You don’t qualify
Pairs of young men in dark suits from Bob Jones University once roamed Greenville, SC trolling for souls:
The Jones boys would approach and ask if you were a Christian. Saying yes was never enough. Wonderful, they’d say, exchanging sidelong glances. And where do you go to church? Now, it’s a game of 20 Questions: sniff out the sinner. Anyone from a church not on their approved list is against them. Alien. Enemy. Other.
Donald Trump doesn’t want converts. He has adapted the Jones boys’ paranoid approach to weeding out Americans who in his eyes are trespassing in his exclusive club. The man who for years complained he was the victim of a witch hunt has launched a nationwide witch hunt. Stephen Miller and Russ Vought are cardinals in his Inquisition.
Digby introduced yesterday the Trumpian effort to strip immigrant citizens of their Americanness. Joyce Vance this morning reviews the little-used statute that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Civil Rights Division means to weaponize against anyone Trump, et al. find don’t meet membership standards for the World of Trump. The June 11 memo issued by the head of the DOJ’s Civil Division directs personnel to initiate denaturalization actions in “Any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.” That opens the door to stripping citizenship and expelling from the country anyone the Trump administration finds insufficiently Trumpy. They might even denaturalize the ham sandwich.
Vance explains:
The provision is so vague that it would permit the Division to denaturalize for just about anything. It could be something prior to or following naturalization. Given the other priorities discussed in the memo, it could be exercising First Amendment rights or encouraging diversity in hiring, now recast as fraud against the United States. Troublesome journalists who are naturalized citizens? Students? University professors? Infectious disease doctors who try to reveal the truth about epidemics? Lawyers? All are now vulnerable to the vagaries of an administration that has shown a preference for deporting people without due process and dealing with questions that come up after the fact and with a dismissive tone. “Oopsie,” and there’s nothing we can do to get them back.
Trump’s white nationalist drive to bleach the country of undesirables began as ethnic cleansing. The next phase is a Stalinist purge of dissidents. He’ll performatively expel them from the country to satisfy his xenophobic cult. Or else consign them to domestic gulags if he can make money from them. Trump in his first term wanted to fortify his southern border wall, The New York Times reported, “with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators” to keep immigrants out. Florida is constructing a camp in the Everglades surrounded by snakes and alligators to keep them in. Trump is scheduled today to attend the opening.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are out. The greater Trump-Miller-Vought plan is to define “America” down, to make it more exclusive, more like Trump’s golf resorts. The country that was once a haven for “your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” is to become one white, Christian, ethno-nationalist nation, not under God but under the Trump identitarian cult. Those of us they do not expel or gulag will be expected to serve the members. So check your references. Do you have a sponsor? Can you afford the initiation fee and dues?
Being an American was once a point of pride. The idea that anyone from anywhere could come here to build a better life, no matter their creed, color or national origin, etc. Now that’s a historical artifact.
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