anymore.
It’s how it is now official U.S. policy to defund Hispanic-serving colleges (and we should assume HBCUs are next.)
It’s how you get a concentration camp for brown migrants in the Florida Everglades, which a federal judge has now ordered to be wound down — not due to the utter racism of having a concentration camp for nonwhite migrants in a literal swamp surrounded by alligators, but due to its environmental impact. Although thankfully, for the nearby Miccosoukee tribe, the ruling preserves their rights — so long ignored — under law, at least for now. I have no faith that the Roberts Court majority will protect them, or the migrants though, when the appeal inevitably gets to them.
And it’s how you get an entire state mandated to protect straight white Christian people’s feelings. Andrew Gillum: your witness:
It’s how you get the crusade to topple the Black woman out of Harvard’s presidency, by some of the same people who are equally obsessed with ending Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in all aspects of American life and forcing every American to take the knee to colonial Zionism.
It’s how you get Texas governor Greg Abbott responding Trump’s call to find him five more congressional seats by launching a campaign to do a blatantly racist off-Census gerrymander, on the absurd Trump DOJ “civil rights division” claim that white Texans are being denied their 14th Amendment right to equality under law by having both state houses, the governorship, the vast majority of congressional seats and both Senate seats already in their hands.
And it’s how you get fitness experts attempting to play down slavery on national TV with a “hey, everybody did it” argument, in response to Trump’s demands that museums stop … museuming …
The people engaged in these efforts likely do not consider themselves to be white nationalists or white supremacists or even particularly racial. I don’t know any of them personally, so I’m in no position to say. Who knows if they’ve ever even heard of David Lane. But in their own ways, they are doing the dirty work of mainstreaming “14 words conservatism” — meaning conservatism whose primary interest is preserving the historical privileges and advantages of being white in America for future generations regardless of how this country’s demographics change; including ensuring that white Americans have first to the table, unlimited and unimpeded access to their choice of schools, jobs, financial opportunities and more, whether they meet the objective qualifications or not (and if you go by the Trump cabinet — particularly when they do not) … with competition from nonwhite people largely taken off the table by removing them from positions and/or barring racial considerations other than considerations of white protection (using the very laws designed to ameliorate slavery and Jim Crow.) The goal is do this while also ensuring that white Americans give up as little of their acquired wealth via taxation as possible, and never have these privileges questioned or their emotional comfort disturbed by any educational lesson, museum exhibit, or policy that might make them feel unease — with those privileges permanently locked in, like the 2017 tax cut was, even after white Americans lose their majority, and enforced by state and local government, elite universities, corporations, Hollywood, arts institutions and museums, and if necessary, by state and federal police, and/or the U.S. military.
In short: 14 Words Conservatism isn’t about making everyone equal, despite it often being shrouded in self-righteous demands for “colorblindness.” Because privilege — particularly economic privilege — is highly unequally distributed in this country on the basis of race, as a literal consequence of America having been a slave empire, this brand of conservatism winds up seeking to not just freeze the status quo, but rather to reverse it, repeal the 20th century, and allow undisturbed, unfettered, permanent political power and social control to return to and remain in the hands of conservative white American men, no matter how the demographics of America change (see: Texas.) And sorry white ladies, you’re meant to be at home churning butter from scratch and pumping out babies to prevent “the great replacement” in this scenario, and not even necessarily getting to vote.
It’s what white supremacists have always called for, but have been unable to deliver in the modern era, as political correctness drove their ideas out of the mainstream, and civil rights laws, Supreme Court rulings, political correctness and multiculturalism brought this country closer to being a multiracial democracy — with nonwhite and women lawmakers and leaders, even in corporate America, the military, and at universities. Trumpism, through the maga personality cult around the former Apprentice star, has brought those fringe notions back into the mainstream on steroids, and fully captured the Republican Party and the American right.
