We’ve already established that now we’re just haggling over the price
If kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace
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In June of last summer Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen who has been and will forever be the pinched public face of Trump’s cruel ethnic cleansing policy was confronted at a Mexican restaurant near the White House. In a video protestors can be seen approaching her table clapping and chanting. “No borders! No walls! Sanctuary for all!” they chanted. “If kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace” they said to her and other shit like that. After about ten minutes she left escorted by her guards having had her table-side guacamole completely ruined which is another kind of tragedy in its own right. For a lot of people being chased out of a restaurant by people who hate your fucking guts would be the worst thing to happen to them for a long time. Maybe their entire life. Most people would probably remember that for a while. It would hurt. Why is this happening to me they’d say. I’m not a monster they’d say.
Nielsen’s attempt to have a casual dinner in public on any other day would’ve be justifiable grounds for disruption but this was the day that the shit tornado over her enforcement of the separation of children from their parents at the border reached a crescendo. News was circulating widely about the existence of baby jails which we literally have now and have just sort of gotten used to. It was a mind-boggling show of hubris for her to show her face in public anywhere only further adding insult to injury that the incident occurred at a Mexican restaurant. You might wonder if she appreciated the irony but I don’t think that sort of self awareness has been kept particularly well stocked in this administration. Self awareness? Ah let me go check out back they’d say when you walked in looking for some. Sorry I don’t think we carry that anymore.
It was reported this weekend that Nielsen is finally resigning from her post or has been fired by Trump which is the same thing in any case.
“Its [sic] been an honor of a lifetime to serve with the brave men and women of @DHSgov,” she tweeted on Sunday. “I could not be prouder of and more humbled by their service, dedication, and commitment to keep our country safe from all threats and hazards.”
And now presumably much like everyone who has come and gone from the Trump administration she will embark on the next chapter of her life which will be taking a high-paying lobbying or consulting job and she will expect to be welcomed back into polite society appearing on the Sunday morning shows and such and the thing is she probably will be and the lanyard kissers with Beltway bipolar disorder will thank her for coming on. Thank you for coming on they’ll say. Thanks for having me she’ll say and she’ll hope that we all forget why we know about her in the first place but I’m not going to and I don’t think history will either although in fairness history is pretty fucking forgetful. Ideally decades years from now kids in school if we still have kids and we still have schools will have to memorize Nielsen’s name as the answer on a history test and they’ll get a B- on it and be proud of themselves because generation Z5000 are all lazy and spoiled.
What’s your favorite Beatles song or Prince song or whoever else it is with a lengthy catalogue absolutely loaded with jams? It’s hard to say right? You have a half dozen you could rattle off easily but it would be hard to fully commit to just one because as soon as you said it you’d remember another one and be like wait wait hold on. That’s how I feel this morning thinking about Nielsen’s racism discography. There was for example the time she said this thing below. That certainly has to go on the Mount Rushmore of lies I think we can all safely agree.
As it turns out despite being ordered to stop separating families at the border by a judge they are in fact still doing it and hundreds have been ripped apart in the months since. Business is too good.
Another tune I can’t get out of my head was the time a couple days before her chicken mole went cold on her and she was asked on CNN whether the separation policy amounted to child abuse and she said no it doesn’t count as child abuse because they have a TV there for the separated kids to watch in their kid prisons.
“We have high standards. We give them meals and we give them education and we give them medical care. There are videos, there are TVs,” she said.
Another thing she said on CNN the same day which is a line Trump has trotted out frequently was that these weren’t even authentic families in the first place. It’s all a con she said. These people are trying to game the system. Their pain isn’t even real they just want to come and take your shit.
Those are all good but I’m a bit of a hipster when it comes to Kirstjen Nielsen lies and if you asked me to pick a favorite I would go with a deep cut which was the time she pretended not to know about the demographics in Norway. In a Senate hearing in January of last year she was asked to respond to recent reported statements that Trump had made about shit hole countries like Haiti and other places black people live and how he preferred immigrants from Norway.
“I don’t dispute that the president was using tough language” she admitted but she attempted to explain the obvious racism away by saying Trump was hoping to move to a merit-based system for immigration. Whether it’s immigration or hiring for a job or accepting students to schools a merit-based system is what we call it when we conspire to ensure that certain groups of people suffer under terrible enough living conditions that it would be nearly impossible for them to rise to the level of merit in question. They would have to be superlatively exceptional to cross the merit bar and then we would reluctantly let a few of them through as tokens to be like see we are not basing this on race.
