Data is anti-fascist

Last week, this newsletter was refreshingly apolitical. Well, that was then.

Chapter 1
What they want you to believe about immigrants

You don't need to travel too far up the branches of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller's family tree to find immigrants. As his uncle explained in a 2018 article for Politico excoriating his nephew's hard-line position on immigration, Miller is the descendant of the Glosser family, the patriarch of which arrived at Ellis Island in 1903, unable to speak English.

This did not prove to be an insurmountable problem. Glosser brought over his family, some of whom made their way to Johnstown, Pa. They opened what became a successful, regional department store chain — one of countless stories of immigrants coming to the United States to shape and be shaped by it.

But this traditional story of American success has seemingly done little to moderate Stephen Miller's view of immigration. He serves as the rhetorical and practical engine of Trump's immigration dragnet, a sweeping, ripping effort that reporting suggests Miller feels is moving too slowly.

On Thursday, Miller, responding to the Indiana state senate's rejection of a more Republican-friendly congressional map, framed his efforts in terms that would be familiar to anyone who is aware of the "great replacement" conspiracy — the toxic, dangerous idea that immigrants are being encouraged to come to the U.S. to reshape the population.

Notice that Miller describes this theoretical "scheme" in partisan terms: Democrats are trying to replace Republicans by "mass voter importation." This, he asserts, will "facilitate the disinheritance" of Republicans' children.

There's one deviation here from standard "great replacement" rhetoric: Miller puts it in partisan rather than racial terms. But this, too, is demonstrably false.

In September and October, KFF conducted polling in which they asked immigrants to the U.S. how they viewed politics and Trump. The results? The politics of immigrants to the U.S. mirror the politics of Americans overall — not really that surprising when you consider that nearly everyone in America is here due to immigration.

KFF broke out the immigrants with whom their pollsters spoke into three groups: All immigrants, naturalized citizens and citizen immigrants who were registered to vote. In each case, the immigrants were most likely to identify as independent or apolitical, while being slightly more likely to be Democrats and slightly less likely to be Republicans. A blue wave, it isn't.

How to read this chart: The partisan identities of each of the three groups above are shown in the outer ring of the diagram. The overall partisan composition of Americans, measured by Gallup, is shown in the inner circle.

I've highlighted one part of the third chart, showing the partisan identity of registered immigrant voters. They are 8 percentage points more likely to be Democrats (and 3 points less likely to be Republican). This, Stephen Miller would have you believe, is the urgent driver of a nefarious scheme to rebalance politics to the left.

But we don't really need this poll. Miller's assertions are self-evidently false if you just look at politics as it stands. As I wrote in my 2023 book "The Aftermath" (makes a great Christmas gift!), no state better reflects the more-diverse, more-immigrant-heavy future population of the U.S. than Florida — and Florida is hardly a deep blue state.

The KFF poll also asked specifically about Trump. Immigrant voters were as likely to approve of his presidency as Americans overall (comparing KFF's numbers to contemporaneous polling from YouGov), even if they were slightly less enthusiastic. Immigrants who identified as independents were actually more supportive of Trump.

In fact, on the specific issue of immigration, immigrants were as likely to approve of Trump as were Americans overall.

So why does Miller claim that immigration is some big scheme to freeze out Republican voters? Because he recognizes that partisanship is a potent, acceptable lens through which to fearmonger. Miller is and has long been committed to rejecting immigration; he sees partisan insecurity as a way to bring other Republicans on-board with his efforts.

It reminded me of a piece I wrote for MS NOW last week, exploring how the administration's recent increase in inflammatory anti-immigration rhetoric compared to 1930s Germany. Then, historians told me, the Germans had a scheme to excise Jews from German society but needed to build political power to do it. Trump seems to operate in reverse, using demagoguery to build power. But Miller's approach above aligns with history more neatly.

One historian, University of Maryland Professor Emeritus Jeffrey Herf, explained that one of the talents deployed by German propagandist Joseph Goebbels was his cynicism. He was "lying all the time," Herf said — but because he argued that everyone lied all the time.

But there is an objective, observable reality, one that sits at odds with Miller's presentation of immigration. The data — unemotional, precise — demonstrates that the fascist project of the present isn't a competition between two sets of lies but between a lie and a truth.

Chapter 2
Happy birthday, from the National Park Service

We also learned this week that the schedule of days on which national parks will have free admission has been overhauled for 2026.

I assumed, upon first reading news articles about the shift, that this schedule aligned with federal holidays, which made me curious about when those holidays were instantiated. So — you're not going to believe this! — I made a chart.

Turns out, a lot of the 11 federal holidays are relatively new. Five of them have been around for less than a century.

But this isn't actually how national park free-admission days work. Which makes sense: These are federal holidays! The federally run parks are, for the most part, closed. Instead, the free-admission schedule for past years included park-related celebrations, like National Park Week and National Public Lands Day. They also included some federal holidays: Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Juneteenth and Veterans Day.

So what's changed? Well, only Veterans Day survived from that bunch, for reasons that I will leave to you to glean. Memorial Day was added to the mix, as was the entire Fourth of July weekend.

Oh, and a bunch of birthdays were added! George Washington's birthday, Teddy Roosevelt's birthday, the National Park Service's "birthday" (as the new calendar puts it) and, let's see here … oh! Donald Trump's birthday! Who would have guessed.