Everything old is new again
To be clear, fourteen words conservatism is how the U.S. operated for most of its 249 years as a nation and the nearly 160 years of colonization before that. It’s a system conservatives have defended throughout this country’s history, whether they called themselves Democrats, Dixiecrats or Republicans. Richard Nixon, with his “southern strategy” understood the power of appealing to white voters’ social unease and instinct for self-preservation in a changing world, and he, and later Republicans, including George H.W. Bush (with his Willie Horton ad campaign) and Ronald Reagan (with his made up “welfare queens,” used white Americans’ fear of being “taken advantage of” by Black people as a wedge to win elections. The fear of immigration is a similarly powerful tool — the notion that brown immigrants will out-number, out-earn and out-breed native-born Americans is not new; and exploiting it pays electoral dividends beyond just white voters. Many Black and even fellow Latino Americans respond to that particular provocation in predictable ways. Fourteen words conservatism is essentially a vow to use political power to restore and preserve the status quo ante. It’s what the Afrikaners would have done in South Africa before turning it over to the Blacks, had they had the time and their own version of Project 2025.
There are lots of different kinds of conservatism: fiscal conservatism, social conservatism, neoconservatism. And some of them even still exist (though most have been eaten alive by MAGA.) But there’s a reason 14 words-style conservatism has hung around in American society almost from the start, given that its primary concern has always been “protecting” white people; their feelings, history, wealth, neighborhoods and prerogatives, from the rest of us.
And while I doubt most white Americans have any interest in formally signing up for the cause of formalized white nationalism, the merger of far right ideology with mainstream Republicanism means they don’t have to. As we speak, a half dozen red states, mainly from the former confederacy, are literally sending armed troops to occupy the nation’s capitol; with threats to expand the military occupation to blue cities nationwide. With this insane plan, Trump and Hegseth — both seeming admirers of the Confederacy’s (failed) military exploits — are effectively flipping the Union’s occupation of the South to enforce Reconstruction and protect the formerly enslaved from their tormentors after the civil war on its head, with the revised military directive of imposing right wing immigration policy on sanctuary cities whose diverse populations would never willingly vote to have their own people terrorized, strong-armed, Tazed on the streets, incarcerated in concentration camps or private prisons, or deported to foreign countries they’ve never even been to, or even to foreign gulags, if given the option in a free and fair election. And we have no idea when this military occupation of blue cities will end; or how we will end it.
Every day that this idea of red states militarily occupying blue states on the orders of the president gets normalized, the number people will become to the idea of seeing armed troops on American streets in diverse cities that the president wants to bring to heel.
Trump as the savior of White America
Trump’s push to weaponize white anxiety to his political benefit began with his trip down the elevator in 2015, during which he declared that Mexico is sending “rapists and criminals” to the U.S. as immigrants, with perhaps some “good people” thrown in. (Notably: Coulter takes credit for feeding Trump the rapists idea.) It accelerated with the “good people on both sides” Trump excuse-making for the Charlottesville white supremacists Spencer organized, who marched with lit torches chanting “you will not replace us!” and “JEWS will not replace us” while Black women clergy and dozens of congregants literally hid in nearby churches.
One of those clergy, a Black woman pastor, Reached out to Bishop William Barber that night, terrified in the dead of night. Barber then connected her to me, since I had a weekend show on cable news. When we spoke, she described the sight of flames and the guttural chanting she and the people she was hiding with were forced to endure to the Klan marches she remembers in her southern town as a child. And while I highly doubt Trump has given much thought to intellectualized white supremacy (though his father did get arrested during a Klan-police brawl in 1927 and his late wife Ivana claimed the man who would later accuse nonwhite immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our people,” kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside,) his default of surrounding himself with people who are motivated to center straight, white, conservative men in U.S. culture and history, likely because that’s what he himself believes in, as a white boomer from Archie Bunker’s Queens, has given birth to a new-yet- age old style of conservatism that seeks to quash any history, art or entertainment that doesn’t venerate white men and traditionalize white women. It’s why Ta-Nehisi Coates during Trump regime 1.0 referred to Trump as “the first white president.” In the modern era, no politician has made race a more explicit political issue.
