Revenge on California: How Personal Grievances Creates Policy

[0:05] Did you know that back in college, I was in college Republicans?

[0:11] Don’t worry, I got better. Then we look at the political theater playing out in Los Angeles this week as Orange Snowflake Felon attempts to punish California for protesting his fascist racist agenda. I’m Doug Berger, and this is Secular Left.

[0:49] One thing that we know for sure is that President Trump is a narcissist, a classic narcissist, where he blames other people for his own failings, never takes responsibility, and he likes it when people praise him and he wants to be praised constantly. And if you don’t praise him, then he’s passive aggressive trying to guilt you or attacks you or things like that. We know this. This is not speculation. We have many, many, many, many examples of that. And so at the time that I’m recording this segment, it is shortly before June 14th. And June 14th is flag day for most people. But it also, I believe, is Trump’s birthday.

[1:49] And so one of the things that he’s always wanted, especially during his first term, was that he wanted to have a military parade in his honor. Like you would find in Soviet Union and other dictatorships where they have these massive soldiers and tanks and equipment marching down the street in front of him. And he can, you know, kind of act like El Duce and stand there and be glorified in all this. And, you know, it’s just utter BS. But yeah, so they’re going to do it. They’ve hidden the actual reason. It’s actually for Trump, but they’ve kind of tried to mask it for people who are, I don’t know, mentally disabled and say that it’s to celebrate the army, the U.S. Army, 250th anniversary. Well, it’s the 250th anniversary of the revolution coming up.

[2:48] But that’s what they’re saying. So, you know, I was watching news reports and they were having train loads, flatbed train loads of tanks and armored cars. And they’re spending all this money, millions and millions of dollars to set this up for him so that he can get a hard on and actually climax. Probably that’s probably what will happen. But you’ll probably watch him there and he’ll just kind of go, oh, you know, because that’s the kind of guy he is. He’s a bully. He’s a narcissist. That’s what he wants. But it reminded me of a little bit of my own history.

[3:30] This narcissism about in this trying to act like a tough guy and and, you know, having portraits. You know, he’s had Trump’s had portraits of himself put up big, huge posters of it. You know, he likes that stuff. You know, the classic dictator called a personality thing. He’s into that. And it kind of like I said, it kind of reminded me of my own little bit of history back when I was in college.

[4:02] And I grew up in a conservative town. It would be considered red today. It’s people that overwhelmingly supported Trump and other Republicans. And I didn’t know any better back then. I was in a little bubble, white kid in an almost 99% white public school, things like that. I just didn’t know any better. So I get to, I went to Ohio State and Columbus, went to Ohio State my freshman year. I joined the college Republicans because, hey, you know, I was kind of political. I wanted to do that. We get started and the red flags, there were plenty of red flags. Well, first of all, once I met people, not only people of color, more people of color than I’ve ever met in my life. And I’ve met some LGBT people and other people that were totally different than how I grew up, I started doubting.

[5:10] It wasn’t so much I doubted my belief. I knew I was not an ultra-conservative Republican. I agreed with some Republican points because I didn’t know any better. And so I started questioning it at that time. Then there was one incident. It started out with the first club meeting of the year. We were meeting in the Hagerty, it was called Hagerty Hall.

[5:38] And this is 1986. There was a gubernatorial campaign going on. And former Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes was running again. He had been out of office for probably a decade. And he decided to go again. And he was running against Dick Celeste. Going to run against Dick Celeste. So Jim Rhodes wanted to appeal to some of the younger people. So he picked a younger running mate as lieutenant governor, Robert Taft. Of the Taft family, yes. The political dynasty from Southern Ohio, from the Cincinnati area. You had Robert Taft, who was a senator in the 50s, and then you had William Howard Taft, who was president. It’s the same family.

[6:40] So Rhodes pegged Robert Taft. So the college Republicans at Ohio State that year were going to have him come in and speak. He was going to come in and speak on the benefits of their ticket for Ohio. And so I remember it vividly. I just remember it because I also wrote a short story based on this incident later that’s in, is it? No, I didn’t self-publish that one, but I had written this story about it later.

