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This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: In The Hitler Legacy, Peter Levenda noted anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia as part of “The Hitler Legacy.”
Fear of “the other” has been a staple of fascist thought and is dominating much of the political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic.
In FTR #838, Levenda discoursed on how immigration from Europe, both Catholic and Jewish, melded with other events in the post-World War I period to mobilize fascist sentiment and activism.
Reacting to the advent of the Soviet Union, abortive Marxist revolutions in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, large scale immigration of Catholics from Ireland and Italy and Jews from Eastern Europe, powerful elements of the U.S. power elite embraced fascism and eugenics ideology.
With the onset of the Great Depression, the potential threat of Communism was magnified in the eyes of many powerful American industrialists, financiers and corporate lawyers. Germany’s success in putting down the Marxist revolutions within its own borders, as well as the business relationships between corporate Germany and its cartel partners in the U.S. business community inclined many influential American reactionaries to support fascism.
By the same token, these same elements came to despise Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his “Jew Deal,” as it was called by his enemies. American Jews were seen as hiring Jewish immigrants and thus denying “real Americans” jobs and economic well-being.
Attacking Roosevelt as a Jew and a Communist, American fascists embraced a cognitive and rhetorical position not unlike the view of Barack Obama as a “Kenyan Muslim,” and, consequently, a “traitor.”
Some key points in Peter’s analysis are explored a section of the book titled the “Origins of 21st Century Conflict.” Highlights of this part of the program include:
- Analyzing the abortive socialist revolutions that took place in Germany at the end of the First World War, Peter notes the role of the Freikorps and related institutions in suppressing those revolts. In particular, a number of overlapping Pan-German occult organizations, including the Thule Gesellschaft, contributed to the substance of German reaction in the post-World War I period.
- In the United States, the Bolshevik Revolution produced a spate of anti-Communist organizations that saw Marxism’s advocacy of a workers’ revolution as a fundamental threat to the existing order.
- Marx’s Jewish background–in tandem with large Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe–fed a doctrinaire anti-Semitism which fused with anti-Communism to become a key element of fascist ideology in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
- The program set forth how Bolshevism, immigration and anti-Semitism fused to become a theory of “global conspiracy.”
- We highlight the role in the formation of this ideology of Darwin’s theories and eugenics, both in the U.S. and in Germany. (In particular, we discuss the impact of Irish and Italian Catholic immigration as well as Jewish immigration on the consciousness of elements of the American power elite.) We also detail how National Socialists came to view their role in shaping the evolution of homo sapiens.
- The Depression and FDR’s New Deal and their effects on many of those same elements of the Power Elite.
- Hate-mongering that labeled FDR as a “Jew” and a “Communist”–similar to anti-Obama rhetoric portraying him as a Muslim and a traitor.
- Atavism–the longing for a “simpler time” and its manifestations both in the 1930’s and presently.
In FTR #864, recorded in September of 2015, Peter updated the context of our discussion from March of that year in the context of Donald Trump’s lead in the GOP primary struggle and the reaction sweeping Europe.
Immigration dominated the news that fall and has continued to do so. The flood of refugees from the wars in the Middle East threatened to overwhelm European infrastructure and the phenomenon dominated the political debate in the GOP primary election campaign. Donald Trump capitalized on anti-immigrant xenophobia during the primary and then the presidential campaign.
Of course, he continues to do so today.
In The Hitler Legacy, Peter noted anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia as part of “The Hitler Legacy.”
Fear of “the other” has been a staple of fascist thought and has dominated much of the political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic.
“. . . Xenophobia is at an all-time high in Europe and increasingly in America. The Internet has provided new and improved means of communication. . . .
As the political life of every country becomes more and more polarized between “right” and “left,” the men of ODESSA can only laugh at our discomfort. . . .”
Next, we turn to a more recent development.
Melania Trump garnered considerable media attention when she visited a detention center for immigrants, including children, wearing a jacket that said “I Really Don’t Care. Do U?”
Tasteless on its surface, the statement assumes added significance when we factor in the fact that “I don’t care” (“Me Ne Frego” in Italian) was an important fascist slogan.
Furthermore, the Zara company that made Melania’s jacket has a history of marketing garments with fascist/racist overtones. It marketed a shirt that mimicked a concentration camp inmate’s garb and a swastika-enlaid handbag. It also marketed a Pepe The Frog skirt.
Recent comments by Trump disparaging Haiti as a “shithole” country and pining for immigration from Norway instead warrant a fresh look at the Crusade For Freedom.
During Trump’s brief tenure as President, the media have consistently lamented his actions as idiosyncrasies. Trump’s policies are not his alone, but follow in a linear path, along which the GOP has traveled for decades.
In this post, we review the Crusade For Freedom–the covert operation that brought Third Reich alumni into the country and also supported their guerrilla warfare in Eastern Europe, conducted up until the early 1950’s. Conceived by Allen Dulles, overseen by Richard Nixon, publicly represented by Ronald Reagan and realized in considerable measure by William Casey, the CFF ultimately evolved into a Nazi wing of the GOP.
“. . . . Vice President Nixon’s secret political war of Nazis against Jews in American politics was never investigated at the time. The foreign language-speaking Croatians and other Fascist émigré groups had a ready-made network for contacting and mobilizing the Eastern European ethnic bloc. There is a very high correlation between CIA domestic subsidies to Fascist ‘freedom fighters’ during the 1950’s and the leadership of the Republican Party’s ethnic campaign groups. The motive for the under-the-table financing was clear: Nixon used Nazis to offset the Jewish vote for the Democrats. . . .
. . . . In 1952, Nixon had formed an Ethnic Division within the Republican National Committee. Displaced fascists, hoping to be returned to power by an Eisenhower-Nixon ‘liberation’ policy signed on with the committee. In 1953, when Republicans were in office, the immigration laws were changed to admit Nazis, even members of the SS. They flooded into the country. Nixon himself oversaw the new immigration program. . . .”
1. In FTR #838, Peter Levenda discoursed on how immigration from Europe, both Catholic and Jewish, melded with other events in the post-World War I period to mobilize fascist sentiment and activism.
Reacting to the advent of the Soviet Union, abortive Marxist revolutions in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, large scale immigration of Catholics from Ireland and Italy and Jews from Eastern Europe, powerful elements of the U.S. power elite embraced fascism and eugenics ideology.
With the onset of the Great Depression, the potential threat of Communism was magnified in the eyes of many powerful American industrialists, financiers and corporate lawyers. Germany’s success in putting down the Marxist revolutions within its own borders, as well as the business relationships between corporate Germany and its cartel partners in the U.S. business community inclined many influential American reactionaries to support fascism.
By the same token, these same elements came to despise Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his “Jew Deal,” as it was called by his enemies. American Jews were seen as hiring Jewish immigrants and thus denying “real Americans” jobs and economic well-being.
Attacking Roosevelt as a Jew and a Communist, American fascists embraced a cognitive and rhetorical position not unlike the view of Barack Obama as a “Kenyan Muslim,” and, consequently, a “traitor.”
Some key points in Peter’s analysis are explored a section of the book titled the “Origins of 21st Century Conflict.” Highlights of this part of the program include:
- Analyzing the abortive socialist revolutions that took place in Germany at the end of the First World War, Peter notes the role of the Freikorps and related institutions in suppressing those revolts. In particular, a number of overlapping Pan-German occult organizations, including the Thule Gesellschaft, contributed to the substance of German reaction in the post-World War I period.
- In the United States, the Bolshevik Revolution produced a spate of anti-Communist organizations that saw Marxism’s advocacy of a workers’ revolution as a fundamental threat to the existing order.
- Marx’s Jewish background–in tandem with large Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe–fed a doctrinaire anti-Semitism which fused with anti-Communism to become a key element of fascist ideology in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
- The program set forth how Bolshevism, immigration and anti-Semitism fused to become a theory of “global conspiracy.”
- We highlight the role in the formation of this ideology of Darwin’s theories and eugenics, both in the U.S. and in Germany. (In particular, we discuss the impact of Irish and Italian Catholic immigration as well as Jewish immigration on the consciousness of elements of the American power elite.) We also detail how National Socialists came to view their role in shaping the evolution of homo sapiens.
- The Depression and FDR’s New Deal and their effects on many of those same elements of the Power Elite.
- Hate-mongering that labeled FDR as a “Jew” and a “Communist”–similar to anti-Obama rhetoric portraying him as a Muslim and a traitor.
- Atavism–the longing for a “simpler time” and its manifestations both in the 1930’s and presently.
2. In FTR #864, recorded in September of 2015, Peter updated the context of our discussion from March of that year in the context of Donald Trump’s lead in the GOP primary struggle and the reaction sweeping Europe.
Immigration dominated the news that fall and has continued to do so. The flood of refugees from the wars in the Middle East threatened to overwhelm European infrastructure and the phenomenon dominated the political debate in the GOP primary election campaign. Donald Trump capitalized on anti-immigrant xenophobia during the primary and then the presidential campaign.
Of course, he continues to do so today.
In The Hitler Legacy, Peter noted anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia as part of “The Hitler Legacy.”
Fear of “the other” has been a staple of fascist thought and has dominated much of the political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic.
. . . Xenophobia is at an all-time high in Europe and increasingly in America. The Internet has provided new and improved means of communication. . . .
As the political life of every country becomes more and more polarized between “right” and “left,” the men of ODESSA can only laugh at our discomfort. . . .
3. Melania Trump garnered considerable media attention when she visited a detention center for immigrants, including children, wearing a jacket that said “I Really Don’t Care. Do U?”
Tasteless on its surface, the statement assumes added significance when we factor in the fact that “I don’t care” (“Me Ne Frego” in Italian) was an important fascist slogan.
Furthermore, the Zara company that made Melania’s jacket has a history of marketing garments with fascist/racist overtones. It marketed a shirt that mimicked a concentration camp inmate’s garb and a swastika-enlaid handbag. It also marketed a Pepe The Frog skirt.
“A Brief (Fascist) History of ‘I Don’t Care’” by Giovanni Tiso; Overland; 06/22/2018
This article was sparked by the jacket that Melania Trump wore as she travelled to a detention camp for migrant children, but my intent isn’t to argue that she or her staff chose that jacket in order to send a coded message to the president’s far-right followers. It is, rather, to highlight some of the historical echoes of that phrase – ‘I don’t care’.
The echoes of which someone ought to have been aware, especially in an administration that includes – to put it mildly – several far-right sympathizers. And also to show that the attitude, the theatrical ‘not caring’, was an explicit character trait of Fascism. . . .
. . . . Fascism lay its roots in the campaign for Italy’s late entry in the First World War, of which Mussolini was one of the leaders. It was at this time that the phrase ‘me ne frego’ – which at the time was still considered quite vulgar, along the lines of the English ‘I don’t give a fu ck’ – was sung by members of the special force known as arditi (literally: ‘the daring ones’) who volunteered for the front, to signify that they didn’t care if they should lose their lives.
The arditi were disbanded after the war, but many of them volunteered in 1919 for an expedition led by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio to capture the city of Fiume (Rijeka, in present-day Croatia) and claim it for Italy during the vacuum created by the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire. At the time of this occupation, former arditi also formed the backbone of the original Black Squads during the terror campaigns that began in 1919 and culminated with the ‘March on Rome’ of 1922, which completed Fascism’s swift rise to power.
This lapel pin worn by an original member of the Black Shirts was recently sold on a website devoted to military memorabilia. It is emblazoned with the words ‘Me ne frego’ underneath the original symbol of the arditi and the acronym FERT (which stands for the motto of the Royal Family). The seller calls it ‘bellissimo’.
[see image of “me ne frego” pin worn by the Black Shirts]‘Me ne frego’ was the title of one of the most famous songs of the Fascist era.Its original version, dating around 1920, hails D’Annunzio and Mussolini as the fathers of the fascist movement, recycling the old war song of the arditi as the third stanza.
Me ne frego I don’t care
me ne frego I don’t care
me ne frego è il nostro motto, I don’t care is our motto
me ne frego di morire I don’t care if I should die
per la santa libertà! … For our sacred freedom! …
Later versions removed mentions of D’Annunzio, who faded fairly quickly into the background. In the meantime, Mussolini made the slogan his own, and explicitly elevated it to the philosophy of the regime.
[See image of Benito Mussolini “me ne frego” quote]The meaning of ‘Me ne frego’
The proud Black-Shirt motto ‘I don’t care’ written on the bandages that cover a wound isn’t just an act of stoic philosophy or the summary of a political doctrine. It’s an education to fighting, and the acceptance of the risks it implies. It’s a new Italian lifestyle. This is how the Fascist welcomes and loves life, while rejecting and regarding suicide as an act of cowardice; this is how the Fascist understands life as duty, exaltation, conquest. A life that must be lived highly and fully, both for oneself but especially for others, near and far, present and future.
The connotations of altruism at the end of the quote are in direct contrast with the meaning taken on by the word menefreghismo(literally, ‘Idontcareism’), which ever since the regime has meant in common parlance a kind of detached self-reliance, or moral autocracy. Just as Italy broke with its former allies and charted a stubborn path towards the ruin and devastation of the Second World War, so too the Fascist citizen was encouraged to reject the judgement of others and look straight ahead. It should be remembered in this regard that the regime treated ignorance and proclivity to violence as desirable qualities to be rewarded with positions of influence and power. This required a swift redrawing of the old social norms, and of the language used to signify the moral worth of individuals. ‘Me ne frego’ was the perfect slogan for the people in charge of overseeing such a program.
Four years ago, speaking at a First World War commemoration in the small town of Redipuglia, Pope Francis linked ‘me ne frego’ not only with the carnage of that conflict, but also with the horrors of Fascism, recognising its ideological and propaganda value for Mussolini’s project. This is the form in which the slogan has survived until the present day, as a linguistic signifier not of generic indifference, but of ideological nostalgia. And because the attempts in Italy and beyond to stem the spread of such signifiers have been comprehensively abandoned, we readily find those words appearing not just on seemingly ubiquitous Fascist-era memorabilia but also on posters,
[see image of poster]
t‑shirts,
[see image of t‑shirt]
or this line of stickers that can be purchased for $.193 from Redbubble (motto ‘awesome products designed by independent artists’), where it was uploaded by user ‘fashdivision’.
[see image of stickers]
The international neofascist movement is of course well aware of this lineage. By way of example, if you search for it online you’ll find a long-running English-language podcast called Me ne frego which recycles this imagery in support of arguments against immigration and multiculturalism, or to opine on the subject of ‘the Jewish question’. I don’t doubt that people close both to the Trump administration and this world are similarly cognisant of the uses to which those three words have been put. But even for those who aren’t, claims to indifference have a history which we mustn’t allow ourselves to forget.
4. The Zara company that made Melania’s jacket has a history of marketing garments with fascist/racist overtones. It marketed a shirt that mimicked a concentration camp inmate’s garb and a swastika-enlaid handbag.
High street retailer Zara has pulled a striped shirt featuring a yellow star on the front on Wednesday after social media users likened it to the uniform worn by Jewish prisoners in concentration camps during the second world war.
The striped “sheriff” T‑shirt, aimed at children aged three months to three years, drew criticism for a design which featured white and blue stripes and a six-pointed yellow star on the front. The star itself had the word “sheriff” written across it, which was not completely clear in the zoomed-out images on the Spanish chain’s website.
But from first glance, many people felt the shirt bore too close a resemblance to the striped uniform and yellow star Jewish prisoners were forced to wear during the Holocaust.
