Emma Vigeland welcomes Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist covering security and US politics at KlipNews, discussing the 15 anti-ICE activists indicted by the Justice Department.
Every autocracy has a central ideological mission. The current United States government wants to transform America from a multiracial democracy into a White Christian male-dominated ethnostate. This fanatical mission is increasingly influencing the administration’s policies, propaganda, and visuals produced by this United States government.
Their goal is to change who counts as an American, who can have leadership roles in government and society, who can vote, and who can walk the streets without fear of being imprisoned or deported.
This agenda of authoritarian transformation is the connective tissue binding the many news stories we see each day, whether it is the Trump administration deporting an estimated 17,500 immigrants to countries they have never visited, to White Christian Holy Warrior Pete Hegseth blocking promotions by female and Black Navy officers, to the wrecking of the Voting Rights Act.
Remember that Nazi salute given by Elon Musk at Trump’s Inauguration festivities, and that other Nazi salute given soon after by Steve Bannon at CPAC? They were not aberrations or provocations, but rather the opening shots of a race war now unfolding.
That war seeks to remove agency and mobility and rights and freedoms of non-Whites, while implementing schemes of population redesign, reducing the numbers of immigrants by disappearances, mass detentions, and deportations by government authorities.
MAGA is now a potent project of White race hegemony that feeds on several vectors: the long and tragic history of violence and legal and other effacements of Black people in America, the history of anti-immigrant xenophobia, and the example of authoritarian racial utopias that promoted some while cleansing society of others.
Foreign Policy, National Security Policy, and Elections
Transforming a multiracial and multifaith democracy into a White Christian ethnostate requires a holistic approach, and for months I have been tracking the attempts to achieve greater cohesion of government policy around this goal.
In a recent speech, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended “Western civilization” as the shared identity of the United States and Europe and depicted mass migration as a threat to that civilization.
I have also examined how suppressing free and fair elections fits into this scheme.
Here I add the tool of population reengineering, which is embraced by White House policy advisor Stephen Miller, Musk, and many other MAGA luminaries. A throughline of the far-right from Benito Mussolini to Musk is Great Replacement Theory, the idea that Whites are being outperformed demographically by non-Whites, necessitating measures to save “civilization” from “erasure” and Whites from annihilation.
The Fascists provided the template. “Cradles are empty and cemeteries are expanding,” Mussolini declared in 1927. “The entire White race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.” In a speech that year, Il Duce cast himself in the role of a “clinician” who undertook “necessary hygienic actions” to defend Italian people from criminals, leftists and other political dissidents. “We remove these individuals from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person,” he concluded chillingly.
A vast network of penal colonies, confinement zones, and prisons appeared to “quarantine” the “abnormal.” This “therapeutic” approach to governance, as official Giuseppe Bottai called it, was later applied to Italian Jews, and in Italian Ethiopia the regime experimented with apartheid-style racial segregation to stop the wrong kinds of babies from being conceived.
This idea of state action to protect White Christian civilization and the “natural family” –one man, one woman, and both white–continues among the far right today, as does the attachment to Great Replacement theory.
“I think there is a deliberate plan to erase everything that identifies us: culture, Nation, family are under attack,” stated Giorgia Meloni, a neo-Fascist, in March 2019. As Prime Minister, Meloni champions White motherhood as an antidote to population changes caused by non-White immigration.
Having the right kinds of babies in the right numbers and keeping out undesirable races and births was a mainstay of the former Viktor Orban government. “Europe has become the continent of the empty crib,” said Hungarian Family Minister (and future President) Katalin Novak in 2019, echoing Mussolini. Novak had to resign from the presidency after she pardoned a pedophile, but she continues to advocate for “saving nations” from “a collapsing global birthrate,” this time through x-y, an organization she founded in 2024.
Musk, Meloni, and Novak at the launch of x-y.
X-y has been supported by Musk, who shares Novak’s preoccupation about Whites being replaced and civilization ending. A Washington Post investigation found that Musk posted 850 times in recent months on the topic of population and Whites being “a rapidly dying minority,” which triples his posting rate on these subjects in the previous 2 years.
An Optics of White Supremacy
We can expect X and other MAGA-friendly social media platforms to increase their messaging about a supposed race emergency, and we’ll likely see the Trump administration become more aggressive in its attempts to create an optics of White hegemony in government spaces.
This idea of an all-White governing class was tested in Trump’s first term, as I warned in a 2018 CNN essay on White House interns.
