A Reid after Dark: Paging Mr. Orwell
First they erase the history, then they make people disappear, too... Kilmar Abrego Garcia is just the start.
Welcome to Little Rock, Arkansas, where in the 1950s, something happened at a school. It’s hard to say what, but it definitely had nothing to do with race…
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell
Definitely, absolutely no racism involved…
From The Arkansas Times:
Recent reporting about censorship on the website of the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site only begins to capture the changes to the site since Donald Trump took office in January.
The Washington Post and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette both published stories this week about changes to National Park Service webpages since the Trump administration began scrubbing mentions and hints of diversity, equity and inclusion themes on federal agencies’ sites.
The Post noted that the website for Central High School Historic Site had been edited to remove the word “equality” on six webpages. The Democrat-Gazette built on what the Post started, reaching out to a spokesperson and reporting that the park service had restored most of the instances of the word “equality,” along with part of a sentence that had been deleted.
But the edits to the website for the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site are more extensive than those stories suggest.
Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, an online tool that preserves older versions of websites, the Arkansas Times identified additional changes to the Central High School Historic Site website that had not been restored as of Wednesday.
Those changes include information about Central High’s Memory Project, an annual assignment where high school students complete unique community projects centered on civil rights struggles of the past.
Past examples of student projects include an audio walking tour of the Central High School grounds that follows the footsteps of the Little Rock Nine on the day of the 1957 desegregation crisis and a replica of a bus stop bench Elizabeth Eckford sat on for 35 minutes on Sept. 4, 1957.
Entire paragraphs and pages have been erased from a section of the website about the Memory Project.
“The Memory Project immerses students in the oral history of civil rights through hands-on, inter-generational learning, and requires students to analyze historical events.” That’s what the historic site’s website says today, after a Feb. 6 update.
Before Feb. 6, however, the same sentence read as follows:
The Memory Project immerses students in the oral history of civil rights and human rights through hands-on, inter-generational learning and requires students to analyze causes and effects of historical events + the resulting impact on both individuals in their families and institutions in our communities.
The Memory Project page used to end with the following paragraph, which has been removed entirely:
The goal of the Memory Project is to open a door into history and encourage students today—not only at Central High, but at other schools around the state and nation as well—to continue the process of change in race relations and civil rights in their own lives and communities.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Memory. That is the chief enemy and first victim of autocracy.
But the Trump regime isn’t just attacking our collective historical memory. They are dismantling everything that middle and lower income people fought for and gained in the 20th century: old age pensions, aid to the poor, labor rights, women’t rights, civil rights for Blacks that ricocheted to everyone from nonwhite immigrants, to the disabled, war veterans, and LGBTQ folks whose very existence was scarcely acknowledged at all before the 1970s … and of course, they’re out to kill the income tax and corporate and environmental regulations. The extremists who comprise the second Trump regime, and their friends on the nation’s highest court, despise them all. They even hate the Teddy Roosevelt-driven protection of federal lands. All of it, in their sick, twisted view, should be trashed in exchange for a return to the Gilded Age; layered over with a thick, impenetrable veil of Christian nationalism to keep the masses watching the skies and not their draining wallets and bellies full of forced in fetuses. (For reference: see The Handmaid’s Tale…)
And after completing this vast, moral crime, our Project 2025 overlords plan to wipe away any evidence that these “rights” ever existed at all in America. To cleanse our libertine society of the sins of “equity,” “diversity” and “inclusion,” they must first cleanse our minds of the unfortunate thoughts that produce rebellion. And so, they attack our memories. If our stories no longer exist on line, in this modern age, who can argue that they ever existed at all.
The “unhumans”
Among those things that can no longer exist in America are the kinds of people who in the right numbers, will inevitably shift the demographic balance against the preferred majority. Here’s a quote from a 2020 interview by Andrea González-Ramírez with investigative journalist Jean Guerrero, on senior Trump aide Stephen Miller’s embrace of white supremacy. The book is called Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda:
Jean Guerrero: It started when I was covering the family separation crisis at the border. I’d been interviewing all of these parents who had had their children taken away from them by U.S. officials. I was hearing the White House and then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen talking about how this policy was really about national security, and how they were only separating people who had broken the law. I was on the ground at the busiest border crossing in the United States; I knew that that wasn’t the case. It raised the question: If this isn’t about law and order, then what is it about? That’s what led me to Stephen Miller, the man behind most of the administration’s immigration policies. He had grown up in Southern California at the same time as I did in the ’90s. I became fascinated with trying to understand his story: how a Jewish American descendant of refugees becomes the person crafting Trump’s harsh rhetoric and policies, targeting people fleeing violence, people like his own great-grandparents.
