The Protests: Shooting Ourselves in the Foot
The anti-I.C.E. protests, cultural grifts, and the reinforcement of MAGA ideology on a suffering people
Today I sat reading a commentary on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, absorbed in a chapter that examined how a prolific philosopher became engulfed in Nazism and nationalism. I then received a notification regarding the protests and riots in California that played me a video of protesters waving above all things a Palestinian flag! The protesters were chanting to “globalize the intifada from Mexico to Gaza!!!” Here it is…
One is obviously left wondering… how the hell did we get here?
On Immigration
Though many on the left, as well as myself, want a secure border and find it a common sense notion that the United States should be allowed to choose who enters its borders, there is an aroma of fascism watching the ICE raids through Los Angeles and the rest of California. One is left pondering on how MAGA Republicans always manage to occupy both the realm of moral objectivism and also postmodern moral relativism. They are often quick to speak of universal, God-bestowed natural law (many times quoting Thomas Aquinas) regarding sexuality, capital punishment, and “polite society” standards. However, when it comes to families who are in the US illegally and their deportation, ethics is rarely entering the conversation.1 Regarding the protests in California, it is not bizarre to ask, is this the most ethical way of securing a border and helping the country.
In reality, migrants come to the states for a better life, are rarely involved in crime compared to the average US citizen (this is a no-brainer as it is the only way to protect themselves from being caught and deported), and contribute significantly to the United States’ economy while receiving very little in economic returns (as they do not qualify, obviously).
Balancing this observation is the argument that yes, migrants should enter the country legally and there must be legal consequences for breaking the law, especially if one comes illegally and commits a crime. It is valuable to have a team set to handle and enforce immigration and customs. Despite the right-wing lie that the United States or any modern nation in Europe has ‘open borders’, there is a moment of acknowledgment that must be had where one notices that unvetted immigration can have a detrimental effect on one’s precious nation.
In short, I am left dumbfounded how MAGA consistently embodies the neurotic insanity of every cliche movie villain. Some how, as if willingly, choosing to appear as ‘the bad guy’: far too trigger happy, devoid of compassion, and speaking in fascist lingo of ‘saving the country’, handling the ‘deplorable people’, and ‘preserving law and order.’
On the Protests
However, despite all the support I have for those peacefully protesting the unethical ICE raids, I cannot continue my day without thinking of this video: clueless, shameless, and more deranged than any of the cops shooting at reporters with beanbag shotguns. This video caused me to reflect on my experience at the George Floyd protests of which I participated in. I attended three protests here in the DFW region and one in my hometown of Portland, Texas. I was passionate about police reform, shaken by the George Floyd video, and troubled by the moral lunacy on the right regarding the incident. I still stand by these motivations. However, while marching in Dallas, an accompanying chant soon over took our “No Justice No Peace” chant. Like fingernails on a chalkboard, our march was soon chanting “Black Trans People are People Too!” How the hell did this chant overtake our current one you might ask? I have not the damnest idea other than the depressing realization that those marching were more concerned with their social capital than justice for George Floyd. With no pause of introspection, we marched on; I had never thought to leave the march or ask someone why we stopped marching on police reform, I merely walked confused.
I feel safe in assuming that there are some in California wondering what the hell a Palestinian flag is doing at the pro-Latin/anti-ICE march. I want you to know, I understand your confusion, and as someone on the left who is invested in social issues, you might be wondering if there is any hope regarding our future legitimacy. This post is not to say that one should not be compassionate about the plight of Palestinian civilians or concerned with the bigoted views regarding LGBT folk in our state. However, simply put, the optics of this moral derangement and lack of vision delegitimizes all the efforts for all these movements. The progressive movement, which the MAGA Republicans always conflate with the liberal movement, continues to alienate and ostracize itself from the larger body of concerned people. Might it just be possible to balance a rich feeling of compassion for Latino folks in the United States and a disgusted feeling of repugnancy for Hamas tyranny? Can one have a passion for police reform and racial justice while also having qualms regarding some of the demands made by the LGBT movement? For those that do hold these balanced positions, they will find no place in the marches in California or any other protest soon to be hijacked by progressive grifters.
