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The Trump administration is using the tragic shooting of two National Guard members by an Afghan national as justification to close the door on immigration, refugees, and asylum seekers trying to enter the US. This week, Alex speaks to an Afghan aid worker who now fears for his family’s safety, and then is joined by Joy Reid to talk about how this is all part of a larger MAGA plot to Make America White Again.

TRANSCRIPT

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: Hi everyone. It has been a pretty extraordinary week. Last Wednesday, two members of the National Guard, Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe, were shot while patrolling the streets of Washington, DC. Beckstrom was killed, and Wolfe remains in critical condition. The alleged shooter is a 29-year-old Afghan national named Rahmanullah Lakanwall, who was once part of the CIA-backed Zero Squads operating in Afghanistan. Those were highly controversial paramilitary units, and they were unofficially known as death squads. When Afghanistan fell back into the hands of the Taliban in 2021, Lakanwall evacuated to the US. After many rounds of vetting, he was admitted into the country under the Biden administration, and then he was granted asylum under the Trump administration. And now that same administration is using Wednesday’s deadly event as a pretense for essentially overhauling American immigration as we know it.

[clip of Donald Trump]:  It means get people out that are in our country, get ’em out of here. I want to get ’em out.

Alex Wagner: As of this recording, President Trump has now indefinitely paused all immigration applications, frozen the green card process, and stopped processing citizenship applications for people from 19 countries. That list includes Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Venezuela, Haiti, and Burma, some of the poorest and most unstable places in the world. And they also happen to be countries with predominantly Black and brown populations. In addition to that, the State Department has halted all visas for Afghan citizens. U.S. Citizenship and immigration, also known as USCIS, announced that it is pausing all asylum-related decisions until they quote, “Ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.” And the Trump administration is now planning to review all asylum cases approved by the Biden White House, which includes people already living here in the United States. All of this, a massive retrenchment of the American immigration system because of the actions of one violent man. These new rules could affect over 1.5 million people who have pending asylum applications, and 50,000 more who received asylum under President Biden. The shooting last week was a terrible tragedy. But make no mistake, the Trump administration is using it for a very specific political purpose. I’m Alex Wagner, and this week on Runaway Country, we’re talking about the ways in which the Trump administration is using that violent Thanksgiving attack to push an agenda of ethno-nationalism to redefine who is American and who isn’t. On today’s episode, I spoke to a former aid worker from Afghanistan who is now living in the US as a green card holder. He is exactly the kind of person that the Trump White House is now targeting, and he spoke to me under the condition that we not use his full name because he’s afraid of being deported. So we’re calling him Naseem. Naseem worked with US government agencies beginning in 2005 on over 80 projects in Afghanistan.

Naseem: 95% of those projects supported by US, funded by US government and USCID. Very sensitive projects on countering white extremism, projects on education, elimination of violence against women, women’s access to justice, a lot of projects on counter-narcotics, and projects on youth empowerment, girls’ empowerment, education projects, and civil civil rights, women’s rights, human rights.

Alex Wagner: When Kabul fell in 2021, Naseem and his family went into hiding. The projects he had been working on had been leading for the U.S. Government were seen as treasonous in the eyes of the Taliban. After several months of vetting and extensive security checks, Nassim and his family were granted asylum in the United States, where they lived in relative safety and freedom until last week. Now, with Trump’s new immigration agenda and his targeting of both Afghans and asylum seekers, Naseem is very worried about what happens next.

Naseem: Although I’m a green card holder, I’m scared. Well if if if we go back to the country, we are just victims. We they will they will punish us because why we work with the United States and and supported the same values. We will be punished for that, for sure. Sometimes even my son says that if if if let’s say ICE come to the school, what should I do?

Alex Wagner: What do you tell him?

Naseem: He has a telephone say that I said that. Call me. Call me directly.

Alex Wagner: And then what will you do?

Naseem: Tell tell your tell your I do not have anything else. Otherwise I just go and talk with attorneys or people that they helped us in the past for the green card or for my SID. I do not have any other choice. So.

