The Skinny: A Whiter Shade of Fail
The Grim Consequences of Crackery: June 1st – 10th
Trump, Israel, and the Witkoff Massacre
Despite what appears to be a broad, albeit primarily rhetorical, shift in mainstream establishment opinion about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza across most of the Pig Empire, Very Serious People TM in the US remain inside a disturbingly bipartisan, pro-genocide unreality bubble. Apparently, when you’re inside that bubble it seems far more reasonable to analyze the state of Pork Reich support for Israel’s crimes through the lens of Trump’s personal relationships with Israel’s fascist PM Benjamin Netanyahu, than it would be to talk about all the ways his regime has actively expanded on the Biden administration’s open facilitation of that genocide; even as the slaughter continues to this very moment. Yet outside that bubble, across the broader planet, and even in the US discourse that exists beyond corporate media or in-pocket political actors, the reality that this is America’s genocide too is utterly inescapable.
Take for example the absurd “humanitarian aid” scheme the Trump regime and Netanyahu cooked up to pretend Israel wasn’t trying engineer a famine as part of its broader, openly stated project to ethnically cleanse, occupy, and colonize Gaza, that was nevertheless treated as a plausible sign Trump was reigning Israel in by a credulous, pro-genocide US establishment and media complex. The moment the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” and the plan to distribute aid under the watchful eye of the IOF and U.S. mercenary contractors was revealed, everyone living in the real world, including UN aid officials and humanitarian relief experts, immediately said this wasn’t going to stop the intentional starvation and the whole thing smelled fishy. Folks who truly understood the nature of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza however spoke of a far darker possibility; that the reason to march Palestinians halfway across the Gaza strip and herd them like cattle into a heavily-surveilled area surrounded by soldiers, was to directly facilitate and further the genocide and mass displacement of Gazans itself.
Well, now that IOF forces have engaged in a massacre at one of these sham food distribution sites, actively engineered, supported, and protected by the Trump administration and our hired military contractors, I think we can chalk this one up as yet another loss for team “it’s not genocide” and the US establishment unreality bubble. As Israel sprints towards pariah state status, and the international community is searching for an off ramp before public opinion drowns their formerly pro-genocide leaders, the Trump regime has responded by actively facilitating and even participating in a settler colonial massacre that’s part of a larger ongoing genocide. Yet somehow, despite plenty of corporate media coverage of the incident, this reality largely escapes Very Serious People TM in the American discourse.
‘The Witkoff Massacre’: Hundreds Killed or Wounded as Israeli Forces Open Fire on Gaza Food Aid Site
“Health officials in Gaza and multiple witnesses at the site near the southern city of Rafah reported that “Israeli forces fired on crowds around a kilometer (1,000 yards) away from an aid site run by an Israeli-backed foundation,” according to the Associated Press.
“The international community must act immediately and decisively to compel Israel to end its inhumane aid distribution mechanism in Gaza, following today’s massacre near a U.S.-backed aid centre south of Rafah, where Israeli forces killed or injured over 220 starving civilians,” said the Switzerland-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med), in a Sunday morning statement, which had personnel on the ground near the aid station.”
My friends, if you haven’t figured out that America (as embodied by our government) is on the wrong side of history here; I don’t know what else to say that will convince you. We are literally luring starving Gazans out of hiding with the promise of food, concentrating them in pens, and then letting IOF soldiers shoot at them, while calling that “humanitarian aid” and pretending the Trump administration is trying to do something about a famine engineered by our own client state. There are no words I’m comfortable uttering in this political climate that can adequately cover the outrage, revulsion, and loathing I feel towards a Trump regime, US corporate media, and a broader bipartisan American establishment containing plenty of rich Democrats, that has brought this livestreamed genocide into being. Even now, even among those who at this late an hour have finally decided that TikTok videos of starving toddlers means this really is a genocide, our chattering classes are trying to couch this in terms of “Netanyahu’s genocidal war” despite the fact that literally none of this would be possible with direct American material support, and a US corporate media complex devoted to manufacturing consent for murdering babies and bombing hospitals. The word “infuriating” does not even begin to fully communicate how that makes me feel.
