CrimeTalk
An educational resource for students and staff studying the sociology of crime, deviance and social censure, criminology, sociology of law and socio-legal studies; the intriguing stuff that made the subject fascinating in the first place. So much of this has now become political that we also discuss politics.
Corporate Justice
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HOW TRUMP WON
Random thoughts:
“Let’s be honest about this. Let’s be absolutely blunt about it: There were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country,” Axelrod said on CNN early Wednesday morning, after former President Trump was projected as the winner over Vice President Harris. A September survey from The Associated Press/NORC Research Center showed 38 percent of voters think being a woman hurt Harris’s chances of winning, and only 13 percent of voters said the same about the GOP nominee.
“To Trump’s top aides, the thesis of the campaign could be summed up in a simple slogan: “Max out the men and hold the women.” That meant emphasizing the economy and immigration, which Trump did relentlessly. It meant diverting attention away from the chaos of his first term, the abortion bans he ushered in, and his assault on American democracy four years ago. It meant a campaign that rode the resentment of disenchanted voters and capitalized on the cultural fractures and tribal politics that Trump has long exploited. Most of all, the outcome can be credited to a singular figure whose return to the White House traced a political arc unlike any in 250 years of American history. Trump left office in 2021 a pariah after inciting a mob of supporters to ransack the U.S. Capitol at the end of an attempt to overturn his electoral defeat. Three years later, he engineered an unprecedented political comeback. Trump effortlessly dispatched his GOP rivals, forced President Joe Biden out of the race, and vanquished Vice President Kamala Harris in a dominant victory that exceeded virtually everyone’s expectations. Along the way, Trump shrugged off a 34-count felony conviction and an array of other criminal indictments.”
https://time.com/7172052/how-donald-trump-won-2024/
“We are a country that just elected – that just willfully chose – one of the most cruel, unscrupulous and transparently self-serving political figures in modern history to be president. Again. We just elected a convicted felon who has normalized bullying, spread hate like an industrial sprinkler and shown us over and over and over again he sees laws as irrelevant and self-enrichment as sacrosanct. Faced with a billowing ocean of red flags – from indictments for trying to overturn the 2020 election to the coddling of dictators who rule enemy nations – a majority of Americans cast their vote for the man who is a totem of the worst in all of us.”
“His team’s data clearly showed that the highest return on investment would be a group that didn’t often vote: younger men, including Hispanic and Black men who were struggling with inflation, alienated by left-wing ideology and pessimistic about the country. The Trump campaign committed its limited resources, including the candidate’s time, to communicating with these young men, embracing a hypermasculine image. His first campaign stop after his criminal conviction was an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. He entered the Republican National Convention one night to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” He spent relatively little time doing mainstream media interviews and instead recorded a series of podcast interviews with male comedians and other bro-type personalities who tapped into the kind of audiences Mr. Fabrizio’s data said were most receptive to Mr. Trump’s message. They included a three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan that racked up more than 45 million views on YouTube, and won Mr. Rogan’s election-eve endorsement. Aides and allies like Mr. Musk made explicit appeals to men to vote for Mr. Trump in the contest’s final hours.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/us/politics/trump-win-election-harris.html
"White voters have sided with Republicans in every presidential election since at least 1976. And in this election, white voters went up as a share of the electorate from 67% to 71%. That is remarkable, considering that, quite simply, white people are a smaller share of the population in the country than ever before. They have been steadily declining as a share of eligible voters, and that is not changing any time soon because of growth with Latinos and Asian Americans. So the fact that they were a larger share of the electorate than four years ago was a boon to Trump."
https://whyy.org/articles/2024-election-how-trump-won-takeaways/
?It may be the biggest story of the race: Latino voters swung toward Trump by a staggering 25 percentage points compared with four years ago. Trump won the support of 45% of Latino voters nationally compared with 53% for Harris, the NBC News Exit Poll found. That's far better than the 33-point loss Trump suffered among Latinos in 2020, when he won 32% to Joe Biden’s 65%. And it may end up being the strongest GOP performance among Latinos in a presidential race since George W. Bush carried 44% in 2004. Nationally, Latinos accounted for 12% of the electorate, and Trump’s gains are boosting his margins across a host of battleground states, from Pennsylvania to Arizona, which complicated Harris’ path. Trump's gains were fueled by a massive shift among Latino men, who backed him over Harris by 10 points."
