The Afghan refugees that Trump wants to deport

On Sunday, 60 Minutes told the harrowing story of how Jason Kander (read about him here) used private resources to get 383 refugees out of Afghanistan after the U.S. pulled out of the country.  The focus of the story was on the nephew of Kander's translator, Rahim Rauffi, who had received death threats from the Taliban because he possessed critical documents from his work in payroll for Afghanistan International Bank.

Rahim has access to the list of tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked directly with everybody from the UN to the U.S. Embassy, to any other multi-lateral just trying to build democracy in Afghanistan, everything that the Taliban stood against, and everything that once the Taliban took over, one of their first priorities was to find those people and make an example of them by imprisoning them or killing them.

If you didn't see the segment, I highly recommend watching it. As I commented while it was airing, "if this were a movie script it would be rejected as too wild to be believed." But here's what Kander wants us all to take away from the story:

I want Americans to know that every Afghan that they meet did something heroic to get here. And when you first meet them they might be in a job where you may not think about that. They might be bussing your table. They might be driving your Uber. But these are some of the most industrious and resilient and incredible people that you'll ever meet. And I just would like every American to know that.

What the 60 Minutes story didn't cover was the immigration status of these Afghan refugees. It is most likely that they're covered by humanitarian parole, which has been granted to 133,000 Afghans, but is only valid for two years.  

Donald Trump has promised to end the "outrageous abuse of parole,” meaning that Rahim, his family, and the rest of those rescued by Kander would be at risk of deportation. In case you thought the incoming administration would be sympathetic to Afghan refugees, keep in mind that Vice President-elect J.D. Vance suggested that they might be terrorists. 

I wish 60 Minutes had included this risk of deportation when telling this important story. But when/if you hear about Trump ending humanitarian parole, perhaps Rahim's family will come to mind and we'll remember Kander's words about these heroic, industrious, resilient, and incredible people.

The least tyrant-proof part of government: DOJ

Donald Trump, who made more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, or imprison the "enemy within," has nominated Kash Patel to be FBI Director. Here's what he's promised to do: 

Here is Trump’s nominee for FBI Director Kash Patel calling for “offensive operations” to jail Americans who they consider “the enemy.” “We will go out and find the conspirators... Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media."

[image or embed]

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen.bsky.social) November 30, 2024 at 7:02 PM

I was reminded that, very early on in the first Trump administration, Benjamin Wittes wrote that the least tyrant-proof part of government is the Department of Justice. To make the point, he quoted Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who also served as U.S. Attorney General (emphasis mine).

What every prosecutor is practically required to do is to select the cases for prosecution and to select those in which the offense is the most flagrant, the public harm the greatest, and the proof the most certain.

If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his case, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.

Wittes goes on to point out that the safeguards against this ultimately "reside in an institutional culture at the Justice Department, and that is precisely the sort of thing a tyrant leader can change." 

So, if confirmed as FBI Director, Patel will be able to prosecute/sue/harass anyone Trump deems to be an "enemy within."

Wittes concludes that, "There is, in fact, only one way to tyrant-proof the American presidency: Don't elect tyrants to it." 

Oops, too late for that.

Rep. Seth Moulton would rather blame the word police than confront his transphobia

I'm not very knowledgable about Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), but he seems to be making a name for himself by promoting the idea that the Democrats lost in 2024 because they are too "woke." Yesterday the Washington Post published an op-ed by Moulton with these opening paragraphs.

Since Election Day, I’ve learned two things about the Democratic Party: The word police will continue to patrol no matter how badly we lose, and a growing number of us are finally ready to move beyond them to start winning again.  

Two days after Donald Trump’s victory, I gave an example of how Democrats spend too much time trying not to offend anyone, even on issues where most Americans feel the same way. Speaking as a dad, I said I didn’t like the idea of my two girls one day competing against biological boys on a playing field. My main point, though, is what I said next: “As a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

The Congressman went on the relay that, after making those remarks, the local Democratic Party condemned them and people showed up at his office to protest. Ohhh, the horror! 

It's also interesting to note that nowhere in Moulton's op-ed does he reference the fact that Republicans are targeting the first transgender women ever elected to congress - Rep. Sarah McBride - with harassment and threats. In his mind, the real threat is that those who disparage transgendered people are being silenced. WOW! 