As outraged as I am however, I, like many observers in the independent left wing media, can see the light of truth growing brighter even through the blinding fog of colonialist propaganda. The truth is that well over a year and a half into Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the propaganda bubble is starting to burst; even with an army of sycophants and stenographers, nobody can stop reality from being real, forever. We, the United States of America, own this genocide, and the whole world is watching while our chattering classes full of Very Serious People TM pretend our government isn’t an active participant.
Punishing the “Wrong Kind” of Americans
There is something altogether insidious about the way purposely-cultivated, nativist coding in American attitudes about immigration policy work to obscure the ethno-nationalist reality of Trump’s mass deportation efforts and his regime’s broader white nationalist agenda. No matter how many times the Pork Reich lets the mask slip and either openly admits or institutes policies that make it clear they also want to harm, expel, or otherwise remove legal immigrants who don’t fit a particular political and racial archetype, the broader US discourse translates those objectives to “Trump is deporting dangerous, violent, criminal migrants who snuck across the border illegally.” This literally does not change, no matter how often ICE arrests a beloved small business owner who has been contributing positively to his community for decades, or DHS deports children who are American citizens in their fanatical quest to expel an undocumented parent, or how often the Trump regime’s policies treat refugees, green card holders, and even foreign-born US citizens as “illegal” and “criminal.” The overtly racist, authoritarian reality of our immigration policies washes away in a national mantra about “keeping us safe” from “violent criminal migrants” that represent an almost microscopic fraction of the very real people, often guilty of nothing more than a civil violation, these fascist programs and policies affect.
As I’ve documented repeatedly however, if you actually bother looking you’ll find a clear and unmistakable ethno-nationalist or nativist pattern to way the Trump regime’s overarching “immigration reform” agenda functions. Whether it’s revoking protected status from hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers at the stroke of a pen, trying to deport visa-holding foreign student protestors, or looking to end birthright citizenship entirely, most of Trump’s anti-migrant policies are very clearly about targeting people the Klepto Kaiser doesn’t feel should be in the country, regardless of their actual legal status in America. Now, you can add preventing potentially millions of legal immigrants from working in America because they can’t get a social security number, to the growing pile of evidence demonstrating the Trump regime’s rhetoric about “criminals” and “illegals” is obfuscating an openly nativist political program.
Millions of legal immigrants’ lives upended after social security freeze
“The Enumeration Beyond Entry program is an agreement between the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, where US Citizenship and Immigration Services would provide social security with information from applicants for work authorization or naturalization.
The program began in 2017 under the first Trump administration.
Without any public notice, on 19 March, the program was halted, affecting millions of immigrants every year and burdening Social Security Administration offices, as those applicants will now have to visit a Social Security Administration office and apply separately to receive a social security number.
Following the freeze, the Trump administration issued a memo on 15 April aimed at preventing undocumented immigrants from receiving social security benefits, but provided no evidence of it being a problem.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before but it turns out a Trump regime policy the government claims is necessary to stop “illegals” from stealing our social security benefits (that the ruling GOP party is trying to steal itself) actually has nothing in particular to do with preventing social security fraud, and in reality is just a giant “fuck you, go home” to legal immigrants in the United States. I’ll give you a moment to get over your shock; I guess the folks this targets should have been South African nazis if they didn’t want Stephen Miller and Downmarket Mussolini to harass them, am I right?
Now, you might be tempted to push back on my categorization of this as a nativist administrative maneuver if you take this malicious, but not particularly cancerous-looking policy shift at face value. After all, legal immigrants still can get a social security number, they just have to visit an office in person to so. Even setting aside the fact that this still gives the federal government an unwarranted degree over oversight over the lives of folks the US government has already said were fit to be admitted into the country however, this action must be placed in the context of a Trump administration and DOGE project that just slashed the SSA’s staffing to the bone, closed a massive number of Social Security offices, and altered this policy without even making a formal announcement of how it would affect legal immigrants. I may not be a billionaire ketamine addict who builds cars and rockets that burst into flames randomly, but I’m not dumb enough to believe the Trump administration doesn’t realize what they’re doing here; fucking with legal immigrants is the point, because this entire government doesn’t believe anyone who isn’t white, Christian, and pro-Trump actually belongs here.