[7:16] Anyway so we’re having this it’s in i think it was in the evening like at six or seven o’clock at night and a lot of the college republicans were in their suit and ties because that’s what college republicans do uh i did not own a suit and tie so i just had a dress i think i had a dress shirt on and some jeans but anyway sitting there and then one guy there’s this one guy that comes in shortly before the speech, the campaign speech, wearing a green army jacket. And he has a pair of jeans, well-worn jeans with some holes in it, like he’s had them for a long time. And he sits in the back of the room and he has a sign and he opened and he had it folded up and he opened it up and it said, Kent State.

[8:12] Now, for those young’uns who don’t know what the context is, Jim Rhodes was running for governor again. Jim Rhodes was the governor of the state of Ohio in 1970 when the Kent State massacre happened. He was the one that ordered the National Guard to go into Kent State and rough up some protesters. And they ended up killing two of them. And he has never been held accountable for it, ever. Even the National Guard troops that were actually there, that participated, they were never held accountable for it.

[8:56] And so this guy in the green army jacket, that’s what he was doing. He was protesting Jim Rhodes. Now, this is Ohio State. When you had a club meeting, meeting on university property, you had to be open to the public. You couldn’t kick people out. You couldn’t exclude people as long as they weren’t disrupting the meeting because you could get rid of somebody if they were disrupting the meeting. So this guy’s sitting in the back and he didn’t pull out the sign until shortly, just as Taft starts talking for maximum effect. And so there was two or three suit guys at the front that weren’t with Taft, but they They were with college Republicans. I had seen them probably once or twice before. They immediately converged on this guy in the green jacket and started telling him that he was leaving and trying to physically remove him from the meeting, which is against university policy at the time. I think it’s still against university policy because he wasn’t, like I said, he wasn’t disruptive. He wasn’t trying to interrupt Taft and keep him from speaking. He was just making his views known.

[10:19] And so while these goons are trying to remove this guy, the other people around me, the other college Republicans around me were happy about it. They were egging them on. And then finally, Robert Taft, he paused and he said, he said, no, no, no, no. Let the guy stay. Let him stay. He’s not being disruptive. That’s okay. He said, this is a free country.

[10:48] And so the goons then backed off, but they stood next to him and just kind of stared at him the whole time. So then Tass’s speech, he goes on, talks about tax cuts, blah, blah, blah, the usual, the usual conservative bullcrap. And so that kind of got me concerned. Because for me, that was a red flag because I believe in free speech. I believe in freedom of assembly. And as long as you’re not, you know, hurting people, like beating them or damaging property, well, I wouldn’t say that either.

[11:30] If you are not maliciously damaging property, you know, like that’s the only point of the protest, then you should be able to protest away to your heart’s desire. And nobody should be able to tell you any different. So that was the first red flag. The final straw came later in the fall when the bright heads ahead of college Republicans decided that they were going to honor President Ronald Reagan, who was still in office at the time. He was just, it was, uh, starting his, uh, I think he left office in 89. So, uh, yeah, cause the presidential election was in 88. Yeah, that’s what it was. And so they were going to honor president Ronald Reagan and have a birthday party. I said he was going to be 76 years old, 1986. They were going to have a birthday party in his honor at the student union.

[12:40] And they recruited me and some other first-year people to fill out address postcards that they were using as invitations to the party. And so we were given a list of names and addresses to put on these postcards. And then we had stamps, or they might have already been stamped. I forget. but then they would be sent out. And I remember thinking as I’m doing it, it just was leaving a bad taste in my mouth as I continued to do it. And especially hearing some of the leadership and the college Republicans talking. These are the people that talked about putting Ronald Reagan on Mount Rushmore. Kind of like what we hear about people talk about putting Trump on Mount Rushmore. It felt like this cult of personality.

