Musings on the Shootings in Dallas... with a personal connection

Curmie really wants to write about something other than the immorality and incompetence of the Trump administration and their minions in more than a few statehouses.  He’s even got something about another topic essentially written and ready to post. 

But.

It doesn’t happen often, thankfully, but this time a personal friend was witness to an event that made national headlines, and his story demands to be told.  By now, Gentle Reader, you’ll have read about the shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas early yesterday morning. 

You may well have first learned of the incident when the Usual Suspects started blathering without evidence about the shooter’s motives, just as they did in the wake of events in Utah a couple weeks ago.  Here’s Kristi Noem: 

This vile attack was motivated by hatred for ICE.  For months, we’ve been warning politicians and the media to tone down their rhetoric about ICE law enforcement before someone was killed. This shooting must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences. Comparing ICE Day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police, and slave patrols has consequences.

And JD Vance: “The obsessive attack on law enforcement, particularly ICE, must stop. I'm praying for everyone hurt in this attack and for their families.”  Curmie notes that all the victims were detainees, and the day Vance gives a shit about any of them is the day after the Devil tells him why he’s in hell. 

And Kash Patel: “These despicable, politically motivated attacks against law enforcement are not a one-off. We are only miles from Prarieland, Texas where just two months ago an individual ambushed a separate ICE facility, targeting their officers.”

And Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons: “It wasn’t directed at the detainees; it wasn’t directed at civilians in the street.  It was a definite attack on law enforcement.”

And here’s a selection from the rant by the Tangerine Palpatine himself: 

The Brave Men and Women of ICE are just trying to do their jobs, and remove the “WORST of the WORST” Criminals out of our Country, but they are facing an unprecedented increase in threats, violence, and attacks by Deranged Radical Leftists. This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to “Nazis.” The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, must be stopped. ICE Officers, and other Brave Members of Law Enforcement, are under grave threat.

OK, let’s unpack that a little.  ICE is not the least bit interested in removing the “worst of the worst.”  Indeed, they’re under orders to avoid high crime areas, especially those with significant levels of gang activity.  Whether this is because of commands that they fill numerical quotas (it’s a lot easier to arrest a grandmother than a gang leader) or simply garden-variety cowardice is unclear.  Probably a bit of both. 

It is indeed true that at least one of the bullet casings found at the scene did have “anti-ICE” written on it.  That may be relevant; indeed it likely is.  But, of course, as some memester pointed out, a real lefty would more likely write “Fuck ICE” or “Abolish ICE”; “anti-ICE” is what “a right-winger thinks a leftist says.”

Still, A hand-written note found at the home of the shooter, Joshua Jahn, seems to support the idea that Jahn was indeed attacking ICE.  It remains curious, however, that there were three casualties, including at least one death (not counting Jahn himself), but none of the victims were the supposedly intended targets.  There’s a difference between a likelihood and a certainty, after all, but you’d certainly never know that if you listened to the squawking from the Trumpian minions.  And some of the evidence that Jahn was indeed anti-ICE wasn’t discovered until well after the accusations were belched forth.  Government officials hurling accusations without evidence is a problem, even if, as now seems probable, they turn out to be right.

In fact, all this hyperventilating about “Radical Left Terrorists,” especially given the inconclusiveness of the evidence, does little but fan the flames and incite further violence.  Curmie isn’t quite ready to say that such is the intent of the administration—providing an excuse for further infringements on First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights, for example—but it does loom as a possibility.  Of course, simple stupidity is the explanation for a lot of what this administration does…

Let’s be honest here.  We may suspect, even strongly suspect, what may have been Jahn's motives, but we don’t know with anything like certainty.  The local Fox affiliate reports that “A sign on a car that reportedly belonged to the shooter reads, “Radioactive fallout from nuclear formations that've passed over these areas more than 2x since 1951.”  So we’re dealing with someone quite likely to be a pancake short of a Grand Slam Breakfast, whatever his politics.  Plus, of course, if he was truly aiming for ICE agents, he’s an even worse shot than Thomas Michael Crooks.

All of this brings us to Curmie’s introduction to this piece.  A good friend and former student of Curmie’s posted on social media that he was on site when the shooting occurred.  His post was public, but Curmie doesn’t want him to get any backlash, so he’ll be listed here only as SR, and Curmie isn’t supplying a link; you’ll have to trust me on this, Gentle Reader.  Curmie also declined to ask for further details: this had to have been an especially harrowing incident, and there’s no need to make him re-live that experience just to assuage Curmie’s curiosity.

