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Taking a break from the awful to celebrate - remember that? - indefatigable civil rights icon, all-round mensch and former chicken preacher John Lewis, who died five years ago today after a lifetime of good trouble. The peerless "moral compass of Congress," now sorely lacking, Lewis never gave up seeking his "beloved community" even as he acknowledged he might never live in it. "Our struggle is not (of) a day, month or year," he said: "It is the struggle of a lifetime."
Over 60 years, Lewis' lifetime of struggle extended from student lunch-counter sit-ins, beatings as one of 13 original volunteers on Freedom Rides, founding and leading SNCC, speaking fire as the youngest organizer of the March in Washington and Bloody Sunday's seminal Selma march to, eventually, the halls of Congress, where he served 17 terms while persisting in making good trouble in ongoing fights for peace, immigrants, LGBTQ rights and voting rights that, he resolutely declared, “For generations we have marched, fought and even died for." Above all, "John believed in the power of ordinary people to do extraordinary things."
Born the trouble-making son of sharecroppers outside Troy, Alabama in 1940, he attended segregated public schools. As a boy, he wanted to be a minister, and famously practiced his oratory on the family chickens. Denied a library card for the color of his skin, he became a voracious reader. He was a teenager when he heard, riveted, Martin Luther King Jr. preaching on the radio. They met when Lewis was trying to become the first Black student at Alabama’s segregated Troy State University; he ultimately attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary and Nashville's Fisk University.
Along with Diane Nash and other members of the Nashville Student Movement, he began organizing sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters after four Black college students in Greensboro, N.C. first did it; there, staff refused to serve them but the students wouldn't leave, and then went back with more recruits. Lewis' first arrest came in February 1960 at age 20, when he sat down at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Nashville. Angry white patrons beat and tried to remove him and his fellow protesters; when police finally arrived, they arrested the protesters.
“I didn't necessarily want to go to jail," he recalled in a 1973 interview. “But we knew (it) would rally the student community." And it did: By the end of the day 98 students were in jail, hundreds followed, and that spring Nashville lunch counters began serving Blacks. "Nashville prepared me," he said. "We grew up sitting down or sitting in. And we grew up very fast." Soon, Lewis was also traveling through a belligerent, still-segregated South as a Freedom Rider, enduring more beatings and arrests. Between 1960 and 1966, he was arrested at least 40 times; as a Congressman, he was arrested five more times.
As the 23-year-old head of SNCC, he gave a fiery speech at 1963's MLK Jr.-led March on Washington. Older fellow-organizers - Philip Randolph, 74, and James Farmer, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins - urged him to tone it down; he scaled back critiques of JFK and dropped a "scorched earth" reference, but it was still potent. "To those who have said, 'Be patient'...We are tired. We are tired of being beaten by policemen, (of) seeing our people locked up in jail... How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now...We shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in an image of God and democracy.”
Two years later, hands tucked in his genteel tan overcoat, he led over 600 voting rights protesters over Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Ku Klux Klan leader, in what became known as Bloody Sunday. State troopers and "deputized" white thugs beat him so badly - still-chilling video here - they fractured his skull. Images of the brutality shocked a complacent nation, and eventually helped led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When he joined Pres. Obama at the site 55 years later, Lewis was still urging anyone who'd listen to "get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America."
In 1981, Lewis was elected to the Atlanta City Council; in 1986, he won what became his longtime seat in Congress. He spent much of his career in the minority, but when Dems won the House in 2006, he became his party’s senior deputy whip. Humble, friendly, eloquent, he was revered as the "moral compass" of the House. His last arrest was in 2013 as one of 8 Dem lawmakers, including Keith Ellison and Al Green, arrested at a sit-in for immigration reform; police arrested 200 people for "disrupting" the street. Lewis posted a photo: "Arrest number 45." Always, he calmly insisted, "We will find a way to make a way out of no way.”
The last survivor of the civil rights icons, he worked for 15 years toward the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History. When Trump ran in 2016, he sensed the urgency, posting, "I’ve marched, protested, been beaten and arrested - all for the right to vote. Friends (gave) their lives. Honor their sacrifice. Vote." He refused to attend the inauguration because Trump wasn't a "legitimate president." He called him "a racist" after the "shithole countries" slur, and voted for impeachment: “When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something. Our children and their children will ask us, 'What did you do? What did you say?'"
