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?

The Man Is Weak

 

May 28th: White House assistant Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trump’s immigration policy, pushes ICE officials to dramatically ramp up the arrests — calling for 3,000 illegal migrants to be picked up per day. (Trump had campaigned on the promise to deport 1,000,000 illegals a year.)

June 11th: Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested more than 70 people at a meatpacking plant in Omaha, Neb., and other federal agents targeted farms north of Los Angeles.

June 12th: Clearly feeling heat from big farmers and meat processors and the hospitality industries -- who were complaining loudly to the White House about the disruptions to their operations, Trump stumbled into a change of policy based on favoritism: "We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have, maybe not," Trump said. The New York Times reported that a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official quickly ordered a pause to immigration raids at agricultural businesses, meat packing plants, restaurants, and hotels. 

June 14th: President Donald Trump directed federal immigration officials to prioritize instead deportations from Democratic-run cities.

June 15th: President Donald Trump said on social media that he is willing to exempt the agriculture and hotel industries from his nationwide immigration crackdown. The surprise move came after executives in both industries complained to Trump about losing reliable, longtime immigrant workers in immigration raids and struggling to replace them. Plus there had been pushback from some farm-owners -- some had slammed their gates shuts and wouldn't let ICE in without a warrant. 

Also June 15th: ICE and HSI field office supervisors began learning about a likely reversal of the exemption policy, after hearing from DHS leadership that the White House did not support it, according to one person with knowledge of the reversal. During a morning field call, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told leaders representing field offices across the country that they must continue to conduct raids at worksite locations, "a reversal from guidance issued days earlier under pressure from certain industries that rely on migrant workers."

June 16th: The Department of Homeland Security told staff that it was reversing guidance issued last week that agents were not to conduct immigration raids at farms, hotels, and restaurants. Agents are ordered to continue conducting immigration raids at agricultural businesses, hotels, and restaurants. The new instructions were shared in an 11 a.m. call to representatives from 30 field offices across the country.

Trump and History

To cut to the chase: Trump knows as much about history as a dog knows his father.

In the statement Trump read aloud on Saturday about the violence in Charlottesville (a part of it not usually replayed on TV news), he said "We must ... cherish our history." That's an interesting line, as it shows up all the time as camouflage on the Web and elsewhere: "We're just celebrating white heritage. We're just honoring history." Well, particularly, the specific history of pain and loss of property by Civil War Americans defending their right to own and sweat human beings for a profit. 

L to R: Trump, Bannon, Gorka, Miller

Josh Marshall asked a crucial question yesterday: Who wrote that statement about "cherishing history" for Trump. He didn't write it himself. He can't write. He can barely read.

Was it White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, who reportedly has Trump's ear as some kind of international sage. Very recent headline about Gorka: "White House Aide Says People Should Stop Criticizing White Supremacists So Much."

Or was it NortoriousSB, Stephen Bannon? Everybody knows his fondness and nurturing care for the "Alt-Right."

Or was the author the other Stephen? Stephen Miller, the man who wrote Trump's Inauguration speech ("Darkness Falls") and the subsequent Trump Anti-Immigration Presidential Order that crashed. This Steve hung out at Duke University not long ago with Richard B. Spencer, the now-president of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank. Richard Spencer's big media moment came soon after the election of Trump and in a Washington venue to boot: "At a National Policy Institute conference, [Spencer] quoted from Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews. In response to his cry "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!", a number of his supporters gave the Nazi salute and chanted in a similar fashion to the Sieg heil chant used at the Nazis' Nuremberg rallies. Spencer has also refused to denounce Adolf Hitler."

Jeffrey C. Billman, in The Independent Weekly, threw down the gauntlet to a major political party that is now left holding the coats of resurgent white supremacists:

At minimum, every decent Republican—looking at you, Tillis and Burr—should be demanding that Trump immediately fire Gorka, Miller, and Bannon .... In any normal administration, Republican or Democrat, [people] half that repugnant would have been prevented from getting anywhere near the Oval Office. In Trump’s, they’re top advisers.

History, who hasn't been introduced yet to Mr. Trump, will not be kind in telling this tale of a bad seed moving into the White House.

The President's Daughter and the Male Manikin

Interesting article in today's NYTimes about the Jared-Ivanka lock on power at the White House. They have risen as the only antidote to Steve Bannon.

"Even allies acknowledge Mr. Trump is impulsive, indifferent to preparation and prone to embracing the last advice offered."

--Peter Baker, Glenn Thrush, and Maggie Haberman

Jared Kushner

Son-in-law Jared Kushner is now in charge of so much he looks like Swiss Army Man. He's "fixing" everything, apparently, from the Middle East to your cousin's hydrocodone addiction. He can't be fired. Neither can Ivanka, who apparently made the case against Bannon most effectively: "He's puffing himself up, Daddy, at your expense."

Footnote: Stephen Miller, the young white nationalist from Duke University who wrote much of that Day of Doom inauguration speech, has pulled away from Bannon and attached himself to Ivanka. That's a rat leaving a sinking ship if we've ever seen one.

Young Man on a Power Trip

Interesting and long profile of Stephen Miller in today's Raleigh News&Observer. Miller is Steve Bannon's deputy and sidekick in the Trump White House and is credited as the lead author of Trump's inauguration speech and of the Muslim ban executive order.

The N&O profile focuses on Miller's years in Durham as a student at Duke University.

One meaty quote: “He’s the most sanctimonious student I think I ever encountered,” said John Burness, Duke’s former senior vice president of public affairs and government relations. “He seemed to be absolutely sure of his own views and the correctness of them, and seemed to assume that if you were in disagreement with him, there was something malevolent or stupid about your thinking. Incredibly intolerant.”