…
The shirt was available via Zara’s UK homepage as well as in a number of its international outlets, including Israel, France, Denmark, Albania and Sweden. Israeli journalist Dimi Reider was among the first to notice the resemblance.
Writing on 972mag.com, he said: “It’s a SHERIFF shirt for your three-year-old. Obviously. What else could it be?
“Why, what else does it remind you of?”
The retailer has since apologised, in several languages on its Twitter feed, and confirmed the shirt is no longer on sale.
…
A spokesperson for Zara’s parent company Inditex said: “The item in question has now been removed from all Zara stores and Zara.com.
“The garment was inspired by the classic Western films, but we now recognise that the design could be seen as insensitive and apologise sincerely for any offence caused to our customers.”
This is not the first time Zara has made an unfortunate design choice. In 2007, the retailer withdrew a handbag from its stories after one customer pointed out the design featured swastikas.
5. Zara’s fascist fashion sense just keeps bubbling up. It turns out Zara made a skirt in 2017 with what appear to be ‘Pepe the Frog’ faces
“Zara Loses Its Skirt Over Pepe the Frog” by Vanessa Friedman; The New York Times; 04/19/2017
Digital activists have claimed another head. Or, rather, skirt.
On Tuesday, Zara, the Spanish chain owned by Inditex that has more than 2,100 stores in 88 countries around the world and was rated No. 53 on the Forbes 2016 list of the world’s most valuable brands, quietly withdrew a distressed denim miniskirt printed with a cartoon face from its websites and stores in the United States and Britain after it became a subject of social media controversy for the graphic’s resemblance to Pepe the Frog.
You know, the green amphibian that was originally intended as a “peaceful frog-dude,” according to Matt Furie, the man who created him, but that was co-opted by anti-Jewish and bigoted groups and designated an alt-right hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League last September.
The skirt had been on sale as part of Zara’s limited-edition “oil on denim” offering of spring-fling artist partnerships.
Twitter got on it pretty fast. “Zara is really out there trying to sell a P*pe the frog skirt, apparently unaware (?) of its current implications,” @meaganrosae wrote. Added @ccarella, “Hmm Pepe on a Zara skirt.”
There is a lot of “how did this happen?” and “how deluded could they be?” going around the cybersphere, but the answer may come down to a blunt collision of globalism and cultural ignorance.
A spokeswoman for Zara said: “The skirt is part of the limited Oil-on-Denim collection, which was created through collaborations with artists and is only available in selected markets. The designer of the skirt is Mario de Santiago, known online as Yimeisgreat. There is absolutely no link to the suggested theme.”
Mr. de Santiago is a Spanish artist based in London whose biography on his official web page states, “I like to explore social interactions and gather them into quirky and colourful storytelling compositions.” According to Zara, he said the frog face “came from a wall painting I drew with friends four years ago.” It is not hard to imagine he was unaware a similar frog face had been used for a somewhat different purpose in the United States.
Unfortunately for Zara, however, the brand has a history with public pressure over a product with potentially offensive implications — especially anti-Semitic implications — which may have exacerbated the reaction. In 2014, it apologized for offering, and then withdrew, a set of children’s striped pajamas with a yellow star on the breast that was widely seen as resembling a concentration camp uniform (the star was supposed to be a sheriff’s badge). In 2007, it withdrew a handbag printed with folkloric designs, one of which happened to look a lot like a swastika.
…
All of this may add up to something of a teachable moment for the fast-fashion model. Because the business is based on the constant turnover of new products that are effectively “tested” on the shop floor, so that companies can respond quickly to what sells and drop less popular items without much cost, it involves a higher than usual amount of churn. This may mean designs are subject to less stringent vetting than they might be in, say, a traditional fashion brand in which products are created and assessed more than six months ahead of production.
Add to that the recent commercialization of the summer festival circuit, in which corporate giants are leveraging the fashion appeal of sartorial rebellion (always a dangerous game, since it co-opts symbols without really understanding their use), and the pitfalls were potentially pretty big. Just think for a minute of the absurdity implicit in choosing a hate symbol to stick on a garment seemingly meant for a summer-of-love/dancing-in-the-muddy-fields-type event. Oops.
Given the increasing role of the internet in policing brands and companies, it was probably only a matter of time before a company attempting to make hay while the music played made a mistake instead.
Consider it a cautionary tale.
6. Although we have discussed it frequently over the decades, recent comments by Trump disparaging Haiti as a “shithole” country and pining for immigration from Norway instead warrant a fresh look at the Crusade For Freedom.
During Trump’s brief tenure as President, the media have consistently lamented his actions as idiosyncrasies. Trump’s policies are not his alone, but follow in a linear path, along which the GOP has traveled for decades.
In this post, we review the Crusade For Freedom–the covert operation that brought Third Reich alumni into the country and also supported their guerrilla warfare in Eastern Europe, conducted up until the early 1950’s. Conceived by Allen Dulles, overseen by Richard Nixon, publicly represented by Ronald Reagan and realized in considerable measure by William Casey, the CFF ultimately evolved into a Nazi wing of the GOP.
“. . . . Vice President Nixon’s secret political war of Nazis against Jews in American politics was never investigated at the time. The foreign language-speaking Croatians and other Fascist émigré groups had a ready-made network for contacting and mobilizing the Eastern European ethnic bloc. There is a very high correlation between CIA domestic subsidies to Fascist ‘freedom fighters’ during the 1950’s and the leadership of the Republican Party’s ethnic campaign groups. The motive for the under-the-table financing was clear: Nixon used Nazis to offset the Jewish vote for the Democrats. . . .
The elder George Bush installed the GOP ethnic outreach organization as a permanent part of the GOP:
“. . . . . . . . . It was Bush who fulfilled Nixon’s promise to make the ‘ethnic emigres’ a permanent part of Republican politics. In 1972, Nixon’s State Department spokesman confirmed to his Australian counterpart that the ethnic groups were very useful to get out the vote in several key states. Bush’s tenure as head of the Republican National Committee exactly coincided with Laszlo Pasztor’s 1972 drive to transform the Heritage Groups Council into the party’s official ethnic arm. The groups Pasztor chose as Bush’s campaign allies were the émigré Fascists whom Dulles had brought to the United States. . . . ”
. . . . Frustration over Truman’s 1948 election victory over Dewey (which they blamed on the “Jewish vote”) impelled Dulles and his protégé Richard Nixon to work toward the realization of the fascist freedom fighter presence in the Republican Party’s ethnic outreach organization. As a young congressman, Nixon had been Allen Dulles’s confidant. They both blamed Governor Dewey’s razor-thin loss to Truman in the 1948 presidential election on the Jewish vote. When he became Eisenhower’s vice president in 1952, Nixon was determined to build his own ethnic base. . . .
. . . . Vice President Nixon’s secret political war of Nazis against Jews in American politics was never investigated at the time. The foreign language-speaking Croatians and other Fascist émigré groups had a ready-made network for contacting and mobilizing the Eastern European ethnic bloc. There is a very high correlation between CIA domestic subsidies to Fascist ‘freedom fighters’ during the 1950’s and the leadership of the Republican Party’s ethnic campaign groups. The motive for the under-the-table financing was clear: Nixon used Nazis to offset the Jewish vote for the Democrats. . . .
. . . . In 1952, Nixon had formed an Ethnic Division within the Republican National Committee. Displaced fascists, hoping to be returned to power by an Eisenhower-Nixon ‘liberation’ policy signed on with the committee. In 1953, when Republicans were in office, the immigration laws were changed to admit Nazis, even members of the SS. They flooded into the country. Nixon himself oversaw the new immigration program. AsVice President, he even received Eastern European Fascists in the White House. . . .
6b. More about the composition of the cast of the CFF: Note that the ascension of the Reagan administration was essentially the ascension of the Nazified GOP, embodied in the CFF milieu. Reagan (spokesman for CFF) was President; George H.W. Bush (for whom CIA headquarters is named) was the Vice President; William Casey (who handled the State Department machinations to bring these people into the United States) was Reagan’s campaign manager and later his CIA director.
. . . . As a young movie actor in the early 1950s, Reagan was employed as the public spokesperson for an OPC front named the ‘Crusade for Freedom.’ Reagan may not have known it, but 99 percent for the Crusade’s funds came from clandestine accounts, which were then laundered through the Crusade to various organizations such as Radio Liberty, which employed Dulles’s Fascists. Bill Casey, who later became CIA director under Ronald Reagan, also worked in Germany after World War II on Dulles’ Nazi ‘freedom fighters’ program. When he returned to New York, Casey headed up another OPC front, the International Rescue Committee, which sponsored the immigration of these Fascists to the United States. Casey’s committee replaced the International Red Cross as the sponsor for Dulles’s recruits. Confidential interviews, former members, OPC; former members, British foreign and Commonwealth Office. . . .
6c. While serving as chairman of the Republican National Committee, the elder George Bush shepherded the Nazi émigré community into position as a permanent branch of the Republican Party.
. . . . . It was Bush who fulfilled Nixon’s promise to make the ‘ethnic emigres’ a permanent part of Republican politics. In 1972, Nixon’s State Department spokesman confirmed to his Australian counterpart that the ethnic groups were very useful to get out the vote in several key states. Bush’s tenure as head of the Republican National Committee exactly coincided with Laszlo Pasztor’s 1972 drive to transform the Heritage Groups Council into the party’s official ethnic arm. The groups Pasztor chose as Bush’s campaign allies were the émigré Fascists whom Dulles had brought to the United States. . . .
Banking with Bin Laden
Here’s an article that points towards another refugee crisis that President Trump is apparently very keen on exacerbating: the Venezuelan refugee crisis that’s going to explode of the US invades Venezuela. And as the article makes painfully clear, while Trump’s advisors and US allies in the are staunchly against the idea of a US invasion of Venezuela, Trump is still really, really interested in invading Venezuela and can’t contain that interest:
“As a meeting last August in the Oval Office to discuss sanctions on Venezuela was concluding, President Donald Trump turned to his top aides and asked an unsettling question: With a fast unraveling Venezuela threatening regional security, why can’t the U.S. just simply invade the troubled country?”
Why can’t the US just go ahead an invade Venezuela? That’s the question President Trump appeared to be genuinely asking back in August. And when those top aides, like then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, explained to Trump the magnitude of such an action and how easily it could backfire, Trump pushed back, citing the US invasions of Panama and Grenada in the 80’s:
And then the very next day, Trump made public remarks about the “military option” to remove Maduro:
And then he raised prospect of a military invasion directly with the president of Colombia, a country that is already facing large numbers of Venezuelan refugees, and brought the idea up again on the sides of the UN General Assembly:
And when the Trump administration is asked about these previously unreported incidents, the National Security Council give the ominous replay that the US considers ‘all options at its disposal to help restore Venezuela’s democracy and bring stability’:
And there are apparently already consequences to all of Trump’s public and private talk of a military invasion of Venezuela: the Venezuelan opposition appears to be warming to the idea:
So we have the Venezuelan opposition increasingly hoping for a US invasion after Trump’s many declarations, which presumably means elements of the Venezuelan opposition diaspora are going to be increasingly lobbying the Trump administration for exactly that. Will they get their wish? Well, considering that people like HR McMaster and Rex Tillerson have been replaced with people like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, it’s looking a lot more like they will get their wish. Especially with Bolton, who has made his hawking views on Venezuela abundantly clear for years:
““Though he and Pompeo are considered hardliners, most governments in Latin America should not be spooked, assuming Bolton does not share the president’s habit of bullying U.S. allies,” Gedan said.”
LOL, what an assurance: The US allies in Latin American shouldn’t be too concerned about John Bolton replacing HR McMaster as the new national security adviser, if you assume Bolton doesn’t share Trump’s habit of bullying US allies.
If, on the other hand, you assume that Bolton will be perfectly fine with Trump’s habit of bullying US allies, there is plenty to worry about, because both Bolton and Trump clearly have a predilection for military solutions:
But perhaps the most ominous aspect of Bolton becoming the new national security adviser is his suspicion that Venezuela is being used by Iran to launder money and avoid international sanctions. Because it’s already abundantly clear that the Trump administration is interested in whipping up a war with Iran, with Bolton calling pressing a regime change push by the US. So if Bolton gets his wish, will a war with Venezuela soon follow? It’s one of those questions we have to ask:
But with hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans already economic refugees, and 5,000 more fleeing to surrounding countries each day, one of the other big questions surrounding a possible military invasion of Venezuela is just what kind of refugee situation is this going to create, for the US but more importantly for Venezuela’s neighbors?
And what if there is no military invasion but still stronger sanctions on Venezuela that creates even more economic refugees, what’s the US response to that going to be? Well, according to the following article, the top Pentagon commander for Latin America and the Caribbean currently envisions no role in providing direct humanitarian assistance to countries taking in fleeing Venezuelans:
“The top Pentagon commander for Latin America and the Caribbean said he sees no role for the U.S. military in providing direct humanitarian assistance to countries being inundated with Venezuelans fleeing a collapsing economy under President Nicolas Maduro.”
So, currently, the Pentagon doesn’t envision any direct role for the US military in providing humanitarian assistance for the all of the countries currently receiving thousands of Venezuelan refugees a day. And as the Pentagon commander put it, ultimately the Venezuela situation “is going to require a diplomatic solution”:
So we have the top Pentagon commander for Latin America saying the US has no plans to directly assist with a growing South American refugee crisis while reiterating that a diplomatic solution is required for Venezuela. At the same that the White House, led by a president with an open desire for a war with Venezuela, elevates war hawks like John Bolton to positions of high influence.
All in all, it there’s no shortage of reason why the Venezuelan refugee situation could get a lot worse. And while some of those refugees will presumably flee to the US, the vast majority of them are probably going to end up remaining in South America and is inevitably going to impact South American politics. What kind of political impact will that be? We’ll see, but it’s probably not going to be a positive impact...
It looks like the massive wildfires outside Athens this week that killed at least 82 people was probably arson. So what was the evidence that it was arson? Fifteen fires had started in three areas around Athens simultaneously:
““We have serious indications and significant signs suggesting the criminal actions of arson,” Civil Protection Minister Nikos Toskas told a news conference. He said police had testimonies to that effect, but did not elaborate.”
So, at at this point, the arson suspicions are just suspicions. But suspicions based on some pretty compelling evidence:
And while no suspects have been named at this point, it’s worth noting that seven members of the neo-Nazi group “Combat 18 Hellas”- suspected by some to be the Greek branch of Combat 18 although, as we’ll see below, that might not be the case — were charged with a series of crimes back in March, including arson, causing explosions and possession of explosives:
“All seven Greeks were formally accused Wednesday of membership in a criminal organization, arson, causing explosions and possession of explosives and weapons.”
So although there’s no indication that neo-Nazis were behind these arson attacks, it’s hard to ignore the fact that a the Greek neo-Nazi group was arrested for arson just a few months ago.
And then there’s the second Greek neo-Nazi group, calling itself Krypteia, that actually claimed responsibility for an arson attack against an Afghan refugee center in March:
“A group calling itself Krypteia claimed responsibility in a call to a Greek news website on Friday.”
And note how the refugee center was apparently “full of people, including children, not long before” the arson, indicating a willingness to kill people and not just damage property:
The actuall attack happened around 1 PM on March 22, which is time when you would expect people to be there.
