Fire and ICE

This just in to our mailbag:

“Okay, so ICE has 22,000 agents and Trump wants to hire 10,000 new ones. Or more. They make a lot of money. They get fifty grand in signing bonuses. Overtime. Great benefits. Student loan repayment!

“Besides the fact that ICE is apparently hiring the worst of the worst, another question arises: What happens to ICE once the regime actually DOES remove all immigrants, illegal or otherwise, as seems to be happening at an accelerated pace? You end up with tens of thousands underemployed ICE agents, people who were hired and trained for one thing...urban warfare. Trump is not going to declare a job well done and muster them out of service — they’re his private army. They will want to fight as they were trained to do. So whom are they left to fight, except you and me?”

— Tom Logan, Sterling, VA

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Yeah, Tom. I’ve had this exact thought, too. Keeps me up at night.

These guys are not the National Guard, who see themselves as beholden to military laws of engagement and a larger good. ICE agents are poorly trained goons, beholden to one man. They are brutal by nature, and by design. They operate from the darkness, descending in packs of five or six, their faces hidden behind masks, KKK-style. They feel hounded and demonized by ordinary people who resent their presence, and they retaliate with an implacable stony totalitarian demeanor, and with unnecessary violence. They are angry. They want people to be afraid of them. No, we are not demonizing them — they have demonized themselves.

They are bounty hunters. Reportedly, they get bonuses for arrests, whether or not those arrests hold up.

These are Trump’s private brownshirts, under Trump’s sole command and protection. Are we to trust him to employ them judiciously once their primary job is over, or winding down?

What’s to stop another Kristallnacht, exactly? Trump’s celebrated sense of restraint?

What will Trump stop at? He has unextinguishable gall. That goo cannot be diluted, even by those around him: Yesterday Trump went to court to prevent his own Justice Department from releasing more files from Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results — files about which he prefers we remain ignorant.

ICE agents have been informed by Trump’s own vice president that they have “absolute immunity” for their actions, a legal term that covers even those actions committed with malicious intent. He said that. ICE’s authority operates behind a tissue of lies, whatever lies are necessary to excuse and defend their actions. JD Vance is also the guy who called Renee Good “a deranged leftist.” Trump calls ICE agents “patriots.” He calls the righteous demonstrators “paid agitators.”

So. Yes. I am worried.

Yesterday ICE agents frog-marched a bewildered 56-year-old Minnesota grandpa out of his house into the swirling snow, handcuffed and wearing only a thin cotton blanket around his shoulders, and boxer underpants, and Crocs; ICE had allegedly been told a child molester was living in that house. They had no warrant. ChongLy Thao, a Laotian Hmong man, had no criminal record but he was, y’know … foreign looking with a weird name. They took him into custody; then, hours later, they released him without explanation or apology. This is the No Apology Regime.

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So, yes, Tom, I am concerned.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran two stories — one an opinion piece, one a news analysis — politely wondering if there is some sort of coherent master plan Trump has, one he is not sharing but is wielding with some brilliance as a form of extortion to achieve less extreme, more benevolent goals. In other words, that these outrages are canny bargaining chips.

Hey, Mainstream Media: It’s waay too late to still be mouthing this normalizing, sane-washing nonsense. There is a madman in The White House. He operates on impulse and hatred, driven by galloping dementia.

The MSM is going to be judged harshly by history over their performance through this existential crisis. The only coherent master plan that Trump has is a Master Race Plan.

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So. An unusual Gene Pool Gene Poll today.

A few days ago, I criticised The Washington Post for an unfortunate headline it wrote, and lamented the fact that their Opinions section had laid off all its copyeditors.

This was the headline:

The gaping hole in the transgender sports case

Avoiding the definition of a woman is hurting the trans rights movement.

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I called it an accident of innuendo, “a vulgar, adolescent gender joke” the paper had blundered into, with no experienced editors left to catch it. Your response in The Gene Pool confirmed this judgment: Two different readers said that when they first read the headline they had actually tried to alert the editors through comments, but that their comments were either rejected or immediately taken down. A couple of readers felt the headline was a deliberate vulgar adolescent gender joke.

However, there was a different reaction in the Comments section to the story on The Post website: Several readers accused me of having a dirty mind. They saw nothing wrong with the headline and everything wrong with my judgment. Are they right?

I thought I’d put it to a formal vote today!

So:

Good.

I am tired. Older even than that other grandpa, ChongLy Thao. He can use your support. So can I. If you can afford it, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.