Month: August 2019

Democrats are still the party of the working class. Most of them are people of color.

by digby

This is wrong:

College-educated white people have left the Republican Party over the past decade, but higher-income voters are, as ever, disproportionately Republican. Wealthier people tend to be more educated, too, but now these forces push in opposite directions. That complicates the traditional relationship between Democrats and the white working class.

For decades, working-class people voted for Democrats, but recently, the difference in party affiliation between the white working class and other white people has evaporated. This trend, experts say, might make it difficult for the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee to mobilize voters by appealing to working-class identity.

Working-class people in this country are largely people of color so “working-class identity” isn’t white anymore. And even where it is, it’s not in the industrial trades, it’s mostly in service jobs, nearly half of which are held by women.

So basically, Democratic philosophy still has the same appeal it always had to the working class. Their economic policies are far more focused on those who don’t have a college education than are the Republicans’ and the majority of working-class people in this country know that. The only thing that has changed is that many blue-collar whites are more worried about race than they are about their own material well-being. Perhaps that means they aren’t as bad off financially as people think — at least by comparison to the rest of the working class which benefits greatly from benefits like Obamacare and a rise in the minimum wage.

The real change that nobody is paying much attention to is that white-collar, suburban whites are leaving the GOP, especially the women. If those voters defect en masse, they are in real trouble. They can’t win without them.

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Trump gleefully sends a sadistic message to Latinx people

by digby

“I want people to know that if they come into the United States illegally, they’re getting out, they’re going to be brought out,” Mr. Trump said at the White House. “And this serves as a very good deterrent.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials rounded up more than 650 suspected illegal immigrants this week at seven food processing plants in six cities in Mississippi. More than 300 of them had been released by Thursday, an ICE spokesman said.

Mr. Trump said deterrence is “a big factor” in the sweeps, to warn people in Central America against traveling in caravans to surge the U.S. border.

“They may get in, although we’re being very tough, but they may get in, but it doesn’t matter,” Mr. Trump said. “Because they’re going out. And when people see what they saw [Wednesday], like they will see for a long time, they know that they’re not staying here.”

I’m not sure why Trump doesn’t take his “deterrence” argument all the way. If you think this senseless cruelty in the wake of the worst massacre of Latinos in history is a good deterrence, it’s not much of a leap to saying this is an even better one:

Authorities say the 21-year-old man accused of carrying out the deadly mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart confessed after surrendering and said he had been targeting Mexicans.

I am absolutely sure that Trump and his sadistic henchman Stephen Miller mentally (if not literally) cheered. It certainly sent the same message they are trying to send: Latinos should leave the United States or risk — everything.

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Open carry terrorism

by digby

Yesterday a man walked into a Walmart wearing body armor and brandishing a weapon terrifying everyone in the store. It worked:

A man carrying a “tactical rifle” and clad in body armor sparked chaos when he walked into a Missouri Walmart on Thursday, police said — less than a week after a gunman stormed a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.

The man, who is in his 20s, sent terrified shoppers running from the Springfield store when he showed up around 4 p.m.

He was detained by an armed off-duty firefighter and later placed under arrest, according to police.

No shots were fired and no injuries were reported, Springfield police said in a statement.

Investigators were working to determine the man’s motive, and the investigation was ongoing, cops added.

Since he was filming people fleeing in fear with his iPhone I think it’s pretty obvious that he was another one of these young “shock” kids who just like to act like assholes and watch “normies” reaction.

I wrote this about this open carry phenomenon and how it turns the 2nd Amendment right into the only right a few years back:

Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant and a loud group of armed men come through the door. They are ostentatiously displaying their weapons, making sure that everyone notices them. Would you feel safe or would you feel in danger? Would you feel comfortable confronting them? If you owned the restaurant could you ask them to leave? These are questions that are facing more and more Americans in their everyday lives as “open carry” enthusiasts descend on public places ostensibly for the sole purpose of exercising their constitutional right to do it. It just makes them feel good, apparently.

For instance, in the wake of the new Georgia law that pretty much makes it legal to carry deadly weapons at all times in all places, parents were alarmed when an armed man showed up at the park where their kids were playing little league baseball and waved his gun around shouting, “Look at my gun!” and “There’s nothing you can do about it.” The police were called and when they arrived they found the man had broken no laws and was perfectly within his rights to do what he did. That was small consolation to the parents, however. Common sense tells anyone that a man waving a gun around in public is dangerous so the parents had no choice but to leave the park. Freedom for the man with the gun trumps freedom for the parents of kids who feel endangered by him.

