President Trump's racist time machine

[DemocratSinceBirth]

The executive order President Trump signed last week barring all refugees from the United States and banning entry by natives of seven Muslim-majority countries was many things: incompetently drafted, chaotically executed, driven by hate and fear, an offense to American values, a blow to our efforts to combat terrorism and convince young people not to join ISIS, to name just a few. But it was also something else: just the beginning.

This White House is embarking on a long-term project that goes way beyond an executive order here or there. What they're after is nothing less than a rollback of American diversity.

There are some promises Trump is not going to keep — remember when he was going to stick it to Wall Street? Ha ha, no. But the central promise of the Trump campaign, the one that got all those white voters in key states out to the polls, was a pledge to wind back the clock to an earlier time, sometime around the 1950s or 1960s. It was a time when the steel mills and coal mines were humming, when a man was a man and a woman knew her place, and when you didn't have to worry that you'd go down to the supermarket and have to hear people speaking Spanish, let alone Arabic. Trump can't actually put the whole country in a time machine, but there are some facets of this promise he can make good on.

Those hoping for a fulfillment of that promise were no doubt heartened when he announced that he would make Jeff Sessions the nation's chief law enforcement officer. Sessions may have gotten lots of criticism over civil rights, but it's his passionate opposition to immigration that has truly marked his Senate career. He was not only a vehement opponent of comprehensive reform that would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, he is one of the few politicians who favors reducing legal immigration. He has objected to allowing immigrants to serve in the military, and praised a racist 1924 immigration law. As The Washington Post put it, "Sessions' ideology is driven by a visceral aversion to what he calls 'soulless globalism,' a term used on the extreme right to convey a perceived threat to the United States from free trade, international alliances, and the immigration of nonwhites."

http://theweek.com/articles/677500/president-trumps-racist-time-machine

[guillaumeb]

1. One Tea Party slogan was "I want my country back".

Back in 1950.

Southern Tea Partiers disagree. They prefer 1850, when not just women but everyone knew their place.