This Week in American Fascism

It's Kristallnacht. We are rounding people up.

Watch this video.

Imagine you are a 16-year-old girl, who has been watching the last few months as Mohsen Mahdawi, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mahmoud Khalil were illegally detained by ICE.

As people like Kilmar Obrega Garcia were ripped out of their cars and sent off to a torture prison in another country.

Or sent somewhere else that is, at this point, untraceable.

Imagine watching the news over the weekend and seeing that Tennessee Highway Patrol officers were working with ICE agents in Nashville to stop drivers in a particular section of town - the section where Latinos live - and cart 100 of them off without due process?

Then left the detainees’ toddlers and babies in car seats.

We have no idea who was taken, whether or not they were citizens.

And then imagine a phalanx of local police and masked ICE agents coming to your house to take your mother.

Wouldn’t you be upset? Wouldn’t you scream, “Why?” Wouldn’t you try to get to your mother?

The video above, the best angle I’ve seen yet thanks to NBC News, is horrifying.

This is 1938 Germany. Kristallnacht has happening. Now the Gestapo is coming into peoples homes.

While MAGA cheers.

While MAGA believes the propaganda.

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Imagine you are a 19-year-old who was brought to the U.S. as a child. And you make a right turn on red. In Georgia.

And are now in ICE custody.

Which says it is “upholding the rule of law.”

Pope Leo XIV, when he was still just Cardinal Robert Prevost, endorsed an article from America the Jesuit Review, which, according to Newsweek, stated in part that "it ought to be clear that Catholics cannot support a rhetoric that demonizes immigrants as dangerously criminal simply because they have crossed the border in search of a better life for themselves and their families.”

Emphasis is mine. We have lost sight of that. This 19-year-old honors student crossed the border with her mother as a child. Then she committed a traffic violation.

And ICE cites those two things as reasons for detaining her.

“Rule of law.”

Heil Hitler.

Heil Trump.

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If you subscribe to the idea that the white or white-pleasing manosphere is like a caged tiger, fighting ferociously and viciously for it’s life, then the events of the last week make a macabre sense.

And it’s not surprising that Stephen Miller - who would look so at home in a Nazi uniform - has doubled down the same week that the Vatican doubled up by electing an Augustinian pope with Jesuit leanings.

In other words, a caring human being.

In Stephen Miller’s world, all caring human beings are enemies. When empathy enters his vicinity, he turns the screws tighter.

This week, he has turned the screws tighter.

Which means he’s getting desperate.

Because this week, not only did the Catholics elect a man who has called out the Trump administration for it’s lack of empathy, but a federal judge released Öztürk, who joined Mahdawi, who was released on bail 10 days prior.

So, it’s not surprising that Himmler… I mean Miller floated the idea on Friday of suspending habeas corpus. Under the pretense that we are at war.

And then, apparently, gave an order to arrest the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, outside a detention center in his city.

Or, as this guy put it:

Mayor Baraka told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki that he was at the facility to do a press conference with three of New Jersey’s Congresspeople - Bonnie Watson Coleman, LaMonica McIver and Rob Menendez - who were there to inspect the Delaney Hall detention center, which, until February, was a half-way house. Since then, according to WHYY Philadelphia, the facility, owned by GEO Group, has been holding ICE detainees as part of a $1 billion, 15-year contract with the Trump administration.

A 15-year contract.

Baraka told Psaki that since the change in focus, GEO Group has refused to let Newark city inspectors in the building. And Baraka has visited the facility to talk to the managers several times, including Friday morning.

Here’s some confirmational context from a New York news station.

Watson Coleman told MSNBC that she and her colleagues were denied entry into the detention center. And when Baraka showed up to do the press conference, he was invited through the gate to talk with officers. He was then asked to leave, and he did.

A few minutes later, after receiving a phone call, ICE agents stepped outside the gate and arrested Baraka.

Here’s video of the arrest, as Congresspeople were huddling around the mayor to protect him.

Have you noticed the ethnicity of the Congresspeople and the Mayor? And the ethnicity of the ICE agents?

Hmm…

But Homeland Security could not allow video or truth that might pierce the veil of their MAGA cheerleaders, so they put out this statement.

Members of Congress are allowed to go into any federal building. Even ICE detention centers. Nobody “broke in.” They also didn’t get in to the actual building. As you can see in the video, the three Congresspeople followed Baraka through the gate. They never got any farther than that, as the mayor was taken away in handcuffs.

But, because Homeland Security is a government agency, and it is a knee-jerk reaction for news outlets to report what government agencies say, ABC and other news orgs followed with headlines that sowed doubt.

And MAGA is still believing the propaganda.

Just like the “good Germans” in the 1930s and ‘40s.

You’re Overthinking it is a weekly thought piece on the world we live in and the realities we may not see in the legacy press. Most of what I write is fearless and relentlessly introspective.

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Carrie Kaufman is veteran print and radio journalist who has always been more interested in what people are avoiding than what they are talking about. She founded and published PerformInk, a Chicago theatre and film industry trade paper, which covered economics, jobs, politics, racism, sexism, power, real estate - all through the lens of the artist. She then moved on to public radio, where she hosted talk shows in Vegas and Wisconsin, which is when she realized she was too old to do bad journalism.

Check out past and present work on Muckrack.

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