At some point you have to accept that the purpose of a system is what it actually does; and everything about the Trump regime’s fascist immigration policies consistently does nativist bullshit. This isn’t about “criminals” or keeping anyone “safe,” it’s bald-faced racialized nationalism and we as a society must say so loudly, no matter how ingrained pretending otherwise is in American culture.
A Not-So-Secret Fascist Plot
Speaking frankly, I would define the larger Project 2025 discussion that started well before the 2024 US election as one of the most tragic and frustrating political football matches in the modern history of America. Here, on its face, you had a disturbingly plausible blueprint for installing a Christian nationalist political, social, and economic order on the United States, published by a fundie fascist think tank, and written by no less than 140 people who worked in the first Trump administration, that leaked into the public discourse months before the vote. Everything about Project 2025 was widely publicized, and talking about all the awful nazi shit inside the plan was probably the most effective part of an otherwise dismal Harris presidential run. Everyone, including Trump’s voting base, hated it; at its lowest point, the blueprint for a Christian nationalist dictatorship was polling at a remarkably poor 4% approval rating.
Project 2025 was thus rendered utterly radioactive during the 2024 US presidential election campaign and Trump needed a way to distance himself from it as quickly as possible, so he did what he always does: he lied. Downmarket Mussolini claimed he had no affiliation with Project 2025, wasn’t planning on implementing it, and indeed didn’t even know what was in the supposed blueprint for his second administration. And, perhaps because most Americans instinctively knew the Klepto Kaiser isn’t exactly a big reader, that worked. Which isn’t to say that anyone opposing Trump already was fooled, but it was enough for the cracker Volk to ignore the story and pull the lever for the Klepto Kaiser on election day.
In fact the strategy of “just lie your ass off” worked so well on the campaign trail, that even as the Trump regime objectively follows the Heritage Foundation’s plan to install a Christian nationalist dictatorship in America almost to the letter, the larger administration is still choosing to lie about doing so. During a June 1st, 2025 interview on CNN, the Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who literally co-wrote the part of Project 2025 that transforms fundie fascist objectives into policy, responded to a set up question about whether the Trump regime was openly enacting Project 2025 with a simple, direct, and completely fucking false “no; of course not.”
Now, you know Russ is lying, and I know Russ is lying, but would you believe the raw statistical data also makes it clear Russ is lying? Of course you would, but let’s check out this recent report published by DeSmog anyway because the numbers involved here are staggering to the point of making the Trump regime’s denials farcical:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/project-2025-trump-cabinet
Analysis Finds Majority of Trump Cabinet Tied to Project 2025 Groups
“That’s according to an interactive analysis published Monday by the international climate-focused news outlet DeSmog, which found that more than 50 high-level Trump administration officials have ties to groups behind Project 2025.
That figure includes many of Trump’s closest advisers, including Stephen Miller and Elon Musk, who recently stepped down as the de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. It also includes 14 out of 24 Cabinet-level officials, or 70% of the Cabinet.
“That’s a hugely significant finding,” Duke University history and public policy professor Nancy MacLean told DeSmog. “In Heritage’s own longtime language, ‘personnel is policy.’ It shows the incredible bad faith of Trump’s denials, because this is who he stocked his administration with.”
So without just quoting the rest of Brett Wilkin’s article here, the two key points to keep in mind are that Trump’s entire administration and his cabinet are littered with people associated with Project 2025 or the fascist think tanks behind it, and virtually everything the Trump administration and the ruling Republican Party have done since the Swine Emperor retook office was and is mapped out in Project 2025. The Trumpenreich nazis are lying when they deny it, and we know exactly what Trump is going to do next as he progresses his fascist agenda forward because these muppets literally wrote it down.
Which of course brings us back to a current American political reality where CNN host Dana Bash, who knows damn well Trump is enacting Project 2025, is still playing pattycake with Russ Vought about it instead of just stating that the regime is obviously following the blueprint the Heritage Foundation laid out. Folks we are talking about printed and easily-verifiable evidence of a vast, well-funded, ideological coherent right wing conspiracy in America to install a Christian Nationalist one-party dictatorship in this country; we’re definitely well past the point where playing gotcha with Russell Vought on CNN is a reasonable course of action for Bash to take here. The reality that the Trumpenreich is a fascist regime in progress is no longer disputable, and if anyone in our establishment is still committed to doing something about that in the really real world the rest of us have to inhabit, it’s probably time they started acting like they know what time it is.