AGR: How did his formative years lead him to his current beliefs and put him on the path to the White House?
He grew up in California at a time of extreme anti-immigrant hostility. Then-Republican Gov. Pete Wilson was blaming all of the state’s fiscal problems on “the invasion at the border.” There were attacks on affirmative action, bilingual education, and social services for children of the undocumented. It was scapegoating migrants for everything that was going wrong in California. Stephen Miller was going through a period of family turmoil and looking for someone to blame. His dad is a real estate investor who was very similar to Trump — tangled up in numerous legal disputes and bankruptcies related to his real estate companies. Court documents described him as a master of evasion and manipulation. This whole thing started out with Stephen Miller trying to get his father’s attention by acting out. He started to express very combative and extreme conservative views when his father lost a lot of money related to his legal disputes. The family had to move to a less affluent part of town and he had to go to this public high school that was very diverse, instead of going to a private school like his younger brother later attended.
He started telling his Mexican classmates to speak English, telling them to go back to their countries, going to school board meetings to argue against measures to improve racial equity. Then, he meets these radical conservatives who begin to indoctrinate him. He is a case study in radicalization.
One of the most affecting parts of the book is when you speak with Miller’s former friend Jason Islas. The summer before high school Miller called him and said they couldn’t associate anymore because Jason is Latino. He tells you: “I really think people ought not to be judged for the rest of their lives by who they were in middle school. However, Stephen Miller’s personality calcified into something pretty dark.” It’s so telling about the long-lasting impact of his radicalization as a teen.
And here is the afformentioned Stephen Miller yesterday…
Got all of that? Well almost none of it was factual.
Nor was it factual when Pam Bondi went on Fox (of course) and declared proudly that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is “not a Maryland man,” insisting that “[h]e’s part of a foreign terrorist organization. He’s a member of MS-13, who, as you laid out in your monologue, came to this country and committed just gang acts…” you can bet the right wingers who spend full days watching nothing but Fox or doom scrolling through X-Twitter believe AG Barbie, and Miller, and Trump, and Rubio, and the rest of the regime officials.
But like the sanitized version of the Little Rock Nine’s horrific daily marches through screaming white housewives just to try to go to school was deleted, then restored in sanitized fashion in Arkansas, the story the regime is telling about Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a useful palliative for the maga faithful despite it being complete horseshit that they know isn’t factual, despite it containing bits and pieces of facts.
They tell these lies to camera because they know that most people won’t bother to learn the actual facts about Mr. Garcia, despite those facts being freely available to know:
Abrego Garcia grew up in El Salvador’s capital city, San Salvador, according to court documents filed in U.S. immigration court in 2019. His father was a former police officer. His mother, Cecilia, sold pupusas, the nation’s signature dish of flat tortilla pouches that hold steaming blends of cheese, beans or savory pork.
The entire family, including his parents, two sisters and older brother, ran the business from home, court records state. Abrego Garcia’s job was to buy ingredients from the grocery store and make deliveries with his brother.
“Everyone in the town knew to get their pupusas from ‘Pupuseria Cecilia,’” his lawyers wrote.
A local gang, Barrio 18, began extorting the family for “rent money” and threatened to kill his older brother Cesar — or force him into their gang — if they weren’t paid, court documents state. The family complied but eventually sent Cesar to the U.S.
Barrio 18 similarly targeted Abrego Garcia, according to his immigration case. When he was 12, the gang threatened to take him away until his father paid them “all of the money that they wanted.” They still watched him as he walked to and from school.
The family moved 10 minutes away, but the gang threatened to rape and kill Abrego Garcia’s sisters, court records state. The family shut down the business, moved again and eventually sent Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
The family never went to authorities because of rampant police corruption, according to court filings. The gang continued to harass the family after they moved to Guatemala, which borders El Salvador.
