Former senior DHS official, quoted in “Unfettered and Unaccountable: How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force,” by J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam for ProPublica
Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the official rattled off scenes that once would’ve triggered investigations: “Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they’re showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can’t access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there’s a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.”
The former official paused. “We’re at an inflection point in history right now and it’s frightening.”
Jack Dickinson, “An Interview With the Portland Chicken”
There’s been a nice overall whimsy that has shown up. The frog is amazing. We had a bunch of other inflatable people here last night, too. I saw people playing Twister the other day.
What they rely on is fear. So by coming out in an absurdist manner, it speaks to them, to some extent, that we’re actually not that afraid.
It also dismantles their narrative a little bit. When they try to describe this situation as “war-torn,” it becomes much harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying [Secretary] Kristi Noem is up on the balcony staring over the Antifa Army and it’s, like, eight journalists and five protesters and one of them is in a chicken suit.
Joel Bowman, “Why don’t white evangelicals listen to Black Christians?”
White supremacy is the system that sustains and perpetuates racist attitudes, practices and policies. Within the system of white supremacy, it is assumed the racialized construct of “whiteness” should be centered and privileged.
In her book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, Anthea Butler says: “When some evangelicals say they don’t see color, they mean it. They see whiteness — no color but the dominant one.”
Because many white evangelicals have consciously or unconsciously bought into the system of white supremacy, they often approach conversations with Black Christians lacking “cultural humility.”
Many white evangelicals see their subculture and faith tradition as the norm or standard for “true” Christianity. They believe themselves to be the “gatekeepers of the faith.” Therefore, they are suspicious of any version of Christianity that departs from their own.
Jill Filipovic, “The GOP’s Nazi Youth”
It is hard to overstate how much Trump and the MAGA movement have coarsened American discourse, gutted American morality, and generally turned our country into an uglier, less decent place. More than anything else, this is an administration of impunity: Personal impunity for Trump and his family, but also impunity for those who support him to behave in the vilest of ways with no consequences — including seeing no consequences for using their positions to target their political enemies, and to kneecap any political opposition to their cause. Young conservatives who support Trump and the MAGA movement do so because of this culture of impunity, not in spite of it. This is a movement that revels in cruelty and glorifies hurting people — in laughing at children who are sobbing because their parents were taken away by ICE, laughing at people who die thanks to USAID cuts. Online, young conservatives now relish how far they can go. The president, after all, invited one of the country’s most notorious white supremacist Holocaust-denying Nazi sympathizers to dinner. He is reportedly considering revamping the refugee resettlement program to give preference to white people.
Being “edgy” by being super racist, misogynist, and antisemitic is standard now among young Republicans. That’s not just because they’re young and dumb. It’s because they’re taking their cues from their elders.
W.E.B. Du Bois, in Dusk of Dawn (1940)
[World War I] was preceded by a spy scare — a national psychosis of fear that German intrigue would accomplish among Negroes that disloyalty and urge toward sabotage which their situation and treatment would certainly justify. It was no so much that this fear had any real support in fact; it was rather that it had every justification in reason. It was succeeded by witch-hunting — feverish endeavor to find out who dared to think differently from the increasingly major thought of the nation. Not only did Germans suffer and other foreigners, but Negroes were especially suspected. Suspicious state and Federal agents invaded even the offices of the Crisis and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and asked searching questions: “Just what, after all, were our objects and activities?” I took great satisfaction in being able to sit back in my chair and answer blandly, “We are seeking to have the Constitution of the United States thoroughly and completely enforced.” It took some ingenuity, even for Southerners, to make treason out of that.
Eugene McCarraher, “Enchanted Capitalism”
When I get business students in my college classes, I’ll say, “Look, you guys in standard economics, you have this notion called effective demand, right?” They’ll say, “Yes.” I say, “Effective demand says that if I’m thirsty, but I don’t have any money to pay for, say, a bottle of water, my thirst, as far as the market is concerned, does not exist. Am I right?” And they’ll say, “Yeah, that’s true. Your thirst has no effective demand.”
Now, you and I both know that I’m still thirsty even if I can’t afford to quench it. But in the eyes of the market, my thirst is nonexistent. And, as I point out to my students, that economic fact is also a moral statement, an ontological assertion. The market is an ontology, a way of deciding not only what is right and wrong, but what is real and what is unreal. And that’s exactly the kind of power we used to attribute to God.
In the past, humans generally believed that the metaphysical structure of the world was determined by God. In a capitalist society, money plays that role: without money, you, or at least your needs as a human being, don’t exist.
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