Doom Report (Week 21: Third-World Lawlessness)

So our wannabe dictator has decided that you should not look over there, where Elon Musk is calling him a pedophile, but rather over here, where people are protesting the insanity of ICE rounding up, not criminals, but day laborers, farm workers, people showing up for court dates, and even elementary school children.  How dare people assemble peacefully to object to the government trying to arrest children! 

Now, since “here” in this case is the actual city where I actually live, I’ve chosen to take this personally.  Oh, not because of the ICE raids: it’s hard to feel singled out on that count when they’re shutting down meat packing plants in Nebraska and roofing companies in Florida.  And not because of the military either: while LA may be the first, it certainly won’t be the last, and anyway they’re ripping up the roads in DC even as I’m typing this.  Is it because they threatened to arrest my governor, or because they manhandled and handcuffed my senator, throwing him to the floor because he tried to ask a question at a press conference where noted dog-murderer Kristi Noem had just said that homeland security had come to “liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership” of its mayor?  Nope—although those things are very bad.  No, I take it personally because they are creating the crisis they are supposedly responding to.

I hear people like Robert Reich and Jimmy Kimmel say “there is no crisis here.”  But that’s not true.  There’s a crisis now, because Trump and his cronies—in particular Stephen Miller—made damned sure there was one.  They sent in the National Guard without the permission of—over the express objections of, even—the governor, for which they were already on shaky legal ground, and then threw in some Marines just for fun.  The majority of them have nothing to do, and even nowhere to sleep.  Now reporters are getting shot with rubber bullets (and be sure to watch the left side of the screen to see the cop deliberately turn to shoot her), and government SUVs are threatening to run people over to elicit reactions of “violence” from the surrounding crowd.  The President of the country is publishing screeds about arresting everyone wearing a mask while the majority of mask-wearers are the ICE agents people were protesting in the first place.  And, as Jimmy Kimmel said: “Putting out a fire you purposefully start doesn’t make you a firefighter: it makes you an arsonist with a hose.”  Even Hank Green—typically known for videos about science, not politics—had this insight:

This is a situation that inevitably will create conflict.  And in my opinion this is a situation that is intended to create conflict.

(You should probably watch the whole video.  It gives a really incisive overview of the strategic aims of Trump & Vance.)

Trump said at Fort Bragg that what’s happening in California is “invasion and Third-World lawlessness”—well, it sure is, because he’s invaded us, just like a Third-World tinpot dictator.  And, even after all that, the real situation is still not as bad as he’d like us to believe.  One of my personaal heroes, Lou Wilson, is also Kimmel’s announcer, and he, as Jimmy put it, “went downtown today [June 12th] where all hell isn’t breaking loose” and showcased the contrast between the peaceful protesters and the military presence.  As Lou put it when talking about the Marines, “the general vibe I get from them is boredom and a sense of ‘what are we doing here’.”  The crowd Lou showed was pretty tame, since it was a lull in the protests; if you’d like to see a bit more active scene, Brian Tyler Cohen (who, like Kimmel, Lou Wilson, and most of the Some More News crew actually lives here) went down yesterday for the merger of the ongoing local protests with the nationwide “No Kings Day” protests where he spoke quite eloquently, as well as showing the (entirely peaceful) crowds being fired up to show their support for, you know, not being invaded by a guy with (as BTC put it) “small dictator energy” who seems to think Third-World lawlessness is what America’s been missing for the past 250 years.

But, hey: don’t believe what you can clearly see with your own eyes.  Just believe what they tell you.  Watch the video where the FBI grabs Senator Padilla and drags him out of the room; note that the first words out of Padilla’s mouth are “I’m Senator Alex Padilla.”  Yet Noem’s department later tweeted that Padilla “interrupted a live press conference without identifying himself.”  As Devon notes in his excellent breakdown of the whole incident, this makes perfect sense:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command ...
— George Orwell, 1984

But I’m not “the party.”  I’ll tell you to make your own decisions.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Zeteo had a great interview with civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis about “copaganda,” by which he means that the harms the media tends to focus on pale in comparison to the ones they never mention.  A simple example he gives: “There was one viral video of a shoplifting from a Walgreens in San Francisco of a guy on a bicycle that spawned 309 news stories around the country.  During that same period, there was not a single national news story about the far larger wage theft cases against Walgreens from stealing from its own employees.”

• If you’d like to know about the Trumped up charges (quite literally, in this case) against illegally deported, newly returned Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, both Devon from Legal Eagle and Brian Tyler Cohen did excellent videos this week.  My favorite was when the reporter interviewed by BTC (who was in the courtroom when the government presented its “case”) noted that they asked the judge to deny bail because Abrego-Garcia was a flight risk.  And the reason they gave for him being a flight risk?  Well, if the judge lets him out on bail, ICE would just pick him up and deport him!  Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up (because people would call you an idiot for saying such moronic things).

It’s a difficult week to find much hope to leave you with, but I’ll defer to the exemplar for why not all old white guys are bad: Bernie Sanders.  He put out a short video this week which he ended with these words:

If there was ever a time in American history when we need to come together, now is that time.  If we continue to fight for the basic principles of economic, social, racial, and environmental justice, I am confident that we will not only get through this unprecedented crisis in modern history, but that we will lay the foundation for a better and more just America in the future.

I can’t say I share his confidence, but, then again, if people had taken him seriously for the past 40 years, we wouldn’t be in this mess.  So I guess we have to take him seriously now.