And then there’s what Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen said about Trump under oath back in 2019:
When it comes to the U.S. military, the surge toward white male-centered outcomes couldn’t be more explicit. Here is Virginia Senator Tim Kaine laying into our most incompetent and unqualified ever secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, over his dogged determination to restore the names of treasonous confederate generals to U.S. military bases, replacing the names of actual heroes:
And here is Hegseth trying to justify the renaming to the face of actual war hero, Senator Tammy Duckworth, who left two legs in Iraq for her country, but who would fail to qualify for any military leadership position under Trump and Hegseth merely based on her gender and the color of her skin:
Immigration: the ultimate wedge
Even more explicit, if that’s possible, is the Trump regime’s determination to push as many undocumented immigrants out of the United States as possible, by performing masked, sometimes violent ICE stops based on “apparent ethnicity,” (overwhelmingly targeting brown people) while also rendering green card holders undocumented by stripping them of their legal protections and deporting them, too. Immigration was Trump’s strongest issue in 2024 — and when Trump voters explain their reasoning, they invariably cite “the border” as their biggest concern, no matter how far they live from the actual southern border. Thanks to constant demagoguing on Fox and other right wing media, paranoia about immigration became so widespread, it was even shared at election time by some immigrants who were once undocumented themselves or whose families were. Such is the nature of door slamming by people who’ve managed to get in the door.
And so, a majority of Americans, in the first months of the new Trump regime, were supportive of as harsh a crackdown as possible on undocumented people (though that has subsided markedly as people have actually witnessed what that looks like and discovered that the vast majority of the people being slammed to the ground and tossed into unmarked vehicles by masked men have no criminal record, are victims of mistaken identity, or are actual children, as young as seven, or teens kidnapped while walking their dog) or are actually U.S. citizens. Even the conservative CATO Institute is crying foul.
The architect of Trump’s cruelest policies toward immigrants is Stephen Miller, an alleged acolyte of Spencer’s at Duke. Both men deny Spencer was Miller’s mentor, though Spencer says he knew Miller “quite well.” Miller doesn’t seem to deny being mentored by the viciously anti-everybody David Horowitz, however.) And here’s how that connection played out, as described in a Miller biography called Hatemonger, by Jean Guerrero:
Born in 1985 in Santa Monica, CA, Miller came of age in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising and the reelection campaign of Governor Pete Wilson which relied on scapegoating Mexican immigrants for an economic recession in the state and prompted the passage of California’s anti-immigrant Proposition 187. Miller became enamored of conservative talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Larry Elder. Under their sway, Miller increasingly expressed contrarian and intentionally provocative—sometimes racially coded—views at Santa Monica High School and became a frequent guest on Elder’s show.
David Horowitz, a former Marxist turned conservative, heard Miller on Elder’s show and saw an opportunity to groom him through his “School of Political Warfare.” Horowitz taught teenagers like Miller “to use the language of civil rights to attack civil rights. Wielding the shield of free speech and wearing the armor of oppressed minorities, his acolytes attacked minorities for their perceived assault on the purity of Western heritage” (p. 7). Miller then studied political science at Duke University, where, he became more focused on immigration. He hosted a debate—in collaboration with White nationalist alt-right spokesman, Richard Spencer—between pro-immigrant author Peter Laufer and Peter Brimelow, author of the xenophobic Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster. Miller later aped some of Brimelow’s arguments in defending the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
In 2007, Horowitz connected Miller to Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, who hired Miller as her press secretary. From there, Horowitz found him work with Arizona Tea Party congressman John Shadegg, and shortly thereafter as press secretary for Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, “the leading nativist on the Hill” (p. 118). Guerrero writes that Miller, ignored by many journalists from mainstream publications, found an outlet for his provocations in Breitbart.com—including pushing author Jean Raspail’s notoriously racist tract, The Camp of the Saints—and a new mentor in Steve Bannon, who helped him secure a position in the Trump campaign.
Miller played a key role in shaping the campaign’s messaging on immigration. He wrote speeches for Trump in which, Guerrero says, “gut-punching emotion was a uniquely Miller-Trump mind meld, spiraling up from the underbelly of conservative media and a shared obsession with violent fantasies” (p. 150). Miller also consulted with Horowitz and Elder to refine campaign messaging and solicited endorsements from the Customs and Border Patrol and ICE unions, as well as from Jeff Sessions, the first U.S. senator to publicly endorse Trump.
