Welcome to the Age of Disappearance
America's new era of secret police.
In the HBO drama “The Leftovers,” two percent of the world’s population suddenly disappears. This is cast as a fantastical and mysterious occurrence, setting the stage for a surreal tale of science fiction. You should never underestimate American ingenuity, though. We are on the verge of our own age of mass disappearance. It will be all too real. And it will not be fun.
Trump’s big budget bill passed the Senate yesterday. It will now go back the House, and there is more haggling to be done to appease various factions of the Republican Party, but it is a safe bet that it will pass with its biggest priorities intact. That means that an avalanche of new funding for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and anti-immigration measures is, in fact, coming. This is going to spill well past the bounds of what any sane person would consider to be “immigration enforcement.” It is going to create a lavishly funded, unaccountable, quasi-secret police force that will transform our nation for the worse. Very soon.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the terrifying scale of this new funding. This bill contains enough money to build a new system of immigration detention centers far bigger than the entire federal prison system. The American Immigration Council says that it will be enough to facilitate the “daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens.” It will let ICE hire more field agents than the FBI. Its $170 billion in funding for Stephen Miller’s rabid campaign to purge America of brown people is comparable to the total annual funding for the United States Army.
Donald Trump envisions himself as an all-powerful leader whose will is equal to law. He is bent on revenge against his political enemies. He has installed extreme loyalists in the Justice Department, the FBI, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and all other security departments. The courts have declined to meaningfully restrain his abuses of these departments. This budget will give him the final piece of the puzzle that he needs to achieve his fever dream: a nationwide army of masked, unaccountable armed agents empowered to snatch anyone they like off the streets, and the physical infrastructure to imprison or deport those people at will. Thousands of men with guns, unrestrained by judges or local police, who do not answer to Congress, who point guns at the press, who arrest whoever they want, for reasons they do not share, and do whatever they wish with those people. The implications of this are going to make America a much darker place.
One year ago, if a Congressman on the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party had called for the forcible deportation of the man who just won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, it could have been dismissed as posturing and delusion. Today, after what has happened over the past six months, you would be delusional not to consider this a serious threat. ICE has already arrested a number of Democratic elected officials, including mayors and members of Congress and a judge. In this environment, it is a trivial matter for Trump and his loyalists to concoct reasons to arrest almost anyone. People can be arrested if they are immigrants, if they look like they might be immigrants, if they illegally harbored or assisted immigrants, or if they somehow impeded ICE’s quest to arrest immigrants. The mission can and will be scaled up from “deport immigrants” to “punish those who want to stand in the way of our mission.” This is already happening, and soon will happen much more, in more places, to a greater degree. We must recognize that we are dealing with people for whom the intellectual justifications are unimportant secondary concerns, made up hastily to pave the way for them to do what they want to do.
This week, the White House told the Justice Department to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by evidence.” Thus we will begin to see some of the 25 million naturalized US citizens who the White House considers to be its enemies have their citizenship revoked. They will be exiled. What sort of criteria might be used to choose these targets? According to the memo, among those prioritized for denaturalization will be “Cases against individuals who pose a potential danger to national security, including those with a nexus to terrorism.” Because “national security” and “terrorism” both mean nothing and everything, this category alone is large enough to cover just about anyone that the administration wants to get rid of. Been to a protest? Written a left-wing op-ed? Shared a meme of JD Vance? You can and will be ejected from America.
Yesterday, JD Vance wrote that everything in Trump’s budget bill “is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.” This statement is false, particularly for the millions of people who will soon be losing their health insurance, but it does illustrate the extent to which Republicans are willing to whip up hatred of immigrants and use it as a smokescreen for their grand class war. It also reminds me that it is impossible for me to put into words my contempt for JD Vance. Men like Stephen Miller are, at least, genuine Nazis to the core, driven by a deep reservoir of hate. Vance, on the other hand, is a lotion-drenched, amoral careerist, a professional ass kisser of monsters, sitting in air conditioned rooms with his fellow Yale graduates dreaming up justifications for racist policies as a way to amuse himself, as a beloved PTA mom who has spent 47 years in America is snatched out of her Louisiana home and separated from her family. If Trump and Miller are the arsonists of American democracy, Vance is the accomplice pointing the firefighters in the wrong direction, to ensure that things burn as completely as his boss wishes.
