Fear is imposed by people who are fearful themselves

 

There are a lot of complaints from Amazon customers about their “prime” drivers. Of course Amazon drivers "work" too hard; I have seen drivers "one stop away," and then suddenly are a "few more stops away" with the GPS showing them sitting in some out of the way place for an hour or two. A few times I decided to see what the driver was doing, and sometimes I’d find them just sitting in the van not doing anything in particular…

 

…and a couple times I've seen drivers taking a leisurely stroll carrying one package a couple blocks one way and a couple back:

 

I think Amazon is so desperate that they (or their contractors)  just hire anyone they can to do the job and overlook laziness and incompetence. Of course drivers for other carriers also don’t appear to be too fearful of losing their jobs just because they anger customers with late deliveries because the package “out for delivery” wasn’t even loaded on the truck…

 

…which some drivers like this one appear to believe that angering customers is "amusing." 

Meanwhile as I frequently see people in the evening selling “pharmaceutical” goods at “popular prices” right outside the building I work in on Seattle’s infamous Third Avenue, where shootings and knifings “occasionally” occur, you get the idea that these “entrepreneurs” are unconcerned (let alone “fearful”) of police interfering with their business:

 

But “fear” is a real thing for others, such as those being targeted by ICE. Isn’t it “interesting” that we are told that all these people being detained and deported are “dangerous criminals” and terroristic gang members, yet the only people you see actually acting like “dangerous criminals” and “terroristic gang members” are ICE agents and their collaborators, like local law enforcement and IRS agents taking a (long) break from investigating multi-million dollar tax and financial fraud to aid ICE by identifying “illegals” who are working and paying taxes, such as the 17 arrested at Eagle Beverages in Kent, which  manufactures  syrups, teas, cider, and (egad) straws.

This “poll”…

…provided by KOMO News suggests why unhelpful  people answering phones at cut rate wages,  with faked work visas who work for Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle or some other local tech firm have much less to fear from ICE storm-troopers invading their places of occupation than roofers or food processors. Such targeted violence against Hispanics has become “accepted” as “normal” under the Trump administration, and as a paper in the MIT scholarly publication Dædalus observes that while Trump’s racialization of immigration that desperately tries to convince white Afrikaners to “self-immigrate” to this country with a fast-track to citizenship,

The deportation regime in the United States has been racialized since its inception, but racialization solidified and expanded under Trump. Furthermore, in the absence of undocumented migration from Mexico, and in light of increased refugee migration from Latin America, racialized illegality applies to all immigrants from Latin America, and to families and children legally seeking asylum from home-country conditions wrought by U.S. imperialism and intervention. This has implications for new immigrants and their children, regardless of national origin or legal status, because the social and economic consequences of racialized illegality will shape how they are viewed and treated by others in the Trump era and beyond: as racialized citizens or as racial/colonial subjects.

But while the “fear” of violent ICE thuggery used to be solely the “problem” of Hispanic immigrants, for people who think what Trump is doing now is anything “new” there is a 2019 New York Times story reporting that…

The jump in the number of detained immigrants in 2019 was a direct result of arrests of people with no criminal records. ‘ICE makes it sound like they are snatching wanted felons off the streets when it conducts these operations,’ said Austin C. Kocher, a geographer at Syracuse University who analyzes immigration enforcement data. ‘We don’t get a full picture. They downplay the large numbers of people detained and deported who committed minor offenses, usually a long time ago, or who had no crime on record.’

When people have an indifferent view on the human life of certain “others,” "fear" is something not so much acted upon, but is acted out, and the cruelty of their actions is the "point." Take for example the perpetration of the Hamilton Avenue massacre in Indianapolis in 2006 when anti-Hispanic hysteria was being used by Republicans as a “fear” tactic to avoid losing Congress; in that “incident,” four children were shot “execution style” by two black perpetrators looking for “money and drugs” according to police.  Then there was the brutal beating and murder of Luis Ramirez in Shenandoah, PA in 2008 by those “respectable” members of the high school football team who shouted obscenities at Ramirez, and as CBS News reported at the time “they beat him up with a piece of metal called a ‘fist pack,’ and threw punches and kicks to his head:

 

CBS reporters in Shenandoah were “stunned” by the racism against Hispanics they heard, where white residents in a town that had seen its coal mining occupations dry-up, and took to blaming migrants who worked in the outlying farm country for their problems:

“If that happened to a white person, every church in this goddamn fucking town wouldn’t do a goddamn thing about it,” said one kid while pounding his fist to cheers from a surrounding group. “Just because they’re fucking border-jumpers and came over here.” “I can’t say it without sounding racist,” said another teenager. “I can’t say, you know, the Mexicans came here and now there’s problems.” “But is that how you feel?” asked Doane (a reporter). “Yeah … Obviously I’ve been here my whole life and I’ve never had a problem. Now there’s problems,” he responded.

While CNN was interviewing one local woman who decried the treatment of Hispanics in Shenandoah, another one cut in to say “Get your story straight before you go babbling anything. It wasn’t a racial crime. If he wasn’t here illegally, I think it wouldn’t have happened.” Of course the “problem” is the “assumption” that Hispanics in this country are all “illegal”; in fact 80 percent are U.S. citizens. There shouldn't be they hypocrisy that racial animus isn't at play, and that includes racial animus in determining who is allowed to immigrate or be issued work visas “legally.”

Still, everything is “relative,” and there was once a time it was more “talk” before ICE was even a “concept.” The most “popular” television show that featured a Hispanic actor was the comedy sitcom Chico and the Man. Why was it popular (at least initially) than other shows that featured Hispanic actors—even film stars like Anthony Quinn in the (very) short-lived drama The Man and the City—was because you heard the curmudgeon garage owner, played by Jack Albertson, say the following to Freddy Prinze’s Chico:

 

“Mexicans knew their place—in Mexico.”

 “If their car breaks down, they just steal another one.”

 “Get out of here and take your flies with you.”

 “Everybody knows you people are lazy.”

“Don’t think, you haven’t got the equipment.”

After Chico leaves, “The Man” starts spraying the air with insecticide.

 

Devalued as human beings, we see in 2009 Raul Flores and his nine-year-old daughter Brisenia...

 

…were murdered in their home in Arizona by Shawna Forde, who had once run for a Everett, WA city council seat…

 

…and two confederates. Forde was the leader of a racist vigilante group called the Minutemen American Defense. Forde, of course, assumed that because they were “Mexicans” they must have had drugs and money in their house, which Forde intended to steal to finance her group’s activities. Flores’ wife was shot three times, but feigned death and reported the shooting after the shooters left after finding neither money nor drugs. 

Forde has been sitting on Arizona’s death row since 2011; she was put there by a jury that “agonized” about it, until one juror admitted that an image of the girl’s face half blown-off “convinced” them that she belonged there. Of course there is the more recent case of the kidnapping, rape and murder of 13-year-old Hania Noeila Aguilar in North Carolina by a "real American":

 

Funny how such examples of “real Americans” perpetrating what the Trump administration keeps parading in order to justify more violence against them, even against U.S. citizen children. No one should be fooled: targeting immigrants with U.S. citizen children is one of arch-racist, white nationalist Stephen Miller’s ideas to get around the birthright citizenship issue. 

By the way, Miller being Jewish poses an interesting question: with all this talk about “anti-Semitism” by this hypocritical administration that just rings “false,” why isn’t that part of the anti-DEI equation since it is clearly meant to “gaslight” other groups? Oh, I forgot: they are “white” when useful to racist and far-right causes.

Putting “fear” into people in order to force them to accept a violent policy against a group selected to be the “fall guy” for every ill this country faces isn’t new; it is just being magnified to beyond reason by the current administration.  There was a time when it might have been a “little” true that Trump was more a joke than an actual menace in his first term, but that was when there were all those “professionals” trying to keep him from crashing through the guardrails they erected. At least enough so that people like an editor of The Onion could publish a satirical book like Trump's America: Buy This Book and Mexico Will Pay for It and we could wonder how someone who is really this unsubstantial…

 

…and paranoid…

 

…and “imaginative”…

 

…can be mistaken for being a "very stable genius," but what we realize (or should) is that he is like that the infomercial barkers who “tease” you about some great thing that they have come up with, but they won’t tell you what it is unless you pay them first, and then like those sellers of get-rich-quick schemes involving real estate or on-line selling, the people who are actually getting “rich” are the ones selling phony “dreams.” 