Curmie should also mention that SR is a man of exemplary honesty and forthrightness.  He has no political agenda, and is far more forgiving than Curmie of other people’s ethical failures.  If SR says, “this is what happened,” then, Gentle Reader, you can take it to the bank that that’s what happened.  His account may not be complete (how could it be?), but it is honest.  Curmie would bet everything he owns that SR is telling the absolute truth to the extent that he can determine it.

So… SR drove a member of his church, who apparently had an appointment, to the ICE facility.  Apparently there’s a rule that you can’t enter the facility without an appointment, so SR and several other people were directed to an outdoor waiting area.  (Curmie bets this will go over particularly well in February.)  OK, so it’s a stupid rule, but ICE doesn’t have a monopoly on them…

The half dozen or so people outside, including SR and a mother and her infant, still weren’t allowed inside when the shooting started.  SR says he “can’t really blame the employees” for that decision; this is because SR is far more forgiving than the average person.  SR “had nowhere to go, nothing to hide behind. The best option given the situation was to shelter in place and wait and hope.”  Eventually, “Dallas PD arrived at the scene and ordered us to shelter inside, and the ICE agents finally allowed us into the building.”

SR concludes, aptly: 

Frankly, I don't care about the motive because it will just be propagandized to death. Ultimately, this event is another indicator of failed policies and inflammatory messaging.

Perhaps the most frustrating part is knowing that this will not lead to any meaningful change. It will be another fading headline, another statistic, another signpost on the road toward our own self-destruction.

There’s a reason SR is one of the former students in whom Curmie takes the most pride. 

Let’s consider above all his objective statements rather than his analysis.  Those “brave men and women on the ground” that Lyons was praising may indeed have been trying to rescue detainees from vehicles that were under fire.  But we also know that ICE employees—perhaps the same ones, perhaps not—refused to allow innocent civilians to seek shelter inside their facility: an act both craven and cruel.  How do we know?  Because SR said so (without the adjectives).  If the average person on the street said something contrary to a Trump minion’s statement, Curmie would tend to believe that person.  When it’s SR, he’s certain of it.

This, alas, is the true face of ICE: paranoid, cowardly, and mendacious.  They’re not the Gestapo, though.  Those guys weren’t afraid to show their faces.

FIRE's Scorecard: 3 Wins, 1 Forfeit

Frequent readers of this blog know that Curmie views himself as more of a civil libertarian than a liberal.  There’s a lot of overlap, of course, especially in an era in which the POTUS is a narcissistic authoritarian.  (Curmie notes, apophasistically, that he didn’t use the word “fascistic” in the previous sentence.)  Curmie has followed FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, since back in the days when the RE in their acronym stood for “Rights in Education.”  He doesn’t always agree with them, but he did recently renew his membership, if that tells you something, Gentle Reader.

We start with the “forfeit” part of the title of this essay.  Whereas it is true that FIRE concerns itself primarily with freedom of speech and assembly, they do proclaim themselves to be champions of religious liberty.  So Curmie finds it interesting (concerning?) that FIRE offered no opinion on the recent SCOTUS case regarding Oklahoma’s attempt to create a specifically Christian charter school.  SCOTUS ultimately upheld, which in this case means “didn’t overturn” a lower court ruling blocking public funding for such an enterprise.  The vote was 4-4, with Justice Barrett (to her credit) recusing herself, and presumably one of the conservatives (probably Roberts, possibly Gorsuch) joining the liberals in supporting the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling.

Ultimately, the case boils down to whether direct funding of religious schools is different from indirect funding, and whether there’s a substantive difference between full and partial funding.  No one seems terribly bothered by students at Brandeis or Baylor or BYU getting Pell Grants, for example.  But completely underwriting the entire cost of a religious school with public funds seems a bridge too far to a lot of folks, Curmie included.

Curmie suspects that FIRE might not agree with him, given their interest in supporting individuals rather than society if the two come into conflict.  That’s okay, but if so, Curmie would like to see their reasoning.  Their silence on this matter does not do them credit.

Moving on to the wins.  (Note: a “win” here is not about a legal victory, but about being on the “right side” in Curmie’s opinion.)

Back in February, the Maine legislature formally censured Representative Laurel Libby for posting on social media about a trans athlete who had won a championship in girls’ track.  The athlete, a minor, was identified by name and school, and there was a photo of the podium in which the faces of other competitors were blurred, presumably to protect their privacy, but the trans athlete’s was not. 

