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.
MINNEAPOLIS — From high school students to elected officials, residents in Minnesota are pushing back against the growing deployment of federal immigration officers in their neighborhoods, leading to days of confrontations and protests.
Resident Neph Sudduth stopped to choke back tears as she witnessed immigration officers roaming around her neighborhood, just a few blocks from the site where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot Renee Nicole Good last week, and clashing with protesters.
“They will hurt you for real! They will hurt you for real!” she shouted at anti-ICE demonstrators, urging them to move away from the officers’ vehicles. Just then, an immigration officer rolled down his window, extended his arm and sprayed a protester point-blank in the face with a chemical agent.
“How dare they come back to this neighborhood,” Sudduth told NBC News. “How forgone you have to be morally to come back here and stand up and do that with your faces covered?”
ICE agents detain a woman after pulling her from a car Tuesday in Minneapolis.Stephen Maturen / Getty Images
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Sunday that she planned to send more agents to Minnesota this week to quell protesters and continue to enforce immigration policies. President Donald Trump defended the Minnesota operation Tuesday, saying, “We have taken out killers, rapists and drug dealers, people from mental institutions that came in illegally.” ICE has posted on social media about the arrests of people accused of sex crimes and who they allege are in the country illegally.
Cary Wang, a medic who is part of 50/51, a nonpartisan grassroots group, provided medical help Tuesday to several people who were affected by chemical agents deployed by immigration officers.
“I think it’s part of their strategy to intimidate and show that they’re immune to any type of repercussions,” Wang said. “The fact that they’re ramping up their enforcement officers — that they’re bringing more here when they already know it’s a volatile situation — it just doesn’t seem that they’re looking for things to cool down. It looks like they’re actually trying to escalate things.”
The highly charged confrontations between protesters and immigration enforcement have been captured in various clips on social media, including posts showing agents asking people at an electric vehicle charging station if they are citizens and another in which protesters curse and scream as an agent appears to kneel on a man’s neck as officers arrest him.
The videos and images contribute to a picture of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations as they fan out across the country, triggering pushback from residents in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Charlotte, North Carolina.
In Minneapolis on Tuesday, resistance to the presence of federal agents was represented by the smell of tear gas, which lingered in the air of a neighborhood following a clash between community members and immigration officers who said they were conducting an operation in the area.
Residents and witnesses told NBC News they came out with whistles to alert others about the operation and act as observers while others began protesting. That’s when, they say, officers began deploying pepper spray and throwing tear gas canisters, which were still on the ground Tuesday afternoon.
ICE agents detain an observer Tuesday after they arrested two people from a residence in Minneapolis.Stephen Maturen / Getty Images
Sam Luhmann, who saw the incident, said he spotted a large number of armed immigration officers in the area “pounding on doors” and arresting a few people.
Then, “they started tackling protesters” and deployed what he believed to be tear gas and pepper balls, Luhmann told NBC News. “It seemed like a war.”
Luhmann, 16, of Chicago, drove to Minneapolis with his older brother after Good was fatally shot. He said they wanted to help community members monitor immigration enforcement activity in Minneapolis the same way they did when immigration officers were deployed to Chicago last year under “Operation Midway Blitz.”
Many of the clashes are taking place just blocks from where Good was killed.
Community observers and protesters gathered after immigration officers rear-ended his car, said Christian Molina, 40. Molina told NBC News officers were asking him whether he was in the country legally.
“Luckily, they didn’t hurt me or shoot at me. But what if they did?” said Molina, a U.S. citizen and father of four. He added that he wasn’t doing anything wrong when officers went after him.
“There’s no reason for them to just look at you and try to just chase you.”
DHS did not comment on the incident involving Molina.
The crowd that gathered around Molina was later hit with tear gas and pepper spray.
South of Minneapolis, in Richfield, Border Patrol agents stopped at a Target store Thursday and arrested two U.S. citizens, Democratic state Rep. Michael Howard said.
“Yesterday in Richfield, federal agents, including Greg Bovino, senior commander of US Border Patrol, entered Target without a warrant, physically assaulted, and arrested two Target employees, both who are U.S. citizens. Madness,” Howard wrote in a news release Friday.
Angela Oberfoell, who witnessed the arrests of her co-workers at Target, told NBC News the experience was “traumatic.”
Oberfoell also provided NBC News with a video she recorded of the incident. It shows workers in disbelief and customers confronting Bovino and other Border Patrol agents.
Another video of the second employee arrested showed the moment Border Patrol agents followed the employee as he recorded the agents and yelled “f— you” before the agent tackled the employee to the ground at the store’s entrance.
DHS said of the arrest captured in that video, “This individual was arrested for assaulting federal law enforcement officers under 18 U.S.C 111, assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers.”
Howard said that both of the Target workers have been released but that they “sustained injuries and untold trauma while their rights were trampled for no reason whatsoever.”
“We continue to call on ICE to GET OUT of Minnesota,” he added.
Officials in Minnesota sued the federal government Monday to stop the deployment of thousands of immigration agents to Minnesota.
Shaquille Brewster and Natasha Korecki reported from Minneapolis and Nicole Acevedo from New York.
Shaquille Brewster
Shaquille Brewster is a political reporter for NBC News and MSNBC.
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