Week 47: Con-men, nativists, anti-anti-fascists
A little about what I’m doing/reading this week …
The book I’m into at the moment is Michael Grunwald’s The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era. (After seven or eight books about far right movements and ideologies, I needed a break.)
Via
, this long reflection on Tommy Robinson’s message and appeal from is instructive, if not completely conclusive. The obvious wish here is that people would simply understand how dishonest and self-serving figures like Robinson are once they are shown, or that some magic rhetorical turn of phrase will pop the aura of fascination that they build up around themselves. That’s not how it works. As I and others have suggested, the more promising approach is to be clear and communicative about what the situation is and what we are defending, and, as Stafford puts it, to tell a positive counter-story that is a more attractive alternative to the weird, conspiratorial far-right stuff that is seducing more and more people today. It’s not that we give up debunking and rebutting, but if that’s all we do, then we are constantly chasing after their narratives instead of weaving our own.Trump officials need to go to jail for what they are doing to deportees. Via
:In March and April 2025, the U.S. government sent 252 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador’s CECOT prison. Of these deportations, 137 were carried out under the Alien Enemies Act, an archaic 1798 statute that the Trump administration invoked by declaring that Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal group, constituted part of a “hybrid criminal state perpetrating an invasion.” The remaining 101 were removed under Title 8, basically the regular immigration procedures. …
Although the Trump administration sought to characterize these people as gang members, many of these people were not gang members at all. Human Rights Watch analyzed ICE data showing that at least 48.8 percent of the Venezuelans deported to El Salvador had no criminal history in the United States whatsoever. Only 3.1 percent had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense. In 58 of the 130 documented cases that Human Rights Watch examined in detail, the individuals had no criminal records in Venezuela or other countries in Latin America either. This finding aligns closely with my own research showing a growing trend of detained immigrants with no criminal record.
Perhaps even more troubling, many of these people appeared to have been denied their right to seek asylum. …
The report documents that beatings began the moment planes landed in El Salvador and continued systematically throughout detention. The report says that the CECOT director told the detainees, according to multiple accounts, “Welcome to my prison. You are here as convicts. The only way out of here is in a black bag.” Guards and riot police beat detainees during daily cell searches, when they considered that detainees had broken prison rules, when detainees requested medical attention, and following visits by U.S. officials and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The most severe beatings took place in punishment cells known as “the Island,” small dark spaces where guards took detainees to punish or intimidate them for infractions such as speaking loudly, showering at the wrong time, or requesting medical assistance. After beating detainees, guards left them locked in these punishment cells for periods ranging from four hours to three days, often denying them food, water, and medicine.
Three former detainees reported sexual violence. Most interviewees endured verbal and psychological abuse from guards who repeatedly told them they would “never leave alive,” that “no one knew they were there,” and that “their families had abandoned them.” Four detainees said they experienced suicidal thoughts and at least one attempted suicide.
Arbitrary, illegal cruelty is the policy of this administration. It and its officials need to be held accountable.
As of this (on Friday), the U.S. State Department’s frightening escalation against MAGA’s political opponents is getting no attention in American mainstream media. Maybe it will have drawn some comment by the time this is published, but it will still be nowhere the level of alarm and pushback it merits. Meanwhile, if you commit political violence against those Trump views unsympathetically, you have a reasonable chance of being pardoned.
Earlier this week Attorney General Pam Bondi reiterated the administration’s view that “Antifa is an existential threat to our nation.” They are coming closer to declaring any critical take on capitalism, Christianity, and American society and use of power and influence abroad as de facto political violence. What do we call people fundamentally oppose anti-fascism … ?