We’ve touched on the subject of the economics of immigration here, in regards to H1B visas, and how the Capitalist desire for oppressive control over captive workers is at odds with the howler monkey smoothbrains that demands blood sacrifice to the gods of their racist power fantasies to validate their delusional, external in-group identities. And a part III on the Economics of immigration and labor mobility is coming.
But this is just part of the story here. What about undocumented immigrants, stealing our jobs, slurping up our services, anchoring their babies, using our tax dollars to send money out of the country to fund drug cartels and terrorists? What about these demonic, America-hating criminals who prowl around murdering the defenseless white women and creating massive pedogangs? Who are hellbent on turning America into a Spanish-speaking Muslim shithole under Sharia law?
Fascism depends on lies, myths, and shared delusions to create narratives that build and validate the in-group identity. So no, literally none of these things are true. As we’ve mentioned in other posts, these require a belief in Essentialism, that there are inherent, immutable traits that define all members of a group, both positive and negative, allowing for the separation of in-groups and out-groups, although both are defined by the in-group. Going from “we just want to purge illegal immigrants” to “all immigrants are illegal and must be purged” seems like a semantics shift, but it’s a definitional framing that is an obvious precursor to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
We’ve touched on Essentialism here, in regards to how the Right creates a grimdark definition of the essentialist traits of men and women to fuel their transphobia. And here, they are doing the same thing. All immigrants are criminals. All immigrants are sexual predators. All immigrants are insidious agents of foreign replacement. These traits are inherent and immutable, and cannot be changed, therefore, we must kill them all is the argument here.
Now, anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that none of this is true. No, it’s not a crime wave. No, they aren’t voting. No, they aren’t resisting assimilation. And we can’t believe we have to include this, no, they aren’t “eating the dogs”.
People are, not surprisingly, people, with roughly the same ratio of saints to sinners no matter how you divide them. People make individual choices, and unless clear mechanics can be delineated to explain group behaviors, it is obvious that the spectra of behavior in humans is about the same among Eagles fans as Catholics. Pobody, of course, is nerfect, but the toxic ease of stereotyping is blown up on more steroids than an ICE locker room with this Essentialist framing.
Defining membership in an out-group as immutable, inherent, inescapable, and then ascribing the worst crimes imaginable to that group is as old as humanity. Pretty sure Neanderthals slandered the Cro-Magnons with some “all those people do is steal fire eat hot mammoth and lie” bullshit to justify murdering them all in their sleep. Racist lies about “savages” who “could not be civilized” justified White Supremacy against everyone from Africans to Aztecs to Indians and indigenous Americans. As stated in Part I, the first real immigration law in the US was anti-Chinese, despite their labor being a huge boon to the Manifest Destiny fantasies of white settlers and industrial interests alike.
It is important to note, unequivocally, that Essentialism is a fascist myth that has no basis in reality at all. For a taxonomy to be definitional, all members must exhibit the traits, and no other group can exhibit those traits. Even in biology, this doesn’t happen. There are always exceptions, there are always outliers. Everything is a spectrum, and everything is a dynamic. Nature is always mutable and adaptive, evolving and diverse. The simplistic thought terminating cliches of Essentialism and other fabricated oppressive structures are solely based on the need for in-group definition and reinforcement.
Essentialist mythos are toxic fantasies to create hierarchical taxonomies to allow for the structuring of power and the elevating of in-groups and the oppression – or eradication – of out-groups. You may be tempted to point out the irony of saying “this thing positing inherent traits is inherently fascistic”, but remember, there’s a functional mechanism here – creating hierarchical taxonomies itself is an act of in-group/out-group enforcement, the root mechanic of Fascism.
So how do we see this playing out in the current gestalt?
Stephen Miller, the genocidal psychopath driving Trump’s Final Solution, has already made this pivot to language that moves the definitional structure of the out-group from “criminals here illegally” to “everyone is an illegal criminal and needs to be rounded up and sent to American Auschwitz”, legitimizing the idea that the Gestapo ICE can grab whoever they want with their sweaty little bemasked hands.
