As for racism I think the Muslim Ban was a case of explicitly racist policy. I know the Supreme Court disagreed, but frankly they are wrong on this.
2. If discrimination by religion is not acceptable by your standards, why should discrimination based on politics be?
Nobody is being discriminated against based on politics. They are being penalised for their personal actions as individual citizens.
I have commented on this in more detail elsewhere on this discussion.
As for racism I think the Muslim Ban was a clear case of explicitly racist policy.
The travel ban was not something I see as racist. It was nationalistic and popularist. There was a terror threat and Trump actioned a broad travel ban to make his voters feel protected from that threat. Did it actually protect anyone, probably not. Did it unfairly disadvantage huge numbers of primarily Muslim people, yes it did. But the intent had nothing to do with them being Muslim, it had to do with their perceived link to terrorism. You could argue that it was racist to ignore the rights of all these foreign nationals but I think Trump's position was that he only cared about Americans. He was a strong nationalist but in my opinion not a racist.
Most neo-Nazis and white supremist are white, isn't any action targeting those groups also racist? of course not; but what's the difference between that argument and the so-called "muslim ban"?
Neo-Nazis are not targeted under the law for being Neo-Nazis. They are targeted for individual criminal acts they perform personally, or conspire to perform together. Some small groups have been outlawed in some countries, but only in the same way that criminal gangs such as the Mafia or other terrorist organisations are targeted. That is in no way comparable to targeting "Muslims".
The mistake you are making is to conflate the criminal act with the motivation for that act. Setting a bomb or shooting someone because you are a Neo-Nazi does not mean that if someone prosecutes you they are doing so because you are a Neo-Nazi. They are doing it because of the bomb or the shooting.
This is the mistake the MAGA crowd on the Capitol were making when they were surprised and shocked that the police didn't come over to their side. It's a characteristic of racism that it conflates group identity with individual identity, and it's also why I am vehemently opposed to far left identity politics which makes exactly the same mistake.
They may be on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but wing nuts generally are susceptible to the same cognitive failure modes.
I don't really see religion as any more than personal/group belief; I understand America sees it differently, and privileges religious belief.
Is a religion-based ban more acceptable? yes, race is an immutable characteristic that does not determine or prescribe a persons actions or motivations - "religion" is a systems of belief that absolutely does.
> Neo-Nazis are not targeted under the law for being Neo-Nazis
If the metric for hate speech is guilt-by-association with acts of violence, any ideology that promotes violence is hate speech. Neo-Nazi ideology falls under this category, and I believe "refusing entry" has a lower bar then outright bans on freedom of expression.
> That is in no way comparable to targeting "Muslims"
The Muslim ban was so-called by Trumps opponents. The ban targeted specific countries, and was not an exhaustive list of all Muslim nations.
> The mistake you are making is to conflate the criminal act with the motivation for that act
I'm not sure they are so different. Thought-policing ones own citizens is chilling, but I'm less certain about doing the same to refuse entry - we already filter based on a persons character.
Er, and Trump himself. Many times. It was really important to him that people understood that. He explicitly and frequently said it was his attempt to implement the explicit Muslim ban he promised in the campaign.
https://www.cato.org/blog/dozen-times-trump-equated-travel-b...
I agree religion is a choice, but 'Muslim' is simply a massively broad category. It includes many groups that are implacable ideological and religious opponents of each other, and says practically nothing about a person's actual likely behaviour or actions. As with all racism and other-ism the belief otherwise is nonsense on stilts.
The vast majority of people who vote for him do not think he has policies with these traits. Describing his policies as "open racism", "open sexism", etc requires definitions of those terms so broad that most of the American population (and the vast majority of the world population) would also be guilty of them.