"* Trump wins 56% of voters without a college degree nationwide; Harris wins 42%. Trump's share is up 6 percentage points from a 2020 exit poll.
* Harris wins 55% of voters with college degrees nationwide; Trump wins 42%. Trump's share is down 1 percentage point from a 2020 exit poll."
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/results-nevada-exit-poll-us-presidential-election-2024-11-05/
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-11-07/white-women-vote-donald-trump-kamala-harris
"Now, in 2024, the story of red America’s minority status as an economic power continues unabated, albeit with unmistakable gains. This year, Brookings calculations suggest that President-elect Donald Trump’s winning base in 2,523 counties represents 87% of the nation’s total counties but just 40% of the nation’s GDP. Conversely, Vice President Kamala Harris’ losing base of 376 much higher-output counties represents 60% of the GDP."
"First, incumbents worldwide were facing tough election odds. Electorates were frustrated by the COVID inflationary years and were clearly seeking change. In Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and beyond, ruling coalitions lost power across the political spectrum. Second, I don’t think Kamala Harris was ever going to be a great candidate. After Biden’s disastrous debate effort in late June and it seemed he might be pressured to drop out, I wrote an article calling on Democrats not to coronate their vice president, and pointing to key vulnerabilities she displayed and the value of an open democratic process."
"I think that she, by all accounts, ran a strong campaign that was based on her strengths. And I think she had an undeniably dominating debate performance. They ran a nice convention. Her speeches were good. The messaging pivot, the launch was good. There wasn’t a lot of drama inside the campaign, right? There are other things that she isn’t particularly strong at. I don’t think that she is that great in unscripted moments. Sometimes she’s better than others."
"Elon Musk's super PAC spent around $200 million to help elect Donald Trump , according to a person familiar with the group's spending, funding an effort that sets a new standard for how billionaires can influence elections. The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO provided the vast majority of the money to America PAC, which focused on low-propensity and first-time voters, according to the person, who was not authorized to disclose the figure publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. America PAC's work was aided by a March ruling from the Federal Election Commission that paved the way for super PACs to coordinate their canvassing efforts with campaigns, allowing the Trump campaign to rely on the near-unlimited money of the nation's most high-profile billionaire to boost turnout in deep-red parts of the country. That allowed the campaign to spend the money they saved on everything from national ad campaigns to targeted outreach toward demographics Democrats once dominated. “By conserving hard dollars, we were able to go wider and deeper on paid voter contact and advertising programs,” Blair said. That, he added, included broad ad campaigns aimed at a national audience, as well as — critically — more targeted campaigns seeking to boost turnout among Black and Latino men, two areas where Trump saw sweeping gains in 2024."
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-america-pac-trump-d248547966bf9c6daf6f5d332bc4be66
"Presidential historian Allan Lichtman, who had predicted that Vice President Kamala Harris would win the 2024 presidential election against former President Donald Trump, mainly attributed his incorrect prediction to the proliferation of online misinformation and disinformation. Lichtman, who had correctly predicted nearly every presidential race since 1984 using a formula of 13 true-or-false questions, cited the influence of social media platforms including Elon Musk’s X as one of the reasons he was wrong. The American University professor said Monday on NewsNation’s “CUOMO” that “disinformation has exploded to an unprecedented degree. We’ve seen something brand new this time: Elon Musk putting his thumb on the scales through his control of X.”
"Lichtman blamed disinformation first and foremost, and called out two culprits by name: “You talked about a grievance-driven election, but a lot of that grievance was driven by disinformation. It starts with Fox News and conservative media. Conservative podcasters with tens of millions of views. But we’ve seen something brand new this time—the $300 billionaire, Elon Musk, putting his thumb on the scales through his control of X, formerly Twitter.” Lichtman said that voters were given “vast disinformation” on a variety of issues, including jobs, immigration, unemployment, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and even hurricane relief. The second factor, according to Lichtman, was what he called the “dark side of American history”—elements that included “racism, misogyny, xenophobia, antisemitism.”"
