Nina-Bytes: Sowing and Reaping in Trump’s America

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Incubated in Bipartisan Oppression

As I’ve written numerous times over the past eight and a half years, a lot of the horrifying fascist things the Trump regime is doing represent a logical extension of bipartisan American policies adopted long before Donald Trump came down that escalator and launched his first campaign for President by spouting explicitly white nationalist propaganda about Mexican migrants. None of which is to imply that any of this fascist bullshit is morally acceptable, or strictly legal, but the reason Trump and his minions have been able to try and speedrun us towards a sci-fi novel fascist dictatorship is because a lot of the tools he needs to do so were already built by his predecessors in office. Even the ideological xenophobia, cop worship, and white supremacy that are paving the way for Trump’s authoritarian agenda were ultimately gifted to Der Leader by decades and decades of American political actors who embraced and promoted those ideas for their own purposes.

The reality is that while Trump is certainly an accelerant of American fascism, the Kelpto Kaiser and his agenda is also a product of that very same American fascism; Dowmarket Mussolini didn’t legalize a “counterterrorism” panopticon surveillance state after 9/11, he didn’t empower the office of President to act like a dictator during even fake wars, and he didn’t build out the fascist police state he’s using to destroy what passes for American democracy as we speak. The instruments of repression, security theater, and white supremacist ideology Trump is employing to create his own patchwork dictatorship in America were embraced and installed by a largely bipartisan consensus of US political leaders happy to exploit popular reaction to increase their own power and enrich the ruling class via imperialism, extractivism, and objectively racialized exploitation. The US national security state and counterterrorism apparatus has been Trump’s most effective laboratory for enacting a fascist agenda on his way to transforming America into his own private dictatorship; give or take the input of a few unhinged nazi broligarchs he owes his return to power to, of course.

The national security state isn’t however the only incubation chamber from which the Trumpenreich dictatorship is emerging. As this excellent article from the executive director of Detention Watch Network, Silky Shah details, Donald Trump also inherited a prebuilt migrant carceral complex and extraordinary authoritarian powers to protect Americans from scary brown people who might not possess the proper documentation. A thirty year bipartisan consensus towards caging brown people and calling that protecting public safety has resulted in the creation of a vast enforcement army, and a nation-wide detention complex, that are so normalized in the American imagination that we rarely recognize that these things represent a ready-made police state with concentration camps. This objectively white nationalist yet completely bipartisan immigration apparatus has also directly empowered the regime’s fascist takeover of American life, and like the national security state, Trump didn’t have to create this monstrous oppression machine either.

Trump’s First 100 Days Show Immigrant Jails Are Authoritarian Testing Grounds

“The changing infrastructure and scope of immigrant incarceration has become a clear testing ground for this administration’s authoritarianism.

But these policies did not emerge overnight. For decades, government leaders from across the political spectrum set the stage for these draconian moves by diminishing immigrants’ due process rights under the pretense of “protecting public safety.” Transferring immigrants to remote immigrant jails is also a familiar tactic intended to impair access to legal counsel while putting cases before more hostile courts. Trump’s deportation machinery is building on what prior administrations, including those of Obama and Biden, had already put in place. An honest stock-taking of the Trump administration’s first 100 days reveals how bipartisan support for detention expansion and criminalization of immigration created the ideal conditions for today’s war on immigrants.”

Look friends, if anything I just said strikes you as controversial then I strongly courage you to just read the entire article; Shah does an excellent job of both recapping the ways the Trump regime is already using immigration enforcement to gallop us towards a fascist dictatorship, and why previous Democrat administrations have made it possible to do so. I’m not posting this to drop an “I told you so” but rather because decades of bipartisan policy, rhetoric, and political messaging have taught Americans to see the war on migrants as something separate from their own rights and freedoms. Even now, as the Trump administration proves daily that this assumption is demonstrably false, a significant portion of Der Leader’s political opposition in the Democratic Party is arguing that defending the rights of migrants from an openly white nationalist executive branch is a “distraction.” These are the very same people who, along with the openly racist Republican Party of course, built the turnkey dictatorship Trump is now activating and weaponizing against us all. And for what have they betrayed you? Campaign contributions? Private prison lobbyist money? A general white supremacist agreement that brown bodies need policing? I’m sure as shit not going to listen to anyone who empowered this monstrous bullshit tell me it was about keeping Americans safe while that very same machinery gives birth to a dictatorship under Trump and a half dozen billionaire broligarch techno-fascists.

The reality is that a police state and vast carceral complex built to target migrants, can just as easily be repurposed by a fascist government to target the regime’s political opposition. Either we make our stand against fascism here, on the issue of immigration justice, or the rest of us will surely fall under that same machinery of oppression in due time. Both the Department of Homeland Security and ICE were built under false pretenses by governments who were violating our civil rights; they are “solutions” in search of a problem, and under Trump anyone who opposes fascism has become that problem. It’s not enough to stop Trump from installing a fascist dictatorship, we must abolish these agencies entirely to ensure that the next Trump doesn’t have access to them, and run anyone who wants to keep the fascist police state that empowers this regime after it’s gone, right out of political life entirely.

 

 

– Nina Illingworth

 

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

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