Alex Wagner: I asked Naseem about the shooting last week, and he told me that what unites Afghans like him and national guards people like them is the suffering. And in that shared experience there is extraordinary empathy.

Naseem: I feel sympathy with these and two national guards. Who who can feel better than us? We were the victim of the violence, extremism back in our country. Every day there was people losing their lives. I can feel the the the pain that family, particularly in this Thanksgiving Day, that they have the family of the victim of these two National Guards. It’s horrible. And we all condemn that.

Alex Wagner: But as terrifying as this moment is for Naseem, he has not given up on America, nor has he given up on its promise.

Naseem: We came here to be part of the American community and serve this country as well, serve humanity. My understanding is that back the values that we discussed and we were together, that was democracy, peaceful, freedom from the freedom from the violence. So I came with the hope that I will live here in a peace and I will work with here and be responsible as every responsible American person that who are living here and finally become a citizen and play my role in the society in a best positive manner.

Alex Wagner: When we come back, I’ll be joined by my friend and former colleague at MS Now, nay, MSMBC, Joy Reid. Joy was, of course, the host of The ReidOut, and she has written a book about Trump called The Man Who Sold America. And now she hosts the Joy Reid show, which everybody should and must check out on YouTube. Joy weighs in on Trump’s not so secret plan to make America white again.

Joy Reid: They’ll distribute the bleach to us all and we shall apply it daily if you want to survive.

Alex Wagner: Totally. Totally. I got her thoughts on what’s happening to immigrants, green card holders, and asylum seekers, given the fact that over 50 million U.S. Residents were born in another country. And nearly three-quarters of that population is here legally. Not that the Trump administration seems to care. Because it’s not about where you were born or whether you followed the rules. It’s clearly about the color of your skin. Our conversation in just a minute.

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: I mean, I don’t know. America’s been waiting for this reunion. [laughter] I’ve certainly been waiting for this reunion. My friend and former colleague, one of the lights of my life as a journalist, my old friend Joy Reid. Not old. Like we’re not you’re not old, but our friendship. You’re you are young and fresh. Our friendship is is aged. It’s old and gold is what it is.

Joy Reid: It’s old and gold, baby. I miss you so much.

Alex Wagner: I miss you too. This is like I’m so happy to see you and thank you for doing this. And God, there’s a lot to talk about.

Joy Reid: So much, girl. I mean, dude.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, dude. Period. We’re done. Okay. So there’s so I mean, the focus of this week, there were many things to choose from, but we’re talking about this. The there was a shooting last week, which I know you’re well aware of, a National Guard troop, and Trump has effectively used that as an excuse to further terrorize Black and brown communities and wholeheartedly embrace white nationalism at the topmost echelons of the federal government. So I, you know, one of the things he’s done, he’s really basically ending the asylum process. He’s not making America a home for refugees. The whole Statue of Liberty thing is like whatever that was. And I just want to get your kind of top line reaction to the president of the United States effectively ending the American immigration system as we have known it for the last 50 years.

Joy Reid: Yeah, it’s and taking it back to the nineteen twenties, right?

Alex Wagner: Yeah.

Joy Reid: The era when ironically Stephen Miller’s family barely escaped the exclusion act that would have kept them trapped in Germany where they all would have died. And when, you know, the it was not our finest hour, the 1930s, when we didn’t want to take in Jewish refugees, we were excluding Asian immigrants. And we’re, you know, the past is prologue because we are right back there again. Because this is the era that a lot of Donald Trump’s minions, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, I’m not sure Kristi Noem thinks things. I think she just does whatever.

Alex Wagner: I don’t know. She’s she’s like a cat. I was told that cats don’t understand the passage of time or it’s like flat, like a dimension to them. I think that’s sort of how Christy No she doesn’t understand history or time.

Joy Reid:  Yeah. Cats also don’t like dogs. And would probably shoot them if they could. As Kristi Noem would. [laughs]

Alex Wagner: Yeah. I mean I have a cat so I don’t want to malign cats too much.