"Fox and Musk have gotten away with spreading disinformation because of a self-serving misapprehension of the political speech doctrine: The First Amendment protects ‘core political speech’ above all other forms of expression. But Musk purchasing the world’s town square only to weaponize it to support his own agenda, and Fox admittedly lying to viewers nonstop to promote Trump, isn’t political speech presumptively entitled to legal protection. Weaponized disinformation will ultimately kill the First Amendment, which the Supreme Court recognized back in 1969 when it approved the Fairness Doctrine and required accuracy in the media."
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/trump-didn-t-win-disinformation-did-opinion/ar-AA1tRicR
"To improve their standing in Washington, some of the country’s crypto elite had spent years pouring money into politics: They donated heavily to former president Donald Trump, while flooding congressional races nationwide with advertisements that promoted crypto-friendly candidates. Soon after the polls closed, those efforts appeared to pay off. Trump clinched a return to the White House, and by Wednesday afternoon, 43 of the 58 congressional candidates backed by a trio of new crypto-funded super PACs had been declared the winners of their races. The groups, led by the organization Fairshake, spent more than $130 million nationally to advertise in congressional contests, some of which have not yet been called."
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FINAL WARNING: Donald Trump seeks a Fascist Dictatorship
No President nor nominee in US history so openly and brazenly pursued a fascist dictatorship like Donald Trump does today. In fact, many of Trump's own handpicked senior advisers from his first term as President issue urgent warnings today about Trump's drive to dictatorship. For example:1) TRUMP'S LONGEST SERVING CHIEF OF STAFF MARINE GENERAL JOHN KELLY
John Kelly enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1970, and was discharged as a sergeant in 1972. Following college graduation in 1976, he returned to the Marines as an infantry officer. Kelly rose to Brigadier General and served in Iraq for the better part of 2 years. Kelly deployed again to Iraq in 2008 after promotion to Major General. Ultimately, in his last military post, from 2012 to 2016 he served as a four-star general leading the United States Southern Command, the unified combatant command responsible for American military operations in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.President Trump appointed Kelly the Secretary of Homeland Security in 2017. Trump promoted Kelly to Chief of Staff on July 31, 2017. At the time, Trump called Kelly a "great American" who has "done a spectacular job at Homeland Security" and "been a true star of my administration."
The New York Times published an interview with Kelly, on Oct. 22, 2024, available here. According to General Kelly: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist. . . . He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.” Further, the General said that "a very big surprise for him was that we were — those of us who were former generals and certainly people still on active duty — that the commitment, the loyalty was to the Constitution, without question, without second thought. That was a big surprise to him that the generals were not loyal to the boss, in this case him.” Trump apparently failed middle school history.
2) TRUMP'S HANDPICKED CHAIR OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF MARK MILLEY
Four star General Mark Milley became the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 30, 2019,and served as the nation's highest ranking military officer for four years until September of 2023. Milley first became a commissioned officer in 1980 after graduating from Princeton University. As chairman, General Milley acted as the principal military advisorto the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council.When Milley took his oath as Chair, Donald Trump said of his appointee: "In his new role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley will serve as my top military advisor. I have absolute confidence that he will fulfill his duty with the same brilliance and fortitude he has shown throughout his long and very distinguished career."
Today the retired General says of Trump: “He is the most dangerous person ever. [N]ow I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country, a fascist to the core.” In his retirement speech Milley stated: "“We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or tyrant or a dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
3) 13 FORMER TRUMP OFFICIALS IN SUPPORT OF THE GENERALS
In the wake of comments from General Kelly (and fully consistent with the comments of General Milley), 13 Trump appointees wrote a letter of supportstating:
Donald Trump's disdain for the American military and admiration for dictators like Hitler is rooted in his desire for absolute, unchecked power. This is a man who threw his own Vice President – Mike Pence – at a violent mob in a desperate bid to hold on to power. When Donald Trump says he wants to be a "dictator" on "day one" and deploy the military against American citizens he deems “the enemy from within"--he means it. . . . We did not take the decision to come forward lightly. We are all lifelong Republicans who served our country. However, there are moments in history where it becomes necessary to put country over party. This is one of those moments.