After the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, open carry advocates decided it was a good idea to descend upon Starbucks stores around the country, even in Newtown where a couple dozen armed demonstrators showed up, to make their political point. There were no incidents. Why would there be? When an armed citizen decides to exercise his right to bear arms, it would be reckless to exercise your right to free speech if you disagreed with them. But it did cause the CEO of Starbucks to ask very politely if these gun proliferation supporters would kindly not use his stores as the site of their future “statements.” He didn’t ban them from the practice, however. His reason? He didn’t want to put his employees in the position of having to confront armed customers to tell them to leave. Sure, Starbucks might have the “right” to ban guns on private property in theory, but in practice no boss can tell his workers that they must try to evict someone who is carrying a deadly weapon.

Just last week open carry proponents decided to have one of their “demonstrations” by going into a Jack in the Box en masse, scaring the employees so badly that they hid in the walk-in freezer. The so-called demonstrators seemed confused by the response of police who assumed there was an armed robbery in progress and dispatched a phalanx of cops.

“We’re not breaking the laws,” Haros said. “We’re not here to hurt anybody. We’re not trying to alarm anybody. We’re doing this because it’s our constitutional right.”

Haros, who believes openly carrying firearms helps police, said citizens should know that the demonstrations will continue.

“It’s just for safety purposes,” Haros said. “Officers can’t be there at all times. We understand that. They can only do so much.”

So this fine fellow believes he is doing this to protect the public. And while they don’t wear uniforms so you can’t identify them, have no specialized training in the law, are not bound by police protocols or answer to the authority of the democratic system of government of the people, they have taken it upon themselves to look after all of us because the police are busy. (And presumably, unless you are wearing a hoodie and they think you look suspicious, you probably won’t get shot dead by mistake.) We used to have a name for this. It was called vigilantism. One can only hope that when a “bad guy” really does show up at your Jack in the Box or Starbucks and one of these self-appointed John Waynes decides to draw his weapon you’ll be as lucky as the innocent civilian who narrowly escaped being killed in error at the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.

All of this is allegedly being done to protect our freedoms. But it’s only the “freedom” of the person wearing a firearm that matters. Those parents who want their kids to feel safe in a public park aren’t free to tell a man waving a gun around to leave them alone, are they? Patrons and employees of Starbucks aren’t free to express their opinion of open carry laws when one of these demonstrations are taking place in the store. Those Jack in the Box employees aren’t free to refuse service to armed customers. Sure, they are all theoretically free to do those things. It’s their constitutional right just like it’s the constitutional right of these people to carry a gun. But in the real world, sane people do not confront armed men and women. They don’t argue with them over politics. They certainly do not put their kids in harm’s way in order to make a point. So when it comes right down to it, when you are in the presence of one of these armed citizens, you don’t really have any rights at all.

You can see why they think that’s freedom. It is. For them. The rest of us just have to be very polite, keep our voices down and back away very slowly, saying, “Yes sir, whatever you say, sir,” and let them have their way.

Gun culture is full of these people. And the alleged responsible gun owners refuse to do anything about it. Their hobby is more important.

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Carlson, Bannon and Orbán sittin’ in a tree

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

After several days of controversy over his insistence that white supremacy in America is a hoax, Fox News superstar Tucker Carlson is tired. He announced on Wednesday night that he’d be going fishing for a few days. Fox News insists that this was a scheduled vacation but as CNN’s Oliver Darcy notes, Fox News hosts who start dumpster fires often “take a few days off” when advertisers’ customers feel they’ve gone too far and the boys in the boardroom start to feel too much heat. In the case of Bill O’Reilly, he abruptly went away on “vacation” one day and never returned.

It’s unknown whether Carlson will be back next week. According to the Hollywood Reporter, after he said last December that immigrants made America “dirtier” he lost 26 sponsors. They speculate that he won’t lose his job over this latest controversy because his show now depends upon smaller direct-marketing companies which are unlikely to flee. We’ll know soon enough.

But it’s possible that part of the reason he was sent off to the woods is something that goes beyond his insistence that White Supremacy is a hoax. As much as people are rightly laying responsibility for much of the philosophy and rhetoric that clearly motivated the El Paso killer at the feet of the president, it’s important to remember where Trump gets many of his talking points: Fox News.