Joy Reid: Yeah. I have a great cat—[overlapping speak]

Alex Wagner: In the way that a house pet doesn’t fully under, grapple with the implications of the real world, much I think the same could be said for the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Joy Reid: I would I would agree with that. I think Tom Homan does grapple with it and he has a deep hatred of all mankind and he’s getting to exercise that. He and Stephen Miller, they’re sort of the two kind of horses of the apocalypse. And so and I also don’t think Donald Trump thinks things. You know, I think Donald Trump is just a knee-jerk racist old person who is if you tell him the Somalians, as he calls the Somalis, are taking over Minnesota. He says, Yeah, let’s get let’s get him out, get him out. You know, so I think he’s just having a—

Alex Wagner: And you’re referring to, and you’re referring to the raids that were announced on Tuesday in Minnesota, which is—

Joy Reid: Exactly.

Alex Wagner: Part and parcel of like this suite of actions designed to remove people of color from this country, regardless of what their legal status is, whether they’ve been here for generations, whether they’re American citizens. And really we’re gonna get into this, but but a bleach the country. I want to first talk about the political implications of some of this because you know, Trump’s promise, and I remember you, you know, you and I were on set at MS formerly NBC.

Joy Reid: MS Now their name is.

Alex Wagner: MS Now. And we, you know, I remember seeing these signs at the Republican National Convention that said mass deportations now. And I guess if we’re giving the people at that convention the benefit of the doubt, they the expectation, as Trump promised, would be that he would deport the quote “worst of the worst.” Like, I don’t know, the 19-year-old college student who was trying to return home to her family for Thanksgiving. Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, who was then detained at Boston Airport and is now been deported to Honduras. The worst of the worst, Joy.

Joy Reid: Yeah.

Alex Wagner: My my thinking is like you look at the polling, and this stuff is not popular with the American public, right? The ICE raids, the dragnets, you know, what it’s doing to the economy and to say nothing, the moral stain on America’s hands. But he keeps doing it. Like they keep, they keep going full steam ahead. You referred to the Somali raids and the raids on the Somali community in Minnesota. What do you what do you I mean, is it them just trying to reach the quotas? It it doesn’t seem politically expeditious. And I wonder if you think he even considers a politics at this point, or kind of like what the motivating factor is.

Joy Reid: Well, I actually think he is considering the politics of it. And, you know, I can remember sitting there with you as you know, Jacob Soboroff was on the floor of the Republican convention with these senior citizen women with huge smiles on their face waving their mass deportation now signs. And Jacob would ask them, I think incredulously, you’re so joyful about this idea of mass deportation. Do you really mean it? And they, oh, yes, they really meant it. And, you know, I having been inside of a Republican National Convention and had that vibe from a senior citizen, someone’s grandma, but whose glee was directed towards some of the most heinous ideas you could imagine, right? You know, sort of gleeful towards sort of returning to 1930s Germany, not even the United States. Like I know that it’s real. I actually think that what those people wanted and what Donald Trump is delivering is ethnic cleansing.

Alex Wagner: Right.

Joy Reid: Well, I think, you know, I think it and I and I don’t, and I don’t think that they see it as ethnic cleansing. I don’t think they see it as something bad. I think that they looked at the the actual factual, the true fact that the number of immigrants who are non-European has risen over time, rose after 1965 when the other thing LBJ did, Lyndon Johnson did, in addition to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act. He also signed this landmark immigration bill that ended the Asian Exclusion Act and that and that really fundamentally changed the complexion, literally. Of our immigrant communities from being very, very European, very Italian, very Irish, very, you know, even Scandinavian, all of that, to being very brown, to being largely from Central America, largely from South and Central America. That’s a fact. It’s a thing that happened from the 60s on. And then you had another surge during COVID.

Alex Wagner: Yeah.

