Doom Report (Week 13: Snippets the Second)

This week, the major story (at least in my view) has been that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump regime disappeared to El Salvador in direct defiance of a court order.  The court order, by the way, only prevented him from being deported to El Salvador: if the regime weren’t utterly incompetent, and they really wanted to deport him, they could have deported him to literally any other country in the world.  But they are utterly incompetent, and they actually didn’t mean to deport him: they picked him up completely by accident, thinking he was Venezuelan.  And of course if they had just deported the 200 Venezuelans to Venezuela, poor Abrego Garcia would be stuck in a country where he had never been and had no knowledge of, but the regime wouldn’t have run afoul of the law.  But the regime, in its brilliance, decided to send the Venezuelans to El Salvador, where our taxes are paying the “world’s coolest dictator” to put them all in prison, despite none of them being convicted of a crime ... or even spending a day in court.  Thus, Abrego Garcia ended up in the one country in the world where he wasn’t allowed to be deported.

So the issue went to court, where the regime admitted that Abrego Garcia was deported by mistake.  And then it went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled 9-0 (an amazing thing in and of itself) that the regime had to bring him back—or, as Trump put it, “it’s interesting because we won that decision nine to nothing in the Supreme Court, and, uh, if you listen to the news, you wouldn’t know that.”  Nope, you sure wouldn’t know that thing you just said that totally isn’t true.  So then the regime immediately changed their story and started claiming that they had done it on purpose because he was a dangerous gang memeber.  Don’t miss Stephen Miller’s self-righteous, condescending press conference: when he asks “what do you think would happen to him if he came back to this country?” and a reporter responds “he could be with his family.”  Rolling Stone also has a great article covering all the regime’s lies.  Meanwhile, the courts are now contemplating holding the government in criminal contempt, and a court of appeals has denied the Trump regime’s request to allow them to interpret the word “facilitate” to mean “sit around and do nothing despite the court order.”

Again: we are paying the dictator of El Salvador to keep all these possibly innocent people incarcerated.  Which is a sweet scam for him, because, as Mother Jones reported, Bukele actually cut a deal with MS-13 to stem the flood of violence and let him credit for it, which is how he was able to come to power.  Then he in turn gives incarcerated MS-13 members special privileges, including just letting a bunch of them go.  Some of them end up in Mexico, where they get picked up and deported to the US for outstanding crimes here, and could possibly end up in court testifying to the whole devious scheme.  Trump is doing a Bukele a favor (though) by sending those guys back to El Salvador so that Bukele can let them go again and start the whole cycle over.  And then Bukele makes us, the American taxpayers, pay for the whole scam to boot.  Slick motherfucker.

Good videos this week:

• Legal Eagle has the absolute best summary of the Abrego Garcia case, including a later update.

• On this week’s Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Heather McGhee.  She tells some fascinating stories of institutionalized racism, including a few I didn’t know about.  Do you know what two major groups of workers were initially excluded from receiving Social Security?  It was agricultural workers and domestic labor.  Probably just coincidence that those were the two sectors with the highest percentage of black workers.

• If you’re still buying the bullshit that Trump is “just joking” when he talks about running for a third term, you should watch BTC’s analysis of Steve Bannon’s comments on Politically Incorrect. (To his credit, Bill Maher calls him out on this stance pretty hard.  While Maher is, in general, a terrible human being with terrible views, he’s still on the right side of history every now and again.)

• America Unhinged had a pretty good show this week, where they cover RFK Jr saying just the most disgusting (and abjectly false) things about people with autism—which my autistic child watched and just laughed at the ignorance of—and also Republican Lisa Murkowski admitting that she’s afraid of speaking out against the current regime.

On this week’s Pod Save the UK, Nish Kumar once again put something into perspective for me.  He pointed out that he had learned in school that the Great Depression led inevitably to the rise of the Nazi party.

... I spent so much time at school, studying the Wall Street crash and the depression in the 1930s, and how that had huge implications and led directly to the rise of the Nazi party.  It was such an important event for me, like the ways that that happened, and the lack of regulation around financial markets.  Then, in 2008, to see that happen again, and to see, over the next sort of 15 years, that not lead to the kind of sweeping changes that brought in the postwar consensus and led to the establishment of the NHS and the welfare state in the United Kingdom; to sort of instead see that all we’ve seemed to have learned from that is, that inevitably leads to a rise in far right politics, is really a great source of despair for me.

Again, the British perspective (and their no doubt superior educational system) helps a lot.  As a stupid American, I had never actually thought of the Great Depression as a worldwide event before, but now that I have, it all makes perfect sense: a severe economic downturn makes people desperate, and distrustful of their leaders, and ready to listen to anyone who tells them that the immigrants and the brown people and the Jews (or the Muslims) are the problem, and promises them a better life if they’ll just hand over all the political power.  And they do.  And apparently the only difference between 1929 and 2008 is that, in the latter case, it took twice as long before the people elected a right wing lunatic.  And also that Hitler seems to have been a lot smarter than Trump.  But it’s the fact that we as a people seemed to have learned nothing in the intervening 80 years that really depresses me.

In the end, I’m trying to take comfort in the wise words of Heather McGhee this week, who reminds us to stay ready so we don’t have to get ready, and always know what time it is.