longer.blue

Reposted with permission By Jesse Fox Mayshark A few not-quite-random thoughts about ICE and Minnesota: — I think an underappreciated reason for the irrational enthusiasm Trump and MAGA have shown for flooding the Twin Cities with armed agents is the specific nature of the immigrant populations they're targeting. Racism and Eurocentric white supremacy underlie the entirety of the "mass deportation" campaign, of course, as they have animated anti-immigrant politics in the U.S. throughout its history. But I think Somalis punch a few extra buttons above and beyond whatever delights are afforded by brutalizing Spanish-speaking brown people. They're mostly Muslim, for one thing, which activates the Islamophobic pleasure centers in white Evangelical nervous systems. And even more than that, they're African — i.e. unlike most of the immigrant population of the U.S., they're what we recognize as Black. And nothing resonates more deeply with the animal spirits of American racism than demonizing Black people. It's kind of a perverse intersectionality, bringing together multiple strands of bigotry into a sort of perfect prey. — I've thought about what Trump meant in his social media post promising all-caps RECKONING AND RETRIBUTION for Minnesota. It was a bizarre thing to post even by his standards, coming just a few days after the murder of Renee Good. Retribution for what exactly? A lot of people have located the animus in Trump's feeling jilted by the state, which unlike several of its neighbors never voted for him in any election, and in personal anger toward Gov. Tim Walz. Those are plausible, and the answer doesn't have to be just one thing. But I think it's important to consider what Minneapolis represents in the racist American mind. It was the place where residents rose up over the murder of a Black man by a white police officer — and worse than that, had the absolute gall to convict and imprison the police officer for the offense, which even in the 2020s remains an extremely uncommon thing for any American city or state to do. It's a stark rejection of the "Back the Blue" ideology, which is widespread on the right and produces almost automatic support and defense of any police action, particularly against minority groups. I don't think we should underplay the backdrop of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 in understanding conservative anger toward Minneapolis. — One thing I've been saying for a long time is that conservative talking heads and politicians have put themselves at a tactical and strategic disadvantage by constructing and living inside a right-wing media system that is largely impervious to outside information and empirical review. Fox News and talk radio and all of the layers of online propaganda that have followed them obviously serve great and useful purposes for conservatives advancing various agendas, from anti-tax billionaires to theocratic evangelicals to guns-and-ammo manufacturers. It's impossible to imagine Trump sustaining even the reduced level of support he currently has without a 24/7 system of disinformation pumping out lies to millions of willing consumers. But to use such a system effectively, you have to not be completely beholden to it yourself. It's one thing to justify an authoritarian program by pretending that there is some vast network of violent leftists funded by a villainous cabal. It's another to actually believe it's the case. Because if, for example, you make strategic decisions about deploying thousands of federal troops to a given city because you actually believe a bunch of militant Antifas are going to show up and shower you with Soros-branded Molotov cocktails, then what do you do when they don't arrive? You look like a bunch of heavily armed thugs terrorizing a city of people who are just trying to live their lives. You end up killing and brutalizing people on camera. When the imaginary terrorists in your head don't materialize, you murder a mom in an SUV and an ICU nurse with a cell phone, and pretend that they're the terrorists you've been warning about. Thirty years into the Fox News era, the entire American right is now high on its own supply. We have a couple of generations of right-wing leadership that mostly has no other sources of information, and is so accustomed to being lied to and having the world always explained in ways that flatter their beliefs and bigotries that encountering the actual world outside that bubble is consistently disconcerting and disorienting.