He died of pancreatic cancer on July 17, 2020, at 80. Nancy Pelosi called him "one of the greatest heroes of American history...May his memory be an inspiration that moves us all to, in the face of injustice, make ‘good trouble, necessary trouble.'” This week, Congressional Black Caucus members honored his legacy by vowing to do the same and reading his works. "His words are more necessary today than ever," said Rep. Jennifer McClellan. "John Lewis understood just as Dr. King did he wasn’t going to reach the promised land of that more perfect union. But he fought for it."
Since his death, Dems have continued to reintroduce the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore key, GOP-trashed provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It has repeatedly stalled in Congress, and for now will likely continue to. But Lewis' colleagues vow to keep pushing for it, said Georgia Rep. Lucy McBath, "to honor his legacy with unshakeable determination to fight for what is right and what is just." "Freedom is not a state; it is an act," said Lewis. "It is not some enchanted garden perched high (where) we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take." While, he attested at a Stacey Abrams event the year before he died, finding joy. May he rest in peace and power.
To those who feel nothing seems to change: "You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more. We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before.” - John Lewis, near the end of his life.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Racist madness explodes, the "straight-up Gestapo stuff" of dystopian nightmares, from brown people "hunted like animals" by roving thugs and packed into fetid concentration camps devised by cartoon ghouls to inane war waged on "SLIMEBALL" protesters, diligent farmworkers, brown toddlers - no Head Start for you - and a woke Superman decried as "the ultimate immigrant." Clark Kent's father's message in a God-awful timeline: "Your choices, your actions make you who you are."
And your words. The linguistic framework for the regime's war on immigrants, the hateful "glue that holds together the MAGA movement," is itself depraved, leading to and warping the rest. The White House proclaimed its rabid intent to protect us from an "invasion" of "illegal aliens" who "present significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans," with some "engaged in hostile activities, including espionage, economic espionage, and preparations for terror-related activities." Steadfastly, robotically, they snarl and spit out the terms, enough said. Illegal. Alien. Other than. Distanced from. Not us. Not quite human, menacing brown-skinned replicas of David Bowie's Man Who Fell to Earth.
Ever since Trump rode down his fucking fake gold escalator to defame all Mexicans as rapists or murderers and launched his hateful fake war against brown "worst of the worst" gang leaders and drug dealers, it's been one vile vicious racist lie. Facts, one more time. Immigrants commit far fewer crimes than native-born Americans. Immigrants do much of the hardest and shittiest work in this country, which they've largely built, because white people don't want to. And entering the country without proper documentation is not a crime. It's not a felony. It's not even a misdemeanor. It's a civil violation, akin in venal criminality to a parking ticket. So why the fuck are Goebbel's masked shock troops in Amazon-bought camo grabbing gardeners off the street?
Now, with the big fascist bill throwing unholy amounts of money at the hate - $170 billion, with $45 billion for detention and $30 billion for recruitment, making ICE richer than Israel's and Russia's military - emboldened goons will abandon any pretense of due diligence. Fentanyl dealer or farmworker: "If they cross the border illegally, they're coming with us." Increasingly authoritarian law enforcement, conflating peaceful protest with terroristic violence, will respond to criticism of its police state tactics by escalating them; DHS urges officers to consider signs, cellphone cameras, requests for ID, protesters on bikes - scouting for weapons? - "from the point of view of an adversary," deserving to be met with force. One advocate: "It’s going to get really scary."
Meanwhile, the racism grows more brazen. Last week, top goon Tom Homan told Fox, "People need to understand we don't need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them." (Not.) He babbled on about getting "the totality of the circumstances" and "the articulable facts based on their location, their occupation, their physical appearance." In other words, "Trump's thugs will racially profile you, then go on national television to brag about getting away with it." Totally credible DHS response: "Any claims that individuals have been ‘targeted’ by law enforcement because of their skin color are disgusting and categorically FALSE. These type of smears are designed to demonize and villainize our brave ICE law enforcement." Uh huh.
