(Thread) The history bhind those bald Latino @CBP set pieces @realDonaldTrump's press conference yesterday is the same history that turned a lot of our families into extensions of the Homeland Security state. It started w "Bush's Brain," Karl Rove in the early 2000s.
I predicted the ascent of precisely the hard right wing politic those bald @cbp set pieces embody in this piece documenting how Rove envisioned using security agencies (DHS, CBP, ICE, police, etc) as entities of political acculturation here: bit.ly/2QkVI4l
For Rove, the security agencies were as much about fundamentally altering and aligning Latino culture & families as they were about policing poor people.Rove studied Pres Willaim McKinley’s success in assimilating the German, Irish, Polish and other immigrant groups in the late
19th century.“Rove understood that “He [McKinley] basically made it comfortable for urban ethnic working people to identify with the Republican Party.” McKinley did this with the "Irish problem" of the late 19th century, which is where we get the "natural" propensity of some to
become the "Irish cop" of fact & fiction. Rove, who wrote about these dynamics in his master's thesis seized the opportunity to respond to what elite bipartisan consensus considered a "problem" of the 21rst century: the massive young population that doesn't nicely fit neatly
into the black- white binary that still dominates the US imagination of itself. Like its predecessors,the militant white supremacy taking hold in many Latino families includes the helping hand of a State in fear of barbarians. Other institutions—evangelical churches, the military
and other entities—are also doing their part, in what is a cookie cutter we also see at work in Brazil, Guatemala & other countries. I first encountered this in the 80s, when evangelicals hailed the sudden & exponential rise of evangelicalism in El Salvador, Guatemala & other
countries following Holy Spirit's workings at a meeting in Costa Rica between leading Evangelical leaders & folks who were more than likely CIA spooks. It later became pretty obvious how the elite, bipartisan consensus decided to put its gaze on Latinos.
Elite consensus about Latinos embraced the weaponized view of Latinos put out by former Carter National Security Council strategist Samuel, who saw them as 'the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity.'
Huntington's created a blueprint for civilizational warfare against or assimilation of Latinos, his book Who Are We?. Lots of Latino intellectuals made Huntington out to be some backwoods racist, when he was the padrino of both the national securitization of immigration & the
militarization of Latino families we're saw Trump talking about with his @Cbp set pieces yesterday. I documented these dynamics in numerous pieces written in the early 2000s like this one. bit.ly/2F8lSqa
Better than most, Huntington understood how to engineer society through an ongoing psychological operation or, as his Carter Admin National Security Council memos put it, a “psy-op.” Manufacturing various types of fear – including racial fear – is a standard psy-op that affects
multiple audiences in multiple ways. Like Rove, Huntington saw the need to try and assimilate Latinos by using the military and other militarist institutions as builders of nations and national character and culture. Talking about Latino immigrants, who he saw as a civilizational
threat like that posited in his Clash of Cvilizations book, Huntington said this about the need to bring Latinos into the umbrella of whiteness:
“Without a major war requiring substantial mobilization and lasting years… contemporary immigrants will have neither the opportunity nor the need to affirm their identity with and their loyalty to America as earlier immigrants have done.”
The Dept of Defense picked up on this opportunity to fill the growing gap in enlistment during the Bush Admin, whose Pentagon spent 100s of millions of dollars to target young Latinos for military recruitment. I documented these developments here bit.ly/2CPVoHq
So, those bald buffoons up there on stage with @realDonaldTrump yesterday have a history behind them. Rather than buy into the simplistic"Latinos just wanna be white" narratives put out by even some liberals, probably a better idea to read, study & learn how the national security
state is giving Latinos, especially poor Latinos this choice: either literally join & work for the state or become the enemy of the state. Time to become the barbarians they fear.
