A surreal week

What are we doing here?

Hi readers,

Apologies for the brief lapse in posts. After hosting my first Thanksgiving in Brooklyn, I spent a very heavy week helping my partner move his life in New York back to Brasil. It’s not an easy move for either of us, and it’s happening at least in small part because of this country’s hard turn towards fascism and the Trump administration’s nauseating war on immigrants.

I’m including this rare bit about my personal life here only to underscore how surreal it feels, while having to watch the person I love pack up his home in my neighborhood after ten years here, to read stories like this one in the Washington Post today about White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt having fully betrayed her own Brasilian immigrant relative to keep up appearances for the regime. I keep thinking that somewhere, deep down, at least the women in this administration must have a tiny bit of humanity clanking around in there that we can appeal to as the situation gets more dire, and then Karoline throws her own nephew’s mother under the bus.

In case you missed it, ICE detained Bruna Ferreira, the 33-year-old mother of Leavitt’s nephew/godson who’s spent most of her life in the U.S., in Massachusetts a few weeks ago. Leavitt claimed that she was estranged from Ferreira and supported the arrest, releasing a statement that called Ferreira a “criminal” with a previous arrest for “battery.” But Ferreira’s lawyer says the White House is lying about her battery charge, and in a new video interview from an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, Ferreira said Leavitt was like a “little sister” to her and painted a very different picture of their relationship than Leavitt described.

“I asked Karoline to be godmother over my only sister. I made a mistake there, in trusting,” Ferreira said. “Why they’re creating this narrative is beyond my wildest imagination.”

Ferreira says she signed off on her son’s trip to the White House Easter egg hunt this spring and “moved mountains” to get him to Karoline’s wedding earlier this year. She was apparently hanging out with Karoline’s parents just a couple weeks before her arrest.

Of course, we know why the White House is creating this narrative: because Karoline can’t be the mouthpiece for Trump’s inhumane immigration policy while showing even an ounce of human emotion toward an immigrant in her own family. No cracks in the matrix.

This level of callousness is especially helpful, I reckon, when you’re being asked about Pete Hegseth openly doing war crimes on civilians in the Caribbean. Hegseth ordered the military to kill everyone aboard a boat that was suspected (suspected!) of carrying drugs. The boat, it turns out, was not even headed towards the U.S.—it was moving south to Suriname. But nevermind all that; Pete was out for blood that day. He wanted to blow up some Latino dudes in the sea. So he ordered a lethal strike on the boat. And after destroying the boat, a couple of men who survived were struggling for their lives on pieces of smoldering wreckage in the sea, and we (the United States) went back and murdered those flailing men, too.

All of this is flagrantly illegal, by national and international standards. So much so that Congress demanded to investigate and see video of the attack, which made one person nearly vomit, per the Atlantic:

Republicans, meanwhile, have been trotting out Senator Tom Cotton to defend our “double-tap” strike on a boat that may or may not have been carrying drugs to an entirely different country, because Cotton has never witnessed a murder of brown people that he couldn’t love.

I do not believe the administration is winning hearts and minds on this one; the war crime is simply too obvious. So obvious that Cotton slipped and called Trump “President Bush” while talking about it on Sunday shows today, Hegseth is facing mounting, bipartisan scrutiny, and Leavitt herself is struggling to find the right spin to defend the strikes. Lately, she appears to be trying to protect Hegseth by blaming the order for the second strike on a lower admiral.

But if we zoom out a little, the details of this particular strike don’t matter. ICE is hiring racist thugs who are barely literate and can’t pass an open-book test to harass men without any criminal history while they’re literally repairing roofs damaged by hurricanes in New Orleans. Trump said of Somali immigrants, generally, at a cabinet meeting this week, “We don’t want ’em in our country.” Spouses of U.S. citizens are showing up at their green card interviews and leaving in handcuffs. We’re murdering random men in the Caribbean for being alleged “narco-terrorists,” while the president pardons an actual cocaine kingpin who ruled Honduras.

The situation is clear: We are living under an explicitly neo-Nazi administration. Our current government, including many “democratically” elected members of the House and Senate, is full of bloodthirsty psychopaths who want to purge the United States of non-white people. They don’t mind doing so violently; some of them even enjoy it. And there is no red line for them in terms of authoritarian overreach, or we would have already crossed it.

I’m going to pivot to midterms coverage after this post, including detailing how the administration is trying to fuck next year’s elections and how we can fight it. But I think the first step is being able to acknowledge the extent of what’s happening.