Stephen Miller, master of the master race though ostensibly Jewish, is updating actual Nazi talking points - "Without the Jew, the German school would thrive" - positing Los Angeles as a paradise without any "illegal aliens" and charging Dem leaders with forming "an alliance with the cartels." It was his furious rant to ICE agents in May they up their arrests to 3,000 a day - like Raising Arizona's Holly Hunter spitting, "Go out there and get me a toddler!" - that sparked the escalation of "straight-up Gestapo stuff" in L.A. County, where masked henchmen roam the streets, leap from unmarked cars and grab hapless laborers and gardeners to meet the quota: "If someone runs, they're taken. If they don't answer a question, they're taken. If they can't produce papers, they're taken."
Over 100 raids in southern California - at least 15 Home Depots, also car washes, parks, farms, churches, swap meets - have been documented by Bellingcat, an independent investigative collective, working with CalMatters and Evident Media. They found many similarities to an infamous April raid in Bakersfield to the north, touted as a search for violent criminals, in which 77 of 78 victims had committed no crimes; it prompted a judge's angry injunction barring warrantless raids: "You just can’t walk up to people with brown skin and say, ‘Give me your papers.’" But the relentless raids continue in LA County, with about 95 arrests a day, including U.S. citizens and green-card holders who "look like an illegal alien." An ICE training/propaganda video "If they run, we go."
Chilling bystander videos of our marauding police state abound. People grabbed at court, guys chased and pummeled at Home Depot, women cuffed as their kids cry, crowds shouting in rage. A guy on the ground, piled on by thugs, screams, "I'm an American!" Brown workers at a car wash are dragged off past two dazed white workers. Beefy stormtroopers shriek into terrified faces, "What hospital were you born in?" A guy in a truck, his window blithely shattered by goons: "Are you fucking serious, bro?" A young woman and U.S. citizen abducted as she's dropped at work by her weeping mother: "The only thing wrong with her (was) the color of her skin." A furious witness: “They don’t care if you have papers, as long as you look like what they want you to look like."
Especially egregious was the surreal, pointless scene in LA where about 100 heavily armed, camo'ed, masked troops, some flamboyantly on horseback, descended on downtown's MacArthur Park to sweep a now-empty area where low-income kids in day camp had just been playing before they fled in terror. (As a result, we're sure they slept well and peacefully that night, as did their parents.) Mayor Karen Bass angrily denounced what's become "a city under siege, under armed occupation." Snarling ICE sector chief Gregory Bovino shrugged her and it off: "I don't work for Karen Bass. Better get used to us now, 'cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles." Fox chyron: "Karen Bass Interferes with Raid."
As the abuses in California snowball, support plunges. The Catholic Bishop of San Bernardino, one of the country's largest dioceses, issued a rare decree allowing parishioners to miss Mass due to fear of raids that "may impede the spiritual good of the faithful." The mayor of largely Hispanic Perris warned residents to stay home and "know your rights." Polls show only a fragment of MAGA creeps back the terror, with a record-high 80% of Americans saying immigration is "good" for the country. (Duh). Even many stormtroopers don't like snatching gardeners, not drug traffickers, off the street, and morale is "in the crapper." A former ICE guy: "What we're seeing now is what, for many years, we were accused of being, and could always safely say, ‘We don’t do that.’”
Amidst multiple lawsuits - "What they're doing is actual terror" - there have been legal victories. In one class action suit, a federal judge in New Hampshire blocked the effort to end birthright citizenship as doing "irreparable harm." In another class action suit by the ACLU, 18 Democratic AGs and advocacy groups who describe "racial profiling on a scale unseen since Jim Crow," a judge in L.A. ordered a halt to raids in 7 California counties, citing "a mountain of evidence" that ICE is "indiscriminately rounding up numerous Individuals with brown skin without reasonable suspicion," as well as doing racial profiling and denying access to counsel for people held in "dungeon-like" facilities. DHS: "Whah?!" Also, "highly targeted," dietician-approved meals and "the best health care many aliens have received in their lives."