So we have a recent history of neo-Nazi arson in Greece. But it’s not just very recent attacks. Because, as the following article notes, it wasn’t just Combat 18 Hellas members who were arrest in March. There was another neo-Nazi group, “Unaligned Maeandrist Nationalists” (AME), that also had people arrested. C18 and AME have close ties they might be considered a single entity. And the crimes they were charged with include closer to 30 arson attacks since 2015:
“The dawn of March 6th, anti-terrorist units of Greek Police began with arrests of people who allegedly participated in criminal neo-Nazi organisations. Until March 11th a total of 7 suspects were charged with participating in the so-called “Combat 18 Hellas” (C18) and “Unaligned Maeandrist Nationalists” (AME), both extremist nationalist organisations, and with other crimes. Four of the suspects remain in custody.”
So it was both Combat 18 members and members of the “Unaligned Maeandrist Nationalists” (AME) who were arrested on March 6th. The two groups are so close they might be considered a single entity. And it was in the summer of 2015 that the two groups began their arson campaign using Molotov cocktails and other explosive materials:
And since the beginning of this arson campaign there have been around 30 arson attacks, mostly against anarchist, leftists, and Jewish memorials:
Unfortunately, despite the fact that these groups were openly claiming responsibility for the attacks, Greek authorities did little. But thanks to some Greek bloggers who track these kinds of groups (and thanks to the neo-Nazis openly claiming responsibility), they were able to put together enough evidence to force Greece’s authorities to act:
And note how it doesn’t appear that Combat 18 Hellas is actually the Greek branch of Combat 18. There does, however appears to be some sort of affiliation between Combat 18/AME and Golden Dawn since Golden Dawn introduced Greek nationalist audiences to Combat 18 Hellas through its youth magazine back in November-December 2001:
Finally, as the article notes, on the same day of the Afghan refugee center attack on March 22, there was also a death threat phoned into the Hellenic League for Human Rights by the same Krypteia neo-Nazi group:
And then there’s the attack against a refugee camp on the island of Lesbos back in April. While there aren’t reports of actual arson, the far right attackers did yell “burn them alive” while throwing bottles and shooting flares:
“Despite a police presence, the situation soon escalated as the extremists started throwing bottles and lighting flares, shouting slogans like “Burn them alive” and “Throw them in the sea”.”
Bottles and flares...hmm. It would be interesting to learn if those bottles contained flammable fluids or not. Either way, the crowd certainly demonstrated a desire to see these people burnt alive. And it’s hard to treat it as hyperbole given all the rest of the neo-Nazi arson attacks.
So, as we can see, Greece’s neo-Nazi movement has been on an arson-spree in recent years. A spree that was really only cracked down on starting in March of this year after bloggers put together overwhelming evidence.
Might the arsonists that started the latest round of deadly fires be neo-Nazis too? Again, at this point we have no idea, but would do have a very good idea about whether or not they should be the prime suspects.
Here’s a pair of stories about of the growing factors that could end up shaping the politics of immigration (and the opportunities for exploitation for the far right everywhere) that has the potential to explode in coming decade:
With wildfires spiking this year as a reminder of how things to come as climate change gets worse, it’s worth noting a rather depressing study from last year published in Nature Clime Climate that makes it clear that you won’t be safe from the extreme heat and drying conditions from climate change even if you stay for away from combustible forests: if climate change continues unabated, 75 percent of humans face the threat of dying from lethal heat by 2100. And even if there are reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, half of the global population will still likely face at least 20 days of lethal heat:
“Without major reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO 2, up to three in four people will face the threat of dying from heat by 2100. However, even with reductions, one in two people at the end of the century will likely face at least 20 days when extreme heat can kill, according to the analysis, published on Monday in Nature Climate Change.”
The bad news: 3/4 of people risk dying of heat by the end of the century if nothing is done about climate change.
The good news: only about half of all people will face 20 or more days of lethal heat if something is done about climate change.
That’s how bad the situation is: the ‘good news’ is still bad news, just not as bad as the ‘bad news’.
And if killer heat waves sound like alarmism, the authors of the study note that killer heat waves are already common. Humanity just doesn’t seem to recognize this:
So killer extreme heatwaves are already common. They’re just going to get more common. And more extreme.
And here’s part of what’s going to guarantee that these killer heatwaves because driving forces for human migration: the tropics are the most sensitive to temperature changes. A relatively small increase in temperatures is going to make a much larger difference in the number and intensity of lethal heatwaves:
Also fueling those future migrations out of the tropics (and into places like the US), is the pervasive inequality that guarantees that large numbers of people who will be facing these heatwaves won’t have access to things like air condition:
“In Chicago people can escape the heat, but that’s not the case for many poor people in India”
Yep, the poor of India, or Central America, aren’t going to have the same resources someone in Chicago has to find shelter. Their only option is going to be to relocate to a cooler latitude.
And for those who don’t perish at some point from the deadly, their still going to be suffering from temperatures that literally breaks down their cellular machinery:
So let’s hope that study was wildly off the mark, because if not if if these researchers are correct, the wild fires of today are just a symbolic prelude to what’s to come.
As with all stories of catastrophic climate change, the question of whether or not humanity will do anything meaningful about it or just wait for the worst to today and hope to ‘tough it out’ remains unanswered...largely because we aren’t actually doing much of anything about it. There’s always the hope that maybe we’ll smarten up as things get worse. And who knows, maybe future generations will indeed smarten up (it’s a low bar at this point, so it’s possible). But that’s assuming all those future heatwaves don’t literally dumb us down:
“The reports, which examine the effects of air temperature on cognitive performance in the United States and China, rely on different data sets and methods to arrive at the same conclusion: The hotter it gets, the more our brains seem to slow down.”
That was the strong conclusion from these four studies: the hotter it gets, the dumber you get.
And while air condition can reverse this cognitive decline, it’s also a luxury many of the poorest people in the US don’t have access to, let alone the rest of the world:
And that the cherry on top of this sh#t sundae humanity is creating for itself: the worse things get thanks to human stupidity the dumber humanity is all going to get...unless you can find refuge in air conditioned buildings. There’s something karmic about, except for the fact that the people who did the least to cause climate change (poor people living in developing countries near the equator) are the same people least likely to have access to air condition and the most likely to experience deadly heatwaves. So it’s more anti-karmic and just awful.
And in other news...
It’s that time again. Time to give an update on the Trump Administration figures getting caught palling around with white supremacists. And this time we got a twofer:
First, one of President Trump’s speechwriters and policy aides, Darren Beattie, was just discovered to have been a speaker at the 216 H.L. Mencken Club Conference. The Mencken Club was started in 2008 and is reportedly regularly attended by the leading white nationalist/‘Alt Right’ figures like Richard Spencer, John Derbyshire, Jared Taylor, and Peter Brimelow.
Beattie claims his speech wasn’t objectionable, telling CNN, “in 2016 I attended the Mencken conference in question and delivered a stand-alone, academic talk titled ‘The Intelligentsia and the Right.’ I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely.” So, the way Beattie puts it, it would apparently be fine an not at all objectionable to give a speech at a hate rally as long as your particular speech wasn’t particularly objectionable.
It’s worth noting that Beattie ‘provided CNN a text of his speech, and he starts off thanking the Mencken Club for inviting him and calling it “a great honor”. And when you start off your speech to a white nationalist audience by talking about what an honor it is to be invited there, that along makes it a pretty objectionable speech regardless of the rest of the content. Especially if you become a White House speech writer and policy aide a few months later:
“CNN’s KFile reached out to the White House last week about Darren Beattie, a policy aide and speechwriter, who was listed as speaking at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club Conference.”
He wasn’t just an attendee, he was a speaker. A speaker at a Club that’s basically a “Who’s Who” of white supremacists:
Beattie provided a transcript of his speech to CNN apparently to prove how non objectionable the speech actually was:
And yes, the very beginning of the speech starts off with Beattie calling it a “great honor” to be invited to speak there. Ouch.
Ok, so that was the first story we got yesterday about a White House staffer palling around with white supremacists. Now let’s move on to White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow. As we also learned yesterday, Kudlow got caught invited Peter Brimelow to Kudlow’s birthday party. Note that Brimelow was list above as one of the attendees of the H.L. Mencken Club event.
When confronted about inviting Brimelow, Kudlow explained that he’s known Brimelow for decades from back when Brimelow was a respected financial commentator (Brimelow only became an open leading white nationalist over the last couple of decades). The Kudlow played completely dumb and acted like he had no idea Brimelow was a white nationalist, adding that Brimelow has been “coming to my dinner parties for years” but that “none of this other stuff has ever come up.”
Even Brimelow couldn’t maintain the absurd pretense that Kudlow had no idea what he was all about. When asked about it, Brimelow said, “I’ve known Larry for nearly 40 years. I regard him as a personal friend. They knew my first wife, who died, and were most kind to Lydia when I remarried. We agreed to disagree on immigration long ago.”
Other attendees of Kudlow’s birthday bash include Roger Stone and some members of the media, CNBC’s Michelle Caruso-Cabrera and Fox News anchor Brian Kilmeade.
So it sounds like Kudlow and Brimelow have probably been hanging out for years. Apparently in larger social setting that involve lots of other acquaintances. And that’s rather notable because it’s one thing for someone to attend a gathering of white supremacists. At least you can ostensibly keep it a secret when you head to the white supremacist gathering. But it’s another thing to invite the white supremacists to your own birthday party and them mingle with all your other friends. Especially when some of them are in the media:
“Peter Brimelow attended the gathering, a birthday bash for Kudlow, one day after a White House speechwriter was dismissed in the wake of revelations that he had spoken alongside Brimelow on a 2016 panel.”
You know you’re going to have a memorable birthday party when you invite a leading white supremacist. It might not be memorable in a positive way, but it’s going to be memorable. And yet Kudlow claimed to have no knowledge at all that Brimelow had these views, despite Brimelow being someone Kudlow has known “forever”:
Apparently politics never came during the dinner parties they’ve had for year.
Brimelow, to his credit, doesn’t engage in the same act, and simply says that he and Kudlow “agreed to disagree” on topics like immigration long ago:
And that “agree to disagree” chumminess with leading white supremacists raises the question of just how frequently are ‘mainstream’ conservatives secretly hanging out with folks like Brimelow. Is ‘dinner with the Alt Right’ a regular thing in Kudlow’s social circles? And how large is that social circle? For instance, we’re now learning that Bob Stefanowski, this year’s GOP nominee for governor of Connecticut, was also at this dinner party with Brimelow. Again, that’s the Connecticut nominee for governor this year in attendance.
So who else was there and common is it in mainstream conservative circle to just casually invite leading white supremacists to your dinner parties? We’ll presumably never know. But we now have a better idea of where ‘the line’ is for Trump White House employees openly cavorting with white supremacists: you can invite them to your birthday party, but if you give a speech at white nationalist conferences that crosses ‘the line’. Sometimes. There are exceptions.
someone noticed a rather strange 14 word headline on this link
We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/02/15/we-must-secure-border-and-build-wall-make-america-safe-again
and...
On average, out of 88 claims that pass the credible fear screening, fewer than 13 will ultimately result in a grant of asylum.
@Mark: You have to wonder if Ian Smith, the former DHS employee in the following article, had anything to do with that creepy ’14 words’ DHS slogan. It would certainly be consistent with the profile that emerges of the guy:
“The messages, given to The Atlantic by a source to whom they were forwarded, paint a picture of the social scene in which white nationalists gathered for an “Alt-Right Toastmasters” night in 2016, and organized dinner parties and visits from out-of-town friends. And they provide a glimpse into how a group that included hard-core white nationalists was able to operate relatively incognito in the wider world, particularly in conservative circles. The revelation of these messages comes amid increasing scrutiny of white nationalists’ ties to the administration; a White House speechwriter, Darren Beattie, left the administration after CNN reported earlier this month that he had attended a conference with white nationalists in 2016. The Washington Post reported last week that Peter Brimelow, the publisher of the white nationalist website VDare, had attended a party at the top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow’s house. Kudlow told the Post he was unaware of Brimelow’s views and would not have invited him had he known about them.”
Relatively incognito white supremacists infiltrating conservative circles. It’s like the meta-story of this era. Although a more complete meta-story would be relatively incognito white supremacists infiltrating conservative circles, getting caught, maybe getting fired, and then everybody plays dumb, acts like it’s a surprise, and promptly forgets it.
In the case of Ian Smith, it was already pretty obvious that the guy had strong Alt Right leanings based on the fact that he worked for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of the far right/pro-eugenics Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). And Smith wrote almost exclusively about immigration (and his opposition to it) for the National Review. The writing was on the wall with this guy. So of course he was hired by Trump’s DHS to work on immigration issues:
And while Smith turning out to be a Nazi fellow traveler should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his background and the groups he worked for, it is rather illustrative for how “a group that included hard-core white nationalists was able to operate relatively incognito in the wider world, particularly in conservative circles.” It’s as simple as Alt Right figures like Richard Spencer quietly networking with people like Smith who are basically on the same page, politically, with Spencer but who haven’t yet been outed as Nazis. In other words, people like Spencer are able to operative in conservative circles relatively easily because the internet has made quietly associating with people easier than ever and those conservative circles are filled with crypto-Nazis who largely agree with people like Spencer. And that quiet association can happen unimpeded as long as people like Smith aren’t caught in these email threads or attending Alt Right events (or inviting Alt Right figures to their birthday parties). And based on these emails, it sounds like Smith was indeed able to attend a number of Alt Right events without getting caught for years...until these emails came out:
And just in case it wasn’t totally obvious that Smith is indeed a Nazi at heart, there’s the email from October of 2015 where Smith describes his plans to “hit the bar during the dinner hours and talk to people like Matt Parrot” from the aggressively neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party. And this was his message in response to an email about keeping a home “judenfrei”:
So if we had to come up with a suspect list of DHS employees who would have had a keen interest in ensuring DHS flashes neo-Nazi call signs with creepy ’14 word’ anti-immigrant slogans, it seems like Ian Smith would be near that top of the suspect list. But this is the Trump administration’s DHS we’re talking about, so, of course, Smith has competition.
Now that ‘the caravan’ — the group of Central Americans slowly traveling from Honduras to the US — is being turned into some sort of right-wing fantasy caravan, with claims by Trump that it contains ISIS terrorists and is financed by the Democrats, and even Trump officials themselves are calling it a “political gift” for Republicans in the final stretch of the mid-terms, the question of who actually organized this caravan in the first place is suddenly an important political question. After all, the timing of this caravan literally couldn’t be worse. And as Josh Marshall notes, not only is the timing almost perfect for boosting GOP chances in the mid-terms, the timing is also perfect to ensure the cruelest treatment of the actual caravan members themselves once they reach the US border because being has harsh as possible, and demonizing them as much as possible, is now a political imperative. So whoever arranged for this caravan either had no idea what kind of political trap they were setting for themselves or knew exactly what kind of political trap they were setting and went ahead with it anyway:
“Indeed, one source I spoke to, who has knowledge of migration patterns out of Central America in recent years, told me it’s not implausible that the organizers just aren’t or weren’t tuned into the fact that this is probably the worst possible time to do this. And by worst possible time, I mean not for its impact on the US election but for the incentives President Trump and the US government have to impose the maximum degree of brutality on the migrants – whether that’s by pressuring Mexican authorities to do their dirty work for them or creating cruelty and immiseration spectacles at the US border.”
