“Absent significant mitigating circumstances, federal prosecutors are expected to seek the death penalty in cases involving the murder of a law-enforcement officer and capital crimes committed by aliens who are illegally present in the United States.”
“It’s a helluva thing, killing a man. You take away everything he ever had and ever would have.”
—Unforgiven
What cheerier way to start the weekend than waking up to find out a bloodthirsty madman’s trying to bring back the federal death penalty, Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment be damned?
Here I was, dense enough to hope the next time the death penalty crossed my mind, it’d be a reflection on The Executioner’s Song.
I suppose this is one of those times where a pinch of knowledge about history comes in handy. The dehumanizing tactics we’re seeing have been around for ages, so we’ve seen them before; most troublingly, and most commonly on people’s minds, of course, in nazi Germany.
Note, to begin with the Executive Order, that capital crimes on LEO are specified as warranting the death penalty. It would stand to reason that, in general, assaults on LEO are a serious crime, and I would say this holds true in society. Even in shadier company, there’s a general understanding not to hit a cop because cops, increasingly, are a bit like bringing a feral animal into the house.
(Before you get your hackles up—come on, cops have like a 40%+ chance of being domestic abusers compared to 10% of the general population. In general, they’re violent and authoritarian because instead of training them to deescalate a situation like a normal person, they’re trained to yell louder, start hitting, and reach for fatal weapons. As Uvalde shows us, this instinct is liable to disappear in the face of danger but come roaring back in the face of defenseless potential victims. Colloquially, this is often boiled down to, “Cops are assholes on a power trip.”
This certainly does not come from a bitter experience where, say, someone who shall remain unnamed decided to mouth off about bodycam footage while plastered, verbally realize partway through that mandatory bodycams for cops don’t start for two more months—anyway, that didn’t work out so well at the hospita, and the hospital won’;t forward the bill to the police department. "Apparently, “Well, they’re the ones who left me in that state, I figured they could foot the bill,” is not a convincing argument.
Oh, cops have a real thing for the far-right, too, though I believe this was discussed a bit in my review of Into the Devil’s Den [a book about a time when LEO, appropriately, took far-right terrorism seriously instead of incorporating it into the force]).
Anyway, who was exempted from that “hurting LEO bad” list?
Oh, right. These scumbags.
Anyone keeping up headlines on Trump’s “very fine people” by the way?
Yeah, that’s been a real good look at the kind of people who comprise his coalition.
Jan 6 Rioter Pardoned by Trump Arrested on Child Sex Charge
Donald Trump-pardoned January 6 rioter shot dead by cop in traffic stop
Oh, there are others, but I’d digress. (How they live baffles me—who employs these assholes? I’ve gotta put in a few hundred apps to get a goddamn callback…)
These dirtbags had already been pardoned by Trump, sending a message that his followers are exempt from this rule.
Now, let’s move on to the next part about how illegal immigrants will be subject to the death penalty and charged with capital offenses, then discuss the problems there, especially with rushing to carry it out.
First off, we’ve got the Guantanamo Issue: whether Guantanamo (hungover Hegseth—I’m a recovering alcoholic; he is an active one, don’t believe the bullshit) or, now, El Salvador (fuckin’ Reichsminister Rubio), the plan appears to be to ship people accused of crimes off.
Accused, not convicted.
When I was a kid, Guantanamo was a big issue. Conveniently brushed under the rug because I was pretty young and just took my folks’ word for it that those were bad people. But how do we know that?
We don’t.
What do we know?
I believe I brought up a fear of this sort of thing before.
But now we’ve got a better look at the dynamics at play here, don’t we? One more.
Trump wants to end birthright citizenship
See the confluence?
LEO officers know now not to mess with the loyal brownshirts Trump has. These were the same kinds of forces that were used in the January 6th riot.
This is what cops have to remember if they think of crossing neo nazis: “Will I be next?”
Citzenship for those with melanin is subject to arbitrary change and can be written off altogether.
Elon appears to have contracted with Constellis Holdings, the company formerly known as Blackwater, so we’ve got mercenaries marching around acting the role of military (boy, who could’ve seen that coming?).
Frost, others in Congress barred from Treasury during protest against Elon Musk
Unelected neo nazis are barring elected officials from government buildings on behalf of apartheid’s corpulent heir.
People aren’t going to be shipped off for violent crimes.
That’s just going to be a convenient excuse—like PC, or woke, or cancel, or liberal, or…
This is the same circular firing squad we saw form in both nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
The list goes on, the point is the same. The word is demonized and the people behind it are dehumanized. That’s the “magic.”
Muslims? Nope, terrorists.
Mexicans? Nope: “They're sending people that have a lot of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.”
South Africa? Let’s get nuanced! Help the white Afrikaner descendants of apartheid, but cut off assistance to the Black Africans. (Lynne Duke’s informative and powerful Mandela, Mobutu, and Me comes to mind for a glimpse of post-colonial Africa—prominently South Africa)
I mean, South Africa is the most fucking blatant example of how racism is a big deal for these shitheels, if Donald slapping a neo nazi into USAID and a “normalize Indian hate” guy being fired—then brought back by the combined efforts of Musk and VVP Vance because he was “just a kid” didn’t tell you that already.
