California is a paradise.
There may not be a more physically beautiful country on the planet. And yes, California is a country in any meaningful and every old sense of the word. Like Texas or New England or The South it is a thing large enough to hold an identity of country, the sort of place that would possess a culture entirely of its own within a couple generations were it not for the homogenizing forces of modern media.
California is also a hot mess.
There may not be a more dysfunctional country on the planet. Not in the first world, anyway, although southern Europe would certainly give the competition a full morning’s effort before retiring for the rest of the afternoon and evening. Come to think of it, there are probably some similarities to be found there. When the weather is practically perfect, the soil is practically perfect, and the Earth seems determined to deliver a practically perfect mix of beaches, woods, mountains, and valleys, it is hard not to feel like a lot of the work is already done.
It’s a fascinating mix that has made California a land of contradictions. Its politicians have embraced the most expansive portfolios of socialized services in America, and yet it is among the most unequal states in the union. It is at once one of the hardest states to own and operate a business and the only state where you can really conduct certain types of business. It is responsible for some of America’s most powerful cultural export industries and also the center of the world when it comes to the industry of self-flagellation for cultural ‘imperialism’ and ‘appropriation’. There is remarkable wealth in California and remarkable poverty. There are veritable utopias and crime-ridden slums.
California has problems. Some of them are big problems. And if you think that handling a lot of migrants in a short period of time – maybe too many – may have exacerbated some of those problems, it doesn’t make you crazy, it doesn’t make you a Nazi, and it doesn’t make you a racist. America’s track record for assimilating migrants is very good, and provably better than most people think. But border regions can slow or change the nature of that assimilation, and assimilation is a process anyway. It’s entirely reasonable that too much, too fast can put a strain on various public resources. That’s true completely independent of the race, ethnicity, or origin of the people involved. Just ask anyone who lived, taught, or worked in medicine or other social services in Houston in the year or two after Hurricane Katrina.
But hear me: you are not crazy. You are not unreasonable. And unless you wander onto one of the few dozen university campuses where the word still means “anyone who doesn’t support the wholesale dismantling of society,” you are probably not racist..
Stephen Miller and Brandon Gill, on the other hand, are crazy1. They are unreasonable. The sentiments embedded in their posts from a few minutes apart on June 9th are absolutely dripping with racism.
President Trump’s Chief of Staff and the representative from the 26th Congressional District of Texas would very much like you to think that what they said here is basically the same thing as the reasonable views that you (and I) hold on this issue. It is similar to the motte-and-bailey technique, in which someone makes an extreme argument, retreats to a more reasonable one, then pretends they’re the same. Only in this case, they have no intention of retreating from the extreme position; they simply want to use us to bolster the perceived reasonableness of their claim. There is nothing new about this technique, especially among national populists like Miller and Gill.
Every national populist movement MUST and eventually WILL abstract complex, multi-causal frustrations into a single cause.
That single cause MUST and eventually WILL be a group of people that represent an external threat.
The movement MUST and eventually WILL coerce a reasonable population into opposing that threat by conflating reasonable, morally defensible views with extreme, often violent, nearly always racist views.
If it is your aim to engineer support for whatever it takes to enforce an aggressive, often unconstitutional, frequently legally dubious mass deportation program, it is not enough to argue that rapid, large-scale immigration can place strain on communities, public resources, state finances, and cultural cohesion.
The most common response I’ve seen among what I’ll call the normal people I know, both in the real, actual world and on Twitter, is some form of “I spent X number of years being fairly dovish, then merely tolerant, and now I’m at the point that I just want everyone gone.”
Trump broke us in a very specific way in 2016. Biden broke us in another way starting around summer of 2021. Everything is now simply a reaction to a prior policy that itself was a reaction to some other prior policy. There remains a staggering degree of continuity within this doom loop, and maybe even some pretty irrefutable logic, but it’s no way to run a railroad.
Now here’s the part that neither MAGA nor Bluesky, want to admit: ICE didn’t actually grab that many people in LA, and the majority of the ones they did round up would have been targets under Presidents Romney, Obama, DeSantis, or Fetterman. Most of them were serious criminals [side note here, but holy shit are there a TON of sexual predators out there]. But Trump’s flair for theatrics meant that the enforcement of some pretty basic rules couldn’t have been done without masked dudes in black Tahoes kicking in doors while maybe having a casual attitude about warrants. The bad optics were the point. He knew it would outrage people. He knew cars would be set on fire. He knew that his base would be absolutely tumescent at the sight of Mexican flags waving in front of a burning Waymo. The only thing missing from this plan was a sign for free birdseed, and it still somehow worked. Everyone got what they wanted out of that news cycle, and we all lost just a little bit more of ourselves in the process.