As to dungeons: Reports from the concentration camp giddy MAGA has dubbed Alligator Alcatraz - a cinematic "memefication of cruelty" - describe vile conditions: Sparse food with maggots, temps veering from steamy to freezing, not enough toilets, showers or water, no calls, huge mosquitoes, sweltering people packed into cages "like dogs in a kennel." Three Dem reps who just got a staged tour recounted "disturbing, disgusting conditions," an unforgettable stench, and "wall-to-wall humans" yelling "Help me" and "I'm an American citizen." "This place needs to be shut the hell down,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. "They're abusing human beings here." As they left, inmates chanted, "Libertad! Libertad!" Now, the GOP is fundraising off "ICE With A Bite" t-shirts, because they are sick fucks.
Two days earlier, ICE launched its largest, most violent raid on two Glass House Farms, in Camarillo and Carpinteria CA., that grow tomatoes, cucumbers and cannabis. In an ugly scene - injuries, women cuffed, kids running and crying: One to another, "They took your Mom?" - a phalanx of goons faced off against swiftly-summoned families and allies, attacking them with tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets before arresting about 200 farmworkers, many longtimers in their 50s or 60s. "We are not the enemy," protesters chanted. Also, "This is an abomination," "What's your ammunition for?" and, "Has any fucking single one of you ever worked as hard as these field workers?" Workers were held for hours in a parking lot, their cells phones taken and erased, before being loaded into vans for parts unknown.
Most of the country's over 2.6 million farmworkers are Hispanic non-citizens - perhaps 40% undocumented - working in "close to slavery" conditions and, until they began hiding at home, easy to find. Still, said the United Farmworkers, nowhere is it legal "to terrorize and detain people for being brown and working in agriculture." The next day, Jaime Alanis, 57, who'd worked at Camarillo 10 years while sending his pay back to Mexico, died of catastrophic injuries - broken neck, fractured skull - after he fell from a roof running from state agents. His niece began a GoFundMe with a $50K goal; it raised $159,432. He was, she said, "just a hard-working innocent farmer...He will be taken to his hometown Huajumbaro, Michoacán. His wife and daughter are waiting for him. We are still looking for justice."
Back in D.C., a vengeful, racist bully, incensed people had flocked to defend mere farmworkers - one protester maybe even threw something at stormtroopers - said he's giving "Total Authorization" for any ICE or other thug "confronted by thrown rocks, bricks, or other form of assault to arrest these SLIMEBALLS, using whatever means is necessary." At a White House meeting with African leaders, he also put his "aggressive ignorance proudly on full display" by patronizingly praising Liberian President Joseph Boakai's "such good English...Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?" Fact: The official language of Liberia, settled by former U.S. slaves, is English. America cringed: "Bro is a dumb racist. Straight up." He also ewww flirted with a Black reporter, handing her some crapola trinket with, "Darling, that's for you."
Having failed to adequately abuse people of color, his HHS also cracked down on brown three-to-five-year-olds by banning them from Head Start - which he'd tried but failed to kill - and other federal programs meant to "only serve America citizens." "For too long, the government has diverted hardworking Americans' tax dollars to incentivize illegal immigration," spouted JFK Jr., arguing a Clinton-era law had "improperly extended (some) public benefits to illegal aliens." (His father spun in his grave.) The action applies not just to Head Start's pre-school, which for 60 years hasn't labeled any child "illegal," but its meals and health screenings and other services brown people def don't need - health clinics, family planning, energy assistance. In Illinois, Head Start told members to just keep serving undocumented children. Sorry, small illegal aliens.
Things got not just mean but weird when, on behalf of our Christo-fascist homeland, DHS posted a video claiming ICE is bringing God's justice - a move deemed "the height of blasphemy." "There's a Bible verse I think about," muses the narrator, citing Isaiah: "Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send?' And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me.'" Cue shots of ICE goons as Johnny Cash sings God’s Gonna Cut You Down. Zach Lambert, an Austin pastor "fed up with the Bible being weaponized to hurt people," calls bullshit. In fact, the verse decries corrupt leaders "who make unjust laws (to) deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed"; Isaiah steps up to stop them. As usual, they got it wrong, and illegal: The song is by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, who trashed DHS for using it without permission and disrespecting Copyright Law, Habeas Corpus, Due Process and separation of Church and State. They ordered them to cease and desist, take down the video, "Oh, and go fuck yourselves."
