“GIVE US YOUR RACISTS…”

Trump rethinks the Statue of Liberty

May 15, 2025

IT IS A cold and snowy winter’s day, and children are bundled up at school. The headmaster speaks to a teacher who then explains to her class that she must leave. She calls out the names of two girls, asking them to come with her. The small group walks quickly to the courtyard where other children are anxiously waiting. The Nazis are coming, and these children are Jewish and at risk. A young maquisard in the French Resistance is waiting to lead them into the forest to hide. He tells the children to stay very quiet and to run very fast.

But a horrible, mean boy, who has already made slurs against Jews to one of these girls, cracks open his classroom window and calls out to the Nazis that the children are still on the grounds. The soldiers take their dogs and go after them.

This is a sad and sweet movie called White Bird, which stars Helen Mirren and Gillian Anderson. As I watched this terrible scene of human cruelty, I thought, That boy would be Donald Trump. He would be the one to gleefully inform on his classmates. He would be the one to become a young Nazi malice, an eager collaborator with all the evil in the world.

You forget many things in life, but you never forget kindness…It stays with you forever.
Vive l’humanite!
--Sara Blum in White Bird

There is certainly no kindness in this administration. Humanitarian values don’t fit a guy who wants his image to be that of a Mob Boss. That vicious expression on Trump’s face is one he must have spent many hours looking in the mirror perfecting.

TRUMP’S MAGA AGENDA isn’t actually designed to make anything great, but is instead aimed at hurting the most vulnerable among us. I’m thinking of the thousands, if not millions, of people who will die from the lack of USAID—and if these horrendous cuts from Medicaid go through….

House Republicans have unveiled the cost-saving centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” at least $880 billion in cuts largely to Medicaid to help cover the cost of $4.5 trillion in tax breaks…Democrats warn that millions of Americans will lose coverage. A preliminary estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the proposals would reduce the number of people with health care by 8.6 million over the decade.

It is sickening. I can’t stand the malice. Over and over again, what we’re shown by our president and his people—pretty much the entire GOP—is their hatefulness, their spitefulness, their bitterness, their vengefulness, and their ill intentions toward the non-MAGA among us, with special cruelty directed at those who need communal help—which, at one time or another, is all of us.

Paul Krugman said:

Millions of low-income Americans would lose health coverage; millions would go hungry. Many of those suffering would be children. The purpose of these cuts, sadism aside, would be to partially offset the cost of huge tax cuts for the rich — cuts that would still explode the budget deficit. The cruelty is mind-boggling.

He went on to say that the assault on renewable energy is even worse. Fossil fuels would receive billions in subsidies. What is it about protecting our planet that these Congresspeople and some of our citizens don’t comprehend? Are we that ignorant and/or hateful as a nation?

I keep seeing an image of Trump as a fat, ugly constellation-sized baby, throwing a cosmic tantrum—banging the planets together, mowing down the stars, destroying everything he can until he’s wrecked the whole Universe.

Trump, his staff, and the MAGA diehards—with support from a malignant Republican Congress—always lead with their misogyny, their racism, their disdain for the poor and disabled, and their absolute contempt for families, single mothers, children, and babies—the ones that are actually born.

No matter what they tell themselves, the “Christian” nationalists who designed Project 2025 policies that are being put in place are anything but Christian. Not in the true sense of Christ’s actions and words of compassion and love. The Christian nationalist creed preaches intolerance, judgment, bias, and hate.

Remarkable Baptist preacher Rev. Dr. Ben Boswell in Charlotte, North Carolina—a Southerner—found a path within his faith to lead progressively with acceptance and compassion. One of my Facebook friends sent me a video of one of his wonderful sermons, and my husband and I watched it with one ear bud each on a train from NYC to Fredericksburg, VA. But after Trump’s November election, the Rev. Dr. Ben Boswell was pushed out of his Myers Park Baptist Church because of his heavy focus on social and racial justice.

New York just published a piece titled The Christians Who Believe Empathy Is A Sin. When Suffering is Irrelevant, Anything can Be Justified. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. When I lived in France, my late friend the very clever and irrepressible Joe Bageant (I highly recommend you follow this link) told me even then that we were in a class war and getting people to vote against their best interests was part of it. And he was right. What else can one call running on a platform of stopping diversity, equity, and inclusion? Firing all the women and black experts? Replacing accomplished and competent civil servants with incompetent bigots who have no idea how to do those jobs? Removing books from libraries and erasing mentions and artifacts in history because they relate to people MAGA pathetically feels threatened by? The goal is to enshrine racism, misogyny, and intolerance.

