the face of a moral monster
Michael Knowles, the far-right pundit on the Daily Wire, has posted a defense of Trump’s mass deportations that is basically a confession of American atrocities, and excusing them because they’re American.
I don’t know if you guys are history buffs or not. Have you ever heard of the Trail of Tears? I know a lot of people don’t defend the Trail of Tears. But that was a mass deportation. That was in, what, 1830? Have you ever heard of Operation Wetback when we actually deported a ton of Mexicans, like a 100,000 or more Mexicans? You might not defend Operation Wetback, in part because of the name because it’s an offensive word. 1954. That was a mass deportation. How about the Palmer raids of all the communists? 1919, 1920, deported, because a lot of the communists were foreigners who were in America deported lots and lots of commoners — communists, rather. How about the Japanese? We always talk about Japanese internment during World War II. You know, we also deported a lot of Japanese. Again, you might say, well, that was all really terrible. OK. But it’s American, though. We sure did. I’m noticing a trend here. How about the Haitians and the Cubans that we deported after the Mariel boatlift in 1980? That was a mass deportation. You say, well, that’s wrong. It’s anti-American — again, I know. Maybe you don’t like it. Maybe you can make an argument that some of these things were unjust. But the one thing you can’t say is that it’s un-American or anti-American.
Deportation is as American as apple pie, therefore it must be good. That’s what the right is reduced to, excusing oppression because we’ve always oppressed other people. This is the language of tyranny.
I did not realize that in this time we need to explain that the Trail of Tears was injust, that the internment of citizens of Japanese descent in WWII was evil. I missed an opportunity yesterday, then — I was lecturing on Mendel, discussing the importance of institutions that easily provide agricultural/gardening stocks that were a precondition for his experiments, and I gave personal credit to Taki and Haru Nagasawa who exposed me to nursery work when I was in high school and college. That kind of work is an important foundation for science and we don’t acknowledge it often enough. I failed to mention, though, that the Nagasawas were well-respected members of the community, who had lost everything in the internments and had to rebuild their business after the war, and that American policy had done them a deep injury.
I should have hammered on that, briefly, in the class. It would have been a natural lesson given the specific subject I was trying to get across. I didn’t think it needed to be said, but apparently I’m wrong. It’s unfortunate, because some universities are kicking out professors who mention “political” topics in the classroom, and that might be my only path to retirement. In our dismal future, informed people with historical knowledge will be prohibited from disseminating that knowledge in small classrooms to a few people at a time, while blithering idiots will be free to misinform and spread hate en masse via the internet and certain television and radio channels.
If atrocities aren’t anti-American, what does that say about America?
The anti-Mexican operation referred to above deported a lot of US citizens.
Maybe you can make an argument that some of these things were unjust. But the one thing you can’t say is that it’s un-American or anti-American.
The creep has one of the most punchable faces ever, but one has to admit, when he’s right, he’s right. The whole thing is, as Tom Lehrer pointed out, American as apple pie.
@ 1
Trust me, you don’t want them to answer that question:
Average Right-winger: “What does it mean? IT MEANS AMERICA KICK’S ASS, YOU WOKE CUCKED LIB! [THURSTING HIPS] U-S-A! U-S-A!”
The whole argument is simply, “might makes right.”
Which means that there is no such thing as morality or right and wrong.
Using this guys non-logic, the Nazis weren’t wrong to kill 6 million Jews. Their mistake was to lose World War II.
Stalin and Mao weren’t wrong to kill tens of millions of people either. They never lost a war and ended up dying of old age.
As always, he was so, so very close to getting the point.
Would lay odds, of course, that almost all of the idiots supporting this also want the Bible in everything, including class rooms, because it contains “objective morality”. Or, as some others have already put it, “Its damned odd that the party of law and order shows an adherence to neither.”
Once again, this is just Cruelty Theater.
It is similar to the ancient Roman Gladiator games. Watching people suffer as entertainment.
It is a diversion for the MAGA masses while the oligarchies loot the USA and gain even more power and money.
.1. As I thought, ICE doesn’t have any where near enough money, humanpower, and facilities to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the USA.
They are well aware of this.
I doubt they will deport many more than Obama and Biden did.
Biden deported more than Trump did in his first term.
They will just make sure it is as ugly and vicious as possible and is on TV often. Heavily armed thugs storming a grade school to arrest 10 year olds.
.2. They can’t deport too many undocumenteds without wrecking our economy. These people are here to work and make up most of several critical industries in the USA, notably housing and agriculture.
The GOP knows this too.
Raven I think you are very wrong. Like I u Persians where you are coming from with the past history of us politics, but this is different. These people are true believers, they aren’t cynical like past administration, when these policies fail they are going to Amp things up again and again.
