Remigration - the one word to rule them all

[This should have gone out a few days ago, but production was slowed by events of the past week involving a fainting spell, a trip to the ER where it was discovered that I had a heart rate repeatedly dropping to like 22 with a BP of something like 85/13, a heartbeat ever more irregular than it already was, and oh by the way I have COVID. 

I left with a pacemaker and (due to wrestling with that damn hospital bed while wearing a heart monitor) a pinched nerve with the result that I can only work for about 10 minutes before my shoulder hurts so much I can't concentrate and have to take a break. Hope it was worth the wait....]

They said it. Not by second-hand reference, not by implication or suggestion or as a passing reference buried in a longer list, but right out. And not for the first time. But this time in shouting all caps.

Just before midnight on Thanksgiving, our rapidly-decomposing Orange Overlord turned to his sickenly-misnamed “Truth” Social for a deranged screed labeling immigration as the root of all our evils¹ - one punctuated with “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can finally cure this situation.”

And there it is. Maybe this time we will finally notice.

“Reverse migration,” you see, is a longer version of “remigration,” once a neutral, descriptive term with no overlying meaning. It meant simply homecoming, of a return to a place you previously lived. It was used, for example, following the end of World War II to refer to Jews who had fled Nazi Germany or Nazi-controlled territory in Europe who were returning to where they had lived before.

However over past couple of decades, particularly over the last 10-15 years and particularly in Europe, the right wing has taken hold of it and as often happens when the right wing grabs onto something, it has been twisted into a vile encapsulation of their inhumanities and unreasoning hatreds.

Put perhaps over simply but still accurately, the right wing saw an opportunity to spread their bigoted, racist xenophobia by amplifying the increasing resentment about both immigrants from Africa and refugees, particularly from Ukraine. “Remigration” was twisted from a straightforward reference to relocating to a previous home into a rallying cry first for kicking out any refugees and then to kicking out all foreigners, whether they had legal status or not.

The concept expanded, as such fanaticism invariably does, in this case to pushing for the “forced return” - the active expulsion - of all non-white immigrants and their children, regardless of their birthplace or citizenship; indeed, it meant forcing them back to their “ancestral home,” their home of racial ancestry, no matter how long their family had lived in Europe.

In other words, “remigration” is a wink-and-a-nod substitute for ethnic cleansing and racial-cultural lily white hegemony.

The driving philosophical idea - although I feel dirty using a fine phrase for such a low concept - the driving idea has been a rebirth in Europe of the idea of “Völkisch” (“people”), an ethno-nationalist movement from the late 1800s which under the Nazis became a policy in law of having to be, it was said, German (mostly, non-Jewish) “enough” to be a citizen.

After the defeat of the Nazis, those laws were scrapped - but like the man said, “Fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.”² “Völkisch” was rebranded as “Völkisch nationalism,” basically the same racist ideas with a little bit of dressing up - replacing references to “race” with “culture,” for example - without being explicitly antisemitic.

For example, in France, the Nouvelle Droite (“New Right”) emerged during the late 1960s to argue that different ethnicities require their own segregated living spaces, creating a need for remigration of people with “foreign roots.” The ND, as it’s called, gained some importance in the 1980s amid right-wing cries of “La France aux Français” (“France for the French”).

In Germany, the slogan is “Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus” (“Germany for Germans, foreigners out”) - bringing us to elections in Germany this past February in which the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) - the AfD³, you remember, the party that Elon Musk and J.D. Vance wanted Germans to support - got 20.8% of the vote, making it the largest opposition party in the Bundestag and the second largest overall.

That degraded duo of Musk and Vance serves to bring it home to the US version.

On October 27, 2024, at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Stephen “Voldemort” Miller, the driving force for this in the campaign (and now in the White House) declared in a deliberate echo of the extremist cries in Europe, “America Is For Americans And Americans Only.”⁴

As I wrote at the time,

I’m surprised that more people have not emphasized the fact that the references have moved from bizarrely false claims about “illegal” immigrants to being about immigrants, period, claims given an exclamation point by Steven Miller’s goose-stepping.