But this is the kind of backward "logic" we're hearing from pundits these days. It reminds me of a conversation I witnessed way back in 2007 between African American, Hispanic, and Native American bloggers in response to this statement from Glenn Greenwald:

It is always preferable to have views and sentiments -- even ugly ones -- aired out in the open rather than forcing them into hiding through suppression. And part of the reason people intently run away from discussions of race...is because it is too easy to unwittingly run afoul of various unwritten speech rules, thereby triggering accusations of bigotry. That practice has the effect of keeping people silent, which in turn has the effect of reinforcing the appearance that nobody thinks about race (which is why nobody discusses it), which in turn prevents a constructive discussion of hidden and unwarranted premises.

At his blog, The Unapologetic Mexican, Nezua responded with this:

In this analysis (or this part of his post at least) the problem is the various unwritten speech rules. But guess what? There really aren't any. There are just poor attitudes we keep about people who look different. Or who we've been taught to think of differently. And there is a "White" attitude of deciding for everyone else how they should live, be, self-identify, and do many other things. There are old slurs and old tropes that hurt people. These are the things that are flushed out when people speak: attitudes, thoughts, beliefs, manners of speaking that hint at lurking attitudes.

People avoid talking about race because they are scared of exposing their thoughts and views on race. They are afraid they are A RACIST. They are not afraid of "unwritten speech rules." They are afraid that what they really think and feel will cause them to be ridiculed or ostracized in public, or that they may see a part of themselves they have to feel bad about. So they keep the potential to themselves.

That conversation on the "diversosphere" went on for days. I learned a lot from all of the bloggers involved and am sad to say that most of their sites have disappeared or gone quiet. 

But if we take Nezua's response and apply it to what Moulton wrote up above, you'll see that he referred to transgender females as "biological boys." That indicates that, at best, the congressman knows nothing about the issue and, at worst, he's parroting transphobic talking points. Of course, he's free to say ignorant stuff because there are no "speech rules." But the people who responded are also free to protest that kind of bigotry. Actually, it is imperative that they do so. 

As Nezua ended his response, "if we keep the focus on Speech Rules, we miss the opportunity to change ourselves." The truth is that Moulton is upset about the fact that he got called out for his thoughts/attitudes/beliefs about transgender people. Rather than listen and learn, he decided to blame the "word police." 

Gov. Tim Walz: The fascists depend on fear. Don't give them the power.

I recently went back to remind myself of the first time Gov. Tim Walz talked about Donald Trump and J.D. Vance being weird. 

Gov. Walz on trail stumping for Harris. Posting a few of his remarks that stuck out to me.

"These guys are just weird," he said before calling Trump/Vance "a threat to democracy" who will put people in danger. He said Trump is going to have his "ass handed to him" in Minnesota. pic.twitter.com/BcHYSFKFxX

— Eva McKend (@evamckend) July 28, 2024

Here's the transcript (emphasis mine): 

These guys are just weird. That's who they are. So it ain't much else.

Don't give them the power. Look, are they a threat to democracy? Yes. Are they going to take our rights away? Yes. Are they going to put people's lives in danger? Yes. Are they going to endanger the planet by not dealing with climate change? Yes, they're going to do all that.

But don't lift these guys up like they're some kind of heroes. Everybody in this room knows. I know it as a teacher, a bully has no self-confidence, a bully has no strength. They have nothing.

The fascists depend on fear. The fascists depend on us going back. But we're not afraid of weird people.

We're a little bit creeped out, but we're not afraid.

The part about Trump/Vance being weird got all of the press. But I think that the most important part of what Walz had to say is the context he provided  - and that part is even more important now that the weird guys have been re-elected: "Fascists depend on fear, so don't give them that power." 

When I think about fear and power, this quote from Audre Lorde comes to mind.

Standing up as a Black lesbian woman 50 years ago would have given Lorde plenty of reasons to be afraid. Notice that she didn't simply dismiss those fears. Instead, she said that they became less important when she dared to be powerful. In other words, she didn't focus on her fears...she focused on her vision and her own powerful self.