[13:47] That smacked of Hitler. It really did. Dear leader, we’re going to celebrate your birthday. We just don’t do that. In this country, we just don’t go overboard celebrating the birthday of a president. You know, we acknowledge it just like we acknowledge everybody’s birthday. Because in tradition, the president is just like an ordinary person. He just happens to be the head of state. You know, he’s just got a few more duties that he has to do than usual than most people. And I remember I got so sick of it by that point, by the end of that task, that I actually addressed a couple postcards to myself and a cartoon character at the time that I used to draw called Swiss cheese, Swiss cheese, and then my address on it. And I got them. I don’t know what I ever did with those postcards. But, yeah, it was shortly after that event that I quit the college Republicans and never looked back. Because, like I said, I got better. I figured it out.

[15:05] And so the stuff that’s going on with Trump is kind of like that, what I experienced in 1986, but on steroids. And really dangerous. More dangerous than celebrating Reagan’s birthday, because in this case, Reagan wasn’t asking people to do it or demanding people do it. And they weren’t spending millions and millions of dollars that they could spend to feed and clothe people that are struggling in order to give him a parade with a bunch of toys. You know, that wasn’t Reagan didn’t do that. you know as people around him probably did and i know they did but the the man himself did not so you know he we didn’t agree politically and he did some bad stuff but at least he wasn’t a narcissist at least an obvious narcissist and so that is how i joined the college republicans and then quit within a year.

[16:09] For more information about any of the topics covered in this episode, check out our show notes at secularleft.us.

[16:22] Well, if you were paying attention to the news over the weekend of June 7th and 8th, you would have found out that our current occupant of the White House, the convicted felon, Trump, got his panties in a bunch over California and sent in the National Guard to quell the violence, the insurrectionists, he called them.

[16:51] Even though they had nothing to do or no comparison to what happened on January the 6th when we saw real insurrectionists causing problems, Uh, there was a couple of things that played into it. One is that, uh, Trump’s, uh, incompetent ICE people, uh, the border patrol, uh, Cause problems because they swept into an area to try to arrest a bunch of brown people that they, that they assumed were illegal. And the public in that area, the neighborhood in, in Los Angeles, uh, fought back. They, you know, protested. Wannabe federal officers in their army gear, their helmets and their guns got scared. And so they decided to call in the National Guard. Well, you know, of course, how it works in the United States is that, in general, the president can’t call in the Federal Guard, the National Guard, unless a governor requests it. Because initially the National Guard is under the purview of the governor of a state.

[18:08] So essentially if the governor needs the National Guard to come in.

[18:14] Or if the federal government needs the National Guard to show up for some reason, then they have to ask the governor. Well, of course, being California and Gavin Newsom, Trump didn’t ask. He just federalized 4,000 National Guard troops and sent them to this small neighborhood in Los Angeles. It says here, the protests began Friday, June 6th, when dozens gathered in the fashion district near downtown Los Angeles after immigration and customs enforcement agents appeared at a clothing business there. The day ended with four different search warrants executed across the city by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a spokesperson for Homeland Security told Los Angeles Times at least 44 people were arrested. So what that what that says is that there are many different types of jobs that undocumented people do in this country. The obvious ones that most people think of is farm labor, you know, picking picking vegetables or or things like that.

[19:31] Landscaping, you know, menial tasks. But they also, a lot of undocumented people, work in sweatshops.

[19:45] Well, I guess the technical term isn’t a sweatshop, but it’s technically a sweatshop. And they have a lot of that in the fashion industry. They have these giant rooms full of mostly women, some men, sewing clothes together. For companies that then sell them in high-end stores and boutiques.

[20:14] OK, so they have a lot of undocumented people that work there. So naturally, that’s why ICE would show up in the fashion district in Los Angeles, because they’re looking for brown people. They’re racial profiling brown people because they have a quota. And that’s another problem, is that Stephen Miller, the racist, fascist guy, this is his little baby of rounding up illegal immigrants.

