Forget Trump's border distraction - the real threat is inside the house

Rebecca Solnit

While the government was shut down over the president’s wall, native-born white men proved, once again, to be America’s biggest terrorist danger

Fri 1 Feb 2019 06.00 EST

We already know that the border is a distraction and the dangers there are largely fictions. We know that undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates than US-born people; that most undocumented people in the US got here by overstaying their visas, not coming across the southern border illicitly and that undocumented people are a crucial part of the labor force. But we also know that if you can get people excited about imaginary threats, you can distract them from the real ones, and that often the greatest dangers are the people fomenting the excitement.

We already know that the serious threats are coming from inside the house.

Recently, Trump has been telling lurid and apparently baseless stories about women being victimized by traffickers on the border. If this sounds familiar, it’s because he campaigned on pumped-up stories about Mexico sending rapists to the US. But he had nothing to say about the border patrol agent who killed four women in September, one of them transgender, and was only caught because a fifth escaped from his pickup truck.

Last week, when the US government was partly shut down because of the president’s hostage-taking tantrum tactics to get his border wall, native-born white men – not immigrants, not Muslims – proved, once again, to be a major source of violence and hate in America.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/01/forget-trumps-border-distraction-the-real-threat-is-inside-the-house

Last week, four young white men were arrested on 19 January, in upstate New York for a plot to kill Muslims in nearby Islamberg; they had 23 guns and “makeshift bombs packed with nails and black powder”. One of them had invited Trump to his Eagle Scout ceremony in 2017.