Trapped With Trump in a Land of Rage and Shame
After pretty much a decade of analyzing news in the Trump-soaked Pig Empire media environment Downmarket Mussolini’s first run for president created, I’m prone to assuming that I can predict precisely how low the Trump regime will go to further its fascist objectives and nothing these nazis do is capable of staggering me anymore. In fact, I think many veteran observers of the Swine Emperor’s atrocious fascist agenda in action can become numb to the raw amount of violence, criminality, and repression this regime engages in; the nazi carnival funhouse mirror reality all of the Trumpenreich operates in has a habit of eventually wearing out your capacity for emotional responses, and I’m no exception. Sometimes however, a Trump 2.0 era headline will punch you in the mouth with a raw, and visceral reminder of precisely how horrifying and evil America has become during the Kelpto Kaiser’s second act.
I think what I’m trying to say here is that words cannot begin to describe how uncomfortable it makes me to see the Trump regime’s cracker nationalist mass deportation scheme so interwoven into our everyday lives, that the government is proudly keeping score on the number of migrants detained by the American Gestapo, and celebrating a new daily arrest record in public.
Ice makes record number of immigration arrests on single day
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) made a record high number of arrests on Tuesday, detaining more than 2,200 people as Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policy continues.
NBC News reported that the figure represents the most people ever arrested by Ice in a single day.
Hundreds of the people arrested were enrolled in Ice’s alternative to detention program, under which migrants who are awaiting legal status are given background checks to determine they are not a safety risk, then tracked by the government using ankle monitors or smartphone apps.
The record total comes after senior officials over the weekend instructed rank-and-file Ice officers to arrest more people, even without warrants. In May, the White House demanded that Ice arrest 3,000 people a day.”
To put it bluntly: the on the ground realities of this administration’s fascist mass deportation project bullshit is absolutely racist, dystopian, and if it isn’t illegal it certainly fucking should be. If learning about this doesn’t make you want to see ghouls like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem punished for crimes against human rights and a supposedly free society, you’re probably reading the wrong blog; the US government is treating caging brown people like animals as a net good, and to at least some degree most of the larger establishment is barely blinking in response to that presumption. This should piss you off, but I’m not sharing this story to make you angry; I have a greater purpose here.
The backdrop behind this repugnant milestone in what amounts to a type of ethnic cleansing, is the same broader discussion we’ve been having about the regime’s ethno-nationalist objectives, right wing propaganda about violent migrant criminals, and how the gap between who Trump says he’s targeting, and who the Gestapo detains, debunks every reason the Trumpenreich has offered for its mass deportation program. Ratcheting up ICE’s arrest quota by two hundred percent has made it impossible for even a credulous American establishment to pretend this is about public safety, or removing violent criminals from the country; and the nazi chucklefucks running this cracker nationalist shitshow have admitted as much internally.
“Some of the arrests “appear to be the result of a new Ice tactic”, NBC News reported, in which Ice officials arrest migrants who are enrolled in the alternative to detention program when they arrive at pre-scheduled check-in meetings at Ice offices.
“[With] mass arresting of people on alternatives to detention or at their Ice check-ins or at immigration court hearings, the dragnet is so wide that there’s no possible valid argument that could be made that these individuals are all dangerous,” Atenas Burrola Estrada, an attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, told NBC News.
The Guardian reported that on Saturday senior Ice officials urged officers to “turn the creative knob up to 11” when it comes to enforcement, including by arresting undocumented people whom officials may happen to encounter – here termed “collaterals” – while serving arrest warrants for others.”
These tactical shifts are of course in addition to unconfirmed reports that Stephen Miller himself yelled at DHS officials last week to demand the Gestapo stop focusing on just “criminal” migrants; which if true, makes it abundantly clear that the regime understands the rhetorical two-step they’re playing here as part of a broader project to whiten US population demographics. Folks we’re arresting asylum seekers reporting for monitoring, refugees who just lost protected status by Presidential fiat, and migrant mothers with American citizen infants; nothing about this has anything to do with fighting “crime” or keeping anyone “safe.” It could not be any clearer that when this regime says “criminal” they mean “undocumented” and when they say they’re acting to keep the public safe, they mean “from having to see brown people in their neighborhoods.”