No more the fig leaf of “if only they’d do it legally, there would be no problem.” No more the differentiation of the “bad hombres” from the “good hombres.” Just naked hatred for and irrational fear of any and all among “the other.”

This is fascism fulfilled, paranoia as policy, systematized xenophobia.

It was explicit, it was overt; the extremism, the meaning, was there for all to see - and most of the media to ignore.

And while this was perhaps until that time the most emphatic revelation of their intentions, it was definitely not the first. Mother Jones, for one, flagged it two months earlier, quoting a post from the Orange Soon-to-be-Overlord referring to “return[ing] Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration)” and Voldemort reposting it with “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”

It was out there - but even then, even after Miller’s invocation of the overtly racist slogans of the furthest of Europe’s far right, still too much of the media (and, bluntly, too many of the rest of us) essentially sleep-walked our way through the declarations, preferring to see it all as a re-run of the old “illegal immigrants invading our country/stealing our jobs/blah-blah-blah” rabble-rousing bullshit.

But it wasn’t. Or, perhaps more accurately, it was the smokescreen. Because it isn’t about undocumented immigrants and for people like Miller it never was. For them, it’s always been about immigrants, period - or, again more accurately, non-white immigrants.

As soon as they got into office, they went to work. The Spray Tan Who Would Be King suspended the nation’s 40-year-old refugee resettlement program on his first day in office.

A few - emphasize few - highlights from the rest of the year:

In April, the White House cabal filed a brief in federal court claiming they can deport someone for their “beliefs, statements or associations.” This came the same day that ICE shared (and then deleted) a social media post saying that it is responsible for keeping illegal “ideas” from entering the US.

In May, the White House announced that an agency called the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, historically involved in supporting refugee programs, would be restructured to “reflect core administration priorities,” including an Office of Remigration to “revers[e] the flow of migrants” and focus on “Western values.”

In June despite the suspension of refugee resettlement, a group of about 50 white South Africans entered as “refugees” fleeing a non-existent “white genocide,” not only going to the front of the line for vetting, but skipping over it entirely.

In July, AttGen Pam Bondage⁵ directed that federal application forms and processes must only be in English, a step to implement the executive order declaring English the official language of the US.

That same month, “border czar” Tom Homan⁶ said ICE and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to detain and question someone; their “physical appearance” (read: skin color) is enough, a notion to which the Scurrilous SCOTUS Six later gave their blessing.

In September, the Orange Overlord declared that no more than 7500 refugees would be admitted in 2026, just 6% of the number in Biden’s last year. Most of those slots will go to white South African farmer “refugees” like the group that arrived in June.

Over the course of the year they have attacked the idea of DACA and have seized people under its protection.

They have striven to strip protection from temporary protective status (TPS) recipients, more than 1.2 million people who fled wars, oppression, natural disasters, poverty, and more and who have permission to live and work in the US.

They have made a practice of rejecting the concept of due process, dismissing it in theory and denying it in practice.

They’ve openly talked about denaturalization, stripping people of their citizenship, even aggressively pursuing cases.

They’ve even attacked the notion of birthright citizenship, including pressing the Supreme Court for support.

Which brings us to November and Thanksgiving and the deranged post I mentioned at the top, the core of which multi-screen screed can be found in just three statements, which in a way can sum up the entire argument. In order of appearance, they are:

One: The “foreign population stands at 53 million people, most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.”

The population figure is from the Census Bureau and it is a count of all “foreign-born” residents of the US, no matter their status - which means it includes not only the long-demonized “illegals” but any who are here legally, including those covered by DACA or TPS, who have asylum claims pending, who have green cards, and who are naturalized citizens, all thrown into one, we might call it, basket of deplorables to be condemned and reviled for the ethnic crime of being foreign-born.

Two: This supposed “refugee burden” is “the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II.”

