- Signalgate and white mediocrity;
- How we are seeing tribal impulses eroding the high ideals designed to overcome them;
- How the Trump administration is indifferent to refugees… except for whites from South Africa;
- Jill Lawrence at The Bulwark about Trump’s bid to whitewash American history;
- Short items about RFK, National Review, and Paul Krugman about how MAGA is bad for business.
I’m mentioned white supremacy a couple times. It’s seemed to me that the goal of DOGE is to reinstate white supremacy, that DEI is bad because it treats the entire nation’s population as worthy of consideration, while Trump and MAGA care only about whites, and everyone else should be disappeared.
Here’s one result.
Salon, Rann Miller, 31 Mar 2025: Signalgate is a consequence of anti-DEI hysteria, subtitled “White mediocrity has become a national security risk”
Beginning with a prominent example, which most people have probably forgotten about.
Lloyd Austin, the former defense secretary and a four-star general with 40 years of military experience, was nonetheless labeled a DEI hire of the Biden administration. Pete Hegseth, the current secretary of defense, lacks adequate expertise and experience, on top of the fact that he’s had allegations of sexual assault and is known as an excessive drinker. A former National Security Council member and a Senate member deemed Hegseth unqualified for the position. However, according to Donald Trump, Hegseth had a tremendous track record that qualified him for the position.
The MAGA crowd called for Austin to resign because he failed to share that he had an emergency medical procedure, yet they explain away Hegseth’s failure to keep the details of a war plan confidential. Clearly, the ability to keep a secret wasn’t a qualification for Hegseth to get the job as defense secretary. What Signalgate, the recent scandal involving the Trump administration discussing war plans in a text thread with a journalist mistakenly added to the conversation, made abundantly clear is that the only qualification for Hegseth is that he was what Mishel Williams calls WEI: white, entitled and incompetent.
WEI: white, entitled, and incompetent. This is where we are.
One more bit, with a famous line from LBJ.
What this scandal shows is that the practice of hiring unqualified and mediocre white people — and calling it making America great — can, and has, compromised national security. And yet, many white people are so convinced that Black people and other people of color are wholly unqualified to lead, specifically those who don’t think like or act like them.
Donald Trump has reinforced that belief, proving Lyndon B. Johnson right when Johnson said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” I guess you can call Donald Trump the pick-pocketing pied piper… say that three times fast.
Once again, this isn’t about America and MAGA and white supremacy per se so much as it’s an illustration of how tribal impulses can erode the high ideals designed to overcome them. It can happen, and has happened, anytime and everywhere. It’s part of human nature. This seems to be a fundamental limitation of our species.
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Trump’s US is indifferent to refugees, except for the white ones.
NY Times, 31 Mar 2025: ‘Mission South Africa’: How Trump Is Offering White Afrikaners Refugee Status, subtitled “The United States has banned most refugees, including 20,000 people who were already ready to travel to the United States before President Trump took office. But Mr. Trump is making one exception.” [Gift link via JMG]
The Trump administration has thrown open the doors to white Afrikaners from South Africa, establishing a program called “Mission South Africa” to help them come to the United States as refugees, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
…
The administration’s focus on white Afrikaners comes as it effectively bans the entry of other refugees — including about 20,000 people from countries like Afghanistan, Congo and Syria who were ready to travel to the United States before Mr. Trump took office. In court filings about those other refugees, the administration has argued that core functions of the refugee program had been “terminated” after the president’s ban, so it did not have the resources to take in any more people.
…
“There’s no subtext and nothing subtle about the way this administration’s immigration and refugee policy has obvious racial and racist overtones,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice. “While they seek to single out Afrikaners for special treatment, they simultaneously want us to think mostly Black and brown vetted newcomers are dangerous despite their background checks and all evidence to the contrary.”
So… is this not the implementation of white supremacy by MAGA?
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What, I wonder, is the Venn Diagram overlap between white supremacy and whitewashing?
The Bulwark, Jill Lawrence, 30 Mar 2025: Trump’s Latest Bid to Rewrite Reality, subtitled “From the Smithsonian to statues, he wants to whitewash America’s past.”
… I’ve been fuming over Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order to disappear from our “national attic” all evidence of “woke,” mistakes, and regret, and restore monuments that honor people and events on the wrong side of history’s moral line.
This one short document hyperfocused on the Smithsonian Institution is just 1,150 words, but it is towering in its Stalinesque ambition to walk back history and whitewash America’s past.
So, with thanks to my high school English teachers for having shown me the importance of unpacking language, here’s a close reading of this order.
Let’s start with the title, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” As with most things Trump and MAGA, including another recent pronouncement about “preserving and protecting the integrity of American elections,” it says exactly the opposite of what it means. In both cases, the goal is to mute or silence voices Trump disagrees with.
A lengthy piece, as she reads her way through the order. One more bit.
The most glaring error in this passage, the one that reveals it to be garbage, is the word “irredeemably.” America is anything but irredeemable. Time and again, we have confronted, corrected, and even transcended our tragic errors. That is how we have achieved our advances in “liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.”
The irony here is that Trump—along with Elon Musk, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and many others in his administration—is right now doing tremendous damage to liberty, individual rights, and human happiness. Abducting immigrants and throwing them into foreign prisons? Thoughtlessly firing government experts? Kicking patriotic transgender service members out of the armed forces? Gutting government grants on science? It’s not our historians and museum curators who are weaving that tale of woe and misery.
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Shorter items, with comments but not quotes. Ok, one quote.
- JMG from WSJ: WSJ: “Our Worst Fears About RFK Are Coming True”
- Even National Review, the most conservative of the major magazines, has issues with Trump. Jeffrey Blehar, 31 Mar 2025: Where Do You Draw the Line?, subtitled “While I concede the legality of the administration’s move against Rumeysa Öztürk, I reject its morality and prudence.” Comment: this is about the woman abducted in broad daylight…
- Paul Krugman, 31 Mar 2025: MAGA is Bad for Business, subtitled “And business owners were deluded to believe otherwise” OK, I will quote a key fact that most people don’t know, or deny.
One odd feature of U.S. politics is that businesspeople, especially small business owners, always seems to believe that they will do better under Republicans, even though history shows that business does better under Democrats. Small business owners supported Trump in the last election, despite ample evidence that he would be very bad for business.
I have more, but I’ll save them…
