The Republican disinformation apparatus is stronger than ever. It’s controlled by the former political party, and its patrons, who now live outside of our democratic framework. It’s become so effective in controlling the narrative that it can swing our elections and drive our populace to argue endlessly about all the wrong things. Making it impossible to solve real problems, instead, It creates distractions to divide us and keep us fighting about things like bathrooms, what gender Mr. Potato Head is, or whether Jesus was woke. Jesus was woke people, get it through your heads. Yes, the disinformation apparatus is also ridiculous, which would be more funny if it wasn’t getting people killed.
We could pick any problem we face and look at it through this prism, but today let’s talk about immigration. Somehow, immigration has become our number one problem. By somehow I mean that the disinformation apparatus run by the Republicans did everything in its considerable power to train our attention on this problem. Not to solve it, or even discuss it based on facts and figures and an agreed reality. No, just as a way to spread disinformation and scare the living daylights out of enough of us so that they could use it as a way to assert more control over our population and slide us further into an autocratic state. That would sound like crazy talk if it weren’t true.
The majority of Americans now view immigration as our number one problem. And they are viewing it through a fog of disinformation constructed by the Republican disinformation apparatus making it impossible to discuss in real terms. Meanwhile, the Republicans are using this to assert control over state and local governments. Tom Homan the acting head of Homeland Security is threatening to make examples of sanctuary cities. The Justice Department sent out an unusually harsh-sounding warning that state and local law enforcement officials will be prosecuted if they don’t cooperate. ICE is talking about establishing and widely promoting a new hotline specifically for people to report suspected illegal immigrants. And all of this is being excused by reclassifying legal asylum seekers as criminals.
So the obvious result of this is to intimidate local law enforcement and give the hotheads that exist throughout our system a license to be more aggressive. If you listen to Tom Homan, the White House Border Czar, for one minute you can get a sense of what these guys sound like and what they want to do with any amount of power they are granted. At the same time, Trump just pardoned 1,600 J6ers, some of whom are members of far-right paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Groups he’s been courting for years and who now have more allegiance to him than ever. He was asked in a press conference yesterday whether groups like the Proud Boys could be part of the political conversation and he said, “We’ll have to see.” And then went on to say, “These are people who love our country.”
But yeah, immigration is our biggest problem. If we don’t have a border we don’t have a country, right? To which I say, if we don’t have the rule of law, we don’t have a country.
So let’s talk about immigration for just one second outside of the prism of disinformation that the Republicans have cast it in. So do we have an immigration problem? Yes, of course, we’ve been not solving it for decades. It goes like this. America is addicted to cheap labor that is devoid of the basic protections that are afforded to its citizens. Our economy is propped up by having access to this labor while extracting taxes that fund our Social Security system and local municipalities. If we pulled this labor source out of our economy in an unorderly way we would likely suffer something much worse than the Great Recession. Every non-Republican operative economist will tell you this.
That’s our real problem. So how do we solve that? It’s not hard really, if we could just actually address it as our real problem by using facts and data that show us what works. But we can’t do that because we have a highly effective disinformation apparatus run by the Republican party that is instead feeding the public an endless litany of bullshit. So let’s talk about that bullshit. Wait, isn’t there more to the immigration problem than labor? No, that’s the bulk of it, we solve that and everything else is pretty much cake. Okay then, let’s get on with the bullshit we’re being fed.
I’ll keep this short.
We don’t have a border or it’s an open border. We spend 8 billion a year, we have 20,000 border agents and we deport hundreds of thousands of people a year, I think we have a border. Catch and release, they like to make it sound like these people are fish or something, that’s all part of their methodology to dehumanize immigrants. What’s happening in reality is that people, human beings, in fact, are processed and then given a court date for their asylum claim. They’re sending their criminals and bringing drugs. No, that’s not how it works, no one is sending anyone and the vast majority of drugs are brought in by American citizens. They’re raping and killing and pillaging and taking over apartment complexes and eating cats. Immigrants statistically cause less crime. Do Republicans seize on tragedy to feed their disinformation apparatus? Yes, and it’s sickening.
So I could do that all day with the endless disinformation that they spit out but we got to move on. I mean we really gotta move on, they’re killing us. Literally.
In reality world we are in the middle of one of the largest human migration events in the past one hundred years. It’s a result of poverty, political instability and natural disasters, which in turn are caused by a myriad of geopolitical factors and the effects of globalization and climate change. So, of course, you can cherry-pick bad events in all of this mess. And also in reality world people wouldn’t come here if there weren’t jobs available to them. Jobs that by design are meant to be filled by this type of insecure workforce. See what I mean by saying that America is addicted to cheap labor? So yes, it’s a solvable problem for those who want to solve our problems. But that’s not what the Republicans are doing. What they’re doing is two-fold. One is to use immigration as an excuse to push us further into a police state. The other is to keep us focused on a red herring instead of what our real problems are.
So let’s talk about our real problems for a moment. And read this like you’re imitating Bernie Sanders. We don’t have a health care system, we have a for-profit insurance scam. It’s estimated that implementing a Medicare for all type plan would save an estimated 68,000 people every year. Climate change is wreaking havoc in our communities. We have the highest child poverty rate of any developed country. We’re not keeping up with educating our future workforce in math and science. We have a housing shortage, parks in our major cities are filled by people living in tents like never before. Half of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. And yet, we have the greatest wealth inequality of any time in our history. I could go on and on about our REAL problems.
Immigration is not by any means our number one problem. The number one problem facing America is the Republican party, its patrons and its well-financed disinformation apparatus. Because that is what is keeping us from solving our real problems.