J'Accuse: The #MeToo Movement and the Backlash

 

Reading the New Yorker in New Hampshire is a pleasantly surreal experience.  Even out here, in the Provinces, we can live through the issues and conflicts of the day. 

The June 23, 2025 is jam packed with amazing articles but the one which currently has me transfixed and thinking about it even having finished it is "Backlash" by Alexis Okeowo.

Tina Johnson

It tells the tale of Tina Johnson, who told of visiting the office of a lawyer, Judge Roy Moore about a child custody case, with her mother. During the visit Johnson thought it strange that Moore asked her about the color of her daughter's eyes, asking if they were as pretty as hers. He then asked her for a drink after the meeting, which she declined and on the way out the door, with her mother ahead of her she felt Moore's fingers find her vagina, and she just ran out of the door. When Moore ran for the U.S. Senate, women started coming forward with similar stories of his behavior and Johnson joined the chorus, as the #MeToo movement was surging.  Articles documenting that Moore had been banned from a shopping mall "for bothering young girls." Moore lost the election to Doug Jones, who had prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan men who set the 16th Street Baptist Church bomb in Montgomery, Alabama which killed four young Black girls in 1963.  Jones wrote about this in a book called, "Bending Toward Justice," but he was ultimately defeated by football coach Tommy Tuberville, and normalcy was restored to the state of Alabama.

Okeowo's article documents the price paid by Tina Johnson and a spate of other women who came forward with complaints about the sexual depredations of men during the #MeToo movement.

The portrait which emerges of the Alabama towns where these women lived is scaborous: Leigh Corfman was run off the road in a scene right out of "Easy Rider" and wound up paralyzed. Johnson's house was burned down. Moore launched libel suits and neither woman had the financial means to defend themselves from lawsuits.

Okeowo notes that eventually people grew uncomfortable with accusation without due process and when Al Franken was forced to resign his U.S. Senate seat because his Democratic colleagues did not have the moral fortitude to defend his right to an impartial hearing, the backlash. really began.

Trump Endorses Roy Moore for Senate

I read all this through my own personal lens, honed by my own experiences. I had seen the movie "The Assistant" depicting a sexual predator who used his position of power to demand sexual compliance on the casting couch of his office--women actresses who wanted parts he had the power to offer had to consent to sex with him and the assistant was left to sanitize the leather couch.

Looking at the photos of Harvey Weinstein, I thought, "Oh, yeah, he did it. He did all of that," as he looked like a sexual predator from central casting. There was no way a man as repulsive looking as Weinstein could ever claim "consensual sex." Well, maybe he could say he simply struck a bargain: You want the part; I want sex. 

So there was that.

On the other hand, I have been wrongly accused--not of sexual abuse--but I was falsely accused as a child, and that searing experience has never left me and I still get angry to this day thinking about it.

I was about 10 years old and one day my mother got off the phone looking alarmed and disturbed. A woman who lived up the street said I had shouted profanities at her and acted defiant and she was emotionally traumatized.

I had only the vaguest idea who this woman was: the mother of children younger than me who I could not have picked out of a line up.  We lived in a development with eighty homes strung out around two concentric circles and I knew the kids in families whose kids were my age and who got on the school bus with me. I knew maybe a dozen families, maybe a score, but I did not know this woman or her children and I certainly knew I had never had any sort of disputatious interaction with any adult in the neighborhood. 

I denied the accusation categorically. I think my mother believed me, in part because this whole incident as the mother described it simply did not sound like her son, but she was inclined, as most adults would be, to at least consider the possibility the adult was correct.

Fortunately, in my case, I had some rudimentary legal training by age 10. Disputes in our family had always been resolved by convening "family court" and I demanded I be allowed to face my accuser and interrogate her. I was able to say that the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution guaranteed any accused "to be confronted with the witnesses against him." That had come up before in our family court and I quoted it now. My mother was stuck. She had to demand a meeting. 

We met outside her house in the street and looking at her I knew I had not seen her before, or if I had, in so fleeting a manner I did not recognize her. She looked at me with narrowed brows, and though it was apparent at a glance, she was not at all sure who I was, she still stuck to her story. She began to waffle a little about exactly what I said. "You can stuff it. You're not my mother. Go to Hell."

Well, maybe not those exact words. 

"Have you ever seen me before now?" I asked. 

She hesitated just enough to satisfy me, but she said, "Yes. You shouted at me."

When I tried to pin her down on the time and date and circumstances she looked at my mother and said, "I'm not going to continue this."

