Identitarianism

HE WAS ONLY SUPPOSED TO HATE MUSLIMS!:

He voted for Trump. Now his wife sits in an ICE detention center. (Lauren Villagran, Mar. 16th, 2025, USA Today)

Bradley Bartell and Camila Muñoz had a familiar small-town love story, before they collided with immigration politics.

They met through mutual friends, had a first date at the local steakhouse, married after two years and were saving to buy a house and have kids. Muñoz was already caring for Bartell’s now 12-year-old son as her own.

But last month, on their way home to Wisconsin after honeymooning in Puerto Rico, an immigration agent pulled Muñoz aside in the airport.

“Are you an American citizen?” asked the agent. She answered no, she wasn’t. She’s from Peru. But she and her husband had taken the legal steps so that one day she might get U.S. citizenship.

Millions of Americans, including Bartell, had voted for President Donald Trump’s promise to crack down on “criminal illegal immigrants.” But eight weeks in, the mass deportation effort has rapidly expanded to include immigrants whose application for legal status in the country is under review.

WHY CONSERVATIVE REGARD FOR COOLIDGE IS MISPLACED:

The dark parallels between 1920s America and today’s political climate (Alex Green, 3/10/25, The Conversation)

Other Americans were concerned about the possible rise of communism in the U.S., as well as the arrival of many immigrants. This led extremists to introduce and implement hate-based policies at the federal and state level that targeted nonwhite immigrants and disabled people.

Among the most significant results of that political moment was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, a restrictive immigration policy that, among other changes, prohibited immigration from Asia.

Another pivotal movement was the Supreme Court’s 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, which affirmed that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize intellectually and developmentally disabled people.

The Johnson-Reed Act prompted a major shift in American immigration policy, based on the fear of something that former President Theodore Roosevelt and others called “race suicide.”

The law introduced rigid restrictions keeping people out of the country who were not from Northern and Western Europe. The immigration quotas that it established would continue to be enforced into the 1960s.

The U.S. politicians who lobbied for this law were successful because they supported their effort by presenting evidence that showed purportedly scientific proof that almost all people in the world were biologically inferior to a group they called the Nordic Race – meaning people from Northern Europe – and their American descendants, who formed a group they called the “American Race.”

By restricting immigration from all other groups, these legislators believed they were counterbalancing a crushing period where war and pandemic had killed off what they saw as the country’s best people.

Different groups preyed on Americans’ grief about the war and pandemic and directed it against minority groups.

From Maine to California, a revived Ku Klux Klan attracted millions of followers with its belief that white people were superior to all others, and that Black people should remain enslaved. At the same time, a group of scientists, doctors and psychologists found enormous success in persuading the public that there were scientific reasons why hatred and discrimination needed to be incorporated into American government.

Their proof was something called eugenics, a pseudoscience which argued that humans had to use advanced technology and medicine to get people with good traits to reproduce while stopping those with bad traits from having the opportunity to do so.

Harry Laughlin, a eugenicist based at a research laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, was one of this movement’s most vocal representatives.

Laughlin worked for several different eugenics research organizations, and this helped him become successful at creating propaganda supporting eugenics that influenced public policy. He then gained a spot as an expert eugenics adviser to Congress in the early 1920s. With his position, Laughlin then provided the pseudoscientific data that gave the supporters of Johnson-Reed the claims they needed to justify passing the measure.

Nazism is just the German version of the science of American Progressives.

WHITER BUT POORER!:

Trump to Wall Street: Brace for Impact (Peter Coy, 03.11.25, Free Press)

[S]tock prices have fallen at least in part because investors are coming to the painful realization that Trump doesn’t seem to care so much for them anymore. In his first term, Trump viewed the market as his personal scorecard. Now? “You can’t really watch the stock market,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.

With the market nearing correction territory—defined as a 10 percent drop—since its mid-February peak, I asked Mohamed El-Erian, the bond whiz who is now president of Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, whether this realization was part of the reason stocks had fallen over the past month. He agreed. The steadfast belief that Trump would do whatever it took to keep the stock market happy was termed “the Trump put.” (A put is a derivative that protects its owner from price declines.)

Confidence in the Trump put began to erode when Trump and his economic team started talking about bond yields, rather than stock prices, as their metric of choice, El-Erian said. (Bonds can do well even if stocks are doing poorly.)

Even before this past weekend, the market had been falling, partly thanks to the specter of high tariffs. But then, over the weekend, Trump and others on his team seemed to say that even a recession would not cause the administration to pull back from its tariff strategy.