Yep, it really was like the worst time for a high-profile caravan to do this. A dangerous journey seemingly timed to ensure an unhappy ending for all the participants. It’s quite a mystery as to why they decided now is the time to do this. A mystery compounded by the fact that no one seems to know who actually started this, which itself seems rather amazing. So it’s worth noting that this is by no means the only caravan of this nature in recent years. And the group that’s been organizing many of the previous caravans, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, is not the group that arranged this caravan. First, here’s an article from April of this year covering an earlier caravan organized by Pueblo Sin Fronteras. Trump also latched on this earlier caravan and was tweeting about it at the time. And according to this article, all of that negative attention from Trump had them convinced they were going to have to change tactics. Note that they didn’t claim they were going to stop helping migrants and asylum seekers reach the US. But they were rethinking the whole caravan plan that made these people such an easy political target of politicians like Trump:
“Abeja is one of the lead organizers of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which for over 15 years has led migrants to the U.S. via caravans to help them to seek asylum in other countries.”
So we do know of at least one group that has been organizing these kinds of caravans (caravans not just to the US) for the past 15 years: Pueblo Sin Fronteras.
Like the current caravan, the caravan from earlier this year largely consisted of people from Honduras, a country experience a wave of violence due, in part, to a dirty election last year backed by the US:
And following Trump’s tweets about the caravan, the Pueblo Sin Fronteras organizers appeared to change the strategy and tried to identify those caravan members most likely to qualify for asylum in the US, with the rest staying in Mexico where they would likely be refused asylum:
And according to the following article from just a few days ago, Pueblo Sin Fronteras is not part of the current caravan:
“The notion that refugees will leave their homes solely for a little cash is “crazy,” said Alex Mensing, a project coordinator with Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a transnational group that captured Mr. Trump’s attention last spring.. (The group did not coordinate the caravan that is now traveling north, but has been organizing similar journeys for years.) ”
So Pueblo Sin Fronteras is saying they didn’t organize the current caravan. So who did? We’ll according to the following Daily Beast article, it started with pro-government Honduran TV reporters lying to audiences and encouraging them to join the caravan by telling them all the food and costs would be provided. Keep in mind that the Honduran government is an ally of the US and the Trump administration backed this government after the disputed election last year. That’s the government that appears to have encouraged this.
Specifically, it appears to have started about a month ago when migrant activist Bartolo Fuentes learned about small groups of about 200 Hondurans who were organizing among themselves to make the journey north. Fuentes has years of experience organizing such caravans and offered his help. Then the pro-government HCH cable news channel, the country’s most-watched cable news channel, did a report on Fuentes’s work. The anchors interviewed a woman who was supposedly part of the caravan and who mentioned foreign assistance. The anchors, without any supporting evidence, told TV audiences Fuentes would pay for the migrants’ food and transportation. Fuentes was later interviewed by these anchors and strongly denied this, but at that point the damage was done. Thousands of Hondurans suddenly joined the caravan.
So it sure looks like the Honduran government, which kind of owes Trump a favor at this point over the US decision to back his contested election, returned the favor in the form of prompting a giant caravan a month before the US mid-terms:
“Until recently, Fuentes lived in relative anonymity despite being a former legislator and the host of a radio show on migration called “Without Borders.” But today, depending on who you ask, he is either a hero who’s put his own life on the line to help migrants, or a cynical villain. Many in the Honduran government—concerned with the country’s image amid a mass exodus—portray Fuentes as a “coyote,” or human trafficker, who organized the migrant caravan and took advantage of the people in it with “false promises” for political purposes.”
Bortolo Fuentes is being cast as the man behind the caravan. And yet, when you look at how the situation played out, it sure looks like the people behind the caravan are the pro-government reporters who told audiences that Fuentes would pay for their food and transportation:
Again, this is a government that probably feels pretty indebted to Trump right now given the US decision to ignore the calls by Organization of American States to call for new elections despite all the irregularities that ensured Hernandez’s victory:
Of course, the false reporting wasn’t the only thing that triggered the caravan. Rampant poverty, crime, and drought from climate change all created the conditions that made the too-good-to-be-true promise made by these reporter too tempting to refuse for many Hondurans with little to lose:
And the Honduran government doesn’t appear to be the only government trying to curry favor with Trump. The president of Guatemala decided to claim, without providing evidence, that several ISIS members had be caught in the caravan. The fact that these caught members were parading on TV makes it clear that this was a blatant lie. A blatant lie intended to buttress the blatant lie Trump made a day earlier about the caravan being rife with criminal and “Middle Easterners”:
All in all, it’s sure looking like the conditions for current caravan crisis was created by a combination of a corrupt Honduran government, rampant crime, and climate change. But the actual spark that created the caravan was thanks to Hondura’s pro-government media. Media working at the behest of a right-wing government that owes Trump big time.
Adding to the dark comedy nature of the narrative coming out of the White House, Vice President Mike Pence just told reported that it’s actually Venezuelan leftists financing the caravan. Yep. And who told Pence this fun fact? The president of Honduras:
“The President also tried — and failed — to get Vice President Mike Pence to accuse Democrats of funding the caravan, and to say there were Islamic State members in the caravan.”
Yep, Trump actually tried to coax a new set of lies out of Mike Pence during a joint phone call after Pence told him that the Honduran president blamed the financing of the caravan on Venezuela:
So it sounds like the right-wing needs to work out its narrative. Trump clearly wants to idiotically assert that the Democrats are behind the caravan. And he clearly wants to claim there’s ISIS members in the caravan (Pence has been sort of backing him up on that lie). And as we saw above, the Guatemalan president was happy to push the ISIS meme. But the Honduran president is pointing fingers as Venezuela. What will the narrative be that they ultimately arrive at? We’ll find out. But the actual causes (crime, poverty, climate change, and the Honduran government’s media assets) will presumably continue avoiding blame and maintain the conditions where new politically convenient caravans can be created as needed in the future.
Here’s another piece that describes the factors that led to the suddenly growth of the migrant caravan. As we should expect, in addition to the disinformation promoting the caravan that was heavily pushed by pro-government cable TV, it sounds like Facebook and WhatsApp also played key roles:
Bartolo Fuentes, the migrant activist who ended up leading the caravan, explains how he was initially contact over WhatsApp by a small group of people in September who were planning on making the trip to the US and wanted Fuentes’s advice on about the trip. A week before the caravan started, Fuentes posted a flier on his Facebook page calling for people to meet at 8 a.m. on October 12 at a bus terminal. Then there was surge in media coverage, especially from the popular pro-government HCH broadcaster. By the time people started gathering at the terminal around on October 11th, there were already live streams from Facebook pages and the whole thing had gone viral across Central America. The caravan organizers were stunned with the sudden flow of people far beyond anyone’s expectations. Within days of the caravan’s departure almost no one in the caravan could explain how it all started. They could only cite Facebook posts or TV coverage that prompted them to decide to join.
So that explains at least part of the dynamic that led to this unusually large caravan suddenly popping up less than a month before the US mid-terms. But that still leaves a number of unanswered questions. Questions related to the lessons we’ve been learning about Facebook and WhatsApp in recent years, the lesson that the right-wing has mastered the art of weaponizing social media a mass manipulation. So given the fact that the pro-government (right-wing government) cable TV station was apparently spreading misinformation to promote the caravan and given the obviously political gift the timing of the caravan represents to the American right-wing, the obvious question of whether or not right-wing forces were also behind the Facebook and WhatsApp promotion of the caravan has to be asked (even though it probably can’t realistically be answered, especially for WhatsApp)
“Although the caravan’s origin story remains somewhat opaque, the answer from many migrants here is that they had wanted to leave for months or years, and then — in a Facebook post, a television program, a WhatsApp group — they saw an image of the growing group and decided.”
TV, Facebook, and WhatsApp. That’s how people in Honduras, and eventually elsewhere in Central America, learned about the caravan. Bortolo Fuentes was first contact by a small group of would-be migrants in September, he agreed to help them:
He then posts on Facebook a week before the October 12th departure date, letting anyone who wanted to join know to show up at a bus terminal. Then there was a surge of media coverage, in particularly from the popular pro-government HCH cable news channel, along with live Facebook streams. An explosion of media coverage in the days following its departure ensure the whole thing went viral across Central America before audiences in the US had even heard about it:
So it sounds like the caravan had an unusual amount of media attention. Keep in mind that these caravans are a common thing, so it’s not like this one was some sort of media-worthy novelty.
But despite this wave of media coverage (including from the pro-government HCH), the Honduran government his now blaming it all on Bortolo Fuentes, claiming he did it all to make the Honduran government look bad:
Amusingly, the Honduran government also told Mike Pence, without evidence, that the Venezuelan government was financing the whole thing. So the Honduran government seems to be very interested in framing the caravan as some sort of attack on itself (presumably in part to deflect from the role the pro-government TV coverage played):
The caravan members themselves are saying that it was all of the media attention of the last caravan from March/April of this year that helped generate interest in this caravan. The fact that they don’t have to pay traffickers for protection is another big incentive for the caravan approach. So when you combined the inherent advantages of a caravan (cheaper and safer) with the extensive free advertising they received from the media, it’s almost surprising there aren’t more and larger caravans of this nature:
“The last caravan, which left southern Mexico in March, received so much media attention, particularly during its final days, that it appears to have set the groundwork for the current, larger exodus, said many migrants. The current group is exponentially bigger than previous caravans.”
So given that the large amounts of attention that caravan from earlier this year received and the role that attention appears to have played in the unprecedented size of the current caravan, it’s worth noting that one of things that drew enormous international attention to that last caravan was the decision of Donald Trump and the GOP to politicize it at the time. As the following article from early April describes, these caravans are common place and typically done primarily to bring public attention to asylum seekers (and not to simply bum rush the borders of a country like the GOP is claiming). They’ve been going on for years. But Trump and the GOP decided to politicize the last one and now there’s a super-caravan. So in that sense, we can thank Donald Trump and the GOP for the unprecedented size of the current caravan:
“Trump has made the migrant caravan a central theme in tweets. He has warned that Mexico must stop the group or risk being penalized in the negotiations over revising the North American Free Trade Agreement. He has also threatened to reduce U.S. aid to Honduras.”
Yep, the caravan from March/April of this year was a central theme of Trump’s tweets at the time, along with Trump proclaiming that the US has a ‘weak law’ border. It’s kind of the perfect advertisement to encourage future, bigger caravans:
But as the director of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the migrant rights group that organized this earlier caravan, stressed, the plan for these caravans was never to simply bum-rush the people across the US border. The caravan is distinct from the regular flow of migrants. That’s not to say that people don’t use the caravan to safely reach Mexico and then independently try to cross the US border. But the actual caravans are about raising awareness, moving people safely so they don’t become prey to the cartels and kidnappers:
So when Trump and the GOP directed international attention to the caravan, they were almost thankful because it got them the attention for the migrants’ cause they were seeking in the first place:
But it’s also worth noting that this caravan in March/April was, itself, an exceptionally large caravan, due largely to the political turmoil in Honduras following the contested election outcome. An outcome the US backed in favor of Honduras’s current right-wing government:
Overall, it’s looking like we can attribute the size of the current caravan to a combination of a social media viral campaign, the pro-government Honduran television coverage and the decision of Trump and the GOP to politicize the earlier caravan.
So given the immense media attention the current caravan is receiving, should we expect even larger ones in the future? We’ll see, but as the following article makes clear, the GOP is planning on making ‘the caravan’ its central talking point in the final weeks of the mid-terms, and heavily promoting the idea that George Soros and the Democrats are funding it. Which means the GOP is loudly sending the message to the rest of the world that, yes, there are foreigners who will pay for these caravans. And as we’ve seen, that’s the kind of messaging campaign that’s great for making the next caravan even bigger:
““It doesn’t matter if it’s 100 percent accurate,” a senior Trump administration official told The Daily Beast. “This is the play.””
It’s always fascinating when politicians suddenly get honest about their dishonesty. But that’s what just a bunch of anonymous Trump officials just did for this article. They’re just going to proudly say whatever works politically. And given the round-the-clock coverage conservative media is giving this caravan, whatever they say is going to be loudly repeated over and over:
The intended audience is for the right-wing Big Lie machine is, of course, Trump voters. But as the experience from the March/April caravan demonstrates, when Trump and the GOP make these caravans a major US topic of US media it also gets more attention elsewhere in the world. Like in Central America. Which likely led to the unprecedented size of the current caravan:
And note how the Trump/GOP fixation on the caravan got started: GOP congressman Matt Gaetz fraudulently claimed that footage of the caravan members receiving small amounts of money in Guatemala was actually footage of them being paid in Honduras to make the journey. And George Soros was the one paying them to reach the US before Election Day for some unspecified diabolical plot:
That’s the message Gaetz was pushing to US audiences and it’s a message that undoubtedly also traveled to Central America too. So you have to wonder how many people across Central America are under the impression that George Soros will pay them to travel to America thanks to Gaetz and the GOP? And don’t forget the Honduran government claiming Venezuela is paying for this.
As we can see, we aren’t simply witnessing a GOP pretend freak out over a migrant caravan that poses no meaningful threat to anything other than the profit margins of human traffickers. We’re actually witnessing the GOP incite future mega-caravans. Endless fearmongering about how the US has ‘weak law’ borders and that George Soros and Venezuela will pay for the migrants is pretty much the best advertising these caravans could get. And given the way the GOP is gleefully exploiting the caravan for political gain, it’s the kind of pro-caravan advertising the GOP no doubt is happy to provide.
Now that it looks almost certain that Brazil is going to be electing a fascist pro-torture/pro-dictatorship lunatic as president on the runoff election this Sunday, here’s a pair of article that remind us that the election of Bolsonaro doesn’t just represent doom for Brazil. It also represents the latest instance of an anti-environment strongman politician coming to power in a world where anti-environmentalist strongman politicians are coming to power almost everywhere:
“What is less well understood, however, is the catastrophic environment implications of his rise to the brink of power. And in this, Bolsonaro is not unique: around the world, diminishing resources are fueling a global rise of authoritarian leaders dedicated to doing the bidding of some of the world’s most environmentally damaging interests.”
As we can see, one country after another is choosing to follow the lead of strongman politicians coming to power on a grievance-filled ‘populist’ right-wing agenda but backed by the powerful and environmentally destructive industries on the planet. And what’s so disturbing as that, as history tells us, when the environment deteriorates, societies increasingly turn to strongmen and religious zealots. In other words, when the going gets tough, humanity goes insane. Over and over:
“Such neo-fascist politicians should not be blithely dismissed. They are the hired guns of the industries working against the Paris accord and other international agreements that aim to prevent further environmental catastrophes, which hit the poorest hardest. Their “anti-globalism” is first and foremost anti-nature and anti-future. An extraction-first approach may bring economic benefits in the short term, as cronies and campaign donors clear more forests, open up plantations and dig more mines – but the profits are concentrated while the environmental stress is shared.”
That’s a pretty good way to describe these kinds of politicians: anti-nature and anti-future hired guns of the industries that have the most to lose from saving the environment.
And this twisted dynamic, where environmental deterioration and collapsing resources leads people to vote for the strongmen who will exacerbate the deterioration, raises the question of whether or not humanity is facing a kind of political doom-spiral: where environmental crises lead to strongmen leading to worse environmental crises and worse strongmen, etc. If humanity’s hardwired instinct to think and react in a short-term manner when under stress can’t be overcome, we literally may not be capable as a species of avoiding that kind of doom-loop:
“At some point, voters will realise that ecological stress is at the core of the world’s current woes. The aha! moment may be when water grows prohibitively expensive, or crops fail owing to successive heatwaves, or the refugee crisis sparks war, but at some point the weakness of the strongmen will be apparent, and people will seek change. The danger is, by then it may be too late. Climate and politics alike will have passed a tipping point, leading to social chaos and the morphing of populists into full-blown dictators-for-life.”