[20:46] Is that there’s no plan to it. There’s no due process. If you are brown and they think that you are here illegally, you’re here illegally, and then they arrest you and take you to detention. Then it’s up to you to get out. But if they’re not doing due process, you could end up being deported and you could be still be a citizen. And, you know, we’ve had quite a few cases of that happening. So the fashion industry is one area. The other area that you can find a lot of undocumented workers is in the agribusiness sector. And what that is, is the chicken processing plants, the beef processing plants, the pork processing plants, you know, these highly tedious, monotonous, dangerous jobs that most Americans refuse to do. These undocumented workers do, like butchering cattle, processing chicken.

[21:58] And then the other thing that a lot of undocumented people do is construction work. Um, yeah, I was watching this program on HGTV the other day and they had, it was in Oklahoma. The project was in Oklahoma and they were replacing the roof. And I noticed pretty much everyone that was working on that roof looked Hispanic.

[22:24] That’s what they do. You know, the undocumented workers, they work on construction. So these are the areas where we’re seeing a lot of ice raids in various areas of the country. Because Stephen Miller has given ICE a quota. They want to deport a million immigrants a year. And now that they’ve locked down the border, supposedly, now they’re sending their goons through the streets and rounding up people. And again, I have problems with this because they’re not doing any due process. They don’t have any warrants. They call them search warrants, but they’re they’re not judicial warrants. They’re administrative warrants. So, you know, that’s why the ACLU and some other groups tell you that if an ICE person comes to your door and it says they have a warrant and you look at it, it’s almost always something signed by a supervisor at that office. It’s not a judge’s warrant. You can refuse them.

[23:36] So that’s the first problem is there’s no due process, they’re racial profiling, they’re hitting these areas that can harm local economies, neighborhoods, business people. Believe it or not, the business people that exploit these undocumented workers, yeah, they get hurt when their workers get arrested. And that’s what and see, that’s what they used to do before now. ICE would show up at some business that they got a tip that had a lot of undocumented workers. And what they would do is they would round up all the workers and then nothing would ever happen to the business owner. They would never be prosecuted because they’re committing a crime by employing undocumented people.

[24:29] Because they’re paying them, they’re not, you know, paying them a good wage. They’re, in most cases, and they’re not paying taxes on those workers because technically those workers don’t exist. But we know the facts. The facts are that a majority of undocumented people in the United States are law-abiding. They keep their heads down. They pay taxes, whatever, you know, when they have taxes. They don’t get Social Security. They don’t get Medicare. They get emergency Medicaid. If the hospital receives federal funding, she still gets treated.

[25:09] But that’s the only benefits that they actually get officially in this country. So the Trump administration is rounding up all the brown people. And the other problem besides the lack of due process that I have is that these thugs are loaded for bear. They’ve got their flak jackets, their Kevlar, their helmets, their goggles, their long guns, and they have masks. They cover their faces. Why are they covering their faces? If they’re doing something legal, why are they covering their faces? Well, the Homeland Security is saying that they don’t want their agents to be doxxed, which means finding out who they are and where they live and then threaten their families. Well, that rarely ever happens, that they do that, that people do that. You know, I think that once this whole situation is resolved and over, and hopefully once Trump’s out of office, that they go back and look at it and make it a law that federal law enforcement is not allowed to wear masks when they’re executing their duties. Because I just think that that is fascism.

[26:30] That’s authoritarianism. So then there’s people that think, well, you know, this is only happening in blue states because the news is focused on California. And like I said, it’s a small area. It’s a small area in Los Angeles. It’s been spreading because it’s been five days. It’s spreading out. But even the Los Angeles Police Department put out a statement saying that in general, the protests were peaceful.

[27:01] And there was no need to call out the National Guard. The National Guard was like, you know, look up video of the Rodney King riots and racial riots that happened in Detroit in the 60s and things like that. That is when you call out the National Guard, when you have a systemic violence happening across the city and the local law enforcement can’t stop it. But the LAPD said that they had everything under control. They didn’t need the National Guard, but it was sent in anyway.

