Haitian-American writer and YouTuber Wilkine Brutus believes that President Donald Trump’s immigration ban was conceived back in 2007 to neutralize seven nations in the Middle East and North Africa.
During a March 2, 2007, appearance on Democracy Now, retired U.S. Army General Wesley Clark told journalist Amy Goodman that the United States government devised a plan to deliberately destroy seven countries in five years. Clark named off Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and Iran as the supposed targeted nations.
What Brutus alluded to is that six of those nations are mentioned in Trump’s executive order, the only difference being that Lebanon is replaced by war-torn Yemen.
“Now, I see why the right-wing is afraid the U.S. government is trying to persuade the American people in accepting refugees from the same wars the U.S. profited from,” Brutus says.
The U.S. political landscape “is essentially team sports right now,” he said. Mainstream and some alternative news outlets have placed being first to break news stories as their No. 1 priority over being correct and factual.
Brutus added that the immigration ban has been scrutinized by think tanks like the Cato Insitute because of the ban’s faulty legalities and ineffectiveness.
“The United States of America has one of the most extreme vetting systems in the world,” Brutus says. “Aside from mentioning a phone call from Saudi Arabia mentioning safe spaces in the Middle East, the ban came with no other alternative or public conversations. So, we [U.S.] drop thousands of bombs and some of them hitting hospitals in the Middle East. And then we ban children and the elderly from speaking asylum.”
The post-truth era of politics is keeping dialogue static, Brutus said, while urging his viewers to “don’t just read headlines” but to also pay close attention to how they consume media.