Migrations
Birds, philosophies, people
If one was seeking to froth up the MAGA-verse, a little post-production work on this graphic would make for a nice anxiety-inducing meme. It’s the planned Venezuelan invasion, they’re coming right through the Texarkana trailer park fields like a tornado! All those Trump 2028 voters’ lives at risk.
Trump is holding to the New American Order in the recent case of real tornadoes destroying swaths of Arkansas. The governor—his former Presidential Spokesperson/Cover—Sarah Huckabee Sanders, sought federal recovery aid for the state and got a bunch of nothing instead. Of all the many departures from the first administration, hers seemed among the smoothest; and she was the most successful of all midterm departees in parlaying her White House gig into something bigger. Trump encouraged her run for office and she won.
You would think she said he lost the 2020 election, or something. [I found no such record through several search queries.]
Despite a chance to show mercy upon a state that has always favored him, and to do his loyal soldier a favor, Trump is putting the principle of dismantling state support systems first. It’s a step out of character, because it will cost him the public appreciation he constantly seeks, from those who once supported him.
It’s a small indicator of a change in philosophy. The question is: Whose?
The fascistic actions taken in the first 100 days of the second Trump Administration are both with and without precedent. The invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is not new and was last employed in 1942—the main difference being the U.S. was in a declared war at the time, which remains a condition for the application of the Act. Would Justice Thomas and the other originalists on the Supreme Court be inclined to rule Trump’s invocation unconstitutional for the lack of an Act of Congress, declaring war? Not a chance.
Putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps was not the end of the Executive (or Congress) seeking extra-constitutional powers, and having them affirmed by the Judicial. The Reagan War on Drugs targeted demand by hyper-criminalized the drugs themselves, rendering all who were in proximity to them a criminal, and the Supreme Court supported the creation of “High-Intensity Drug-Trafficking Areas,” where “assembling in groups of two or more people” were grounds for legal stop and search by police.
Today’s warrantless searches and deportations without due process that are becoming common practices are ostensibly being conducted in response to an invading force. But those voters who have long-supported deportations believe undocumented laborers are driving down their pay (they are, but not by their own choice) and taking away job opportunities (again true, but not so much them), not establishing a beachhead.
This is the front line of the class war, and another instance where MAGA can perhaps be educated and flipped. Point them to the demand side.
The largest motivation for the demonized, undocumented immigrants to cross the border is to find paying work. This is a labor market, and there are buyers and sellers—just like a drug market. As with drugs, some labor is legal to buy and use and some is illegal to buy and use. Unlike the Drug War, there is no real attention being paid to demand in the War on Immigration.
Imagine U.S. drug policy being the DEA finds illegal drugs and then they ship them to El Salvador. No trial, no hearing. No one is arrested for buying or selling them, or for using them. Zero demand-side enforcement. One would imagine this policy would be very inefficient since it offers little disincentive. Importers would just oversupply and buyers would be able to almost immediately replace what had been seized and exported.
And how long would it be until someone suggests just incinerating the drugs domestically?
There is no Democrat willing to suggest targeting demand in the War on Immigration. None of them want to be on record suggesting mandatory minimum prison sentences for those who buy illegal labor. They will scoff at the idea.
Their failure to frame immigration as a social class issue where all workers regardless of legal status share common interests is going to manifest in even more horrific forms than foreign slave camps.
#BankruptElon