I spoke to my mother, being careful not to be seen as being rude to an adult. "She doesn't recognize me. She doesn't know who she was talking to."

That ended the confrontation and my mother's report to my father at dinner ended with his asking, "Who is this lady? Do we know her?"

That was a case of eye witness testimony being unreliable, not of sexual abuse when the eyewitness has such a close and extended experience there is not really a question of identify.

But it was a case of bearing false witness, of false accusation. 

It wasn't the first time I'd been falsely accused: A patrol at school accused me of sassing him and I had never seen this kid before. He mistook me for someone else. Another false accusation.

So when it comes to false accusations, I have been conditioned in some ways to doubt the accuser.

During the height of the #MeToo movement at universities, boys accused of date rape were not put on trial by the state: they were tried by college tribunals, star chambers, with no rules of evidence, often without the accused boys present, without being allowed to face their accusers--that would have "re-traumatized and re-victimized--the women and some of these boys were expelled from college.  In my own college, a junior in the engineering program was expelled after a drunken episode of sex with a naked coed who had climbed into his bed. She was too drunk to say no; but he said he was too drunk to know better. To say he was denied due process is to understate the case mightily. That's like saying "The Oxbow Incident" was about cattle rustling. 

In the case of a man who has been banned from a shopping mall and whose accusers independently describe similar approaches, the evidence weighs toward beyond a reasonable doubt.

At one of our Democratic Committee meetings a candidate for Congress, running in the primary spoke at our meeting and I asked her about the problems with #MeToo, with equating an accusation with a conviction and without due process and what did she think about this? She reacted with outrage, "I cannot believe we are even talking about this!" she said, as if these objections did not even merit discussion. 

Needless to say, she did not get my vote.

I had caught her by surprise and she was unprepared because she had never considered the other side of the issue.

I'm not sure Roy Moore has had his day in court to answer the charges against him. 

I do know one thing: The women who accused him have been violently attacked by his fans in Alabama. What I really get out of "The Backlash" is that American carnage does not exist in American cities; that's not where the carnage is. 

 It's alive and thriving in the Old South, and in Trumpworld in general, wherever the MAGA flag waves.

Dime Store Patriotism

 We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

--Last words of the Declaration of Independence

We must all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

--Benjamin Franklin at the Signing of the Declaration

They're all saps, fighting for strangers.

--Sonny Corelone, speaking of those who rushed to enlist after Pearl Harbor

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel

--Samuel Johnson

He won't even wear a flag on his lapel!

--Remark by a neighbor in Hampton, NH about Barack Obama, after asserting he was born in Kenya and not a real American.

"Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, D-Ill., said he will no longer wear an American flag lapel pin because it has become a substitute for “true patriotism” since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 'My attitude is that I’m less concerned about what you’re wearing on your lapel than what’s in your heart," he told the campaign crowd Thursday.' You show your patriotism by how you treat your fellow Americans, especially those who serve. You show your patriotism by being true to our values and ideals. That’s what we have to lead with is our values and our ideals.”

Donald Trump spent a day transforming the White House grounds into what looked like a suburban automobile dealership with a Memorial Day sale. Two huge flags, bigger and better than any flags in the world, on two gargantuan flag poles, the best flag poles ever in the history of the world.

But, of course, the flags and poles are equaled by many automobile dealerships and exceeded by NFL stadium displays.

And looking at the workers who erected these poles, he asked idly if any were illegal immigrants, because some of them looked, you know, a little brown, and maybe from "shithole countries."

So, like the rest of his Presidency, this is just another mindless, cheap stunt which he thinks clever.

School boys spend hours writing essays on the meaning of the word "patriotism," so Mad Dog will not bore you with his version on what patriotism is.

Actual Patriot

But he will offer that one thing patriotism cannot be, is cheap. A sine qua non of patriotism is that it cannot be purchased for $2 at a 7/11 store and pinned to your lapel. Anything that is risk free, that costs little and risks nothing (like wearing a lapel pin or running a flag up a pole) is not patriotism.

It is not empty phrases like "leftist elites" or "fake news" or "America first."  Whatever it is, it requires actual, critical thinking. 

In fact, as Barack Obama once suggested, before he relented and started wearing the pin again, wearing something like a pin is so easy it defiles the very idea of patriotism, which, whatever it is, by definition, cannot be easy.

Like paying your income taxes.

Like getting shot at by an opposing army.

Like actually thinking about what is good for your country.

When those guys who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged loyalty to one another, they knew they could hang for it. 