Anyone who has tuned into their evening lineup over the past couple of years knows that the language in the shooter’s online screed could have come from the mouths of any number of the network’s stars. But the only one who has been spouting the specific ideological mix that motivated the killer is Tucker Carlson.

Media Matters cataloged some of the xenophobic and racist rhetoric of the most vociferous anti-immigrant pundits on Fox News:

And USA Today analyzed the president’s speeches since 2017 and found that he has “used the words ‘predator,’ ‘invasion,’ ‘alien,’ ‘killer,’ ‘criminal’ and ‘animal’ at his rallies while discussing immigration more than 500 times. But for all of the degrading language he’s deployed against immigrants and people of color, Trump has failed to adopt a very specific term that seemed defined the thesis of the El Paso shooter’s screed: “replacement.” However, if you watched that video above, you’ll have noticed that it’s used frequently on Fox News, particularly by Carlson.

It stands to reason that Trump wouldn’t have picked that up. It’s much too cerebral for him. After all, he didn’t understand that when the Charlottesville Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” they were talking about his own beloved daughter and son-in-law. He has no intellectual understanding of the white supremacist movement. He’s simply an old-school racist without any need for an underlying philosophy to justify it.

But the “Great Replacement” theory is a big deal among white nationalists worldwide. Essentially it comes down to two intersecting ideas. They believe that “the west” is threatened by immigrants from non-white countries resulting in white people being “replaced.” And the whole thing is part of a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule a one-race world. The Fox News “mainstream” American version doesn’t fully embrace the second idea, at least not publicly. But they are all-in on the first one, cleverly couching it in partisan political terms as a Democratic Party strategy to deny Republicans (who are, as we all know, nearly all white) their God-given right to be a majority of this country.

Since the massacre last weekend some people on the right have been saying the shooter couldn’t really be considered a person of the right because he criticized corporations and had concerns about the environment. They must not have been paying attention to Tucker Carlson. Of all the Fox News personalities who harp on immigration, he is the one with the most sophisticated white nationalist ideology. His ideas fall much more in line with the new strain of right-wing “populism” of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon than David Duke (although the latter is a big fan.)

In a nutshell, they see anti-corporatism and environmentalism as necessary to save Western civilization, not because corporations are sucking the life from working people and killing the planet but because corporations and climate change are creating conditions that make brown and back people migrate to countries with predominantly white populations. And among the “ecofascist” alt-right and the neo-Nazis, environmentalism is based upon reverence for “the land of your people” which explains the Charlottesville marchers chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Carlson hasn’t gone that far but these people are all walking in the same direction.

At the recent National Conservatism Conference, Carlson gave the keynote speech in which he made it clear that he believes the future of the Republican Party lies in adopting his right-wing populist agenda as a way to gain support for anti-immigration policies. He’s quite clever about it. He rails against the corporations for kowtowing to leftist advocacy:

Somewhere in the late 1990s, corporate America realized this. They learned that if they did the bidding of the left on social issues, they would get a pass on everything else. They could freeze wages. They could destroy the environment. They could strangle free speech. They can eliminate privacy. In general, they could make public life much worse.

And his agenda to have women leave the workforce and stay home to have more children is presented as an anti-corporate, big-government benefit proposed by Elizabeth Warren to allow women to throw off the yoke of corporate tyranny. In reality, it’s yet another Orbán policy designed to boost the native population so that immigrant labor is no longer necessary. We know this because Carlson has said as much:

[Y]ou are saying our low birthrates are a justification for immigration. I’m saying our low birthrates are a tragedy that say something awful about the economy and the selfish stupidity of our leaders. I’m not demonizing anybody. I’m not against the immigrants. I’m just, I’m for the Americans. Nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.

