I’ve been unable to think of anything intelligent to say lately. The Czarist Occupation Government, d.b.a. “the Trump Administration,” is so profoundly evil and likewise stupid, that it is nearly impossible even to keep abreast of all the heinous acts committed in our name on a daily – even hourly – basis, let alone formulate some reaction.
“Flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon famously advised.
What we are faced with is a leader and a ruling party that are not just bad but fractally bad, as the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson once put it. It’s as if you zoom in and examine any of their acts in detail, that particular thing reveals itself to be every bit as stupid and evil as the entire big picture of their regime.
And nowhere is this more evident than the goon squads of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka the Redneck Freikorps, who have tooled themselves up with face masks and AR-15s and Kevlar vests to take down a passel of fruit pickers, dishwashers, and nail salon techs, or to loiter outside courtrooms and kidnap people who are halfway through complying with the legal immigration process.
Which would be plenty bad enough, had they not taken to roughing up and arresting the elected leaders who are attempting, outnumbered as they are, to provide the oversight and protections that our Constitution demands to be extended to all persons, “legal” or otherwise.
Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, was arrested by ICE a month ago while attempting to inspect what they call a “detention facility,” and what others might call a “black site,” that had been erected in his city without his knowledge or permission.
Brad Lander, financial comptroller of New York City and candidate for mayor, was arrested by ICE last week while escorting an immigrant from his citizenship hearing in a federal courtroom down to the street.
David Huerta, president of SEIU-West, one of the largest unions in the nation, was knocked to the ground and injured before being arrested by ICE while he was peacefully protesting one of their recent sweeps in Los Angeles.
It’s a disturbing pattern of intimidation and violence directed towards Democratic leadership, and one would expect our Democratic representative, Maria Glusenkamp-Perez, to speak out against it.
Instead, she saw fit to join the GOP in passing a House resolution expressing “gratitude” to ICE personnel for their recent actions.
Gratitude? Look, I’m not throwing around words like “Freikorps” and “goon squad” out of mere partisan distaste. Words mean things, as a famous junkie once observed. These men display no badges, wear neither uniform nor insignia, hold no warrants – at best merely bench warrants; notices-to-appear that do not in fact convey the power of arrest – and they go about with their faces covered, anonymous and unaccountable, abducting and mistreating ethnic minorities here in the land of the free and the home of the brave!
They might as well be the Klan – although the Klan at least was a volunteer force, as was Hitler’s Freikorps, to say nothing of the various “militias” that burrow like cicadas in the dark fields of our Republic. In Trump’s America, we get the benefit of knowing that our tax dollars helped pay for this goat rodeo.
But make no mistake: the true believers – Jay Gould’s Army – are already on the march.
As I write this post, law enforcement agencies in at least three states have apprehended people who took advantage of this lawless and undisciplined conduct by federal officers to commit felonies on their own initiative.
In South Carolina, Sean Michael Johnson stopped a car full of Hispanic men at gunpoint, taking the keys from the ignition and harassing them until they could summon actual police.
In North Dakota, Shane Al Randall walked an inmate out of the Williams County jail, claiming to be an ICE officer.
In North Carolina, Carl Thomas Bennett impersonated an ICE officer to sexually assault a woman, claiming she would be deported if she resisted him.
And then, of course, we have the news from Minnesota.
State legislators Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman, together with their spouses, were shot in their homes by a man impersonating a law enforcement officer – Vance Boelter, who was able to stage two home invasions on the same night because police initially mistook him for one of their own – and he had a hit list of 45 more targets.
Where are we? Are we in Afghanistan, where any grown man with a Holy Book in one hand and a semiauto rifle in the other IS the government, over as much of the country as he can see? Are we back in the Jim Crow South of night riders and slave catchers? Do we pledge allegiance to liberty and justice for all, or to liberty for some and “justice” for others?
It’s time for the good people of Clark County to take a stand and elect someone who feels not “gratitude” but contempt and a healthy dose of fear towards an American President who’s busy setting up their own secret police. We’ve all seen this movie before, and MGP seems to be the only one who doesn’t know how it ends.