There will also be a ramping up of removals of non-White immigrants from the public sphere, as the massive Amazon-style warehouses ICE is repurposing for people would indicate.
Our Identities Cannot Be Erased
This administration will never succeed in wrecking our multiracial and multifaith society, no matter how much damage it does to our democratic political system. It is who we are. Our identities cannot be taken away from us. And the attempts at mass disenfranchisement will backfire; a new civil rights movement is already starting.
In trying to create a homogeneous society and ban talk of diversity, this government is merely drawing attention to what makes the United States special, and the power of our roots, identities, and traditions. These will serve us well in the coming years as we pursue peaceful resistance to restore our democracy.
Trump’s failure with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is a perfect example of how this regime operates.
He said he wants to beautify Washington DC, though the city is already beautiful. This is like when he came into office in 2017, and before the afternoon was over, he took credit for rebuilding the military. We were spending over $800 billion a year on our military before Donald Trump came into office, so trust me…. We already had a military. If anything, our military is weaker today because Donald Trump just wasted a lot of its armaments on his stupid chosen illegal war. It’s also being led by a chauvinistic, racist, white Christian nationalist with the brain of a moldy sponge.
Back to the pool. Trump wanted to beautify it before July 4, when our nation celebrates its 250th birthday, not to be confused with June 14, which is Donald Trump’s birthday, which will now be commemorated every year by having shirtless men pummel each other in your backyard. (snip-MORE)
The UFC event at the White House last Sunday was not supposed to be political, even though it was held on Donald Trump’s birthday. But after winning his fight, UFC fighter Josh Hokit was being interviewed by podcaster and ring announcer, Joe Rogan, when he grinned and looked into the camera, and said, “And lastly, Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?”
Of course, he is not right, and his racist and sexist conspiracy theory shouldn’t be given the dignity of a defense because it is just too ridiculous and stupid. But what Hokit did wasn’t just disrespectful to Michelle Obama and President Obama, but also to the White House, where he made the comment (hasn’t that place suffered enough during Trump 2.0?), and the country, as this was supposed to be for America’s 250th birthday.
The event itself was disrespectful enough to the White House and the Oval Office without Hokit’s hateful comment. (snip-MORE)
At a D-Day celebration, Secretary of Defense Pete Kegseth claimed that today a different dangerous ideology is storming the beaches of European countries, and he listed them. Kegseth is a die hard white supremacist Christian nationalist who is trying to enforce a Christianity only policy in the US military to the point military members can no longer have atheists on their dog tags. So aside from Kegseth implying the Allies had a dangerous ideology which I guess the Nazis would have agreed with as Sam and crew discuss, the dangerous ideology he is demanding Europe stop and repel is Islam and the dangerous men are Muslims. Hugs
This clip was with a reporter detailing the abuses in ICE detention facilities and the illegal actions of ICE agents and for profit prison staff. Profit over people as these ICE and prison staff do not see the detainees as humans like themselves. What is concerning is ICE is learning how to use existing laws to make the local law enforcement work against the will of the people. This young man wont admit he was attacked by ICE agents instead saying he thinks he hit a tree limb in the confusion but I showed Ron the video and he said the guy looks to him like he was hit repeatedly and hard in the head and possibly the body as well. When will we as a people see that these abuses are so very similar to the abuses suffered by the minorities in 1930s Geermany. Hugs
Remember this is a Christian nationalist who wants to push his version of religion on everyone else. He has denied promotion to women and black people. He is a radical religious crusader, which I know because he has a crusader tattoo. Years of trying to make the US military of which I was one and my dog tags read pagan for religion more inclusive are being destroyed by an administration that is filled with people who are driven to promote and push a religious domination on the military and country. It has long been known that religious zealots infected the Air Force Academy and were pushing the evangelical version of the Christian religion. In Germany I had to spend an uncomfortable 8 months when a fundamentalist religious group in our unit decided that as it was an open secret in the unit I was one of the gay members of the unit that was more open about it they needed to save me from my sins. Every time I went to the chow hall one of them cornered me at a table and started to preach at me. Not talk to me, not to offer friendship, but to tell me all about hell and how horrible I was and that their god hated how I was and that I was in willful disobedience to their great deity. They could save me from their already determined fate if I just joined them and gave my life to their god instead of the heathen sin some demons had infected me with.