“Being from Norway is not a skill,” Pat Leahy responded to Nielsen in the hearing which is a hilarious line on its face but also not entirely true. Being white looks absolutely stellar on a resume or school application it’s maybe the biggest skill a person can have.
“What does he mean when he says he wants more immigrants from Norway?” Leahy asked and Nielsen tried to pass it off as a testament to the hard working Norwegian character which we all know about and then Leahy said Norway is a predominately white country right and she stammered.
“I… um..ah…eee,” she starts and you can actually pause the video and see the moment when she thinks to herself Lord forgive me but it’s time to go back to the old me and realizes she’s got to risk it all with one last shot.
“I…ehh…I actually do not know that sir… but I imagine that is the case.”
Norway is one of the whitest countries in the world I probably don’t need to say.
“White House officials” have been busy trying to launder her reputation in anonymously sourced pieces from the access-addled civility reporters saying she has pushed back against some of the president’s harsher policies all along and advised him when actions he’s proposed such as shutting down the border entirely aren’t how do you say… legal and I am sure a lot of people are going to fall for that but not you and me due to we are the smart ones aren’t we.
The bastard of the thing is she is trying to position herself as being the relatively compassionate one compared to Trump due to she was fired for failing to rise to his impossibly high standards of cruel racism all the while remaining the overseer of one of the single worst human rights disasters in recent American history. If there is any justice in the world which there is not lol she will never be able to appear in public again without being asked to get the fuck out.
I’m not saying Trump and Nielsen are Nazis because that’s not fair they’re only aspiring Nazis who didn’t complete all of the prerequisite course work as of yet but I was reminded of these documents I’ve been meaning to write about on here for a while just now and I haven’t had the opportunity to give them the full accounting they deserve yet. It’s from a trove of unclassified interviews with and conversations among Nazis conducted in American POW prisons in 1944 compiled by the CIA and if you have some time I encourage you to go read through them.
It’s striking to see the casual discussion of the war from the people who carried it out. It’s like when you go out on one with your buddies and you text each other the next day like woh what the fuck was that.
A lot of them are like ah I’m starting to get the impression we fucked up here mate. Some of them are like well at least we are still the master race we still have that after all and his buddy will be like like shut the fuck up.
Ok read this next part below on your own while I go have a cigarette because I don’t want to read it again. It’s from Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad which is about a runaway slave named Cora and it’s… not easy reading. This scene is set after another runaway slave has been captured and brought back to the plantation in Georgia he is imprisoned on by a slave owner named Terrance Randall. Randall is particularly cruel even grading on the unfathomable sliding curve of horror perpetrated by people like him who barely even seem like people when described as they were. It’s fiction but it’s not.
The new stocks Terrance ordered explained the delay in Big Anthony’s justice. The woodworkers toiled all through the night to complete the restraints, furnishing them with ambitious if crude engravings. Minotaurs, busty mermaids, and other fantastic creatures frolicked in the wood. The stocks were installed on the front lawn in the lush grass. Two bosses secured Big Anthony and there he dangled the first day.
On the second day a band of visitors arrived in a carriage, august souls from Atlanta and Savannah. Swell ladies and gentlemen that Terrance had met on his travels, as well as a newspaperman from London come to report on the American scene. They ate at a table set up on the lawn, savoring Alice’s turtle soup and mutton and devising compliments for the cook, who would never receive them. Big Anthony was whipped for the duration of their meal, and they ate slow. The newspaperman scribbled on paper between bites. Dessert came and the revelers moved inside to be free of the mosquitoes while Big Anthony’s punishment continued.
On the third day, just after lunch, the hands were recalled from the fields, the washwomen and cooks and stable hands interrupted from their tasks, the house staff diverted from its maintenance. They gathered on the front lawn. Randall’s visitors sipped spiced rum as Big Anthony was doused with oil and roasted. The witnesses were spared his screams, as his manhood had been cut off on the first day, stuffed in his mouth, and sewn in. The stocks smoked, charred, and burned, the figures in the wood twisting in the flames as if alive.
