MLK, Jr: "A Riot Is The Language Of The Unheard. And What Is It That America Has Failed To Hear?"

Do You Feel Kristi Noem Wants To Liberate L.A.? Or Oppress It?

Authoritarian leaders are always framing their invasions as “liberation,” basically to justify aggression, rally domestic support and deflect international criticism. In 1938 Hitler claimed the annexation of the Sudetenland was to liberate oppressed German speakers from Czech rule and argued they were denied self-determination, using propaganda to amplify alleged atrocities. Similarly, the following year Nazi propaganda described parts of Poland as German territory being “reclaimed” or “liberated.” Even in France, Holland and Belgium Nazi rhetoric painted the invasion as a necessary step to liberate Europe from “corrupt democracy” and “Jewish-Bolshevism.” Speaking of which… the Soviets used “liberation” rhetoric in 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, when they invaded eastern Poland, claiming to “liberate” Ukrainian and Belarusian populations from Polish oppression. The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring was justified as “liberating” the country from counter-revolutionary forces to protect socialism. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was framed as “liberating” the Afghan people from imperialist threats and supporting a socialist government. Today, Putin frames his invasion of Ukraine the same way a “special military operation” to “liberate” Russian-speaking populations in Crimea and Donbas from alleged Ukrainian oppression.

Even Mussolini framed his 1935 invasion of Ethiopia  as “liberating” the country from backwardness and bringing Italian civilization. A few years earlier, Japan’s invasion of Manchuria were justified as “liberating” it from Western colonialism. Saddam Hussein claimed Iraq was liberating Kuwait in 1990, another attempt to sanitize aggression, sometimes effective because it appeals to moral sentiments while obscuring imperialist or authoritarian goals. 

Last week Kristi Noem was saying Los Angeles is a city filled with criminals. On Friday she said she’s sending in the troops to liberate it, no different from Hitler, Stalin, Putin and the rest. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city, she said.”

Most MAGAts certainly love it— it was designed and executed for them, after all— but everyday, normal Americans do not. This is Elliott Morris’ chart of the week:

“The Trump administration,” he wrote, “is underwater in 11 out of 12 poll questions related to immigration, deportations, and the LA protests this week.” Trump is underwater on all key issues and his overall net approval fell from -6.5 points last week to -8.4 yesterday. Why? For one thing “over the last week we have seen the president of the United States repeatedly call for the use of federal troops and domestic law enforcement to suppress any constitutionally protected free-speech rights at his military birthday parade on Saturday (saying they would be met with ‘very big force’). And his Cabinet officials are talking about people exercising their 1A rights as militant combatants engaged in an insurrection or siege. Four days earlier, Trump told Los Angeles demonstrators they would be ‘hit harder than ever’ if they kept marching against his immigration crackdown. This is not the first example of Trump embracing authoritarian politics. Last September, at a Pennsylvania rally, he said shoplifters should be shot on sight, an extreme ‘law and order’ politics that encourages the state to deprive someone of their life for stealing toothpaste. And, according to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Trump privately asked advisers whether soldiers could ‘shoot protesters in the legs’ during the 2020 demonstrations surrounding the murder of George Floyd. And remember he has also called for law enforcement to ‘crack their skulls’ of protesters. Together, these threats erode the norm that political disagreement is settled with words, not weapons… The numbers in these polls are not just abstract data points; they are signals to elected officials, the media, and the public about the boundaries of acceptable government action. When approval for the president’s handling of immigration and protest response drops, it sends a message that Americans are watching, and that there are political costs to overreach.”

Greg Sargent looked at the immigration issue from another perspective: agriculture. Señor TACO “admitted on Truth Social that his mass deportations are hurting farmers and the economy. Those removals are ‘taking very good, long time workers away’ from farms and hotels, Trump declared, adding that those workers are proving ‘impossible to replace.’ To be clear, Trump was talking about his own immigration policies. That’s a stunning acknowledgment that Trump’s forced mass removals are targeting hard-working folks and that those undocumented immigrants aren’t taking Americans’ jobs. But it’s also functionally an admission of political vulnerability. Trump plainly grasps that his deportations are now perceived— accurately— as needlessly targeting good people who are contributing vitally to our economy and society, and not primarily the violent “criminal migrant” class that Trump and Stephen Miller keep insisting they’re removing.”

If you doubt this, then go listen to vulnerable House Republicans on the matter. In a new letter that’s gotten almost zero media attention, six of them effectively reveal that they now see Trump’s deportations as a political problem along exactly those lines. Democrats who worry about taking on this issue should ask themselves: If even Republicans are showing fear on it, isn’t it time to drop the skittishness and engage already?

The letter— which six House Republicans sent to acting Immigrations and Customs Enforcement director Todd Lyons— openly calls on Immigration and Customs Enforcement to redirect its deportation resources toward “convicted criminal aliens” and away from undocumented immigrants who are not convicted criminals.

Naturally, the letter goes through the motions of hailing Trump’s glorious toughness and infallibility on immigration. But these Republicans also state that they are “concerned” that Trump’s “limited resources may be stretched to pursue individuals that do not constitute an immediate threat to public safety”:

Every minute that we spend pursuing an individual with a clean record is a minute less that we dedicate to apprehending terrorists or cartel operatives…we need to give absolute priority to every violent offender and convicted criminal illegal alien present in our nation. Diverting limited resources to other objectives puts our national security at risk.