And because the tariffs could lead not only to slower economic growth but also higher inflation—stagflation, it’s called—investors can’t count on the Federal Reserve to bail them out as it has in the past, El-Erian told me. (That’s called “the Fed put” on Wall Street.) The Fed will hardly be eager to cut interest rates aggressively if tariffs are pushing up prices, he said.

Stocks rose after Trump was elected because investors were looking forward to deregulation and tax cuts. Yes, they assumed that Trump might use the threat of tariffs to gain concessions from trading partners. But he surely wouldn’t be so foolish as to erect high and long-lasting tariff walls. Instead, El-Erian said, “The things that the market really likes haven’t come yet,” and the thing the market doesn’t like—tariffs—are turning out to be more than just tactical threats.

Destroying the economy makes America less attractive to immigrants. The nihilism is intentional.

SHERMAN WAS TOO CIRCUMSPECT:

Waiting for Liberal Democracy in the American South : Our country’s constitutional order is withering before us. In the states of the former Confederacy, democracy never fully flourished. (Alan Elrod, Mar 07, 2025, The Bulwark)

Liberal democracy has never put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country. The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era. Inequality continues to define economic life in the region. […]

Bourbon rule across the South is a good starting place for understanding the challenges facing the region. The Bourbons—Southern Democrats of the planter and professional classes who opposed Reconstruction—came to dramatically shape American politics from the 1870s into the early twentieth century. For decades, this small elite fomented discord among poor whites to keep their political energies focused on their peers rather than their de facto rulers. As Reconstruction began to falter in the mid-1870s, Bourbon power brokers gained control in Southern states like Alabama and Georgia. By the 1890s, the Old South was aggressively reasserting itself. In 1896, the Supreme Court enshrined the principle of “separate but equal.”

In 1898, America’s first coup d’etat took place as the Democrats of Wilmington, North Carolina issued a “White Declaration of Independence.” They were attacking the coalition of black Republicans and white Populists that had control of the local government in the 1890s, which the old Confederates of the city found intolerable. With their resentment and rage being fueled by white Democratic powerbrokers, two thousand armed men forced out the duly elected government. None were more pleased by this result than their Bourbon backers.

V.O. Key Jr., one of America’s greatest scholars of Southern politics, blames this “banker-planter-lawyer” class for the South’s political and economic underdevelopment. Ostensibly pro-business but viciously self-interested, the Bourbons not only defended the South’s racial apartheid but also exploited the region’s poor rural whites, as the Wilmington coup attests.

The consequences of this, as of the Civil War, are still being felt. In a 2024 essay for Aeon, academic and writer Keri Leigh Meritt laid out the many ways the South as a region lags economically—pinned down by poverty, hobbled by an absence of public investments, and choked by a miasma of disillusionment and isolation:

Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families – almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy’s wealthiest slaveholders – a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working classes from earning a living wage. It’s virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has no social healthcare benefits.

Vance’s comments on the Bourbons place them in a national frame, which brings us to another important dimension of the post-Civil War South. Historian Heather Cox Richardson and others have argued that the South’s oligarchic power structures were not dismantled following the defeat of the Confederacy. A number of modern studies have shown that, in many places in the South, the self-styled aristocrat Bourbons recovered their wealth and status in the years following the Civil War.

Always De-Nazifi.

SCRATCH A TERRORIST FIND A TRUMPIST:

Germany’s alleged Christmas market attacker was steeped in far-right ideology. Why didn’t anyone notice? (Jakob Guhl, March 03, 2025, The Prospect)

Our research team at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an international counter-extremism organisation, has examined al-Abdulmohsen’s online profile over the past eight years and found that he did in fact have a clear set of views—security services just didn’t spot them. Al-Abdulmohsen consistently expressed views inspired by the counter-jihad movement, a loose network of bloggers, thinktanks and organisations promoting anti-Muslim and often far-right ideas. He considered Islam to be a dangerous, violent and totalitarian ideology, not a religion. He described Muslims and Arabs as intellectually primitive, promoted conspiracy theories about the “Islamisation” of Europe and justified discrimination against Muslims. These posts are not outliers but rather part of a consistent pattern spanning more than eight years.

Despite the AfD’s attempt to use the Magdeburg attack as further evidence to support its anti-migration policies, the alleged attacker had supported the far-right party since 2016. In his view at that time, “I and the AfD were fighting the same enemy in order to protect Germany.” In December 2017, he even shared a post by Alice Weidel in which she blamed Islam for security threats to Christmas markets.

