This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Back in 2018, a 19-year-old neo-Nazi going by the name “ThomasRyan” wrote in a private Discord server that a “vast remigration program” in the United States was the “best outcome we can stand to look at.” There was no mistaking what ThomasRyan meant by “remigration,” a term only he and his ilk were using at the time. It meant the forced removal of non-white people from the U.S., a process ThomasRyan imagined would begin with the U.S. government escorting “willing” non-white people to their “ethnic homelands.” The “unwilling” — that is, immigrants and U.S. citizens who refused to leave the country that is their home — would be rounded up in chains so the government could “dump them” somewhere abroad. 

Fast forward to the present and ThomasRyan — real name Thomas Rousseau — is the leader of Patriot Front, a growing white supremacist group known for committing hate crimes across America. The vision of “remigration” he articulated eight years ago in a neo-Nazi message board has become official U.S. policy. 

“The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear: Remigration now,” the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security posted on X last week. The post included a video — set to Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” — showing border patrol agents shackling the hands and feet of immigrants before escorting them across a tarmac to a waiting Boeing 777. “Removal flight,” read text overlaid on the footage. The border patrol agents’ faces were blurred in the video. The immigrants’ faces, all belonging to people of color, and all filmed at the exact moment of their forcible expulsion from the Land of the Free, were not. The government propaganda celebrating putting people in chains even included a glamor shot of a tangled mass of shackles stored in a milk crate. 

As America celebrated its birthday with fireworks and fairs and speeches extolling our “freedom,” Rousseau led hundreds of masked Patriot Front members on a march through the streets of Washington, D.C. chanting “Reclaim America!” And the White House and the Republican Party have fully embraced the term “remigration,” a euphemism with the clearest, most traceable of fascist lineages, designed just over a decade ago to soften or obscure the atrocities associated with its actual meaning: ethnic cleansing. 

The story of how the term “remigration” traveled from the far-right fringes to the halls of power is one of the most defining, emblematic, and alarming of the 21st century. It is a story of how the “fringes” were never really that fringe at all; of the power of euphemism or, in far-right parlance, of “hiding your power levels,” to advance a white nationalist agenda; and of a tech platform taken over by a white South African immigrant to America who last month became a trillionaire. When you see or hear the word “remigration,” it is imperative that you know it means “ethnic cleansing” — a term considered by some genocide scholars to be a euphemism in of itself, one that masks the historic horrors of homes being raided, of human beings separated from their families, of concentration camps and mass murder. The stakes, to borrow........

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