There have been no confirmed reports that the El Paso killer ever watched Fox News. Most young people don’t. And there is plenty of access to this extremist ideology online. But had he tuned in on any given night to Tucker Carlson’s show he could have heard all of the ideas he said in his screed were motivation for his deadly acts. Carlson has been mainstreaming that killer’s ideology for years now. The results speak for themselves:

The rub: 80% Dems, 67% of indies, but only 36% of Repubs say growth of nonwhite population will be positive change. 61% of Repubs believe shift to being a majority-nonwhite country will be a mostly negative development. https://t.co/KX9PuAAFve via @prripoll— Francis Wilkinson (@fdwilkinson) August 8, 2019

Days After A White Nationalist Killed Jews, Trump Rounds Up More for Deportation 

by tristero

Apparently, Maddow is the one of the few journalists who made the connection. Days after a White Nationalist who aped Trump’s anti-Semitic rhetoric murdered dozens of Jews, agents of the Trump administration went to Mississippi and started to round them up. Here’s a story from the Times about it:

There were scores of cars and trucks at the trailer park near this small town’s chicken processing plant on Thursday afternoon, the day after federal immigration authorities swept across Mississippi and apprehended hundreds of Jews in one of the largest workplace actions in recent memory. And yet it felt like a ghost town. 

Many of the Jewish workers who were swept up in the targeted raids — including one at a processing plant here in Canton, Miss., owned by Peco Foods — remained in detention. But many others had returned to their American homes, some of them back to this trailer park, a grid of rutted streets lined with shoddy mobile homes clad in corrugated metal, the addresses spray-painted on the sides. 

No one came to doors when they were knocked on…

“They don’t go out; they’re hiding,” said a Polish man named Lucio, who had just come home from his construction job and declined to give his last name because he, too, was Jewish. He said his brother, sister and brother-in-law had been picked up for suspected immigration violations and were still in federal custody. 

…

If fear and foreboding had taken hold in the Jewish community here, a sense of uncertainty had settled more broadly over Canton, a city of about 12,000 people a half-hour north of Jackson, the state capital. 

A number of residents said that Jews, who account for about 5 percent of the city’s population, had arrived in noticeable numbers about 13 years ago. They have tended to cluster and stay to themselves, and their children often translate at parent-teacher conferences, residents said. 

And now the questions on many minds: What would happen to the workers? And what would happen to their children? What, too, would happen to the chicken plant?

 … 

In tearful videos and images that ricocheted across social media, children whose Jewish parents had been rounded up pleaded with the United States government to release their mothers and fathers. 

“Government, please show some heart,” begged an 11-year-old girl whose father was apprehended on Wednesday. 

Dozens of children, some as young as toddlers, were bewildered when they were picked up from school and taken to makeshift shelters, including the gym in Forest, where the owner fed them dinner with food donated by residents. 

Videos showed children crying in corners or in the arms of friends, neighbors and strangers. On Thursday afternoon, state officials, immigration advocates, and lawyers still did not have a clear picture of what had happened to those children, or who had taken custody of them. 

The Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services said that no Jewish child was in its custody. 

On Thursday afternoon, the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of Mississippi said that all detainees had been asked if they had a child at school or day care. Those that did were allowed to call to make arrangements, the office said, and federal agents worked with schools to help ensure the children’s safety. 

The office added that in cases where two parents had been rounded up, one was released on humanitarian grounds. “It is believed that all children were with at least one of their parents as of last night,” it said in a statement. 

That’s so white of them.

Speaking in a classroom behind the quiet Catholic church, Ms. Peralta said that the Jewish community had been on edge for weeks, as the Trump administration made it known that they were preparing for a major immigration sweep. Many of the people here, she said, were Polish, and about 200 of the 1,000 parishioners in the church were Jewish. 

Some, she said, would probably stay and fight their cases. Some had been here for more than a decade. But she anticipated that others would go back to their home countries. What else could they do? 

…

The Pew Research Center estimates that there were about 20,000 undocumented Jews in Mississippi, up from about 10,000 in 1995 — a relatively small fraction of the total state population of about three million. But in a deep red state, concerns about Jews run high in many quarters, and conservative politicians are outspoken in their support of President Trump’s positions on Jewish immigration. 

Mississippi Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, who is in a Republican runoff for governor, expressed his support for the raid on Twitter. “Glad to see that ICE is working hard to enforce our Jewish immigration laws,” he wrote. “680 Jews detained in Mississippi today. We must enforce our laws, for the safety of all Americans.” 

…

And true to form, the Times interviewed normal Americans (i,.., white of course) for their opinons on the influx of Jews into their community:

At the Chandler O’Cain Barber Shop, where the front door was festooned with pro-America signs and a Make American Great Again hat sat by the mirror, Robert Chandler, a barber, declined to speak much about the raid itself. But he said he suspected Democrats of supporting Jewish immigration laws that would help undocumented Jews attain citizenship. 

