Splitsville BRUTALITY TV

The Righteously Indignant Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

Hey, remember “death squads”?

Sure ya do. And if you don’t, here’s Wikipedia to remind you:

A death squad is an armed group whose primary activity is carrying out extrajudicial killings, massacres, or enforced disappearances as part of political repression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or revolutionary terror.

You may remember them as starring in such Cold War iterations as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador—you know, those relatively poor, fucked-up Central and South American countries, where everybody was always running around repressing the left, murdering nuns and priests, and installing ruthless dictators with the help of the US government, the CIA, and US corporations. You might, if you were so inclined, call them “shithole countries.”

In hearing about their activities (kidnapping and torture, the mass slaughter of entire towns, throwing people out of helicopters—that sort of thing) you may have thought or felt something along the lines of, “Well, yes, that’s barbaric and terrible. But that’s how it is with your hot-blooded Latinos south of the equator in shithole countries, where democracy can never quite take root, the church is sometimes in collusion with the repressive state, and they’re just not as civilized and enlightened as we are up here.”

Uh-huh. Except that we regret to inform you that we now have our own All-American death squad. But rest assured, it’s nothing like those brutal, non-governmental, extrajudicial ravening gangs of bloodthirsty scumbags we used to deplore in those far-off shithole countries. No, our ravening gang of bloodthirsty scumbags—we call it ICE—is fully funded and authorized by the US government. So that’s reassuring. And, just to further their effort to distinguish our good, new death squad from the bad old death squads of the Cold War, ours has adopted a new (or, rather, old) slogan that has nothing to do with Latin America. It takes its inspiration from the massacre of (not in; of) the Czech village of Lidice in World War II. Wikipedia:

Lidice was chosen as a target for reprisals in the wake of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, because its residents were suspected of harboring local resistance partisans, and were falsely associated with aiding team members of Operation Anthropoid. On 9 June 1942, 172 boys and men between age 14 to 84 were shot. Altogether, about 340 people from Lidice were murdered in the German reprisal (192 men, 60 women and 88 children). The village was set on fire and the remains of the buildings destroyed with explosives.

This gave birth to the slogan subsequently embraced by the SS and the Einsatsgruppen (“deployment squads”) of Nazi Germany, whose job was to roam the country and summarily kill anyone deemed an enemy of the Reich. You can see it proudly displayed by the Queen of Puppicide herself, the woman who, if she had a Native American name, it would translate to “She Whose Face of Botox Cannot Move,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

ONE OF OURS

ALL OF YOURS

Get it? If, even in self-defense, you bring harm to one of their patriotic agents, “all of yours” will pay the price. Note, here, that not only are they “not hiding it anymore” as regards ICE’s similarity to Nazi death squads, they’re outright flaunting it.*

This should be, by any normal American standard, morally repugnant, legally dubious, and politically suicidal. A year ago, when Donald Trump talked about mass deportations, we thought: “Oh, come on. That would mean fanning out into neighborhoods and literally grabbing people from their jobs and their homes. It would be physically impossible and grossly illegal. So just stop.”

How wrong we were. But it just goes to show how you’re never too old to learn something new about the character of your (right-wing) government and the intellectual and moral nature of its electoral—here’s an apt term—base. MAGA patriots—who, when they proclaim “Don’t Tread on Me” also mean “But Do Tread on Them”—can take additional pride in the American Exceptionalism they believe makes them exceptional by noting a new and exciting variation on the classic death squad formula. Because ICE isn’t just in it to deport anyone—illegal or citizen, possessing a visa or no, long-term resident or recent arrival—they can get their hands on to meet Stephen Miller’s grotesque quotas. And they’re not just in it for the brutality (if not death) they can inflict on anyone they choose.*

Oh, they’re in it for all those—and for the money, although when exactly they’ll be paid in full seems open to debate. And, as everyone familiar with Donald Trump’s history knows, Trump never pays contractors in full, and sometimes he pays them not at all. But the thugs and sadists and overweight dickheads currently terrorizing Minneapolis and St. Paul may not mind getting stiffed, because this gig offers them something they might have thought would never come their way:

They get a chance to be creative. They get a chance to produce content.

This fact was driven home with especial force the other day by two writers. The first was David Frum. Now, you know, and we know, that Frum has much to answer for as regards the abominable killing and destruction in George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s horrendous fiasco in Iraq. So yes, he’ll spend some time in Purgatory, if not in one of the pleasanter suburbs of Hell itself. But his anti-Trump writings have been pretty good. And so, in the Atlantic, he points out:

ICE is violence-prone in part because the agency has lowered its training standards and ditched much of its background vetting to meet the president’s grandiose deportation targets. But more fundamentally, ICE is violence-prone because its main purpose has become theatrical. Under present leadership, ICE is less a law-enforcement agency than it is a content creator.

