Monday, November 11, 2019

Article Analysis:Trump's Ignored Police "Surge" Threat


Editor's note: this article originally appeared November 11th, 2019 on my Facebook page - if you're looking for source articles, check out the comments section of the original article. For my latest full length piece "The Library - the First Five" please click here.



In today's article analysis, I'd like to take a look back at a fairly thin "stub" style item in Truthout from October 29th; a piece I meant to write about at the time, but lost in the shuffle during my recent two week involuntary absence.

Frankly there really isn't a whole lot to the article; while speaking at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Trump's favorite "Black liberal" city to demonize, Chicago, Downmarket Mussolini alluded to a new sweeping, nationwide crackdown on crime when he said:

"In coming weeks, Attorney General Barr will announce a new crackdown on violent crime — which I think is so important — targeting gangs and drug traffickers in high crime cities and dangerous rural areas. Let’s call it the surge.”

As the article notes, it is impossible to avoid the militant nature of Trump's rhetoric in light of Bush's use of the same term, "the surge," to describe sending more troops to occupy Iraq in 2007 and especially in light of the Klepto Kaiser's repeated (and often objectively racist) bloviation about urban warzones (read: cities that vote Democrat and have a large number of African Americans or other non-white minorities) and in particular the city of Chicago - which has become the bĂȘte noire of the reactionary right's rhetoric about "black on black crime" and the need for "law and order."

The article then goes on to reference Trump's $600 million dollar promise to provide even *more* military hardware to American police and the broad coalition of activists opposing Trump (and police violence against African Americans) in Chicago; two issues that are largely a bipartisan problem as racialized injustice and militarized police forces have remained a virtually consistent theme throughout every single presidency since Richard Nixon won a tight election in 1968 behind anti-crime rhetoric designed to stoke the white rage of the "silent majority."

These are all obviously important points to consider and it should be extremely alarming to you that this story seems to have gotten largely lost in the Trump impeachment saga shuffle, but I'd like to take a moment to talk a little bit about the context this piece isn't providing:

Whether or not you think Donald Trump is smart enough to be an actual fascist, there can certainly be no doubt whatsoever at this point in the man's multi-decade and extremely publicized life, that he is a racist.

William Barr, his Attorney General, is a reactionary Catholic Fundamentalist who in addition to being "the guy that covered up Iran Contra" and someone willing to work for the swine emperor, recently gave an alarming speech at the University of Notre Dame that outright rejected the separation of church and state, while using every dog whistle in the book to suggest that any attempts to roll back white Christian patriarchal rule represented a literal f*cking holy war against American Christians. A war being conducted even as we speak by the dreaded "militant secularists" - by which Barr presumably means people who think gay couples should be able to buy wedding cakes and women have a right to autonomy over their body because they're not "baby ovens" for a dwindling Aryan race under assault by the migrant Muslim hordes of godless brown people threatening the eternal Western (and explicitly Christian) order.

Now, these two stellar examples of compassion, humanity and colorblind justice are going to come up with a battle plan to "save" cities like Chicago (cities full of "militant secularists" apparently) from "urban crime" and these cracker f*cks are openly referring to it as "the surge?" To quote Trump directly, this as of yet unannounced program will be "very dramatic" and he assured the conference "you’re going to see tremendous results very quickly" - are you folks kidding me or what? That doesn't sound even slightly ominous to you? Apparently it didn't sound very ominous to mainstream media because if you type "Trump + the surge" into Google right now you'll turn up three copies of the same Jake Johnson article I shared with you above posted at Truthout, Common Dreams and Salon respectively.

In other words, Trump might legitimately be about to let the cops declare war on predominantly liberal American cities with large, non-white populations in an effort to crackdown on a crime increase nobody can prove is actually happening, and the Washington Post couldn't summon up the effort to write more than a line item in their daily update about it? Okay then, bang up job you're doing preventing democracy from "dying in darkness" there, Mr. Bezos.

Of course there will be those who'll argue with me that mainstream corporate media didn't drop the ball here because "Trump says a lot of things" and virtually no details about "the surge" have actually come out into the public sphere aside from the obvious exception of this speech to police chiefs in Chicago. "This is just election rhetoric" the cynical Beltway liberal will say, without ever mentioning that they're not exactly on the firing line if this turns out to be one of those times we should all take Trump both literally *and* seriously.

Unfortunately I fear that this view is laughably naive and largely ignorant of history; it's no big secret that a tremendously large portion of Downmarket Mussolini's target voting base is openly in favor of persecuting liberals, visible minorities and other marginalized people of all stripes - a war on "black on black crime" in cities like Chicago would automatically be understood by America's numerous hordes of voting white supremacists to be a war on Democrats and a war on African Americans. Furthermore, Trump would hardly be the first president to secure a second term in office based on passing horrifyingly racist "law and order" platforms during his first go around - obviously Nixon stands out here, but Reagan's War on Drugs, Bill Clinton's mass incarceration bonanza crime bill and Bush's ritual harassment of Muslim Americans through the FBI's anti-terrorist programs, all come to mind just as readily as examples of this phenomenon at work. 

Finally I think it bears mentioning that just because Trump's administration consistently leaks trial balloons for nightmare dystopian (and yes, usually racist) policies into the public discourse, does not mean it's strategically wise to stand around waiting for the Pork Reich to turn that rhetoric into policy. Every greedbag fascist atrocity the Trump administration has foisted on America as a whole, started out as babbling political rhetoric delivered by a fascist reality TV show host who likes to "grab women by the pussy" - including the Muslim ban, purposely inhumane concentration camp conditions for migrants, as well as the complete and utter dismantling of regulatory regimes overseeing Wall Street, the fossil fuels industry and American business as a whole.

At some point you have to accept that this babbling moron is President and that means a significant percentage of the time, his fascist daydreams and racist promises are going to turn into reality sooner or later - it might behoove people who don't want to see the racist Pork Reich occupation of liberal cities in America grow any more entrenched, to say something about this now, before Trump signs on the dotted line and we're throwing one more horrifying fascist policy on the pile of grievances that won't be redressed until Trump is long gone; if ever.



- nina illingworth  

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

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