The Grift…
Those chanting about Gaza at the ICE protests neither care about immigration, nor Gaza. They merely hungrily crave your social affirmations of them being good people. Indistinguishable from their MAGA counterparts besides their green hair and septum piercings, these people whip out their phones not to record police brutality, but to record themselves, excited to upload their social justice to social media where they can soon marinate in righteous victory. Like termites in wood, they find a healthy a object, an object strong with force and capable of true social reform, only to infest it with their own personal ideology and agenda. Bold of them to assume that all the people marching share the same social concern for all social issues. Relevant to point out, I always charge MAGA Republicans with echoing the same boring and outdated talking points, stuck in a masochistic echo chamber bent on their own dissolve. Meanwhile to not align completely with these social grifters is to find ourselves dejected from any efforts to improve social wellbeing. We are left to wallow in our defeat to Donald Trump in 2024 with no hope of any relevancy in the the 2026 midterms. The quagmire of social individualism and look-at-me ideologies appears to be eroding the social-ethical framework that previous protests were so established on. Martin Luther King Jr. certainly wrote about his qualms with American capitalism, but these musings seldom found themselves in the marches he lead. One smart comment on the video I showed was that progressives cannot view struggles in isolation, but bear the oppressor/oppressed postmodern lens of all struggles. This lens means the impoverished Muslim man holding a puddle that used to be their child has much in common with the Catholic Cuban mother of 3 who now has to find an immigration lawyer. The middle-class black man who voted Republican in 2004 being questioned unreasonably long by police, the transgender 16-year-old facing backlash from their religious organization, the Palestinian who just had their home hit by a JDAM, and the deported 7-year-old Mexican boy who was brought here when he was a baby by his mother are all living vastly different lives with vastly different worldviews. The unprogressive oppressor/oppressed lens destroys the individuality of these folks and delegitimizes all their struggles to a slogan. But this is the nature of the grift.
Closing (or Opening)
As I watch the video of the Palestinian chants hijacking the anti-ICE protest, I cannot help but watch the man in the blue shirt subtly shake his head and bear a look of confusion.
I do not think he thought this was going to be the direction of his passionate protests that day, but there he is, stuck like I was in the streets of Dallas where we ended marching on trans rights instead of police reform.
(watch the video again to see his continued reaction)
So what can you do? Must be become dogs of MAGAism and fight back against the illiberal left? Not one bit. There are sane, morally conscious individuals left of center that can be leaned into. You can be contrarian to insanity and sympathetic to normalcy. You can speak up against Hamas, stupid progressive talking points, and MAGA ideology all in the same breath without fear of contradiction. The more you do so, the more sustainable common-sense conversations become. I recently read Christopher Hitchens’ book Letters to a Young Contrarian which gave me a tough pill to swallow.
Hitchens notes that there is no convenient time for truth. At the hight of MAGA idiocy, we are faced with Jake Tapper’s all too real book, Original Sin. When Jews need the social capital support to repel anti-semitism and fight Hamas, we are given a video of IDF soldiers gang raping a POW. Hitchens writes, “The truth cannot lie, but if it could, it would lie somewhere in between.” He later remarks that after watching a Civil War reenactment, those who wore grey were conditioned to think in terms of black and white.2 We are not called to identity politics, but to democracy, regardless of when we need to tell the truth. I argue there is no such thing as ‘inconvenient’ truths, only inconvenient times.
Do not fall victim to the same lazy meanderings of the MAGA crowd: stand by your values when you are sure of them, but question them regularly. Change your mind when the facts change. Idiocy in your movement does not help you, but slows you down. You really are as strong as your weakest link but those links can be strengthened. Correct people who hijack your presence with the term ‘we’.
Despite my support against the current ICE raids, my disdain for the Trump administration, and my compassion for those being deported unethically, I could not allow this writing to go on unwritten. It might be inconvenient, but that was never my aim.
My email, comment section, and in person presence is open to your criticism.
One only has to ask a MAGA Republican about Russia’s ethics, Trump’s sexual ethics, or Musk’s family life to watch normative ethical beliefs vanish into the dangerous question of “who am I to judge???”
Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian, (Basic Books, 2001), 21.
Don’t understand why Americans are supporting these riots. These people are probably “WFH” as they riot. Maybe they should read the room and realize that businesses only care about work/life balance until it starts eating up profits. Next they’ll be rioting because they got fired for being unproductive.