Parsing the Pork Reich’s Family Raid Pause
Editor’s Note: originally the material in this piece was going to be a smaller part of a “Six Things I Think” feature about the Trump administration and (largely unopposed) rise of Americanized modern fascism; a feature that I’m currently still working on, but is not ready for publication yet. As the story surrounding Trump’s threatened national ICE raids began to evolve however, the length of my analysis outgrew the confines and gravity of a news recap post. Although I often post single story examinations of current events on my Media Madness blog, this story is really more about Pork Reich fascism than it is about the propaganda model in corporate news coverage; so we’re just going to have to go with a shorter post here.
Please note, this article is part of a larger series of posts about fascism that I’ve been sharing across all of the websites I currently use to publish my work; interested readers are encouraged to follow the links provided in this paragraph to find out more about these discussions.
Our Police State Future Is Already Here
“The biggest mistake of a democratic country is to underestimate the power of a democratically elected pro-fascist leader because it is always easier to destroy a castle from within!” –
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Outrage and Warnings of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ as Trump Threatens Mass Raids Against Millions of People in the US: amid the now overwhelming piles of evidence that Trump’s Pork Reich represents a shift towards a very overt and distinctly Americanized form of fascism, I think it’s probably time to start questioning the motives of those who continue to insist using the term “fascism” is hyperbolic. When the swine emperor first announced his intentions to deport “millions” of migrants using nationwide ICE raids just before a grotesque reactionary rally to kick off his 2020 re-election campaign, some media commentators were quick to dismiss it as scaremongering and electioneering. Soon afterwards however, the Washington Post and CNN obtained testimony from law enforcement officials that indicated the raids were definitely real, and clearly motivated by the political needs of the Trump administration – sending (mostly Democrat) cities into panic, activists to the mattresses and migrant families into hiding. Then after both Trump himself and his acting ICE director defended the proposed national raids specifically targeting families, Downmarket Mussolini abruptly announced on Twitter that he was delaying them for two weeks to allow Congress to find a solution; presumably to a border crisis that is primarily a dystopian self-fulfilling prophecy cooked up by Trump’s objectively white nationalist immigration advisor, Stephen Miller.
So what exactly is going on here; was the corporate media right for once, or are the revanchists running amok? Looking at the available evidence, I’m personally inclined to believe it’s a little from column A and a whole lot more from column B.
There is no question that Herr Donald was throwing red meat to his racist, reactionary base ahead of his campaign announcement and callous media observers are technically correct when they say “there’s no way Trump could deport *millions* of people on such short notice.” Furthermore, there is certainly a small amount of political utility in using threats of threats of violent, fascist raids on migrants to monkey-wrench concessions out of the Democrats towards your revanchist and purposely cruel immigration policies; while this is unlikely to actually work, Trump can at least whip up his base again later by blaming his opponents for whatever abuses he eventually orders ICE, CBP and the DHS to carry out. It probably also at least bears mentioning that the swine emperor’s political maneuverings surrounding this threatened ICE “Family Op” raid have done much to drive the very recent public rape accusations against president Trump out of the front page headlines; although it’s also probably worth grimly asking why he’d bother in light of how little anyone, including Trump, seems to care about the staggering amount of evidence we already have that the Klepto Kaiser is almost certainly a rapist.
Unfortunately, what this sort of surface level political analysis lacks is an implicit understanding of precisely what and who we’re dealing with here – namely, fascism; from the absolute top of the Trump administration all the way down the Gestapo pigs who enforce Stephen Miller’s immigration policies. Many liberal observers are fond of parroting the (absolutely correct) line “the cruelty is the point” and indeed, this “cruelty disparity” continues to serve as their primary defense for Obama’s objectively fascist immigration policies; tragically however, far too few of these same observers seem to factor this truth into their larger analysis of the Trump administration’s behavior.
When Trump announces horrifying mass ICE raids targeting families to deport “millions” of people, only to “delay” them, a mere day before they were scheduled to start, he is at once chumming the waters for future authoritarian repression of migrants and also engaging in a form of psychological warfare against his “enemies” as defined by the revanchist politics of American white supremacy. Indeed, the grossly disproportional response of using violently abusive and heavily armed fascist cops to round up “illegals” primarily in large U.S. cities that oppose the administration’s immigration policies, is itself a form of demonstrative state-sanctioned domestic terrorism – and it’s hardly the first example.
While collaborators demure, we’ve all watched an increasingly emboldened ICE declare that “the gloves are off” while targeting undocumented migrants committing such heinous crimes as: using a hypothermia shelter, seeking medical treatment for brain cancer, complying with previous immigration orders, obtaining a protective order against domestic violence, picking their children up at school, or attending child custody hearings. These tactics are clearly designed to isolate, silence, dehumanize and frighten both migrant communities and even those who would help them survive fascist repression; a self-evident fact that Donald Trump himself has all but already confirmed.
Justifying this terror is of course why the Pig Empire president calls non-white migrants “animals” and the countries they come from “shitholes.” It’s also why the Trump administration works so hard to conflate mostly harmless migratory victims of U.S. foreign policy with international terrorism, drug dealers, rapists and violent gangsters. Furthermore, when Herr Donald orders troops to the border, threatens NIMBY liberals with “hordes” of brown people or promises to deport literally millions of migrants at the drop of a hat, it’s not only undocumented migrant communities he’s targeting with psychological warfare. Even and perhaps especially when the crisis isn’t real or becomes delayed, we are still all being slowly desensitized and groomed to accept further repression and atrocity as normal or at least unavoidable. Do you even remember what it was like in the beginning, when thousands of people stormed airports and GOP town hall events to protect Muslim visitors and extremely mediocre health insurance? Today it’s right wing militia “posses” and concentration camps for horribly neglected migrant children, will tomorrow just become outright ethnic cleansing? How many times do you figure Trump and his minions have to push back mass arrests in major U.S. cities a couple of weeks before we’re so fucking numb we don’t even notice the situation has become a full blown genocide?
So it is that the actions of a would-be tyrant seem like cynical and bumbling attempts to control the narrative while casting blame on his political enemies when looked at the through the myopic lens of modern political coverage, but reveal themselves to be something far more sinister when set against the backdrop of an ongoing fascist creep in the Pig Empire. Perhaps in light of the available evidence, it would behoove serious analysts to stop assuming that Downmarket Mussolini and his pet white nationalist advisor are merely accidentally stumbling ass backward into all the steps you’d need to take to convert our society from a barely concealed hyper-capitalist police state posing as a liberal democracy, to an overt fascist oligarchy?
Or I guess we could keep assuming the fascists are joking; that might work too.
– Nina Illingworth
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