I’ll Show You the Life of the Mind
by Sam Thielman
We are sick in our souls.
The other day New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein interviewed Christopher Rufo, the professional racist whose recent campaign of lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio was rewarded on June 25 by the right-wing Supreme Court majority, who gave the Trump administration carte blanche to rescind temporary protected status for every immigrant. This is expected to affect the Haitian population of Springfield, Ohio most immediately, but it will certainly be abused further as Trump’s posses of lawless, masked thugs roam the streets kidnapping with impunity.
I’m not averse to people interviewing Rufo. I think it is probably better to know what he has planned, or what he is willing to say he has planned. Rufo is addicted to lying outrageously, and he enjoys such broad institutional support that his lies can hurt huge numbers of people, and he seems to really get a kick out of bragging about it. Anyone like that ought to be examined until they beg you to stop and, ideally, for a good long while afterward.
The institutional moral degradation that Rufo is accelerating is also the work of anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-Muslim conservatives who exerted themselves for decades to pave the way for this moment, and Rufo is their king for a day. Other parts of this coalition are working in concert with him: Conservative gun culture has forcefully rejected even the most modest safeguards; police and prisons remain essentially un-prosecutable; fitness requirements for ICE agents are a bad joke and the NYPD has all but given up trying to recruit people who won’t use unnecessary force. Our lengthy conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have made the weapons of war as cheap as life itself. Given all this it’s hard to imagine a world in which we would not be terrorized by inept thugs in plate carriers waving badly maintained military-grade guns from their private collections at elementary schoolers, unconstrained by the municipal police they illegally impersonate.
Keep us breathing fire!
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