Trump Budget Bill's Authoritarian Core
First Caged Concentration Camp Opens in Florida Swamp
As the July 4 holiday approaches, I’m wondering how the events of the past week will impact the 58% of US adults who answered Gallup polling by saying they were extremely or very proud to be American. It’s an all-time low, down by 9 points since the question was asked last year.
I know for sure that I’m not proud of the Alligator Auschwitz deportation camp, opened in Florida with a $450 million grant from FEMA. The President flew to Florida to give it his blessing, making light of its dismal location, suggesting that American citizens could end up there and promising to “look into” deporting the winner of the New York City Democratic Mayoral primary.
From the Washington Post:
The administration has been leaning into the controversy surrounding the detention center, offering dark memes in attention-grabbing ways. The White House has shared videos on its official social media accounts with song lyrics such as “ice, ice, baby” and “hey, hey, goodbye.”
Ahead of Trump’s visit, the Department of Homeland Security on Saturday shared a digitally altered image of alligators wearing ICE caps.
Florida politicians have been joining in. The Republican Party of Florida is selling insulated cup sleeves and T-shirts branded with “Alligator Alcatraz,” in fundraising emails that describe the site as a “gator-guarded, python-patrolled prison for illegal aliens who thought they could game the system.”
The alligator meme being conjured up has nothing to do with immigration; its origins are a long standing fixation by white supremacists about alligators eating Black and Brown people. (h/t @ truthHrtzz)
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I’m not proud of the travesty dressed up as a budget reconciliation bill passed by the Senate and soon to get ok’d by the House. The lies and deceptions used to promote this piece of work’s content changed hourly, but the general overall thrusts remained the same:
The transfer of one trillion dollars in wealth from the assets of 99% of Americans to the 1% of corporations and billionaires who already have so much wealth that they’ve come to consider themselves to be superior beings.
Construction of the apparatus needed to run and maintain a police state.
The construction of an ignorance culture, based on superstition and hierarchical religious organizations.
The destruction of the administrative state created in conjunction with social safety net programs.
The institutionalization of various guideposts for stratification, based on ancestry, gender, ideology, and social participation.
News flash: Most of the social safety net destruction will occur subsequent to the 2026 Congressional elections. This, my friends, is cruelty on a timer.
Vice President J.D. Vance, in the hours before his vote broke a Senate tie, allowing the budget to return for House of Representative consideration, was widely quoted as saying that all of the negative things (Medicaid, SNAP, etc.) were just "immaterial" "minutiae" compared to the money the bill provides to help Republicans deport immigrants.
And the Vice President is absolutely right. The police state stuff will have the most immediate impact, with collateral damage to voting rights and limits to freedom of expression. The intellectual, cultural, and stratification aspects will be phased in, with the ideal deadline being the general election in 2028.
For purposes of today’s posting, I’m focusing on the authoritarian angle dressed up as immigration enforcement.
The provisions of the budget bill pertaining to immigration and law enforcement generally pencil out to increase the ICE budget by a factor of TWENTY ($2.2B to $45B). Just think about having twenty times more masked secret police descending upon America’s streets.
The Department of Homeland Security will be allowed to fund state, local, and tribal security “and other costs” for major sporting events like the FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles — setting aside $625 million for the former and $1 billion for the latter. Another subset of grants for additional border security totals $10 billion, along with funding and grants — more than $3 billion each — under the Department of Justice for police to aid in Trump’s deportation machine.
The State Homeland Security Grant program, the bill authorizes $500 million for state and local efforts to “detect, identify, track, or monitor threats” from unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, and $450 million for Operation Stonegarden, a program under the Federal Emergency Management Agency which supports “enhanced cooperation and coordination” with Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol, and police agencies “to improve overall border security.”
According to the rules of the reconciliation game (allowing a simple majority of Senate votes), those provisions should have been x’ed out by the Senate parliamentarian. But according to the last version of the bill publicized just an hour before the vote, the DHS grants remained in the text.
Via Akela Lacy at The Intercept:
“If these grants remain in the bill and it passes, you will start to see more local law enforcement participating in the kidnapping of innocent people off the street,” said Jessica Brand, founder of the Wren Collective, a group of former public defenders advising on criminal justice reform strategies.
President Trump, assuming that the House is complicit, hasn’t even signed the bill, and the limitations concerning use of enforcement powers are falling by the wayside.
Trump:
“We have a lot of bad people … many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here too.”