That’s perhaps that saddest possibility: that humanity will eventually wake up and realize that listening to siren songs of ‘populist’ strongmen was a really bad idea but it will be too late and conditions will be perfect for these strongmen ‘populists’ morphing into dictators-for-life. Plenty of people living under dictatorships would love to change their situation but can’t. “We have no choice” will become the default slogan for all of the horrors of the future.
Let’s also not forget that in Bolsonaro’s case, the odds of him becoming dictator-for-life are alarmingly high simply because he’s openly in favor of a military dictatorship. Brazil won’t have to wait until it’s ‘too late’ ecologically to get a dictator-for-life. They’re knowingly voting one in now. So if Bolsonaro does indeed stay in power for years to come and unleashes a new wave of ecological destruction across the Amazon, how is he going to respond as the impacts of climate change inevitably become undeniable? The following article gives us a hint. It turns out that Bolsonaro doesn’t deny that climate change is happening. He doesn’t deny that humans are causing it. And he doesn’t deny that it could lead to the destruction of humanity. But he exclusively pins the blame on overpopulation.
Now, it’s undeniable that overpopulation is a major problem facing humanity. And if it wasn’t for the influential Religious Right, particularly in the United States, there would have been far more resources put into family planning and other programs for limiting population population. Pointing out the perils of overpopulation is one of the few valid points Bolsonaro makes. But to exclusively rely on family planning programs, at the same team he’s about to decimate Brazil’s rain forests at the behest of the most environmentally is obviously just trolling. Bolsonaro clearly doesn’t care at all about the catastrophe his policies are going to create or future Brazilians and he’s clearly pointing to overpopulation because that’s a perfect Nazis device for pinning the blame of eco-collapse on the poorest people in the world and immigrants. As the environment gets worse, politicians like Bolsonaro will point to the poorest populations, which typically have the highest birth-rates, and immigrants (who often have higher birthrates and come from countries with higher birthrates) and declare that they are the cause of all of this environmental destruction. Not Bolsonaro or the powerful resource-extraction industries behind him and not the wealthy nations that consume far more per-capita than anyone else. In other words,
Bolsonaro is already laying the groundwork for a future Nazi-like response to eco-collapse of blaming immigrants and the poorest people on the planet:
“An enthusiast for torture and the 1964–85 military dictatorship, the retired army captain is famous for racist, homophobic, authoritarian and misogynistic rhetoric. But his views on how to manage Earth’s largest tropical rainforest are just as grim and appalling.”
Yep, we don’t just have to fear Bolsonaro pulling a coup and turning into a dictator. We also have to realize that if he does become a dictator that’s going to give him plenty of time to utterly destroy and permanently destroy Brazil’s environment. And even if he doesn’t become a dictator, he’ll still have the power to do irreversible harm to Brazil’s environment and the global environment with moves like pledging to pull Brazil out of the Paris climate agreement
On top of that, he casually embraces the idea that Brazil’s minorities, in particular the indigenous populations, which have rights to the Amazon that currently stand in the way of industrial deforestation, need to “bend down to the majority … The minorities [should] either adapt or simply vanish.” He is already talking about wiping populations out:
His running mate recently call for a new constitution without popular participation and raised the possibility that Bolsonaro could proclaim a self-coup. And Bolsonaro campaigned on abolishing the ministry of environment and putting those responsibilities in the hands of the “beef caucus” that runs the ministry of agriculture. So he could rapidly do long-term damage with a new constitution or mass deforestation with or without that coup:
But perhaps the most ominous part of Bolsonaro’s rhetoric is the fact that he appears to acknowledge that climate change is man-made and could lead to the end of the human species, but he exclusively attributes this to overpopulation. Yes, overpopulation is a major driver of climate change, but when a Nazi like Bolsonaro fixates on overpopulation as the sole solution for a crisis he is trying to exacerbates that’s a pretty obvious sign about the nature of the kinds of solutions he’ll be advocating after ‘family planning’ doesn’t save the day. It starts with ‘we need to focus on family planning’ and ends with ‘we simply can’t afford to have those people around. We have no choice!’:
Just think about that: the guy who has pledged to destroy all of the environmental laws standing in the say of deforestation tells us that it’s really just explosive population growth that’s causing all of this deforestation. And that’s the guy poised to become Brazil’s next president and possibly Brazil’s next dictator. For who knows how many years to come. So when the future strongmen of Brazil are declaring that this or that minority group needs to be wiped about because there are too many people and ‘we just don’t have a choice’, it will be worth recalling the choice Brazil is about to make in a few days. Granted, recalling this blunder in the future won’t really help, but we might as well learn from history at some point, even if it’s too late.
This was probably inevitable: Trump appears to be leading a full scale ‘Willie Horton-ization’ of the GOP’s closing arguments for 2018 mid-terms. The particular ad that prompted all the comparisons to the infamous Willie Horton ad was tweeted out by Trump Wednesday night. The ad focuses a twice-deported Mexican immigrant who was given the death penalty for the 2014 killing of two California police officers. The ad starts off focusing on Bracamontes, blaming Democrats for ‘letting him in’ (in reality he was originally deported by Bill Clinton) then shifts to footage of people rioting in streets and pushing down fences, and asks the question, “Who else would Democrats let in?” As one conservative commentator put it, “I don’t see anything in this video that I haven’t heard from the president consistently for the past couple of years,” but added, “it’s not the message I would be closing the campaign on.” And that’s the message Trump is closing the campaign on:
“The video, which the president promoted Wednesday afternoon to his 55.5 million Twitter followers, came with a message from Trump to “Vote Republican now!” As of early Thursday morning, the video had been viewed more than 1.8 million times, drawing widespread condemnation.”
Hordes of people from south of the border are coming to kill you and your family. That’s the message to American voters Trump wants to turn into the message in the final stretch of the mid-terms. There’s going to be riots and people pushing down fences and they’re coming to commit horrible violence:
“Who else would Democrats let in?” It’s basically the opposite of the “Who else would Mike Dukakis let out [of prison]?” message at the heart of the 1988 Willie Horton ad. An ad that almost defined race-baiting in American politics for the last 30 years and, of course, was created by Fox News creator Roger Ailes:
And that’s Trump’s final message to voters. But, as the following article notes, it’s not like it’s just Trump going ‘full Horton’ in the final stretch of the campaign. Republicans across the country are running extremely similar disturbing ads of this nature, with many of them produced by the superPACs associated with House and Senate Republican leadership. It’s clearly a popular message with the party as a whole. And not just because anti-Latino race-baiting helps fire of the Republican base. It’s also a great distraction from all the deeply unpopular positions held by the party. As one GOP operative put it, “It’s clearly working. We are all talking about it and not health care”:
“President Donald Trump’s new Willie Horton-style web video posted to Twitter on Wednesday night represented a new flashpoint in a culture war he is stoking ahead of next week’s midterm elections. But it also came as part of a broader strategy GOP candidates are using in key House, Senate and governor’s races.”
It’s not just Trump. It’s a broad strategy. A strategy that’s played a key role in the GOP’s hopes in Tennessee, where the GOP has been running ads that mention “caravan” nearly 800 times:
And it’s not just candidates or conservative superPACs. The Senate Leadership Fund and Congressional Leadership Fund are all running similar ads:
And as one GOP operative put it, “It’s clearly working. We are all talking about it and not health care”:
It’s an invasion (and never mind our wildly unpopular health care policies)! That’s how the GOP as a party is closing out the mid-terms. Going all in on out doing ‘Willie Horton’.
In fairness, the GOP isn’t exclusively focusing on disgusting race-baiting in order to distract from its wildly unpopular health care policies. Some candidates are actually talking some their health care stances. With up-is-down complete fiction lies, of course.
Here’s an interesting followup on the origins of ‘the Caravan’ in Honduras and the mystery over how it grew so large so suddenly and why it was timed to arrive during the US mid-terms, arguably one of the worst possible times it could have made the journey given the US political dynamics: First, recall how it appeared that a pro-Honduran government cable news channel, HCH broadcaster, played a key role in disseminating misinformation about the caravan and providing heavy coverage. The pro-government station falsely claimed that community activists, led by a former legislator named Bartolo Fuentes, were initially behind the group and that Fuentes would pay for their food and transportation. The right-wing Honduran president also allegedly told Mike Pence that Venezuela was financing the caravan. Also recall how Facebook and WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) played a key role in disseminating this misinformation.
Now we’re learning more about the role Facebook played in this dynamic and how it was that the size of the caravan exploded in the days before it departed Honduras. It turns out someone set up a sophisticated fake Facebook account pretending to be Bartolo Fuentes and used that account to send misinformation to a large number of migrant activists. Most of the messages were sent using Facebook Messenger which would have helped keep the existence of this fake account ‘under the radar’. The account operated entirely in Spanish and precisely targeted influencers within the migrant rights community. Fuentes only learned about the existence of this fake account from the migrant activist group Pueblo Sin Fronteras. As we previously saw, Pueblo Sin Fronteras has indeed organized previous caravans but did NOT organize this one. As we’ll see below, the reason the group did not support this caravan was specifically because of the horrible political dynamic of doing it right before a US election. But the fake profile was telling people Pueblo Sin Fronteras was going to lead the caravan on its journey.
So who was behind this fake Facebook account? We don’t know, and Facebook is refusing to give out any information barring a subpoena or request from law enforcement, saying it does not share such information out of respect for the privacy of its users. That Facebook cited an alleged respect for user privacy would be hilarious enough for random users, but keep in mind that this is a user who blatantly impersonated a public official for the purpose of spreading misinformation to the public. Even Fuentes himself can’t get any information from Facebook.
But there is one clue about the identity of the person (people) behind the fake account: the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa is listed in the fake profile as Fuentes’s hometown, not his real hometown of the San Pedro Sula suburb of El Progreso. According to the BuzzFeed article, this is NOT the kind of mistake that someone from Honduras would make. Fuentes is a well-known politician in the country.
So it’s looking like Facebook once again was used by right-wing forces to sow disinformation and is once again doing as little as possible to correct this.
Ok, first, here’s a post by Josh Marshall where he notes Facebook’s opposition to revealing anything about the impersonator, not even the country of origin. Apparently Facebook considers the country of origin to be part of that fake user’s privacy. Marshall also notes that, according to immigration activists he’s spoken with, it’s entirely possible that the Honduran people themselves had no understanding of the grave political risks of traveling to the US right before the US mid-terms, so the timing of the caravan wasn’t shocking from the perspective of the poor migrants who actually joined the caravan. But as Marshall notes, it was only after the fake account started operating that the caravan began to swell. And as Marshall also notes, it’s hard to imagine a disinformation operation this sophisticated would have limited itself to just one fake account. So that’s another aspect of Facebook refusing to give out any information about this: we have no idea how many other fake accounts were doing the same thing:
“Here’s a very, very interesting Buzzfeed article which reports that a fake Facebook account appears to have had an important role stirring up the Honduran immigrant caravan which coincided almost precisely with the 2018 midterm election. Facebook has admitted the account was an imposter account impersonating a prominent Honduran politician. But it is refusing to release information about the account, who may have set it up or what country it originated from.”
Yes, Facebook, the company now known for rampant privacy violations, won’t even give out the apparent country of origin for the fake account.
Marshall also notes that, while it’s not surprising that a large number of migrants would have joined such a caravan despite the peril of doing this right before a US election because they simply wouldn’t be familiar with the role immigration plays in US politics, immigration activists are still suspicious of this caravan. It didn’t seem to happen the way past caravans did:
And it was the fake Fuentes account that appeared to play a key role in giving the caravan momentum right in the final days before the departure:
And as Marshall also points out, given the sophisticated nature of this Facebook operation and the obvious intent behind it, it’s hard to believe there were other fake accounts that we just haven’t discovered yet:
Now let’s take a look at the actual BuzzFeed article, and how Facebook refuses to give even the country of origin of the Facebook account out due to an alleged concern over user privacy (Bwahaha!!). It also note that there appeared to be a mistake made by the people behind the fake account: they incorrectly set the hometown of Fuentes to Honduras’s capital, which is the kind of mistake a Honduran would be unlikely to make since Fuentes is a well known politician. There are also a number of quotes from Pueblo Sin Fronteras about the group’s apprehension about the caravan, with the group’s representative asserting that “Nobody wanted this to take place so close to the elections...Somebody was clearly trying to mislead people to generate more interest in the caravan.”:
“Nobody wanted this to take place so close to the elections...Somebody was clearly trying to mislead people to generate more interest in the caravan.”
Yep, somebody was clearly trying to mislead people to generate more interest in the caravan. And they clearly knew enough about Honduras’s immigration activist community to know to impersonate Fuentes and successfully pull it off while precisely targeting influencer in the migrant rights community. But they did make one mistake: incorrectly listing Fuente’s hometown as the Honduran capital. Given that Fuentes is a well-known national politician it’s a reasonable assumption that his hometown would be the nation’s capital, but that’s still wrong and a real Honduran would likely know this:
Also keep in mind that, given the evidence that the right-wing Honduran government was also promoting this caravan, perhaps this account was being run by someone working in the government (presumably from the capital) and they carelessly set the Honduran capital as the fake profile’s hometown because they were literally working from there.
And note how, when the imposter account bean, the caravan was only around 160 people. So this account appears to have played a potentially very significant role in that last minute surge. And since Facebook won’t cooperate with Fuentes we have no idea how many Facebook messages were sent from this account and who received them:
Based on the information Fuentes has, the account was created less than a week before the caravan’s scheduled departure and primarily used Facebook Messenger to spread the disinformation, which would have kept this disinformation operation more under the radar. And those messages claimed that Pueblo Sin Fronteras was organizing the caravan and would be leading it. Pueblo Sin Fronteras was actually staunchly opposed to it precisely because of the timing with respect to the US mid-terms and only joined after it had swelled in size:
And Fuentes only learned about the fake account from a representative from Pueblo Sin Fronteras:
But Facebook refuses to give any information about this fake account...citing respect for user privacy:
So that teaches us something about Facebook and privacy: Facebook will fight for your privacy...as long as you’re running a right-wing disinformation operation.
And given the wild success this fake account had, it raises the question of what else Facebook is going about this fake account. Is the user going to be allowed to do it again? Was there a much larger network of fake accounts that have yet to be discovered? Facebook isn’t talking.
And more generally, can Facebook prevent something like this again? Or are fake Facebook profiles impersonating public figures just something Facebook can’t really prevent? Keep in mind that if the user obscured their digital trail — like using a throw away email address and virtual private network to sign up — it’s entirely possible Facebook itself has no idea who did this and can’t effectively prevent them from doing it again.
So that’s all another reason not to believe the things you read on Facebook. And preferably #DeleteFacebook.
Phew! That’s kind of a relief. A little: President Trump is schedule to make a televised address to the American public tonight to build up public support for his decision to keep the government shutdown over demands for funding for ‘the Wall’. And while it sounds like Trump will continue fanning the flames of fantasy by trying to convince the public that there really is a big national emergency with the US-Mexico border, at least we’re getting reports that he’s not planning on formally declaring the situation a national emergency and unilaterally ordering the military to start building the wall, a move he’s been openly considering in recent weeks. So the real national emergency that would be created by the president declaring a fake national emergency in order to extricate himself out of his shutdown showdown crisis of his own making is at least not imminent.
