Weekly Mind Dump: The GOP's Final Solution to the Migrant Question
And - Trump confirms yet again his intention to destroy NATO.
Week of 2/4-10, 2024:
As media pundits fuss over Joe Biden’s age, two events this week should be setting the commentariat’s collective hair on fire — extremist plans from the Trump camp so dangerous that the incumbent president’s occasional tongue slips are truly trivial by comparison.
The GOP’s Final Solution to the Migrant Question Outlined
Congressional Republicans’ move, on Trump’s orders, to reject a bipartisan stringent border security bill that they had practically written themselves feeds growing defiance to federal authority by Red state governors regarding immigration enforcement.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s move to block federal officers from border areas and defy a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court affirming Washington’s authority is gathering steam. Twenty-five Red state governors have declared their support; 14 of these, moreover, have sent National Guard troops or other law-enforcement officials to Texas to back Abbott up. Does a Fort Sumter-type confrontation await us? Jeff Davis’s rebel spirit is certainly astir.
Trump, of course, is egging this defiance of federal authority on. “We encourage all willing States to deploy their guards to Texas to prevent the entry of Illegals, and to remove them back across the Border,” he posted on Truth Social last month, calling for the rapid implementation of the “Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History.”
It is essentially a plan for ethnic cleansing via extreme measures, part of the radical right’s Project 2025, a detailed road map to impose full-blown fascist rule, starting with politicizing the civil service, neutering the judicial system, and persecuting foes.
Trump’s designated man to carry out mass deportations is Stephen “Muslim Ban” Miller. He outlined key elements in a recent interview with conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk. Lowlights:
building large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas.
go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids —10 million illegals and visa overstayers.
standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets. And that’s how you’re able to scale and achieve the efficiency. Then in terms of personnel, you go to the Red state governors and you say, give us your National Guard. We will deputize them as immigration enforcement officers.
if you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland.
one other group are people who were let in on visas but whose views, attitudes, and beliefs make them ineligible to stay in the country.
A former senior ICE official told The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein that removing 500,000 to 1 million migrants a year could call for as many as 100,000–150,000 deputized enforcement officers. Staffing the internment camps and constant flights could require 50,000 more personnel. “You are talking a mobilization the size of a military deployment.” Warehouses and abandoned malls would need to be converted into transit centers for thousands of migrants.
Project 2025 calls for immediate invocation of the Insurrection Act not only to help carry out mass deportations but also to quash inevitable public protests and pursue Trump’s adversaries.
Forgive me again for invoking Godwin’s Law, but the draconian measures Trump & Gang plan to implement are cut and pasted straight from the Third Reich playbook. Project 2025’s plan to immediately activate the Insurrection Act mirrors Hitler’s 1933 Enabling Act, which allowed him to bypass the German government’s system of checks and balances and crack down on opponents.
Formulated by 80 arch-conservative “think tanks” and other entities, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 eerily resembles in structure and spirit the Reich’s notorious Wannsee Conference laying out modalities for exterminating the Jews. Examples:
Nazis: mass deportations of Jews to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Project 2025: mass deportations of migrants to their home countries or other countries.
Nazis: Jews to be held in mass internment camps. Project 2025: migrants to be held in mass internment camps.
Nazis: total number of Jews to be deported/eliminated - 11 million. Project 2025: total number of migrants to be deported - 11 million.
Nazis: designated two categories of nations with Jewish populations: “A” - those under German control and “B” - those not fully under German control, thus requiring dispatching of the SS and other Nazi forces to round up Jews. Project 2025: Red (i.e., Republican-led) states and Blue (Democrat-led) states; federalized Red state National Guards would be deployed to Blue states to round up migrants.
Nazis: the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was enacted to purge Jews and anti-Nazis from government ranks, to be replaced by Nazi loyalists. Project 2025: mass dismissals of career civil servants to be replaced by MAGA loyalists.
Nazis: official overseeing the Final Solution to the Jewish Question - SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Project 2025: official overseeing deportations: Trump Senior Advisor Stephen Miller. (Note the resemblance of the two in the photo above; see my essay: “Does Evil Reincarnate Itself? The Case of White House Advisor Stephen Miller.”)
Taking the above in, how does obsessing over Biden’s age compare? You be the judge.
Unconvinced that Trump Would Destroy NATO? Listen to This
At a campaign rally on Saturday, Trump proclaimed:
One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and were attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, ‘No I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.’
I’ve probably written 30 thousand words on how another Trump presidency would lead to the destruction of the post-World War II security order with resultant global chaos and conflict and the end of America’s leadership in upholding that order and promoting democracy and rule of law.
Are the American people so oblivious, ignorant and clueless that they don’t see this? As Alexis de Tocqueville observed of Americans, “I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country, as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny… The subjection of individuals will increase…not only in the same proportion as their equality, but in the same proportion as their ignorance.”