Mass transit, the psychopath version.

Also: how long before a fugitive act for pregnant women?

I.

Imagine being Ron DeSantis. I know this may be asking the impossible. Perhaps keep a bucket handy in case of extreme moral nausea? But just try to see yourself in this man’s place. He’s in his office among staff, devising another stunt to raise his national profile by abducting some Venezuelan families in Texas and sending them to an island where the Kennedys, Obamas, and Clintons own property, a place easily hated by red-staters merely on the basis of its precious name. It’s the geographic embodiment of old-school patrician liberalism which means it also now resonates with woke hypocrisy, globalism, and secret satanic pedophilia, no doubt.

Imagine each person involved in this project, from professional white man Tucker Carlson who first suggested it, to the brain trust in the Florida governor’s office who developed the idea and hired the videographer to memorialize it, to the mysterious blonde woman with a probably bullshit name of Perla who got paid to smile pretty and tell these people in their native language that they’d be getting a surprise present if they boarded those charter planes. Imagine the great big black hole at the center of all their souls.

(Or don’t imagine it. Read the unsubtle pro-DeSantis attitude in, for example, the report in The New York Post—which I refuse to link here because fuck The New York Post—as well as the dozens of venomous cheerleaders holding forth in the opinion section.)

Yesterday morning, journalist Judd Legum reported new and hellish details at his excellent Substack blog, Popular Information.¹ First, this particular group of families are in no way “illegal immigrants”—they are asylum seekers from an oppressive, starving, authoritarian regime, legally permitted to be here (and to move around freely) while immigration courts hear their cases. They are essentially defectors. We used to like defectors, remember? Maybe they had to be from officially communist countries to matter.

These Venezuelans have been registered in a fully legal asylum process that may require them to check in with their local immigration office to keep their cases in good standing. Now, apparently, at least some of them are at risk of missing critical check-in appointments back in Texas.

Legum learned that many of the Venezuelans had been handed an inexpertly designed but somewhat official-looking brochure to entice them to board the plane.

The brochure says that migrants who arrive in Massachusetts will be eligible for numerous benefits, including "8 months cash assistance," "assistance with housing," "food," "clothing," "transportation to job interviews," "job training," "job placement," "registering children for school," "assistance applying for Social Security cards," and many other benefits. None of this, however, is true.

These benefits, it turns out, are a legit package—but only available to refugees being resettled by the UN, not border crossers. The fake brochure was a very deliberate bait-and-switch. Imagine being the low-level staffer or possibly even intern tasked with designing and printing this sickening ruse.

Let us pause very briefly to remember that there are legitimate, severe problems being distracted from, I believe, rather than helped by populist rabble-rousing. There are ongoing crises at the border; there have been for years; they ebb and flow due to many complex factors. Non-partisan observers have warned for years that neither Republicans nor Democrats seem able to develop and enact a sensible plan to deal with the reality of unofficial southern border crossings. Of course, effective right-wing demagoguery on this topic also requires that the issue never gets sensibly or rationally addressed. They don’t want red voters starved of their red meat.

Soon, as the temperature rises and droughts and famines escalate, the global problem of uninvited and unwelcome border crossers will explode everywhere all at once.² I dunno…maybe our environmental reality is so dire that it will require soulless operators, comfortable with sacrificing huge swaths of humanity, to save a lucky few rich and/or useful people for the limited spaces in survivalist bunkers. It feels as if something different is afoot now. Maybe as the climate emergency deepens, “Gaia” is manifesting mass murderers as a feature, not a bug. (A twisted projection, I know. Trust me, sometimes I do manage to put blinders on my imagination and tra la la through life.) The math is subject to controversy, but most experts believe 10 billion people is several billion more than the planet can sustain.

Remember, Trump wanted Covid-19 to wash over the country. I’m assuming so did the anti-mask, anti-vax crowds he riled up. Riled ‘em up so well, that some of them didn’t even realize they were the ones being washed over, and they spent their last hours screaming Hoax! Hoax! at the masked nurses offering palliation.

It’s already the case that leaders of endless-war nations like ours make fatal decisions about vast populations every day, even leaders we think of as upstanding, good, and sane. Compartmentalization is a needed skill the higher up you go. Innocents die from state-level actions all the time. Obama presided over a civilian-killing drone counter-terrorist program while being, from reliable reports, a thoughtful, ethical human. Meanwhile, framed by liberal/progressive/globalist parameters of right and wrong (which may still prove not nearly ethical enough…), these ugly GOP stunts have moved straight past cruel political theater into unbothered psychopathy.

Imagine being Ron DeSantis and thinking it both politically advantageous and (I have to assume) a little bit morbidly funny to fling vulnerable people, including young children, into the unknown like that. Funny not because of what’s going to happen to the Venezuelans (they clearly don’t count for much) but because of the Libs who will be Owned. (He expected that the virtue-signaling hypocrites would go berserk—his own words to the press.)

