The Felon's and MAGA's Hatred of Minorities and "Liberal" Women

The Felon has a long history of racism - his company settled a federal lawsuit in Norfolk in the 1970's for anti-black discrimination - and his contempt for and objectification of women, especially smart, educated liberal women, has an equally long history. While the Felon's regime is supposedly fighting "wokeness", its real agenda is rolling back civil rights laws which the Felon recently complained that the milestone civil rights laws from the 1960's have caused "white people to be treated badly."  The Felon's war on so-called DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) through executive orders and agency regulations follow the upside down view that whites face discrimination when in reality that so-called discrimination is merely restraints on whites to mistreat others badly, especially racial minorities.  ICE's cruelty is aimed at anyone with brown skin regardless of their citizenship and even Native Americans have been seized. All of this agenda was laid out in Project 2025 and was sadly ignored by far too many voters.  The shooting of Renee Good last week also shows this racist agenda threatens whites who do not buy into the Felon's campaign of cruelty and discrimination.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's push to to undo civil rights protections:

[O]ne of the key Republican talking points of the [2024 election] cycle: that “wokeness” was sweeping the nation and upending established ways of life, and that [the Felon] Donald Trump would fight against it. Trump has since made clear that he wasn’t interested in just reining in what some people saw as excesses. He was interested in a wholesale rollback of bedrock civil-rights protections.

During his recent interview with The New York Times, the [Felon] president harshly criticized the legislation of the 1960s, which included the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which bans employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which bans racial discrimination in voting).

“White people were very badly treated where they did extremely well, and they were not invited to go into a university or a college. So I would say, in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases,” . . . it also hurt a lot of people—people that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job.”

[The Felon] Trump went on to say that the laws caused “reverse discrimination.” This idea that white Americans are suffering from widespread bias is a core belief of the revanchist right. In a Pew Research Center poll last year, 62 percent of white Republicans said that white people face some or a lot of discrimination. It’s not a mainstream view, though. Overall, fewer than 40 percent of Americans believe that white people face some or a lot of discrimination; roughly three-quarters say the same about Black and Hispanic people, and two-thirds about Asian people.

The idea that early-2020s “wokeness” went too far is more mainstream. Trump’s anti-woke campaigning appealed not only to the MAGA base but also to independents and even some voters who viewed themselves as left of center but felt that Democrats had overreached. The word woke was a useful tool because it had no clear definition . . . . This meant that people could interpret Trump’s rhetoric however they wanted . . . . observers, including my colleague Adam Serwer, warned that this vagueness was a Trojan horse for attacking more popular equal-rights protections.

After taking office, [the Felon] Trump did move to push back on DEI initiatives (in the federal government and in private universities) and transgender-athlete participation in sports . . . . But [the Felon] Trump has also gone much further than that, working to undermine structures that were in place long before DEI or woke became familiar terms. This broader project is one that keen observers of the plans laid out in Project 2025 would have known to expect—but that many voters may not have intended and may not endorse.

In April, Trump issued an executive order that throws out the theory of disparate impact, an approach that allows policies to be assessed not just on whether their intent is to discriminate but also on whether their effect is discriminatory. Disparate impact has been a core tool for civil-rights enforcement for decades. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been hollowed out . . . Last month, the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission posted on X to solicit complaints: “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.” The administration is even trying to erode the foundational post–Civil War constitutional amendments.

Alongside these policy moves to undermine civil-rights protections, the administration has also resorted to old-fashioned racist rhetoric. The Department of Homeland Security has consistently published winking nods to core racist texts in its advertising materials, including the white-nationalist screed Which Way Western Man? My colleague David Frum reported earlier this week on a DHS post that alludes to a song popular on the far right. Quoting the song, the post read, “We’ll have our home again.”

Trump’s new frankness about the most basic civil-rights laws shows another way in which he hopes to restore MAGA’s sense of home: His administration is going to reclaim the pride of white people who believe that their country has left them behind, no matter who gets treated badly in the process.

As for "liberal" women, a column in the New York Times looks MAGA's the contempt for this demographic:

If you read conservative media, you might have heard about a new danger stalking our besieged country.

This week, Fox News warned about “organized gangs of wine moms” using “antifa tactics” against ICE. According to a column in the right-wing PJ Media, the “greatest threat to our nation” is a “group of ‘unindicted domestic terrorists’ who are just AWFL: Affluent White Liberal Women.” (The acronym is wrong, but never mind.) The Canadian influencer Lauren Chen . . . . wrote that the ideology of women like Renee Good is “almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.”

It’s as if the right is speedrunning the Martin Niemöller poem that begins, “First they came for the Communists.” ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis started with the demonization of Somali immigrants. It took only weeks for conservative demagogues to direct their venom toward the middle-class women of the Resistance. We’re now seeing an outpouring of misogynist rage driven by both political expedience and psychosexual grievance.

One reason Renee Good’s death was such a shock is that we’re not used to seeing law enforcement violence against middle-class white mothers. The citizenry has broadly recoiled; her killing, in addition to being a human tragedy, has been a public relations disaster for the administration. According to an Economist/YouGov poll, most Americans have seen videos of the shooting, and only 30 percent believe it was justified. A plurality of Americans say ICE is making cities less safe, and more people support than oppose abolishing the agency.

In the face of such widespread public revulsion, the administration and its enablers have been trying to invent a terrorist threat to justify their increasingly unpopular siege of Minneapolis. That’s why the Justice Department pushed for a criminal investigation of Good’s partner, Becca, leading six federal prosecutors to quit in protest. For authoritarian leaders, lying itself isn’t enough; they must act as if their lies are true. And the lies go far beyond Renee and Becca Good to smear the entire movement of which they were a part.

Conservatives aren’t wrong to see furious women as an obstacle to their dreams of mass deportation. . . . . . CNN reported that Renee Good served on the board of her son’s charter school, which provided links to guides about opposing ICE. ICE watches are being organized in churches and neighborhood associations. In many ways they are manifestations of local civic health.

They’re also a problem for the right. These activists both document ICE’s brutality and are often subject to it, demonstrating the casual violence that Trump’s paramilitary forces are bringing to American communities. Just this week, a woman named Patty O’Keefe described agents surrounding a car she was in, spraying chemical irritants through the vents, breaking the windows and dragging her out. She was thrown in the back of an ICE vehicle, where she said the driver taunted her: “You guys got to stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” After eight hours in detention, she said, she was released without charges.

To defend such treatment of activists — many of them women — right-wingers need to cast them as enemies of the state. The editor of the conservative National Review, Rich Lowry, wrote a column headlined, “The Anti-ICE insurgency,” describing Good almost as a suicidal militant. . . . . His language seems designed to rationalize ICE agents storming through Midwestern streets kitted out as if they’re headed into battle in Falluja.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump has now threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. . . . . no normal administration would contemplate a military response to such small-scale disorder. Trump doesn’t want to crush just criminal defiance, but the civil defiance that he wishes he could criminalize. . . . . it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy. But it also makes sense, because everyone hates an apostate. In the right-wing imagination, these women are acting like harpies — an epithet often seen online — when they’re supposed to be helpmeets.

For MAGA, ICE’s eagerness to put women in their place might be a feature, not a bug.