Notes from the US: Overtly racist methods

Kidnapping continues at some of the highest rates ever. Abuse, assault, and general violence by ICE agents – especially against activists and women. US-citizen children are being abducted and sent to countries like Haiti. This, as racist oppression in the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio (the town singled out for supremacist lies by Trump and Vance before the election) increases.

In similar vein, the Trump cult has now revoked the Temporary Protected Status (TPS – the humanitarian protection provision available since the 1990 Immigration Act for those coming from countries, return to which would be too dangerous or life-threatening). This can be presumably seen as a way for the cult to facilitate the mass death by ‘proxy’ abroad of most guest-workers and refugees in the US – so great must be cult members’ hatred and fear of non-white families.

It emerged last month that, after ICE murdered bystanders in St Paul, Minnesota in January, the Department of Homeland Security almost immediately began to ‘investigate’ left-leaning groups which are likely to oppose such events.

A similar approach is being applied with increasing pressure to the SLPC (Southern Poverty Law Center) for its work on hate groups and racist organisations. Last month for instance, the Center’s former chief financial officer, Heidi Beirich, was arrested on charges attempting to silence SPLC’s work.

Last month, the US State Department announced that it would from now on discontinue, stamp out, and otherwise defeat (not their actual words, of course) any and all efforts to welcome, accommodate, value, and otherwise accept non-white, disabled, non-heterosexual, etc. members of staff. The announcement eliminates and/or bans already available (re)sources and specifically mandates that initiative to promote equity, diversity, tolerance and inclusion be stopped. Overtly racist methods will be used instead.

Racism, the insistence that only whites belong in the US, is fully ingrained in the Trump/MAGA cult. For instance, Byron Donalds, the fascist candidate for Governor in Florida, and (Florida being what it is) the likely winner for that position in November’s midterm elections, told MSNow that the reason for the increase in measles in children had nothing to do with Trump’s lies about the lethal nature of vaccinations, but because of the influx of immigrants.

The following week, quack secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert Kennedy, accused authorities in Pennsylvania of lying about the recent measles deaths there; Kennedy, Trump and MAGA in general, of course, are wildly anti-vax too and consistently downplay the many adverse effects of failing to use them in healthcare.

A report published earlier this month indicates that almost ten million people have lost their healthcare coverage as a result of the so-called ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)’ passed by Congress in July last year.

As part of their sadistic bad faith towards the public, the Trump administration announced last month that they will discontinue those parts of the Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, which provide gender-affirming care for transgender youth. These include cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and transition-related surgeries. Tens of thousands of teenagers will no longer have life-saving transition care.

Also in health, the largest trade union of registered nurses in the US, National Nurses United (NNU), has launched a campaign for hospitals to end contracts and partnerships with Palantir because of the latter’s participation in the genocide in Gaza.

And something about Trump’s own health. If almost any other world figure did what he did over the Labor Day weekend last week…well…

‘Notes from the US’ has often drawn attention to the lawlessness of the MAGA/Trump cult. It could hardly have a better (though not life-or-death) example than when the Trump-packed board of the Kennedy Center in New York last month simply defied the ruling effectively saying, We’re not going either to take down the tarpaulin and reveal that workers have removed Trump’s name or to follow your legally-binding directive that we should not rename the centre, whose name can only be changed by Congress – something which has not happened.

The environment as a concern for us all is totally missing in public discourse – except, perhaps, as a way to mock the fear-mongering ‘commies’, listening to whom and their hoaxes would deprive us of our freedoms.

It ought to come as no surprise that no news or commentary, analysis, updates or interviews with experts appear on any media outlet. It’s not an issue in the polls. Events like the landslide in Nepal are dealt with briefly but with no reference at all to the warming of glaciers, which caused that huge loss of life.

(Instead of assigning the cause of the many disastrous climate ‘events’ this summer to climate collapse, in January 2025 Trump cut a contribution to monitoring such hazards when he began his second term.)

For two decades the Arctic Report Card has long been the flagship indicator of climate collapse in the Earth’s north. Last month Trump ended federal funding for the project as part of their climate-lying push. Responses from informed sources stated the obvious: former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad called the move, “…imposing ignorance on the system…”; “…it’s like not allowing your primary care doctor to tell you how you’re doing. Taking away the checkup doesn’t stop the changes from happening…” (Melody Brown Burkins, Dartmouth College professor and polar researcher).

If unchallenged and/or if any challenges are unsuccessful, the MAGA cult will open almost 45 million acres (the rough equivalent of the size of countries like Cambodia, Syria or Uruguay) of wilderness the construction of highways and the destruction caused by logging. Senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Drew McConville, pointed out that “By ripping protections from some of our oldest intact forests, the Trump administration is endangering the drinking water supplies of tens of millions and threatening wildlife habitats and recreation opportunities in almost every state.”

This month the National Interagency Fire Center released data showing that there have been well over 50,000 wildfires in the United States burning over eight million acres of land; roughly the area of Belgium. The response of the MAGA/Trump gang has been to sack thousands of firefighters, deny the issue and reduce the number of research bodies preparing for fires by nearly three quarters. Climate lying at its most dangerous.

But then you can also now get sacked – it seems – for explaining to members of the ‘forces’ merely that humans play a role in ‘climate change’.

Some potentially vaguely good news: when Trump largely destroyed the work of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the start of his second term with the help of fellow fascist, Elon Musk, and their failed ‘DOGE’ fiasco, a group of scientists was sacked because they worked on climate ‘change’. The scientists, though, kept the data, and the conviction that the public should know about the crisis. Their new site is Climate.us. Worth a visit.

Photo: Molly Riley, The White House on Flickr