Then imagine being so steeped in your own partisan hatred that you’re shocked to see an immediate and compassionate response instead of the freak-out you were expecting.

Well, maybe just pretending to expect. I think it’s also possible we’re all being played here. Someone in Tallahassee may have gamed out a potential humane response in Martha’s Vineyard as one possibility and figured it would place the stunt exactly where it needed to be: inspiring to the MAGA masses but not quite deadly to the Venezuelans, nothing that might awaken any sliver of conscience remaining in the crowds. Again, the fate of these people matters not at all to the stunt-makers. I’m assuming they realize outright genocide is still beyond the pale for the GOP faithful. For the moment.

Armed with buses and planes, a couple of red-state governors are pledging to do the same kind of thing over and over (even though the DeSantis deception may include prosecutable crimes). Border obsessives and white nationalists are cheering. De Santis’s star may or may not be on the rise (too early for those polls) but he certainly has more national name recognition than last week.

I am convinced these people in Florida’s governor’s office found it fun to devise their gaslighting scheme. You can imagine it, can’t you? The sheer fiendish joy at their plot?

Tell them they’ll be getting a surprise present. Show them this flyer. Speak in their language! Sell the benefits!

Hand me the bucket, please.

II.

Speaking of useful base-enflaming issues that many GOP leaders probably wish never got “fixed” quite this well: the batshit crazy extreme anti-abortionists have won their big prize. The party leaders and operators who ensured the end of Roe with Dobbs v. Jackson seem caught between triumph and doom. They underestimated the power of highly motivated pro-choice voters in Kansas, but it’s still far from clear whether reproductive rights will be a determining factor in November, rather than inflation or other economic worries.

Maybe the GOP will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Last week their flippiest-floppiest opportunist Lindsey Graham lurched into the chaos to propose a nationwide abortion ban past 15 weeks. (This is a medically meaningless deadline, of course, based on an ancient notion Aristotle called the quickening—i.e. the enlivening. In certain fact-averse circles, though, a popular notion from the fourth century is not to be controverted in the 21st.)

Court watchers are braced for the possible further erosion of privacy-based rights protecting the bodily autonomy of women and men. Contraception, gay marriage, consensual sexual activities in one’s home—if this is a de facto theocracy, what’s not to regulate? In his conservative majority opinion, Alito tried to limit the ruling to apply only to abortion. Ginni Thomas’s man on the inside, though, wrote a concurring opinion out of the “textualist” playbook: it attacks the idea that there are any implied rights at all in the Constitution.

Whether there’s a nationwide ban coming or not—and it could certainly happen quickly if the Republicans regain the House and Senate—some of the most restrictive states are already testing their willingness and ability to criminally prosecute women who cross state lines to seek an abortion in a rights-protected place, alongside anyone who might help them. So much for freedom of movement. Oh, wait! That’s another one of those rights, like privacy, that was so fundamental to the Founders and enumerated in documents previous to the Constitution, they didn’t bother to state it out loud. Well, obviously, they were only thinking of white men. Phew! Textualism restored! Or wait, I think that would be originalism. Whatever! By some verbose trickery, it will magically not apply to vessels for unborn persons.

The stories of desperate women or girls in dire straights are already piling up, and of course, we’re only hearing the few that make it to journalists’ ears. It takes a certain amount of depraved indifference to ignore these stories, but we have proof that this uncaring stance is well within reach for a certain overly powerful minority of voters. (Reminder: the vast majority of US citizens are pro-choice.)

I’m not a lawyer or expert on these matters, so here is a piece of wild speculation. There are now fringe groups riled up to advocate for the death penalty for women who’ve had abortions; I for one no longer laugh when I hear insane ideas like this because you just…never…know. There are anti-abortionists today who want to ban IUDs and Plan B because these interfere with conception, which in their nuance-free minds is the same thing as abortion. And there are several Supreme Court Justices who are 100% down with this crowd. This is already crazier than I ever expected to see in this “modern” nation.

At some point, an inspired lunatic (maybe on the DeSantis presidential nomination staff?) is going to have to play all this out. Someone is going to propose an enforcement mechanism to catch and detain suspected abortion-seeking women. Someone will have to envision a counterpart to the 18th- and 19th-century laws that empowered slave catchers to chase down “runaway property” in free states. The Pregnancy Paddyrollers? The Unborn Underground? Although I read Margaret Atwood’s novel ages ago, I haven’t been watching The Handmaid’s Tale in streaming adaptation. I haven’t wanted to court that level of Hollywood-style hysteria and hyperbole. Maybe I should reconsider, not because the fictional scenario is likely, but because even our darkest dystopian stories provide an escape from current real-world absurdities.

1. “The Smoking Gun In Martha’s Vineyard.”

2. The crisis is described by The UN Refugee Agency here.