Consider what this really means. These Republicans are admitting forthrightly that deportations that sweep widely— beyond convicted criminals— take resources away from pursuing the dangerous and violent, and that this makes us less safe, and that this is precisely Trump’s policy.

The letter is signed by Representatives like David Valadao of California, Gabe Evans of Colorado, Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, [Tony Gonzales of Texas, Monica De La Cruz of Texas and Nicole Malliotakis of New York]. Those are among the most vulnerable Republicans in next year’s midterm elections.

Now, anyone who understands politics will get that these members are putting out this letter so their local papers will report on how “concerned” they are about removals hitting their districts’ local businesses. In the end, they’ll enthusiastically back whatever Trump does.

But this is nonetheless a revealing moment. To see why, note that Miller, who is reportedly raging about lagging arrests and deportations, is shrieking wildly at ICE officials, commanding them to round up as many migrants as possible by searching for day laborers in Home Depot parking lots.

The key point here is that to boost those numbers, Trump and Miller have to go after non-criminal migrants. There aren’t enough criminals around to pad the numbers, and targeting non-criminals is less resource-intensive. In other words, Miller is deliberately choosing to focus more resources on non-criminals— and thus away from dangerous criminals. Law enforcement insiders have leaked word of their anger over exactly this.

Which is what these Republicans are obliquely criticizing. In so doing, what they’re really demonstrating is that Trump-Miller-MAGA propaganda is failing. To get voters to support mass removals, Trump and Miller have relentlessly smeared targeted migrants as uniformly dangerous criminals. But polls show that majorities oppose removing undocumented longtime residents, people with jobs, and those who don’t have a criminal record.

The public is even souring on deportations more broadly. And as NBC’s Natasha Korecki reports, headlines about deported families and other deeply sympathetic cases are growing more common. If this weren’t becoming a major political problem, vulnerable Republicans would not have to distance themselves from all of it.

Which raises a question: If those Republicans fear the politics of mass deportations, then why can’t Democrats engage on them more vocally?

Trump has himself now admitted to precisely the same thing as those Republicans did: His mass deportations are sweeping up countless people who make essential contributions to economies and communities, to the detriment of our country. Yet after that admission, we saw only a handful of perfunctory statements from Democrats about it.

This is puzzling, because Trump’s admission repudiates MAGA ideology and politics at a very profound level. A core MAGA tenet is the idea that undocumented immigrants must be forcibly removed because their presence is taking jobs from Americans who are now forced to molder away in idleness and social stagnation. In some iterations of this… elites are treacherously in on this scheme. In this mythology, those elites deliberately avoid employing American workers— while sneering at them as lazy and entitled, to boot— precisely because they have the option of hiring undocumented immigrants.

But Trump’s own admission— and to some degree that of these vulnerable House Republicans— undercuts that story. As Trump himself concedes, there is not a rush of Americans looking to fill vacancies left by deported immigrants.

Some MAGA proponents might argue that many undocumented immigrants still take Americans’ jobs even if farmworkers do not. But this has largely been debunked. And as Andrew Egger notes, Miller appears to have quickly persuaded Trump to clarify he isn’t backing off mass deportations; Miller clearly understood how damaging Trump’s admission truly was.

Indeed, Trump’s confession arguably undermines the broader zero-sum foundation of the MAGA worldview, which holds that any undocumented immigrant’s gain is an American worker’s loss. The reality is that undocumented immigrants often complement the American workforce. Without realizing it, Trump admitted this himself.

One of the very best pieces I read last week on the Trumpist invasion of L.A. was by Rebecca Solnit on the nature of violent protest. I recommend reading all of it. She thinks “the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that's happened over the past several decades— the advance of rights for nature, women, children, indigenous peoples, BIPOC and immigrants/refugees, queer people, trans people, people with disabilities, workers, the right of us all to be free from being poisoned by food, water, air. It's begun in Los Angeles, the city of angels, a city of almost four million people, almost half of them Latino, in a region of almost twelve million that two thousand California National Guards cannot and will not subjugate. All they can do is punish and incite… [T]he protests in LA yesterday were mostly peaceful and any violence was ICE-initiated... One thing to remember is that they'll claim we're violent no matter what… I believe ardently that nonviolent resistance is in the big picture and the long term the most effective strategy, but that doesn't mean it must be polite, placid, or please our opponents, not least because nothing ever will and they'll lie and distort no matter what.”

As Martin Luther King, Jr., our great prophet of nonviolence, said: "In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear?”

… And there are so many other kinds of violence at work in this country, old and new. This nation was founded on two epic forms of violence, the enslavement of Black people and their kidnapping from Africa for this purpose, and the genocide against Native Americans to seize their lands and destroy their cultures and sovereignty, and a third should always be included: the normalized denial of almost all rights to any and all women, including economic, social, educational, and political equality and participation, the rights to bodily autonomy, to dignity, and to protection under the law from male violence.

The Trump Administration is a huge surge of almost every kind of violence: Trump is an adjudicated rapist who put a man in charge of the military who himself paid a settlement to a woman who charged him, credibly, with rape; Trump has pardoned the ultra-violent January 6th rioters (if you want to call anything a riot or an attack on police, start there), has routinely threatened violence against his rivals, his enemies, and the press, has turned the federal government into his own personal vendetta machine, and arguably is making his second term a revenge tour against America for rejecting him in 2020.