When has Donald Trump, or Stephen Miller or Kristi Noem or that Dr. Strangelove called RFK JR ever done anything like that?

Government Protects Public Health: When you Allow It

 Where is Tony Fauci now that the impossible has happened?

Dr. Fauci

AIDS was first reported 44 years ago, and the virus which causes it, HIV, was identified within two years later, a remarkable scientific achievement. 

The virus itself clearly spilled over from monkey to man years before AIDS was identified in  a group of men in Los Angeles, published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Reports, (a publication Trump and his toadies have abolished) and then quickly identified in reports from New York Hospital (Henry Masur) and from San Francisco shortly thereafter published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Tony Fauci, down in Bethesda, Maryland at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), quickly organized a task force to respond to HIV, recruiting Masur down to the NIH along with Cliff Lane and others. 

Robert Gallo

Identifying the causative agent of any infectious disease is the sine qua non of any effort to control or cure it. That was done by Drs. Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo. 

Alexandre Yersin: Discoverer of Plague bacillus

The alacrity with which the medical establishment was able to come to grips with the basics raised hopes the scourge could be halted the way polio once had been, or small pox.

Couldn't scientists do just about anything?

Right from the get go, politics entered the fray: ACT UP, a group advocating for a government effort to thwart AIDS vilified Fauci for not doing enough fast enough. Fauci did something government folks rarely do: He invited the protestors picketing outside his building on the NIH campus into a conference room and offered to show them the ICU where AIDS patients were being cared for and the labs where research was going forward. They became among his most ardent fans.

George F. Will

From the other side, George F. Will dismissed AIDS as nothing to worry about, in an piece in the Washington Post, he posited that it was a "gay disease" which would only ever be a problem in that community, owing to the peculiar practice of anal intercourse, which disrupted the anal mucosa, exposing the tissues below with their blood supply and allowing the virus to enter. But AIDS would never infect the innocent heterosexual population Will averred. (Sound familiar? Oh, measles! We get measles outbreaks all the time. Nothing to worry about!)

That elicited a quick letter to the editor from a local doctor who pretty well destroyed Will's hypothesis, along with his credibility in scientific areas, which was important because Ronald Reagan had bought into that whole trope.

So, for those who think Robert F. Kennedy is the first ignoramus to gain currency in the response to infectious disease and the first clown to try to grab the controls of the airplane when he has no pilot training: he's not.

"As for George Will's rectal mucosa theory of AIDS {op-ed, June 7}: it is appalling to see a columnist's speculations elevated to the realm of fact, especially when there is at least as much evidence against his contention that there is something so special about the actual practices of homosexuality as to ensure that the predominant reservoir of the disease will remain with homosexuals. Mr. Will's column does a disservice in two major (and I'm sure, many minor) ways:

1) The implication is that heterosexuals may heave a collective sigh of relief and pursue their sexual activities with somewhat less trepidation.

2) There is now the likelihood that the heterosexual majority will be less keen to support research for a disease that is confined to a rather unpopular minority.

Reports from Africa suggest that AIDS has already become a heterosexual disease of frightening proportions. Physicians like myself realize we function in an area of impressive ignorance. We can only advise what seems prudent, realizing our advice may change as research provides more answers.

Mr. Will risks moving from a position of renowned conservatism to one of medieval reaction by suggesting, however obliquely, that this plague has been visited upon those who in some way deserve it. There will always be ''innocent'' victims of disease. And I would argue that patients should always be considered ''innocent'' and treated with compassion

What the world needs now is a biologist who can provide the kind of relief Jonas Salk provided from polio. Perhaps his name will be Anthony Fauci, perhaps we have not yet heard his name. But I very much doubt that relief will come from the speculations of George Will.

So, even at that early stage, physicians were looking to Dr. Fauci to be the central figure to bring the HIV era to a close. 

But Dr. Fauci insisted that a successful vaccine against HIV would be so unlikely it was not likely to ever be the solution. 

Within 6 years, the first effective, if cumbersome drug protocols emerged, and ultimately, by the late 1990's HIV was no longer a death sentence which got executed within months, and HIV became a chronic disease.

And still, at every appearance, Dr. Fauci was asked about the prospects for a preventative vaccine and he would always shake his head, dolefully, and say the problem with this virus is that it attacks the very cells, the T cells, which were essential to mounting an immune response to any virus, and it mutates so effectively, catching up to it with a vaccine seemed unlikely--so he despaired of a vaccine ever being successful. 