I got so damn frustrated with them. Then my friends who had started eating with me to drive them away came up with a plan. We created a religion based on greek mythogoly that we called the “House of Aphrodite”. We drew up a few tenets of the region, one of which was that it was a sex religion and to worship everyone needed to do so with each other nude. The last time they saw me at the chow hall and several of them tried to sit with me and my friends, my friends sprung the trap. They told the guys we would gladly go to their church meetings and pray with them but only if they went to one of our religious meetings first. They did not know we were religious they claimed but we assured them we were very devout. Thinking we were talking about a “liberal” church they readily agreed and then my friends sprung the trap. They told them about our religion The House Aphrodite and the tenets. My friends emphasized how we all worshiped in the nude and some rituals enacted required people to touch each other even on their sexual organs to honor the goddess. My friends played it up and I could hardly keep from laughing at the horrified looks on their faces. Needless to say they declined our invitation to join us in worship. But after that they never bothered me again. Hugs
This is pure racism and entitlement. The boy put the bottles of water back. But even if he had not does stealing bottles of water rate or equate to a death penalty performed by a civilian? This is clearly an extra juditiacal killing. No judge or jury just a store owner and his son angry thinking a kid stole from them deciding to end his life. This automatic killing of Black people with no evidence has to stop. Black Lives Matter. Hugs
Gas station owner charged in shooting death of 14-year-oldRick Chow, 58, has been charged with murder after allegedly killing Cyrus Carmack-Belton in Columbia, South Carolina, on Sunday, police said.
The family of Cyrus Carmack-Belton expressed their indignation towards a South Carolina jury’s decision on Tuesday to acquit Chikei Rick Chow in the 2023 fatal shooting of the Black 14-year-old.
“Yesterday a jury watched our 14-year-old boy run away from two grown men on video. They knew one of them shot him in the back and they still said no one is to blame,” the family said in a statement first released to ABC News. “We are heartbroken. We do not accept it. Cyrus stole nothing. He was a child, and he was running for his life. Our son mattered.”
Chow, a 61-year-old store owner, shot the 14-year-old in the back outside of his Columbia, South Carolina, store in May 2023. He and his son were seen chasing Carmack-Belton outside of the store in video leading to the incident. Chow was charged with murder and denied bond multiple times before his acquittal.
An image of Cyrus Carmack-Belton is displayed in court during closing arguments in the murder trial against his shooter, Chikei Rick Chow, a convenience store owner accused in the 2023 fatal shooting of the 14-year-old, on June 1, 2026, in Columbia, S.C.
Erik Verduzco/AP Photo
Prosecutors alleged that Chow acted out of a false belief that Carmack-Belton had shoplifted four bottles of water from his store. The defense claimed that Chow acted to protect his son, after allegedly seeing Carmack-Belton point a gun at him.
“On behalf of the Chows, we’re very pleased at the jury’s deliberations and their verdict,” attorney Jack Swerling said in a statement to ABC News. “We think it was the appropriate verdict in this case, although it was a difficult decision to come to, because you have two different stories, two extreme differences.”
Video obtained by ABC News shows that Carmack-Belton returned the bottles of water in question and did not steal anything from the store. A 9mm pistol was found next to Carmack-Belton, with prosecutors saying it was in his possession during the chase, and it had fallen to the ground at some point.
In this June 1, 2023, file photo, mourners stop by a memorial to Cyrus Carmack-Belton, in Columbia, S.C.
Jeffrey Collins/AP, FILE
As the verdict was read in the courtroom, members of the Carmack-Belton family and the audience were seen breaking into sobs.
In their statement Tuesday, Carmack-Belton’s family drew a connection between their case and a larger history of violence against the Black community. “Black families have stood right here too many times — burying our children and then being told the law sees nothing. We feel every bit of that today,” the family said.
Troy Belton, center, father of Cyrus Carmack-Belton, reacts after a not guilty verdict against Chikei Rick Chow, a convenience store owner accused in the 2023 fatal shooting of his 14-year-old son, during a murder trial, on June 1, 2026, in Columbia, S.C.
Erik Verduzco/AP Photo
“To everyone hurting with us: honor Cyrus in peace. We will not stop. We’re taking this fight to civil court, and we will not rest until our son’s life is given the dignity this verdict denied him,” the family added.
According to family attorney Todd Rutherford, the family filed a civil lawsuit against Rick Chow in Richland County, which was put on hold until the conclusion of the criminal case.
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