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The answer like many topics is that Americans in general are not nearly as retarded as elites seem to think and their lazy attempts at doing and saying extremist unpopular things while denying it with "nuh uh that's not true" doesn't actually work well outside of the far left and far right cultists. The Biden admin forcing through progressive policies while pretending to be moderate lost them the popular vote suddenly, and the Trump administration has decided to take the same approach.
"Illegal immigration" is both a great example of the noncentral fallacy and of a motte and bailey.
When the Trump admin says it's only illegal immigration, and the DHS is talking about deporting a number equal to all non white people in the country, they undermine their claims. They have left this post up for months, it is not a mistake. Americans are not retards, people who are for removing illegal immigrants but not every minority sees this sort of thing too and gets pushed away from supporting his agenda.
Likewise when the Trump admin strips the legal status of people who came here properly, people who are against illegal immigration but for legal immigrants are also pushed away. People who see their friends/coworkers/family/etc have their spouses and children banned not because they're doing anything illegal but because the Trump admin just won't process them are able to look past the lies that it's just the "worst of the worst"
When the Trump admin continues to just straight make shit up all the time even in the Senate, people notice.
The Trump admin has repeatedly decided to appeal to the extremist online right who believes in some grand race war, instead of the independent and centrist Americans who make up the swing vote. And because they know what they're doing is unpopular among that crowd, they just lie instead. But asking the centrists and moderates to disbelieve what you are literally doing and bragging about doing doesn't work! Biden couldn't do it, and Trump can't do it now. The American people are not that stupid, and the progressives and postliberals should learn the lesson that just because you, an extremist partisan, can trick yourself into ignoring the world doesn't mean everyone else will.
Heck even Trump himself is less extremist than many of the people in his admin. He offers asylum to the Iranian woman's soccer team if Australia wouldn't take them, meanwhile the people below have pretty much completely cut off asylum and are even trying to deport people like this gal who was adopted by an American soldier, is Christian and has had her life here for 53 years. She would die in Iran just like the soccer players would, she's a Christian American to them!
When the moderate American hears criminals they're thinking people who do violent things. When they hear about illegal immigration, they want the focus on the antisocial and anti American ones. They don't want the sweet Nona across the street who got a speeding ticket 20 years ago removed to have her legal status revoked, and yet that sort of thing is what the administration is doing.
Here's some advice for the Biden and Trump admins and any future presidents to come. Instead of telling Americans you're doing popular thing Y and then doing unpopular things X, just do the Y thing! Tell your extremists to settle instead of trying to appeal to them.
People who are against illegal immigration are against it not because it is against the law, but for some other reason. Joe Biden going and flying in millions of people, immediately giving them humanitarian parole, and then giving them TPS does not actually address any of those reasons those people were concerned about. People can see that Biden used humanitarian parole / TPS in a very novel way, they can see it used as an immigration pathway,
Who here is lying? Do you have any evidence that Trump has ever said this?
From his 2024 platform he did not promise this. CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY is what it promises. I have searched and I have not found DJT promising to just deport criminals, and I have found loads of instances of him saying positions contradictory to that claim.
There is no singular explanation for the dislike of illegal immigration. There are plenty of people who are perfectly fine with legal immigrants and just want them to enter in following the rules. Most immigration restrictionist seem to believe that this is even the mainstream view among them, given the proclivity to focus on illegal immigration in discourse and staying on the down low regarding efforts to restrict legal ones.
The PR you choose to output is reflective of what you believe others want to see of you, and the PR of immigration restriction puts a large emphasis on the illegal part. Therefore they must believe it is an important distinction to the swing voters they are trying to convince.
Trump repeatedly uses the phrase "worst of the worst". They even had a website about this exact phrasing, albeit they even admit it was filled with errors. Just go ask any of the chatbots and they can give you tons of examples.
And like many things involving Trump, he changes what he says based off who is talking to and who is trying to appeal to at the time. You can't point to just one place where he says something and assume he's never contradicted it elsewhere.
The claim was that Trump has called for "JUST" the removal of the "worst of the worst". Those are your words, I even quoted them. You are not alone in making the claim, but that is your claim. That you change the claim instead of defending it with evidence indicates that you cannot defend it.
You are interpreting words to mean what you want them to mean, not what they actually mean. This website is a good example of what is going on. Here is the Trump admin, direct from the website you linked, emphasis mine:
"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is highlighting the worst of worst criminal aliens arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)."
"Under Secretary Noem's leadership, the hardworking men and women of DHS and ICE are fulfilling President Trump's promise and carrying out mass deportations - starting with the worst of the worst - including the illegal aliens you see here."
They say they are starting with the worst of the worst. They never say they will just deport the worst of the worst. They say they are doing the opposite of just going after the worst of the worst, they are carrying out mass deportations.