There have been at least three cases in Maine this year in which a trans female (the same one all three times!) secured a podium finish in some sort of athletic competition; Libby has been vocal about at least two of them.  OK, did Libby deserve censure?  Yes: not for the political opinion, but for the manner it was expressed.  Is she a smug, narcissistic, reckless, grand-standing, hypocrite?  Obviously.  Is she a bully, as Anelise Feldman, the second-place finisher in one of those events, would have it?  Yep.  Does she care more about getting publicity for herself than for her cause?  Well, duh.  She’s this year’s Elise Stefanik.  Is she an idiot?  She’s a proud anti-vaxxer, which pretty much tells Curmie all he needs to know.  Is she a bigot?  Quite possibly, although the issue of how trans athletes should be treated is complicated, and reasonable people can disagree about this one.

But, as FIRE pointed out on May 8, there’s a difference of kind, not merely degree, between a censure and denying Libby the right to speak or to vote in the legislature.  Curmie may think that she’s a blight on society, but her constituents deserve representation, even if Curmie thinks they’d have been better off choosing someone else. 

Daniel Ortner’s piece for FIRE also accuses the Democratic majority of “end-running Maine constitutional provisions that say a representative cannot be expelled absent a two-thirds vote or recall election.”  Trouble is, he’s right.  Just because there’s an authoritarian buffoon in the White House and the Republicans in Congress are too stupid, too corrupt, or too craven to stand in his way doesn’t mean the Democrats won’t behave in exactly the same manner if given the opportunity.  Alas.

SCOTUS agreed this week in a convincing if not unanimous 7-2 decision.  The only good news on the ethics front for Democrats is that Justice Kagan agreed with the majority, and that Maine officials immediately acceded to the ruling, unlike a certain portly pettifogger.

The second win for FIRE is kind of a silly case, but it does point to larger issues.  Apparently there are no actual problems anywhere on the campus of the University of California at Irvine: no lack of funding for library books, faculty salaries, or financial aid, no administrators who see their primary job as justifying their existence, no over-emphasis on athletics (Go, Anteaters!) at the expense of… you know, actual education.  Nope, nothing like any of that. 

This is the only rational reason why the university should care about (wait for it) doormats in university housing.  You read the correctly, Gentle Reader: doormats.  The issue, you see, is that one particular doormat had (GASP!) writing on it!  Worse, that writing was “No warrant.  No entry.”  You see, there’s a policy… except that, actually, there isn’t.  More on that in a moment.

FIRE’s Graham Piro was all over this on May 15.  Piro notes that had there been a policy prohibiting doormats altogether (for safety concerns, for example), there would be no problem.  But apparently, it’s the fact that there are words on this particular doormat that’s the problem.

Piro references the university’s Graduate and Family Housing Policies.  Curmie read through all the sections that even might be relevant (he has a masochistic streak sometimes): not a word about doormats, or writing, for that matter. 

But the university does have a prohibition against “all outward‐facing signs, decorations, and expressions in windows/on doors,” “materials, signs, banners, posters, etc. … anywhere within Student Housing,” (no exception for inside apartments, by the way) and “materials… posted on windows, including windows in resident rooms.” This incoherent and redundant slop could only have been created by some administrator in either Student Affairs or Housing.  It does seem to suggest that someone putting up a poster for their next concert on the outside of the door to their apartment, or indeed anywhere in the building, would be in violation. 

That’s OK, though, because the administration cheerfully admits that rather than re-write the policy to make sense, they merely engage in selective enforcement.  Piro writes that “the office probably wouldn’t ask someone to remove a holiday snowflake display but that it has asked ‘people to take down things like Pride flags, country flags, and advertisements for businesses.’”  They place content restrictions on protected speech, in other words.  That’s not a reasonable time, place, and action restriction.  You can see why FIRE’s headline suggests that UC Irvine is “wiping its feet on the Constitution.”

Finally, there’s the Great Harvard Brouhaha, the most recent episode of which was the absurd attempt by Kristi Noem (a.k.a., Gestapo Spice) to de-certify Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program, making it impossible for the university to enroll foreign students, who make up over a quarter of the current student body.  Most of those affected are grad students from over 100 countries.

Noem, of course, is a sociopathic narcissist, but that hardly separates her from the rest of the current administration.  Her allegations—that Harvard was “fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus”—are paranoid delusions.  The demand for “any and all audio or visual footage, in the possession of Harvard University, of any protest activity involving a non-immigrant student on a Harvard University campus in the last five years” is not merely creepy, but unconstitutional.