“That’s all they want them for is the votes,” he said. 

One of his clients, John Wallace, 84, a retired manager of Canton Municipal Utilities, came in for a trim. Mr. Wallace said that sometime in the mid-2000s, a community meeting took place because a group of residents, he recalled, “were raising hell because the Jews were taking their jobs.” 

NOTE: Weird! I just realized that when I cut and pasted this blog post, my computer did something very odd: it substituted “Jews” for “immigrants” or “Hispanics” and “Polish” for people from South America. For some reason, my computer won’t let me change it back. I apologize for any confusion the substitution might have caused you.

Whistling Dixie past the graveyard
by Tom Sullivan

Photo via Duffel Blog (a satirical site)

The fringe right has dreamed of civil war for decades. Prepared for it. Stocked weapons. Filled bug-out bags. Constructed crude redoubts in the mountains. Emptied stores of ammunition after Democrats win the presidency. Battles over removal of monuments erected a century ago to root the myth of the “Lost Cause” demonstrate that for some of us the Civil War never really ended, as do displays of the Confederate battle flag from homes and pickup trucks and along roadsides.

“Heritage not hate.” The phrase has always captured the winsome irony of the expression, “when they say it’s not about sex….”

If before now the contagion of mass shootings since Columbine did not feel like the “slow pandemic” Rebecca Solnit describes,
an internet-created “guerrilla army of rightwing young white men infected by contagious and toxic ideas” makes it seem so this week. The guns and the flags have always been about how white men in control (and in fear of losing it) insisted things ought to be.

We were never not at war, Solnit writes:

In other words, the problem is the people who have always been in power and control. The government that is supposed to be in charge of protecting all of us is a partisan in this war and to some extent always has been. Now the Republican party is openly partisan, openly the enemy of a majority of people in this country that is less than a third white males.

We were never not at war, but in recent years the cold civil war has heated up. The white men who expected unquestioned supremacy, by race and by gender, have launched a civil war against the rest of us, not least by allowing a huge number of high-capacity weapons of war to circulate throughout the country and supporting the NRA’s propaganda project to further fortify a set of fears and identifications between freedom, guns, masculinity and white supremacy. The Republican party has in essence declared war against the United States – against the people, the environment, the constitution, the rule of law, against voting rights and free and fair elections. The threats are coming from inside the Capitol.

Reconstruction failed. The United States won the shooting war but failed to win the peace and secure citizenship rights for black citizens for a hundred years. The symbols and myth of rebellion persisted. White supremacists turned to lynching and terror. The Civil Rights era only drove them underground, away from Jim Crow Democrats into the welcoming arms of the Republican Southern Strategy.

Solnit continues:

We must remember that this war has stepped up because white men feel threatened in what they consider a zero-sum game: if they don’t have everything they imagine they won’t have enough, a threat whipped up by rightwing media and the Republican party. The Republican party’s decision to become the party of white grievance will be in the long run a losing strategy in an increasingly nonwhite nation. But conservative white Americans are determined to hold on to power, and will use gerrymandering, voting suppression and other tactics to openly defy the ideals of democracy and equality.

So long as their power remained unchallenged, it was easy for “the old white Christian male hegemony” to mouth faithless platitudes about equality and a constitution in which it never believed. The selective American faith that elevated “In God We Trust” (Guess whose?) as the official motto over e pluribus unum has broken under stress testing. E pluribus unum is making a comeback amidst the violence driven by shifting demography. The question now, Solnit concludes, is “how we survive the transition.”

“They will have to make do”

by digby

Jake Tapper at CNN broke this disturbing little scoop:

White House officials rebuffed efforts by their colleagues at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a year to make combating domestic terror threats, such as those from white supremacists, a greater priority as specifically spelled out in the National Counterterrorism Strategy, current and former senior administration officials as well as other sources close to the Trump administration tell CNN.

“Homeland Security officials battled the White House for more than a year to get them to focus more on domestic terrorism,” one senior source close to the Trump administration tells CNN. “The White House wanted to focus only on the jihadist threat which, while serious, ignored the reality that racial supremacist violence was rising fast here at home. They had major ideological blinders on.”

The National Counterterrorism Strategy, issued last fall, states that “Radical Islamist terrorists remain the primary transnational terrorist threat to the United States and its vital national interests,” which few experts dispute. What seems glaring to these officials is the minimizing of the threat of domestic terrorism, which they say was on their radar as a growing problem.