And given that this is so obvious, why is anyone still pretending otherwise? The Trump regime’s mass deportation scheme is very clearly a type of ethnic cleansing project designed to produce a whiter America, and it’s probably only a matter of time before some clever nazi in the Pork Reich figures out bullets are cheaper than airplane rides. At what point are we as a nation going to accept that this is how the Third Reich and the horrors of the Holocaust happened, and collectively stop pretending this is immigration policy? I hope the answer is soon, because it does no good to realize the truth after we’re digging up mass graves.
Shared Ideological Goals in Fascist Amerika
While I understand why some liberals get frustrated when left wing analysts stress the bipartisan nature of the US establishment’s efforts to create a new McCarthyism, and its support for deploying an already existing police state against student anti-genocide protestors, I’d like to think that months into the Kelpto Kaiser’s openly fascist presidency it’s clear to reasonable observers why this matters. The conflation of anti-genocide, with antisemitism and support for Hamas, an organization the US government had labelled as “terrorist” long before Trump took office, as well as public demonization of student protestors calling for the larger US establishment to sever ties with Israel, and the normalization of militarized police responses on university campuses, were all supported by both the Biden administration *and* the larger “liberal” capitalist establishment. And every aspect of that pre-established “new McCarthyism” is so foundational to Trump’s expanded fascist repression of protestors and critics, that you can’t separate one from the other; even while acknowledging that Downarket Mussolini is using this bipartisan support in appalling ways Biden did not, to drive his larger fascist agenda.
The other reason you can’t separate the support of the larger liberal establishment from the fascist shit Trump is doing to anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian protestors now is because said liberal establishment hasn’t actually stopped engaging in their own acts of fascist repression targeting student protestors. For an example of what I’m talking about, let’s return to my home state of Michigan, where sharp-minded readers may recall Dem state AG Dana Nessel got into hot water in April after she allowed FBI (so, federal) agents and local law enforcement to smash in the doors of pro-Palestine anti-genocide activists connected to the University of Michigan, and then told a bunch of big stupid lies about why that didn’t mean she was working with Trump to target student protestors. Well I’m sorry to say the targeted harassment and intimidation of pro-Palestine activists at UM continues, but this time it’s coming from the university itself.
University of Michigan using undercover investigators to surveil student Gaza protesters
“The surveillance appears to largely be an intimidation tactic, five students who have been followed, recorded or eavesdropped on said. The undercover investigators have cursed at students, threatened them and in one case drove a car at a student who had to jump out of the way, according to student accounts and video footage shared with the Guardian.
Students say they have frequently identified undercover investigators and confronted them. In two bizarre interactions captured by one student on video, a man who had been trailing the student faked disabilities, and noisily – and falsely – accused a student of attempting to rob him.
The undercover investigators appear to work for Detroit-based City Shield, a private security group, and some of their evidence was used by Michigan prosecutors to charge and jail students, according to a Guardian review of police records, university spending records and video collected in legal discovery. Most charges were later dropped. Public spending records from the U-M board of regents, the school’s governing body, show the university paid at least $800,000 between June 2023 and September 2024 to City Shield’s parent company, Ameri-Shield.”
There are a lot of local political winds blowing around in the background of this story, but the key point to understand here is that UM is hiring private goons to intimidate activists calling on the university to stop supporting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza; the majority of whom are their own students. Furthermore, there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Trump administration is making them do this; UM, which proudly bills itself as a Midwestern bastion of enlightened liberal culture and a leadership factory for broader American society, just really wants to scare students into silence on its own, and in doing so happily prosecutes Trump’s agenda for him.