In the final third of the book, Guerrero details Miller’s role in the administration’s immigration agenda and his manipulation of the media to advance nativist views. In his inauguration speech, Trump presented a dystopian vision of “American carnage” that was derided by many in the media. However, she says, “Miller had long learned that there is value in outrage. The more upset the media [were] at his boss—or pretended to be—the better. They’d fixate on him, elevate him” (p. 183). In the first days of the new administration, Miller was the principal author of three executive orders designed to speed up deportations, build Trump’s border wall, and temporarily ban travel from six Muslim-majority countries. Guerrero also points to Miller’s influence on policies that attempted to use cruelty as a deterrent to undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, including family separations, which sparked nation-wide outrage when images circulated of small children held in cages, and the Stay in Mexico program, which required asylum seekers to wait on the Mexican side of the border until their cases could be processed. Throughout Trump’s term, Miller also unsuccessfully pushed for an end to birthright citizenship.
Notably, Miller is also the guy who allegedly urged Breitbart.com to embrace Camp of the Saints, an insane, white supremacist screed of a novel warning white people of the West of the dangers of nonwhite immigration. So there’s that …
In the second Trump regime, Miller has added to his resume of Camp of the Saints-style horrors, a 3,000-deportee-a-day quota for rounding up undocumented immigrants. (Yes, the right suddenly believes in quotas.) … The policy is being brutally enforced by “deportation Barbie” Kristi Noem, who has turned the Gestapo-like roundups into “Cops” style TV episodes … you know … for “accountability…” even inviting once-popular TV personality Dr. Phil along to some of the roundups and recruiting a former Superman actor to join the “force.” Alongside her is the apparently morally flexible Catholic border czar, Tom Homan, whose general countenance alone, makes you feel like praying for God’s deliverance…
The regime’s extreme detention, rendition and detainment policy has unleashed a wave of masked terror against any brown person who works at a restaurant, home goods store, in an agricultural field, meat packing plant or literally anyplace brown labor dominates. Just being the wrong color or having the wrong accent could get you renditioned to a far-off country you’ve never even heard of and tossed into a terrifying prison camp overseas or in Florida or some other cruel red state. And what you can’t count on is getting a hearing. The Trump regime is disappearing people like Duterte’s Philippines or Pinochet’s Chile did; and masked agents — who could easily be Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, since they’re rarely identifying themselves as law enforcement — are demanding nonwhite people’s papers like Afrikaner police did in apartheid era South Africa. Here’s just a sample of the outrages, including against military veterans:
There’s also a peculiar series of cases targeting lawyers who represent immigrants in their cases, who are getting ominous letters demanding they self-deport … even if they are U.S. citizens themselves:
It’s as if being of color has become its own kind of crime in Trump’s America. Even Trump-voting business owners are becoming alarmed:
As is Joe Rogan, who I will remind you, endorsed and voted for Trump, and urged his listeners to do the same… But you know … converts…
There’s also a disturbing trend of ICE agents seemingly baiting protesters so they can be charged with federal crimes, just as New Jersey LaMonica McIver was, as a way of quelling dissent.
The extremist right declares victory
Donald Trump has normalized this violence against nonwhite immigrants by demonizing them, Democrats, and protesters, for years, and grooming his fans to hate them. He’s even proposed ignoring the 14th Amendment and canceling birthright citizenship … an idea that’s entirely unconstitutional.
And that’s just the way the extremist right wants it. From Saturday’s New York Times:
During President Trump’s first turn in the White House, right-wing extremists like the Proud Boys were on the streets, weekend after weekend, raising their voices — and oftentimes their fists — about issues such as immigration, the squelching of conservative speech and the removal of Confederate-era statues.
But in the first seven months of Mr. Trump’s second term, there has been a conspicuous absence of far-right demonstrations. And that, some leaders of the movement say, is because the president has effectively adopted their agenda.