Then we got  a report (November 2024) in the New England Journal of Medicine about Lenacapavir, which may actually work to prevent HIV, not that it's a vaccine, but, in practice, offers much the same protection a vaccine would.  Of 3265 men in the trial cohort, only 2 got HIV infected during the trial, an astounding result. It has to be injected every 6 months, but it works in men. It was known to work in women, but apparently men are different in some way. Maybe they are more sexually active, and less likely to take precautions. Or maybe Will's notion that anal intercourse is different plays a role. Who knows? But now we've got a prophylactic anti viral which might protect as well as a vaccine.

Dr. Fauci is now 84, and he's kept a low profile since retiring.  He was the object of death threats for his role in guiding the country through COVID, and then he was out in his own backyard in Washington, D.C. and got bitten by a mosquito and got West Nile Virus, of all things, which nearly killed him. Of course, infectious disease experts have died from the diseases they studied, and Fauci admitted he had nightmares of getting AIDS, but he got West Nile virus in Washington, D.C.

Go figure.

At least it wasn't COVID.

But I'd sure like to hear what he thinks about the future of AIDS prevention. Lenacapavir is not a vaccine. It's a drug, a selective poison, but it's worlds better than where we have been, and it might even, some day, help slow or halt the spread of AIDS. 

Where Oh Where Did My Nasty Immigrants Go?

 

"In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. 

These, and other such Cities, are the core of Democratic Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base

(1)Cheat in Elections

(2)and grow the Welfare State,

(3) Robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American citizens.

These Radical Left Democrats are 

(4) Sick of mind

(5) Hate our Country and 

(6) Actually want to destroy our Inner Cities--and they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. 

(7) That is why they believe in Open Borders,

(8) Transgender for Everybody,

(9) and Men playing in Women's Sports--

(10) and that's why I want ICE, Border Patrol and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. 

(11) You don't hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!"

--Who Else? Oi! Donald the Trumpling

So, this Trumpish screed was just so good not even Paul Krugman could resist responding to at least part of it. As Dr. Krugman noted, you don't hear those who live in New York City--or any other--complaining about having to live with the "American carnage" Trump sees in their towns. In fact, in NYC, where 37% of the population is immigrant, murders were 83% lower in 2024 than in 1990, and the murder rate is still falling--which is more than you can say for the state of Mississippi, which has no big cities comparable, where the murder rate is 20/100,000 people, the highest in the nation.

If there is American carnage anywhere, murder rates would place it among the non urbanized, but highly Confederate Red States which elected Trump.

But let's unpack some of these Trumpist claims. Usually he just throws so much at the wall, one never pauses to pick apart the ketchup from the spaghetti but let's just go through it this one time.

(1) Illegal immigrants do not cheat in elections. Democrats do not use them to cheat. There is deminimis election fraud and none of it involves illegal immigrants who have no incentive to want to get swept up in any such thing. The only reason Trump resents inner city election results is cities vote so resoundingly against Trump and all those who sail with him. This is where the biggest No King demonstrations happen. People who live in cities, who are actually pretty good at living with their neighbors and with other people who come from different backgrounds revile Trump and all he stands for, which is hostility to anybody but white bread Leave It to Beaver types.

No Kings Houston

(2) Illegal immigrants do not grow the Welfare State, as they are not eligible for Welfare and do not want to raise their heads above the ground to be identified by applying for welfare. This is all that Ronald Reagan Slipper Gipper non sense about the Black welfare Queen who drove her Cadillac around town living high off her $5 a week welfare checks.

(3) Illegal immigrants do not rob good paying jobs from hard working American citizens--This is that whole "Simpson's" episodes, "They Took Our Jobs" thing.  Illegal immigrants tend to take jobs employers cannot find workers for--scrubbing toilets in hotels, picking crops, roofing, installing drywall, landscaping, washing dishes in the kitchens of restaurants. In fact, Trump had to back off on raids on workplaces because the fat cat owners got to him, complaining he'd shut down their businesses if they could no longer exploit and hold captive illegal immigrants to do the work.

(4) People in big cities are not sick of mind. You want to see some sick of mind people, go out into the rural parts where there isn't much in the way of health care or social services.

(5) People in cities do not hate our country. Viz the demonstrations in big cities this past weekend.

No Kings, Philadelphia

(6) People living in inner cities do not want to destroy the cities--they like their cities. That's why they live there.