The point I’m getting at is that when a school like Michigan acts against its own students and communities in the precise way Trump would do himself, it’s hard to believe that school sincerely opposes Trump, or even his fascist policies. And while this is just one school, this act of doing one cowardly thing while bravely saying another is being replicated all across the broader US liberal establishment in both the public and private sectors as Trump’s fascist creep worms its way deeper into the heart of American life. This has helped, and continues to help Trump in his quest to intimidate US universities, and crush dissent under the guise of fighting made up antisemitism that half of that liberal establishment also continues to falsely insist exists broadly on the anti-genocide left. Until such a time as so-called “liberal” leaders stop supporting actions and ideology that harms protestors and furthers the goals of a fascist regime, their betrayals and fascist collaboration will remain a vital part of this story.
When You’re Worried About the Wrong Roads
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that Trump is staging a wasteful and obnoxiously vain military parade to celebrate the Army’s 250th year of existence, which just so happens to fall on Downmarket Mussolini’s 79th birthday. It’s outrageously expensive, deeply embarrassing, and wholly unprecedented in the history of America; a country that at least ostensibly, has traditionally prided itself on not being the sort of place where an authoritarian’s cult of personality has to be fed by ostentatious public displays of American military hardware. We tend to save militaristic propaganda like that for Monday Night Football flyovers.
As Judith Levine, writing in The Guardian notes however, just because we’ve heard a lot about Trump’s gauche military parade, doesn’t mean the media is reporting on the actually important reason none of this should be allowed to happen. I’ll give you a spoiler: it’s because Trump is a fascist would-be dictator who is currently searching high and low for an army to enforce his cracker fundie nationalist agenda; and what better place to find one than well, the actual US army.
We’re minimizing the horror of Trump’s military birthday parade
“This time, as Washington prepares for a huge military shindig on 14 June, Trump’s 79th – and, oh yes, the US army’s 250th – birthday, the generals are silent. The Republicans have sworn allegiance to the king. And the media are focused on the price tag, the potholes and the impending pomp; on tensions between the blue city of Washington and the red capital; and on the decimation of veterans’ healthcare, housing, and pensions while the administration throws $25m to $45m at a circus of war.
All are important parts of the story. Yet commentary is muted and the debate mischaracterized as normal political discourse. The horrific point is missed: the spectacle of a massive show of military might, before a president who behaves like a dictator and views the armed forces as his personal foot soldiers, evinces memories of the worst totalitarian regimes. History may mark 14 June 2025 as the ceremonial birth of a new American fascism.”
Well I must confess that at least in so far as my analysis is concerned, the author has a point; this is the first time I’ve written about Trump’s overtly fascist cult of personality-coded military parade. Furthermore, while the corporate media coverage of this appalling authoritarian spectacle in the making that originally put me off from talking about the parade until now has certainly been ubiquitous, I agree with Levine’s argument that this coverage is mostly very poorly done and in some ways works to actively sell the spectacle of a dictator birthday parade on the streets of Washington DC. There’s nothing wrong with talking about the absurd waste holding a military parade on Trump’s birthday represents in a country where the entire fascist right is insisting we have to feed grandma into the woodchipper to save the economy, nor in pointing out that Trump’s narcissistic vanity influences the decisions he makes as president, but neither of those things are the story here. Once again by presenting the events of the day wholly outside of the larger context of a nation under the Trump regime, our corporate media has largely avoiding talking about why this is a terrifying sign of America’s descent into an authoritarian dictatorship under the rule of the dumbest, most dangerous nazi our society has yet produced in the White House.
That context of course is that this is a fascist regime, ruled by a reality TV show nazi with his own burgeoning cult of personality, actively looking to create an American one-party dictatorship by consolidating as much governing power and control over US security forces as possible, in the executive branch. Levine is more than correct to point out what other observers apparently will not; in addition to positioning himself as the embodiment of US military might, Trump is also courting the armed forces he needs to enforce a nazi police state conducting mass deportations under martial law, with lavish funding and the prestige of a fascist propaganda theater event that celebrates the troops, at the same time it celebrates Trump.
“If he is to ease from commander of the armed forces to commander of everything, he will need more than God on his side. He’ll need to own the military. Forty-five million bucks is a good starting bid.”