Joy Reid: When you had this two factors, COVID, which was driving people out of work and into desperation, and COVID on this end of the border that was pulling brown people into the jobs we needed done. The meatpacking plants, the farms, the places where you needed labor that couldn’t go home and hide from the pandemic. And they were drawn here by the millions. I mean something like 11 million people. And that surge of brown migration caused our latest demographic panic. You know, there was a demographic panic when Barack Obama was elected and there was the demographic panic post the pandemic and the rage that you can detect if you talk to enough MAGA type people or experience them is real. They really hate the fact that there’s so many brown people here. And I’m not trying to be ungenerous. I think I think they would agree with me that they are really angry about that border opening up during the pandemic and the years during the Biden administration when so many brown people came here that they don’t want just the worst of the worst to be gone. They want them all gone. And Donald Trump is implementing the ethnic cleansing he knows his core base wants. And the ones who are alarmed by it are the more mild Trump supporters, the sort of more, you know, the the maybe economic Trump supporters, the people who want to tax cuts, the people who maybe wanted the border closed, but maybe didn’t want to see their neighbor get dragged off. Those people don’t like it. But there’s still a core of people who love it. They love it. They want it.

Alex Wagner: More of my conversation with Joy Reid right after this quick break.

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: For people who have not paid attention to the ways in which this administration has explicitly embraced ethnic cleansing, right? There is the DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, which on X officially called for remigration to be US policy. The quote is the stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear. Remigration now, which is a term used by the far right in Europe. It’s embraced by white nationalists. Kristi Noem, the department of that federal agency, posted this to Twitter. I just met with the president. I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. First of all, that’s just leeches, kill killers and entitlement junkies are our forefathers, and that’s an exclusionary our, not an inclusionary our. Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom, not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to all caps Americans. All caps, we don’t want them. All caps, not one. And then, of course, there’s Trump himself, the president of the United States, who said only reverse migration can fully cure this situation. And Stephen Miller, whose own family came to this country fleeing religious persecution in the early 1900s. That guy, Stephen Miller had this to say.

[clip of Stephen Miller]: What you heard tonight from President Trump, the breaking news here tonight is saying that his government is going to accelerate efforts to review every person added to this country over the last 20 years or the last four years, all 20 million. Now, obviously, if you’re illegal, you’re out automatically. But everybody else who is brought here, refugee, asylum status, whatever status, as he said, if you’re not someone who loves this country, if you’re not any benefit to this country, then we’re gonna send you out of this country because it’s enough already. No one else has to die, no one else has to be murdered, no one else has to be shot, no more empty seats are needed at the Thanksgiving table or the Christmas table because of what Democrats have done to this country.

Alex Wagner: I mean just like a bastardized Charles Dickens reference in there as he, you know, does the most un Christmas like thing you can do, the most uncharitable thing you can do, which is shut America’s doors to the you know, the those in need and—

Joy Reid: The huddled masses yearning to huddle free.

Alex Wagner: The huddle exactly. I was trying to think of the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Do you think this was always the natural endpoint to MAGA, or do you think Trump himself has become more radicalized while in office?

Joy Reid: I think Donald Trump is a useful idiot. And I think MAGA is the natural outgrowth of a far right that has kind of catapulted itself into power, despite literally being a far right, you know, what would have been a com—politically untenable movement even a generation ago. There has been a a a a demographic panic that’s been ongoing in this country from the very beginning, right? The you want to talk about what is what is it, leeches, killers and junkies for what free money?

Alex Wagner: It is killers, leeches and entitlement junkies.

Joy Reid: Right. So the you know, this nation was founded by killers who slaughtered ninety percent of the indigenous people. Leeches who glommed off of the indigenous to taught them how to survive in the wilderness and then murdered them as their things and then took all their land. And you wanna talk about entitlement. They felt entitled to own other people and they didn’t even want to pay taxes on it. So they decided to have a whole war with Britain. So I I’m not really a hundred percent sure where that’s coming from. And then you.

Alex Wagner: Oh, I have a sense of where it’s coming from.

Joy Reid: Oh, oh, I yeah. But I mean, then you what you have is people like Stephen Miller, whose people came here in the 20th century. So they are not in related in any way to the forefathers, and the forefathers wouldn’t have wanted them here. They wouldn’t have wanted them here, they wouldn’t have wanted Tom Homan’s family here, they wouldn’t have wanted any of these people here. You know, they come from the people who at one time were considered excluded, but now they have a full sense of entitlement to decide who is a proper and fitting American and to vet them ideologically. But really what they’re doing is vetting them in terms of color.