The other side of the always-evil present in these xenophobic dreamscapes is the always-glorious, wonderful, mythologized past, one in which, we are here told, there was no crime, no shortage of health care or housing, no urban decay, and no student failed or was failed, at least not enough to care about. It depends on both ignorance of the present and amnesia about the past. That is why history is their enemy and why they’re looking to, for one example, scrub LGBTQ+, particularly trans, history: not just to sanitize US history, but to fantasize, to infantilize, it, the better to turn the past into a weapon of control.

Three: He wants to “deport any foreign national who is ... non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

Which, we can safely assume, would exclude anyone non-Christians - especially Muslims, indeed I expect it was said with them in mind. (I suppose Jews would be okay. For now.) But questions of “non-compatibility” are not limited to religion but can include cultural. Remember the French New Right and the argument that different ethnicities require segregated living spaces.

Which brings up another, related, and final point. Although I’ve been addressing immigration mostly, don’t think for a moment that this is unrelated to, in fact do know it is wholly intertwined with, their attacks on DEI. Because diversity is exactly what repels them, inclusion is exactly what they can’t abide, and equity is exactly what denies their racial supremacy.

It’s all part of the same overriding racist, xenophobic, white supremicist, Christian nationalist worldview, an openly and consciously fascist ideology, rooted in visions of racial and ethnic purity that sees non-white people as undeserving of citizenship or even basic human rights.

It is a worldview, an ideology, the Orange Overlord and his minions, most particularly Steven Voldemort Miller, have firmly embraced and are pushing for, trying to wrench our society into their personal warped, evil dreamscape of a white ethno-state untouched by the contamination of lesser beings.

That’s what they’re after, those are the stakes. And as their speech becomes more openly exclusionary, more eliminationist, it’s ever more important that we never forget and we never let them pretend otherwise.

1 And here you thought it was the love of what he most passionately desires: money. (1 Timothy 6:10, Luke 12:15, Matthew 6:24)
2 Clarence Darrow during the Scopes Trial, Dayton, Tennessee (July 13, 1925). (Yes, the movie used an actual trial quote.)
3 In May, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor” that “threatens democracy.” The classification was suspended a week later, awaiting a final court decision.
4 If you want to see the video, it’s here.
5 Because she keeps getting tied up in legal knots trying to make sense of the regime’s legal arguments.
6 Good last name for him because, y’know, it’s almost human.

So I said - something about AI in healthcare

Another in an occasional series of trying to provide some more content here by posting worthwhile comments I’ve posted elsewhere.

In this case, I took a YouGov survey related to public perceptions about the use of AI in healthcare. Three of the questions asked for general responses rather than picking from among multiple choices.

-

November 26, 2025

What ethical considerations are most important to think about when adding AI tools to healthcare?
I was told by my surgeon some years ago “You treat the patient, not the X-ray.” The more we use AI, the more that adage is reversed.

During my recent hospitalization my PCP came by on their rounds, during which they displayed not through words but tone and demeanor a genuine personal concern for my health, something of which AI is incapable of expressing or feeling, at best offering instead merely an algorithmically-driven facade of concern, a programmed pretense, which well could be likened to the comforting reassurances of the scammer.

  

What is your overall impression of AI in healthcare?

Not ready for prime time. For now, it’s a bandwagon promising what it can’t (and perhaps never will) deliver, driven less by public health than by the profit-driven preferences of the corporate spectrum of health care (i.e., hospitals and the insurance industry) who pursue a goal of “efficiency” (read as “fewer employees”) and would, as I suggested earlier, “treat the X-ray, not the patient,” with us coming to exist less as patients than as datasets.

Is there anything else about AI in healthcare that you would like to share with us?
AI is good for, indeed excellent at, analyzing large amounts of data, producing results that can be viewed and considered mathematically because that’s what they are - mathematical derivations from mathematical data.

But healthcare in general and medicine within that reach involves more than mere data but also includes personalities and foibles and trust and other human interactions along with unavoidable judgment calls driven by such non-mathematical considerations, all of which are beyond its capabilities.