Speaking frankly my friends, I’m honestly not sure Levine is being hyperbolic enough given the circumstances. Dictators around the world hold these type of military parades for a reason, and either because US corporate media is too cool for school to care about overt fascist propaganda, or they’re afraid to admit this parade by itself is a sign Trump is going for the full Third Reich experience, American analysts and opinion makers seem largely disinterested in talking about why the Klepto Kaiser is even throwing this stupid nazi military party. So they bitch about potholes, and talk about Trump being Trump, as we collectively slide into the fascist abyss.
Engineered Outcomes and the Invasion of LA
In order to understand the true story of the Trump regime’s invasion of LA, and broad resistance to the regime’s white nationalist agenda by labor class Angelinos, you have to start with a story I briefly touched on last week about a change in ICE enforcement strategy mandated right from the top of the Trump administration; namely new authoritarian arrest tactics and a mandate to triple the number of migrants arrested per day to a mind-numbing three thousand. So, and in response to direct pressure from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to massively increase the number of migrants arrested per day, as well as instructions from Trump’s unofficial director of nazi shit Stephen Miller to target commercial businesses and public locations, ICE officials ordered agents to engage in acts that all but ensured widespread racial profiling, a massive number of civil rights violations, and militarized abductions in American communities; including, crucially, no warrant arrests that aren’t strictly illegal, but immigration officials know aren’t allowed to be used the way they’re instructing Gestapo goons to use them right now, either.
For more details lets check out this report by José Olivares, writing for The Guardian;
US immigration officers ordered to arrest more people even without warrants
“If it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing,” another message said.
The instructions not only mark a further harshening of attitude and language by the Trump administration in its efforts to fulfill election promises of “mass deportation” but also indicate another escalation in efforts, by being on the lookout for undocumented people whom officials may happen to encounter – here termed “collaterals” – while serving arrest warrants for others.
The emails, sent by two top Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials this past Saturday, instructed officers around the country to increase arrest numbers over the weekend. This followed the Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, and the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, pressing immigration officials last month to jack up immigration-related arrests to at least 3,000 people a day.”
Please keep in mind that this article was published on June 4th, which is two days before fascist ICE raids touched off what will then eventually become the Trumpenreich invasion of LA. As such a significant portion of this article is devoted to talking about ICE’s hypothetical but still quite illegal-sounding efforts to meet the regime’s Nazi-esque migrant arrest quotas, and the circumstantial legality of collateral immigration arrests. It’s an illuminating discussion for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that every legal observer quoted in the article warns that warrantless arrests can be abused in precisely the unlawful ways ICE would go on to use them in LA later that week; it is however irrelevant to our larger discussion except in to note that ICE swarming businesses and arresting all the brown people because they might be “illegals” is not how this power is supposed to be used, and doing so is a clear violation of the American constitution and other civil rights legislation.
What’s important here is that the article provides a comprehensive picture of an agency desperate to meet a fascist mass deportation quota, whose leadership then directly instructed its Gestapo agents to engage in activities they knew would result in unlawful arrests and civil rights violations; because the agency was already sanctioned for doing these same things and surprise, that resulted in unlawful arrests and civil rights violations. This, when combined with the increased migrant arrest quotas and Miller’s instructions to stop focusing on actual criminals and get directly into communities to snatch up foreign-looking people, inevitably resulted in the fascist outrages that touched off the battle for LA; with heavily armed and armored Gestapo goons storming businesses in the fashion district of Downtown LA and other high traffic urban areas in broad daylight, to round up anyone brown enough to fit the description. Indeed, the combination of instructions given to both ICE officials and Gestapo foot soldiers could not have resulted in any other outcome and the regime was clearly prepared to capitalize on the outrage it would cause; that’s why they were so quick to respond to completely justified popular pushback with cries of insurrection and orders to send in the National Guard. Furthermore, given the national scope of DHS and ICE’s authority, what we just saw happen in LA is clearly an outcome this administration intends to replicate all across the country; with Stephen Miller and Tom Homan seemingly targeting sanctuary cities in blue states in particular out of politically-motivated reasoning and sheer ideological spite.
The invasion of LA wasn’t spontaneous, it was engineered; and that engineering started at the very top of the Trump regime. This fascist shitshow wasn’t ever about public safety or even enforcing immigration laws; it’s a reproduceable battleplan for a war the regime just chose to start at a time, and in a place of its choosing – and they chose LA.
