A good piece by historian Carl Zimmer
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Crucially, the Right’s desire to purge is not confined to the national story. They also dream of cleansing the nation from anyone they believe does not belong.
The central promise of Trump’s election campaign is to conduct an unprecedented mass deportation. To do this, Trump and white nationalist purge-planner-in-chief Stephen Miller envision the creation of a deportation force larger than the U.S. military, sweeping the country, rounding up anyone they can get their hands on. This isn’t empty campaign rhetoric either: Russell Vought, the guy who is chiefly responsible for Project 2025’s “180-day Playbook,” has proudly admitted that he has been preparing the executive orders to turn those mass deportation fantasies into reality as quickly as possible.
A few months ago, Trump said he wanted to deport 15 million people, then 20 million … the number keeps escalating. The exact number is not important, but the magnitude is: The estimated number of undocumented people in the country is far lower, and the rightwingers know it. What they are planning is a purge of the nation that will not be confined to undocumented people. Miller has been talking about “denaturalization” for a long time. And rightwing thinkers openly fabulate about the need to go much further. In an infamous essay titled “Conservatism is no longer enough,” published in Claremont’s online magazine in the spring of 2021, Glen Ellmers outlined a vision of redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and excluding over half the population: Anyone who is not an “authentic American,” as he put it – literally every single Democratic voter. In his view, people who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” were simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic.
Such extreme ideas are fully in line with the type of blood-and-soil nationalism that has taken over the Right: The allegiance to the “real American” homeland overrides all else, and those who undermine it must not be tolerated. Legal status is irrelevant, citizenship is always conditional. There is an enemy within – the globalist elites, the “woke” ruling class, the radical Left – that is responsible for the assault on the homeland. This enemy is aiding America’s foes abroad, in cahoots with China, and undermining the strength of the nation by “flood(ing) this country with millions of illegal aliens,” as J.D. Vance claimed in his Convention speech. Propagating Great Replacement, all the way down. For the homeland to be made safe for “real Americans,” the enemy within must be purged too
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