And that is what is happening now; Trump and all those unfit and unqualified people whose “policies” are not based on any reality but on paranoia and anger about the justifications for policies curtailing their “freedom” to do whatever the hell they want to do (say during the pandemic), are now taking their revenge, minus any reason.

Trump and his henchpersons are tossing a wide net of fear tactics over the “fake news” press, over “liberal” law firms, over Democratic lawmakers, the courts (the “big beautiful bill” contains a provision to limit contempt charges aimed at Trump and his henchpersons) and “radical” universities. Funding is part and parcel of the infliction of fear; the news site Raw Story tells us that a Florida Republican, Rep. Greg Steube, “is demanding that Washington, D.C. name subway trains in its transit system after President Donald Trump and, if it doesn't, he says Congress will cut funding to the public system shared by the district as well as the states of Maryland and Virginia.”  

Trump is selling “fear.” He has admitted that he sees the infliction of  “fear” and pain as the means to real power. In his book Fear: Trump in the White House, Bob Woodward detailed a first term administration where those who had any sliver of human decency or any sense of reality walked on eggshells every waking moment. Those who survived with their human decency still intact issued forth memoirs which revealed this atmosphere of fear and chaos; far from a well-greased “machine,” the Trump White House was at the whims of a capricious and unstable man, on one hand between the “professionals” who tried to keep him in “check,” and those who wanted to use him to pursue their own extremist agendas. Today, of course, the only “professionals” in the Trump administration are those who do best chaos and destruction and the instilling of fear and cruelty. 

On the other hand there are the real "professionals" at instilling fear in the populace, like Putin; the "mysterious" deaths of political opponents and journalists exposing his misdeeds suggests as much. But like all dictators Putin fears failure and the price of failure, meaning of course his war in Ukraine. Putin obviously doesn't believe in a "god" that will punish him in the afterlife for the murder of thousands of innocent civilians in his unjustified war, but he surely fears that there are some people closer to him than he would like who are tired of his bloodletting and the resulting economic instability.

Putin obviously does not fear Trump, and Trump we can assume not only fears Putin making a fool of him, but apparently fears him so much that he is refusing more sanctions against Putin. What does Putin have on him that frightens him so? We can imagine what Trump has passed on to Putin in those "private" conversations.  And what about the rest of the world? The EU isn't afraid of Trump; why should it deal with him when they know that Trump fears Wall Street more than he does them?

Of course it shouldn't be a surprise that fear is what is truly motivating the fearmongers. Take Tom Homan, who actually looks like someone who would fit right in Hitler’s inner circle. Here 1 we are told about Homan and Tucker Carlson going on a bizarre rant that reveals more about their own paranoia about "too many" Hispanics being in this country. The Guardian noted that the pair seemed to endorse the “great replacement” conspiracy theory as having an evil “international” element: “Carlson suggested a wide-ranging plot involving international bodies such as the UN and NGOs and Homan responded by calling for an investigation.”

They continued exhibiting fear of the Hispanic “menace” by attributing “the cartels’ motivations in part to their worship of ‘satanic’ ideas or ‘death’, seeking to tie that to their ‘cultures’ which ‘practice human sacrifice.’” Of course Homan doesn’t mention these ideas to the “fake news,” press, since they will “misreport” it and make him look like the paranoid racist he is.

Historians may point to the writings of Machiavelli in The Prince to justify “fear” and “cruelty” in governance, but as Mathew Kroenig writes in  Foreign Policy , he seemed to have a change of heart  later in Discourses:

Machiavelli’s answer is straightforward. Rome achieved glory due to its republican form of government. His review of history leads him to conclude that democracies are better able than autocracies to harness the energy of a broad cross-section of society toward national greatness. He explains “We have seen from experience that states have grown in land and wealth only if they are free: the greatness that Athens achieved within a century of liberating itself from the tyranny of Pisistratus is astonishing and even more astonishing the greatness that Rome achieved after it freed itself from its kings.”