Still, while that kind of national nightmare won’t be happening tonight, it’s still looming. And when the White House is doubling down on such outrageous lie that even Fox News calls them out — like the lie that four thousands “suspected terrorists” have entered the US illegally, with the southern border be a key point of entry — it’s pretty clear that Trump and his entire team are fully committed to whipping up a fake crisis. And a great way to make that fake crisis feel much more ‘real’ is to declare it an emergency and start using those emergency powers. And the more extensively those powers are used, not just at the border but inside the US, the more real this fake emergency is going to feel.
So in the interesting of peering into the abyss, here’s a looking at the US history of presidential emergency powers and all the things Trump could do if/when he eventually goes down that path. For instance, he’ll also have the option of declaring any US citizen who provides assistance to asylum seekers or undocumented immigrants in the US as a threat to national security. “Sanctuary cities” could be declared defiant of the federal government and the military could be ordered in to enforce immigration law. Things like shutting down websites that he doesn’t approve of can be shut down. And when Americans start protesting in response, the military can be brought in to suppress those protests:
“But will they? Unknown to most Americans, a parallel legal regime allows the president to sidestep many of the constraints that normally apply. The moment the president declares a “national emergency”—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—more than 100 special provisions become available to him. While many of these tee up reasonable responses to genuine emergencies, some appear dangerously suited to a leader bent on amassing or retaining power. For instance, the president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts. Other powers are available even without a declaration of emergency, including laws that allow the president to deploy troops inside the country to subdue domestic unrest.”
Yep, there’s a relatively unknown parallel legal regime that grants presidents extra powers and the magic words to get that regime started are “national emergency”. This parallel regime isn’t spelled out in the constitution. And what emergency powers are declared in the constitution are left to Congress. But that hasn’t prevent prevented some legal scholars and past presidents from asserting that there are inherent constitutional powers during times of emergency and, for the most part, the Supreme Court has supported those emergency powers when presidents declared and used them:
And it’s not like the emergency powers automatically go away when the emergency ends. As a result, thirty states of emergency are in effect today and Congress has done next to nothing to address this:
So not only does Trump have the ability to declare a national emergency, he’s got enormous precedent. Except, of course, the ’emergency’ in this case is a fake crisis aggressively promoted by the right-wing disinfotainment complex. But as long as Trump can get away with declaring a fantasy emergency a real emergency, he’s going to have a whole legacy of emergency powers precedents to work with. That includes the powers Congress granted presidents in 1942 to allow the president to shutdown or take control of wire communications facilities. And today that means Trump could basically take over the internet and selectively censor whatever content he wants, at least in America:
Then there’s the economic emergency powers he’ll have as a result of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 combined with George W. Bush’s Executive Order 13224. With these powers, Trump could literally sanction individual American citizens he deems to be providing support for whatever is causing the emergency. So, for instance, if he declared some future caravan of asylum seekers an emergency, he could sanction anyone offering help to those asylum seekers. The immigrants rights community could be destroyed:
Then there’s the possibility of Trump simply sending troops to engage in domestic police actions. That should be helpful for dealing with any protests:
And as was revealed back in 1987, Oliver North worked with FEMA to set of a secret contingency plan authorizing “suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to fema, appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis”:
This plan by Oliver North is the infamous “Rex 84” scheme. Recall how Rex 84 was created with the idea of the mass internment of black Americans — under the assumption of mass civil uprising by black militants — and one of the key features of the scheme was the deputization of right-wing paramilitaries to maintain order. Might the Trump team have some sort of Rex 84 Redux in mind? Spark mass protests in the Latino and immigrant rights communities and follow that up with mass arrests and incarcerations? Perhaps with the help of deputized groups like the Oath Keepers to keep the protestors in line? It’s a grim thought, but one of the key lessons we’re learning over and over in the Trump era is the grim plausibility of the previously unthinkable.
And that’s perhaps the most chilling aspect of this look back at the history of executive powers and national emergencies: Trump will clearly enjoy drawing upon a wide array of the emergency powers granted to him by America’s growing legacy of executive emergency powers. But of all the examples of previous national emergency powers, the grimmest, Rex 84, is clearly the most ‘Trumpian’ in nature. And while US isn’t at the point yet where mass uprisings could be used to impose a Rex 84-inspired mass crackdown, a great way to get to that point is the declaration of a blatantly fake national emergency about a blatantly fake border crisis.
Nazi trolls are going to troll. It’s one of the unavoidable parts of the New Normal of the internet age. But as Adam Serwer reminds us in a new piece in The Atlantic discussing the abundant overt trolling in the manifesto of neo-Nazi killer Brenton Tarrant, the Nazis were always trolls going back to the beginning of the movement in the early 1920’s. Trolling was a crucial political weapon. This is in part because trolling gave their violent exterminationist rhetoric an air of plausible deniability. But it was also a way of expressing a contempt for the prevailing liberal order. As Serwer puts it, “the insincerity itself was a moral act, an expression of contempt for the weak.” In other words, trolling is a means towards the ends of overturning the prevailing moral order.
It’s worth noting how this relates to the slogan ‘Me ne frego’ (“I don’t care”) used by Italian fascists that was echoed by Melania Trump’s disturbing “I don’t really care, do you?” jacket that she wore in public while traveling to a visit to the immigrant child detention centers. While the slogan may have started off as an embrace of a willingness to die in battle, it went on to symbolize a kind of moral autocracy and the rejection of the society’s concepts of morality. It was literally a slogan stating ‘I don’t care about your concepts of right and wrong’ as the fascists took over Italy. And that was the slogan in large letters on Melania’s jacket as she took a high-profile trip to the visit the centers for large numbers of undocumented immigrant children who were separated from their parents and held in prison-like conditions. So it was a chillingly apt use of a slogan that has come to symbolize a rejection of liberal morality.
As Serwer notes, part of the appeal of trolling for the original Nazis is that liberal society, which is generally predicated on the pretense of an open debate of ideas, is simply ill-equipped to deal with trolls. How does one engage in a debate or simply assess someone who shrouds their extremist beliefs with an “I’m just joking about these calls for mass murder (Or am I?)” wink and nod patina. It was a challenge societies utterly failed to address during the rise of the fascists and Nazis in the 1920’s and 30’s and they are doing it again today:
“Although the manifesto itself was written in the distinctive vernacular of the far-right internet, there is nothing new about white supremacists trolling. The Nazis were dedicated trolls who weaponized their insincerity to take advantage of liberal societies ill-equipped to confront them. This was not done just for political advantage—rather, the insincerity itself was a moral act, an expression of contempt for the weak.”
Yep, the insincere trolling of the Nazis itself was a moral act. The Nazi morality of contempt for the weak, where ideals like democracy, equality and rights for women and minorities are what is seen as weak. And a Nazi moral paradigm where cruelty is a virtue:
But the trolling is also highly strategic, in part because it allows observers to avoid truly seeing what was staring them in the face: that the Nazis really are intent on mass extermination. They aren’t joking. And yet, repeatedly in the 1920’s and 30’s, observers arrived at the conclusion that the Nazis were just engaged in hyperbolic rhetoric. Their words weren’t to be taken seriously:
Flash forward to today, and we have a growing far right presence on the internet that had turned trolling into a giant game: say something so extreme it gets you banned or censored, and then wave the flag of ‘free speech!’ The fact that the Nazis, when they take power, would almost immediately ban free speech is just part of the trolling:
It’s worth recalling that when Matthew Hale, the neo-Nazi leader of the white supremacist World Church of the Creator, was caught on tape asking one of his followers to murder Judge Lefkow, Hale’s attorney, Glenn Greenwald, argued that Hale’s barely coded request to kill Lefkow was simply a “misinterpretation” and he wasn’t actually calling for the judge’s murder. Instead, it was protected political speech. While that wasn’t exactly trolling that Hale was engaged in on that tape, it’s another example of a Nazi attempting to use barely-coded language to provoke violence under the banner of ‘free speech!’
So what’s society to do? That sadly remains an open question but Serwer does end his piece with some very good advice: when Nazis are trolling you there is a one very simple and accurate way to interpret their trolling: the Nazis are simply telling you “we are going to kill you.” That’s their underlying message:
And sure, it’s deeply unsettling to interpret the avalanche of online neo-Nazi/‘Alt Right’ trolling as effectively death threats against you and everyone you know (at least everyone you know who isn’t a Nazi). But that’s what they are. Death threats that are intended to be seen by other Nazis are real death threats and rallying cries and intended to be seen by everyone else as just a sick joke. And that’s a pretty good way to characterize Nazi-like movements: very sick, serious, and deadly jokes that are laughed off at society’s peril.
Here’s a particularly grim set of articles in light of the Trump administration’s ongoing strategy of using cruelty as a tool for discouraging refugees and asylum seekers from coming to the United States:
The leadership of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is once again in a state of flux and the end result of that flux appears to be the consolidation of influence by Stephen Miller, the far right protege of Steve Bannon and old friends with Richard Spencer, over DHS’s immigration policy.
Note that it was reported earlier this year that Miller would tell White House staffers that “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil.” That’s the current de facto shadow-director of DHS following the resignation of DHS Security Kirstjen Nielsen yesterday. Trump has been agitating towards a return to his family separation policies (separating kids from parents when dealing with the refugee and asylum seekers at the US southern border) and Nielsen was reportedly resisting this, which presumably played a big role in her resignation. Nielsen wasn’t channeling the spirit of Miller enough so someone new is required.
Word is that Miller is also pushing for a number of other senior DHS replacements. Specifically, Miller wants to see Trump dismiss the director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, Lee Cissna, and the department’s general counsel, John Mitnick. So DHS could be in for not just a new director soon but also a new general counsel. And who knows who else. And all of the people chosen will presumably be willing to implement Stephen Miller’s vision of a DHS that will be cruel to refugees and asylum seekers as Miller deems necessary to dissuade them from even trying to come to America. What could possibly go wrong?:
“Miller’s heightened influence within the West Wing has been aided by the President, who recently told aides in an Oval Office meeting that Miller was in charge of all immigration and border related issues in the White House, according to a person familiar with the meeting.”
Keep in mind that immigration-related issues are probably going to be the centerpiece of Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. Fear-mongering about immigrants and asylum seekers is going to be a core Trump message. So when Trump puts Miller in charge of all immigration and border relates issues in the White House he’s effectively making Miller one of the most powerful figures in the administration because so much of what the administration is going to be doing between now and the election is going to be related to showcasing for immigration-related fear-mongering but also showcasing the Trump administration’s willingness to employ cruelty as a policy tool. In other words, Stephen Miller’s chilling id is set to become manifest in Trump’s immigration policy as a strategy of increasing Trump’s political appeal. But before Miller’s id can fully manifest as DHS policy he’s going to have to clean house at the DHS leadership level. Which is about to happen:
So a Miller-directed leadership purge is taking place at DHS in anticipation of an election year immigration policy that’s going to be so inhumane that the current leadership couldn’t be trusted to go through with it. It’s more than a little ominous. Especially because, as the following article from June of 2018, shortly after Trump ended his family separation policy for families making asylum claims, Miller doesn’t just advocate for inhumane policies like family separations as a means of discouraging asylum seekers from even coming to the US at all. He also appears to enjoy it. As one White House official told reporters, “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border...He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS.”:
“Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border,” an outside White House adviser said. “He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS.”
Miller actually enjoyed seeing the pictures of people in turmoil. That’s how one White House adviser portrayed him last year. And given that he referred to family separation policies as a “simple decision” highlights how casually he views these decisions. The fact that he’s old friends with Richard Spencer doesn’t help with the “Waffen-SS” description:
Of course an old friend of Richard Spencer would find family separation policies to be a “simple decision.” Lacking empathy simplifies a lot of decisions. And it’s that joyful Waffen-SS mindset that is increasingly looking like the centerpiece for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign because Trump has been pushing for a new family separation policy for a while now:
“A senior administration official said it seems Trump is convinced that family separation has been the most effective policy at deterring large numbers of asylum-seekers.”
Yep, Trump is convinced that family separations are a deterrent to stop asylum-seekers. And that’s why he wants to reinstitute the family separation policies. But then Nielsen informed him that federal courts orders prohibited it, so he had to replace her:
But Trump isn’t just planning on family separations to discourage asylum-seekers from coming to the US. He appears to have also decided to make public statements directed at asylum seekers that would discourage them from coming and waging a rhetorical campaign that portrays asylum-seekers as dangerous liars who aren’t actually facing dangers in their home countries. For example, during a recent speech on Saturday to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Trump declared his suspicions that asylum seekers are not facing real dangers and are, themselves, built like dangerous mixed martial arts fighters and would assault Americans. And then the next day Trump announced that the US is “full” and that immigrants or asylum seekers shouldn’t bother coming during a trip to a Border Patrol station:
“Speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, Trump said asylum-seekers are “some of the roughest people you’ve ever seen, people that look like they should be fighting for the UFC,” referring to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a company that promotes mixed martial arts matches.”
Yep, days before Trump fires Nielsen for her unwillingness to reimplement a new family separation policy, Trump smears asylum seekers as fakers who aren’t really facing real dangers are are, themselves, actually dangerous fighters who will “do the accosting” if allowed into the US:
And then the next day Trump declares that the US is “full” and asylum-seekers shouldn’t bother coming:
As we can see, it’s pretty clear that Trump is convinced that tripling-down on fear and hatred towards Latin Americans and a whipped up border crises is his best shot at reelection in 2020. And that campaign strategy isn’t just putting Stephen Miller in the Trump 2020 campaign driving seat. Miller is now effectively one of the most powerful people in the US national security establishment as a result of his elevation as the person in charge of Trump’s immigration policy at DHS. The joyfully sadistic Waffen-SS guy is in charge of US immigration and asylum policy and it’s happening as a core element of a political strategy that’s supposed to appeal the American electorate next year.
So if you think the situation at the US southern border is grim now, just wait. Stephen Miller has some
sadistic 2020 campaign stuntsnew policies he’s working on.Here’s another story to keep in mind whenever you hear about the US government systematically downplaying the threat posed by far right domestic militants:
A militia group, United Constitutional Patriots, has been detaining migrants at the US-Mexico border in New Mexico and posting videos of their exploits on Facebook. One video shows the armed men in masks and fatigues stopping around 300 migrants at gunpoint, ordering them to ground, and then waiting for US Border Patrol to show up to hand them over. In at least two videos, one of the men in fatigues identifies himself as Border Patrol when stopping the migrants. These videos raise obvious question about whether or not Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) is actively working with the group and tolerating their vigilante actions. CPB acknowledges that they are in contact with the group but deny that the agency condones armed arrests of migrants.
So there is definitely a problem with armed militia’s operating as border vigilantes on the US-Mexico border. The open question at this point is the extent to which the militia vigilantes have the backing of US Border Patrol:
“They show people often in full military fatigues, with handguns strapped to their sides, wearing gloves and black face masks. Armed men order migrants to stop, force them to sit on the ground and then apparently call Border Patrol to pick them up. At least two videos posted on the group’s Facebook page depict a man in fatigues verbally identifying himself as “Border Patrol” as he stops a group of migrants.”
So there’s an armed militia running around pretending to be “Border Patrol” and holding migrants until the actual border patrol agents show up. It’s more than a little disturbing. And while CPB denies endorsing the group’s actions, the agency does acknowledge having contact with the group:
Keep in mind that if the way this group operates is to hold migrants at gunpoint until CPB arrives it seems impossible that CPB wouldn’t be aware this was happening and being done in a way that casts the militia as CPB helper. So it’s going to be interesting to see what turns up in the investigation into this. The FBI has reportedly arrested the leader of the group, Larry Hopkins, are charges of being a felon in possession of a gun.
