Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Will Sommer: Thanks for having me.
Sommer: Yeah, remigration is a concept from the European far right that, to be honest, until a few weeks ago, I wasn’t familiar with either. But basically, in the European conception of it, it’s this idea of they’re looking around and they’re saying, OK, we’re going to send these people who are often maybe refugees or people from nonwhite countries who have immigrated to our countries back to their countries. And I think the key here—the thing to understand—is these are not just people who are on temporary refugee status. They’re talking about people who were born in those countries who are not white, people who are otherwise completely legal citizens of those countries, and they’re talking about sending them back to whatever their imagined previous homeland was. So the idea that Trump is picking up this language, I think, is very ominous, as you said.
Sommer: Well, it’s odd, right? Because it is a relatively idiosyncratic term. It’s not one that’s really part of our discourse in this country. You might say, I think it would make sense if Trump was saying “deportations.” That’s something we know about. But saying “remigration” suggests to me that whoever wrote that tweet is really steeped in far-right stuff globally, a Steve Bannon–, Stephen Miller–type who is taking ideas from other countries and saying, What are these other white countries doing and talking about? Essentially, what’s ethnic cleansing?
Sommer: Yeah, I think that’s right on. I think that all of these efforts aimed at immigrants or the anti-DEI stuff [are] aimed at making the concept of who is an American very specifically—I believe they’ll call them something like “heritage Americans,” and essentially, they’re saying white people—and denaturing the idea of Americans as people of many color or ethnic groups. So it’s making it like white people are the real Americans and everyone else is here on their suffering.
Sommer: Yeah, I think JD Vance is really at the vanguard of this thinking. It’s funny you bring up JD Vance. One thing that’s become a big argument on the far right lately is that they’re trying to suggest that someone doesn’t really belong in America. They say, Well, let’s look up your last name in the Civil War registry and see if anyone in your last name fought in the Civil War, the Revolutionary War. And in an interview recently, JD Vance said, Oh, you know, there are these registries where you can look up your surname. So it seems like he’s really keyed into those discussions.
Kristi Noem (audio voiceover): We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city.
Sommer: Yeah. Look, it’s one step closer to the idea of using troops against American citizens or using them against Democrats. It is remarkable, saying essentially that if she had her druthers, Los Angeles would be under military occupation. I think the online right, as far as I’ve seen, obviously [has] been very delighted by the idea of sending troops into Los Angeles. The idea that it was initially the National Guard [is] exciting, but the real stuff is when the Marines are sent in. So I think that’s the further step here in terms of the administration’s.... It’s almost this idea that they’re criminalizing being a liberal or being a Democrat. You see this with people saying or Democratic lawmakers saying, Well, maybe we want to ban ICE from wearing masks, for example, and Tom Homan saying, Maybe we should prosecute people who even advocate for that kind of law.
Sommer: Yeah, I think the key thing to understand about what’s called “the new right” is the idea [that] the Republicans of the past, as they see it, were too tied to the Constitution or to niceties or to the idea of a classical liberal consensus of you take power, we take power, we share power, even though we disagree. Whereas now JD Vance is the friendly face of this, but it’s represented by more extremist elements, including Peter Thiel, people like that. They say, Yeah, when we get power, we’re going to use it against our political enemies. And we don’t care about things like the Constitution or the First Amendment or traditional respect given to opposing legislators. We are just going to use it to crush our opponents to the extent that we can.
Sommer: Yeah. You can see that the defense of this from the Noem camp is this idea that, Who knows what that guy was up to? You had this guy in there. He blundered into the room. He could have been a shooter. Who knows? They had to do everything including pushing him out of the room and cuffing him.
Sommer: Yeah. Right. It is this element of like, How are we to look at this guy? How are we to know he wasn’t a dangerous assailant?
Sommer: Yeah. So what we saw right after the the ICE raids in Los Angeles and then the protests was a lot of the.... In my piece, I call them the “leading thinkers of the right.” Some [might go], Wow, Leading thinkers, but that really is what they are. These are people like Jack Posobiec, Charlie Kirk, Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire. All of a sudden, they came out in a perhaps coordinated effort to call for a ban on migration from the “Third World,” including legal migration. And so for me, that marked a change because typically we’re used to even really hawkish Republicans on immigration saying, People just have to come the right way. Just wait in line, come legally, whatever. But this is a couple steps further—and they don’t define what the “Third World” is, but I think we can assume that it would be basically a total ban on nonwhite immigration.
Sommer: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s in keeping with this idea that that’s been promoted on the right that immigrants in general are a drain on the country—that they don’t provide anything—and, again, going back to the idea that Americanness is whiteness. As you said, they’ve closed off the methods of getting here legally as it were, and they’re trying to extend any effort to get people out of the country if they are here legally as well. And so I do think that that’s happening more and more.
Sommer: Yeah. And you know what? I’m glad you bring that up because I think that was an important moment in which they said essentially, If I don’t like the program that lets them be here legally, that means they are illegal. And I think that’s certainly something we’re seeing as the administration now revokes a lot of those programs.
Sommer: Yeah. Look, in a way, it can sound alarmist to say, These people are focused on making white Americans at most modestly the prime Americans or making white being what American is. And yet they do all these things that suggest that’s exactly the plan. Charlie Kirk, who’s the avatar of young Republicanism, very closely tied with the Trump administration and the family, posted a video of a peaceful all-white small town and he said, It’s so peaceful, I wonder why that could be, with the implication that well, there’s no minorities there. And this is, you can see, also a popular meme there; they say, All these European countries, they want the people to look white when they visit, all these things. And so it doesn’t take that long for them to them look at the U.S. and say, This should be a white country as well. So I do think that that is very much on the agenda for a lot of these prominent right-wing figures.
Sargent: And Trump has been actually pretty direct about this, although I think it was in private. It was reported that during his first term, he said no more migrants from shithole countries, by which he meant developing countries, right? And he said something like, I want people from Northern Europe. So I guess we’re going back to the 1920s or earlier, right? How do we get out of this? I think at bottom, if the center of the country, if the middle of the country, if moderates and independents understood that these core concepts are really what’s driving Trump, they’d recoil. Now Trump and Stephen Miller know that, so they sell it all as we’re just going after criminals. But isn’t it true that if the center of the country understood what the real game plan here is—what’s really driving them, the real hateful, sadistic, ideological core of this—that it would be a lot harder for someone like Trump to get elected president? Wouldn’t it?
Sargent: I just want to underscore the point of what you said there, which is that when Stephen Miller shrieks wildly at ICE officials and tells them get out to a Home Depot or a 7-Eleven and scoop up three dozen migrants immediately, he’s consciously and deliberately saying go after the noncriminals, not just the criminals. And he’s consciously and deliberately shifting resources away from going after serious criminals and toward going after noncriminals precisely because it’s the only way to get the numbers up for his white nationalist purposes. Can you close out on that for us, explain it?
Sargent: And that’s what the president is really all about, folks. That’s about as naked a description of it as I’ve ever heard. Will Sommer, thanks so much for coming on. It was alarming stuff, but certainly edifying.
Sommer: Yeah. Thanks for having me on.
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