Martha’s Vineyard

[BoSoxGal]

Have we all seen the news about the migrants dropped off on the island in the nighttime? Turns out many were lied to about where they were headed and some are scheduled for immigration court hearings next week in Florida, so DeSantis seems to have intended to contribute to the likelihood they will be deported from the country for failure to appear unless quick work is made of getting them legal assistance.

Which we liberals in the commonwealth are stepping up to do, along with rallying resources to get them in comfortable transitional housing with adequate supports in place for all the needs they will have going forward. Our SANE Republican Governor Charlie Baker has offered them shelter at joint base Cape Cod and has activated national guard to assist.

How does this stunt benefit DeSantis? By riling up the xenophobic base? Venezuelans are like Cubans, and the substantial population now in Florida is fiercely Republican. How is he helping himself at home by trafficking their fellow Venezuelan migrants fleeing communist dictatorship?

[eddieq]

I realize not everyone is a Christian or even religious. Most of these GQP folks profess to be Christian, though. It's an old argument, but I see nothing Christ-like in any of their public actions/interactions. They like to speak publicly about how much their faith means to them and that's where it ends. In the situation with the migrants involved here, I honestly don't know what Jesus would have done. He probably would have told his disciples to feed them and find them someplace to stay (such as what the MVY folks are doing). What I know that he wouldn't do is use them as a political pawn to try to score points or "own the libs".

It's very clear to me that the historical Jesus would be condemned as a communist or socialist and decried by the current republican party.

[Sue U]

How does this stunt benefit DeSantis? By riling up the xenophobic base? Venezuelans are like Cubans, and the substantial population now in Florida is fiercely Republican. How is he helping himself at home by trafficking their fellow Venezuelan migrants fleeing communist dictatorship?

I attended a seminar over the summer where some jury consultants were reviewing the results of a number of recent academic studies of social attitudes in America, and the upshot of the research was that a substantial segment of the population is motivated most by a desire to punish those they see as their enemies. Unsurprisingly, this segment currently lines up pretty neatly with the Trump/DeSantis political demographic. As long as those perceived as "threats" are being punished, they will lend support to whomever is leading the charge and give them carte blanche in the effort. DeSantis is just tapping into the obvious vein of grievance, vengeance and spiteful vindictiveness that Trumpists have made the currency of the GOP.

Or, as Adam Serwer pointed out several years ago, "the cruelty is the point":

The Cruelty Is the Point

President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.

By Adam Serwer

October 3, 2018

The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.

The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.

Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.

Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.

Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.

This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

A blockbuster New York Times investigation on Tuesday reported that President Trump’s wealth was largely inherited through fraudulent schemes, that he became a millionaire while still a child, and that his fortune persists in spite of his fumbling entrepreneurship, not because of it. The stories are not unconnected. The president and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the nation’s darkest impulses in the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get away with this fraud is tied to cruelty.

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

Source: The Atlantic

[Crackpot]

They profess Christianity in so far as it is a tool to define someone else as “other”.

[ex-khobar Andy]

I don't see a big difference between what de Santis did here and the actions of the coyotes who bring people over the border.

[Bicycle Bill]

I don't see a big difference between what de Santis did here and the actions of the coyotes who bring people over the border.

Or some sleazeball who targets young runaway or confused girls and ships them to larger cities with promises of someone who will get them a job, or a break into showbiz, but they wind up doing porn films, working as street whores, or worse.  Say what you want to about how over-the-top and fantastical the Liam Neeson film "Taken" might have been, the basic premise was rooted in fact.  And it isn't just 'something that maybe happens in Europe or the Middle East, but not here in the USA!"

Maybe we can add "human trafficking" (almost said 'white slavery', but you know he's not doing this to the pale people) to the list of reprehensible offenses DeSantis will have to answer for sometime in the (hopefully not-so-distant) future.

[Jarlaxle]

I don't see a big difference between what de Santis did here and the actions of the coyotes who bring people over the border.

Then you are REALLY STUPID.

[Econoline]

I don't see a big difference between what de Santis did here and the actions of the coyotes who bring people over the border.

Then you are REALLY STUPID.

Yeah...there's a BIG *BIG* DIFFERENCE: the coyotes are getting paid (big money, by people who can't afford it) for their "services"; deSantis and Abbott are taking (big money, from taxpayers) and giving it to private contractors.