Life in the U.S.
Abrego Garcia fled to the U.S. illegally around 2011, the year he turned 16, according to documents filed in his immigration case. He joined Cesar, now a U.S. citizen, in Maryland and found work in construction.
About five years later, Abrego Garcia met Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen, the records say. In 2018, after she learned she was pregnant, he moved in with her and her two children. They lived in Prince George’s County, just outside Washington.
In 2019, Abrego Garcia went to a Home Depot looking for work when he was arrested by county police, according to court filings. Detectives asked if he was a gang member. After explaining he wasn’t, he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Abrego Garcia later told an immigration judge that he would seek asylum and asked to be released. Vasquez Sura was five months into a high-risk pregnancy.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, however, alleged that he was a certified gang member based on information that came from a confidential informant used by county police, records state.
According to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys in his current case, the criminal informant had alleged that Abrego Garcia belonged to an MS-13 chapter in New York, where he has never lived.
The information was enough for an immigration judge in 2019 to keep Abrego Garcia in jail as his immigration case continued, court records state. The judge said the informant was proven and reliable and had verified his gang membership and rank.
Abrego Garcia later married Vasquez Sura in a Maryland detention center, according to court filings. She gave birth while he was still in jail.
In October 2019, an immigration judge denied Abrego Garcia’s asylum request but granted him protection from being deported back to El Salvador because of a “well-founded fear” of gang persecution, according to his case. He was released, and ICE did not appeal.
Abrego Garcia checked in with ICE yearly while the Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, his attorneys said in court filings. He joined a union and was employed full time as a sheet metal apprentice.
He and Vasquez Sura were raising three kids, including their 5-year-old son, who has autism, is deaf in one ear and unable to verbally communicate, according to the complaint filed against the Trump administration. They’re also raising a 9-year-old with autism and a 10-year-old with epilepsy.
In 2019 at the time of that court filing, the attorney general of the United States was William Barr, who replaced Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, whose top aide… was Stephen Miller. And which gang was Mr. Garcia supposedly a member of? MS-13? … Barrio 18? … or Tren de Aragua, the gang the regime has actually declared we are somehow “at war with” in their invocation of the Foreign Enemies Act? They can’t even get their story straight … including the fact that they themselves already admitted that Mr. Garcia was deported in error (though the official who admitted that has now been suspended for failing to “vigorously defending the administration.”)
None of it matters. Like the babies Miller and ICE czar Tom Homan demanded by ripped from their mothers’ and fathers’ arms and separated, some permanently, during the first Trump regime, or the nearly 240 Venezuelan immigrants sold to Nayib Bukele’s notorious Salvadoran prison (75 percent of whom have no discernible gang or criminal record, and none of whom received due process…) and like dissident students who dared to speak up for Palestinian humanity and take positions on international law that displease Trump donors, or who wrote op eds containing disfavored opinions, or lawyers who have dared to represent brown migrants in court, these people are not “people” in the sense that they ought to be afforded the protections of the U.S. constitution. They have no rights white men need respect, to paraphrase our most notorious Supreme Court case. And no one, not even the courts, can force the regime to respect their rights as human beings or to bring them back onto U.S. soil once they have been disappeared.
What Kilmar Abrego Garcia is to the regime, is an “unhuman” … a repulsive word coined by maga grifter and Pizzagate promoter Jack Prosobiec and professional ghost writer Joshua Lisec for their violent-themed right wing fan fiction that boasts a blurb from none other than JD Vance:
…their book professes to be a history of communist and leftist revolutionary abuses over the decades—but with a twist. They claim, “For as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill.” And these “people of anti-civilization” have always gone by different names: communists, socialists, leftists, and progressives. The pair contend these folks—be they the Bolsheviks of Russia or the BLM activists of this decade—are better called “unhumans.”
“With power, unhumans undo civilization itself,” Posobiec and Lisec write. “They undo order. They undo the basic bonds of society that make communities and nations possible. They destroy the human rights of life, liberty, and property—and undo their own humanity in the process by fully embracing nihilism, cynicism, and envy.”