The Invasion of LA Started Last Week
Finally, I’d like to take a look at one more story about the lead up to Trump’s fascist invasion of LA, because I think a cop-loving, white supremacist media class is reflexively leaving out the story of why people in Los Angeles resisted both ICE raids and militarized law enforcement suppression this past weekend. Widely-publicized in LA, this report from CBS news clearly demonstrates how it was fascist ICE repression in the heart of a diverse sanctuary city that incited a response from Angelinos, not the other way around. In the week leading up to Friday’s nazi ICE raids, word leaked out that immigration officials were arresting migrant families who reported for their check-in appointments, and detaining them in inhumane conditions in the basement of the very same Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown L.A. which would become a focal point of protest by Angelinos; at least in part, because of these incidents.
“Immigration lawyers said it was also unclear why people were being held in that basement.
“They’re having to literally house these immigrants in a makeshift detention center, which on its face is illegal,” said Juan Proaño, chief executive officer of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). “It is beyond inhumane treatment for any immigrant and in this particular case, you’re talking about families.”
In human terms, the cause for entirely understandable outrage among the citizens of LA in response to these events are threefold. First, the Gestapo is arresting and detaining hard-working families who represent no danger to the community and are at worst civil violators; they are not violent or criminal. Additionally, ICE is detaining law-abiding families who are following the rules by reporting for their immigration check ins, in a nonwhite majority sanctuary city where that is not supposed to happen. Finally, the Gestapo is so desperate to throw brown people in cages that they’re locking women and children up, sometimes overnight, in a makeshift basement jail without adequate access to beds, food, or water; actions which highlight the racialized dehumanization aspect of this entire nazi ethnic cleansing shitshow.
Alright, so now our stage is set, let me just put the question to you bluntly: how would you feel if it was your home, your family, and your community being targeted for racialized fascist kidnappings and violent security state repression? Put yourself in the shoes of an Los Angeles resident who almost certainly didn’t vote for this fascist bullshit, and has been assured by their local government that LA is a safe haven for law-abiding, hardworking migrants in a country hell bent on criminalizing brown people just trying to earn an honest living. ICE is locking up families in basements, they’re swarming commercial businesses and slapping cuffs on any brown people they can catch, they assaulted, arrested, and lied about one of the most respected labor leaders in the entire state, armed Gestapo goons are in the street tossing flashbang grenades and firing “nonlethal” ammunition at people who’re peacefully blocking traffic that happens to be part of a fascist mass deportation project; and your leaders, the mayor and the governor are complaining, but otherwise letting the feds get away with it all. What would your response be? For a whole bunch of people in Los Angeles, their response was to surround the federal building and demand the release of their friends and loved ones; and for that crime the fascist Trump regime thinks military occupation of their city and police state violence are the warranted response.
Don’t save all your smoke for the fascists running the US government either, because a mainstream corporate media actively “both sides”-ing violence started by state security forces at every turn, and a California Democratic Party establishment promising to unleash the police and institute a curfew just to prove Trump and the military are not required to quell protests in LA, are also guilty of flipping perpetrator for victim in this odious tale. The fact of the matter is that despite the echoing chorus of mewling about “not giving Trump what he wants” and the importance of “lawfully protesting,” Angelinos would be in the moral right even if they had chased ICE officers out of town in broad daylight with bricks. This is a diverse community, acting to protect their friends and loved ones from militarized fascist abductions, unlawful state repression, and slow-motion white supremacist ethnic cleansing; the fact that the people of Los Angeles responded only with nonviolent protest and traffic disruptions until the Kletpo Kaiser literally called in the fucking troops is a testament to the character of the city’s people, and stands in stark contrast to cowardly masked Gestapo goons locking small children in a basement to keep us all safe from seeing brown people in our communities.
In the final analysis, the battle to shape the narrative around the Trumpenreich invasion of the City of Angels may be more hotly contested than the streets of downtown LA were during the protests. The fascist American right is telling you that brown people started an insurrection, and “enlightened centrist” media says there was violence on both sides; from where I’m standing however, Angelinos resisting fascism are the only heroes in this story. Don’t let propagandist swine on your television make you forget that.
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– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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