All of these Trump Administration appointees, including many serving in senior positions, worked day-to-day with Trump and witnessed first hand how he governs and how he seeks to accumulate dictatorial powers.
4) FORMER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE JAMES MATTIS
Four star Marine General James Mattis served as Trump's first handpicked Secretary of Defense, from Trump's inauguration through early 2019. Mattis previously served as a Marine officer starting in 1971, and saw combat in Operation Dessert Storm, Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.General Mattis posits that Donald Trump is unfit because he places himself above the Constitution. More specifically, Mattis issued a statement after the J6 insurrection that said:
Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, an effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump. His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice. Our Constitution and our Republic will overcome this stain and We the People will come together again in our never-ending effort to form a more perfect Union, while Mr. Trump will deservedly be left a man without a country.
Mattis previously levelled serious objectionsto Trump's fitness as President due to his misconduct in the summer of 2020, in the wake of protests triggered by the police murder of George Floyd. He stated:
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.
5) FORMER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MARK ESPER
After graduating from West Point, Mark Esperjoined the United States Army and served during the 1990-91 Gulf War as an officer with the 101st Airborne Division. Former President Trump appointed him as the Secretary of Defense and he assumed office on July 19, 2019.
When asked about the former Generals assertions that Trump seeks to impose a dictatorship Esper stated: "It's hard to say that he doesn't. . . .he certainly has those inclinations. And I think it's something we should be wary about." Esper suggests voters look up the term "fascism" and determine on their own if Trump fits the bill. He also praised the Generals for raising the issue and gave them high marks for integrity and honesty.
The Esper interview with CNN is available here.
6) FORMER VICE PRESIDENT PENCE
In an extraordinary development, Vice President Mike Pence refuses to endorse Donald Trump for President in election 2024. Pence stated that Trump should never sit in the Oval Office again because Trump put himself and his hold on power above the Constitution. The video above explains his position best.
CONCLUSION
The 18 patriots quoted above all say in unison that Donald Trump cannot rule our country again because he cannot adhere to the Constitution. Instead he will seek extra-Constitutional power and try to rule as a dictator. Trump himself promises to rule as a dictator on Day 1. These warnings come from life-long conservatives and from Trump's hand picked officials at the most senior levels of the Trump Administration. They saw Trump at work in the Oval Office daily--they know much more than us. They risk their lives and the lives of their family. We must heed these unprecedented warnings and take Trump at his word. The Constitution today demands that we all follow the distinguished leaders above and act courageously to protect our Great Constitutional Republic. History will judge us on this most important issue. We must not elect a dictator who promises to "terminate" the Constitution for power.
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"A REPUBLIC IF YOU CAN KEEP IT"
On September 17, 1787, upon exiting the final session of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin told a bystander that the Founders had established “A republic, if you can keep it.” In my youth this statement made little sense because I assumed humans would always want democratic self-governance instead of dictatorship. Humans will always value freedom including self-governance over oppression.
Today, our Constitutional Republic faces grave dangers and unprecedented political challenges that prove Franklin’s point. The Constitution requires constant citizen vigilance to assure that as political winds blow from whatever direction our Constitution endures to assure the freedom and self-governance of successive generations of Americans. Citizens must certainly value the freedom of all over petty partisan advantage.
Today that certainty wavers, and I understand more than ever how dictatorships and autocracies take root and how republics and democracies fail. We now face an epic election on November 5. The presidential candidates run neck and neck. Our Constitutional Republic hangs in the balance. The manifest threats include:
1) 1. One candidate openly called for the “termination” of the Constitution merely so that he could maintain his grip on power, legally or not.
2) 2. That candidate previously gathered an angry mob, on January 6, 2021, and told them to “fight like hell” to stop the Constitutional certification of election 2020. That mob subsequently brutalized the Capitol Police and vandalized the Capitol all in an effort to overturn a Constitutional election at his behest. Today, he calls those convicted of criminal misconduct on January 6, “unbelievable patriots”, and he promises to pardon them all.
3) 3. He openly ridicules and defames the integrity of our Constitutional elections and attacks American elections as “rigged” and “fraudulent” without any evidence. Over 60 courts of law rejected these lies, including rulings by judges he appointed. Today, he leads an effort undermine the certainty of our elections, and use violence and chaos to sow mistrust of democracy in America.