Yesterday, Trump proudly attended the opening of a concentration camp. There will be many more to come.
It is astonishing how many times we are forced to relearn the Martin Niemoller poem. But here we are! Every few generations, those who lived through the last round of this stuff die off, and a new generation must repeat the same atrocities, and suffer the same indignities, before at least redrawing the same conclusions. America is about to fund and build a huge secret police force that will, I promise you, be used to attack and imprison and exile the president’s enemies, of all sorts. Better to look this fact square in the face than to continue to kid ourselves as long as possible as we march down the road to the gulags.
This state of affairs is the fault of those who are now carrying it out—the White House, the Trump loyalists, the Republican cowards in Congress, the political supporters of fascism. But, if we want to be completely honest, there is a certain level of responsibility that a much broader slice of America must bear. The things that most Americans long countenanced for others are now being turned on us. The surveillance systems, the heavily armed police, the “anti-terrorism” measures, the vast intelligence apparatus—all these things, we imagined, would be used only for “criminals” of the sort that were not us. Now we are surprised to find that we have been defined as the criminals. Turns out we should not have built the systems of injustice in the first place. This is one of morality’s oldest lessons. We relearn, and relearn, and relearn, the hard way.
Getting through the period of American history that is now descending upon us will require all of us to practice radical empathy. A strange quality of even the worst totalitarian fascist states is that very bad things might happen to the person next to you, and your life can still continue as normal. More and more Americans are going to find that their neighbor or their friend or their employee or their colleague was just snatched up by armed men and taken somewhere. And meanwhile, all of us who were not snatched up can still go to McDonald’s and go to the beach and watch TV. The urge to retreat into the comforting security of the idea “it’s not me” will be strong. Yet navigating our way out of this means having a collective heart. You do not know whether they will come for you, or your neighbor, or your friend, or your colleague, and if they come for any one of us, they come for all of us. We must nurture the outrage that fuels the resistance to what is going to happen. We must hit the streets for our neighbors in the same way that our neighbors would hit the streets for us. It is an illusion to think that you are exempt from the gaze of the secret police. That’s not how it works. Believe that they can come for any one of us, and it will give you the conviction that this cannot be allowed to persist. Some bad things are coming. Luckily, we have something that Trump and Vance and Miller and all of the ICE agents never will. All the money and guns and masks and prisons in the world can’t make up for a coward’s weak heart.
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Related reading: Retire the Word “Terrorism”; Anti-Immigration Democrats Fuck Off; Building the American Brownshirts; You’re a Bunch of Cowards!
Two good causes for you to support today. First, in Philadelphia, more than 9,000 unionized municipal workers are now on strike. If you’d like to assist them either in person, virtually, or financially, sign up at this link. Second, the activists who were arrested and hit with insane charges for protesting Cop City in Atlanta are still suffering as their cases drag on. To help an activist and single mother with housing costs, follow this link. We all take care of one another.
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I know it is not productive, but as a brown person, it's impossible to ignore the silence and/or active cheerleading of the affluent white liberal for the people and process that have gotten us to this moment in history. The tide of danger has finally reached their level of the social hierarchy and many are now (correctly) alarmed. However, while the tide was drowning those below them they responded with book clubs and twee window signs while still voting for the same actively complicit politicians and scorning any sort of meaningful change.
So here we are and I don't think it's inappropriate to ask why the affluent white liberal believes they must never be under threat when so many of the rest of us constantly are. I find this to be indicative of the type of white supremacy that animates the Democratic party.
I don't believe in karma, but maybe this is just what America, and Americans deserve? Maybe there is, in fact, a cosmic price to pay for genocide, slavery and building an entire society on the premise that wealth is the highest moral good.
I don't know man, I'm just waiting for the meteor.
Something I keep coming back to is how quick this all feels. It's been 5.5 months! But then I have to remind myself that none of this was quick. This has been in the works for decades. Reagan's tax cuts, Clinton's massive reduction of the federal workforce, George W's creation of the Department of Homeland Security, TSA and ICE in order to strip away our liberties and create the beginning of a surveillance state, Obama's complete inability to be the person he said he was going to be, RBG not fucking retiring....etc. etc. etc. The most heinous, racist, classist, fascist power brokers have been waiting for this moment for so long. And they've won. They've climbed the mountain. They have carte blanche. And it's horrifying.