The slight of hand here is that you are misconstruing "highlighting the worst of the worst" as "just the worst of the worst." Highlighting does not imply exclusivity. Does a highlighter block out everything on a page not highlighted?
ChatGPT says that you are reading framing from media and not Trump's actual words:
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"Temporary actually means permanent" and "Biden's psycho paroling should be permanent" continue to be terrible positions and give away the game that most complaints about immigration from the left are salami-slicing at best.
One president can do what they want and it can never be undone is not a good policy. Everything flip-flopping on a 4 to 8 year basis isn't great policy either, of course.
That more or less Denmark alone has managed this really begs the question of why its so difficult.
I guess Japan just elected what's supposedly their most right-wing government since before The War suggests it's not technically just Denmark, but may also suggest America is past some tipping point where it was possible.
Believe what you want about refugees but people who followed the rules as they were at the time are categorically not "illegal immigrants", and trying to motte and bailey the topic is not a successful PR strategy. The moderate swing voting Americans are not partisan brained enough to turn off their critical thinking like that.
Well one issue that we see with the Biden and Trump admins is that they're often more moderate than the people working under them. The extremists get into positions of power and work for approval from their social media tribes, blinding them to the worsening popularity. A captain isn't liable to remain popular if he can't stop the crew from pillaging, like if Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor while the merry men snuck behind back and beat the children up.
That's not quite what I said, either.
That they followed the rules of the time does not mean the rules of the time made any sense, or that the rules of the time must never be undone.
LOL you were alive in 2020, they absolutely are willing to turn off their critical thinking, or at least stay quiet and in hiding so the outcome is the same.
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Non of the asylum seekers followed the law. It was being abused by the Biden administration. Non of them were ever true asylum seekers. It’s a word cell game they played.
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This was an interesting claim, so I clicked. The post says "America after 100 million deportations" which is a bit shy of the 150 million nonwhites in the States. It's also a bit more than the estimated 10ish illegal immigrants. One must imagine the white supremacist DHS poster to be mathematically challenged.
Yeah this is what I get from ChatGPT at least to double check it
However including white Hispanics does bump it up to around 140 million apparently. It's impossible to say that it means this implication, but it's still an example of how extremist rhetoric is put out by the admin underlings. It's not just "the libs" you get with the Epic Trolling, tons of normies and moderates will see it too and update a little away from supporting you. Likewise with Laura Loomer's statement of feeding all the Hispanics in the country to crocodiles
The left wing extremists often push the moderates back with their own nonsense, but the ones in power tend to be the people most in danger if they can't control their rhetoric and behavior. Biden never learned this lesson, and it doesn't look like Trump intends to learn anytime soon. Even now while they are attempting to moderate out a little, it's only after all this extremist content already got pumped out and it still is upsetting the partisan fringes who are trying to lobby for more extremism.
The issue is that an administration that tries to be popular with the normies and moderates is an admin that the partisans don't really like that much. You have to be willing to upset your own group some knowing that they'll be loyal for you anyway and appeal to the centrists.
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Per the Census, if you exclude multiracial people who identify as both white and another race from "non-white" it goes down from 144 million to 113 million. Note that people who identify as both white and hispanic are already included in "white alone", counting all hispanics as non-white raises it to 160 million. So we're hypothesizing a DHS white-supremacist who thinks Barack Obama is white and then rounds from 113 to 100. I'm guessing the "dogwhistle for number of non-whites" claim was from someone who looked at a "whites in U.S." statistic that included multiracial people, falsely assumed it could be subtracted from the U.S. population to get the number of non-whites, and then thought 113 million was close enough.
Presumably the actual explanation is that "100 million" is a big round number chosen without any reference to actual statistics as a hyperbolic way of saying "more deportations good". It could say "1 Billion Deportations" and the meaning would be the same. Also I very much doubt that accusations of twitter dogwhistles are having much impact on people's opinions on the Trump administration at this point.
Damn it, I'll bite.
Is he not? He's the son of a black (absent) Nigerian father and a white mother. He was raised by her, his grandparents, and for a time an Indonesian stepfather. He has not, so far as I can make out, any experience at all of his father's culture or homeland. He was not raised 'typically' black as the majority of African-Americans were (Michelle was very important to him as being authentically African-American background and able to introduce him to that).
If you can be black with one white parent, why can't you be white with one black parent, if your upbringing was functionally white as a white child?
(The above is not seriously meant).
Because despite both political sides complaining that it's stupid (with different reasoning), the One Drop Rule seems as powerful as ever.
By that rule, we already had a black President: Warren Harding.
Warren "O.G." Harding
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I joked in 2012 that we hadn't really had a black president until Obama got reelected, as the first term only gave us half of one.
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