Echoing this language immediately in the propaganda spaces are folks like Charlie “can I come to your sorority party after this” Kirk, Kristi “I can’t wait to hunt them for sport” Noem, Chaya “Reich Chick” Raichik, Gunther Eagleman, the nom de dipshit of a former TX cop, David Freeman, who was fired after he allegedly tried to slice a guy open while he slept, and Benny “I got paid less by Russia than Tim Pool” Johnson, and is now the primary narrative of the Right.
Myriad twitter accounts daily post literally any crime, real or imagined, ascribed to immigrants. The ghoulish appropriation of “say their name” is applied to every pretty blonde girl or smiling white child image they can find of these deified victims, regardless of the family’s wishes. The echoes of Reconstruction-era lynching rhetoric and post-war Jim Crow framing are not an accident. The leverage of individual tragedies to create the narrative of “this is who these people are” is exactly the same. From the murder of Emmett Till to the jailing (and slandering by then-simply a racist landlord kleptocrat Trump) of the then-labelled Central Park 5, weaponized white fears and tears are once again on full display here to justify “righteous” violence against a growing definition of “other” – starting from “Venezuelan gang members” and headed through “all illegals” to “well, they’re all illegal” to “anyone not American” to “all dissenters should be stripped of citizenship”.
Riley Gaines, using her own Essentialist myths to grift off the demonization of another out-group, trans people, uses the same white women tears as fueled hundreds of lynchings in the South. Her lazy, facile nonsense ignores a complex reality and feeds the base the red meat of easy thought terminating cliches that reinforce their in-group status against a completely fabricated “enemy”. J. K. Rowling retreats to her white woman victimhood any time she is brought to responsibility for her use of Essentialst mythos.
This shows how definitional Essentialist myths of “purity” and “righteousness” ascribed to white women deflect the inherent fascism of those definitions in the first place – even if there are conflicting intersectional forces at work. Leveraging the myth of the virtuous, pure white woman against trans people or non-whites doesn’t affect the oppression of women in general. It doesn’t have to be consistent, because it’s not real. It’s a fabricated fallacy for a specific argument. For “white women” to be part of the in-group, they have to also support their own out-group status as women to benefit from the in-group status of whiteness.
Part of the toxic success of Trump has been the promise of escaping one out-group status if one supports another preferred in-group status. For example, Latino men can escape the racial out-group if they enforce the Patriarchal in-group. Working class folks can escape the economic out-group by supporting the oligharchic in-group. It’s an exercise in identity politics that promises a bulwark against shame by allowing diverse individuals to work against their own political populations for individual in-group identity.
Any vice ascribed to the out-group either implicitly or explicitly defines the corresponding virtue in the in-group. THOSE people are lazy, ergo WE are hard working. THOSE people are criminals, ergo WE are law and order. THOSE people are cheaters, ergo WE are the ones deserving of victory. So as access to those identities are leveraged, so are these imagined virtues. When signalling in-group identity, one is literally virtue signalling by way of shared Essentialist mythos. This gets those with shakier claims to in-group participation to be even more vociferous in their need to validate that identity, and their claim to it. This is Vivek Ramaswamy in a nutshell, who also shows us how fragile and ephemeral this access can be. Just ask Herman Cain.
All of this is evident in Right Wing discourse, all of these arguments are being made, right now. They want blood. They cheer and “I voted for this”, and Stephen Miller posts the most unhinged bullshit possible, and it goes out like a Nazi batsignal, flooding shared spaces with troll posts that circlejerk the in-group identity as it spirals into its genocidal frenzy. This isn’t hyperbole. This is happening.
As we pointed out in Part I, immigration, documented or otherwise, has literally never been a problem in the United States. Or anywhere else. As we’ll point out in Part III, labor mobility is not only a key function of the economy, it is a fundamental necessity in the claim made by Right Wing Economics as part of the Invisible Hand.
The frenzy over immigration is a Fascist myth, just as is any cause that relies on Essentialism to define in-group and out-group power structures. It is an easy tool that fits within the larger pathology of the Fascist identity matrices, and is completely, 100% delusional.
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