Finally, for the release of James Gunn's new Superman movie, the White House inexplicably posted this Felonman, Pooperman, Supergeriatric. After Gunn said the story, of "an immigrant from another place," is "the story of America," and that "basic human kindness is a value (we ) have lost," MAGA threw a fit. "Superwoke," sneered Fox of a guy who "fights for your preferred pronoun (with) MS13 on his cape." Superman, "Champion of the Oppressed," first appeared in a 1938 comic by two sons of Jewish immigrants who fled Europe. "If you haven't noticed he's been an immigrant for the past 87 years, I don't know what to tell you," says Mark Waid, who's written it for 40 years. “Every day, Superman is learning to be a better human. The point (is) we need to be kinder to each other. Bullies hate that because kindness (is) their kryptonite." In a mock review, Rex Huppke charges the movie "gave me the woke virus" with its "aggressive humanity" and "way too much caring" about fellow humans who don't agree with or look exactly like him. "The Superman movie tried to make me less hateful," he gloats. "Nice try!" As to the rest, from the Idaho history teacher ordered to remove welcome posters now banned by law to the fascist thugs on our streets, "Do not look away."
Poster put up by Idaho history teacher Sarah Inama, now banned as "ideological."Photo by Sarah Inama
How user-generated videos on social media brought Trump\xe2\x80\x99s immigration crackdown to America\xe2\x80\x99s screens www.nbcnews.com
We staggered through the darkest ever ostensible celebration of American independence mournfully grappling with what Rev. William Barber calls the "all-out attack on who we even claim we are trying to be." A tireless pillar of righteous rage, he takes a long, moral view and a tough, simple stand on fighting for our rights and moving forward from catastrophe: "All of us have to find our way together now." Hopefully, we'd add, with brass bands accompanying us.
The good Rev. Barber, of course, comes to the fight against fascism armed with far more moral clarity and fortitude than most of the rest of us. His battle, both "a moral rebellion against Trump’s America" and against a deeper, longtime "architecture of inequality" since Frederick Douglas asked, "What to the slave is the 4th of July?" confronts a politics wed to nationalism, capitalism, exploitation and, in an especially "unholy relationship," religion, even as masked goons disappear our neighbors.
For the rest of us, Barber's resolve to bear witness, to build "a memory that resists the lie," takes many other, often mundane forms. We blunder forward as best we can. We seek strength and solace in small joys - friends, dogs, gardens, nature and solidarity - increasingly, at protests around the country, with music, often tubas. Kurt Vonnegut, always wise, was on it: "If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: ‘The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.'"
In St. Louis, the Funky Butt Band sang This Land Is Your Land. In Auburn CA, people sang Les Miserables' soaring Do You Hear the People Sing? In New York, the Street Beat Brass Band play; in Minneapolis, since George Floyd's murder, it's Brass Solidarity with This Little Light of Mine and I Wish I Knew How It Feels To Be Free. In Atlanta on No Kings Day, exuberant tubas drowned out the Proud Boys with Bella Ciao, a 19th-century Italian folk song turned anthem of freedom and resistance.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
In Somerville MA, the Good Trouble Brass Band has joined forces with the Boston Area Brigade of Activist Musicians (BABAM) for parades and protests in "a tradition of resilience and community" to contribute "something that is loud and joyful." And here in Portland ME we boast and love our Ideal Maine Social Aid & Sanctuary Band - "Easy tunes with friendly people" - a community activist, consensus-governed band in the New Orleans street band tradition spreading joy and advocacy since 2017.