We’ve seen this here and there, but it really hit home with the murder of Renee Good. Part of the revolting video of the killing shows the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross (Torment Be Upon Him) taking the extra time and extra care to be sure to produce his phone as well as his gun, and to film with one hand the annihilation he carried out with the other.*

Why? To pander to MAGA’s lust for what Frum calls a “redistribution of respect.” One of the foundations of the MAGA cult’s adoration of Trump is, apart from their (legitimate, if mis-directed) economic complaints, their sense of cultural victimization. Yes, as dumb as it sounds, it turns out that in the beating heart of today’s American fascism is a bit of shtick from Rodney Dangerfield: They don’t get no respect.

Who does get all the respect? Their enemies: Coastal elites. Immigrants. DEI hires. Jews. Lesbians and gays. Scientists. So-called “experts.” Somalians. Anyone and everyone who isn’t a white Christian putz yearning for what Trump correctly intuited was “retribution.”

Frum starts his piece wondering why JD Vance was so quick, in the face of not one but two damning videos (one by the shooter himself), to blame Good’s death on her, to repeat and expand on every self-evidently absurd lie advance by Noem and ICE about a harmless woman trying to drive out of harm’s way. He concludes—correctly—that Vance is pandering—groveling—to MAGA, which he has every incentive to do if he wants a political future. (Actually, he has more incentive than merely signaling that he’s still on Team Fascist. If he has presidential ambitions he already has two strikes against him: One, everyone knows he’s a condescending prick with zero charisma; two, he’s married to a woman who is both a “foreigner” and a Hindu. Good luck securing the mouth-breather-white-supremacist vote, bunky. And even if you get it by debasing yourself to sub-Trumpian levels of disgracefulness, what will you have won? Twenty percent of the vote? Smart!)

Frum:

ICE agents who use violence may be counting on superiors to back them up, because they feel disrespected too, and by the whole ungrateful country. Which returns us to Vance and his don’t bother me with the facts defense of the ICE shooter.

MAGA is many things, but above all it’s a movement about redistributing respect away from those who command too much (overeducated coastal elites) to those who don’t have enough (white Americans without advanced degrees who feel left behind). You see that redistribution at work in the Trump administration’s project to devalue medical experts and empower wellness gurus and vaccine skeptics, and in its dismissal of “deep state” national-security professionals in favor of TV pundits.

Hence the importance, not only of the brutality, but of the distribution of its snuff-film documentation on social media. It’s the administration’s way of “keeping in touch with its audience,” and saying, “See? Sadistic cruelty toward and outright murder of everyone you don’t like. Who loves ya, baby?”*

Does it work? And what can that even mean?

That brings us to Thomas Zimmer, whom we’ve quoted here before. He used to be a professor of history at Georgetown University. But Zimmer (a native German who, annoyingly, writes in better English than most Americans) decided that he and his family would be better off withdrawing from our disturbing and all-too-familiar-to-a-German-historian scene, and moved with wife and kids back to Germany. From there, on Bluesky, he writes that the administration is—

A regime driven by the desire to create social media content for their hardcore fans on the extreme Right. It is an immensely dangerous situation. But I don’t think this cruel spectacle is an effective way to consolidate authoritarian rule.

Trump is surrounded by people who perceive the world almost exclusively through the prism of a hermetically sealed rightwing information environment. That helps explain why they are vastly overestimating how much support they have for their cruel spectacle.

Talk about Splitsville! If, by that, we mean a situation in which the US consists of two more “nations” residing in a single geo-political entity—and we do—then there you have it: One nation includes men perpetrating violence and brutality against citizens as well as non-citizens; breaking into and entering homes, cars, and workplaces without judicial warrants; flooding into blue cities wearing cosplay jungle camo (in snowy winter) and tactical gear; showing up at Home Depot parking lots and elementary schools as though on the front lines at Falluja; gang-tackling teenagers, shooting unarmed civilians, roughing up grandmothers, dragging mothers into vans and leaving their children unattended, all to consign these abducted victims to either domestic concentration camps or torture prisons in foreign countries and, all the while, filming these depredations for the entertainment of perpetually-aggrieved, self-pitying morons.*

The other “nation” consists of everybody else.

It will not have escaped your notice that none of this makes sense. Videos of this vile, thuggish, and certainly illegal behavior are not going to win new converts to Trump’s fascist team. Nobody is going to say, “I was skeptical of Trump up until now. But when I saw his masked goons shoot some kid in the eyeball, I thought, ‘Hang on, he may be onto something.’”

Meanwhile, videos of this terror spree now circulate around the country and the world. Imagine a burglar filming himself and making the footage widely available. To say it’s crazy is an understatement. Even if the perps’ masks make it difficult or impossible to identify them individually, the entire project advertises its own lawlessness and illegitimacy and promotes its own discrediting. Even if MAGA stays faithful, people who otherwise have little interest in politics are seeing these images and are appalled. Even Joe Rogan is against ICE. See Greg Sargent’s new piece in The New Republic for the mounting opposition to our very own gestapo, and on Democrats’ dawning awareness of how it can be exploited.

And what about the Republicans? Oh please.*

*While the Republicans, who could stop it, do nothing.