What Dems should do instead of chase incels.

In 2014, Jeb(!) Bush called illegal immigration “an act of love,” rather than a crime.

“I’m going to say this and it’s going to be on tape, and so be it,” he said during a 25th anniversary celebration of his father’s presidency at the George H.W. Bush Library and Museum in Texas. He described your typical illegal border crosser as “a dad who was worried their children didn’t have food on the table.”

“Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony,” he added. “It’s an act of love, an act of commitment to your family. I honestly think that is a different kind of crime.”

“We need to get beyond the harsh rhetoric to a better place,” Bush said.

Spoiler alert! President Trump just deployed the national guard to quell peaceful protests against ICE kidnapping immigrants in Los Angeles.

***

In other words, Republicans took only a decade to catapult the Overton Window on immigration into another galaxy. We are literally fucking disappearing people into a foreign gulag and using immigration status to throw people in jail for political speech. Gulag. Political prisoners. Stalin is like 🥹 .

Only three election cycles ago many Republicans promoted shitty but mostly sane immigration policy. Mostly for venal business reasons—cheap labor—but still. DHS Secretaries weren’t posing in front of jail cells stuffed with men who look like Holocaust prisoners. We weren’t deporting US legal residents and ignoring judge’s orders by feigning “administrative errors” (it happened a second time after Garcia). ICE weren’t brazenly copying the Gestapo—in what world are you allowed to smash someone’s car window, a daily occurrence it seems, and violently yank them out of the vehicle while their children scream?

In theory, then, a functional opposition party could move the Overton Window in the other direction in a relatively short time—shorter than three election cycles, in fact, because of how much social media has sped up the news cycle. And also profit politically.

Instead Democrats want to make a liberal Joe Rogan (literally impossible, because guess what? A genuine left version of Rogan would be nonstop talking about the genocide in Gaza. Anyone who didn’t would be deemed a fraud and a tool and Rogan’s success lays in projecting authenticity). And they’re spending 20 million dollars figuring out how to talk to incels online. That effort will inevitably lead them to conclude that to win among these young men you need a right-ward shift on immigration because understandibly not getting laid makes you hateful.

You see it already with Gavin Newsom, who decided to lean into his “bro-ness” by starting a podcast (doesn’t he … have a state to run? And currently defend from takeover by the federal government?) in which he engages with rightwing figures of the “manosphere” incel world. He’s already frozen Medicaid-enrollment for undocumented immigrants.

But something else is happening. And it gives Democrats a historic opportunity to regain power, not just in the midterms, but in 2028—to jettison any chance of an otherwise pretty much inevitable Vance presidency. This phenomenon is that in incident after incident after incident, communities have banded together to support their immigrant neighbors. Not just support, like “Whatever we signed a petition.” But to scream, film, try to thwart ICE thugs, who have no qualms about manhandling them and seem to show a preference for battering the women. The outrage and disbelief of everyday people is palpable.

In other instances large numbers have banded together in a concerted effort to protest the detention of valued members of the community.

I mean come on. Tom Homan, in his efforts to please nazi Steve Miller is really overplaying his hand here, in a way that’s ripe for backlash. This 18-year-old honors student, who came to the U.S. when he was 5, was shackled and jailed for 6 days before making bond. He’s clearly popular, and his peers and other members of the community responded to his detention with shock, despair and protest. After his release on bond he described harrowing conditions in the facility. Obviously a fluent English speaker, he translated documents for the other men to make sure they didn’t sign something that would facilitate their deportation. Often, this teenager had to break the news to them that the documents informed them they were being deported.

“These aren’t criminals,” he said plaintively at his press conference, looking dazed—he’d slept on metal and hadn’t showered in six days.

There’s “Ms. Carol.” The Chinese national had moved to a small Missouri town 20 years ago. She’d become a fixture in the community, a regular churchgoer who served waffles, and apparently hugs, at a local diner. Almost everyone in the town voted for Trump. Her arrest shocked residents.

“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Ms. Hui from church, told the New York Times. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”

“‘She paused. ‘This is Carol.’”

“She’s exactly the sort of person you’d want to come to the country,” Chuck Earnest, a farmer, told the Times. “I don’t know how this fits into the deportation problem with Trump.”

***

In 2019 I had the unenviable task, for a Nation article, of figuring out what the deal was with voters who voted for Obama, flipped to Trump, and what Democrats should do to get them to back a Democrat in 2020.

In the course of talking to these voters, I met not one, but two Trump supporters whose wives were deported due to Trump’s immigration policies (“federal government, ‘take my wife please!’”) It was the same story. They thought Trump would purge the country of dangerous criminals, not deport the mothers of their children. They didn’t end up voting for Biden. They were very conservative (both were Hispanic, a harbinger of that shift).

But they sure as hell didn’t cast a second vote for Trump. I talked to their wives I literally think they would have killed them if they had. Another woman also couldn’t stomach more Trump, because of all the chaos, but her redline was abortion. She, too, stayed home election day. This is why sleepy Joe Biden won.

Now you see, on a gargantuam scale, voters waking up to the fact that Trump is not saving us from “immigrant rapists” and “gangmembers” and “terrorists” but targeting hardworking members of their communities. You see complete and total violent chaos unimaginable during the first term. And Democrats can’t do …. anything with that?

I honestly can’t think of a stupider strategic escalation than what the administration is currently doing. In order the inflate the number of deportations—Stephen Miller is obsessed with numbers and was apparently livid the numbers aren’t higher—they’ve begun to target work sites, conducting mass arrests. Before they went after individuals, allowing the administration space to pretend they’re apprehending criminals.

Going after work sites totally undercuts Trump’s narrative. And it adversely affects people with actual power—business owners who rely heavily on undocumented immigrants in sectors like construction most-native born people don’t want to, or can’t do.

***

Since his job requires full fealty and constant ass-kissing, Vance has parroted Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric. If Democrats and the liberal media establishment made a modicum of effort to change the narrative on immigration, he’d be cooked. They are not doing this. A local Democrat might weigh in on a particular case. And local news covers the ICE nazi breaking car windows, but it’s rare a case generates national attention. “Ms. Carol” was profiled by the New York Times, I’d guess because that story has an undercurrent of “these dumb yokels voted Trump and now they don’t have Ms. Carol’s waffles.”

Liberals are doing the opposite of taking advantage of this gargantuan political opportunity. In the Biden era, Democrats and liberals ceded the immigration narrative to extremists. If you concede that you have to be “tough” on the border or that mass migration is a massive problem sowing chaos in the country people will elect the fascist no matter how much you cosplay toughness.