As the following article describes, it turns out the FBI had already investigated the United Constitutional Patriots over “militia extremist activity” in 2017. And according to that investigation, witnesses told the FBI that the the leader of the group, Larry Hopkins, bragged about training volunteers to kill Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros:
“In court papers, the FBI said witnesses in 2017 accused Hopkins of saying the UCP was training to assassinate Obama; Clinton, who was the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016; and George Soros, a financier who supports liberal causes. The accusations were made during an investigation into “militia extremist activity,” the agency said.”
So witnesses told the FBI in 2017 that United Constitutional Patriots’ leader was bragging about training people to carry out political assassinations and this is the same militia that appears to have some sort of quiet working relationship with US Border Patrol.
And in other news...
The horrors of Trump’s immigrant child detentions back in the news following recent reports of stunning conditions at a Clint, Texas, Border Patrol facility where 250 children were kept for weeks without regular access to beds, showers, toothbrushes, and soap. The Trump administration had a predictable explanation: it was the Democrats’ fault. Specifically, it was the fault of Democrats in congress because that they hadn’t yet given the Trump administration all of the money the administration had requested for its various immigration proposals. That’s allegedly why the children couldn’t get beds, showers, toothbrushes or soap...not enough money. This is following an announcement by the Trump administration earlier this month that it was canceling educational and recreational programs and legal aid in shelters because of budget shortfalls and requested $2.9 billion to expand these detention facilities.
On a positive note, all but 30 of the children were removed from the Clint, Texas, facility after this was reported on, although 100 of those kids were just sent back to the facility. Hopefully they get soap and blankets this time.
The Democratic-controlled House just voted on a $4.5 billion emergency funding package so we’ll see if that results in an improvement in the conditions for these kids. But as we’ll see in the following pair of articles, there’s still plenty of reason to be concerned that conditions won’t improve even with that emergency funding. Why? Well, for starters, the Trump administration is already threatening to veto that emergency funding bill in favor of a version created by the Republican controlled Senate that has fewer controls on how the money is spent. And as the following article points out, one of the key concerns of the Democrats who voted in support of this emergency funding is that it won’t actually be used for improving the conditions of the undocumented immigrants held in detention and instead will simply be used to expand the detention system so even more people end up held in inhumane conditions. And as we’re going to see in the second article, that’s a real concern because the Trump administration lawyers have already argued before the courts withholding basic amenities, like soap and toothbrushes, from detained migrants does not violate the government’s responsibility to provide “safe and sanitary” conditions to detained children. Yep, the Trump admin is simultaneously arguing that the inhumane conditions of the children being held in detention is the fault of the democrats for not funding the Trump administration’s full immigration agenda at the same time the administration lawyers are arguing that there’s no real obligation to provide the children basic amenities like soap and toothbrushes:
“Last week, a group of lawyers visited a remote Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas, that was designed for the temporary detention of about 100 adult migrants. What they found were some 250 children in appalling conditions. Several were sick and in quarantine; others had lice. Very young children had been left in the care of slightly older children. Although the government is bound by a legal agreement and other regulations to provide “safe and sanitary” conditions for underage migrants and to transfer them out of Border Patrol custody within 72 hours, children told lawyers they had been in the facility for weeks without regular access to beds, showers, toothbrushes, and soap.”
Weeks without regular access to beds, showers, toothbrushes, and soap and leaving very young children in the care of slightly older children. That’s what was discovered at just one of the federal facilities where undocumented immigrant children are being held. But this is all the fault of the Democrats for not providing enough funding according to the Trump administration. It’s the kind of explanation that’s defies logic given the low costs of things like toothpaste and soap, which only fuels concerns that the Trump administration is basically holding these kids hostage in these conditions in order to force Congress to allocate the full range of funds for Trump’s immigration-related agenda. An agenda that would involved a dramatic expansion of the numbers of these detention facilitates if the administration can get all of the funds it desires. The fact that the Trump administration is threatening to veto the House’s emergency funding bill in favor of a Senate version that has fewer restrictions on how the funding is spent adds to the suspicions that we’re seeing a child abuse hostage crisis designed to extract money from congress in order to create even more poorly-run detention facilities:
And note how some of the facilities housing immigrants while they await their hearings are privately run for-profit facilities, the largest of which has former White House chief of staff John Kelly sitting on its board, highlighting how potentially profitable a dramatic expansion in detention facilities could be and how the profit-motive is going to play into the decisions to leave immigrants in dangerous conditions:
Next, here’s an article that points out the fact that the Trump administration lawyers are already arguing that withholding basic services like soap and toothbrushes does not violate the government’s responsibility to provide “safe and sanitary” conditions to detained children. Yep, they seriously just argued this as part of an appeal of a ruling that found that such amenities are indeed required:
“These interviews followed a viral video of a Justice Department attorney arguing before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that withholding basic amenities, like soap and toothbrushes, from detained migrants does not violate the government’s responsibility to provide “safe and sanitary” conditions to detained children, something established in what’s known as the Flores settlement.”
What was discovered at that facility in Clint, Texas, was legally acceptable. That’s what Trump’s Justice Departent lawyers just argued in their appeal of a ruling that found the opposite was the case. That’s how dedicated the Trump administration is to defending the treatment of these children:
So as we can see, the scandal here isn’t simply the discovery of these children being kept in a government facilitate without basics like soap and blankets. The larger scandal is that the Trump administration is arguing that this isn’t a scandal at the same time it’s using these kids as bargaining chips in order to get more funds from Congress to expand this system. And even that scandal is dwarfed by the much larger scandal that this entire scandal appears to all be going according to plan.
Here’s a rather disturbing story about the Trump administration’s fight with federal immigration judges: The Trump administration is currently working on stripping the federal immigration judges of their rights to unionize. Not surprisingly, this union, National Association of Immigration Judge, has been highly critical of a number of the Trump administration’s decisions regarding immigration policy. The Trump administration is arguing that the judges shouldn’t be allowed to unionized because they serve management positions. As the following article notes, this isn’t the first time a president has tried to make the same argument. Bill Clinton’s justice department tried something similar in 2000, arguing that immigration judges make policy through the issuance of decisions, but the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) rejected the argument.
Interestingly, as the following article also notes, it sounds like the Trump administration does have other avenues for eliminating this union that would be far more likely to succeed. Specifically, there’s a federal statute allows the president to an executive order stripping employees of collective bargaining rights if they work in intelligence or national security. It’s unclear why the Trump administration isn’t taking that approach and is instead basically trying to reattempt the same argument that was rejected in 2000.
Now here’s the disturbing part of this story: It was just reported that the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) sent an email out to all immigration court employees that included a link to a blog post on VDare.com, a prominent white nationalist site. That VDare.com blog post specifically talks about the move to decertify the immigration judges union and includes pictures of judges with the term “kritarch” preceding their names. “Kritarch” was a term for the judges that ruled in ancient Israel during a time when Israel was ruled by a system of judges under a kritarchy. So the DOJ sent an email out to all of the immigration court employees that linked to a VDare.com blog posting about the fight over the immigration judge union that characterized the judges as ancient Israeli judge rulers. The DOJ is explaining that these daily emails sent out to immigration court employees are generated by a contractor and not reviews by the DOJ itself. We are not given the identity of this contractor.
So, true to form, the Trump administration has managed to incorporate far right anti-Semitic memes in its fight to get more compliant immigration judges. Ok, first, here’s an article describing the recently announced push to eliminate the immigration judges union:
“The Justice Department filed its petition with the Federal Labor Relations Authority on Friday in an attempt to decertify the National Association of Immigration Judges. The union—originally certified in 1979—represents about 400 judges around the country. The administration is arguing they serve in management positions and are therefore not eligible to unionize.”
The Trump administration clearly hates unions in general, so on one level the only thing surprising about this move is that it took this long for them to attempt it. But this is also happening in the context of a push to enforce quotas on these judges to speed up cases instead of hiring more judges:
It also appears that the Trump administration could potentially decertify the union unilaterally with an executive order:
So it would be interesting to know why they aren’t taking that approach. Is this more about creating a big public fight with the judges for the purpose of making it look like judges are the obstacle to Trump not accomplishing all of his anti-immigration pledges to voters? Who knows, but Trump’s white nationalist base is clearly quite interested in this fight as evidenced by the VDare.com blog post covering the story and calling the judges “Kritarchs”. And the Department of Justice just happened to ‘accidentally’ let all those judges know that the white nationalists know who they are:
“After publication of this article, EOIR Assistant Press Secretary Kathryn Mattingly told BuzzFeed News “the daily EOIR morning news briefings are compiled by a contractor and the blog post should not have been included. The Department of Justice condemns Anti-Semitism in the strongest terms.””
It was just a complete “oops!” that just coincidentally happened about two weeks after the Trump administration announced that it was pushing to decertify the union. It wasn’t intended to be a threat to those judges. That’s the official explanation. Keep in mind that VDare.com has been generating immigration-related posts and stories for years and these emails sent out by this unnamed third-party contractor are sent out to immigration court employees every single weekday. So unless this contractor was recently hired by the DOJ and very inexperienced, it’s hard to believe that they didn’t already know that VDare.com’s content shouldn’t be included in these emails.
And keep in mind that, as a result of this story, there are going to be white nationalists from all over now reading that VDare.com blog post that describes these judges as “kritarchs”, hence the calls by the union chief for “appropriate safety and security measures for all judges given the tone and tenor of this posting.” This is the Trump administration we’re talking about, after all. An administration with a proven track record of inciting the far right into taking violent action against its perceived enemies, especially if those perceived enemies are characterized as ‘the Jews!’ which is exactly what that blog posting did. In other words, Trump’s DOJ just basically issued a general threat against US immigration judges with this email. A deniable threat in the form of an ‘oops!’ accident done by a contractor. It’s the kind of labor relations approach we should probably expect at this point, which is what makes this an extra disturbing story.
Here’s a few articles laying out some of the key details on the recent arrest of Steve Bannon over campaign finance fraud charges. The gist of it appears to be ithat Bannon was deeply involved in what federal prosecutors describe as a cynical scheme to capitalize Trump supporters’ enthusiasm for a US-Mexico border wall to enrich hmself and his fellow schemers. The alleged scam revolved around the group “We Build the Wall” which had the aim of privately crowdfunding a wall-building project using GoFundMe.
So what was illegal and cynical about the project? Well, before Bannon joined the scheme it was run by Brian Kolfage, an Air Force veteran triple amputee. Kolfage’s initial pitch to donor was that the project was going to raise $1 billion which would be given to the federal government for building the wall. The campaign was started just after Trump failed to convince Congress to pay for the wall and if it didn’t reach that $1 billion goal Kolfage assured donors that every last cent would be returned to the donors. But after raising the $25 million, GoFundMe made it clear that the money would either need to be transferred to an actual non-profit group or else every donation would have be to returned to the donors. It was at this point that Kolfage brought Bannon into the operation along with Bannon’s long-time associate Andrew Badolato. Within days of joining the group, Bannon and Badolato had taken significant control over the operation and its fund-raising plans. The fundamental purpose of the group also suddenly changed from a GoFundMe campaign that was going to give the money to the federal government to build the wall instead into a private initiative to build the wall on its own. As a result, Kolfage and Bannon essentially had to convince the people who made the $25 million in donations to the GoFundMe account into giving their permission to transfer that money to a non-profit group that was going to build its own wall instead of returning it like Kolfage initially pledged to do if they didn’t raise their $1 billion goal.
It sounds like the messaging campaign Bannon developed in order to convince donors to agree to this transfer was to be very explicit that all of the money they donate would be spent on building parts of the wall. And then, of course, Bannon and Kolfage self-enriched, hence the charges. Kolfage took more than $350,000 for “personal use” that included plastic surgery. Bannon took over $1 million through an unnamed non-profit. This non-profit was, in turn, involved with secretly passing the $350,000 to Kolfage. The arrange was that Kolfage initially took $100,000 for personal use. The other $250,000 was secretly paid to Kolfage from Bannon’s non-profit in monthly $20,000 payments to Kolfage’s wife’s company for “media” services. So Bannon and Kolfage both took money they told donors they wouldn’t take and tried to obscure it.
It’s also worth noting some of the other figures involved in the project. It’s like a Who’s Who of Republican con artists. Kris Kobach, the former Kansas Secretary of State who has built his political career on fearmongering about undocumented immigrants, is the group’s general counsel and was apparently using its mailing list extensively for his Senate bid this year. The group’s advisory board includes figures like Erik Prince, Tom Tancredo, former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, and former Major League Baseball Pitcher Curt Schilling. So it’s basically a group of far right grifter political celebrities that fleeced a bunch of conservative donors under the guise of building Trump’s wall. Pretty typical really. And everything probably would have gone as planned but they apparently got too grifter‑y by explicitly promising not to do exactly that:
“Kolfage is accused of taking more than $350,000 in money raised for the project “for his personal use,” while Bannon allegedly siphoned more than $1 million out of the fundraising effort through an unnamed non-profit.”
They promised not to take any money at all...not counting the $350,000 Kolfage took for things like a boat, a luxury SUV, golf car, jewelry, and cosmetic surgery. And not counting the $1 million Steve Bannon took, some of what which funneled to Kolfage via payments for “media” services to Kolfage’s wife’s company:
And it was Bannon who was behind this messaging campaign to donors. A message that he himself delivered to the public during press appearances. And then when they got wind in October that prosecutors were investigating their scam they started scrubbing the group’s website of these pledges about not taking payments. It’s quite an implicit admission of guilt:
Now here’s an article describing both the level of the deception, including the small donors who wrote to Kolfage and expressed how they can’t afford to make a donation and wouldn’t have done so were it not for the promises made to not skim the money, as well as the original $1 billion goal. A $1 billion goal that initially included a provision that if it’s not met all of the money would be returned. Having only raises 2.5 percent of that goal ($25 million out of $1 billion) they still managed to skim over $1 million which raises the question of how much they would have taken had they actually reached their $1 billion goal:
“But once in office, Trump found that neither Mexico nor Congress would agree to foot the bill for his pet project. And in the winter of 2018, a stalemate over the president’s demands for billions of dollars in federal funding for border wall construction led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.”
That’s the context of “We Build the Wall”: it popped up just after Trump’s attempts to cajole either Mexico or Congress to pay it the wall failed. Suddenly Brian Kolfage appears with a campaign to raise $1 billion that would be given entirely to the government to build the wall with the pledge that it will all be returned if that goal isn’t met. But after it became abundantly clear they weren’t going to meet that goal We Build the Wall suddenly had a new mission. Instead of raising $1 billion and giving it to the federal government the group was going to take the $25 million they raised and build their own wall. But because they changed the nature of the group they had to get all of the donors to “opt-in” to the new project. That’s where Steve Bannon comes in, helping Kolfage craft a communicate a message about how none of the money was going to be used to self-enrich. And then they self-enriched:
Just imagine how much larger this scam would have been if they had actually raise the $1 billion.
Ok, finally, here’s an article highlighting how the Trump family itself was openly supporting this project. Don’t forget that this was a project that was initially intended to help Trump deal with his political failure to secure funding for the wall. The $1 billion was intended to be given to the federal government to allow Trump to build his signature political project, after all, so it’s not hard to imagine the Trump team was closely watching their progress. But we don’t have to imagine that the Trump team was closely watching this project. The fact that Donald Trump Jr. spoke at a We Build the Wall fundraising event is evidence enough:
“Trump also reportedly described the project as a “blessing” in a conversation with Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state.”
