The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 16 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We’re at a watershed moment right now. Consider what we’ve seen lately: the violent tackling and handcuffing of a Democratic U.S. senator, which met with bloodlust and excitement from MAGA media; the sending in of troops into an American city; the open suggestion from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that the troops are there to “liberate” the city from its elected leadership. We think all this highlights in a newly vivid way the deep sadism and violent lawlessness at the core of much of the MAGA movement. And Trump just unleashed a vicious new rant in which he floated a concept called “remigration,” which is a vile far-right idea often used to promote the goal of building white ethnostates. Will Sommer, a senior reporter at the Bulwark, has a great piece explaining how central online sadism is to driving the political energy of MAGA, so we’re talking to Will about all of this. Great to have you on, Will.
Will Sommer: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: Let’s start with Trump’s rant. Trump claimed Biden and Governor “Newscum,” meaning Governor Gavin Newsom, flooded America with 21 million illegal aliens, which is an invented figure. Then Trump said this, “All of them have to go home, as do countless other Illegals and Criminals, who will turn us into a bankrupt Third World Nation. America was invaded and occupied. I am reversing the Invasion. It’s called Remigration.” Will, this is seriously hardcore white nationalist rhetoric, but what’s remigration? Can you tell us?
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.
Sargent: Well, I think it’s important to note before we get to that that this vow of remigration came right after Trump admitted on Truth Social that his mass deportations are hurting farmers and the economy. My strong suspicion is that Stephen Miller, who knows how devastating an admission that was to MAGA ideology, really grasped on a deep level that the white nationalists and Trump’s base and maybe the global white nationalist movement very much needed to be reassured that Trump is fully with the remigration program. Do you agree with that? And what goes into a tweet like this one? How does the word “remigration” end up in a Trump tweet?
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?
Sargent: And I think it’s really, really, really alarming that they’re importing it into the American context in particular. I think that’s the point of it, right? America, nation of immigrants, and all that—what they’re explicitly saying is we are breaking with that definition of American identity completely. Similarly, they want to end birthright citizenship. Same idea, right? Don’t you think that’s the real goal here, which is to really make a fundamental break with Americanism as we understand it now?
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.
Sargent: And there’s a soft version of it, which finds its way into JD Vance’s GOP convention speech, which is essentially America isn’t an idea. It’s a nation. It’s a culture. It’s a place. It’s association with place and my ancestors are right there on the ground. That is, I think, a soft version of this larger set of ideas we’re talking about. What do you think?
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.
Sargent: It really, really does. I want to switch to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for a second. Here’s some audio of her talking about the troops being sent into Los Angeles. Listen to this.
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.
Sargent: Will, that’s a pretty remarkable declaration there that the troops needed to be sent in to relieve an American city of its elected leadership. This has outraged a lot of Democrats and liberals—rightly so—but what I haven’t seen discussed much is how this was received by MAGA and the online far right. I’ve got to think that’s pretty thrilling to them to hear, right?
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.
Sargent: Well, exactly. And then of course, there’s the throwing down on the ground of Senator Alex Padilla from California. It’s his own state. He was there to ask the Homeland Security secretary a question. That’s what Congress is supposed to do, right? And so he’s pushed to the ground and cuffed. That was met by a lot of excitement on the right as well, which I think is also in that place where they’re having very heady fantasies right now about military power and law enforcement being used against the left, being used against migrants in a really concerted way. What do you think they’re thinking right now about all that stuff?
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.
Sargent: Well, I think it’s doubly thrilling to them that Alex Padilla is nonwhite, right?
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.
Sargent: Right. Look, who is this guy, right? He’s another darky.
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?
Sargent: Right. What would you have done? That’s really the vibe, I think. So you you had this great piece in which you really captured how essential this sadism, hate, and bloodlust are of the online MAGA right. I want to single out one element of it though, which is that you found that there are increasing calls in that universe for a total end to migration from the third world, which I guess means no more migration from developing countries, or what?
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.
Sargent: So you just hit on something that is an obsession of mine, which is this idea of coming the right way. This is something you hear from Trumpists all the time, Just get in line, come the right way. People like Alina Habba, who’s now U.S. attorney from New Jersey and a longtime Trump ally, his personal lawyer for a while, has said something like this; herself, her parents are immigrants. But the thing about this is, Will, that they’re cutting off every “right way” to get here, right? They’re ending refugee resettlement. They’re functionally ending asylum applications. They’re canceling just about every type of legal protection that they can, creating huge new numbers of undocumented immigrants in this country who they then hope to deport. That’s to me really the essence of this, which is, Oh, look at us. Let me just put my little plastic halo up here. I just want immigrants to come the right way. And also, we’re going to close the door on every right way. Can you talk about that?
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.
Sargent: Yeah. And it’s funny because we really had the tip of that spear when they went after the Haitians and called them “dog eaters” and stuff like that. Those were people who were here legally, and JD Vance said, No, they’re not. They’re not here legally. By which he actually meant that the status that they have doesn’t count because he and Trump say so.
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.
Sargent: Yeah. And yet another right way to be here. The door is closed on that. Before that was the right way to be here; now it’s not the right way. Can you tie some of these concepts together? We have, on the one hand, Trump openly endorsing remigration. Then on the other, some in MAGA calling for an end to migration from the developing world. These are connected concepts at bottom, aren’t they? They’re really about creating white ethnostates. Now, in the American context, that’s pure fantasy obviously, but to what degree is that actually held up as the holy grail for these groups? To what degree do they really conceive of this as trying to turn the United States into a white ethnostate? And just to go back to your big point, there’s an undercurrent of deep sadism there as well, isn’t there?
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.
And the Overton window, as it were, is just constantly shifting right for them in terms of who’s allowed, even compared to the first Trump administration. They were saying, As we discussed, we want people to come here legally, we want high value immigrants, to now these huge backlashes against, for example, H1B visa immigrants, all this kind of stuff.
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?
Sommer: Yeah, I would think so. And I think there would be a lot more opposition to these policies, and that’s why they have to bill it as we’re getting rid of the criminals. By the way, they’re all criminals or very many of them are. But if you actually are targeting criminals or even people they accuse of being criminals, often wrongly as we saw with the deportations to El Salvador, that’s not getting the numbers they want because I think they want full-scale ethnic change. And that’s why a few weeks ago, Stephen Miller had all the regional heads of ICE to D.C. and said, You guys are not getting your numbers. So rather than targeting, saying, Well, I think this guy who skipped out on a on bail lives in this house, let’s go deport him, we have to just be doing mass sweeps of day laborers at Home Depot. And that, of course, is what led to the unrest in Los Angeles. So there’s clearly this effort to really step up the numbers because targeting criminals or even supposed criminals isn’t working for them.
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?
Sommer: Yeah. And to that effect, you can see the amount of the deliberate creation of the idea of terror. They’re saying, We want people to self-deport, and we’ll pay your ticket. But the implication is that if you don’t do that, maybe we’ll send you to either El Salvador and you’ll be lost in this legal limbo—or even people are being deported to South Sudan or Djibouti—and then you’ll be trapped in this shipping container in the middle of a military base. And certainly the other aspect of the terror is, of course, these random sweeps of people in areas that are popular with Latino immigrants. I was struck today; I was listening to Jack Posobiec’s podcast, and he was saying, We’re just trying to ... These are not deportation. We’re just trying to help people. They’re lost. We’re trying to help them find their way home. They don’t belong here. It was very sinister. And that is definitely the vibe they’re trying to set.
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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