The White House video shuns morality in favor of law
I saw a heartbreaking video on the White House’s Instagram page this morning, titled ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight. If you haven't seen this notorious White House video, I will describe it for you.
It took place outside with a ready plane, and an anonymous man of color being handcuffed and led onto the aircraft.
Initially, a part of me tried to fathom how in the world something so unprofessional and bluntly racist and dehumanizing could be posted on the official page of the White House. Was it really on the page of the White House? But then I also remembered, with the surprise at the dehumanization not coming to full fruition for me to get down from, that this is actually not at all surprising.
I was also not surprised at the comments. Thankfully, there were several outraged comments which I hope make up the majority– both in the actual comment section and online. There is also the fact that not every outraged person who calls out the immorality for what it is necessarily left a comment.
As for the proponents of the exhibited dehumanization from this video and making it fit into the ASMR social media trend, their argument that the person being arrested and deported was justified for the person "being illegal" were unsurprising.
US American nationalists love using the terms "legal" and "illegal" to dictate right and wrong, and many with conservative ideologies equate structure and order with morality and ethics. The latter is no doubt influenced by the existential need to latch onto tradition as a means of validation and verification of their world views. The former gives bigoted people a sense of entitlement to antagonizing and dehumanizing people they want to rule over and exclude from resources and opportunities for human dignity and self and community actualization.
What do the proponents of such a dehumanizing act, where they even celebrate it, actually mean when calling someone illegal?
While they may claim that they want to enforce right and wrong, their hypocrisy betrays them.
If they truly cared about right and wrong and claimed to have an ethical and moral compass, then they would care about the character of those they celebrate and support. They would care about justice. However, as evidenced by not just the acceptance, but celebration, adoration and admiration of Donald Trump, it is obvious that they are nonchalant towards injustice.
Funnily enough, they will claim to care about fighting for justice when something directly impacts them and threatens their worldview. For example, US American nationalists will express fear that crime is being brought in through undocumented immigrants that they enthusiastically label as “illegal”, as if that label somehow justifies an undocumented person from having the right to safety and opportunities to resources for creating a good life. There is also an insinuation that immigrants are more likely to commit atrocities again other people, especially towards citizens. At the same time, these same people expressing concerns over potential crimes from immigrants excuse, defend and laud people like Donald Trump whose crimes are bluntly pronounced throughout the country. They won’t care about domestic violence crimes being committed by men they personally know, and excuse and celebrate child sex offenders, human traffickers and other sexual assaulters and rapists. And of course, these same people are nonchalant towards the safety of children in school when it comes to gun laws, the safety of women when it comes to their health, among a list of other things.
It’s not that these US American nationalists and US American staunch conservatives, even if they may not necessarily be nationalists, truly care about ethics and morality.
They care about the performance of it so that they can justify an entitlement to their fascism. You see this everyday with US American Christian religious organizations that promote Trump.
As Matt Bernstein points out on his Instagram page, it’s ironic that people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk appeal to US American conservatives and nationalists who want to promote traditional family values, when these people have had extramarital affairs, multiple divorces and several children from different women.
And perhaps these US American nationalists and conservatives do have families that they are committed to and care about dearly. Perhaps the religious ones are supportive husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, etc. who are inspired by their religion to serve their families. Maybe they even volunteer in their local communities and give to charity. Religion in and of itself doesn't have to be either good or bad, but it can be used for good or evil depending on the person interpreting it.
And if you tend to believe in God like I do (most of the time at least), it also depends on whether the people interpreting religion are truly in humble submission and seeking of God or in search of inflating their own egos where they need validation from an external source to validate their willful ignorance.
The problem is that the Trump loving, bigoted conservatives and nationalists care more about the image of goodness, morality and ethics than they care about being aware of the reality of the world embedded with injustices-- especially when those injustices are largely created and upheld by them.
They believe that being in service to those that they love in ways that are convenient and directly personal to them excuses them from their ecological role towards the rest of humanity. Spoiler alert: it does not.
How can one be at peace with themself when they vote for Trump to save more of their tax money as a multimillionaire or even billionaire, believing that they are doing their families a service, when that vote also entails the separation and deportation of innocent immigrants who had to flee violence from their home countries? Not to mention, many of these violent situations immigrants have to escape from were caused by the United State’s exploitation and colonization practices in their home countries in the first place.
How can these people be completely at peace in gratitude for the cushion upon cushions of safety they lovingly created for them and their families in their privileged situations, giving thanks to a God that favors them, while justifying the dehumanizing acts towards less privileged families who also are worthy of safety and desperately came to the United States to seek that safety?
The answer is simple– these Trump supporters, US nationalists, US conservatives even who may not even consider themselves racist and selectively speak out against racism are only concerned with the wellbeing of those who they deem worthy and deserving of human dignity. For those that believe in God and use religion to justify their bigotry, they further see their privilege as proof that God favors them and excuses them from their spiritual bypassing and spiritual narcissism.
These people may with open arms welcome the very marginalized groups they dehumanize to their churches, but this expressed love and welcoming is conditional. A white Christian conservative who voted for Trump enthusiastically and supports the elimination of DEI and Critical Race Theory in schools and scapegoats people of color for issues created by the corrupt people with power may at the same time hold a door open for a person of color or help an elderly person of color cross the street. There is definitely cognitive dissonance that can be observed, but it’s also important to point out: these acts of altruism are still personal to those doing it. Individually, these Trump voters feel good about themselves and perhaps even "godly" for helping people. But still when it comes to the marginalized people they try to welcome and help, they still have a place for them conceptually beneath the hierarchy of humanity constructed through bigotry.
The human dignity they give to others is conditional, based on whether or not they have a personal connection and relatability to them. The existence of a human being in and of themselves, despite being from the same God for the Trump supporters that are religious, will never hold the same weight of worthiness to these social conservatives and nationalists. The weight of human dignity in these people’s perceptions will always be measured by what is selfishly serve-serving towards them in terms of not just relatability, but their desired relatability. They may empathize to an extent with immigrant families who of color who have children and had to flee war, but at the same time justify their deportation if they are known to have an undocumented status while especially being a person of color. Simultaneously, they will be more lenient towards Ukrainian immigrants who had to flee from war as well. They are selective about their humanity based on the traits they deem superior-- in this case, whiteness.
As human beings, ideally, we should all value each other on the virtue of being human, and from a spiritual deist perspective, being of God’s creation. Empathy, dignity and opportunity shouldn’t be reserved exclusively for those with power and privilege. And those things shouldn’t only be reserved for people we can personally relate to on an individual level based on surface level factors like race and gender- dignity is to be given to those who are different from us, too, and beyond who we have a personal connection to.
When it comes to undocumented immigrants who the far right loves to label as “illegal aliens,” especially when 1) the term “alien” suggests that these immigrants are somehow less worthy of being dignified as human and 2) the term “illegal” suggests that these immigrants are inherently doing something wrong for being here regardless of their circumstances, there is a haughty assumption of morality superiority the conservatives and nationalists love to claim.
They need to be reminded that “no one is illegal on stolen land”-- unless it’s the true criminals who decide to play with bigoted, double standards of humanity who want to hide their lack of human decency as well as their lack of self-proclaimed “godliness” behind legal jargon.