They've played and marched at pride, homelessness, voting rights, abortion rights, Veterans for Peace events; at puppet slams, neighborhood gigs like Porchfest; a fabulous, four-tiered May Day gala; food coop, bike coalition, park conservancy parties; at a small, moving, buoyant Kneeling Photo Art Project - "We Kneel For An Equitable Future" - four years ago during a COVID winter, in their masks and down coats and sailor caps. Searing echoes of make love and music, not war and fascism.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Entirely aptly, these messengers of hope, rage joy offer diverse music, from Civil Rights- era anthems to old folk faves to Brass Band classics. Adding some spice is feverish new entrant from left field, Boston's Celtic punk rock band Dropkick Murphys. Longtime, blue-collar supporters of workers' and veterans' rights, they've been bringing their furious energy to protests; says front man Ken Casey “I think everything we’ve been doing for the past 30 years was a kind of warm-up for the moment we’re in.”
The hardscrabble Casey - from a recent show: "This Magger guy in the audience was waving his fucking Trump hat in people’s faces, and I could just tell he wanted to enter into discourse with me...I’m not going to shut up, just out of spite” - was raised by his grandfather. His foundational lesson: "If I ever see you bullying someone, I’ll kick the shit out of you. And if I ever see you back down from a bully, I’ll kick the shit out of you." On July 4th, they released new album For the People. Its fiery first single, Who’ll Stand With Us? and a quick-cut, seething video are a gut-punch call-out against fascist scumbags and oligarchs, with all the fury the moment demands. Just whew. Onward, evidently.
Through crime and crusade
Our labor, it’s been stolen
We’ve been robbed of our freedom
We’ve been held down and beholden
To the bosses and bankers
Who never gave their share
Of any blood
Of any sweat
Of any tears
Who’ll stand with us?
Don’t tell us everything is fine
Who’ll stand with us?
Because this treatment is a crime
The working people fuel the engine
While you yank the chain
We fight the wars and build buildings
For someone else’s gain.
So tell me
Who will stand with us?
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Plunging to new lows of "cartoonish cruelty" in our fascist reality show, MAGA just voted for our "most deeply immoral piece of legislation," depriving millions of food and health care as their fuehrer celebrated the launch of a scorched-swamp, mosquito-infested concentration camp - "Let's feed people to alligators!" - to detain millions more for overlooking the paperwork in their search for a better life. And there's merch! Fact: "Snakes in the Everglades got nothin' on the vermin in our government."
The Senate's barely-there approval - fuck Shady Vance - of Trump's heinous 900-page bill represents the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in U.S. history along with the largest cut to Medicaid and food assistance, all in the obscene name of (partly) funding a $975 billion tax break for the already richest 1%. The bill, "a tipping point between normality and fascism," also pours over $170.7 billion into "a campaign of extermination against immigrants that evokes the greatest human rights atrocities of the past," funding the hiring of vastly more Nazi thugs to terrorize, humiliate and put in cages millions of brown people who do much of this country's work.
It will kick about 16 million people off health insurance by cutting over $1 trillion from Medicaid, because who needs health insurance. It will throw millions of poor families, veterans, the elderly and disabled off SNAP by cutting $285 billion in food assistance, because who needs food. It will cut funding to rural hospitals, nursing homes, student loans, wind and solar energy - electric bills will soar 30% - costing millions of jobs and adding almost $4 trillion to the national debt, to be paid by our children and grandchildren, one of many excellent reasons it's said to be the most unpopular legislation since passage of the economically disastrous Embargo Act of 1807.
Bernie Sanders calls it, "The most dangerous piece of legislation in the modern history of our country.” Decrying the GOP's "obsession" with stripping people of health care, Maine Sen. Angus King calls it "disgusting..I have never seen a bill this irresponsible, regressive and downright cruel." To longtime Sen. Chris Murphy, it's "the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress." Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said passage of a bill "cooked up in back rooms, cloaked in fake numbers (that) loots our country (for) the least deserving people you could imagine feels (like) a crime scene...When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.”
The bill is so bad the GOP delayed cuts to Medicaid until after the mid-terms, and had to bribe its own members with perks to pass it; Alaska's Lisa Murkowski won the I Got Mine, Jack award by getting exemptions for her state and then complaining about how bad the bill is. To many, even worse than its craven kowtowing to oligarchs is its grotesque billions bestowed on a brutal, unprecedented white nationalist drive to dehumanize, criminalize and rip apart millions of families deemed undesirable by the color of their skin - and, eventually, likely their political persuasions - by making ICE, America's SS, the highest-funded law enforcement agency in a now-barbaric federal government.