4) 4. A jury he helped pick, from his native state, found him unanimously guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of 34 felony counts of illegally influencing election 2016 through hush money payments to a porn star to cover up an adulterous affair.
5) 5. He insults our military heroes willing to die for our Constitution and the hard-won freedoms it secures, calling them “losers” and “suckers” according to, among others, his own handpicked and longest serving Chief of Staff, General John Kelly.
6) 6. He courts the favor and affection of brutal dictators. He leaked classified intel to one and “fell in love” with another who now menaces virtually our entire nation with nuclear weapons.
7) 7. He faces criminal charges that he mishandled classified documents, refused to return documents belonging to the United States and obstructed justice.
8) 8. He openly promises to be a dictator on Day One. This promise entails massive Constitutional violations.
9) 9. He promises “bloody” violence if he should prevail and implement his unconstitutional proposal for “mass deportations” with no due process and massive violations of human rights.
10 10. Even today, he refuses to commit to the peaceful transition of power. He persistently refuses to ever concede defeat.
No President nor candidate for the White House ever committed any single one of these offenses against the Constitution. Each offense renders a person unfit for the Presidency.
Combined, these offenses make Donald Trump incapable of credibly taking and adhering to his oath of office to defend the Constitution. This inability to take the oath of office usually plays no role in an election. Today it assumes the utmost importance. Trump attacks our Constitution and seeks unbridled power. Donald Trump’s extreme embrace of fascism complete with Big Lies, scapegoating and hatred renders him the most unfit candidate in history.
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THE TRUMP/VANCE ASSAULT ON EVERYONE'S BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP
Donald Trump promises to sign an Executive Order on day one of his new term abolishing Birthright Citizenship. This will trigger litigation thar promises to land in Trump's Supreme Court for final adjudication, Assuming Trump prevails there, the GOP already introduced a Bill to abolish Birthright Citizenship legislatively. JD Vance co-sponsored that Bill. This amounts to an historically unprecedented assault on virtually every American's Citizenship.Under Birthright Citizenship proof of birth in the US, via a birth certificate for example, suffices to prove citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment secures this clear and easy path to Citizenship for all Americans born here, and so operated over the last 156 years.With the abolition of Birthright Citizenship no American will qualify for Birthright citizenship without additional proof of parental citizenship. You read that correctly, nearly every voter will face new evidentiary burdens to prove citizenship. Under the GOP approach we will all need to prove the legitimacy of our parents' citizenship.The Vance sponsored Constitutional Citizenship Clarification Act, introduced on June 5, 2024, purports on its face to totally and instantly abolish Birthright Citizenship. According to one co-sponsor's website the Act will:Notably, the Act proposed by Vance includes no limitation on this "clarification" of who enjoys citizenship and who does not. The Act includes no limitation on retroactive effect and lacks any express limitation providing for prospective impact only. The Constitution only proscribes retroactive criminal sanctionsThe intent of the Act is to correct errors in prior interpretations of the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment.
More broadly, the GOP assault on virtually everyone's citizenship seeks to maximize the power of the next Trump Administration to round-up citizens, as discussed in my prior blog post. As such, this amounts to the greatest power-grab of rights over American citizens in history.