Alex Wagner: Yeah.

Joy Reid: Because you know, as a as the Supreme Court has allowed, they’re essentially saying, We get to be here because even if we are not descended from the forefathers, we’re white. You don’t get to be here because you’re brown, you’re Asian, or you’re black. And therefore, whether you’re a citizen not, he said whether you have TPS status, whether you’ve got refugee status, we don’t care. Unless you vet ideologically, and even if you do, there have been some hardcore Trump supporters who’ve been deported. They want to ethnically cleanse the country and make it whiter. They’re not really being that coy about it. They’re not being too cute about it. They’re kind of being open about it because they keep saying everyone who came into the country in their mind during the Biden years, and they really kind of also mean before that, they want them out. And the quota is just a means to an end. It’s to motivate his goons, or I guess Kristi Noem’s goons to get out there and stop any brown person apartheid style, throw them in a van and get them the hell out of here, or put them in a private prison where at least somebody can make a profit off of their presence. So, you know, the way you can be a benefit to this country if you’re brown is go to a private prison so that, you know, that the core civic or whatever they call themselves can get rich.

Alex Wagner: You know, I think the the violence directed at a national guards person, at two national guards, national guardsmen and national guardswoman have provided Trump an excuse to enact some of the more draconian policies that have ever been enacted in this country. But, you know, you point out that he’s been ex relatively explicit about his desires or like the administration writ large has been relatively explicit about their motivations and their end game for a while. And I just I’m I think we some people paid attention to remarks that J.D. Vance, our vice president, gave at the Claremont Institute, a conservative institution this summer. But he kind of explained like where this was all headed. And I want to just play a little bit of sound from his remarks to call to attention the sort of well, the way in which the roadmap has been was made public, at least if you were listening to what JD was saying, Vance was saying at the Claremont Institute this summer. Let’s take a listen.

[clip of J.D. Vance]: If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you.

Alex Wagner: Okay, like setting aside the time frame and whatever the just the argument that America is a concept has been rejected wholesale by the right and in favor of blood and soil nationalism.

Joy Reid: That’s right.

Alex Wagner: Right. That’s literally what he’s saying there. He’s like, you know what? If it’s not just a set of principles, it’s literally like, were you born here and are you white? I mean, he’s not saying that, but that’s that’s effectively what the the criteria is as laid out by the vice president of the United States. And I kind of just wonder, Joy, like, where does that leave us? Because, you know, Trump is not gonna, though he would like to be in office forever, probably for the next 12 years or whatever, 18, I can’t even do the math anymore, but he’s supposed to leave office in 2028. Maybe J.D. Vance inherits the throne, maybe Little Marco does. It’s unclear, but I don’t understand what the implications of all of this are for the American project. And I don’t mean to sound hyperbolic, but how do you begin to sort of put the toothpaste in the tube when one side has explicitly says, said we reject the very idea that is sort of foundational in your idea of of in your notions of governance? I guess like where do we go from here?

Joy Reid: I mean, not in a good place. I mean, Mehdi Hasan has made this point in interviews that he’s done that he, as somebody who is a naturalized American, first of all, probably knows more facts about American history than most Americans, because you had to take a test and and tell those facts in order to get your citizenship. And he has a wholesale belief in the entire American experiment. He chose the country on purpose. And you one could argue that he is a a a a more faithful American than Donald Trump, who doesn’t believe in any of the principles of the Constitution. He doesn’t even pretend to go along with the strictures on the Article II power. He doesn’t care. He’s just doing whatever he wants and thinks the Article I power works for him. And yet, it according to J.D. Vance, Donald Trump is more of an American simply because his family as a white, as white Bavarians emigrated here in the 1840s. And you know, the father and the and his, you know, though his grandparents are immigrants, doesn’t matter. And his mother, I believe, is also an immigrant from Scotland. They’re white, and so they’re obviously American. And he goes on in that speech that you played to say the people who fought in the Civil War, meaning on the Southern side against us, our enemies in the Civil War, are more fundamentally American than any immigrant who believes in the Constitution because they put their blood in the soil. So he literally did the blood and soil thing almost literally. Take it even further. Senator Schmitt of what is he? I guess he’s from Missouri. He was even more.

