Opinion | It’s All Rooted in White Panic

But in Trump’s America, this threat is not the priority that it should be. At the House oversight subcommittee on civil rights and civil liberties hearing this week, McGarrity and others were grilled about why more wasn’t being done to confront this threat. The Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary, Elizabeth Neumann, would admit, “We know we’re not doing enough.”

I would counter that this administration is doing no more than it wants to do. This is its iteration of America. This violence is simply collateral damage in a greater war in which the violence isn’t written in blood but ink, in which the white power is secured, and displacement is delayed, through a fundamental restructuring of the laws around which babies get born, which addictions get treated, which bodies are allowed to immigrate or seek asylum and whose voice and votes get counted.

There are no doubt those who hold the belief, because of religion or otherwise, that a fertilized egg is a baby, and that abortion is murder. But, there are also those among that group who are concerned about demography.

As HuffPost reported, white supremacists cheered at the news that Alabama had passed its draconian anti-abortion law.

As the racist Iowa congressman, Steve King, tweeted in March of 2017, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

The proposed census changes have a similar goal: If you’re losing in the game of numbers, change the way you count.

As NPR reported on Tuesday:

“Challenges threatening the upcoming 2020 census could put more than four million people at risk of being undercounted in next year’s national head count, according to new projections by the Urban Institute. The nonpartisan think tank found that the danger of an inaccurate census could hit some of the country’s most difficult to count populations the hardest. Based on the institute’s analysis, the 2020 census could lead to the worst undercount of black and Latino and Latina people in the U.S. since 1990.”

Don’t just grouse over each individual fruit of the poison tree, also focus on the root.

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