Everything Hurtles Toward Destruction in the Most Shattering and Staggering Terror Crisis in the History of the World

Today’s news is brought to you by psychiatric medications.

I wrote this morning that the City of Los Angeles solved a serious drug and gang problem in MacArthur Park, twenty years ago, by partnering with federal law enforcement agencies to do things like arresting and deporting gang members and drug dealers who had entered the country illegally. And I linked to an NPR story from 2008 that reported the effort, including the deportations, as a policy success. Significant deportation operations are something every administration has done, in some form, for many decades. We have borders and immigration law — this is not actually a new development.

Among other examples, what the Trump administration is doing looks a lot like what the Eisenhower administration did. And the enforcement of immigration law has often been perceived as left-coded politics, as labor activists have viewed illegal immigrants as labor competition, people who bring down wages:

I promise you, Donald Trump is not the first person in the history of the world to think of deportations.

So take a moment to read Linda Greenhouse’s remarkable op-ed essay in the New York Times today, an 800 word panic attack dressed up as journalism. America is a police state now, in the face of “the arrests and deportations now shredding the civic fabric of communities across the country,” and troops hunt humans in the street like animals. Linda Greenhouse has to steel herself to read the news, as America descends into an utterly unspeakable crisis of terror and horror and ruin and and and hold on a minute, Linda needs another pill. The people being deported “stand outside the web of connection that defines human society,” as we watch terrifying spectacles like “the military invasion of the city’s MacArthur Park the other day, when soldiers and federal agents on horseback and in armored vehicles swept in for no obvious purpose other than to sow terror.”

Meanwhile, here’s a recent story from a news site in a border city:

Former President Barack Obama formally removed 3 million noncitizens from the U.S. over two terms – more than any other president in American history, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.

In comparison, President George Bush removed about 870,000 people; Bill Clinton, about 2 million; and Donald Trump about 1.2 million people during his first term.

The DHS defines a removal as a formal court order expelling a person from inside the U.S. Obama does not hold the record for returns, a separate statistic addressing individuals turned away at the border prior to entering the U.S….

When combining removals and returns, Clinton expelled about 12.3 million people, the most of any U.S. president overall.

Weirdly, the Clinton administration and the Obama administration didn’t turn America into a police state, plunging Linda Greenhouse into a state of terror as the web of connection that defines human society snapped and human beings were hunted like animals in the street. But now she’s in absolute agony, believe me. The news about Trump administration policy is Linda Greenhouse’s emotional state. Here’s her op-ed, again:

I was taking an early-morning walk in my neighborhood when a black SUV with tinted windows slowed to a stop a half block ahead. I considered: If this is ICE coming to take someone, should I intervene? Start filming? Make sure the victims know their rights? Or just keep walking, secure in the knowledge that no one was coming for me? The car turned out to be an airport limo picking up a passenger, and I was left to ponder how bizarre it was to feel obliged to run through such a mental triage on a summer morning on an American city street.

Every time she sees a limousine in her neighborhood, she flies into an absolute state of panic thinking the Gestapo is here to take someone to the camps. This is a real paragraph that was actually published.

So whatever the inputs are — the neighbor is going to the airport — the response is, on a scale of one to ten, somewhere up around eleven. We don’t have a crisis in policy. We have an ongoing and incredibly obnoxious crisis in hysterical overreaction.

The valorization of Cluster B performativity turns the public sphere into a forum for status-signaling panic, emotional trigger emotional trigger emotional trigger emotional trigger emotional trigger!!!!!!!!!! In today’s news, everything is far more horrible than it has ever been, and the people who perform their emotional state for you as a result are very high-status. You are not in terror, so you are not good. You are low-status and untriggered. Gilded Age neurasthenia, part two: A nervous disposition is a sign of high social class.

A long cultural shift toward this state of constant emotionally triggered performance accelerated considerably during the pandemic, when you murdered everyone by not wearing your mask and everyone who didn’t get the vaccine died, including me. At City Journal, John Tierney called the sustained culture of panic “the crisis crisis,” and he drew this helpful conclusion:

Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow “the science” to know what they’re talking about.

Speaking of which, during the DEVASTATING AND UNPRECEDENTED LAYOFFS at the State Department last week, the employees who lost their jobs sobbed in public and held each other for the many cameras that gathered in front of the building. Sample images of the same employees, a few seconds apart:

Overcome with emotion, they spontaneously had a group hug in the middle of the street.

In matching t-shirts:

They spontaneously had a planned display of emotion, foregrounding a prepared and shared shaming slogan. “Science for diplomacy. Diplomacy for science.” You can’t reduce the number of government employees, that’s an attack on SCIENCE! Maybe you should take a moment and think about how that feels.

Everything that happened last week was an unprecedented crisis. Also, everything that’s happening this week is an unprecedented crisis. Also, everything that’s going to happen next week is going to be an unprecedented crisis.

At the current rate of escalation, this should result in the last scene of Marat-Sade in about two years, at which point no one will pay any of it the slightest attention.