When talking about border security, or immigration enforcement, or the horrible unimaginable in a democracy things ICE is doing at the direction of Stephen Miller & Sweaty Dozevelt (credit: Jimmy Kimmel) we must remember that all of this…all of it… is based on racist lies. When The Orange Menace first took office in 2016 he set up a team to investigate voter fraud b/c his ego was hurt by the fact that his opponent got more votes than he did (which didn’t stop him from claiming he’d won in a landslide. Throughout the campaign & beyond & still to this day he claims that voter fraud is a real thing that affects our elections. That investigation was headed by Republican hardliner on immigration, Kris Kobach, who immediately ran into trouble when his illegal request for personal identification of voters was resisted by 44 states who refused this insane (or was it just stupidity?) road-to-totalitarianism request. Less than a year later, without even issuing a report showing its findings (because, like other investigations since, it found no credible evidence of voter fraud), it was disbanded amidst public backlash & multiple lawsuits the Adminstration knew it could not win. A decade later it’s hard to find mentions of this failed attempt to prove a lie, suppress voting, & stroke the ego of the Tired Tyrant, but it happened. More recently now Attorney General of Kansas Kris Kobach’s (KKK…hmmm) attempts to disenfranchise his constituents cost his state $1.9M in a lawsuit over his unconstitutional voter suppression poll tax.

So, back to 2017 — his own people investigated his claims, likely spent millions on the effort, found nothing, yet all these years later those fraudulent claims remain an obsession for The Orange Shitgibbon. The only difference now is that congressional Republicans parrot The Big Lie as truth, even many who initially spoke the actual truth, in a concerted effort to gaslight MAGA diehards into accepting the lie. What I believe is that these low-information cultists, incapable of critical thought & so desperate for a *strong father figure to protect them from the scary “others,” represent the 27% of voters who can’t afford gas or groceries or medications yet still support the sociopathic grifter criminal.

*yes, I realize TACO Don is not actually a strong father figure, but that is how MAGA sees him & they will always love him because he has made it possible to use with impunity the slurs of their grandparents, slurs which had been largely drummed out of society over the past several decades.

Back to the racist part, remember those “caravans” of immigrants set to invade through our “porous southern border” that the Lazy Liar promised to protect with a big beautiful border wall that Mexico would pay for, apparently forgetting that (a) Mexico is a sovereign state and (b) ladders had already been invented. That was the harbinger of what is happening now: thousands upon thousands of brown people who have committed no crimes being rounded up by ICE, separated from their families in squalid conditions in some far off makeshift prison or possibly even deported to countries they’ve never been to. Meanwhile the lie that this is somehow making America safer is a proven red herring: immigrant communities in the U.S. have less crime than non-immigrant ones & immigrants are 60% less likely to be encarcerated then U.S. born people. The whole basis for this policy is a false & racist & extension of Tricky Dick Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” employed this time to “other” non-whites & paint their communities as monolithic dangers to white America who must be removed/deported/murdered (aka “justifiable homicide) by snowflake good old boys & Karens (apologies to all the the non-”Karen” Karens out there) who think non-white kids selling lemonade are somehow a threat.

Oh, & if you think that days before the midterm elections the administration won’t announce that ICE will be at every polling place in precincts with large minority populations to suppress voter turnout, then actually follow through with the threat on Election Day by staging for the cameras the violent diappearing of brown people at poling into unmarked vans by masked unidentified thugs to not only prevent them from voting but to further scare voters away…I have a bridge to sell you.

One more thing: Adolph Twitter is now spending taxpayer dollars on self-promoting TV ads. Worse, he’s using money appropriated for homeland security. The same homeland security that puts 5-year olds on trial wihout a parent or guardian or lawyer present, then asks them if they’d like to sign the document they put in front of them — and the reason the cite for not having lawyers for these kids is…you guessed it…not enough money. The Narcissist-In-Chief stole $20 million from DHS to promote himself while DHS claims that its deplorable abomination of a “deportation process” doesn’t have enough money to even give fairness a nod & a wink.

And now back to our regular scheduled program: today’s award-winning live-hosted 480 Minutes show will feature new 🎶 by Adult DVD (Leeds, England, @AdultDVDMenu), The Afghan Whigs (Cincinnati, OH, @TheAfghanWhigs), Arctic Lights (Cork, Ireland), Fat Dog (London, England, @FatDogFatDogFatDog_), Gurriers (Dublin, Ireland, @GurriersBand), Outer Shapes (Brooklyn, NY, @OuterShapes), & Vanishing Twin (London, England, @VanishingTwinMusic).

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480 Minutes / Episode 988

“480 Minutes” - ICE = Gestapo

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[the] caseworker