Machiavelli was not making an argument about the morality or wisdom of democratic or autocratic leaders—he knew better than anyone that humans are not angels—but of institutional constraints. Democratic leaders often want to exploit their position, but they will be constrained by laws, institutions, and other branches of government. Dictators may want to be magnanimous, but since there is little standing in their way, they will always be tempted to maximize their own well-being at the expense of the nation...

….(Machiavelli) argues that the checks and balances in a democracy keep a country on a stable course, whereas unconstrained dictators take countries in an extreme direction and, when they change their minds, back again. He writes, “I therefore disagree with the common opinion that a populace in power is unstable and changeable.” On the contrary, he argued, “The prince … unchecked by laws will be more unstable and imprudent than a populace.”

Thus he would label Trump’s employment of power in order to “exploit” his position in order to achieve his vindictive ends and personal wealth (much as Putin has done to go from nothing to billions) through unrestrained cruelty as being “unstable” and “imprudent.” Not only that, but by ignoring the needs and wishes of the large majority of people who see his policies as madness without reason, he is destroying the stability of this country for his own self-destructive ends—perhaps as Hitler took Germany down with him—with the caveat that the Nazi regime was replaced by a strong democracy, not by a “Thousand Year Reich.”

In his first inaugural address, when unlike the times when we are in now where a power-mad psychopath is wreaking as much destruction on the healthy economy he inherited from his “terrible” predecessor, FDR in 1933 solemnly told the people that it was his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Who was responsible for imposing this fear? Those who were most responsible for the economic collapse by their greed, who now feared their absolute power would be constrained by pro-labor laws and financial regulation. As FDR proclaimed

Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

And that ultimately is why we are where we are today. The “money changers” and “rulers of the “exchange of goods” who have no “vision” save their own “profit” are back in control, and as the Koch Brothers did and Elon Musk is doing now, are the bankrollers of conspiracies and misinformation to undermine democracy. People should not allow unreasoning fear to cloud their judgment about what Trump is trying to do solely for his own benefit and that of his “class.”

FDR went on to say that

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

The way forward is to abandon fear, greed and cruelty. With Republicans controlling Congress, we don’t have the leaders today in power with the discipline to make the sacrifices for the “common good” of all, not just for a few billionaires.

I suppose you can never become too old to know where this country is going to under Trump, and at least for some of us "old" people you can't escape reality no matter how hard you try

 

It is not necessarily true that when you are old you don’t have time to do much damage; it only took one day for the brain-dead 78-year-old Trump to set this country on a course of self-annihilation, largely being played like a puppet by henchpersons who wrote those executive orders who have their own evil agendas and “projects”--and not just the "Project" variety, but a "hunger games" show for would-be immigrants that DHS cooked-up for our "entertainment," or more likely theirs, those sick people. 

Even children are not “safe” from the predations of this man; Karoline Leavett did her version of Hitler Youth propagandizing with that “press conference” for children; the only “adult” question she fielded concerned what Trump was going to do about climate change; well, if there were any "adults" in the room (I didn't see any who qualified, except that kid), they would know what the answer to that question is, but Leavitt with that stupid grin of hers declared that Trump likes “clean air and clean water.” Oh he does? He doesn’t “act” like he does, nor does his interior secretary or EPA director.

Sometimes, you just want to hang it all up and say the hell with you ignorant people who voted for all of this, I’m just going to go watch a movie, which I have more in my video disc collection than I will actually bother to watch in whatever remaining time I have left on this godforsaken country and planet. I mean, why do I want to be unhappy all of the time?

OK, so I plopped myself down this past weekend to watch a film that I remembered was once as much an annual television “event” as The Wizard of Oz and those Christmas specials back in the day; the last time I saw it on network television before cable took over was during Army basic training, watching it one night in the break room, where I recall that a female recruit seemed amused by my mushy sentimentality during its dream finale.

