Scapegoating and Merchandizing Cruelty
Believe it when people tell you who they are.
First, let’s start with quite the admission by the Vice President, which suggests that the most important part of the bill that just passed was the money for ICE and immigration enforcement. Also, don’t forget the lie that the country’s fiscal woes are because of illegal immigration and the freebies that they get. It is a pretty substantial diversion when the bill rewards the wealthy and hurts the poor.
This is just lies and scapegoating to try and convince their voters, including many who will suffer from this bill, that the real problem is foreigners and that mass deportations will make their lives better.
The “minutiae of Medicaid policy” is a pretty heartless and dismissive way of saying that millions will lose coverage and that people will die earlier than they would have as a result. Many of whom live in Appalachia, it seems worth noting.
For more, see NPR: How Trump’s tax cut and policy bill aims to ‘supercharge’ immigration enforcement.
The massive package sets aside about $170 billion to support the Trump’s administration’s border and immigration goals, which includes detaining and deporting a record number of people from the U.S
[…]
The final bill allocates $45 billion for immigration detention centers, as well as about $30 billion to hire more ICE personnel, for transportation costs, and to maintain ICE facilities, among other spending. It comes as detention centers operate beyond their capacity.
The notion that we can blame immigrants for our woes allows us to treat them poorly and then celebrate it. Via the Miami Herald: Merch, jokes and memes: Trump officials, supporters love the name Alligator Alcatraz.
Here’s the Attorney General of Florida.
And here he is teaching his child to be cruel, and thinking that his Twitter followers would think it was cute (and many of them do!). What could be cuter than celebrating mass deportations and the usage of a makeshift camp in the Everglades?
If, in fact, undocumented immigrants are a very serious problem that requires a very serious set of policy solutions, it would seem that it should be treated, you know, seriously. But instead, people like Trump, DeSantis, and Uthwmeier treat it all like a cute little joke and an excuse to sell caps and t-shirts.
And, of course, there’s stuff like this.
It just so happens that 65 million is roughly the Hispanic population of the United States. Loomer claims that it is the number of undocumented immigrants in the US, because that makes joking about feeding them to alligators a-okay!
I know that the response I should have to the Alligator Alcatraz shirts and hats is moral disgust, but my first reaction is how fucking cheap it looks. At least the real Nazis had better memorabilia.
On the other hand, absolutely no one will believe that the people who are collecting this crap in 50 years are doing so out of anything other than racism. No “it’s just an interesting period of history, so I’ve decorated my home office with MAGA”
Enshittification hits everything in the end, even Nazis.
Shades of 30’s Germany
All of this makes me incredibly angry, but none of it makes my blood boil quite so much as the success the Republicans have had in convincing far too many Americans that all immigrants (legal as well as illegal) are criminals and by extension pernicious, dangerous, or simply bad people.
All the while, a convicted felon sits in the WH, VP Vance and Speaker Johnson diminish their high positions with their pious cruelty, and truly evil people like Stephen Miller and Laura Loomer are free to pollute the public discourse with their vile slanders.
The decent are smeared as indecent, the baddies think they are the good guys, and somehow the truth is losing to unreality. It’s maddening.
Propaganda works on very basic psychology. It’s not really the fault of the people. They’re being manipulated by craven people for the most craven of purposes.
The tragedy is that, like everything these people are doing, it will take decades to unwind.
Going a completely different direction on this issue: Does it make either policy or economic sense to expand enforcement and incarceration when the log jam in the system is on the due-process end of the sequence–overburdened immigration courts?
And yes, I DO understand that none of this is actually about getting “the worst of the worst” out. I just think it’s important to look at the trees in addition to the forest sometimes. If we ever become interested in addressing this issue, there’s lotsa stuff that’s gonna need to be addressed. In lotsa policy areas.
Laissez les bons temps roullez.
@Daryl:
That’s been true my whole adult life. From a bottom line, shareholder centered POV, though, continuing to have the problem provides much better ROI than addressing it does. So how long it will take to unwind the problem is immaterial. No one’s going to unwind it.
@just nutha:
I think the Republicans have demonstrated conclusively that they have no interest in addressing the issue. Any and all immigration dysfunction is far, far too useful in the Us versus Them space.
@Scott F.: Which is why I also said
ETA: And, “So how long it will take to unwind the problem is immaterial. No one’s going to unwind it.” In the following post.
@just nutha:
“when the log jam in the system is on the due-process end of the sequence–overburdened immigration courts”.
I think Trump expects that will be less of a problem in light of recent Supreme Court decisions.
@Moosebreath: I think a primary strategy for the administration is to induce mass self-deportation by continuously terrorizing and raising the stakes on undocumented and even legal immigrants. You run the risk of being disappeared or being deported to South Sudan? Better to go back to your dangerous but familiar home country. Get packed into an overcrowded detention center? Voluntarily self deport and take your chances in Haiti than rot in Louisiana for years waiting for a hearing. The cruelty is the point, but it’s the point of a single overarching goal.
I’m pretty sure the “alligator Alcatraz” slogan on t-shirts and ballcaps really means in English “Kick me very hard in the crotch.”
It would be rude not to honor such a simple request.
@just nutha:
Slavery got unwound. Jim Crow got unwound. Eagles were saved and the ozone was mended. Better angels and all that bunk.
We need to regard, and treat, MAGAs as we do pedophiles.
That is, shun them, exclude them, shame them, scorn them.
This is no longer politics. Politics is something reasonable people can disagree upon- tax rates, regulation, etc.
What distinguishes MAGA is their seething hatred of their fellow Americans and fervent desire to inflict suffering on others, a desire that so far has yet to find any limit.
These people cannot be allowed to function and mingle with the rest of us as if this were a debatable point.
@Chip Daniels: Amen to that, brother!