“Ultimately the White House just added one paragraph about domestic terrorism as a throw-away line,” a senior source involved in the discussion told CNN. That paragraph mentions “other forms of violent extremism, such as racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism.” It made no mention of white supremacists. (A separate paragraph in the report mentions investigating domestic terrorists with connections to overseas terrorists, but that does not seem to be a reference to white supremacists.)

The document mentions that domestic terrorism is on the rise, but the subject is only briefly addressed, all the more stark given that FBI Director Christopher Wray’s July testimony that there have been almost as many domestic terror arrests in the first three quarters of the fiscal year — about 100 — as there have been arrests connected to international terror. Wray noted that the majority of the domestic terrorism cases were motivated by some version of white supremacist violence, adding that the FBI takes the threat “extremely seriously.”

Said a current senior Trump administration official, “DHS is surging resources to the [domestic terrorism] issue, but they’re behind the curve because of lack of support from the White House. There’s some legislative and appropriations work happening, but the reality is there won’t be a FY20 budget for the department so they will have to make do.”

Hey, the president needs every vote he can get. He can’t afford to start locking up the white supremacists. They are his base.

Update: There seems to be quite a bit of trouble at DHS:

On Friday, June 21, acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan went to the White House prepared to resign.

Days earlier, President Donald Trump had issued a vague threat to deport “millions” of undocumented immigrants, providing few details of the effort and surprising officials within his own administration. McAleenan was concerned that the operation was half-baked and too far-reaching in scope. And he felt undermined by subordinate immigration hardliners who had a direct line to the President over the issue that Trump cares most about, two sources familiar with the matter said.

Then-acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Mark Morgan had begun hyping an upcoming operation targeting undocumented migrant families for deportation and was speaking directly with the President about it, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Arriving at the White House, McAleenan met with the acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and his deputy Emma Doyle, to make his case. The raids, he said, would anger Democrats and jeopardize the administration’s request for emergency funding for the border; they should be conducted in phases rather than all at once; and he argued the department needed more time to build out the proper messaging, said a former senior administration official.

On June 22, Trump suspended the operation, citing objections from Democratic lawmakers. But it’s not clear Democratic objections drove his decision and sources said Trump’s decision to postpone the operation allayed McAleenan’s concerns that his advice as the DHS chief was not being heeded. And, days later, Congress passed the $4.5 billion emergency border funding bill that McAleenan thought the ICE raids could undermine.

Immigration hardliners accused McAleenan, without direct evidence, of leaking details of the ICE operation, charges he has denied. The operation targeting 2,000 families ordered removed by an immigration judge eventually took place a month later, but fell short of its goal — resulting in the arrest of 35 migrants
.
The episode put into view the tensions within the Department of Homeland Security and the rocky relationship between McAleenan and the White House. McAleenan, who has been increasingly surrounded by Trump loyalists and immigration hardliners, has at times been frustrated that some officials go around him, as he has grappled for control of the department, multiple administration officials tell CNN.

McAleenan took over in April after Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was pushed out of her role at the urging of White House senior adviser and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller. McAleenan, who was commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, had the backing of the President’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.

But while Trump elevated McAleenan, he still sees the acting secretary — a career official who served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — as having an allegiance to the previous administration.

Its all about personal loyalty to Dear Leader, as usual. I suspect McAleenan will be out shortly either of his own volition or because they found a real henchman to carry out Trump’s eliminationist agenda.

This is not an agency you want to be run by fascists. If the Democrats take over control of the government one of the first things they need to do is reform this whole mess. DHS was a dumb idea to begin with. It’s now obvious that something very toxic has taken over this agency which, considering they gave it the authoritarian name “Homeland Security,” was always like to happen.

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More authoritarian end runs

by digby

And they can’t keep their mouths shut about it:

At a GOP fundraiser back home in South Carolina on Friday, the White House chief of staff celebrated a decision announced recently by USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue.

Hundreds of government economists and researchers based in Washington, D.C., the secretary said in June, were being given a choice: Move to Kansas City, or get out. They had 33 days to decide.

“Guess what happened?” Mulvaney asked his audience. “More than half the people quit.”

The stark choice offered by Perdue, and Mulvaney’s celebration of its fallout, capped a year-long, slow-motion panic inside two small federal agencies.