But I don't care what people think about the things that make me "happy" these days. Warner Brothers—which controls the rights to the classic MGM catalogue—finally got off its lazy fundament and replaced that awful MOD DVD-R release made from a worn television print, and did a 4k scan of the original Technicolor negatives for its brand new Blu-ray release of the 1953 musical Lili, and frankly it looks as fantastic as could be hoped and just for that reason is back on my list for consideration for that desert island film:

 

Well, OK, Mel Ferrer plays Paul a little too much like a jerk, but then again the film wouldn’t work as well if Lili was torn between him and the smooth-talking ladies’ man Marc; I mean she had to think about it, which she hadn’t done much of before—or else that dream sequence at the end wouldn’t have a point or the impact that it did have, at least on mushy people like me.

Of course real life isn’t a movie, and when I wanted to review this release I was confronted with this notification:

 

Note also that while I was banned from reviewing Lili for some reason, I was also invited to join a program for which I would receive “free” new releases for which I would be expected to review. Huh? Maybe they think my reviews of video releases like Joan Baez: I Am A Noise are the kind they want me to do more of, and not about mushy films like Lili that maybe most people in this cynical and narcissistic day and age find, well, mushy:

 

I'm not one of those people who gush with those five-star reviews unless something is actually that good, and taking the time to  actually examine in detail a film whose subject I am only familiar with from what I "heard" about it, and expecting something "important" it was only fair to myself to offer an honest opinion. 

Initially when it was eventually posted it billed as the “top negative review,” meaning it was the only one that actually broke down the parts of this video that I thought was good (not enough) and not good (too much). But now it is not only the “top review,” it is the only U.S.-based review on the title page. I wonder what the subject of this film memoir thinks about that, but perhaps being "honest" is more appreciated than gushing tripe.

But as much as I would like to forget about the world and just spend my time watching all these movies I have stacking in storage (many I will probably never watch and end-up selling when I retire officially, if I’m still alive by then), every time I pick up my phone and punch the Google app, on its news feed there is yet another crime that asshole Trump and his asshole henchpersons are doing that enrages me. 

It never fails, not just every bleeping day, but every bleeping hour it seems. Can’t those assholes leave us alone for one minute even? Even when they sleep all they do is dream about new things to do to vent their frustrations on the world, and awake to find new ways to kick the law and the Constitution in the teeth simply because it gives them pleasure to cause as much pain as possible.

I suppose there are “good” and “bad” things about growing old, just as old people like me think that young people today just don’t care or are unmindful of the future of this planet. But you don’t have to be ancient news to realize that what Trump is doing today isn’t "old" news—you go to those “old” news reports during his first term and we are talking about the same damn things: tariffs, mass deportation, whining about the “liberal” press, disrespect of our allies and coddling dictators, making so-called “deals” that never panned out. But four years later, who remembered any of that?

Well, a few of us did. The only difference now is that Trump is completely unrestrained and surrounded not by “professionals” but by sycophants and people even more morally and ethically corrupt than he is; as “bad” as William Barr was, unlike Pam Bondi he had enough respect for his position and responsibilities as attorney general to follow the law, not Trump’s latest social media post demanding retribution against another person who makes his juvenile mind “mad”—although that is more indicative of his mental rather than emotional state. 

Trump power madness is without limit; today he won't allow himself to be challenged, he's never "wrong" about anything. Even when everyone knows that Putin is a thug and a criminal, or that letters on a hand are photoshopped, Trump cannot be dissuaded from living in a world where anything that calls into question his "very stable genius" is not being "nice" to him, frustrating people who try to fact check him, which only tends to make him more instinctual (like an unthinking feral animal) in his responses.

Politico is reporting 1 that the DOJ is “warning” judges and lawmakers with potential criminal prosecution for making Trump “mad” criticizing his deportation policies. This is why in his recent interview with Trump transcripted here 2  Bret Baier never once brings up the topic of immigration or deportation, only lightly pushing Trump on Putin ignoring his entreaties to make “peace”—in fact Trump appears to believe that Putin is not “wrong” about wanting all of Ukraine.