" … free birdseed …" I see what you did there, appreciate the laugh.
On a more somber note, yeah, it seems like we continue to lose, and it seems that it is not enough to not take the bait. (I’ve got friends who email pro-DOGE stuff as well as friends who attend “No Kings” events. Right now, I’m hoping that a “that’s nice!” and not disagreeing is still good enough, as they are all good friends otherwise.)
There are times when the instrument of action is more prevalent in society than the ideals of intellectualism. Bentham vs Church of Englandism. (Utility vs the established doctrines).
It is then that the choices must come.
The rough beast that arrived was Liberalism, as the church became a department of state, not God.
I think one thing missing in your analysis is that there are people reacting to the optics as a threat upon their lives. It doesn’t quite matter to the ones living under the threat of illegal deportation that they “only go after the bad ones- usually”.
Now, this is usually where communication breaks down between us- I know this is not what you are exactly saying but it’s an inferred line of thought that I extracted from it, you can choose to refute it or expand upon this, but I’m exposing the fracture lines in your thoughts as I see them.
It’s not enough just to say things without being aware of the consequences of what you are saying and how others intrepret them. In this I have personal stake and I dislike the framing as this thing in LA where people are getting shot in the ass as being only a shift in optics rather than a shift in escalation. I see this as downplaying the events transpiring personally and a false equivocation of “both sides bad”. One sides are really bad for women, immigrants and gay people in a way that doesn’t effect white males. in truth, they lose a lot too, it’s just harder to perceive the losses they suffer when they aren’t the ones getting stomped.
So in this, I think you are downplaying the bad optics as of low material consequence when they are as you say normalises social dehiscence so that people are more divided than ever. If only as a primer for worse to come as they utilise those burning cars and mexican flags as symbols to increase polarity.
So it’s not just Trump is like every other president, he’s quite a bit worse, he destroyed the idea of legitimacy for everyone. Even the republican base don’t argue what he does is justified, they just usually argue he doesn’t need em’. This is a shift in moral ethical boundaries that aren’t normal personally.
On the contrary, the bad optics are the whole point. The administration wants very much for other illegal immigrants—the ones who are not otherwise law breakers and who generally do not disturb the peace—to be afraid. So afraid in fact that they self deport. This has been an explicit goal from day one.
That idea was a fiction, which is how you end up with Trump in the first place and even more so how he makes a comeback. When a great number of people tell you that institutions are only legitimate if they’re running them the audience will eventually stop trying to argue against that and instead figure out how to take over said institutions.
Solid points, Ben - cue the evergreen Eagles tune for our playlist Packsters, that and so much more comes to mind…
“Anecdotally, among good people (we) love dearly,” we count among our friends one who absolutely idolizes David Tran and his hot sauce immigrant story. If you spend enough time around him you may hear about his admiration for the Rooftop Koreans. I’ll leave the reader to estimate his political bent.
But as you spend more time listening you’ll probably piece together the (imo) tragically severed real-space family relationships that are absolutely fragged as a result of what (again, in my opinion) amounts to an addiction to a narrative, a story of a paradise either lost or never to be realized.
Yet on the opposite end of the bell curve we have acquaintances whose addiction to narrative runs so deeply that this is not good enough.
At bottom, I’ve come to believe that their strongly clutched beliefs are a.) completely ineffective w/r/t their goals on the wider social level, and b.) demonstrably destructive to relationships they should probably enjoy otherwise. I guess I’m stuck with this:
You keep saying this as if the legal ones feel safer?
I’d say false equivocancy is how we got here more so, just because one thing is bad doesn’t make it enlightened to say they are both bad equally. At this point everyone is disillusioned sure, but lying about this escalation in events doesn’t make sense to me.
Given that this is a Stephen Miller policy I would guess that the above situation is a feature rather than a bug. He’s like a cartoon villain at this point.
Who’s lying about the escalation of events? Things happened, people observed those things, and then acted accordingly. I don’t think any of this is unique to our times. It only feels special because we’re living through it.
Not sure but the framing matters to me. Every time due process is ignored to target immigrants is entrenching the belief that immigrants don’t deserve them. Innocent before proven guilty and all that. So when you say that these policies only hurt or target the illegal ones is just a false frame. It targets immigrants and sometimes they catch the bad ones. That’s the aim here because optics is the point, not the policy.
A very strange stance taken from someone who spends their time saying that they read behind the headlines. If you can find me a time in Biden’s administration where unmarked, unidentified, sometimes unofficial, balakalava goons kidnapped people who overstayed their visas in Biden’s time I’d believe this false frame. But we both know that isn’t possible.
If you think is normal, go find evidence that normalises these actions in the past 3 non Trump administration. You are flattening the frame, prove it then- is my only request.