Most visibly, they come for the migrants
‘They’ aren’t just white Christian nationalists
I’m not wild about Jennifer Rubin’s sympathetic stereotypes of Jews as “some of [Spain’s] most educated people” in the 15th century and Muslims as “industrious workers, farmers, and craftspeople” in the 16thcentury as, she explains, Spain imagined “that national defense required ethnic and religious homogeneity,” demanding “mass atrocities” against those groups. But in this critique of a white Christian nationalist crusade to stamp out diversity in the present day,[1] there lies a larger point.
Diversity is far from limited to migrants. We can look to the pronatalist movement’s demand of women that they breed, damn it, even without adequate social supports for doing so,[2] in effect a revival of eugenics,[3] as an ideological commitment to a notion that certain people with particular characteristics (mainly success in a hypercapitalist society) should reproduce—and others should die off for lack of those social supports. We can look to the transphobic hysteria which would deny people access to restrooms as a likely precursor to attacking gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. We can talk about a white Christian nationalist “tend[ency] to identify the country as a whole with an idealized version of themselves [often white, rural, and Southern], and to equate any dissent from their values [or any difference from their social location] with disloyalty by alien, ‘un-American’ forces.”[4]
But it’s larger even than that. I remember a geography assignment to take a single photograph showing how humans use geography to reflect values. I responded to the assignment instead with a series of photographs taken along a single route beginning at 6th and Bryant Streets in San Francisco, near the “Hall of Justice” (a jail and courthouse) along 6th Street through what, at least then, was the worst part of the South of Market Area, across Market Street onto Taylor Street through the Tenderloin and up to Nob Hill.
The photographs were crude, taken on an early smartphone with a low-resolution camera—and I have long since lost them—but I made a point about the rich overlooking—and looking down upon—the poor and could have, along the way, especially with one photograph showing a severely disabled couple slowly making their way along 6th Street, made a point about how we so gleefully discard human beings.
As a one-time cab driver in The City, I have seen the desperate walking across 6th Street heedless of traffic, as if their only hope was to be hit and injured, to collect a large settlement. I have seen better off folks come down from skyscrapers in the Financial District late at night only to have to get up early in the morning to be back at their desks at 4 or 5 am; I realized then that the point was to use these people up and when, inevitably, they burned out, to throw them out. Even white collar workers, I realized, would not be spared the fate of the people I have seen in the South of Market Area and in the Tenderloin.
And we are still doing it as we threaten those workers with layoffs, attributing them to artificial idiocy and a need for ever more “productivity,”[5] and as we refuse to hire those who might in any way disrupt or even disturb the sacred status quo to such a degree that companies might be described as “tribes.”[6]
To paraphrase Martin Niemöller,[8] most visibly, they came for the migrants. But “they” are not just white Christian nationalists and “they” are coming for a lot more of us.
[1] Jennifer Rubin, “The Spanish Historical Lesson,” Contrarian, May 21, 2025, https://contrarian.substack.com/p/the-spanish-historical-lesson
[2] Lisa Hagen, “They say they want Americans to have more babies. What's beneath the surface?” National Public Radio, April 25, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/04/25/nx-s1-5371718/pronatalist-birth-rate-musk-natal-conference
[3] David Benfell, “Eugenics again,” Not Housebroken, April 29, 2025, https://www.disunitedstates.org/p/eugenics-again
[4] Kim Messick, “Modern GOP is still the party of Dixie,” Salon, October 12, 2013, https://www.salon.com/2013/10/12/modern_gop_is_still_the_party_of_dixie/
[5] Chip Cutter, “‘Everybody’s Replaceable’: The New Ways Bosses Talk About Workers,” Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2025, https://apple.news/AaadylOrQSlisIJ3bK5aNBQ
[6] Joe Procopio, “Let’s Talk About Why Job Seekers Can’t Get Jobs,” Inc., May 20, 2025, https://apple.news/AIL7QSBfwRfCU532GOcOfIA
[7] Joe Procopio, “Let’s Talk About Why Job Seekers Can’t Get Jobs,” Inc., May 20, 2025, https://apple.news/AIL7QSBfwRfCU532GOcOfIA
[8] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Martin Niemöller: ‘First they came for the Socialists...,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, April 11, 2023, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists