A Daily Reid: When we call them fascists, it's because they ARE

A brave teenager filmed MAGA secret police brutalizing him and other teenagers, and bragging about a $30,000 kidnap bonus. So no, we don't have to respect ICE or whoever.

ICE arrests criminal aliens as part of a 3-day targeted enforcement operation in North Texas and Oklahoma. Alamy.com

In Magamerica, if you are not white, you effectively have no rights that white men need respect. The constitution, to the extent it’s even relevant anymore, should not apply to you. Even if you’re on Trump’s side, or even the most sycophantic supporter, you are utterly disposable.

That’s not hyperbole. It’s essentially what Donald Trump, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, resident ghoul, Stephen Miller, the utterly incompetent, classified data-posting, apparent future military concentration camp proprieter Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, brown sellout grandson of visa overstayer Marco Rubio, and the rest of the Epstein cover-up cabinet, plus the now firmly anti-immigrant Republican Party, including their sadistic, nihilistic, private prison-fluffing governors, and the Leonard Leo Supreme Court majority have effectively told us.

The evidence is everywhere.

The regime, through its Stephen Miller / Project 2025-built policies, have already driven more than 300 thousand Black women out of the workforce, as per the plan.

Through the Project Esther — Heritage’s other Scooby Doo villain manual, which is ostensibly about fighting antisemitism (and sounds a LOT like a Handmaid’s Tale sub plot — they’re working on the white women, too. Already, women are essentially second class citizens inside the Hegseth-run military, to the extent they are still allowed to serve at all.

I guess we Blacks can just hang it up, at this point. Companies have effectively been told they’re not allowed to be hire us anywhere; military or civilian, if a white Christian man wants the job. Gays and trans, too.

Ditto the poor of every race and ethnicity. Earlier this month, Trump’s secretary of agriculture casually announced that Medicaid recipients could easily replace deported undocumented brown people in the fields. Presumably, the regime envisions whatever brown people, Black people, women and LGBTQ people who aren’t deported, working as maids in white Christian homes, like in the “good old days” when America was great…

Or in the Handmaid’s Tale … also known as “MAGA Goals…”

Which explains why Trump’s immigration policy is in the hands of a weird young man — Stephen Miller — who promoted the racist novel: Camp of the Saints to Steve Bannon and the editors at Breitbart — a book telling the tale of the end of the “white world” due to nonwhite immigration, and which describes immigrants as, among other things: "kinky-haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised phantoms, all the teeming ants toiling for the white man's comfort."

Just so you’re clear what we’re dealing with.

Under his eye.

They got Paramount / CBS to put the 30-year-running Late Show on a ten month cancelation schedule just to bow and scrape and appease Trump and his Project 2025 co-author FCC chair, and to promise, I guess, to never hire anything but white men again, so they could do their “consolidate the world under a handful of billionaires” (including Larry Ellison) Skydance merger.

In fact, they have cowed every major media entity in this country, with the wild exception of also Paramount-owned Comedy Central, via the hilarious guys behind the goofball cartoon series: South Park.

Meanwhile, every day, Stephen Miller’s upside down world white civil rights firm threatens to sue any university, organization or business that fails to devote its entire mission to serving the interests and needs of white men. They’re even going after the Dodgers. Too many brown players, I guess.

The right have revealed that they actually DO favor reparations: but only for people who hate Palestinians and don’t wish to see protests saying they should not be bombed into dust, and of course, January 6 insurrectionists. I await the Stephen Miller-written executive order issuing a trillion dollars in reparations for every white American who believes they ever lost a job opportunity or promotion to “DEI.”

Fascism, caught on tape

A brave Latino teenager captured ICE agents, if that’s what these masked men were, shamelessly violating the rights of his friends, and telling him — a U.S. citizen, born and raised — that he has no rights. Then to top it off, these immigration SS men boasted that their brutality toward those teens might net them a cool $30,000 bonus. Read the story on The Guardian website. A clip:

On the morning of 2 May, teenager Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio was driving to his landscaping job in North Palm Beach with his mother and two male friends when they were pulled over by the Florida highway patrol.

In one swift moment, a traffic stop turned into a violent arrest.

A highway patrol officer asked everyone in the van to identify themselves, then called for backup. Officers with US border patrol arrived on the scene.

Video footage of the incident captured by Laynez-Ambrosio, an 18-year-old US citizen, appears to show a group of officers in tactical gear working together to violently detain the three men*, two of whom are undocumented. They appear to use a stun gun on one man, put another in a chokehold and can be heard telling Laynez-Ambrosio: “You’ve got no rights here. You’re a migo, brother.” Afterward, agents can be heard bragging and making light of the arrests, calling the stun gun use “funny” and quipping: “You can smell that … $30,000 bonus.”

The footage has put fresh scrutiny on the harsh tactics used by US law enforcement officials as the Trump administration sets ambitious enforcement targets to detain thousands of immigrants every day.

“The federal government has imposed quotas for the arrest of immigrants,” said Jack Scarola, an attorney who is advocating on behalf of Laynez-Ambrosio and working with the non-profit Guatemalan-Maya Center, which provided the footage to the Guardian. “Any time law enforcement is compelled to work towards a quota, it poses a significant risk to other rights.”

Chokeholds, stun guns and laughter

And watch the video, which they obtained from the teen, here:

The thing to understand here, which you can clearly hear in the video, is that the maga gestapo isn’t just recruiting angry white men. They’re pulling Latinos, Blacks and Asians into the fold too, to harass and torment their own people; because it turns out, you don’t have to be white to fundamentally mistreat nonwhite immigrants; or even to hate them and want them to go away.

Historically, during the enslavement era, slave drivers, slave patrollers, and overseers were often white male immigrants — many from Ireland (the slave patrols are literally the precursor to the police) — or even other enslaved Blacks.

From this abstract from Cambridge University Press:

The Irish relationship with U.S. slavery varied according to circumstances. However, as foreign-born outsiders, Irish immigrants in the South had to accommodate the region's slaveholding culture. This article takes the story of the Irish as urban pioneers of the antebellum South out into the southern countryside. Those who sought employment as overseers had no qualms about profiting from racial slavery, and the nationality of a successful overseer was immaterial to planters. Irish overseers were not categorically different from native-born southern overseers. Indeed, Irish overseers had to be as ruthless as their American counterparts if they hoped to be successful. The expansion of the southern economy in accordance with the rise of the ‘second slavery’ created more significant opportunities for Irish immigrants to become overseers and demonstrates the essential whiteness of the Irish in the South.

Also this, from the National Humanities Center:

On large plantations, the person who directed the daily work of the slaves was the overseer, usually a white man but occasionally an enslaved black man—a "driver"—promoted to the position by his master. Some plantations had both a white overseer and a black driver, especially in the deep South or on plantations where the master was often absent. Of white overseers, former slaves relate harsh memories (see the narratives in #1: An Enslaved Person's Life). Of black drivers their memories are more varied, reflecting the ambiguous state between power and impotence inhabited by the black slave driver. How did black drivers relate to their masters, and to their fellow slaves over whom they held authority? How did they adapt to the vulnerable (and perhaps empowering) position between master and slave? Consider these questions as you read two sets of letters.

1. George Skipwith was the overseer/driver in the 1840s of an Alabama plantation owned by John Hartwell Cocke, who remained in Virginia on his family plantations. Skipwith had a stormy tenure as overseer and in 1848 was demoted to driver. In these seven letters from May 1847 to October 1849, we follow George's reports on the cotton crop (dismal), building construction (steady), health and behavior of the slaves (worrisome), his battle with alcohol (unsuccessful), and his competition with the white overseer who finally replaced him in 1848.
   

2. Moses and Henry [Pettigrew] were drivers for William Pettigrew, owner of two plantations in eastern North Carolina, each with about forty slaves. During the summer months when Pettigrew vacationed in Virginia, Moses and Henry exercised almost sole management of the plantations. Here we read the letters of two summers, 1856 and 1857, between Pettigrew and his drivers (whose letters were dictated to and written by a white neighbor). The drivers' letters, although laced with the mandatory phrases of deference and filtered through a white man's hand, reveal much about these men's conception of themselves in servitude. Pettigrew's letters reveal his discomfort with being a slaveowner required to depend on the initiative and forthrightness of men whose enslaved status requires them to

In the age of the racist, yet entirely common term “illegals,” which honestly, gets spat out like the n-word but much more casually, you don’t have to be white. You just have to believe that these people, many of them doing the menial grunt work that makes this country function, or running businesses that provide work for U.S. born Americans, are somehow stopping you from having whatever it is that you want; even if they look just like you, or you yourself are an immigrant or the child of one.

This New York Times piece is telling on that score (gift link). A clip:

At his second inauguration, themed “Faith in America’s Future,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of an estimated million people that “America’s possibilities are limitless.”

Yet behind the confident pronouncements of the 2012 election and the faith in demography as destiny, a different reality was coming into view.

That same year, my colleagues and I were researching the ways the 2008 financial meltdown and the myriad of housing and other crises it caused were sowing discontent in the Democrats’ multiracial coalition. Already in our research we noticed how conservatives were directing the frustrations of those suffering these crises at institutions and public workers instead of corporations and Wall Street. The Democratic message that hope and possibility were limitless and the country’s best days were ahead was crashing on the shoals of grim economic conditions and a growing sense of isolation, loneliness and despair. A rift was forming, one that only grew wider as the years wore on. [Emphasis added.]

In this moment of collapsing trust among its multiethnic voter base, the party’s commitment to progressive causes like L.G.B.T. rights and racial equality has become the target of attacks from the right. Tammy Li, a voter in San Francisco whose frustrations with the Democrats stem from the break-ins and shopliftings at the 7-Eleven franchise she owned there, began engaging with the right-wing social critique once she found herself in Republican circles. “I’m a minority myself,” she told me, “but just because you’re L.G.B.T.Q., you have more rights over my rights?”

Democrats and progressive advocacy groups remain mired in a debate about whether they need to tack right to stem the hemorrhaging of voters of color to the G.O.P., or double down on the agenda of racial and economic liberalism that originally built the party’s base among minorities. What I’ve found in my conversations is that the forces moving multiracial voters rightward are more often rooted in economic vulnerabilities.

The Latino community’s changing conditions help explain this shift on social views in nonwhite voter groups. In 1960, there were an estimated six million Latinos in the United States (not counting those living in Puerto Rico), predominantly of Mexican, Cuban or Puerto Rican heritage. In the years following, most identified as Catholic and remained concentrated in the Southwest, South Florida, and a handful of cities in the Northeast and in Chicago. In 2007, 55 percent of Latino adults in the United States had been born outside of the country. With some notable exceptions — like the Cuban American community in Florida — Latinos tended to vote in lock step with the Democratic Party.

But by 2022, the Latino population had exceeded 63 million. Latinos had built longstanding communities in most states, and a large majority had been born in this country. Under 45 percent identified as Catholic, while 15 percent described themselves as evangelical Protestants, in churches that make conservative views on abortion, same-sex marriage and other social issues central to their beliefs. How they vote could change the trajectory of America’s political landscape.

We shall see if this shift remains in tact as more and more Latinos watch their friends and families get dragged off into unmarked vans, detained in concentration camps and deported to who knows where, or back to the hell they came from. Personal experiences tend to sober the mind. But keep in mind that when this song — which has aged worse than any song perhaps in history — was made:

…the lyrics were meant to speak to an aspiration to be seen, deep accents aside, not as “immigrants,” but as Super Duper Hyper Proud Americans. And not for nothing … as part of, and welcome within, the white community. To live in white neighborhoods, and enjoy white privileges. These people by and large didn’t come here to become brown or certainly Black. The came here to become American. For many immigrants, the drive to join; to sign up for Americanness, and all they believe it represents, is a powerful drug.

The reverse lesson has been hard. And painful to watch.

But we’ll see if it changes much at election time, given that the economic anxiety that it turns out nonwhite Americans — not the more affluent than average tea partiers — are the ones feeling the hardest, is only being exacerbated by their Super Duper American president. Especially when the other party seems so ineffectual.

But prepare to continue watching brown people in masks helping to drag other brown people off to the gulags. And you should be horrified by it, but don’t be surprised.

Fascism is like the flu. It transmits really easily.

Stay woke, friends.