Scapegoating and Merchandizing Cruelty

First, let’s start with quite the admission by the Vice President, which suggests that the most important part of the bill that just passed was the money for ICE and immigration enforcement. Also, don’t forget the lie that the country’s fiscal woes are because of illegal immigration and the freebies that they get. It is a pretty substantial diversion when the bill rewards the wealthy and hurts the poor.

This is just lies and scapegoating to try and convince their voters, including many who will suffer from this bill, that the real problem is foreigners and that mass deportations will make their lives better.

The “minutiae of Medicaid policy” is a pretty heartless and dismissive way of saying that millions will lose coverage and that people will die earlier than they would have as a result. Many of whom live in Appalachia, it seems worth noting.

For more, see NPR: How Trump’s tax cut and policy bill aims to ‘supercharge’ immigration enforcement.

The massive package sets aside about $170 billion to support the Trump’s administration’s border and immigration goals, which includes detaining and deporting a record number of people from the U.S

[…]

The final bill allocates $45 billion for immigration detention centers, as well as about $30 billion to hire more ICE personnel, for transportation costs, and to maintain ICE facilities, among other spending. It comes as detention centers operate beyond their capacity.

The notion that we can blame immigrants for our woes allows us to treat them poorly and then celebrate it. Via the Miami Herald: Merch, jokes and memes: Trump officials, supporters love the name Alligator Alcatraz.

Here’s the Attorney General of Florida.

And here he is teaching his child to be cruel, and thinking that his Twitter followers would think it was cute (and many of them do!). What could be cuter than celebrating mass deportations and the usage of a makeshift camp in the Everglades?

If, in fact, undocumented immigrants are a very serious problem that requires a very serious set of policy solutions, it would seem that it should be treated, you know, seriously. But instead, people like Trump, DeSantis, and Uthwmeier treat it all like a cute little joke and an excuse to sell caps and t-shirts.

And, of course, there’s stuff like this.

It just so happens that 65 million is roughly the Hispanic population of the United States. Loomer claims that it is the number of undocumented immigrants in the US, because that makes joking about feeding them to alligators a-okay!