A blessing. That’s how President Trump himself referred to the project. And note the month of Don Jr.‘s We Build the Wall speech: July of 2019, which was when Kolfage still had the $1 billion fundraising goal and plans of giving it to the federal government so Trump could build his wall. So his speech was basically the Trump family granting its blessings to the project. And why wouldn’t they bless it? It was literally a project intended to protect Trump from the political failure of not building his wall. That’s part of what makes this scandal so awkward for Trump: it serves as a major reminder of Trump’s inability to follow through on what was his central campaign pledge. As well as an awkward reminder that the GOP can’t stop grifting its own followers.
Here’s a pair of articles about the We Build the Wall group that’s at the center of Steve Bannon’s recent arrest over charges of defrauding donors. The articles also hint at one of the darker themes we should probably expect from Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign:
As we should expect by now, it turns out We Build the Wall has been falling back on what is now the default right-wing accusation against a political opponent. That would be accusing the your opponent of being a secret supporter of pedophilia and child sex trafficking, the apparent theme of the Trump 2020 reelection campaign thanks to the Republican Party’s open embrace of the QAnon movement. That’s the fundamental accusation the group leveled against Father Snipes, a Catholic priest activist who was working with the National Butterfly Center in Hidalgo County, Texas in opposing the building of a 3 mile wall last year right next to the center. Snipes was also known for his vocal defense of a historic chapel threatened by Trump’s border wall plans.
The accusations against Snipes were leveled by We Build the Wall founder Brian Kolfage during an interview with The Rundown News, an online right-wing ‘investigative journalism’ outfit. The interview took place after a local reporter traveled with Snipes and Butterfly Center director Marianna Treviño-Wright to film a We Build the Wall land clearing operation. During the filming, Treviño-Wright referred to the group as a bunch of “frauds” and that appears to be the comment that Kolfage off, which, of course, is rather telling given the federal fraud charges facing Kolfage and Steve Bannon. Kolfage charged that “[Snipes] is promoting human trafficking and abuse of women and children,” in reference to Snipes’s criticisms of border fences. “Instead of driving around in expensive boats with media he should be helping … to combat the rampant pedophilia in the church.”
While the charge of driving around in expensive boats is particularly amusing given that Kolfage’s fraudulent use of the funds raised by the project apparently includes buying a boat, it’s the accusation that those who oppose border walls are secretly promoting human trafficking and abuse of women and children that has a political resonance at this moment. Ever since the Trump campaign’s victory in 2016 that was driven, in part, by “#PizzaGate”-style accusations of widespread elite (Democratic) pedophilia, the Republican Party’s base has become more and more obsessed with the QAnon movement and at this point a large chunk of the Republican voter base appears to have fully embraced the idea that Democrats are secretly engaged in mass Satanic child abuse and sacrifice. That’s why this story of We Build the Wall’s seemingly reflexive reliance on pedophilia accusations is relevant beyond the particulars of this story. The modern day Republican Party under Trump is now fully engaged in smearing their political opponents with being Satanic child abusers, so when We Build the Wall charges opponents of border walls with being supporters of child sex trafficking that’s the kind of messaging we should absolutely expect from the Trump campaign and its surrogates in 2020:
“Because the government plans to build its wall in a different location, and because Congress has prohibited construction on the butterfly refuge, it seems likely the new private wall will stand isolated—what Treviño-Wright called, in last week’s video, a 3‑mile “monument to stupidity.” Customs and Border Protection (CBP) did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But on Wednesday, El Paso’s Border Patrol Sector chief lauded the private wall in New Mexico, calling it “very effective.” The new acting secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, also said he “welcomed” private help.”
A 3‑mile isolated “monument to stupidity,” as Treviño-Wright called it. That’s what the group managed to build. A wall that can be easily walked around. And if anyone opposed their isolated 3‑mile stretch they are clearly supporters of child sex trafficking according to Kolfage. Keep in mind that Steve Bannon was already part of this organization and involved in shaping the group’s messaging at this point which raises the question of whether or not Bannon was the one pushing this particular smear. He did embrace #PizzaGate, after all:
And note how charges of working for Mexican cartels were also Kolfage’s response to the local opposition to another stretch of wall his group built in Sunland Park, New Mexico:
And now here’s an article from a few days ago about the response by the National Butterfly Center to the arrest of Bannon and investigation of the group. Not surprisingly the Center was elated. But there’s another reason for their elation beyond just seeing the vicious smear-merchants who attacked them last year falling into legal trouble: following the accusations of supporter child sex trafficking, The Butterfly Center sued We Build the Wall for defamation. The suit is ongoing, and it’s hard to imagine this investigation isn’t going to help with that lawsuit. Interestingly, while Steven Bannon isn’t named in the original defamation suit, they’re reportedly considering adding him now. And that’s why this is going to be a story worth keeping an eye on because after years now of rampant accusations of pedophilia by Trump and his associates there’s now a defamation suit over it. A defamation suit that potentially got a big boost from Bannon’s arrest:
“The privately-funded border wall is located near the Butterfly Center’s riverfront headquarters. Treviño Wright and the butterfly center, which also is a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit, contend that they have been at the center of a smear campaign by We Build the Wall organizers who have labeled them as involved in “human trafficking” and “drug smuggling” through various social media posts.”
Are there any consequences ever to increasingly widespread accusations right-wing of child sex trafficking? We’ll find out, hopefully in the form of Steve Bannon getting added to the lawsuit and losing:
And notice the title of a July 2019 Sunland Park event that both Kolfage Bannon attended: “Symposium at the Wall: Cartels, Trafficking, and Asylum.” Keep in mind that this was the event Donald Trump Jr. spoke at where he enthusiastically endorsed the project. You can see his part of the event here (at about 2 hours 48 minutes). Note that the Sunland Park government blocked construction of the wall there in May of 2019 so the symposium with its cartel and trafficking theme is clearly a response to that local opposition. It’s an indication of how they were planning on charging opponents of the wall as cartel-sympathizing human trafficker supporters early on in this project and that Steve Bannon was involved with this messaging theme from the beginning:
Can we get some sort of resolution on this defamation case before the election? If so, and if We Build the Wall loses the suit, it’s going to be very interesting to see if that impacts what is otherwise bound to be a maelstrom of child sex trafficking charges leveled against Democrats. And if the defamation suit isn’t resolved until after the election it’s going to be interesting to see how many more defamation suits there are after this election and the expected defamation maelstrom.
Here’s a set of articles highlighting what appears to be a rapidly growing trend in the politics of Florida’s Latino community and the media targeting that audience. A rapidly growing trend of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that merges the traditional anti-Communist sentiments of Florida’s Cuban community with the ‘QAnon’ worldview of global Satanic elites. As a result, a ‘Communism is Judaism’ meme has now taken hold:
First, here’s an article about how Miami’s right-wing media outlets are now openly promoting Jewish conspiracy theories, with George Soros often being portrayed as the center of it all. Stuff about Jews that never would have been said on the public airwaves 20 years ago are apparently routinely showing up these days and seen as acceptable with minimal push-back. So how did this come about? Well, as we’re going to see in the following articles, it appears that the far right and GOP has learned that the deep anti-Communist sympathies prevalent in Florida’s Hispanic communities — in particular the Cuban community — and the traditional anti-Semitism of many Catholic-dominated Latin American countries are highly compatible with traditional far right anti-Semitic conspiracy worldviews that put Jews at the center of a global communist conspiracy. In other words, the far right found out its ‘greatest hits’ are popular with Florida’s Hispanics:
“This shift toward insinuating Jews-as-communists arises from an intensive and successful branding of Democrats as socialists that has come to dominate Republican Hispanic political circles and messaging in South Florida. Conservative Hispanics drove a shift towards former President Donald Trump and Republicans in Miami-Dade in the 2020 election, helping him win Florida and electing right-wing Cubans to national and state office.”
Yes, the growing Jews-as-communist insinuation in South Florida’s Hispanic media isn’t just horrible trend. It’s also the direct consequence of a deliberate right-wing campaign to rebrand the Democratic Party as socialist...and then equate socialism with communism. Yes, it’s a mind-numbingly stupid rebranding campaign. But there’s no denying it’s been successful:
And note how NO local politicians denounced the “Communism is Judaism” Holocaust Remembrance Day graffiti. That’s a sign of how deeply these sentiments are held by the local community. It’s like Trump’s psychological capture of the GOP: The other politicians know better than to speak up if they want to keep their jobs:
And note the profoundly cynical and sinister nature of this propaganda campaign: polls have shown foreign-born Hispanic immigrants hold the highest levels of antisemitism of all US demographic groups, with native-born Hispanics holding the next-highest level. So we have a propaganda campaign promoting a conspiracy theory worldview deeply root white supremacist mythologies trying to turn Latin American immigrants against Jews. And it’s apparently working, thanks in part to the natural desire of immigrants to fit in with their new community. It’s diabolical:
And now here’s a Politico article from back in September describing...wait for it...an unprecedented level of far right conspiracy theories across the South Florida Spanish language media. Surprise! According to observers, while anti-Semitism isn’t new to Florida’s conservative Hispanic communities they’ve never seen it remotely this bad before:
““The onslaught has had an effect,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a pollster and director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University.”
The onslaught has had an effect. Yeah, propaganda onslaughts tend to do that. It’s why we live in a sea of propaganda. It works:
And, again, this preying on the psychology of new immigrants: it’s natural want to fit in to you new community and its politics:
And whether or not it was this QAnon campaign that persuaded South Florida’s Hispanic voters to swing their support to Trump, or just withhold their support for Biden, the fact of the matter is Donald Trump won Florida in 2020 by a larger margin than 2016 and historically light support for Biden in the South Florida Hispanic community was a big part of that victory. As as the following Guardian piece points out, it wasn’t just Biden who lost Florida. Two Democratic members of Congress lost their South Florida races too. Which means the Republican Party learned a powerful lesson this November: QAnon-style anti-Semitism is a winning political formula for the Hispanic community:
“Whatever their motivations, on Tuesday, across the state but mostly in Miami-Dade county, home to 2 million Latinos, voters turned out in droves to hand the president victory by a margin significantly larger than his 2016 success.”
Yes, we don’t know why exactly South Florida’s Hispanic community didn’t give Joe Biden the support he needed to win the state. We just know he didn’t get that support following a historic onslaught of anti-Semitic QAnon propaganda. So while we can’t say for sure what exactly caused that drop in support, we can be pretty confident that the lesson the GOP is going to take from this experience is that they should continue the onslaught.
You also have to wonder to what extent far right South American governments, like Jair Bolsonaro’s government in Brazil, are actively playing a role in this propaganda onslaught. This all sounds an awful lot like the contemporary far right content being agressively promoted across Brazil, after all.
And don’t forget that this is the age of the permanent political campaign in the US, which means we shouldn’t expect this onslaught of QAnon propaganda to only pop up during election years. This kind of targeted propagandizing is going to become a permanent feature of Florida’s Spanish-language media, if it hasn’t already. The lessons have been learned.
Now that the US appears to be entering into a post-Roe v Wade environment, with abortion set to become a state-level issue but with the net-effect likely being an increase in minority births and especially undocumented immigrant births, here’s a look at how the underlying white nationalist sentiments and the demographic anxieties bound to be turbocharged in a post-Roe America might manifest politically in relation to immigration.
First, recall how Trump ranted about “Mexican rapists” during his presidential bid opening speech and was soon decrying ‘anchor babies’. Flash forward to the end of October of 2018, when then-President announced that he was preparing an executive order that would end the long-accepted constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. This was days before Election Day for the 2018 mid-terms so it was clearly something Trump did with the political need of the moment in mind. He saw this as a political winner. Paul Ryan, then the Republican speaker of the House, dismissed the idea as something Trump didn’t have the power to do through executive order on his own. But in the Senate, Republican Lindsey Graham announced he was going to introduce legislation that would achieve the same thing.
Trump was so enamored with the politics of ending Birthright Citizenship that he raised the idea two weeks after the 2020 election. It was a red meat going-away policy but also arguably a form of messaging to his hard right supporters psychologically gearing up for the eventual Capitol Insurrection that he will deliver for them if they do what it takes to keep him in office.
So with issues related to immigration and citizenship guaranteed to energize conservative electorates even more in a post-Roe environment, how should we expect politicians to adapt? The Trump administration gave us a preview in 2019, when it sent representatives to the International Conference on Family Policy, held in Hungary where Viktor Orban’s government showcased its “procreation, not immigration” policies, a clear reference to the increasingly popular “replacement theory”. Trump officials lauded the slogan. The policies coincided with a new Hungarian constitution that protect life from the moment of conception. Joe Grogan, an assistant to the president and director of the Domestic Policy Council, said the Trump Administration was “inspired” and came “in support and solidarity,” while affirm the Administration’s opposition to abortion. And that, right there, is the kind of political narrative we should probably expect to hear US politicians openly voicing the moment Roe goes down: procreation, not immigration:
“Consider the events of last week. The Trump Administration dispatched officials to the International Conference on Family Policy. There, Trump officials lauded Hungary’s “procreation, not immigration” policies, which oppose refugees and immigration and instead subsidize traditional, nuclear Hungarian families to have more children. These policies coincided with a new Hungarian constitution, which protects fetal life from the moment of conception.”
Procreation, not immigration. A kinder, gentler way of expressing “replacement theory” sentiments. That’s the obvious future for the political movements that currently comprise the ‘pro-Life’ movement. Future and present. Yes, some ‘pro-Life’ groups will continue to remain focused on abortion. But as Hungary makes clear, once abortion is banned the next step is the ‘Procreation, not immigration’ two-step:
So given that it appears immigration and demographic anxieties are going to be turbo-charged in a post-Roe United States, here’s an article from a few weeks ago that should give us an idea of how charged these twin topics of immigration and abortion are going to get: According to a May 2017 survey of migrant asylum seeking in Mexico by Doctors Without Borders, one-third of the of the women had been sexually abused on their journey from Central America. And of the 166 sexual abuse survivors survey, 60 percent had been raped. That translates to round 20 percent of the women in this Central American migrant population being raped on their journey to the US. Which obviously results the much-feared ‘anchor babies’ Trump was railing about in 2015 when these women arrive the US. And that points to another something else we should probably expect in a post-Roe world: a hyperfixation on the threat of pregnant migrants:
“In a May 2017 report, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders surveyed patients at the clinics it supports throughout Mexico. One-third of the women surveyed had been sexually abused on their journey from Central America, and of the 166 sexual abuse survivors surveyed, 60 percent had been raped.”
It’s not like the issue of pregnant migrant women isn’t already a highly animating issue for the Republican voting base. Ending Birthright Citizenship was one of Trump’s opening pitches. So what’s going to happen with this issue when those underlying demographic anxieties are permanently amplified in a post-Roe environment and the US enters a period of hyper-focus on the relative rates of white and non-white pregnancies? ‘Procreation, not immigration’ is going to be part of it, but it’s just a slogan. How is that slogan going to actually be put into put into action. An ongoing drive to ‘build the wall’ with Mexico seems highly likely, but also highly unlikely to actually assuage those anxieties. It’s part of what makes this topic so grim to think about: pregnant minority women — in particular pregnant migrant women — are set to be become the dominant psychological trigger points for conservative Americans for the foreseeable future. The new ‘welfare queens’ to be feared and demonized.
And while the long-term implications of the conservative focus threat of pregnant migrants aren’t necessarily obvious, there is one very obvious short-term implication: Trump isn’t going to have to change his sales pitch very much for his 2024 run.