(But the basic actions—taking poor and desperate humans and shipping them off to an unfamiliar location without planning for any support services once they get there—are pretty much the same. Bill's comparison to "some sleazeball who targets young runaway or confused girls and ships them to larger cities with promises of someone who will get them a job, or a break into showbiz, but they wind up doing porn films, working as street whores, or worse" is also quite apt.)

[Jarlaxle]

Personally, I would rather load them into airliners, fly them back to where they came from, unload them, and leave.

[BoSoxGal]

Personally, I would rather load them into airliners, fly them back to where they came from, unload them, and leave.

You should be watching the program I’m watching on PBS right now, The US and the Holocaust- it might help your grinch heart grow a size or two.

Venezuelans have the right to seek asylum under US immigration law so fantasizing about sending them back to the regime they are fleeing is more than a little callous.

The United States of America is not going to stay a white country. The fix is already in - white people can’t stand each other enough to reproduce at a rate that could keep it majority white. Before you die (if you are lucky enough to live a few more decades) this country will be a multiethnic democracy with a white minority conceding power more and more with each passing year. Don’t be scared; we just have to trust that the people of color won’t persecute us for our past offenses - which are legion - when they take the reins in full. Don’t worry systemic racism is very deeply entrenched we won’t get that far before your time is up.

[Jarlaxle]

Personally, I would rather load them into airliners, fly them back to where they came from, unload them, and leave.

You should be watching the program I’m watching on PBS right now, The US and the Holocaust- it might help your grinch heart grow a size or two.

Venezuelans have the right to seek asylum under US immigration law so fantasizing about sending them back to the regime they are fleeing is more than a little callous.

DOn't give a shit anymore.

The United States of America is not going to stay a white country. The fix is already in - white people can’t stand each other enough to reproduce at a rate that could keep it majority white. Before you die (if you are lucky enough to live a few more decades) this country will be a multiethnic democracy with a white minority conceding power more and more with each passing year. Don’t be scared; we just have to trust that the people of color won’t persecute us for our past offenses - which are legion - when they take the reins in full. Don’t worry systemic racism is very deeply entrenched we won’t get that far before your time is up.

I have no idea where you came up with this. Do you?

[Scooter]

Immigration and Nationality Act:

Sec. 274. [8 U.S.C. 1324]

(a) Criminal Penalties.-

(1) (A) Any person who-

...

(ii) knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, transports, or moves or attempts to transport or move such alien within the United States by means of transportation or otherwise, in furtherance of such violation of law;

...

(B) A person who violates subparagraph (A) shall, for each alien in respect to whom such a violation occurs-

...

(ii) in the case of a violation of subparagraph (A)(ii), (iii), (iv), or (v)(II), be fined under title 18, United States Code, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both

So DeSantis is facing up to 250 years in federal prison for this stunt.

[Bicycle Bill]

Click here to sign the petition.

-"BB"-

[Econoline]

I'm thinking the Dems should start a Banned Bookmobile service in Florida. (ETA:...and Texas...and other states, as needed)

[BoSoxGal]

I'm thinking the Dems should start a Banned Bookmobile service in Florida. (ETA:...and Texas...and other states, as needed)

The librarians of New York (liberals? could be!) are already on the case:

https://www.bklynlibrary.org/books-unbanned

https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/ny ... u-s-041322

New York public libraries offering free cards to teenagers and adults for ebook access to commonly banned books.

You can’t keep a good book down.

[Big RR]

Scooter--nice try, but my understanding is that these people were asylum applicants, and thus not here illegally (at least until their petition is decided). But there may well be other laws he violated.

[Scooter]

Isn't the Republican talking point that all asylum seekers are just illegal immigrants trying to play the angles?

If, in order to defend himself, DeSantis had to argue that asylum seekers are in the U.S. legally, it would have been worth charging him just for the sake of getting that admission.

[Burning Petard]

Scooter, I thought "trying to play the angles" was basic to the Trump rules for Life. with the next article in that code that rules do not apply to them and any thing that is found disagreeable is illegal.

snailgate

[Big RR]

It would be fun to hear hi say that Scooter, but since the law requires that they would have to be here illegally, and they are not, no charges under that law can be filed; it is is incumbent onthe prosecution to prove the elements of the crime are present, not the defense.

[Econoline]