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Trump's Cruel and Racist Attack on All Immigrants: Operation Wetback II
No campaign promise will impose more mass oppression than the zero due process mass round-ups that Donald Trump touts at every rally.Former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance continually promise an almost unimaginable assault on American (legally here or otherwise) workers if elected. They want to bring back Operation Wetback from the 1950s but at a much greater magnitude. These promises play a leading role in their campaign for the White House and make an appearance in each and every campaign rally. In fact, at one recent rally Trump promised a "bloody" round-up and removal operation. These round-ups also feature prominently in the GOP platform so the entire party supports mass round-ups.The original Operation Wetback rounded-up American workers with no due process and summarily dropped them across the border into Mexico. Undocumented as well as legal workers suffered a militarized round-up across the nation. The operation even ensnared unknown numbers of US Citizens and broke-up familiesconsisting of US Citizens and legal workers along with undocumented workers. It amounted to a terror campaign to get immigrants to self-deport. This brazenly racist effort serves as Trump's model.Trump and Vance promise to round-up as many as 20 million American workers a million at a time. Vance would round-up legal and illegal immigrants alike. Like Eisenhower's approach, legality does not matter, only skin color, which explains the utter cruelty of its implementation.The mass deportation program the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950s pursued is the closest and best historical corollary to such a proposal:
The only historical comparison to a mass deportation programme came in 1954, when as many as 1.3 million people were deported as part of Operation Wetback, named after a derogatory slur then commonly used against Mexican people. . . . The programme, under President Dwight Eisenhower, ran into considerable public opposition-partly because some US citizens were also deported - as well as a lack of funding. It was largely discontinued by 1955. Immigration experts say that the earlier operation's focus on Mexican nationals and lack of due process makes it incomparable to what a modern-day mass deportation programme would look like.
President Trump, however, proposes a militarized and no due process round-up that likely would leave the 1950s program in the dust. In a Time magazine interview Trump said: "So if you look back into the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower . . . was very big on illegal immigration not coming into our country. And he did a massive deportation of people." The former President assumes he can do the job with the National Guard, but Trump promises to use the military if necessary, claiming that no federal law prohibits the use of the military against non-civilians. Indeed, it appears that Trump will accord those ensnared in this military operation zero due process,, as he makes clear in this video, from his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He states: "We will pick them up and we will throw them out of our country and there will be no questions asked."
Trump will also not rule out the use of detention camps. Trump's top immigration advisor, the notoriously racistStephen Miller, said: "Because of the logistical challenges…you would need to build an extremely large holding area for illegal immigrants that at any given points in time . . . could hold upwards of 50, 60, 70,000 illegal aliens while you are waiting to send them . . . somewhere that would be willing to accept them.” Presumably, citizens ensnared in these round-ups would hold some means of getting released.
Make no mistake, Trump promises cruel and brutal treatment for those rounded-up, otherwise why would he work so hard to dehumanize and demonize migrants? Alfonso Aguilar, of the American Principles Project's Latino Partnership, states: "The Eisenhower mass deportation policy was tragic, human rights were violated. People were removed to distant locations without food and water. There were many deaths, unnecessary deaths. Sometimes even U.S. citizens of Hispanic origin, of Mexican origin were removed. It was a travesty. It was terrible. Immigrants were humiliated." In her book Impossible Subjects, Mae Ngai writes that many Mexicans were deported by ship. A congressional investigation, according to the book, compared the conditions on the ship to that of an "eighteenth century slave ship."
Trump and his MAGA cult consistently dehumanize migrants and propagate the most heinous lies about them--calling them animalsand wrongfully accusing them of eating pets. They do this to pave the way for unspeakable evil. This evil plotting constitutes the core of their campaign and features in every rally and every campaign event. Dehumanization and demonization is the way to get many people to engage in deeply immoral and evil misconduct.
Miller himself admits that much of this will occur pursuant to a "shock and awe blitz of Executive Orders" such that the slow-moving courts will not keep pace with the Trump plan. Miller promises that the next Trump Administration will not include those counseling compliance with law; instead, officials will prepare to move quickly on Day 1.“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller led the Trump Administration's family separation policy which courts found unlawful but which still inflicted permanent cruelty upon children, many of whom remain separated from their families. As of mid-2024, Trump's policy of family separation still violates the law and about 1100 children still remain separated from their families despite a federal injunction to the contrary, and despite a Biden task force charged with repairing this manifest cruelty.
Many of the barriers and guardrails that stopped Trump from pursuing unlawful conduct such as these round-ups are now weakened or simply gone. The judiciary includes many more Trump appointees compared to 2016. Trump now prepares for a second term with a greater focus on appointing compliant and obedient underlings. Indeed, he wants to eliminate the civil service. His lawyers already laid out arguments for the use of little used laws like the Alien Enemies Act
Worse yet this fast-moving mass round-up campaign will combine with Trump's promise to abolish birthright citizenship to create a perfect storm of lawless cruelty, which I will focus upon in my next post.
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