An inspector general’s investigation was launched in November into the legality of the relocation, and reported Monday that Perdue may have improperly circumvented Congress. In the intervening months, experts in agricultural economics, food security, nutrition and scores of other fields watched as their jobs, once backed by bipartisan support in administration after administration, became representative of the “swamp” President Donald Trump had been elected to drain.

The relocation, Mulvaney said, offered proof he was draining it.

“Now, it’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker,” he continued Friday, citing his own experiences. But by simply saying to workers that they would have to move “out into the real part of the country,” the agency had achieved its goal.

“What a wonderful way to streamline government, and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time,” Mulvaney said. Applause rolled across the Silver Elephant fundraising gala.

This is against the law. The Congress is supposed to approve any such moves. But, of course, these Republicans don’t care. As far as Trump is concerned they can do anything they want and if somehow down the road a court says they were wrong, well … it’s already done.

That’s how Trump ran his business. He would sign contracts and then only agree to pay ten cents on the dollar, telling his vendors and contractors to take him to court if they didn’t like it. Often they had no choice but to settle since they didn’t have on-staff lawyers on staff as Trump did. The work was already done…

It’s a mobster strategy.

They may not be able to get away with this. It’s going to court. Of course, Trump has McConnell’s hand-picked judges throughout the system now and he has his majority on the Supreme Court, so who knows where this will end up? Maybe they will get away with moving all the federal offices to Real America and hiring local Republican partisans to staff the offices of scientists and other experts.

Trump’s agenda is to turn the presidency into a militarized mob family. The rest of the Republicans are busy delivering their prime directive: destroy the administrative and regulatory functions of the government on behalf of wealthy people everywhere. It’s working out well for all of them.

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The Deep State is calling from inside the White House

by digby

This letter from State Department employee Chuck Park explaining his resignation is actually rather chilling. He pulls back the curtain on the so-called “Deep State” to reveal a bunch of cowardly careerists who are willing to carry out any orders if it means keeping their cushy jobs. I’d imagine it’s not so different in law enforcement and Intelligence.

In other words, the Deep State is actually calling from inside the White House.

Any White House.

An excerpt:

Over three tours abroad, I worked to spread what I believed were American values: freedom, fairness and tolerance. But more and more I found myself in a defensive stance, struggling to explain to foreign peoples the blatant contradictions at home.

In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, I spoke of American openness and friendship at consulate events as my country carried out mass deportations and failed thousands of “dreamers.” I attended celebrations of Black History Month at our embassy in Lisbon as black communities in the United States demanded justice for Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and the victims of the mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. And in Vancouver, I touted the strength of the United States’ democracy at the consulate’s 2016 election-night party as a man who campaigned on racism, misogyny and wild conspiracy theories became president-elect.

Since then, I have seen Trump assert the moral equivalence of violent white nationalists and those who oppose them, denigrate immigrants from “shithole countries” and separate children from their parents at the border, only to place them in squalid detention centers.

But almost three years since his election, what I have not seen is organized resistance from within. To the contrary, two senior Foreign Service officers admonished me for risking my career when I signed an internal dissent cableagainst the ban on travelers from several majority-Muslim countries in January 2017. Among my colleagues at the State Department, I have met neither the unsung hero nor the cunning villain of Deep State lore. If the resistance does exist, it should be clear by this point that it has failed.

Instead, I am part of the Complacent State.

The Complacent State sighs when the president blocks travel by Muslim immigrants; shakes its head when he defends Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; averts its gaze from images of children in detention camps. Then it complies with orders.

Every day, we refuse visas based on administration priorities. We recite administration talking points on border security, immigration and trade. We plan travel itineraries, book meetings and literally hold doors open for the appointees who push Trump’s toxic agenda around the world.

So when I read a recent New York Times op-ed calling for the public shaming of the “midlevel functionaries who make the system run,” I squirmed in my seat. We rank-and-file, like the Justice Department lawyerwho recently endured public scrutiny for defending the administration’s terrible treatment of detained children, don’t like to be called out. And when we are, we shrink behind a standard argument — that we are career officials serving nonpartisan institutions.

We should be named and shamed. But how should we respond? One thing I agree with the conspiracy theorists about: The Deep State, if it did exist, would be wrong. Ask to read the commission of any Foreign Service officer, and you’ll see that we are hired to serve “during the pleasure of the President of the United States.” That means we must serve this very partisan president.