[27:36] So now you’ve got all these people with guns and helmets going against these unarmed, mostly unarmed civilians, throwing rocks and garbage and things like that. You know, you’re just going to have it escalating.

[27:54] What’s happening is Trump is escalating it. He caused the situation by sending in ICE into that area, and then there’s protests, and then he gets tougher. He’s like a bully. He tries to get tougher. And then that’s going to escalate even more because then the populace that’s protesting is going to come back stronger. So those are the problems I have with that situation. The other problem, too, is that the people we haven’t been hearing from are the people that complained about Biden taking away guns and talking about the tyranny of the government and censorship and all that stuff. And here, their guy is doing it for real, and they’re not saying a word about it. They’re not complaining. Some of them are, some of them are, but not all of them. But I got sidetracked there. But one of the claims is it’s only happening in blue states and blue areas. Basically, what Trump is trying to do is trying to punish California because it’s a blue state.

[29:12] As Jimmy Kimmel, the comedian Jimmy Kimmel said on his show the other night recently, that when Los Angeles County was on fire several months ago, crickets, the federal government did nothing or didn’t offer any help.

[29:32] And but he said some civilians complained about ICE taking away their friends. Then he calls out the National Guard. So, yeah, it’s all political. It is. It’s all political. It’s it’s for show. It’s performative. People are going to get hurt. People got arrested and it’s going to be all for nothing because then they’re going to go on to the next thing. And so people are thinking, well, this is just the blue states that this is happening, that they’re not doing it in the red states. Well, they are doing it in the red states. The difference is that local law enforcement and everybody isn’t trying to interfere with it as much. so we don’t hear about it. It doesn’t make the news. And Axios had some statistics. It said they reviewed removal orders pending deportation cases and agreements between immigration officials and local law enforcement agencies to how they’re trying to do this mass deportation.

[30:43] And this was dated. When was this dated? June the 3rd. So it’s a little bit old, but that’s OK. Says the analysis shows local law enforcement agencies in Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia have been most cooperative with immigration and customs enforcement and rounding up immigrants through deals known as 287G agreements. And as a reminder, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina and Virginia, I don’t think North Carolina is. But all of those except for North Carolina, I believe, are led by Republican governors.

[31:26] And they’re legislatures controlled by Republicans. Says here in this Axios article, there are 629 such agreements now in place across the country. About 43% of them are in Florida, followed by 14% in Texas, 5% in Georgia. Says the GOP-led state governments of Florida, Texas, and Virginia also have made a point of pushing local agencies to partner with federal agents, leading to a series of high-profile mass raids in those states. Recent raids in Florida by a coalition of agencies led to 1,120 arrests in an effort dubbed Operation Tidal Wave. Federal agents also have been especially active in New York, California, and Illinois, blue states where some local and state laws prohibit authorities from assisting in immigration arrests. It says, by the numbers, of the 42,000 removals of immigrants ordered in March, Nearly 50% involved people in Texas, California, New York, Virginia, and Florida, according to analysis of the data. Harris County, Texas, home to Houston, had more immigrants, almost 2,500, ordered removed than any other county in the U.S. Harris County, Texas, home to Houston. Houston is a democratically run city.

[32:49] Miami-Dade County, Florida had the most residents with pending immigration court deportation cases, 154,974 at the end of March. And I think that is due to them removing protected status for Haitians and Venezuelans and everybody else because they tend to congregate around Florida. And it says, Cook County, Illinois, Chicago has the second most with 113,959 cases, followed by Los Angeles with 112,000. And here are some of the problems. It says, there aren’t nearly enough federal agents to meet President Trump’s unprecedented deportation goal of deporting a million immigrants a year. In some places where the Trump administration faces a gap in resources, local law enforcement agencies are unable or unwilling to meet the Fed’s demands

[33:42] or expand beyond their usual enforcement duties. It says with the nation’s borders essentially locked down, the administration has shifted much of its deportation operations to the nation’s interior. And a state of play says Trump recently urged leaders of the National Sheriff’s Association to have their members partner with ICE.