He also supported international far-right figures promoting counter-jihad ideology, including Dutch politician Geert Wilders. In April 2019, he retweeted a post in which Wilders justified revoking Muslims’ freedom of religion. In 2020, he shared multiple tweets by Wilders that said “Stop Islam” or “Stop Muhammadanism”. In August 2024, he shared a post calling Wilders a “hero”.

As early as December 2016, al-Abdulmohsen also expressed support for the British far-right and anti-Muslim activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder and former leader of the English Defence League who goes by the name Tommy Robinson. In May 2024, he retweeted Robinson stating that “using the word Islamism let’s [sic] Islam off the hook. The problem is Islam.” In October 2024, he shared a tweet by Robinson promoting his new book, which he claimed provided “all the evidence of the replacement of Europeans by the oligarchy”.

Given the remarkably consistent beliefs in the alleged attacker’s online activity over nearly nine years, why were authorities in Germany seemingly unable to link him to the far right?

Because of Islamophobia.

MAGA IS A CULT:

How a son spent a year trying to save his father from conspiracy theories (Zach Mack, February 26, 2025, NPR)

Reporter Zach Mack and his dad are living in separate realities, and it’s tearing their family apart.
This story is an accompaniment to a podcast series released by NPR’s Embedded called Alternate Realities. You can listen to all three episodes here or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About a year ago, my dad bet me $10,000 that he could foretell the future.

It all started when he texted me a picture of a list. Writing in barely legible cursive, he had scribbled 10 politically apocalyptic predictions. My dad was foreshadowing verdicts of treason for Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and the Clintons, who would go down for murder as well. Biden would ultimately be removed from office, and so would the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City. It went on. Donald Trump, who was seeking reelection, would have all charges leveled against him at the time dropped, all while being reinstated as president without the need for November’s election. He also thought that the U.S. would come under nationwide martial law.

For all his catastrophizing, I wouldn’t describe my father as a paranoid person — I tend to think of him as an optimist. He’s very friendly, the kind of father who cracks a lot of dad jokes with strangers. But like so many Americans, Dad had gotten swept up in conspiracy theories. Chemtrails, Biden body doubles, the idea that a shadowy cabal he calls “the globalists” is secretly running the world — these are just a few secret plots my father believes in.

The list, however, was something new. My father was now predicting the biggest shake-up in the country’s history, and he was absolutely certain that it would happen within a year.

At the bottom of the page was a challenge: $1,000 for each of the 10 predictions that were supposed to happen sometime in 2024.

THEY CAN’T WITHSTAND hIS KISS:

Tech Broligarchs Want Jesus Out of the Way (Russell Moore, 2/03/25, Christianity Today))

“God” is no problem in this view of reality. After all, the word God can be made abstract and even algebraic. Albert Einstein suggesting that “God does not play dice with the universe” implicated an impersonal structure, a logic, not the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Spinoza’s “God” will never summon a person before a judgment seat. The words God or religion can be used as stand-ins for the very sort of self-deification the tech-bro ideology and all its successors demand.

Jesus, on the other hand, is not easily dismissed. Once he is heard—not as a theoretical avatar giving authority to some ideology, but for the actual words he spoke, the actual gospel he delivered—the ambitions of every would-be “master of the universe” stand exposed.

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov said he wanted Jesus silenced because the Jesus of the Bible didn’t “understand” human nature: that what people really want is the filling of appetites and the spectacles of distraction. Against the Inquisitor’s diatribe, though, Jesus, as with Pilate, simply stands there, with a look that pierces through all the manipulations of a mechanistic view of the universe.

The digital view of humanity cannot fit with the vision of James Madison and the framers of the American constitutional order. Utopian revolutionaries have always offered some version of “One must break a few eggs to make some omelets,” regardless of the price of actual eggs at the moment. But behind that utopianism is always a theology—and the theology can co-opt almost everything. Christianity can be co-opted by a digital utopianism, but only by silencing Jesus.

Yet Jesus is not easily silenced. The universe is no simulation. It is created and held together not by an algorithm but by a Word. And this Word is no abstraction to be decoded but a person, one who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

A million different Babels lie in the ruins of history, and behind them a million different Nimrods, all of whom would storm the limits of mortality and of accountability to create simulations of themselves and of their rule. They are all gone, and they cannot be rebooted.