Baier praised Trump’s “stamina,” which from the many times we’ve seen him slur or mispronounce words like a drunkard, it appears that Trump is either “high” on medication, or as occurs when he is in a "friendly" environment where he is not threatened and is allowed to make the usual hyperbolic claims of “success” that we should know by now we should wait to see how things actually pan out; see North Korea, which Trump seems to have “forgotten,” and nobody asks him what his "plans" are there. 

We are told by the Financial Times, for example,  that the "big, beautiful" trade "deal" with China is already on "shaky ground," while the EU is uncertain that Trump even wants a trade "deal" that benefits both sides. 

In the meantime, these companies announced price increases that Trump is insisting that they "eat" in order not to make him look like the complete incompetent he truly always has been as a "businessman":

 

 

Meanwhile,  farmers in the state of Washington are being "pushed to the brink" by Trump's tariffs and the foolish decision to exit the TPP trade deal 3 still in effect under a different name, and the current membership is no longer willing to give-in on U.S. demands for "special treatment," especially on agricultural exports. U.S. farmers were to benefit enormously from the TPP, but because it was an Obama initiative, Trump peevishly abandoned it.

There is no rhyme or reason to anything Trump does, from shutting agencies he doesn't like because he has "superior genetics," and people who "don't" do not deserve any "help." Now, according to NPR,  

It's yet unclear what farmers stand to gain from the second Trump administration's trade policies. Across the rural Midwest and West, plenty of farmers still fly Trump 2024 flags over their barns, but quietly worry his latest trade war will bankrupt them…In Washington state, Jim Moyer says wheat farmers are still recovering from the trade war in Trump's first term when the popular Trans-Pacific Partnership was torn up. He's worried that irreparable damage has already been done with trade deals that took decades to build.

And yet

Asked if there's a feeling of disconnect right now between the White House and farm country, Moyer replied: "You know, I don't know. I try not to go there; I don't have much control over it."

People here don't want to talk politics much right now with everything so polarized and with tariffs being on, then pulled off, then back on. Washington may be a blue state in national politics, but there is only one county east of the Cascade Mountains that hasn't voted for Trump in three cycles since 2016.

You know, you do have "control" over it, and that is to not vote for this man who is nothing but personal grievance and convinced he is of "superior" genes, and so should everyone else. No one should be allowed to exist save to serve him, and if they don't they should be banished metaphorically or--his preference--literally. 

Still, you would think that keeping farmers afloat is a "bipartisan" issue, but then again, “working” with Trump and Republicans on “bipartisan” projects is always about allowing the “little people” a tiny piece of the “action” that the economic elites (as opposed to “political” elites) are getting, such as eliminating taxes on tips; it's possible to see tips less as "income" than a "reward" for good service, and tips themselves are presumably already taxed income by those who pay it. 

Yet it is being played not because it is "good" but because it is "political." Despite what polls show, that the large majority of people disapprove of Trump's economic policies, he is still under the delusion that most people "love" what he is doing. I doubt most people who make regular incomes that are taxed "love" this any more than they "love" health care being cut to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. There is no "intelligent" design in evidence, and one way or another, those who "benefit" from untaxed tips are going to "pay" in ways they hadn't considered, like reduced Social Security benefits.

But naturally Trump returns again and again to racial animus and resentment in order to deflect attention away from the harm he is causing "common" people. The white nationalist in him wants to bring in more white "refugees," and of course with a racist white South African like Elon Musk to provide the "evidence," he is opening the door wide open for them.

Thus he clings to his belief that “genocide” against white farmers is occurring in South Africa, using as evidence “songs” and an image of an alleged mass “grave site,” which as reported by the BBC was actually a memorial to publicize the deaths of several people, and was the cause of racial tensions before the crosses seen along the road were removed. PBS’ fact-checking pointed out that Trump’s claim that “no black farmers” were killed was false, more likely a majority of farmers or small plot-holders killed were black, by people motivated by robbery and not by “genocide.” 

The BBC also quoted South African political columnist Pieter du Toit as saying Trump’s “ambush” of Cyril Ramaphosa “showed that "months and years of exaggeration, hyperbole and misinformation fed into the American right-wing ecosystem by a range of South African activists had hit its mark". I suspect that many people watching Trump's stunt saw similarity to that involving Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and are wondering as to the truth of the matter, since Trump only seems to do this kind of thing to people he doesn't like, especially those who have more moral and ethical stature than he does.