Michael Knowles? Mr. “I dressed in drag but drag queens are evil” Knowles? The guy who did drag? That Michael Knowles…?
So here’s my real fear about the direction in which the world now seems to be heading (it’s not just the United States). Historically, might makes right has almost always been the prevailing principle. The idea that people have rights, or that you can’t do what you want to people who are weaker than you are, or that the peasantry doesn’t exist for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful, are all of relatively recent origin. Historically, power cruelly exercised hasn’t required the explanation because it’s always been the status quo. For most people at most times and places, grinding poverty was also the rule.
Since about the Age of Enlightenment, there has been some progress. It’s been glacially slow, and not nearly enough, and has only benefitted some. But on average the average citizen of Planet Earth has far more rights and is far more comfortable in 2025 than did the average citizen of Planet Earth in 1025. And that’s not because things are great now, but because they were far worse then.
My fear is that what we are seeing is a backlash by the rich and powerful that threatens to take us back to the days when all of us really were nothing more than slaves of king, church and plutocrat. Much as I desperately wanted Steven Pinker to be right, he’s wrong. We’re heading straight back in the direction of a new dark age.
And the worst part of it is that in western democracies like the United States, it’s being done with the full support of the very people who are about to be re-enslaved.
I sure hope I’m wrong.
Yeah it’s American but if you teach that in the class, then it’s critical race theory!
Maybe.
I’m sure a lot of the white racist MAGAs are true believers.
But they don’t much matter.
The oligarchies run the USA and you can’t eat hate. You can’t spend it either.
To them, the undocumented immigrants are just cheap, docile labor.
These are the ones who employ all those H1 visa workers from south and east Asia.
If you look at the requirements in terms of cost, humanpower, and facilities, ICE doesn’t have enough of any of those. They are already running at full capacity just deporting 250,000 or so a year.
A lot of people have looked at what it would take to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants.
The numbers are all very high.
Here is one from October, 2024.
This estimate from right wingnuts is $100 billion and 20 years.
Another is closer to $1 trillion and probably closer to the real cost.
ICE relies heavily on local and state police and other government entities to actually do their work.
Without that cooperation, they can’t do much.
And, some places will cooperate and a whole lot of places won’t.
We will see.
And, I suppose see just how much ugliness the US people want to live with.
Yeah, here is what GOP/fundie xian hate looks like.
And also classic fascism.
Today a bill was introduced into the Missouri legislature to put a $1000 bounty on undocumented immigrants.
This is something that would happen in the old communist East Germany or the USSR.
I’d report the governor and the entire GOP legislators as suspected aliens.
As I have read in responsible articles, approximately 50% of those called criminals and deported have never had due process and have not been convicted of a crime.
Those ICEHOLES are picking up and holding many Navajo tribal citizens. Are they going to send them back to their ‘home country’? WTF!
the tRUMP ICEHOLES are clearly picking people who are ‘brown’ and ignoring those who are ‘lily white’. THIS IS CALLED RACISM!
There are now, since the tRUMP destruction began, so many more degradations of our society, YES, I’ll write it again: we are now in a death spiral!
If tRUMP were honest (but, he can’t utter more than one sentence without lying) he would send that illegal immigrant, the elongated muskrat, back to his racist, fascist roots in south africa!
PZ, wrote: universities are kicking out professors who mention “political” topics in the classroom, and that might be my only path to retirement
I reply: PZ, please be careful! You know the corrupt corporate owned university admin. would strip you of your hard earned pension in the name of saving money (it’s the elongated muskrat miser syndrome)
I think this sums up what we are seeing and will see for the next 4 (long) years.
We will see.
If the average US citizen is poorer in buying power 4 years from now, the GOP has got some explaining to do.
@18 raven wrote: If the average US citizen is poorer in buying power 4 years from now, the GOP has got some explaining to do.
I reply, Good point. The experience of everyone in our organization has been (for many years, due to corporate greedflation) a consistent trend of us being poorer and our buying power going down the death spiral. I only see that accelerating for the next 4 (and likely more) years.
Gotta love how the demonym “American” is still used routinely by all.
(Todos los estadounidenses son americanos, pero no todos los americanos son estadounidenses)
18 & 19
Considering conspiracy theory is one of the primary modus operandi of the modern right/GOP, the poorer standard of living will not be blamed on Trump, but on the Deep State, the Illuminati, the
GayTrans Agenda, and of course, the Jews (at least the non-Zionist variety).What a fucking idiot. “What you can’t say is that lynching is un-American. We have a long and proud history of lynching in these United States. Sadly the incidence of lynching has slowed down a little since the 1960s, and we need to fly the flag once more by carrying out more lynchings. Make America Great Again! God bless America!”