To top it off, at a time when Trump has virtually stopped immigration—and is hunting down legal immigrants who are in process of completing their requirements and instead cruelly sending them away without due process—he has invited 59 white South Africans (Afrikaners) here as refugees. What a joke. Racism exists everywhere in the world, but white people are not the ones who bear the brunt of it.

a stained glass window with a bird on it — Photo by David Bumgardner on Unsplash

The Episcopal Church has ended its decades-old partnership with our government in moral opposition to this cruel act when so many real refugees have been waiting so long under dire circumstances. And the South African government has said the group were not suffering any such persecution that would merit refugee status.

But let’s see…Elon Musk grew up in South Africa, where his mother’s family immigrated from Canada to live in apartheid society, and his grandfather was involved with organizations that were antisemitic and pro-Nazi. So white supremacy seems right up Musk’s alley. And then there’s billionaire Peter Theil, who also grew up in South Africa. Could this be the reason we’re seeing Afrikaner refugees?

The South Africa into which Musk was born in 1971, and to which Thiel moved as a child from Germany, was led by a prime minister, John Vorster, who had been a general in a fascist militia three decades earlier that allied itself with Hitler.
The Ossewabrandwag (OB) was founded shortly before the second world war. It opposed South Africa entering the war as an ally of Britain and plotted with German military intelligence to assassinate the prime minister, Jan Smuts, as a prelude to an armed uprising in support of Hitler.
Vorster made no secret of his sympathy for Nazi, or National Socialist, ideology which he compared to the Afrikaner political philosophy of Christian nationalism.

The best headline I’ve seen about the new American Pope, Leo XIV, is by Noah Berlatsky of Public Notice: “The new pope is latest sign that the world rejects Trumpism.” I’m all in. And I agree. One can see from his canon of Christian work that this Pope cares about the people who Trump is hunting down like animals. Pope Leo’s Christianity is in front of us and palpable.

Again, do you see how it all fits together? Back to what Berlatsky calls “christofascist nationalism.”

In short, the new pope, like the old pope, does not support MAGA’s christofascist nationalism. MAGA, confronted with the fact that they do not control everything or everyone, responded in their usual fashion — by wailing and gnashing their teeth.
Trump’s former chief strategist, gutter propagandist Steve Bannon, said “it is shocking to me that a guy could be selected to be the pope that had the twitter feed and the statements he's had against American senior politicians.” Conspiracy theorist and Trump intimate Laura Loomer shouted on social media that Leo was a “WOKE MARXIST POPE.” Rabid Trump supporter and former crypto CEO Ryan Selkis accused Leo of “suicidal empathy” and of being an “American who mostly posts en español.”
Popes are, of course, not generally disqualified for criticizing American political figures. Nor are they disqualified for demonstrating empathy or speaking Spanish. Still, the Vatican had to know that selecting an American, reform-minded, pro-immigrant pope would be perceived by Trump and his followers as a rebuke.

NATIVE AMERICANS ARE the only natives of this continent. But despite our limitation and exclusion of immigration to Asians between 1875 to 1965, the United States of America has long been known as a nation of immigrants—at least for white Europeans, which is all of us with white skin. We’ve all read stories, seen movies, even known people who experienced persecution and came here desperate for a new life. Immigrants landed on Ellis Island with aspiration and hope for a better future, and Ellis Island gave solace to 12 million souls.

The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening The World) was designed by sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and its metal framework built by Gustave Eiffel. It was then given to us by France to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence as well as to celebrate the close relationship of France and America not to mention the liberty that the end of slavery implied. Lady Liberty anchors New York Harbor with what has been a shining reception to those arriving by sea, seeing her, experiencing the idea of freedom here. Symbols are an important cultural tool.

To raise money to construct a base for the statue, Emma Lazarus wrote her famous poem The New Colossus to welcome and embrace the new arrivals who were escaping oppression.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

For nearly a century and a half, Lady Liberty has been seen as the “Mother of Exiles.” Now Trump, the “Father of Persecution,” is rewriting that history:

“Give me your racists, your criminal, your mean
White supremacists waiting to inflict fear,
The wretched refuse of your teeming boors.
Send these, the cruel miscreants to me,
I hide my lamp behind the closed, locked door!”

Please send any questions or comments, so our community can address and respond to them.

Peace. We are one.

A Liberal Southern Woman by Beth Arnold

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