“Things we were doing and talking about in 2017 that were taboo, they’re no longer taboo — they’re mainstream now,” said Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys, who took part in many of those early far-right rallies. “Honestly, what do we have to complain about these days?”
Whether it is dismantling diversity programs, complaining about anti-white bias in museums or simply promoting an aura of authoritarian nationalism, Mr. Trump has embraced an array of far-right views and talking points in ways that have delighted many right-wing activists who have long supported those ideas.
His administration has also hired several people with a history of making racist or antisemitic remarks or who have looked favorably on the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Far-right figures have been particularly thrilled by Mr. Trump’s aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants, praising not only the ubiquitous images of masked federal agents raiding farms and factories, but also the ideology that has fueled those moves: a belief that migration to the United States is all but synonymous with a military invasion.
Last week, in fact, on the eighth anniversary of the violent far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., where neo-Nazis marched by torchlight chanting about immigrants and Jews, Augustus Sol Invictus, a Florida lawyer who helped organize the event, marveled at how thoroughly the Trump administration had adopted a position that had once been on the fringes of political discourse.
“Eight years ago you were an extremist if you protested being replaced by immigrants,” Mr. Invictus wrote on social media. “Your life was over if you talked about stopping or reversing it. Now it is official @WhiteHouse policy.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, offered a vocal defense of Mr. Trump. “President Trump is a voice for millions of forgotten men and women who support the widely popular policies he is enacting,” she said.
During the Biden administration, far-right organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were severely hobbled, largely by the criminal prosecutions of dozens of their members who took part in the Capitol attack.
The Oath Keepers, a militia-style group of current and former military and law enforcement personnel, barely exists anymore. Its founder, Stewart Rhodes, no longer appears in public as often as he once did at far-right demonstrations or standoffs with the government.
Because who needs them anymore. They have the White House, the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, and the Supreme Court. In the end, the tiki torch marchers won the day.
Neo nazis now freely march through American cities, sometimes with police protection. Elon Musk throws what sure looked like a Nazi salute (though he brushed off any criticism as left wing Hitler hysteria), and the media can’t even cover it without a whole lot of caveats (I can tell you we were barely able to report on it at my old job.)
All of this is happening, even as the Trump regime attempts to quash any criticism or protest against Israel, claiming it’s a fight against antisemitism — a risible claim if there ever was one. More likely, the point, including with Project Esther, the Project 2025 Heritage Foundation team’s latest effort, is to crush criticism, protests or even mere critiques of Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, so that people won’t connect what they’re seeing with their own eyes in real time in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, to the centuries of “Christian” colonial enterprises of the same sort that American students are no longer allowed to learn about in school. To say nothing of the current apparent push by the Trump regime to evict millions of nonwhite immigrants — particularly Spanish speaking nonwhite immigrants — from the United States.
All of which must be a huge surprise to Latinos who believed they could buy into the notion of being fully, super-duper American (and white) and bypass the pain of racism by embracing the Republican Party and Trump.
Many Latinos — mainly Cuban- and Venezuelan-Americans, but also a healthy percentage of Mexican-Americans, particularly Latino men, refused to believe that Trump would hurt them, despite his explicit promises to do so. “He only means the bad ones,” so many of them insisted, as they rejected Kamala Harris and ignored the warnings from African-Americans who have trod this stony road for centuries, and now face the whirlwind along with the brown immigrants whose families voted the other way.
But why the focus on Brown folks, particularly given that nearly half of them voted for Trump in the last election? Black Americans are unsurprised that a neoconfederate regime is directing the usual state terrorism against us wherever we are, from Harvard University to presently occupied D.C., where three red states will soon be sending armed National Guardsmen to do a kind of 1960s anti-civil rights cosplay. But brown folks? Why them? Particularly given how pivotal they are to the blue collar labor force? I’ll explain in part two of this series.
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These are dangerous times. Thank you for shedding light on this movement. As a white woman I am horrified by what is happening. Ashamed that so many folks are just following a long. This is not my country!
Thank you for this post and your determination to keep putting truth out there. Your voice gives me hope that we can fight back and - at some point - emerge a better and changed society.