Alex Wagner: Eric Schmitt, yeah.

Joy Reid: Eric Schmitt, he said it even more clear. He said this country belongs. To the pilgrims who defeated, and this is not my word, but he essentially referred to the indigenous as the savages who would not, who tried to stand in the way of the pilgrim’s progress. This country belongs to those white people who defeated them. And also he omitted the idea that enslaved people built the country. He I guess laughs at that idea. It just belongs to white people. He kind of said it a little more bluntly. And I think that’s what MAGA is. MAGAism, when they say Make America Great Again, they mean white people own the country, white Christians specifically, sorry, own the country. And they inherit it from all of the Browns, all the Asians, all of the people who are white but don’t go along with the project. They don’t get to have the country. They’re here at the permission and by the grace of white Christians. And that’s the country they want. It’s what Project 2025 basically says. Women will be obedient and make more babies. Men will be straight and not gay. They will be no trans. There will be nothing that gets in the way of reproducing a white uniform society. And if you if it seems like I’m being hyperbolic, just look at the Department of Labor’s own ad campaign. It’s all over their Twitter. They haven’t taken any of them down. It just shows white sort of European idyllic cartoon person after white European idyllic cartoon person saying, This is America, this is the homeland, defend the homeland, defend this white-looking family. And it’s all white people who liter it literally looks like the old communist party ads from the twenties or the old Nazi ads from the thirties. That’s our Department of Labor.

Alex Wagner: What also, the Vice President of the United States, for all of his lust and fervor for white Americans is married to an Indian woman.

Joy Reid: Correct. But she’s gonna find God and and go to Christianity. Any minute now.

Alex Wagner: This is the thing of the self interest here I mean, I understand J.D. Vance on one hand, yes, this is is a white person, but he, the children he’s making are brown children.

Joy Reid: Of the kids is named Vake.

Alex Wagner: Exactly.

Joy Reid: And you know what’s so interesting? You showed the Claremont Institute. That is where Christopher Rufo  made his bones at being Mr. Anti-critical race theory, his wife, Thai and was undocumented. Make that make sense.

Alex Wagner: We’ll be back with more of my talk with Joy Reid after this break.

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: I do kind of want to like, you know, walk with me through this uncertain future, right? Which is the great bleaching of America, where I guess the only people led into the country are white Afrikaners who are fleeing some kind of political situation in South Africa.

Joy Reid: Yeah.

Alex Wagner: What does that do to our country? I mean, in the near term, I guess, because I I don’t know, wildly wildly unhinged, like, you know, optimism I have that this could maybe not be our destiny, but that someone with more emba empathy and thought will take the reins. But in the near term, what does it mean for America to be saying we’re close to people of color? And if you’re here, you might be kicked out. We are a place for white people, and we champion white heritage, white history, and the white future. Like, what is that? What does that mean for us culturally and economically, do you think?

Joy Reid: I think culturally, to start with that, you’ve already seen what they’re doing, right? They’re erasing the existence of anybody Black from the sort of arc of heroes in the United States. There can’t be any Black ones. Women, indigenous people also erased from our military history, even in Europe in art installations. You can’t have any Blacks, you can’t have that. You can’t have any, you definitely can’t have any queer people. They’ve got to go. You can’t name ships after Blacks or or women or or gays or brown people. All of that’s gone. So now we have a history that looks like an Aryan history, as opposed to the real history of the United States. You know, the the the enslaved hands that built the country vanish and disappear, and it becomes this sort of, you know, ode to European-ness. So we’re sort of want to be little Europe, and pretend that the brown, the Black, the Asians, you know, the Chinese didn’t build the railway. None of that happened. It’s all just white men standing astride the continent, building a civilization all by themselves, you know, and and moving aside the the savage, you know, people who were sacrificing babies over a flame, and thank God they came and Christianized them and took their children to, you know, schools where they could teach them to be little Europeans, and that’s it. That’s our future. We are the white baby Europe. Well, here’s how the real Europe is faring. They are an aging, slowing economy. Their median population age is the oldest on earth. Their GDP is probably what half of ours?

