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  Nationalism is one of the major currents in US society that is wearing away the roots of their democratic nation.  The capitalist 1%’ers are using their political and media distractors in a desperate ploy to place the blame for working classes on immigrants and people who are not white.

Blaming the ‘other’ for your country’s problems is chapter one material in the corporatist manual.  It so much easier to blame people with non-white skin for taking away our jobs than admit that the system we have in place systematically eliminates well paying jobs (via outsourcing or technological advancement) in pursuit of profit and efficiency.

We can see the roots of this game plan in what Trump and Bannon are on record as saying:

     “President Donald Trump’s special adviser Steve Bannon has long disparaged South Asian high-tech workers such as Kuchibhotla and Madasani. In 2015, Bannon interviewed candidate Trump on the Breitbart News Daily radio show. Bannon suggested that there were far too many Asians in the high-tech industry in the U.S. and that perhaps there should be barriers placed on their entry. The H-1B visa, which allows high-tech workers to enter the U.S., is a particular grouse of Bannon’s. Trump expressed doubts about Bannon’s extreme views: “We have to be careful of that, Steve,” Trump said. “You know,” he continued, “we have to keep our talented people in this country.” Bannon would have none of it. “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think…,” he said, then hesitated. “A country is more than an economy,” Bannon said. “We’re a civic society.”

     By “civic society”, Bannon meant that the first priority of the U.S. should be to its own “native” citizens. In other words, white Americans need to be the first in the queue for the benefits of the country. In March 2016, Trump absorbed Bannon’s position. “The H-1B programme,” Trump said, “is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labour programme and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first.” When the term “American workers” is used, people like Purinton and Page hear “white workers”. It is what they signal when they yell: “Go back to your country.”

     In another radio show, in April 2016, Bannon said that the migrants to the U.S. “are not Jeffersonian democrats”. “These are not people with thousands of years of democracy in their DNA coming here,” he said. The idea of democracy in the DNA could only imply that certain “races” have democracy under their skin and that Asians are not in that company.”

Pretty chilling considering these mooks now have their clumsy hands on the levers of power in the US.  We can see the nationalism – even white pride – glowering in the statements of Bannon and Trump.  This present white nationalism flies in the face of the American demographic situation, one in which the US is become less white every year, and will only serve to increase the internal tension and strain on the democratic civic integrity of the US.

[Source: Vijay Prashad writing for Counterpunch]