The bill boosts the ranks of roaming Nazi henchmen by nearly 50%, with $8 billion slated to hire 10,000 more over five years (with signing bonuses!). ICE detention will get $45 billion more, a staggering 365% increase; "removal" gets $14.4 billion, a 500% surge; enforcement (see henchmen) almost $30 billion, up threefold, but we definitely can't afford to feed hungry kids. Billions more will build new camps, ramp up flights, double beds to 100,000, and round up more (hungry) terrified kids to meet a goal of 3,000 arrests a day. Of those, despite the absurd, enduring claim of targeting "the worst" violent criminals, maybe 8% have committed crimes; even ICE data shows over 93% are guiltless of anything but crossing the border.
The rabid stalking of migrants has given Republicans "license to be as openly racist as possible." Moving on from pet-eating Haitians, Scott Bessent sneered New York is turning into "Caracas on the Hudson"; on an image of its new mayor Zohran Mamdani eating with his hands, Texas' Brandon Gill, who's evidently never met a burger, sniped, "Civilized people in America don't eat like this - go back to the Third World"; and Trump already threatened to arrest "communist" Mamdani, blathering, "A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally." (Not.) Witless Tommy Tuberville called the residents of sanctuary cities "inner-city rats" we should "send back home"; Paul Krugman, home-grown but Jewish with a bi-racial wife: "We’re all rats now."
Thus do we have once-vibrant Hispanic communities from New York to L.A. now largely shut down, with frightened residents carrying passports to the corner store, keeping their kids inside until dark, or not venturing out at all for fear of abduction by masked gangs. Farmworkers across the country, up to 80% foreign-born and perhaps half undocumented, are also staying home: "If they show up to work, they don’t know if they will ever see their family again." In California, which grows much of our fruit and vegetables, those crops can go bad in one day as farmers struggle to harvest what they've grown. Experts say that many, already barely breaking even, will likely fold.
Meanwhile, ICE's daily atrocities - and the ensuing trauma - go on apace. A 75-year-old Cuban man here for 60 years died in custody, the 13th death this year; Tom Homan shrugged: "People die in ICE custody." Jacked-up stormtroopers assaulted workers at Home Depot and a woman selling tacos, tossing tear gas as they peeled away. They arrested the wrong mother of two as her kids tried to stop them. In Texas, they detained a preschool teacher with her three-year-old outside a courtroom. In L.A., they took a Honduran mother at a hearing with two children, one a six-year-old with leukemia; they've been held in Texas for weeks, the sick boy getting sicker, and she's filed the first lawsuit challenging the carnage.
And so, because it's still not enough cruelty for these ghouls, to Alligator Auschwitz, a steamy, "sadistic one-stop deportation shop" of tents filled with cages of bunk beds soon thronged with humans in a predator-replete swamp, a "concentration camp without the culpability of execution chambers" pitilessly "designed to enact suffering,” and help sick racists feel good about their whiteness. Set on a disused "shit-hole airstrip" in Florida's vast Everglades, the "bloodcurdlingly-monikered," built-in-8-days "Alligator Alcatraz” is surrounded by swampland brimming with alligators and Burmese pythons in a flood-prone, bug-plagued area where summer temps routinely top 100 degrees, rendering it "a calculatedly provocative celebration of the dystopian."
Tents in an environmentally treasured nature preserve often hit by floods, tropical storms and hurricanes at a time the regime has decimated the agency that warns about those events, operated by a likewise-decimated FEMA and commanded by haphazardly- deputized, wildly ill-qualified members of the National Guard serving as "deportation judges" - what could possibly go wrong? Set to cost almost half a billion dollars a year - but no, we really can't afford to feed hungry children - the barbed-wire re-invention of World War ll Japanese Internment Camps, with a fresh touch of El Salvador's CECOT, evidently fulfills Republicans' most fervent wet dream: To feed immigrants to animals.