Again, Trump's "fascination" with race is too unpleasantly obvious in almost everything he does. The Guardian points out here  4 that that his “dangerous obsession” with immigration is motivated by white supremacy and re-segregation, and we saw evidence of this as early as 1973 when he and his father were sued by the Nixon Justice Department for racial discrimination in their housing units. 

Trump’s view of Hispanic immigrants as all “potential terrorists”, “violent” and “hostile actors with malicious intent” can only come from a racist mind. He doesn't understand that this country needs "Indians" as well as "Chiefs" to survive economically. Instead, what he does is is if he can't get his way with birthright citizenship for another generation of young workers, he'll do an end-around (no doubt Miller's idea) on it by deporting families with US citizen children. 

Mass deportation as rapidly as possible won’t “fix” what is “wrong” in the mind of someone like Trump, since what is wrong there is that he clearly enjoys cruelty against innocent human beings just as much as he enjoyed those scenes of insurrectionists wreaking destruction on democracy on that January 6.

A research publication of MIT, Daedalus, published an article 5 on anti-Latino racism in the Trump Era in 2021 which doubly applies today:

Despite research underscoring the fallacies of these claims, studies have demonstrated that Trump’s xenophobic campaign rhetoric was effective in activating many Whites’ demographobia, or feelings that Whites are under siege by growing racial/ethnic diversity, and that racism and anti-immigrant attitudes motivated some Trump voters.9 Indeed, Trump’s nativist nationalism, anti-immigrant policy agenda, and misogyny have allowed him to connect to a sense of White loss after decades of neoliberalism have exacerbated inequality, shifting the blame about the vanishing American Dream from the federal government to women, immigrants, and people of color.

By adding force to already existing draconian anti-Latino policies and using moments of supposed crisis to propose new ones, normalizing nationalist xenophobic rhetoric on the national stage, and inciting violence against Latinos from federal agencies to private citizens, Donald Trump propelled himself into the political arena as the defender of those fearing demographic change and immigration.

The article notes that “the persistent and effective racialization of Latinos for nearly two centuries,” have become “further institutionalized under Trump, who relied on his supporters’ fear of immigration and Latinos. Latino racialization is a product of the homogenization of a diverse population into a single racial category paired with controlling images that cast Latinos and those of Latin American descent in the United States as the subhuman other, which affects how Latinos are viewed by others and how they view themselves and their place in American society.”

Thus it is no surprise that other than the occasional activism against ICE thuggery and Kristi Noem taken to task about her “confusion” about what habeas corpus is, and the knowledge that a white nationalist like  Miller is behind every policy to undercut the law and the Constitution just for “fun,” it seems  that people feel not only “helpless” to do anything to stop the descent into a hell of our own making for voting for this bargain-basement Hitler, but maybe just don’t really care that much.

Maybe this country deserves where it is going. FBI “director” Kash Patel has no clue of what his job is except to use the FBI to engage in his pet peeves and retaliation against those who abuse his little mind, and Musk and RFK Jr. and his pals are busy eliminating and undercutting the very programs meant to address the problems addressed in the "The MAHA Report: Make Our Children Healthy Again.” Unhealthy eating habits are the results of poverty and discrimination, yet this playing politics with the lives of people is the principle agenda of the Trump administration.

So now what? I am getting older, my time is closer to being “up.” Perhaps I should feel “lucky” that I lived at a time when there were people in government who felt responsibility to the people they were supposed to serve as their principle “job.” Today, it seems that in the Trump administration, their “job” is to serve a man who only whose self-worth is not about what he does for others, but to others to serve his own personal darkness—and every day that news feed provides more enraging evidence of that.

Of course I could just shut it all off and watch another movie, but if everyone chose to do just that, then the spiral down into that black hole of complete moral bankruptcy will leave nothing left of what makes humans “human” but the very worst of it. The fact that many younger people refuse to understand that makes that "trip" one that is much more lethal to this country than any amount of fentanyl.

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