Alex Wagner: Mm-hmm.

Joy Reid: Their one kind of viable country, Germany, ironically, is struggling with its own crisis of migration because their economy is fueled by migrants from the east. And so if we want to be Europe, then we will inherit their economy. We will inherit their situation. And their situation is that they are wholly dependent on Africa for resources. They’re wholly dependent on Asia and the Near East for workers. They don’t have nurses in Britain because of Brexit. Their economy is a sluggish mess. Europe isn’t exactly thriving. Meanwhile, the youngest population on Earth is Africa, where there will soon be a billion people. It’s the biggest emerging market on earth. We don’t want them. You look in Asia, where they’re producing more scientists, more people who understand the new technology that’s coming out of Bangladesh, people places like India and Pakistan. We don’t want them. They’re a large part of our HB H2B visa population for a reason. China, which is essentially going to dominate the earth economically. It is dominating Africa, dominating the Caribbean. And we’re leaving the world to themselves while we’re going to retreat into becoming baby Europe. But by baby, I mean elderly person baby.

Alex Wagner: Like Benjamin Button Europe.

Joy Reid: Benjamin Button Europe.

Alex Wagner: Like a really old baby.

Joy Reid: Correct. And without immigrants, Europe is essentially economically dead. And without immigrants, we will be too. So I just I wish Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, who technically isn’t really in the club, I don’t think he knows that. I think he thinks he’s an Aryan.

Alex Wagner: Right. That is the irony, isn’t it? Someone don’t don’t tell Steven he’s not part of the club.

Joy Reid: He’s not well, I mean, even Kash Patel thinks he’s gonna be in Valhalla. And the the the the white people are like, baby, no, you’re not invited. You’re not even right. I mean, poor Ramaswamy’s like, Valhalla, they’re like, Val, get out. You’re not in you aren’t in our club, you’re not even you a Hindu, get out. And so they they think they’re in. I just I say, do the experiment. Your our economy will be trash. There will be no one to do control.

Alex Wagner: I say don’t do the experiment. [laughter]

Joy Reid: You’re not gonna make it. It’s not gonna work. It will just crush our economy. So culturally, we’ll be a dry, seasonless chicken with no no lawry’s, no, no seasonings whatsoever.

Alex Wagner: No garlic.

Joy Reid: And then culturally will be also that chicken, but really expensive. [laughter]

Alex Wagner: Chicken keeps coming up. Chicken keeps coming up. I talked about chicken this week with Stacey Abrams because George Packer was telling Tim Miller that he was making a capon for Thanksgiving, which is a castrated male chicken. And and we were talking about it’s like a it’s a I we weren’t talking about I was listening to this a chicken, it’s a chicken chicken. It’s like a chicken with no balls. And who in politics is most like a capon?

Joy Reid: Democrats?

Alex Wagner: And they said, well, they said Mike Johnson.

Joy Reid: Oh.

Alex Wagner: But it but you know, I mean, you could say that there’s some capons in the Democratic Party, but it is, you know, people wonder why it were it’s worth worrying about this moment and fighting against it. And then you hear when you really just pause and think, look at the master plan that’s been laid out. Look at the ways in which the news cycle has been perverted to their ends. Look at the way in which violence is perverted to serve their own ends. And and look at the, you know, the violence in turn that they are perpetrating on American citizens and undocumented citizens alike. It doesn’t matter if you have your papers or not. What matters is you say is the color of your skin and what they’re trying to do. Yeah. Well, and that’s ironically, I think what maybe the Afrikaners and the Americans increasingly have in common is a deep and and sort of emotional and quotidian understanding of what it’s like to live in a fully segregated society, but with the haves and the have nots.

