Trying to oversaturate us with nonstop chaos

My Sunday movie was Nowhere Special. It was of interest to me because it shows a man taking care of a child. John is a single man, caregiver of his son Michael, about three years old. John clearly loves his son and does a pretty good job of caring for him and giving him a happy life. But John has only a few months to live. He is working with an adoption agency and he and the case worker interview prospective parents. None of them seem quite right, several are definitely wrong. And John agonizes over the decision as he recognizes he is running out of time. John must also figure out how to prepare Michael. The case worker proposes a memory box, an idea he resists. Why can’t Michael just seamlessly fit into a new family? Yeah, there is that sad ending. However, watching John care for his son was a joy. The IMDb trivia page says before filming started James Norton, who played John, often visited the bedroom of Daniel Lamont, who played Michael, and the two played with Daniel’s toys. That established a bond that came through in the acting. IMDb also says the movie is based on a true story, though the real father and son remain anonymous. The story takes place in Northern Ireland. I’m intrigued that it was a co-production with Romania and Italy and much of the crew was from those countries. Sen. Chris Murphy tweeted a thread, starting with:

Look, Trump is trying to oversaturate us with nonstop chaos so we can’t react meaningfully to any one thing.

Murphy then detailed one of those things, the freeze on foreign aid. He details how dumb and deadly that will be. Over a few days I accumulated many browser tabs, several of them related to deportation. In a pundit roundup for Daily Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Keith Boykin that was also a link to an article in the New Republic.

About 75% of immigrant farm workers did not show up for work this week in Bakersfield, California, as the threat of Trump’s immigration raids looms. Trump’s immigration threats are already wrecking the food industry. Immigrant farm workers are too scared to show up for work.

In the comments of another roundup, this one by Chitown Kev of Kos, exlrrp posted a meme with the words, “Make America Great Again Patriots Wanted. Civic Duty Volunteers needed to pick crops.” Also in the comments is a cartoon by Chris Britt showing a church with the nasty guy in the front row and the rest filled with sleepy national media. Coming down the aisle is Bishop Mariann Budde saying, “Let me show you how it’s done.” In the main body of the roundup Kev quoted Heather Cox Richardson of her “Letters From an American” Substack on the firing of 15 Inspectors General from federal government departments. I’ll summarize: It’s one of the items in Project 2025. Florida Patriot of the Kos community wrote that things could get bad really quickly, as in over a month. The reason is that immigrants are afraid to show up for work. We’ll notice it first in food, as immigrants do a lot of the harvesting. And the harvest has a definite time limit – don’t harvest the crop and it rots. Immigrants also clean offices and hotels and wash restaurant dishes. And a lot of other things in our economy.

Now these folks are terrified, and for good reason. No city or state is safe. The raids are random, here, there, potentially anywhere. The risk is real. Not just for the undocumented, but for anyone who looks Hispanic and who works these dirty essential jobs. America may be about to discover just how essential these workers are to the very fabric of our economy. Imagine what happens if supply chains grind to a halt. Grocery store shelves empty out. Panic buying ensues. Panic selling tears through the stock market.

Kos of Kos wrote that Nebraska went heavily for the nasty guy and is more dependent on immigrant labor than most other states. It also has a severe labor shortage. The nasty guy’s deportation could ruin the economy in a state that strongly supports him. Also, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen will support deportation efforts while others doubt the deportation threats can actually be carried out. Back before Musk bought Twitter and turned it into the far right hellhole of X I used to regularly read Leah McElrath and include her wisdom in my writing. I stopped when Musk no longer let non members (and I refused to be a member) look at more than individual posts. McElrath has now shifted to Bluesky and I can read her wisdom again. I’ve got a bunch of her posts in tabs waiting for a day I can include them. In a thread she wrote:

People on TikTok are reporting ICE raids happening in small cities in various states. To get past algorithmic censorship, they’re writing down the information on paper and holding up and shuffling through the handwritten signs as they talk about pretend subjects like shopping, food, and animals. ... To be clear, I don’t know if these reports of ICE raids are correct. ICE raids happen, they happened before Trump, and it’s plausible they’re happening now. IF the reports are correct, the scale is unknown. My impression is these youths are presenting word-of-mouth information they believe is true.

Morgan Stephens of Kos reported that Attorneys General in Democratic states are suing to stop the nasty guy’s threat to prosecute state and local officials who don’t help with deportation. The AGs say Constitutional limits on federal authority and Supreme Court rulings say the federal government cannot commandeer state resources to enforce federal laws. Kos community member howabout me noticed something about the first few days of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. They were all in blue states. Well, one was in Salt Lake City, whose recent senator was Mitt Romney, someone the nasty guy doesn’t like. So why hasn’t ICE done big raids red states? They’re likely to find a lot more immigrants in places like Tampa, Dallas, and meatpacking plants in Montana. Alix Breeden of Kos reported the numbers of people being deported isn’t meeting the targets the nasty guy wants. Also, one raid included Dr. Phil McGraw – talk show host Dr. Phil – with cameras rolling. That means the raids so far are for PR purposes, for the nasty guy to boast – and to make immigrants feel afraid. Another post by McElrath quoting, I think, Shannon Heffernan who mentioned the Dr. Phil incident:

“How do we share…information…without…becoming part of spectacle” is an important question for journalists, but I’d adjust it to “without becoming a propaganda service for Trump and heightening racism.” Trump creates these spectacles because his supporters get off on and are emboldened by them. For example, the deportation rate under Trump during his first week in office (≈1k people) was in the range of the averages during the Obama and Biden admins. The difference is Trump is highlighting the actions through news media so it makes him look “tougher” on immigration to his supporters.

Breeden also noted that there was a raid on Native American workers. Also that many deported are being treated in a demoralizing manner. That last part is reported by Brazilian officials complaining about “blatant disrespect.” Alex Samuels of Kos reported on something that was reported in wider news. Colombia did not allow two US military planes with deportees to land. Colombia President Gustavo Petro objected to migrants being treated as criminals and wanted the deportees returned in civilian planes. The nasty guy threatened tariffs. Petro threatened retaliatory tariffs, then backed down. Of course, the nasty guy bragged of his dominance. In a second post Samuels said it wasn’t that simple. Petro got a significant concession – Colombia supplied its own air force jets to pick up the deportees. They could travel in dignity, without handcuffs. Lalo Alcaraz posted a cartoon on Kos showing a native person pointing to an ICE agent and saying, “Show me your papers!” At some time the nasty guy said he could tell a criminal immigrant “by the look.” Pedro Molina posted a cartoon on Kos showing on one side a person picking apples labeled “Criminal” and on the other side one person stomping on another and labeled “Hero.” Kos of Kos looked at the daily arrest numbers that ICE is bragging about. The average over four days is 600 a day. That’s lower than Biden’s average of 744 a day. If the nasty guy kept to that average over his four years in the Oval Office he’ll manage to deport less than one million of the 11 million he says need deporting. Which means so far the raids are mostly PR, to be able to brag to his base. If he really wanted to get those number up – 1,200 to 1,500 a day being the goal – he’d have to increase raids in red states. And that would decimate the economies of his base and raise food prices across the country. In the comments of a third pundit roundup exlrrp posted a meme that looks like the cover of a cookbook with the title: “How to cook like the people you just deported, authentic ethnic flavors for bigots who don’t deserve them.”