Which, by the way, makes the use of chat boxes by consumers for health information advice fraught with risk and worse as shown by recent suits against various companies whose chat boxes are accused of having encouraged teenager users to commit suicide. AI simply is not up the task to which the health care industry is trying to set it in pursuit of profit.

Liars figuring

I am sick to flaming death of our senile buffoon president claiming that in the wake of COVID we had “the highest inflation in the history of our country” and nobody ever, ever, calling out that transparent lie. I know it's a lie because remember, I saw, higher inflation than during Biden’s term.

Start with the fact that the peak year-over-year (YOY) inflation rate during Biden’s term was 9.1% in June 2021.*

In 1974, YOY inflation was 12.3%.

In 1978, it was 9.0%.
In 1979, it was 13.3%.
In 1980, it was 12.5%.

The highest in any year since 1929 was 18.1% in 1946.

Okay, next: For the year 2022 as a whole, (based on December end of year figures, the standard method) YOY inflation was 6.5%.

In the period 1941-2024, there have been 12 years with YOY inflation rates above 6.5%.**

Third: Over the course of his presidency, average YOY inflation under Biden was 4.95% - lower than under Nixon (6.10%), Ford (8.11%), or Carter (9.85%) and just a bit higher than Bush the elder (4.8I).

Has inflation been a struggle recently? Is it still a struggle, especially with slow growth and stalled real income growth? Absolutely freaking yes.

But “the highest in the history of our country?” Not even close. And dammit, some one of the White House reporters should have the guts to say it out loud to his face.

I may be considered old, but I damn well can remember 1974. And so can the Orange Overlord - unless his dementia has erased that part of his memory. Either that or he’s just a damned liar.

Actually, I suspect it’s both.

*All data via Investopedia.com.

**The years were 1941, 1942, 1946, 1947, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 2021.

So I said - somethng about elections

As it has developed, I’ve written very little here of late, partly because for whatever reason I’ve found it difficult to compose a piece of any significant depth or length - I guess you could call it some sub-variation of writer’s block - and because as I noted recently, I don’t feel that I’m adding anything of sufficient value around here to justify having a readership. The two are likely connected in some way, but that’s rather more self-analytical that I care to be right now.

Anyway, the point of this is that I thought I’d try to from time to time post some substantive comments I’ve made on others’ posts, not single line or toss-off reactions, but something that makes some kind of point. I’ll date each one and include a heading sufficient, I hope, to provide enough context for the comment to make sense. All such posts will be headlined "So I said."

This may not produce a lot of content and no guaranteed regularity because it depends on how wordy I’ve been elsewhere, but maybe enough to make it worth checking here from time to time. I’ll start with this one and thanks more than I can say for bothering to read.

-
November 10, 2025
[SCOTUS will review the question of counting mail-in ballots received after election day]

This is inane. Elections are supposed to be directed and controlled by the individual states, not the federal government - including accepting mail-in ballots postmarked on or before but received after election day.

The only - the only - argument I’ve heard to the contrary is the real reach that the Constitution sets election day, so you can’t count votes cast after it.

But to do that, they have to be arguing that a vote is “cast” when it is counted, not when it’s actually cast. Which runs into two major problems. First, if they want to be consistent, that “one set election day” argument would not only require banning early voting entirely (which, admittedly, is also part of the right-wing agenda), it ignores the fact by previous decisions the votes in question were cast when that envelope was put in the mail. Cast before, not after, not even on, election day.

“Oh yes, but they were still counted after,” they say? Okay, so suppose you vote in person on election day but because of turnout, vote counting isn’t completed by midnight. Must the counting stop and remaining votes be discarded? They would, after all, by the logic of the argument be "counted after election day" and therefore cast too late, so making the very argument self-defeating.

