The key to understanding the ability of people like Jeff Sessions, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Donald Trump, Ann Coulter, Kirjsten Nielsen. their ICE ICE agents to do evil thing to powerless, endangered children and their parents and guardians is to understand that for them it's all a matter of what's theirs and what isn't theirs. What is theirs or what they can get to be theirs matters to them, what isn't theirs doesn't fall within their realm of moral concern. That is if the term "moral" really belongs anywhere in such a mindset because when all you care about are your things, and in such a mindset people and animals are things too, even love can turn into an occasion for evil, a tool of evil.
That indifference to people outside of the narrow circle of their concern is typical of those who spend their lives avariciously accumulating wealth at the expense of other people, there is absolutely no shock that so many of them would be found in the party of oligarchs and plutocrats.
We're supposed to be impressed and our support swayed with the assertion that these functionaries of American fascism feel for the members of their families, the emphasis being on the possessive adjective, "their". But what might be a normal, natural desire for ones loved ones to be out of danger, to not be in pain, to be happy, when it becomes a frame of thinking that views people outside of that realm of concern as either potential commodities to be used or deserving no concern and may be disposed of as desired, "the family" a circle of friends and acquaintances and business partners turns into a unit of evil. While the selfish person is the basic unit of American fascism (and, really all evil considered politically and economically) "the family" when it is the family of the person practicing that way of thinking is a collective of evil into which children are born, are reared in that way of thinking and from which they either break or they become the propagation of that kind of evil in the future. Most, maybe all families of wealth and those who aspire to it, seriously, have something of traditional organized crime within them.
In the case of some of the racists in the aspiring fascist regime of Donald Trump those outside of the group of concern to them and their supporters, some ill-defined group of white people, use can be made of those outsiders to prey on the racism of so many white people. The American media, other than the briefest of periods in the late 1960s and early 1970s,* has explicitly fed that racism, though at times presenting it as regional resentment and envy. The few and brief positive appearances of people of color, Black People, Latinos, People belonging to Indigenous nationalities, Asians in the media have been more than swamped by the racism flowing out of TVs and movie screens, hate-talk radio and to some extent even pop music. The promotion of evil characters of color has been so pervasive in the commercial media that it was the staple of what were supposed to be some kind of step forward, in blackspoitation movies**, in gangsta crap, and other such self-consuming mentalities promoted to Black People. I would certainly include boxing and football, in which mostly people of color do violence to each other for the entertainment of largely white audiences for the enrichment of mostly white owners. Those are our gladiatorial games in this re-run of the decadence of old Rome.
That the old, money-focused Republican Party went for the evil of Nixon's strategy of harnessing the racist vote is, as well a part of their indifference to people. Nixon was certainly a racist but that wasn't his primary focus, he saw opportunity into turning what would never be his, in his case the votes of Black People, into an opportunity to harvest the votes of racists. But the power that the oligarchs sought to harness and exploit has come to dominate Republican politics as they have found that between the fact their policies are unpopular and they have a propensity to cause economic collapses, they have become dependent on racism and anti-Latino hatred. In the form of the media-product Trump, it defeated the old-line Republicans decisively and got put into the presidency through the mechanisms that the slave-owner "founders" put into place for just that purpose.
In looking at the cold, cruel, upper-class model face of Kirjsten Nielsen I was certain she was chosen for that position to be the pretty face on some of our ugliest, most evil policies. It's plain from what she's said and more so what she's done that behind the blonde magazine cover-girl facade, she is as ugly as Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions. That's the kind of thinking these people have, cover up the ugly things they do with images and people will focus on the images while they get on with doing evil. It's the same reason that they put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court to further the cause of white supremacy, the same reason there is a full-employment policy in the American media for the few black faces that they can get to spout Republican-fascism. I'm certain for all of those willing to do that it comes down to the same thing, "what's in it for me", "what's in it for the small circle of those I care about".
It is all about the othering of others, turning other people into things we don't need to care about - other people and their pets, don't forget such people care more about their pets than they do "other" children. Othering is the basis on which people who can do the kind of evil we're seeing done to these children and their parents. It's the kind of thinking that allows Nielsen and the FOX fascists and the Trump-Nazis to pretend that these children aren't the children of the parents they cry for when they are stolen by the American government and put into concentration camps. They don't feel that they even owe it to them to tell that truth about them.
* If in the early 1970s anyone would predict that the collective "American mind" fed on a diet of TV, movies and radio on ACLU, "civil libertarian" free speech would throw up the collection of increasingly hideous and fascistic Republican governments, interspersed with weakened, sometimes voluntarily weakened center-right Democrats would probably have been discounted as an idiot. From Maine or not. I can tell you one person I know who predicted it would happen in pretty much the way it has, a carpenter and artist I know from Maine who was making exactly that prediction as he witnessed what pop culture, TV and the movies was presenting starting just about the time George Lucas and Steve Spielberg were getting going. From the Starwars movies on he pointed out how the popular films were going that way, as were the TV shows that sentimentalized the military and increasingly presented scary people of color. When Garbage Pail Kids cards were a fad he pointed out that it was a means of setting up the kinds of exclusionary objectification of people and devaluing them on the basis of class and fashion. I'd like to know how many of the idiot, starry-eyed civil libertarians who were claiming that all was needed was more "more speech" got their predictions of the future right. I don't know of any of that period who came close.
Though I don't know of a single champion of the ACLU-"civil liberties" industry who thought to care more about the fact that they were enabling racists and fascists and, yes, Nazis who would hurt other people as long as their careers were enhanced and I'm sure most of them, especially those actually in the employ or patronage of the media did all right for themselves and their families.
** I'm sure someone will raise the supposed satirical intent of many of those movies but if there is one thing I've learned about "satire" it is that for every person who will get that point, there are many more who will not get that point and take it seriously. Satire was, as Dorothy Parker pointed out, one of the hardest of comic forms to pull off, she scoffed at the alleged masters of it in her time, pointing out they were merely topical gag men. Anyone who has something to say would be a lot safer in just coming out and saying it.
Note: The abysmal record of Barack Obama on the same issues needs to be addressed, too. I think Obama shares a lot more of the mindset I wrote about than his supporters and those who romantically look at his time in office would care to admit. I think it is generally typical of people in the prep to Ivy league to well paid professions track, whether they be nominally conservative or what gets called liberal, whether Democrats or Republicans, with some exceptions. But not as many exceptions as people pretend.
The role that Obama played in making me see that much of American liberalism was hardly liberal can't be overemphasized. Nor can his role in making me realize that the prep-> Ivy and may as well be Ivy system product has way, way too much of a role in ruling the United States. Though such people can come from anywhere, you will find more of the ones with power come from that system of ruling class formation.
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