Trump:
"Good elections -- we're working on that next. There's some bills coming in that's gonna make sure that you're a citizen, that people are counted in the voting when they were here as illegals. They are criminals in many cases. And you end up with extra congressmen. That's gonna be easy."
The word denaturalization has been finding its way into news accounts lately, stemming from a June 11 Justice Department memo ordering its prosecutors to prioritize denaturalization in cases where a naturalized citizen has committed certain crimes. There are an estimated 25 million Americans who are naturalized citizens—individuals who were not born in the United States but have obtained full citizenship through a rigorous process.
Loophole alert: Besides the expected list of felonies, the memo authorizes prosecutors to pursue “any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”
In case it’s not clear that this provision is meant to allow the DOJ to denaturalize someone for any or no reason at all, the memo goes on to say that the listed criminal categories “do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case” and the Civil Division “retains the discretion to pursue cases outside of these categories as it determines appropriate.”
Additionally, the Trump administration plans to handle denaturalization cases in civil court rather than criminal. That means that there’s a lower burden of proof for the government and that the person facing denaturalization does not have the right to an attorney.
This looks a lot like Secretary of States Marco Rubio’s vague yet vast authority to expel people for “past, current, or expected beliefs.” But while Rubio’s authority is limited to revoking visas, the DOJ can go after naturalized citizens, opening up a new front in Trump’s war on immigrants.
The list of things that the Justice Department is looking into prosecuting grows daily. Just today Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she was “working with the Department of Justice” to see if the Trump administration could prosecute CNN for publishing an article about an app that allows users to send alerts about the presence of nearby immigration agents.
Via The New York Times:
“We’re going to actually go after them and prosecute them,” Ms. Noem told reporters at an appearance with President Trump in Florida.
CNN said the article was a straightforward report on the existence of the app, called ICEBlock.
“This is an app that is publicly available to any iPhone user who wants to download it,” the network said in a statement. “There is nothing illegal about reporting the existence of this or any other app, nor does such reporting constitute promotion or other endorsement of the app by CNN.”
If you’re thinking that none of this arresting/prosecuting/deporting thing won’t impact you personally, think again. The government won’t need all these detention facilities or immigration enforcers for “illegals” indefinitely.
Trump’s made his point; America is no longer that land of the free and home of the brave. Tourists don’t even want to come here, much less migrants–unless they’re South Africans who haven’t criticized the President.
A Transit Advocate’s Case for Autonomous Vehicles by Hayden Clarkin at The Transit Guy
Here’s the key idea: We shouldn’t allow automation to be used exclusively for personal vehicles. If we’re embracing this technology, we should also apply it to public transportation: trains, buses, and even street-cleaning vehicles. If it can improve service, reduce costs, and make cities function better, we should be all in.
America’s rail technology is stuck in the mid-20th century. Most of our transit systems survive on the capital investments made decades ago. Many major cities have no passenger trains at all, our so-called “high-speed rail” covers only a few dozen miles, and pedestrian deaths keep climbing as we double down on car dependency.
Rather than reject new technology simply because we haven’t gotten the basics right, transit advocates should bring their demands to the table, not end up on the menu. If autonomous vehicles are inevitable, then we should be shaping their future, not sitting on the sidelines hoping for a different one.
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Billionaires Support Corrupted Science of Reading by Thomas Ultican at Tultican
The real reason for promoting SoR is the billionaire plan for resting control of education away from universities and ending democratic control of schools. The agenda is for all teacher education and training to be privatized. Organizations like TNTP and Relay Graduate School are sub-standard billionaire financed entities with political clout pushing aside public institutions.
For billionaires, SoR has never been about better reading education. It is just one more element in their drive to eliminate democracy.
The “greedy bastards” lust for power and wealth is perverting everything.
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‘Explosive increase’ of ticks that cause meat allergy in US due to climate crisis by Oliver Milman at The Guardian
The spread of alpha-gal comes amid a barrage of disease threats from different ticks that are fanning out across a rapidly warming US. Powassan virus, which can kill people via an inflammation of the brain, is still rare but is growing, as is Babesia, a parasite that causes severe illnesses. Lyme disease, long a feature of the US north-east, is also burgeoning.
“We are dealing with a lot of serious tick-borne illnesses and discovering new ones all the time,” said Harrington.
“There’s a tremendous urgency to confront this with new therapies but the problem is we are going backwards in terms of funding and support in the US. There have been cuts to the CDC and NIH (National Institutes of Health) which means there is decreasing support. It’s a major concern.”
