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How Trump Came to Enforce a Practice of Separating Migrant Families By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear
NYT, June 16, 2018
WASHINGTON – Almost immediately after President Trump took office, his administration began weighing what for years had been regarded as the nuclear option in the effort to discourage immigrants from unlawfully entering the United States.
Children would be separated from their parents if the families had been apprehended entering the country illegally, John F. Kelly, then the homeland security secretary, said in March 2017, “in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network.”
For more than a decade, even as illegal immigration levels fell overall, seasonal spikes in unauthorized border crossings had bedeviled American presidents in both political parties, prompting them to cast about for increasingly aggressive ways to discourage migrants from making the trek.
Yet for George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the idea of crying children torn from their parents’ arms was simply too inhumane – and too politically perilous – to embrace as policy, and Mr. Trump, though he had made an immigration crackdown one of the central issues of his campaign, succumbed to the same reality, publicly dropping the idea after Mr. Kelly’s comments touched off a swift backlash.
But advocates inside the administration, most prominently Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior policy adviser, never gave up on the idea. Last month, facing a sharp uptick in illegal border crossings, Mr. Trump ordered a new effort to criminally prosecute anyone who crossed the border unlawfully – with few exceptions for parents traveling with their minor children.
And now Mr. Trump faces the consequences. With thousands of children detained in makeshift shelters, his spokesmen this past week had to deny accusations that the administration was acting like Nazis. Even evangelical supporters like Franklin Graham said its policy was “disgraceful.”
Among those who have professed objections to the policy is the president himself, who despite his tough rhetoric on immigration and his clear directive to show no mercy in enforcing the law, has searched publicly for someone else to blame for dividing families. He has falsely claimed that Democrats are responsible for the practice. But the kind of pictures so feared by Mr. Trump’s predecessors could end up defining a major domestic policy issue of his term.
Inside the Trump administration, current and former officials say, there is considerable unease about the policy, which is regarded by some charged with carrying it out as unfeasible in practice and questionable morally. Kirstjen Nielsen, the current homeland security secretary, has clashed privately with Mr. Trump over the practice, sometimes inviting furious lectures from the president that have pushed her to the brink of resignation.
But Mr. Miller has expressed none of the president’s misgivings. “No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” he said during an interview in his West Wing office this past week. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”
The administration’s critics are not buying that explanation. “This is not a zero tolerance policy, this is a zero humanity policy, and we can’t let it go on,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon.
“Ripping children out of their parents’ arms to inflict harm on the child to influence the parents,” he added, “is unacceptable.”
Beyond those moral objections, Jeh C. Johnson, who as secretary of homeland security was the point man for the Obama administration’s own struggles with illegal immigration, argued that deterrence, in and of itself, is neither practical nor a long-term solution to the problem.
“I’ve seen this movie before, and I feel like what we are doing now, with the zero tolerance policy and separating parents and children for the purpose of deterrence, is banging our heads against the wall,” he said. “Whether it’s family detention, messaging about dangers of the journey, or messaging about separating families and zero tolerance, it’s always going to have at best a short-term reaction.”
And that view was based on hard experience.
When Central American migrants, including many unaccompanied children, began surging across the border in early 2014, Mr. Obama, the antithesis of his impulsive successor, had his own characteristic reaction: He formed a multiagency team at the White House to figure out what should be done. “This was the bane of my existence for three years,” Mr. Johnson said. “No matter what you did, somebody was going to be very angry at you.”
The officials met in the office of Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, and convened a series of meetings in the Situation Room to go through their options. Migrants were increasingly exploiting existing immigration laws and court rulings, and using children as a way to get adults into the country, on the theory that families were being treated differently from single people.
“The agencies were surfacing every possible idea,” Cecilia Muñoz, Mr. Obama’s top domestic policy adviser, recalled, including whether to separate parents from their children. “I do remember looking at each other like, ‘We’re not going to do this, are we?’ We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea. The morality of it was clear – that’s not who we are.”
They did, however, decide to vastly expand the detention of immigrant families, opening new facilities along the border where women and young children were held for long periods while they awaited a chance to have their cases processed. Mr. Johnson wrote an open letter to appear in Spanish-language news outlets warning parents that their children would be deported if they entered the United States illegally. He traveled to Guatemala to deliver the message in person.
Opening a large family immigration detention facility in Dilley, Tex., he held a news conference to showcase what he called an “effective deterrent.” The steps led to just the kind of brutal images that Mr. Obama’s advisers feared: hundreds of young children, many dirty and some in tears, who were being held with their families in makeshift detention facilities.
Immigrant advocacy groups denounced the policy, berating senior administration officials – some of whom were reduced to rueful apologies for a policy they said they could not justify – and telling Mr. Obama to his face during a meeting at the White House in late 2014 that he was turning his back on the most vulnerable people seeking refuge in the United States.
“I was pissed, and still am,” said Ben Johnson, the executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “I thought that he had a shocking disregard for due process.”
Before long, the Obama administration would face legal challenges, and be forced to stop detaining families indefinitely. A federal judge in Washington ordered the administration in 2015 to stop detaining asylum-seeking Central American mothers and children in order to deter others from their region from coming into the United States.
Under a 1997 consent decree known as the Flores settlement, unaccompanied children could be held in immigration detention for only a short period of time; in 2016, a federal judge ruled that the settlement applied to families as well, effectively requiring that they be released within 20 days. Many were released – some with GPS ankle bracelets to track their movements – and asked to return for a court date sometime in the future.
It was Mr. Bush, who had firsthand experience with the border as governor of Texas and ran for president as a “compassionate conservative,” who initiated the “zero tolerance” approach for illegal immigration on which Mr. Trump’s policy is modeled.
In 2005, he launched Operation Streamline, a program along a stretch of the border in Texas that referred all unlawful entrants for criminal prosecution, imprisoning them and expediting assembly-line-style trials geared toward quickly deporting them. The initiative yielded results and was soon expanded to more border sectors. Back then, however, exceptions were generally made for adults who were traveling with minor children, as well as juveniles and people who were ill.
Mr. Obama’s administration employed the program at the height of the migration crisis as well, although it generally did not treat first-time border crossers as priorities for prosecution, and it detained families together in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody – administrative, rather than criminal, detention.
Discussions began almost immediately after Mr. Trump took office about vastly expanding Operation Streamline, with almost none of those limitations. Even after Mr. Kelly stopped talking publicly about family separation, the Department of Homeland Security quietly tested the approach last summer in certain areas in Texas.
Privately, Mr. Miller argued that bringing back “zero tolerance” would be a potent tool in a severely limited arsenal of strategies for stopping migrants from flooding across the border.
The idea was to end a practice referred to by its detractors as “catch and release,” in which illegal immigrants apprehended at the border are released into the interior of the United States to await the processing of their cases. Mr. Miller argued that the policy provided a perverse incentive for migrants, essentially ensuring that if they could make it to the United States border and claim a “credible fear” of returning home, they would be given a chance to stay under asylum laws, at least temporarily.
A lengthy backlog of asylum claims made it likely that it would be years before they would have to appear before a judge to back up that plea – and many never returned to do so.
The situation was even more complicated when children were involved. A 2008 law meant to combat the trafficking of minors places strict requirements on how unaccompanied migrant children from Central America are to be treated. Minors from Mexico or Canada – countries contiguous with the United States – can be quickly sent back to their home countries unless it is deemed dangerous to do so. But those from other nations cannot be quickly returned; they must be transferred within 72 hours to the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services, and placed in the least restrictive setting possible. And the Flores ruling meant that children and families could not be held for more than 20 days.
In October, after Mr. Trump ended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that gave legal status to undocumented immigrants raised in the United States, Mr. Miller insisted that any legislative package to codify those protections contain changes to close what he called the loopholes encouraging illegal immigrants to come.
And in April, after the border numbers reached their zenith, Mr. Miller was instrumental in Mr. Trump’s decision to ratchet up the zero tolerance policy. “A big name of the game is deterrence,” Mr. Kelly, now the chief of staff, told NPR in May. “The children will be taken care of – put into foster care or whatever – but the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.”
Technically, there is no Trump administration policy stating that illegal border crossers must be separated from their children. But the “zero tolerance policy” results in unlawful immigrants being taken into federal criminal custody, at which point their children are considered unaccompanied alien minors and taken away. Unlike Mr. Obama’s administration, Mr. Trump’s is treating all people who have crossed the border without authorization as subject to criminal prosecution, even if they tell the officer apprehending them that they are seeking asylum based on fear of returning to their home country, and whether or not they have their children in tow.
“Having children does not give you immunity from arrest and prosecution,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a speech on Thursday in Fort Wayne, Ind. “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government,” said Mr. Sessions, quoting Bible verse as he took exception to evangelical leaders who have called the practice abhorrent. “Because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”
Analysis Finds Geographic Overlap In Opioid Use And Trump Support In 2016 By Paul Chisholm
NPR, June 23, 20188:02 AM ET
The fact that rural, economically disadvantaged parts of the country broke heavily for the Republican candidate in the 2016 election is well known. But Medicare data indicate that voters in areas that went for Trump weren't just hurting economically – many of them were receiving prescriptions for opioid painkillers.
The findings were published Friday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open. Researchers found a geographic relationship between support for Trump and prescriptions for opioid painkillers.
It's easy to see similarities between the places hardest hit by the opioid epidemic and a map of Trump strongholds. "When we look at the two maps, there was a clear overlap between counties that had high opioid use ... and the vote for Donald Trump," says Dr. James S. Goodwin, chair of geriatrics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and the study's lead author. "There were blogs from various people saying there was this overlap. But we had national data."
Goodwin and his team looked at data from Census Bureau, the 2016 election and Medicare Part D, a prescription drug program that serves the elderly and disabled.
To estimate the prevalence of opioid use by county, the researchers used the percentage of enrollees who had received prescriptions for a three-month or longer supply of opioids. Goodwin says that prescription opioid use is strongly correlated with illicit opioid use, which can be hard to quantify.
"There are very inexact ways of measuring illegal opioid use," Goodwin says. "All we can really measure with precision is legal opioid use."
Goodwin's team examined how a variety of factors could have influenced each county's rate of chronic opioid prescriptions. After correcting for demographic variables such as age and race, Goodwin found that support for Trump in the 2016 election closely tracked opioid prescriptions. In counties with higher-than-average rates of chronic opioid prescriptions, 60 percent of the voters went for Trump. In the counties with lower-than-average rates, only 39 percent voted for Trump.
A lot of this disparity could be chalked up to social factors and economic woes. Rural, economically-depressed counties went strongly for Trump in the 2016 election. These are the same places where opioid use is prevalent. As a result, opioid use and support for Trump might not be directly related, but rather two symptoms of the same problem — a lack of economic opportunity.
To test this theory, Goodwin included other county-level factors in the analysis. These included factors such as unemployment rate, median income, how rural they are, education level, and religious service attendance, among others.
These socioeconomic variables accounted for about two-thirds of the link between voter support for Trump and opioid rates, the paper's authors write. However, socioeconomic factors didn't explain all of the correlation seen in the study.
"It very well may be that if you're in a county that is dissolving because of opioids, you're looking around and you're seeing ruin. That can lead to a sense of despair," Goodwin says. "You want something different. You want radical change."
For voters in communities hit hard by the opioid epidemic, the unconventional Trump candidacy may have been the change people were looking for, Goodwin says.
Dr. Nancy E. Morden, associate professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, agrees. "People who reach for an opioid might also reach for ... near-term fixes," she says. "I think that Donald Trump's campaign was a promise for near-term relief." Goodwin's study has limitations and can't establish that opioid use was a definitive factor in how people voted.
"With that kind of study design, you have to be cautious in terms of drawing any causal conclusions," cautions Elene Kennedy-Hendricks, an assistant scientist in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "The directionality is complicated."
Goodwin acknowledges that the study has shortcomings.
"We were not implying causality, that the Trump vote caused opioids or that opioids caused the Trump vote," he cautions. "We're talking about associations."
Still, the study serves as an interesting example highlighting the links between economic opportunity, social issues and political behavior. "The types of discussions around what drove the '16 election, and the forces that were behind that, should also be included when people are talking about the opioid epidemic," Goodwin says.
Steve Hilton’s silence speaks volumes about the hollow men of the right The ex-Tory guru’s failure to challenge vile lies on Fox News is a sign of a deeper rot By Nick Cohen
Observer, Sat 23 Jun 2018 21.15 BST
TS Eliot didn’t get it quite right. The world doesn’t end with a whimper but a giggle, which reveals that cruelty and lies can pass unchallenged. What was once outrageous is now just a joke at the expense of humourless moralists who don’t understand how obsolete their scruples have become. The laughter comes loudest from the “left behind”. Not the working class, but the left-behind elite who attach themselves to far rightwing (and on occasion far leftwing) movements because they boil with resentment that they no longer have or were never offered the status they took to be their entitlement.
Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch and, to an extent, Boris Johnson are examples that walk among us. As are so many rightwing “contrarian” journalists who show their independence of mind by never contradicting their readers’ prejudices. The origins of their bitterness are wholly obscure to outsiders: how can Murdoch, for example, believe a British establishment that fell at his feet has “slighted him”? But the psychic wounds are real enough in their minds and allow them, however deceitfully, to connect with the humiliations of their base.
If today’s radical rightwing movements are filled with sore losers — nervous members of the left-behind white working and middle classes, who see immigration destroying their culture and economic stagnation destroying their security — they are led by sore winners. Unlike the 20th-century fascist movements, the leaders of the “alt-right” were either born to wealth, as Trump, Murdoch and Johnson were, or, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Putin, have been in power so long they have nothing to feel insecure about. Their privilege ensures that laughter in the form of the sneer of the victor and the snigger of the abuser comes naturally.
If you’re from the old world, nothing could be less funny than the overmighty state tearing immigrant children from their parents and locking them in cages. The imprisonments were not a bureaucratic error but the result of a deliberate act by the Trump administration to create a “hostile environment”, as British conservatives would put it. Migrants would not think of coming to America if they knew that child snatchers would circle their kids. Such premeditated inhumanity demands honest reporting so that everyone, especially its supporters, understands the moral consequences.
If you want to see the authentic mentality of fascism old and new, watch the clip of Trump ideologue Ann Coulter asserting on Murdoch’s Fox News that the stolen toddlers sobbing “Daddy! Daddy!” were “child actors”.
Lies bind a political or religious tribe together. Fox News viewers and perhaps Coulter herself might know what she is saying is not true. By acting as if they believe outrageous falsehoods, they announce they are so dedicated to the conservative cause they will believe anything its propagandists produce and so determined to insult Latinos they will endorse any lie told about them. The reaction of Fox’s host was more telling than standard self-deceit. Steve Hilton, a privately educated Englishman, considered challenging Coulter. He mumbled a few words as if he were about to protest. But then he pulled himself together and did something as shocking as the oppression Trump had enforced and the calumnies Coulter had advanced: the little creep giggled, made a lame joke, then called for the ad break.
Any competent surgeon could locate Hilton’s wound. He was once at the centre of power. He helped draft David Cameron’s modernising conservatism and was all for caring about the environment and using the internet to empower citizens. His thought was largely vacuous: Hilton was against big bureaucracies and in favour of children being free to enjoy “wholesome play” (I haven’t made this up). He was banal, but his was not the banality of evil.
His career fell apart in 2012. Cameron lost patience with him and he left Downing Street. The former Tory guru, who was once the centre of attention, had joined the left-behind elite. If he was known, he was known because of his wife, a successful Silicon Valley executive — and not all men are happy with being upstaged by their partners. Once a somebody, Hilton was a nobody. He did what yesterday’s men have always done and jumped on the next big thing, which in the case of rightwing politics was the Trump movement. A job at Fox followed and the nobody was a somebody again.
I’ve saved the best for last. Hilton is the child of Hungarian refugees who fled communist oppression and found a safe home in Britain. Now he can do nothing but stretch his mouth into an inane grin when the bureaucracy he once abhorred cages the children of today’s refugees and his fellow conservatives slander its victims as actors.
The far right’s laughter recalls Sartre’s comment in 1944 that antisemites amuse themselves and “delight in acting in bad faith”. The calculation that embracing Trump is the smart career move recalls Dorothy Thompson’s warning in her 1941 essay, Who goes Nazi?, to watch out for the man who has risen beyond his real abilities and “whose sole measure of value” is success. If the Nazis were a minority movement, it would not attract him. “As a movement likely to attain power, it would.”
Not that Hilton or even Murdoch have found power by attaching themselves to Trump. If Hilton had spoken out, Fox News viewers would have turned on him. I have heard wistful liberal Republicans say if only Murdoch and his sons would tell Fox to drop Trump, American conservatism could crawl out of its sewer. They do not understand how deep the rot has set. If the Murdoch family tried to change course, Fox would lose its audience, as surely as Republican politicians who challenged Trump have lost their seats. The iron law of autocracy is that the strongman rules and his courtiers, however grand, obey.
All they can do is to fix a smile on their sagging faces and giggle.
Analysis Finds Geographic Overlap In Opioid Use And Trump Support In 2016 By Paul Chisholm
NPR, June 23, 20188:02 AM ET
The fact that rural, economically disadvantaged parts of the country broke heavily for the Republican candidate in the 2016 election is well known. But Medicare data indicate that voters in areas that went for Trump weren't just hurting economically – many of them were receiving prescriptions for opioid painkillers.
The findings were published Friday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open. Researchers found a geographic relationship between support for Trump and prescriptions for opioid painkillers.
It's easy to see similarities between the places hardest hit by the opioid epidemic and a map of Trump strongholds. "When we look at the two maps, there was a clear overlap between counties that had high opioid use ... and the vote for Donald Trump," says Dr. James S. Goodwin, chair of geriatrics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and the study's lead author. "There were blogs from various people saying there was this overlap. But we had national data."
Goodwin and his team looked at data from Census Bureau, the 2016 election and Medicare Part D, a prescription drug program that serves the elderly and disabled.
To estimate the prevalence of opioid use by county, the researchers used the percentage of enrollees who had received prescriptions for a three-month or longer supply of opioids. Goodwin says that prescription opioid use is strongly correlated with illicit opioid use, which can be hard to quantify.
"There are very inexact ways of measuring illegal opioid use," Goodwin says. "All we can really measure with precision is legal opioid use."
Goodwin's team examined how a variety of factors could have influenced each county's rate of chronic opioid prescriptions. After correcting for demographic variables such as age and race, Goodwin found that support for Trump in the 2016 election closely tracked opioid prescriptions. In counties with higher-than-average rates of chronic opioid prescriptions, 60 percent of the voters went for Trump. In the counties with lower-than-average rates, only 39 percent voted for Trump.
A lot of this disparity could be chalked up to social factors and economic woes. Rural, economically-depressed counties went strongly for Trump in the 2016 election. These are the same places where opioid use is prevalent. As a result, opioid use and support for Trump might not be directly related, but rather two symptoms of the same problem — a lack of economic opportunity.
To test this theory, Goodwin included other county-level factors in the analysis. These included factors such as unemployment rate, median income, how rural they are, education level, and religious service attendance, among others.
These socioeconomic variables accounted for about two-thirds of the link between voter support for Trump and opioid rates, the paper's authors write. However, socioeconomic factors didn't explain all of the correlation seen in the study.
"It very well may be that if you're in a county that is dissolving because of opioids, you're looking around and you're seeing ruin. That can lead to a sense of despair," Goodwin says. "You want something different. You want radical change."
For voters in communities hit hard by the opioid epidemic, the unconventional Trump candidacy may have been the change people were looking for, Goodwin says.
Dr. Nancy E. Morden, associate professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, agrees. "People who reach for an opioid might also reach for ... near-term fixes," she says. "I think that Donald Trump's campaign was a promise for near-term relief." Goodwin's study has limitations and can't establish that opioid use was a definitive factor in how people voted.
"With that kind of study design, you have to be cautious in terms of drawing any causal conclusions," cautions Elene Kennedy-Hendricks, an assistant scientist in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "The directionality is complicated."
Goodwin acknowledges that the study has shortcomings.
"We were not implying causality, that the Trump vote caused opioids or that opioids caused the Trump vote," he cautions. "We're talking about associations."
Still, the study serves as an interesting example highlighting the links between economic opportunity, social issues and political behavior. "The types of discussions around what drove the '16 election, and the forces that were behind that, should also be included when people are talking about the opioid epidemic," Goodwin says.
DRUG USE SOARS IN DENMARK
The Danish Government launches a new drug strategy in response to a dramatic increasing number of drug addicts and drug related overdoses.
There are an estimated 33.000 drug addicts (problem drug users) in a country with a population of 5 million. The government plans to introduce more involuntary treatment to stop this disturbing trend.
In the last 4 years, the number of drug addicts has increased with 15%; 5000 new users.
An idea isn't responsible for those who believe in it.
0
Happy Fathers Day: on 19:35 - Jun 24 with 2906 views
The Danish Government launches a new drug strategy in response to a dramatic increasing number of drug addicts and drug related overdoses.
There are an estimated 33.000 drug addicts (problem drug users) in a country with a population of 5 million. The government plans to introduce more involuntary treatment to stop this disturbing trend.
In the last 4 years, the number of drug addicts has increased with 15%; 5000 new users.
I see, so your response to a research paper published in a peer reviewed journal showing a statistically meaningful correlation between opioid usage and Trump voting is: "no, you're the druggie".
Trump calls for an end to the use of pesky judges and courts; wonder where he got that bright spark from? ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Trump: We must ‘immediately’ return undocumented immigrants ‘with no judges or court cases’
By Jacqueline Thomsen -
The Hill, 06/24/18 11:48 AM EDT
President Trump on Sunday called for immigrants who illegally enter the U.S. to be sent “back from where they came” without going through the judicial process in deportation cases.
“When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order,” Trump tweeted.
He added that the U.S.’s immigration policy is “very unfair to all of those people who have gone through the system legally and are waiting on line for years” and “must be based on merit.”
We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order. Most children come without parents... – Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2018
....Our Immigration policy, laughed at all over the world, is very unfair to all of those people who have gone through the system legally and are waiting on line for years! Immigration must be based on merit - we need people who will help to Make America Great Again! – Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2018
Trump's call to eliminate due process from deportation cases is likely to draw fire from critics and immigration advocates. Trump has made a crackdown on immigration a key element of his administration. He has long called for stronger immigration laws since the start of his campaign, including his promise to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and have Mexico pay for it.
His administration implemented a "zero tolerance" policy at the border earlier this year, mandating that all adults apprehended illegally crossing the border face prosecution.
Trump faced backlash for the policy, which resulted in the separations of immigrant children and parents at the border, before he ended the separations last week.
I see, so your response to a research paper published in a peer reviewed journal showing a statistically meaningful correlation between opioid usage and Trump voting is: "no, you're the druggie".
We have found your level: 4th year juniors.
Another little wobble tinged with what? Paranoia shadowed by self-knowledge? You’re a winner, fair play.
No I wasn’t calling you a druggie, I leave the name calling to the ‘liberals,’ that’s their forte. I was suggesting you throw back the curtains and look what’s going on outside your own front window before sneering at the folk in rural America.
Throw them wide. There are more similarities than you’d care to admit...
[Post edited 25 Jun 2018 16:38]
An idea isn't responsible for those who believe in it.
0
Happy Fathers Day: on 10:23 - Jun 26 with 2742 views
Trial runs for fascism are in full flow Babies in cages were no ‘mistake’ by Trump but test-marketing for barbarism By Fintan O’Toole
Irish Times, 26 june 2018
To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism — a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” — what we are living with is pre-fascism.
It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.
Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections — we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities. Fascism does not need a majority — it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.
Moral boundaries But when you’ve done all this, there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.
It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Let’s do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.
To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run — and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment — it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.
‘Devious’ infants And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it — his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us — should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious? Second, the hardcore fans loved it: 58 per cent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trump’s overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.
This is greatly encouraging for the pre-fascist agenda. The blooding process has begun within the democratic world. The muscles that the propaganda machines need for defending the indefensible are being toned up. Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable. So what if those black people drown in the sea? So what if those brown toddlers are scarred for life? They have already, in their minds, crossed the boundaries of morality. They are, like Macbeth, “yet but young in deed”. But the tests will be refined, the results analysed, the methods perfected, the messages sharpened. And then the deeds can follow.
Trial runs for fascism are in full flow Babies in cages were no ‘mistake’ by Trump but test-marketing for barbarism By Fintan O’Toole
Irish Times, 26 june 2018
To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism — a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” — what we are living with is pre-fascism.
It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.
Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections — we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities. Fascism does not need a majority — it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.
Moral boundaries But when you’ve done all this, there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.
It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Let’s do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.
To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run — and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment — it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.
‘Devious’ infants And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it — his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us — should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious? Second, the hardcore fans loved it: 58 per cent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trump’s overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.
This is greatly encouraging for the pre-fascist agenda. The blooding process has begun within the democratic world. The muscles that the propaganda machines need for defending the indefensible are being toned up. Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable. So what if those black people drown in the sea? So what if those brown toddlers are scarred for life? They have already, in their minds, crossed the boundaries of morality. They are, like Macbeth, “yet but young in deed”. But the tests will be refined, the results analysed, the methods perfected, the messages sharpened. And then the deeds can follow.
Yes +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Trump’s Cynical Immigration Strategy Might Work for Him–Again The lesson Trump learned was not that saying shocking, untrue, and arguably racist things about immigrants was politically dangerous but that doing so helped him become President. By Susan B. Glasser
New Yorker, june 22, 2018
On Sunday, June 3rd, Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat not previously recognized for his social-media savvy or immigration advocacy, rang the front doorbell at a former Walmart in Brownsville, Texas, whose parking lot was plastered with “Keep Out” signs. Merkley had already seen dozens of young kids held in dog-kennel-like cages at a processing center an hour away, in McAllen, and now was there in Brownsville on a hunch, having been told that hundreds of other young children, who had been separated from their parents, were being held in the former Walmart. Merkley’s staff streamed his encounter with grim-faced employees and local police on Facebook Live. In a twenty-five-minute exchange that became a viral sensation, the employees and officers refused to let the rumpled Oregon lawmaker in as he patiently lectured them on American’s history of welcoming immigrants.
By the time Merkley flew back to Washington, the following day, the video had been viewed more than a million times and the White House had gone into full attack mode against the two-term senator, blasting him in a statement for “irresponsibly spreading blatant lies about routine immigration enforcement.” But as the facts spilled out in the ensuing days, it quickly became clear that an anything-but-routine new Trump Administration policy had led to thousands of migrant children being separated from their families. Merkley triggered a national political uproar with his senatorial fact-finding trip gone viral.
On Wednesday, I sat down with Merkley in his office on Capitol Hill just a few minutes after President Trump signed an executive order ostensibly rolling back his own Administration’s family-separation policy, the same one Trump’s White House had insisted did not exist. This was the first time in Trump’s Presidency that he had actually been forced to back down from a significant policy by public pressure, as televised images of children in cages and leaked audio of wailing toddlers horrified even staunch immigration opponents in Trump’s own party. Many were calling it the worst blunder of Trump’s Presidency, his Hurricane Katrina–a historic P.R. disaster, a political mistake for the ages.
All of which meant that Merkley was now the Man Who Stared Down Donald Trump, arguably the first Democrat to do so effectively. As we talked, Merkley was clearly still outraged. A biting Trump critic previously best known as the only Democratic senator to back Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries, Merkley called Trump’s policy “child abuse,” and seemed angry, in his very low-key way, about the White House’s “massive smear campaign” against him. Tall, soft-spoken, and clad in a slightly too large gray suit, Merkley had previously clashed with Republicans, in 2017, when he seized the Senate floor for a long, losing, sort-of filibuster against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch. But Merkley had never before become a target of the White House attack machine. “They were, like, ‘There’s no cages, he’s lying, he’s making this up,’ ” he pointed out in our interview.
Merkley, though, wasn’t exactly taking a victory lap. Trump was unrepentant, and his White House had not clarified what, exactly, was in the executive order. Endless rounds of court fights and congressional negotiations seemed imminent. “I’m not sure what’s in it,” Merkley said as he sat in a leather chair in his office; outside his door, phones were ringing off the hook with constituents wondering what they could do to stop children from being separated from their parents. Yet Merkley worried that, instead of a win, Trump would devise another policy that was hardly better for children. “It sounds like the handcuffs-for-all strategy,” he told me. “So now we go from one strategy that hurts children to another strategy that hurts children.”
The politics of it were equally murky. Trump was already busy claiming credit for ending a controversy his own policy had created, and many Democrats were concerned that Trump’s executive order was not so much a reversal as a tactical retreat. In fact, it turned out, this was their fear from the beginning. I asked Merkley what his spotlight-loving Democratic colleagues had thought of his viral moment exposing the Trump Administration. The story had exploded, Merkley recalled, but not everyone was happy about it. Some of the other senators were shocked, telling him, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe that they’re really doing it.” But others, Merkley told me, quickly saw political peril. “There were folks saying, ‘My goodness, shifting the attention from health care to immigration is a huge political mistake.’ ”
What if they were right? Other than perhaps Trump’s hard-line immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, few believe that images of distraught children will actually help Trump politically. The policy was clearly vastly unpopular with the American public, with opinion polls suggesting that two-thirds of the country opposed it. It could prove particularly unpopular in some of the swing suburban districts that could determine whether Republicans keep their control of the House of Representatives this fall.
There are, nonetheless, some uncomfortable facts that Democrats who see the issue as an unmitigated win need to face. For starters, hours before he pulled the plug on his Administration’s policy, and after weeks of other controversies, Trump hit the highest approval ratings since his Inauguration. According to Gallup, forty-five per cent of Americans approved of the job he was doing, which is still a low figure by historical standards, but is arguably strikingly high for such a divisive figure. The President’s endless bashing of undocumented immigrants and his vow to toughen “Boarder security,” as he spelled it in a recent tweet, is a key reason why.
Trump’s ability to gin up fears about illegal immigration, more than perhaps any other issue, won him the White House. Headed in to a midterm election that will be won by the political party that can better rally its base, Trump has remained determined to talk about immigration, even when others in his party have resisted. Indeed, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill were furious with Trump as the immigration controversy spiralled out of control this week–a time they had planned to spend celebrating the G.O.P. tax cut, along with the general strength of the economy, which they hope to make the centerpiece of their fall campaign.
On Monday, as the political pressure on Trump was escalating, I met with Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster who has advised G.O.P. leaders about this fall’s elections at a couple of recent retreats. Trump, she told me, had a “freakishly stable” approval rating; in such a polarized moment, people know where they stand on the President. She said that, unlike in previous midterm elections where the incumbent President’s party has done poorly, voter enthusiasm for Trump has remained strong among Republican voters, even as a blue wave of Trump-hating Democrats has been building. “The question is,” Anderson told me, “if the blue wave is coming, have Republicans built a large enough wall to stop it?” New Pew Research Center data this week underscored her point, finding that voters in both parties are more motivated to vote than they were at any time in the previous twenty years. The Democratic advantage on enthusiasm, Pew found, is significantly weaker than it was in the previous election cycles when their party scored big.
On Wednesday, soon after Trump signed his executive order, I spoke with a veteran Democratic pollster. “I don’t want to be quoted saying Democrats have a problem,” the pollster said, “but there is a real problem here.” The pollster agreed that it appeared to be a smart move on Trump’s part to keep talking about illegal immigration as much as the economy, even in the midst of the backlash over his tough policies. “On most issues, whether health care or taxes or the general mood, the Republicans are in a bad place,” the pollster said. “This is their one wedge issue that actually works for them.”
Trump certainly seems to think so. At a May 29th Nashville campaign event for Representative Marsha Blackburn, who is running to succeed the retiring Senator Bob Corker, Trump said of immigration, “The Democrats want to use it as a campaign issue, and I keep saying I hope they do.” He added, “That’s a good issue for us, not for them.”
In a rally this week, in Washington, Trump said he had used immigration as an issue to his benefit in the 2016 campaign. He even made reference to his opening speech of the race, in Trump Tower, when he referred to Mexicans as “rapists” and falsely claimed that hordes were invading America’s southern border. The lesson learned by Trump was not that saying shocking, untrue, and arguably racist things about immigrants was politically dangerous but that doing so helped him become President. “Remember I made that speech, and I was badly criticized? ‘Oh, it’s so terrible, what he said,’ ” he told the audience. “Turned out I was a hundred per cent right. That’s why I got elected.”
At 8:12 a.m. on Thursday, Trump began sending out a string of tweets bashing Democrats on immigration. “Democrats want open borders,” he taunted at one point, “where anyone can come into our Country and stay. This is Nancy Pelosi’s dream. It won’t happen!” The plight of the separated children was not mentioned. Hours later, he doubled down on his messaging with an angry rant against Democrats during a Cabinet meeting. Trump seemed utterly unfazed, and just as committed as before to his strategy of talking immigration whenever and wherever he could.
For his part, this is exactly what Merkley predicts Trump will do between now and November. He told me in our interview that he considers Trump a “fear” candidate from a Republican Party that had learned to run what Merkley called the “three-terrors strategy”: pick three issues that scare the American public, and emphasize them at all costs. As the midterms approach, he predicted, illegal immigration will be one of Trump’s main rallying cries, never mind this week’s debacle over separating migrant children from their parents. Merkley acknowledged that his more cautious Democratic colleagues could well be right: changing the subject to immigration plays into the President’s hands. “I just feel like when you see children being mistreated, forget the politics,” Merkley told me. “You’ve got to call it out as completely wrong.”