Joy Reid: Well, I mean, the the the thing is it’s so interesting is that the kind of intellectual drivers of this are white South Africans, the the financial and intellectual drivers. Now, the PayPal Mafia are, you know, a crew of South African whites who, you know, wrung that country dry. Their their people, I shouldn’t say they themselves, you know, their people wrung that country dry of its resources, left it a a cold shell. And then after they lost apartheid, their people bounced and came over here to do the same here. They they fundamentally do think apartheid is a better system, that you know, slavery was probably a better system, that Jim Crow was better. And so there’s this yearning backward toward of a mythic past that they feel was somehow better, but it was only better because people like them were unrestrained and unconstrained and unregulated, and they just want to be unregulated. And, you know, I I you know, I think they think in their mind that they they tell themselves this is best for everyone, and that those of us like you and me are effectively children who need to be governed because otherwise we’re just a we’re just, you know, preternaturally violent and incapable of civilization. That’s what they think. And so they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. In fact, they think they’re fighting the antichrist because the antichrist is empathy and kindness toward immigrants and loving the immigrant, every all things Jesus said. Well, that’s anti Christ Christ is antichrist for them.  And so, you know, we’re in this bizarro world where because they have so much money and because they control the president and because he’s fundamentally racist, he goes along with it. And that means everybody that’s rich wins. Big oil gets to have Venezuela, you know, big tech gets to own all of our media and they get all the government contracts and they all win, the whole rest of the country loses. But in the end, when you gut the middle class, which they think is all white people, but it’s multiracial, you end up with a country where there are not enough consumers left to have a decent economy.

Alex Wagner: Well you have no labor either. And you have no labor, you have no innovation, you have a declining birth rate, and you have basically a dead country, a withered country.

Joy Reid: A withered, dead, but very white country. And I think that, you know, some of them.

Alex Wagner: Bleached.

Joy Reid: Bleached. They’re like as long as it they as long as it’s bleached, they’re like it’s good. You know, like when you over bleach your sheets and you think, but they’re super white. Yeah, but they’re shredded.

Alex Wagner: There that’s exactly right. There’s holes in the sheets.

Joy Reid: Yes.

Alex Wagner: And how good are they now? We’ve taken this metaphor as far as we can take it, Joy. [laughter] Does everybody understand what we’re saying here? I I thought about this topic and I thought, who do I want to talk to about this topic who is going to have brilliant thoughts and and just incisive analysis at her fingertips? And there—

Joy Reid: And you settled for me instead. [laughter]

Alex Wagner: Please God. It is so wonderful to have you here to talk about this terrible thing that’s happening to our country. And I am so grateful for your perspective on all of this and your your wise mind. And I’m so happy to be reunited with you. And I’m gonna keep asking you to come back on this podcast as long as you’ll say as long as you’ll answer my text messages [laughter] or even when you stop answering them, I’m gonna keep texting you.

Joy Reid: I shall never stop answering your text messages. I’m always just so happy to hear from you. I’m so proud of you. And look, I I I I did some of my best journalism at at at MS Now. We have to make sure we we, you know, we don’t want to dead name them. We’re gonna give them their name that they said they are. They are MS Now. So MS Now, we we thank you. And, you know, one of my favorite some of my favorite memories are are hanging out with you, my friend, because we did some like badass shit, you know? Like it was so much fun and I just look back at it with only joy because we really have—

Alex Wagner: With only joy. Me too. I look bad at it with the only joy and only joy. Thank you, my friend, for your time. I appreciate you.

Joy Reid: I love you. Thank you, friend.

Alex Wagner: Before we go, I want to hear from you. Have you been impacted directly by the Trump administration and its policies? Maybe you’ve experienced changes to your job or to your healthcare or at your kids’ school. I want if so, I want to hear it all. Whether these policies have impacted you for better or for worse. Send us an email or a one-minute voice note at runaway country at Crooked.com, and we may be in touch to feature your story. And thank you to everyone who has written in already. Last but not least, don’t forget to check out the show and our rapid response videos on your YouTube channel, Runaway Country, with Alex Wagner. Runaway Country is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Alyona Minkovski. Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank. Production support from Megan Larson and Lacy Roberts. The show is mixed and edited by Charlotte Landes. Ben Hethcoat is our video producer and Matt DeGroot is our head of production. Audio support comes from Kyle Seglin. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Adriene Hill is our Head of News and Politics. Katie Long is our Executive Producer of Development. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writer’s Guild of America East.

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