No Kings, Los Angeles

(7) Who the "they" is who believe in Open Borders is unclear. One might argue it's Trump and Stephen Miller who believe in open borders, as they destroyed the most comprehensive and severe Immigration bill Congress was all set to pass because Trump wanted to run on immigration.

(8) Transgender everybody? What is he exactly saying? Does he think Illegal Aliens or Democrats who run the inner cities want to turn everyone into Transgenders? Or is he simply playing that card he knows has resonance when it comes to...

(9) Men playing in Women's sports. Oh, here you have it. He knows that even among many Democrats, among Democrats who would support transgenders being allowed to be left alone, there is hostility to allowing men who have gone through a male puberty and then transitioned to womanhood from playing on women's teams, from swimming in college on women's teams.  This is a weak point for Democrats because it requires some delicate distinctions, which never play well in politics. And if Trump is good at anything, it's finding the raw wound.

(10) Our police are patriotic. Which is to say, police, like some soldiers, are Trumplings. They know where their salaries come from and they want to protect the most reactionary forces which promise no changes, no accommodations and to keep them in power.

(11) You don't hear about Sanctuary Cities in our heartland. Except when you look at the No Kings parade in places like.

Bennington, Vermont 

Louisville, Kentucky (Heartland Enough for you?)

Jackson, Wyoming (Pretty Dang Heartland)

Cincinnati, Ohio

Anchorage, Alaska (Even Alaska! Red as it is)

  

Sympathy for the Devil: Slouching Toward the Sadist State

 

Donald Trump invokes the apocalyptic vision of the state of California--Los Angeles, in particular--as being on the verge of chaos and disintegration owing to the invasion/infestation by dark skinned immigrants, who we can shorthand simply as "MS13" from "shithole countries," and were it not for his timely intervention by calling in the Marines and the National Guard, white women would be murdered and raped and mere anarchy would be loosed upon the land.

Americans, who have long harbored a decidedly berserk streak, love visions of apocalyptic battles, won by strong men superheroes, sitting at their video game consoles, in their mothers' basements.

Sadistic Glee 2025

Sadistic Glee 1933

Of course, as Governor Gavin Newsome has noted, the murder rate in the Deep Red states is far worse than in the Blue States which Trump claims have been overwhelmed by murderous mobs of illegal immigrants welcomed into their sanctuary cities:

Murder rate in California: 5.9% (Murder/100,000 people)

Murder rate in Mississippi: 20.7% (voted for Trump by 23 points)

Murder rate in Alabama: 14.9% (voted for Trump by 31 points)

Murder rate in Louisiana: 19.8% (voted for Trump by 19.8 points)

Murder rate in South Carolina: 11.9% (voted for Trump by 18 points).

So, if strongman King Donald is a superhero, protecting American citizenry from the murderous onslaught of brown skinned immigrants--he isn't doing awfully well in his protection racket.

Updated American Sadism

Having grown up in the South, and having spent most of my life living below the Mason/Dixon line, none of this comes as any surprise.

Classic Sadists

Kids I grew up with, right through their teen age years, were often, not to put too fine a point on it, sadists, pure and simple. They might drown kittens or fry them alive in microwaves, beat up smaller kids, throw rocks, at least attempt to rape girls, and they would reassure you with a smile, this was all just fun, and very much okay.

Date Night at Sadist City

And their friends would, likely as not, just shrug, if not participate. 

It was, I imagined at the time, simply the inheritance of the master race who had once treated slaves sadistically, just for fun, but also for profit.

Founder of the Ku Klux Klan

They weren't doing anything their great grandfathers hadn't done, after all, and those figures were now framed photos on the walls of their parents' homes, often as not in the uniform of the Confederate States of America.

Who is the Brave One?

It was a culture of cruelty to keep the Black Man down.

Brave Boys, Having Fun

Or as Randy Newman put it in his imperishable song, "Rednecks," we are "keeping the Niggers down."

And I do use the "N-word" advisedly. By which I mean, "Nigger." There, I said it. Has the nation collapsed? 

Nothing is so infuriatingly woke as the refusal to say the actual offending word in polite company. Are our wives and daughters and sons really so fragile their psyches will be permanently scarred to hear the actual word which is the problem?

Which brings me to Professor Carole Hooven, who was driven from Harvard for the unforgivable offense of using the phrase "pregnant woman" instead of "pregnant person" among other transgressions including saying there are two sexes (as defined by gametes) and her insistence on cleaving to the truth--"Veritas" being Harvard's motto--even if that truth caused the ultrasensitive, hot house flowers, snowflakes to feel so traumatized, they could not leave their dorm rooms.