[34:02] And they did get some pushback on that. And then here’s an interesting point. Though not as densely populated as other enforcement zones, rural conservative states such as Utah, North Dakota, and South Dakota have seen explosive growth in immigrant populations in recent years.

[34:22] And one of the things that I saw, I saw a report that a White House insider leaked to the press that the Trump administration reassured the agribusiness sector, that’s the meatpacking places and the farm labor, farmers that hire undocumented people to pick their crops, they have been reassured that ICE will not raid their establishments.

[34:52] So there’s that. But as I said, some of the sheriffs have been giving pushback because they don’t have the manpower and they don’t have the funds. They don’t have the money. It takes money to do this stuff. They don’t even have the space to detain people, you know, especially in rural areas. So it’s like, you know, what are they going to do? You know, it’s kind of like how the deployment of the National Guard has gone for Trump at this point is they sent the guard in but didn’t send any infrastructure. So there’s no tents. There’s no place for them to stay. They don’t get any hot food. They haven’t had any hot food or anything. They just sent them in. And they don’t have a plan. I don’t believe they do have a plan. You know, basically what what this is, is this is theater. This is political theater. They’re sending these these troops in and and Fox News has been falling in line. You know, there might, I think there was like three cars on fire. They were those self-driving Waymo cars and Fox ran that video all day, one day, saying how the city of Los Angeles is, is, uh, dangerous and falling apart. And it’s just like one neighborhood, one area.

[36:18] Everybody else is going about their day. People are going to work, going to the store. The electricity is on. There’s not any mass fires that the fire department has to put out. People aren’t looting, burning and looting stores like they did after the Rodney King verdict. And so it’s a manufactured crisis. He sent these goons into this area and people protested and now he’s ratcheting it up. You know, is that a leader? I don’t think it is. But that’s how I feel about this whole thing that they’ve been doing with these ICE raids. You know, no, no, it’s just it’s just racial profiling. They’re just gathering up all the brown people they can find. It doesn’t matter. And we have many, many cases of citizens being rounded up. But just recently, there was a high school student, I think it was a recent high school graduate in the Cincinnati area that got picked up in a sweep. And he’s a citizen and he’s been here for 18 years. You know, he was born here. He’s a citizen and he’s in detention. And they can’t seem to get him out.

[37:36] That’s a poor, poor plan, if you ask me. And like I said, a majority of undocumented people in the United States are law-abiding people. They just go about their day. They do their job. They contribute to the community by going to stores and things like that. And they just want to have a better life than what they did from the place that they left. These MAGA crappers are the racists, the bigots that want to force all these people out without realizing how integral they are into the fabric of the community in some places, like the agribusiness sector. So you get rid of these undocumented people from, say, the meatpacking places. Who’s going to pack the meat? If they’re going to hire American citizens to do it, they’re going to have to pay a lot more money than they pay the undocumented people. That’s going to bump up the price of hamburger.

[38:42] Now, I don’t particularly agree with that model of economics where they use exploit the labor of undocumented people, but that’s what we have in this country at this time. I don’t see this battle of wills ending anytime soon unless the courts get off their ass and start enforcing the law against what Trump’s been doing. And until that happens, it’s just going to keep happening. And it’s going to be probably an explosive summer. You know, we have the June 14th is the No Kings protest rallies happening all around the country. And so there’s just a lot of people that do not approve of what Trump is doing. And even people that voted for him in November are now coming around to the fact that he is an incompetent, convicted felon who doesn’t know what he’s doing and causing the problems that he claims that he’s trying to solve. So we’ll see what happens.

[39:50] Thank you for listening to this episode. You can check out more information, including links to sources used, in our show notes on our website at secularleft.us. Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content. Send us your comments, either using the contact form on the website, or by sending us a note at comments at secularleft.us.

[40:28] Music.