The issue at hand is not when votes are counted but when they are cast. The power of the states to count mail-in ballots postmarked by but received after election day is not in rational question, the arguments to the contrary are flat-out voter suppression, and it's a disgrace - a revealing one, but a disgrace nonetheless - for SCOTUS to even have taken this up.

Two new rules!

One of my more popular offerings is my "Rules for Right-wingers," a compilation of tricks, deceptions, evasions, and misdirections right-wingers use to avoid honest debates, answering questions, responsibility, and truth.

 

It made its first appearance in June 2009 with 13 rules, since expanded several times with additional rules, reaching a total of 22 rules in February 2024.

 

Well, guess what. It's time for two more.

 

Rule #23: Screw the forest, look at the trees!
Drown the argument in details to distract from the overall point. Gaza again is an example, where disputes were created and questions were raised over just how many Palestinians were starving or had been killed to avoid accepting the fact that Palestinians were starving and had been killed.

Rule #24: Use passive voice as a weapon.
To illustrate, look once more at Gaza. The October 7 attack must always be called “a terrorist attack by the terrorist organization Hamas.” When forced to admit to the destruction in Gaza, refer to it only in terms of “the humanitarian situation” as if it was the result of a hurricane or tidal wave with no human agency involved. The words “Israel,” “Netanyahu,” and “IDF” must never be employed in this context.

Okay, I need help

Or maybe advice is a better word.

Y’see, up until relatively recently I kept up a reasonably steady output of political commentary both through a website (okay, a blog, as old-fashioned as that sounds now) and a web channel which also served as a local-access cable TV show in about five states.

I was never a big dog; my audience was in the hundreds, but dammit I felt useful because I knew that audience consisted mostly of people whose news sources were largely limited to things like the nightly TV news - so I knew that I was giving them information and a perspective they might not see anywhere else.

But here nowadays I feel like I’m surrounded by posters who are heavily into news and politics and related commentary. I’m neither a known quantity nor one with any special expertise or background on any particular topic, with the result that I feel I have nothing to contribute here, nothing that is not being said equally well if not better by louder voices (i.e., bigger audience), nothing that adds to the conversation other than the occasional comment. Put simply, I feel useless.

So I guess I’m asking if anyone has any guidance.

If you want to see what I do/did, you can check out my stuff here or at my Substack (whoviating.substack.com). I haven’t been able to do the videos for the last two years, but the ones before then can be found at YouTube; just search on “whoviating.”

Let me be clear: I am not asking you to subscribe. This is not a pitch. You can subscribe if you want, of course, but the idea here is that if you’re moved to consider offering any ideas/suggestions/hope, you might want a sense of where I have been up to this point.

Thanks for reading.

The next level

The fascists and the self-interested camp followers are working up to their campaign to "destroy the left" and its "terrorism networks" and we accept the threat is real because we seem to have finally embraced Maya Angelou's famous quote, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." As I remarked a little while back, "It is possible to overstate their power; it is not possible to overestimate their intentions."

But I also have a next-level concern, beyond the coming attempts at repression, that I wanted to raise, one to be filed under "be ready for the fallout from unintended consequences, even if they’re not your own."

It's what happens when the MAGA Masters can't make good on their promises to "destroy" the left? Because they won't. They can't. Oh, there may be, probably will be, some show trials or at minimum multiple prosecutions; there will be a lot of "investigations" and a surfeit of accusations; there will be repression of speech and assembly; there will be a lot of pain for those directly and the much greater number indirectly impacted - but no, while the left may even be significantly injured it will not be "destroyed." We survived the Palmer Raids, we survived McCarthyism, we survived the conspiracy trials of the 60s, we will survive this. Maybe scarred and limping, but alive and continuing and re-building. And truth be told, every time we have gone through one of these cycles, at the end of it the country is a little better than it was before. The moral arc of the universe and all that, I suppose.

So anyway, getting back to the point, what happens when after the MAGA Masters have gotten their rabid followers all pumped up, they can't produce the ultimate victory they promised? How far will they go, how desperate will they be, to keep that loyalty, to hold that blind commitment?

