The White House wants desperately to craft this ideology that violent brown criminals are “animals.” Administration officials are pushing this so much, they recently released a blog on the official WhiteHouse.gov website titled, “What You Need to Know About the Violent Animals of MS-13.”
There will be people who will point out that Donald Trump’s White House isn’t calling all immigrants animals, just MS-13 gang members.
Fuck those people.
The only reason the White House has issued this finely worded distinction is that it’s never made one before. Trump and his cronies make no distinction between legal immigrants and gang members.
For proof, look no further than former Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was so racist, he was ordered by the court to stop being so racist and he couldn’t. He made no distinction between the “animals” of MS-13 and legal citizens who happened to be brown living in his county.
He was notorious for detaining immigrants with legal paperwork for ungodly amounts of time and was so deplorable that a court threatened him with jail and he still wouldn’t stop. For five years after he was threatened with jail, Arpaio continued to terrorize the community until he was finally locked up.
Trump not only pardoned that man, but during one of his countless rallies, he also claimed that “Arpaio was just doing his job.” In Trump-think, detaining a legal citizen of the United States is just doing one’s job. Treating a person of color to a different set of laws isn’t a crime, it’s just business as usual, and calling brown people “animals” is merely the Trump way.
I would take no issue with Trump’s language if he spoke this way about criminal activity across the board, but we all know that isn’t the case.
Trump gloriously noted during white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Va., that the mob of violent white men wielding tiki torches included “some very fine people” and added that the press has “really treated them unfairly.”
The nation is still reeling from another school shooting, in which a white teen was apprehended in a shooting lasting some 25 minutes and killing 10 people. The stories of white men using assault rifles to take out scores of teens inside school haven’t reached the level of name-calling. I don’t think Trump has ever referred to any of these school shooters as animals.
In truth, Trump hasn’t said much of anything since the latest school shootings. He’s vowed to send his thoughts and prayers. He’s doing his usual song and dance about keeping guns out of the hands of children, but what he hasn’t done, and won’t do, is call those white men charged in the massacres “animals,” because that’s reserved for a special group of men who terrorize a community and happen to be brown.
The White House has literally worked up a list of crimes committed by MS-13 that includes such scare-tactic tidbits like:
In Houston, Texas, two MS-13 members were charged after kidnapping and sexually assaulting one girl and murdering another. The two MS-13 animals laughed, smiled and waved for cameras in court as they faced the charges.
New York communities have suffered tremendously from the abhorrent violence of MS-13. Nearly 40 percent of all murders in Suffolk County, New York, between January 2016 and June 2017 were tied to MS-13.
We’re still waiting on the report that details the number of school shootings using a point-by-point list of all of the things to look out for when dealing with these shooters.
I expect this report to be called, “Fallen Angels: How God and Christ’s Redemptive Spirt Was Shunned by These Special Tear Drops Who Went Astray.”
In this report, the White House would jump through hoops to label the perpetrators of this white violence as “misguided,” “troubled” and “wayward,” but the administration wouldn’t call them animals. Sadly, that label is reserved for brown people.