Terrance addressed the slaves of the northern and southern halves. There is one plantation now, united in purpose and method, he said. He expressed his grief over his brother’s death and his consolation in the knowledge that James was in heaven united with their mother and father. He walked among his slaves as he talked, tapping his cane, rubbing the heads of pickaninnies and petting some of the older worthies from the southern half. He checked the teeth of a young buck he had never seen before, wrenching the boy’s jaw to get a good look, and nodded in approval. In order to feed the world’s insatiable demand for cotton goods, he said, every picker’s daily quota will be increased by a percentage determined by their numbers from the previous harvest. The fields will be reorganized to accommodate a more efficient number of rows. He walked. He slapped a man across the face for weeping at the sight of his friend thrashing against the stocks.
When Terrance got to Cora, he slipped his hand into her shift and cupped her breast. He squeezed. She did not move. No one had moved since the beginning of his address, not even to pinch their noses to keep out the smell of Big Anthony’s roasting flesh.
I started reading the book this week after someone who would know told me that a question about it appeared on the the 10th grade MCAS which is the standardized tests students take in Massachusetts. That doesn’t sound so bad until you learn that the essay prompt was to read a passage from the book about Cora being reluctantly helped by a blatantly racist woman named Ethel who is the wife of a man trying to help her escape and who later betrays the slaves. (Spoiler for me what the fuck I didn’t get that far yet).
I had trouble getting anyone to go on the record to talk about the test and there’s a reason for that and it’s because students and teachers could get screwed for even talking about it in any way in the first place according to the MA Teachers Association:
“Educators and students are forced to sign confidentiality agreements saying that they will not reveal the questions — or even discuss the contents. Students could have their test scores tossed out; educators could lose their licenses to teach. Passing the 10th-grade MCAS test is a graduation requirement.”
Here’s how the question went:
“Based on The Underground Railroad, imagine how the story might have been told differently if it were written from the point of view of Ethel. Create a journal entry written by Ethel reflecting on the events that happened in the passage. Your journal entry should provide insight into Ethel’s thoughts and feelings, as well as her relationship with Cora. Be sure to use what you know about the characters, setting, and events from the passage to develop your journal entry.”
After the test a number of groups including the MTA, the Boston Teachers Union, the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance and the New England Area Conference of the NAACP all called for the test results to be nullified saying the question was widely inappropriate and has traumatized students.
"They had to jump in the shoes of a character who harbored racist notions toward the enslaved character in the book," MTA president Merrie Najimy said. "It was traumatic for them, so this group of educators had to conduct counseling in their classrooms as a way of helping their students cope."
“Whoever came up with the question has done a great disservice to these kids, and everyone who signed off on it should be ashamed,” Whitehead himself said in a statement about his book being used in such a teaching opportunity.
Ultimately the state decided the question won’t be graded and that students taking a makeup tests this week will be instructed to ignore it but the fact that it got that far is nonetheless telling.
I was just searching for updates on the story and I saw on Google that the Daily Caller had written about it and I thought man this is gonna be good but it turns out it was a mostly straight news piece that didn’t stand out much except for this piece of art they used which is certainly the classic depiction of slavery we all recognize.
I don’t know if the crimes we are currently committing against migrants are comparable to what was done by the Nazis or the slave owners in America but what do you call wrenching families apart, losing track of children, giving them away, allowing private companies to profit off the entire ordeal, teargassing impoverished asylum seekers on the border, dragging toddlers in front of tribunals, letting children die in our care, forcing raped young women to give birth, fostering a climate conducive to sexual assault from ICE agents and DHS prison guards, subjugating them to inhumane living conditions and housing people in cages like dogs sometimes leading to suicides of despair, and sending many back to the countries they fled for what will likely be certain death amid the violence they hoped to escape? What would you call it when the people enacting these heinous crimes do so proudly and in fact make it the cornerstone of their entire administration? And on top of all of that characterize the people trying to come here as vermin and an infestation and rapists and criminals who will slit the throats of decent white women everywhere the first chance they get? Maybe those things aren’t as bad as the other stuff but it’s not exactly a weird comparison to make is it?
There’s an old joke that’s been attributed apocryphally to dozens of people over the years and admittedly is not quite up to current sensibilities but it goes roughly like this:
Would you sleep with me for $1 million?
Yes of course.
How about for $1?
No! What kind of person do you think I am?
We’ve already established that now we’re just haggling over the price.
So here’s a thought experiment. Maybe the Massachusetts test has a point. Maybe we should try to put ourselves in the shoes of people like the racist old lady in the Whitehead novel or some of those Monday morning quarterback Nazis above or Kristjen Nielsen or Donald Trump. How does it feel to be that type of person? What does it look like inside a brain like that? Do you feel as if you should hang yourself in shame from a doorknob right now and if not why not?