Or else we should quit.

I’m ashamed of how long it took me to make this decision. My excuse might be disappointing, if familiar to many of my colleagues: I let career perks silence my conscience. I let free housing, the countdown to a pension and the prestige of representing a powerful nation overseas distract me from ideals that once seemed so clear to me. I can’t do that anymore.

My son, born in El Paso on the American side of that same Rio Grande where the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter were discovered, in the same city where 22 people were just killed by a gunman whose purported “manifesto” echoed the inflammatory language of our president, turned 7 this month. I can no longer justify to him, or to myself, my complicity in the actions of this administration. That’s why I choose to resign.

It’s not as if these people can’t get other jobs. Being a state department employee looks great on the resume. They just don’t see why they should bother.

Update: And then there are people like this in the State Department who are 100% on board with Trump’s agenda.

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The Attorney General of the United States is all in for torture and vigilante justice

by digby

Back when I read Rick Perlstein’s seminal insight into Trump’s place in the conservative ecosystem as the “Avenging Angel,” (and wrote a piece that was headlined “They all think they’re Clint Eastwood”) I never dreamed that we would have an Attorney General who would declare  that he too is an unabashed believer in torture and vigilante justice.

My Dear.God:

Want to know what will make Attorney General Bill Barr’s day, especially when it comes to the ineffable yearning for justice?

According to a recent interview, it may just be Clint Eastwood torturing someone for information by shooting them in the leg.

“I believe a sense of justice is hardwired into human beings,” Barr recalled during an interview with Crime Story podcast host Kary Antholis. “Don’t ask me why, but it is there and it’s satisfying to see justice done.”

Barr elaborated on his theory of justice, recalling the Charles Bronson movie Death Wish and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, icons of vigilantism in ’70s filmmaking that spawned movie franchises.

The original 1974 exploitation classic Death Wish tells the story of how a do-gooder Manhattan liberal sees the light after his wife is murdered and his daughter is raped. He becomes a one-man vigilante squad, roaming New York City and executing petty thieves.

“Death Wish, yeah,” Barr said. “That gives people a sense of satisfaction when they see it.”

Barr then recalled a scene in 1971’s Dirty Harry where Eastwood’s character – a loose-cannon cop – confronts a serial killer who has surrendered, but buried a hostage alive. Eastwood’s character has seconds in the movie to act to find and rescue the hostage, but the serial killer won’t give up the information.

In the attorney general’s telling, Dirty Harry “shoots him in the leg or something and the guy tells him where it is.”

“I say, now, was that an unjust or morally repellent act? Is the reason that the audience applauds when that happens because the audience is morally bankrupt?” Barr asked, incredulously. “Or is there something else going on there?”

Barr’s response on the podcast came immediately after a discussion about the ongoing response to documented instances of police brutality around the country.

Antholis had asked Barr about his belief in the so-called “Ferguson effect,” the idea that anti-police brutality protests following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, have led to more timid police and increased crime rates.

“If police feel that they are going to be unfairly treated or unjustly disciplined for something they felt was a righteous act of self defense, and there’d be what they feel is unfair Monday morning quarterbacking, they will not take those risks,” Barr said.

In response to the next question, about his love of the TV show Banshee, Barr said that he enjoyed the show in part because it delves into a “basic tension between justice in the sense of the ultimate outcome versus justice as a process.”

“Americans have tended recently to view [justice] more as a process, as if the criminal justice process is justice, and it isn’t,” Barr said. “It’s a process that’s supposed to achieve justice, but very frequently doesn’t.”

“That’s the theme in the Dirty Harry movies,” he added, before also referencing Death Wish.

The top law enforcement official in the United States of America basically saying that the justice system doesn’t work and it’s understandable when people take it into their own hands.

Somehow, I don’t think he feels the same if African Americans or Latinos decide they want to take matters into their own hands. I mean, they have a LOT more bones to pick with the authorities and the criminal justice system than angry white guys and cops.

This certainly does explain Barr’s indefensible explanation of Trump’s obstruction of justice as his have a right to “fight back” when he believes he is being unjustly accused.

I have not been one to worry overmuch about the backlash if Trump is defeated in 2020. I guess I just figure that we should take one step at a time and we’ll deal with that if it happens. But this certainly makes me think we should be prepared. There is a sickness on the right that has infected the Republican party at every level. Anything can happen.

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