@20 John Morales wrote: Gotta love how the demonym “American” is still used routinely by all.
I repy: I accept your point as quite valid. The term america is so broad in scope as to be almost meaningless. The problem is that most of us in the Untied States (intentional spelling) were, for years, indoctrinated in school that this is the “rill red-blooded ‘murika”.
I’m sure that tRUMP wants to use the term america because his empire sized ego wants to rule everything that encompasses.
Who was the idiot that named these continents after Amerigo Vespucci, anyway. It’s as stupid as saying tribal members in this nation are ‘indians’. Geography can be so distorted.
It’s weird seeing a conservative/authoritarian be this honest. Although i do disagree with the idea that it’s “might makes right” as Raven said, it’s more “what we do is right”. Firing a conservative because he’s a bigot is bad, political purges of communists is ok, because they agree with the conservative. Or more depressingly “what we/the USA do is good, we/the USA did that genocide, therefore that genocide was good”
Any argument they make is just justification of their preferred power structure
dangerousbeans–
They’re being this honest now because they know that they have seized enough power that they no longer need to pretend.
@25 More like they have seized enough power that they “imagine” they don’t have to pretend. We are dealing how ever with idiots. And, this we can be very thankful for. Smart dictators are a serious damn problem, but any of the “smart” ones among these lunatics are likely looking at the situation and going, “When it all goes south we blame Trump for it, reinstitute some of the stuff people like, but keep all the other shit he did, claiming those things where not actually bad, and that includes retaining most of the power.” It will be Russia and the KGB moving in to take over the power vacuum left behind by the fall of the soviets all over again. If any of them are actually smart. But.. we are dealing with people that don’t just fail, utterly, to learn anything from history, other than what they deem useful in it, and by useful I mean, “We can use this to con people into voting for us.”, even their supposed “moral religious leaders” are barely a hairs width different, in comprehending morality, and their own professed religion, than a creationist babbling about Noah’s Ark. They have power, and like the freaking Pakled from Star Trek, this makes them leap to the conclusion, “We are smart now!”, all while (kind of like the joke from the Reagan era, I think it was), arguing over which one is actually in charge because they have the largest hat.
At some point, I have no problem imagining the last words of one of these clowns being the modern equivalent of, “If they can’t buy bread, let them eat cake.” Maybe, “If they can’t afford a house, let them rent a hotel room.”? It will be stupid, and unless we get rid of the f-ers by legal means, it sadly, may end in blood instead. Because, stupid might get you to being arrogant enough to grasp power, but it won’t save you when gullible people start starving, become seriously angry, and their rage overcomes their willing acceptance, out of ignorance, of all the absurd excuses you keep giving them. It doesn’t matter, at all, if most of them fell for it before you ruined their lives or not. Eventually even the laziest person realizes someone is conning them.
And… seriously… Trump and these crazies seem to be trying to speed run the steps between, “Heh, they are only doing this to help all us small folk.”, and, “Wait now, that screws me too! Now I am f-ing mad!!!”
I try to imagine what we’d be hearing today if the Nazis had prevailed in WW2.
Yes, we ethnically cleansed the Slavs from Eastern Europe, those we didn’t kill or starved to death we exiled east of the Urals.
We exterminated all the Jews we could lay our hands on.
Western Europe was absorbed into Greater Germania. The children were forced to learn German. Their native languages and cultures were banned.
It’s a German thing. It’s who we are. Get over it.
Germania Number One!
Sometimes not sure they didn’t kind of “indirectly” prevail. A lot of the stupid we are seeing in the US comes down to a very simple dichotomy:
Europe: Sorry, but while free speech is totally fine for most things, even thinking about teaching anyone to think Nazis where a good thing is something we will bloody jail you for.
Russia, and some other: Heh, hop on over here and tell us how some of this German engineering works, its fine. And, after you get here, you bloody better forgot you where ever German, because we won’t put up with that crap!
The US: Gosh, we like rockets and fast planes! How about we change your name, you pinky promise to pretend to believe in the American dream, and we won’t look to hard at the fact that you continue to teach your any kids you have to hate Jews!
I mean, sorry, but…. as much as a “free speech advocate” I am in most cases, I consider not curtailing obviously deranged beliefs that dehumanize others, and promote racial superiority to be just, “We yelled fire in the theater, but took 50 years to do so, one person at a time, so no one cared.” Maybe Europe had a more sensible perspective on this, especially since the re-emergence of that BS “in” Europe seems to have been heavily influenced by the US exporting it back across the pond. Its almost like we didn’t take it seriously or something…