I think that's what Gov. Walz was trying to tell us last July. At the time, it lifted our spirits and brought us joy. Of course, the threat is more real today than it was back then. But the message is still the same: let your soul shine!

When your world seems cold
You got to let your spirit take control

Talking 'bout soulshine
It's better than sunshine
Better than moonshine
Damn sure better than rain
And now people don't mind
We all feel this way sometimes
Gotta let your soul shine
Shine till the break of day

Why fascism wasn't a deal breaker

As the 2024 presidential campaign was winding down, Tucker Carlson gave a speech at a Turning Point rally for Trump in which he compared the opposition to a disobedient teenage girl.

There has to be a point at which dad comes home….and he's pissed. 

Dad is pissed. He's not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they're his children…. 

And when dad gets home, you know what he says, "You've been a bad girl. You've been a bad little girl, and you're getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it's not gonna hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it's not. I'm not gonna lie. It's gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You're getting a vigorous spanking because you've been a bad girl. And it has to be this way."

The crowd loved it. And when Trump came on stage, they chanted, "Daddy's home!"

As Talia Lavin noted at the time, it was a "florid illustration of the way patriarchal family dynamics and punishment stand at the center of contemporary right-wing morality." She goes on to suggest that Carlson's words "had a special resonance for a particular breed of authoritarian conservative: members of the evangelical right," in which "tens of millions of Americans have experienced, firsthand, the consequences of disobeying Daddy."

In the 1970s James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, gave credence to all of that with his book, "Dare to Discipline." As part of this so-called "biblical parenting," Dobson recommended regular corporal punishment of disobedient children from the ages of 18 months to 10 years old, with a spanking “of sufficient magnitude to cause tears.”

For Dobson, the purpose of all of this was to break a child's will, which he defined as a "passion for independence" and a "deeply ingrained desire to have his or her way." The end goal is to force the willful child into obedience, which is achieved either through violence, or the threat of violence. 

Of course, "biblical parenting" mirrors the right wing view of God and how he interacts with his children. That one goes back a very long time. For example, in 1741 Jonathan Edwards preached his famous sermon titled "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." It employs intense, vivid, and frightening imagery to depict the torments of Hell to create a sense of fear and urgency, emphasizing the wrath of an angry God who demands obedience.

Listen to any evangelist today and they'll repeat the same message: "You are a sinner and God is angry. If you don't obey him, he'll send you to hell for eternal punishment." If it sounds like abusive authoritarianism, that's because it is.

Is it any wonder that right wing evangelicals are uncomfortable with a democracy that promises independence to people in the name of freedom and equality? Or that they are much more comfortable with an authoritarian leader who foments fear and promises to punish those who are disobedient? As Katherine Stewart put it:

The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

They want it all. And in Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.

It should come as no surprise then, that fascism wasn't a deal breaker. To the contrary, it's what they've been looking for. 

Preparing for the zone to be flooded with shit

Historically, a president-elect starts announcing their cabinet nominees by the end of November. But Donald Trump has already announced most of his nominees and plans to finish by next week. Steve Bannon and Sen. Tuberville exposed the game plan recently.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville tells Steve Bannon that Republican senators have a plan in place to confirm Trump's key nominations (including Gaetz and Hegseth) before Trump is sworn in pic.twitter.com/nB15SvDZIa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 20, 2024

The new congress will be sworn in on January 3rd and MAGA senators plan to start their confirmation hearings right away - more than two weeks before Trump's inauguration. 

What's the rush? Bannon answers that question in the clip up above when he talks about "flooding the zone." He explained what that meant back in 2018 when he told Michael Lewis that "the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” 

But the shit isn't going to stop with the nomination/confirmation process. About a year ago Stephen Miller talked to Charlie Kirk about how Trump's plan to deport 10-15 million immigrants was going to work. Here's how the conversation ended:

You go in so many different directions that they can't fight you. You do the deportations, you're simultaneously shutting down the FBI headquarters, you're firing bureaucrats, you go nine different places at once methodically...you have to spread the media thin.

So that's the plan. But rushing through enormous projects like this with the level of incompetence we're seeing in Trump's nominees is a recipe for chaos at best and disaster at worst. 

