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Further
On Manic Racism and Kindness As Kryptonite
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
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