Is It Necessary To Spell Out G E S T A P O?

 

Oh, it's just a dozen or more heavily armed and armored military types in masks with no visible identification, marching up the sidewalk like they owned the joint. Who you gonna call? You got no one to call, so you start yelling. You pull out your phones and start filming. And so far, troops of ICE have retreated in the face of neighborhood opposition. But what happens when one of those masked agents of the State puts his rifle butt into someone's forehead, because he thinks that someone got too close to him? Or was too insulting? Or too loud? And that someone probably was -- protesting not just ICE's presence in the neighborhood but also its very existence as an insult to human evolution and to every moral value we ever learned from our elders. 

The scene in MacArthur Park two days ago.

My Gawd, people. Trump's Big Beastly Bullshit Bill increased the funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to $170 billion, making ICE the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S., "with a bigger budget than most of the world's militaries" (Newsweek). You can look forward to many more, only bigger raids in public spaces, a greater show of force, who knows what theatrical intimidation and of course a higher body count of detainees. Some say that the Trump administration will have at least 750,000 detainees confined within a year -- children, parents, longtime residents, even a scattering of naturalized citizens because they were suspicious.  But never worry. They'll be elegantly "housed" in dangerous remoteness -- like that demented alligator alcatraz (where people have already died).

Not that Donald Jethro Trump had a clue of the details in that thousand-page BBB law. No. We know he doesn't read. He gets Stephen Miller to translate his meanness on immigration into action, into blah blah blah legal language. That's why I think the above dawning reality is really "Stephen Miller's Gestapo," not Trump's Secret Police.

Stephen Miller. The Miller Perplex

Stephen Miller has his mitts all over every piece of government pertaining to who gets to live here. He has a real grudge against people he considers trash. Jason Zengerle's lengthy unraveling of the Stephen Miller Perplex retells the story of when Stephen Miller ran for student body president in a rich California suburban high school -- as the son of a well to do Jewish family (parents were firm liberals. And you could write paragraphs on the ancient rebellions of sons against the values of their fathers). According to Zengerle, Stephen demonized people he considered his brown servants. Direct quotation from Miller's high school campaign speech: “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?” Yes, Stephen Miller got his start in "politics" as a walking paradox, a Jewish white supremacist and obviously a perfect fit for Trump 2.0. In Zengerle's analysis, Stephen Miller is really in charge of Trump's Homeland Security. The confirmed secretary may be ole limberlips Kristi Noem, but she does what Stephen Miller tells her, and Miller told her that ICE needed to greatly increase the round up of the browns. Miller...

paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

Just yesterday, 90 uniformed, masked, heavily armed ICE "troops," some actually on horseback for that extra dose of intimidation, marched into and across the famous MacArthur Park in L.A., "like Pickett's Charge," someone said, and you know how that worked out for Robert E. Lee. They moved as a threatening wave into the park and scared a bunch of playing kids. These storm troops were backed up by some 17 Humvees, four military cargo trucks, and two military ambulances. However (and praise the Lord!), the neighborhood wasn't standing for it, and like other neighborhoods have begun to do, they came out in loud and handkerchief-waving opposition. They followed the ICE, filming them with their phones. Which appeared to take a lot of air out of the military show of force. ICE apparently left without a single detainee. The whole show was just a little escalation of the whole gestapo itch.

When do you reckon they'll point those guns at the protesters?

During the '24 campaign,Trump reportedly once quipped in a meeting with operatives, "If it was up to [Stephen] Miller, the population of the United States would be only 100 million people and they’d all resemble Stephen Miller." Now that same guy has his hands on the biggest and best-funded strong-arm force in the world. Highly secretive. Puts the Stasi in the shade.

What will you do when they show up in your neighborhood?