25, last I checked, is supposed to get, “You’re a grown ass man, face the consequences,” not, “He’s just a kid.” (Boy: I really regret not leaving my pre-25 jobs by using my employee number to open all the rgisters and walk off with all the cash—kids make dumb mistakes, gotta just give ‘em a pass, right? You wouldn’t do that? Then why would you trust this dipshit with the Social Security number and other financial information of millions of Americans, much more dangerous than a few tills at some stores that might net $10k on the biggest day of the year?)
Anyway, the admin’s accusing people of the worst of crimes to appeal to people’s irrational, vindictive side without thinking through the consequences.
Kinda like how Germans used to hear about how Jews were a parasitic species who leeched off the goodwill and prosperity of the German nature. Then they were told how prosperity would go up, if only we got rid of them. Let’s reclassify them—less than human.
But then when these less-than-humans were rounded up, where were they to go? Camps. How were the camps to be maintained? Money. That comes from good. hard-working people. Who are still supporting the less-than-humans dragging them down. So the cost of labor is shifted: make the camps into work camps. This way, instead of society having to put into their upkeep, we can profit off these less-than-humans. Death is their only freedom—so work is freedom.
And those who can’t work? Rip the precious metals from their dental work, boil down their family heirlooms, seize their cash. If they’re not suited for a work camp, they’re suited for a death camp.
Private prisons are currently situated to make a killing as an investment. It’s nice, clean, easy, bloodless—let’s take a look at the New York Stock Exchange.
CCA—Corrections Corporation of America/CoreCivic
GEO—Geo Group Inc.
These are two of the larger private for-profit prison companies in the US. Nice, clean names, right?
Wouldn’t make you think twice that Bing is reporting that one has a “Buy” and one has a “Strong Buy” alert next to it. In investor, this means it’s expected to do well.
Lee Atwater taught about making racism abstract—no longer chanting the n-word, but shifting to discussions of school funds, bussing, being abstract. We’re seeing something similar going on here. Another term could be familiar: Orwellian doublespeak. Or Corporatese. Sarkhanese.
It’s all the same thing: we separate and insulate ourselves from the reality of what’s going on by comforting abstractions. I’m reminded of Lawrence’s apotheosis of wheels. You can look at quarterly or annual reports for CCA or GEO; you can get a lighter attempt to draw in your interest while still noting the horrors a la John Oliver, but at the end of the day: these are people and we can translate all those dividends, profit margins, profit vs. loss, expenditures: those are all real things.
Lower expenditures? That means cheaper food, less working plumbing, fewer protections from extremee temperature, more ragged clothes, and a shorter lifespan. This is horrifying—and in order for us, as a people, to accept it, we have to be trained to dehumanize these people and view them as less-than-human, which allows us to shut off the empathetic part that sees pain and imagines how awful it must be for the person enduring it and instead dive full-hearted into sadism and republicans ‘hurting the people [they] need to be hurting.’
At the end of this dehumanization, when we at last have rhe time and opportunity to reconsider, the action has already been done. The person has already been shipped off to a death, quick or slow, we might not know.
The spell wears off and we see there’s blood on our hands.
And, again, crimes are treated differently based on the amount of melanin you have—though, this has been the case for a long time. Look at The New Jim Crow, or just ask yourself this: why, when crack and cocaine are effectively the same drug, will one face severe penalties for one while the other is associated with white yuppies in business suits on Wall Street? Cultural associations have a lot to do with it. Here, let me lean on John Ehrlichman from way back in the Nixon administration, prior to Lee Atwater’s infamous remark about how you can’t chant “n—, n—, n—'“ anymore; swap out heroin for crack in ensuing years:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people... You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Once someone who is a Native or an immigrant or just a person has been shuttled off to one of El Salvador’s prisons or disappeared into Guantanamo, do you think an administration this sensitive to criticism’s going to go to the effort of extracting them, getting them back home, and then allowing them to go on and discuss the reality of his imprisonment? Absolutely not.
This also serves to make the United States citizenry complicit in the bloodshed by silence, if we don’t speak up. Like the Germans, we cannot pretend we weren’t aware of what Donald was discussing on the campaign trail. We cannot pretend to be oblivious to the people disappearing from our roads or the news stories. I mean, we can.
But no one’s going to believe it, not in this age. There’s a reason after WWII, we forced the Germans to learn about the atrocities they committed. Note any similarities between us and them?
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country, That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world… They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
“All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
People say it’s crazy to compare Trump and Hitler, but there are echoes, aren’t there?
It’s often misstated that Ivana said Donald kept a copy of Mein Kampf next to his bed. No, that was this guy Mark in high school, who after this and a private conversation where he asked if I ever “just look at Black people and think, ‘What a n—?’” stopped being someone I hung around.
No, it was a book of Hitler’s speeches that Donald kept.
I’d repeat the similarity in their rhetoric, as well as their reliance on the Big Lie approach: repeating a lie often enough that people begin to accept it or just give up on correcting it. How many examples of that can you think of during Term 1?