Oh, the victimhood! And at Harvard, no less!

In Hooven's case, there was never much question about the veracity of what she had said: In homo sapiens, there are two sexes--which may be different from saying there are two "genders"--and that these differences are pretty distinctive. But her sin was that some Harvard students felt unsafe hearing this. The effect of hearing true statements disrupted their safe spaces. And the Harvard faculty ran for the bomb shelters rather than simply squelching this nonsense as soon as it peeped its noggin out of its bomb shelter.  So here is a case I cannot work up much sympathy for the "victims" of the truth.

 I find myself unsympathetic to the snowflake. And on the other, I find myself appalled by the ultimate in lack of sympathy: the sadist.

But how can you sympathize with a woman, Laura Simone Lewis  who says, "It is vital to teach med students gender inclusive language, as they will certainly interact with people that identify outside the gender binary"? And by that she means nobody should ever utter "pregnant women" but only "pregnant people." And who is Laura Simone Lewis to be telling anyone what we should be teaching medical students?

And, I'm sorry, but after decades of speaking the only language I've been able to facilitate, I'm simply not able to re wire to say, "They went to town to get a haircut," when I'm speaking of a single person. Sorry, not going to happen. If that makes you feel attacked, victimized, then take to your room and consider therapy. But my pronouns belong to me, not to you. As Dave Chappell has said, "I support anyone's right to be who they want to be. My question is: to what extent do I have to participate in your self-image?"

Even Dave has trouble with the anyone/they convention here, but you get his point, with which I totally agree.

Our brave protectors fear for their lives! She does look so dangerous!

So, we emerge from a weekend in which U.S. Marines and National Guard troops were fully mobilized with their grenades and M-16 rifles to deal with mothers with infants in strollers, brave men that they are. 

And where does that leave us?

Oh, She is Just SO Brave!

Immigration

 

Sometime in the early 1990's, a documentary about global warming was aired with Richard (not David) Attenborough narrating. It was the first time I'd ever heard about global warming or climate change, and I remember most of all its prediction that with equatorial climate collapse, the equatorial lands will no longer be able to sustain agriculture, and large human migrations toward the poles would ensue, destabilizing European and American governments and institutions, and before actual climate apocalypse occurred, political apocalypse would happen owing to migration, or as we now call it immigration.

It all struck me as plausible, but unlikely. I have been unable to trace that documentary on the internet, but I haven't tried very hard. 

But the idea of immigration as the catalyst for political collapse has come true. Britain voted to separate itself from Europe, because, as Trump noted, "They want borders." No European nation has handled immigration from the Middle East and Africa well. As our tour guide in Estonia told us: "I feel like we are a tiny thimble size nation and they are a big bucket being poured on us." Sweden has been struggling with it, ditto Germany, Italy, Greece, France and even the Netherlands has a white supremacy party. 

Demagogues, eager to seize control, look for scape goats and there are not easier scapegoats than immigrants. Hitler found the Jews easy targets, as they often seemed a group of "strangers" and an alien group. Trump looks at darker skinned poor people "from shithole nations" who contaminate, infest our white, clean nation.

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxyqZ0XSDeoHo99NAZOgbl4OJ3ds0W_bEG?si=EGZKJf7mwGmVRFLU

Arguing against this is harder than it should be, as the overwhelming majority of us, in the U.S.A. can recall an immigrant story in their  own families. 

But the fact is, Presidents from Eisenhower to Biden have argued immigrants are good for America, not to be feared or vilified but celebrated.  At the end of a recent Jimmy Kimmel monologue, he strings together speeches from each President since Eisenhower, including Ronald Reagan, extolling the virtues of immigrants and immigration. I have been unable to manage to clip this into this post but there is at least some of it in the link above.

No Irish Need Apply

Trump's malignant screeds against immigrants (who are not white) is currently working well, and until and unless the opposition can persuade 51% of America he is wrong, he will likely prevail.

The Right Kind of Immigrant

Even in New Hampshire, when you ask people why they like Trump, they usually start with immigrants, and even if you ask them if they have seen immigrants in their small, white towns, and they usually say no. When you point out the guys who do the roofing, or the lawn services, or the tree trimming are Hispanics, they look a little taken aback and then say, "Oh, right." And if you asked whether they feel threatened by these workers, they always say, "Well, no. Not them."

So who do they fear?

Barbie Doll Secy Homeland Security

Well, the cat eating rapist murderer immigrants they have never seen in New Hampshire. 

Go Figure.