For his part, the sixty-one-year-old senator remains an unlikely celebrity of the social-media age. At the end of our interview, I asked Merkley if he was considering running for President in 2020, along with scores of other Democratic senators, governors, mayors, and activists, all of them seemingly better known. “I’m exploring the possibility,” Merkley told me, as I was politely ushered out the door.
Susan B. Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Trump’s Washington.Read more »
Story Highlights * Down from personal-best 45% the prior week * Still slightly above term-to-date average of 39% * All party groups' approval lower
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- President Donald Trump's job approval rating fell back slightly last week, to 41%, after he tied a personal best of 45% the prior week.
Trial runs for fascism are in full flow Babies in cages were no ‘mistake’ by Trump but test-marketing for barbarism By Fintan O’Toole
Irish Times, 26 june 2018
To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism — a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” — what we are living with is pre-fascism.
It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.
Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections — we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities. Fascism does not need a majority — it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.
Moral boundaries But when you’ve done all this, there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.
It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Let’s do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.
To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run — and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment — it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.
‘Devious’ infants And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it — his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us — should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious? Second, the hardcore fans loved it: 58 per cent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trump’s overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.
This is greatly encouraging for the pre-fascist agenda. The blooding process has begun within the democratic world. The muscles that the propaganda machines need for defending the indefensible are being toned up. Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable. So what if those black people drown in the sea? So what if those brown toddlers are scarred for life? They have already, in their minds, crossed the boundaries of morality. They are, like Macbeth, “yet but young in deed”. But the tests will be refined, the results analysed, the methods perfected, the messages sharpened. And then the deeds can follow.
So if Republicans and Trump are Fascists and making my country so, why are thousands per week still breaking the law by sneaking into the USA, versus legally immigrating?
Into an evil place where it has been alleged many places already that we are the Nazis, treating illegal immigrants like they are the respective Jews.
They are children that the article is talking about. Do you get that? Children.
They are putting innocent children in detention centres, keeping them apart from their families. They must be terrified. And they have even had the temerity to quote the Bible to justify it. Sessions is quoting the Bible. Think about that for one minute.
He’s enforcing a policy of separating children from family and justifying it by quoting the Bible.
In 2018.
And Trump has the gall to call other countries shitholes?
The only Trump derangement syndrome is that displayed by you and the others like you that can’t see that your country is being run by a bunch of psychotic madmen with a sociopathic would be dictator at the top.
It’s you that is batshit crazy, shockingly stupid and illogical because you can’t see it. Well either that or you simply don’t give a shit.
So...about this tragic separation of "children...CHILDRENNNNOOOOOOO!!!!!!!" moronic hysteria that is the virtue du jour.Â
If you are an American single parent, and you get a 2nd DUI or worse, you will be separated from your child, too. For an indefinite (but definitely lengthy) period of time. If your kid is lucky, they get into a crappy foster parent home. Hopefully not an abusive or rapey oneÂ
If you are an illegal immigrant, you are probably a better person than the one I described above. You are in a desperate, usually heartbreaking situation, so you broke the law. You get your kid back in maybe 2 months, usually less.Â
But putting that kid with their parent in the meantime is about as purely stupid as putting Boozing Bubba in a cell with his kid Cletus in County.Â
The fact this is now even an issue makes me lose another chunk of whatever respect I used to have for the Left. You were once very intelligent, but Feeling has completely consumed Logic. It's sad.Â
Story Highlights * Down from personal-best 45% the prior week * Still slightly above term-to-date average of 39% * All party groups' approval lower
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- President Donald Trump's job approval rating fell back slightly last week, to 41%, after he tied a personal best of 45% the prior week.
One of the Fascist Democrats' leaders calling for harassment against people they disagree with:
People like Sarah Sanders Huckabee should be OK, just requiring Secret Service protection now. But thanks in advance needs to be given to Maxine Waters for pushing the Center our way a little more, in 2018 and hopefully 2020.
One of the Fascist Democrats' leaders calling for harassment against people they disagree with:
People like Sarah Sanders Huckabee should be OK, just requiring Secret Service protection now. But thanks in advance needs to be given to Maxine Waters for pushing the Center our way a little more, in 2018 and hopefully 2020.
92% of Republicans think media intentionally reports fake news
Nearly all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (92%) say that traditional news outlets knowingly report false or misleading stories at least sometimes, according to a new Axios/SurveyMonkey poll. Democrats and non-leaning independents also feel this way, but not nearly to the same extent.
She does have many on here in her claw who see her as some kind of Boudicea .
I simply reply to posts not character .
We re not chums,nor will be but I like the cut of your jib. We need guys like you who do not conform to the pitiful clique mentality clearly evident on here
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Happy Fathers Day: on 18:28 - Jun 27 with 2431 views
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