And will those followers try to make that victory come true on their own? It wouldn't be the first time that leaders of a movement lost control of their creation. We've already seen it here on a small scale in the refusal of some of the MAGA crowd to accede to the attempts of the Orange Overlord and company to drop the whole Epstein file business. So yeah, that could happen.

If it does and the MAGA Masters start to lose control, lose their grip on the formerly obedient, will those Masters turn on their own followers? Again, it has happened before.

And don't anyone tell me "that'd be good" because now we're talking about literal blood in the streets and guerrilla warfare and if you think that wouldn't affect you, wouldn't come to your door (it's often been said, with cause, that civil wars are the worst), you're an idiot.

This doesn't mean, of course, that other than the moves at repression this will happen. Of course and yes it's a string of "what ifs." I only raise it as a scenario for which we should be prepared - because even if you think it unlikely, you, I think, have to agree it's plausible.

And I raise it for another reason: to remind ourselves that, in another old but true phrase, the best defense is a good offense. The more strongly we today, now, don't just defend our rights but press our commitments to justice, the more strongly we don't merely say "no" to what shouldn't be done but also say "yes" to what should, the more prepared we are to sacrifice in the present for the sake of the future, the sooner and more clearly we can show "destroy the left" to be the pipe dream it ultimately is, the less pain there will be in the end to us and, more importantly, everyone else.

So carry it on. Except more.

Speaking of Kirk

What follows is rather meandering and I probably should go to bed and do it tomorrow, but I'm worried I would cool off to much by then. So with that warning and the understanding that I may feel compelled to edit this later to straighten out spaghetti syntax, I'll proceed.

When anybody among the wingnuts of the right says anything about "free speech," you can be pretty damn sure that they mean free speech for them but not for anyone else.

If it wasn't already obvious, the wave of firings, suspensions, and other penalties we've seen imposed on workers for failing to react in a MAGA-approved manner to the killing of the sexist, racist, xenophobic, trans-hater that was Charlie Kirk drove home the point.

Well, here's another example: Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau is urging people to respond to Kirk's killing by reporting to the State Department people "who glorify violence and hatred" so officials can "undertake appropriate action." What constitutes such “action” is left unsaid along with how far it can and will extend.

Why is that concerning? For one, the meaning of "people" is curiously limited to "immigrants and foreign visitors." That could be taken as an admission they can't touch US citizens, except that stripping citizens of their passports is already under discussion, the DOJ is "is aggressively prioritizing efforts" to denaturalize citizens, and there is the on-going effort to repeal birthright citizenship - so that admission-that's-not-an-admission is at best cold comfort and the phrase "can't touch US citizens" must be modified with "yet."

For another, while the meaning of "people" is curiously limited, the meaning of "glorify" is curiously broad, embracing "praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event," none of which need describe anything approaching "glorify." "I'm glad he's dead" isn't "glorifying" the murder, "he made his name spewing hatred so we can't be surprised if he generated a hateful response" certainly doesn't, and "I guess if he'd used a hammer instead of a rifle it would've been okay," while crude, likewise doesn't make the cut.

The real point, however, is that none of that matters even if any of it actually did "glorify" the murder because all of it fits quite comfortably under the banner of the "FREE SPEECH!" the reactionaries will screech at the least challenge to their vile and often enough violent rhetoric. Because that human right does not rise or fall depending on citizenship or even legality of residency. It is a right, not a privilege to be dispensed to a favored few.

But not as far as the right wing is concerned, oh no. Note that Landau's whole premise by definition excludes anyone who has used Kirk's death to issue calls, no matter how violent, for "war" against those in any way on the left, regardless of their status as "immigrant or foreign visitor" or citizen. As long as it is said in praise of Kirk, it's fine.

Well, sauce for the goose and all that and if anyone objects to you having excoriated Charlie Kirk in death for the execrable person he was in life they should just be told "It's free speech. Do you believe in it or don't you?"