It’s a hard-edged message. The foes of conservatism are not merely misguided souls pushing the wrong policies but people who seek to annihilate civilization. They “rob” and “kill,” Posobiec and Lisec maintain: “They don’t believe what they say. They don’t care about winning debates. They don’t even want equality. They just want an excuse to destroy everything. They want an excuse to destroy you.”
To which Vance blurbed:
In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR [Human Resources], college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.
In fact, the regime is already in court challenging the 14th Amendment — well, what’s left of it after John Roberts effectively deleted Section 3 — to try to rip away the literal foundation of Black citizenship, in order to threaten the citizenship of any American born to foreign parents whom the regime deems undesirable for reasons ranging from race to ideology. This despite four of Trump’s five children (from three baby mamas) having foreign born mothers: Melania and the late Ivana, and his own mother having been a Scottish immigrant. Lucky for them, their father is a citizen, making them automatically natural-born, and even if that weren’t so, they would survive the maga test of being judged by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.
After all, Donald, Stephen, Steve, Russ, and their friends in the PayPal Mafia have a deadline to push back…
To get there, they’re gonna need to get their numbers up:
As the Trump administration aggressively pushes to deport more immigrants during the president’s first year back in office, one aspirational number keeps coming up in private conversations, according to four current and former federal officials with direct knowledge of the plans: 1 million.
Deporting 1 million immigrants in one year would ostensibly surpass previous statistics, as the highest number thus far was more than 400,000 a year when Barack Obama was president. But officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal goal, said Trump officials aren’t revealing how they are counting the numbers. Analysts say the available statistics make that target appear unrealistic, if not impossible, given funding, staffing levels and the fact that most immigrants have the right to a court hearing before being removed from the country.
White House adviser Stephen Miller has been strategizing with officials from the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies on an almost daily basis to meet that goal, two of the current and former officials said. One strategy to quickly increase numbers, officials have said, is to find ways to deport some of the 1.4 million immigrants who have final deportation orders but cannot be deported because their home countries won’t take them back.
Oh and just wait til they start rounding up Americans to sell to Bukele…
What Trump believes
Memo to the rich dummies to raced to their knees to press their lips to Donald Trump’s feet during the 2024 election: he isn’t faking the madness we’re seeing, no matter how thoroughly he charmed Bill Maher. He means every single thing we think he means.
He really does seem intent on reversing globalization by dragging America back into a production economy like we had during the late 19th century Gilded Age. He actually seems to believe that blanket tariffs are good economic policy, not just to try to force manufacturing back into the U.S., but also to weaken the dollar, maybe even chase the reserve currency to be someone else’s, and weaken the Federal Reserve so they have to drop interest rates — even if that means driving us into a recession. He definitely seems determined to bring the U.S. economy under his direct control.
He has clearly long admired and agreed with Putin and even before him, Russia itself (and his party now largely concurs) — that America’s post-World War II status of the world’s guardian of democracy; the “leader of the free world” — should be replaced by a multi-polar world in which a bunch of nationalist strongmen divide up the globe and lay claim to its natural resources in their individual spheres of influence.
Under that scenario, Russia should be allowed seize Ukraine, while we seize Greenland, Canada and Panama to exploit them for their natural resources and that canal, and Israel should go ahead and seize Gaza, the West Bank, and hell, maybe Jordan and Lebanon too, if that’s what the religious fanatics behind Bibi desire.
It’s not clear what Trump actually thinks about the Mullahocracy in Iran, but he doesn’t seem entirely pressed about them having non-weapon nuclear capabilities. One suspects that if the Persians could come up with a “deal,” Trump might even take it and leave Bibi out in the cold.
He has no use for Palestinians, except for Nayib Bukele… since he’s willing to take American citizen prisoners into his gulag, for a fee, of course, and since like Bibi, he has embraced Christian Zionism to help prop up his autocratic regime. Trump is nothing if not transactional. He’d do business with the Devil for the right price. And hell at this point, maybe he already has…
On a final note: and I don’t say this often: God bless Harvard.
Now that’s a story worth telling.
I’m in despair. I’m having a very hard time staying positive, but I’m working hard at it. Joy, you give me hope.
It’s so damned exhausting to be swept up in the flood of sewage every day.
A favorite Orwell quote (I’ve been quoting him a lot lately.)
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth."
- George Orwell, 1984