At his campaign rally in Florida on Saturday, Trump took some heat for suggesting that there had been a terrorist attack in Sweden last week.
It turns out that when he referred to “last night,” he was talking about a segment on Fox News, not what happened in Sweden.
He added another tweet this morning.
In case you’re interested, here is the Fox News segment Trump was referring to:
It is becoming clear that Fox News should probably be paying the president a marketing fee for how often he uses their spin to generate headlines. This isn’t the first time. But as is so often the case on Fox, the fear mongering from Tucker Carlson about the way immigrants are creating havoc in Sweden isn’t connected to anything factual. Here is the latest report on crime trends in that country.
What is interesting to note about all of this is the way both Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump are playing right out of the Steve Bannon white nationalist playbook. And the target isn’t simply immigrants. It is particularly focused on demonizing people who are refugees.
Take a look at something that shocked me when it showed up on my Facebook page.
The individual who posted that wrote this comment:
LOOKS TO ME LIKE IMMIGRANTS WOULD BE BLENDED INTO SOCIETY LIKE ALL OUR FOREFATHER DID INSTEAD OF LOOKING TO SET UP THEIR OWN LITTLE AREAS OF INFLUENCE LIKE THE REFUGEES ARE DOING…
I have no idea what this person is talking about when he refers to “their own little areas of influence” and I doubt he has any actual facts to back that up. But it’s worth noting that both D’Souza and the commenter are singling out refugees as the major threat/problem.
As for that quote from D’Souza, it is blatantly false.
Following the admission of over 250,000 displaced Europeans, the first refugee legislation was enacted by the U.S. Congress — the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. This legislation provided for the admission of an additional 400,000 displaced Europeans. Later laws provided for admission of persons fleeing Communist regimes, largely from Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Korea and China, and in the 1960’s Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro arrived en masse.
Following the Vietnam War, most refugees to the United States came from Indochina. Most recently, of course, they have been coming from the Middle East and Northern Africa. The big difference we’re seeing in refugees since World War II and the Cold War is that, since the 1970’s, they have not been white.
For people like Steve Bannon who think that national identity either here or in Europe is tied to whiteness, that makes modern-day refugees a threat. And so they are being viciously demonized…the very people who are fleeing violence and oppression.