On Tuesday, touring this "beyond horrifying" showcase of ruthlessness - initial intake 1,000, ultimately 5,000 - the cartoon villains who created it proudly paraded in: Nazi Barbie, Stephen Goebbels, Ron DeFascist and Trump with a botched make-up line that made him look like The Joker. He delightedly handed the floor to "our superstar," the sociopathic Miller, who praised the use of "novel legal and diplomatic tools," along with building death camps and letting ICE goons rampage through terrorized communities, to "deliver on a 50-year hope and dream of the American people to secure the border," at least on the repulsive planet he inhabits, and we wish he'd go back to.
On her foul planet, replicating her photo-op before CECOT's shaved-head detainees in her illegal $50,000 Rolex, ICE Barbie is still somehow celebrating her imaginary "going after murderers and rapists and traffickers." Tuesday she even added an alleged cannibal they'd put on a plane home who "started to eat himself," arguing he was "the kind of deranged individuals on our streets (that) we're trying to get out of our country because they are so deranged, they don't belong here." Hmm. Ever hard-core, she's also busy menacing one patriot for a nifty ICE Block app: "This sure looks like obstruction of justice - if you obstruct our brave law enforcement, we will hunt you down."
Just before her visit, her "reptile-run Gestapo" shared an AI-generated Alligator Alcatraz image featuring smirking alligators in ICE caps; Noem giddily posted, "Coming soon!" Americans recoiled. "Have you ever wondered what it would have looked like if Hitler's SS had social media?" asked one. Many suggested putting the people who built the atrocity in it; others decried MAGA's dehumanized trolling about concentration camps: "History is repeating - just with better branding." One: "Posting memes that boast about the manner in which people will die if they try to escape the undoubtedly inhumane conditions that will become the norm in a facility (gives) major "Alligator Auschwitz" vibes."
The visit came exactly a year after SCOTUS declared Trump above the law. Standing before cages in a dumb Gulf of America cap, the eternal victim sneered "Biden wanted me in here, that son of a bitch," but "it didn't work out that way." He called Noem "elegant" and "an unbelievable horse person" (umm) before happily noting "they have a lot of cops in the form of alligators" to "keep people where they’re supposed to be." He praised his grotesque cohorts - “It’s really government working together, I'm proud of them" - made zigzag moves with his pudgy hands - "We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator" - and opined, "A little controversial, but I couldn’t care less.”
A dead-eyed, servile DeSantis outlined the task - "intake, process, then deport" - and hailed the camp about to hold human beings who did nothing wrong: "This is as secure as it gets." He added, “This is a model, but we need other states to step up." Meanwhile, his state's party of zombies is so into it they're selling depraved merch - t-shirts, drink cozies - for "Florida’s gator-guarded prison for illegal aliens...It's a one-way ticket to regret." One appalled observer: "That's some Idi Amin stuff right there." Much like Trump on Fox, extolling his latest grotesquerie and airily explaining on potential migrant escapes, "They'll just get eaten by wildlife. I guess that's the concept."
There's more. Amidst performative acts of political intimidation, he's mused, "We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time...many born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here too" - maybe including Musk: "We'll have to take a look." He's selling $249 perfume, "a rallying cry in a bottle...They're all about winning, strength and success." He's musing about nationwide alligator-themed camps: "They might morph into a system where you're going to keep it for a long time,” citing facilities to "handle (some) of the most vicious people on the planet." Observers: "Consider the Alligator Alcatraz gear on sale (before) deciding who are the most vicious people on the planet."
And he's losing what's left of his putrid mind. Asked about a timeline for detainees, he raved: "In Florida? I'm going to spend a lot. This is my home state. I love it." He "fixed up the little Oval Office, I make it - it's like a diamond," he has "a nice little cottage to stay at," he pays lots of fictional taxes, everyone in New York is leaving. "I'll be here as much as I can," he ended. "Very nice question." Lawrence O'Donnell on "the banality of their cruelty," the "utter emptiness of his mind," notably on the virtually ignored day USAID ends, with its expected millions of deaths, its "worldwide campaign of cruelty in their name." Others: "But her emails. I didn't like her laugh. Biden was too old." Now here we are: "A more loathsome fuck never walked the earth."
And on Wednesday, Alligator Alcatraz already began flooding.