With this plan to "flood the zone with shit," I'm thinking that it might be best to pick an area of concern and focus my response rather than try to cover everything. For now, I'm most interested in following the implementation of their mass deportation efforts. 

First of all, I'm interested in where they'll start. Paul Krugman pointed out that the whole process will likely be ripe for corruption.

[D]eportations will also become a way to reward friends and punish enemies. Whatever he says, Trump won't be able to round up 15 million people and put them in camps right away. What we'll see instead, at least initially, are scattershot raids on businesses suspected of employing undocumented immigrants. So which businesses will be targeted, and which will be left alone, perhaps for years? If you think choices of who gets raided and who doesn't will be unrelated to political connections and probably financial payoffs, I have a degree from Trump University you may want to buy.

There's also the fact that one of the states with this largest number of undocumented immigrants - 1.6 million according to Pew Research - is Texas. Writing for the Texas Monthly, Jack Herrera recently noted that "If Texas officials wanted to stop the arrival of undocumented immigrants, they could try to make it impossible for them to work here. But that would devastate the state’s economy. So instead politicians engage in border theater. "

The Lone Star state likes to brag about the so-called "Texas Miracle" that has brought 10 million new people to the state since 2000. The development around that kind of migration has meant a huge boon to the construction industry, while relies heavily on undocumented labor. That's why leaders like Gov. Greg Abbott had engaged in "border theater," but have done little to make it difficult for immigrants to work there. 

Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.

Screaming about all of the dangers posed by "illegals" has been good fodder for politicians like Trump and Abbott on the campaign trail. But when the rubber of mass deportation actually meets the road, the choice will be to (1) devastate the Texas economy, or (2) skip over a state that has one of the largest populations of undocumented immigrants. 

You can bet that I'll be watching to see which one they chose.

The danger of demonizing education

In the aftermath of this election, we're hearing a lot of pundits and politicians suggest that the reason Harris lost is because Democrats abandoned the "working class." It is important that we call that argument out because it's not only wrong, it's dangerous.

These days the standard definition of "working class" is those who don't have a college degree, and the argument that Democrats have abandoned them is almost always paired with the idea that the party has increasingly aligned itself with "elites" who have college degrees. Back in the 1950s, that might have made sense, when about 5% of the population graduated from college. But here's what has happened since then.

Almost 40% of the population now has a college degree, with the number of women recently surpassing the number of men. We see a similar trajectory with African Americans, who started at almost zero in 1950 and now are at about 20% with a college degree. 

For decades, part of the so-called "American Dream" involved parents who sacrificed in order to send their kids to college in hopes they could have a better life. That dream came true for many of us, but now the whole framework has been dumped on it's head. A woman who got a college education in order to become a public school teacher is now an "elitist," while a guy worth $330 billion is some kind of populist leader.

The movement away from an assumption that everyone needs a college education is a positive development. We should all be free to follow the path that is best for us. But in many ways, the script has been flipped to demonize the educated - especially those who are experts in their field (ie, Anthony Fauci). 

For both MAGA and some on the left, the message is that we should abandon expertise and rely on so-called "common sense." That might work when it comes to a seating arrangement for Thanksgiving dinner, but it's an absolute catastrophe when it comes to things like public health, economic policy, or diplomacy. Demonizing experts also makes it difficult to differentiate between the truth and a lie - opening the door to fascism.

All of this is why Trump/Vance have promised to undermine education. For example, Vance gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021 that was literally titled, "The Universities are the Enemy." More recently, he suggested that the U.S. should follow the lead of Hungary's Viktor Orban, who seized control of that country's universities and turned them over to his allies. Meanwhile, Trump promised a "massive higher education overhaul," suggesting that he would tax, fine, and sue private universities in order to confiscate their endowments and create "The American Academy," Orban-style.

But that's not all. They've also promised to eliminate the federal Department of Education. That would accomplish four main goals:

1. Eliminate funds for schools with high rates of students living in poverty,
2. Eliminate funds for students with special education needs, 
3. Eliminate federal enforcement of laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion and disability status, and
4. Eliminate federal student loan programs.

Thomas Jefferson is often quoted as saying, "An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people." Given the complexities facing a representative democracy in the 21st Century, that has never been more true, or more threatened, than it is today.