That’s not just Curmie saying that.  Here’s FIRE’s Legal Director Will Creeley: “The Department’s demand that Harvard produce audio and video footage of all protest activity involving international students over the last five years is gravely alarming. This sweeping fishing expedition reaches protected expression and must be flatly rejected.”

Noem’s other demands—for evidence of foreign students’ actually violating the law, for example—have little relevance to any honest attempt to review Harvard’s operations, but at least that thin veneer of authenticity remains.  Not so for footage of “all protest activity.”  Here’s FIRE’s Nick Perrino in a follow-up article titled “This isn’t just about Harvard”: 

The feds are demanding more than just information involving illegal activity or violations of the student code of conduct. They want footage of “protest activity” — including speech protected by the First Amendment.

And unless those protests involve only international students, American citizens will also find their constitutionally protected speech in the hands of America's national security apparatus.

And how, exactly, is Harvard to know whether that person in the five-year-old video is a). a Harvard student and b). a citizen of another country?  Creeley’s calling this a “sweeping fishing expedition” may just have been a little too kind.

The good news, for the moment, at least, is that Harvard immediately filed a lawsuit, and U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order.  Travis Gettys’s article on RawStory says that Burroughs “wrote in her order” that “Revoking Harvard’s certification is unlawful many times over…. The government’s effort to punish the University for its refusal to surrender its academic independence and for its perceived viewpoint is a patent violation of the First Amendment.”  

She did not.  That quotation is taken from Harvard’s motion for the TRO, not from Burroughs’s granting of that application, which merely states that in the absence of a TRO, Harvard “will sustain immediate and irreparable injury before there is an opportunity to hear from all parties.”

This, Gentle Reader, is why a raised eyebrow of skepticism is always your friend, even especially if the site in question generally aligns with your perspective.  Burroughs may actually believe what she’s quoted as saying (we can hope so), but she didn’t say it.  We’ll find out more at the hearing in a few days.

In the meantime, we return to Will Creeley to take us home:

The administration’s demand for a surveillance state at Harvard is anathema to American freedom. 

The administration seems hellbent on employing every means at its disposal — no matter how unlawful or unconstitutional — to retaliate against Harvard and other colleges and universities for speech it doesn’t like. This has to stop…. 

Whatever Harvard’s past failings, core campus rights cannot and will not be secured by surveillance, retaliation, and censorship.

No American should accept the federal government punishing its political opponents by demanding ideological conformity, surveilling and retaliating against protected speech, and violating the First Amendment.

Well done, FIRE.

Curmie promised that this piece would be shorter than the last one.  It is, but it’s still pretty long.  The next one will be less likely to achieve TLDR status.

Of Tails and Tales

Abe and Gene

   

When the Trumpian apparatchiks Republican members of the House of Representatives declared last month that there would be no “calendar days” for the remainder of the first session of the 119^th Congress, GOP pols proceeded as if the obvious falsehood was simply business as usual.  And the allegedly leftie press was deafeningly silent.

The same thing happened more recently when thousands of immigrants were declared “dead” in a maneuver apparently initiated by Kristi Noem and her gaggle of sadists despite the fact that these people were very much alive.  There are plenty of other examples, but let’s keep this post from turning into War and Peace, shall we, Gentle Reader?

The “calendar days” business was nothing more or less than an act of cowardice: GOP reps didn’t want to have to vote on a resolution to condemn Trump’s idiotic tariffs.  Vote against the tariffs and you’re saying Dear Leader is fallible; vote for them and you’re pissing off a lot of your constituents who saw their nest eggs ravaged by Trumpian incompetence/petulance/malevolence.  Of course, there’s no little evidence that Trump’s billionaire buddies, not to mention his family, were tipped off: “I’m going to impose economy-destroying tariffs, so sell now,” followed by “I’ll backtrack on the tariffs tomorrow; time to buy (at a huge discount).”

The “dead people” canard was simply a deceitful shorthand to allow the Xenophobe-in-Chief to further persecute people named Rodriguez or Argüello or something similar.  There’s mounting evidence, by the way, that not only were many of the victims of this purge in the country legally, but some are actually citizens. 

Curmie acknowledges here that Democrats aren’t above using similar tactics to the calendar charade, and that there’s a legitimate chance that some of those folks described in news stories simply as “immigrants” are in the country illegally.  He’ll grant, too, that some increases in tariffs might be appropriate if handled with moderation, discretion, and forethought (none of which were present in 47’s puerile recklessness).  Finally, he stipulates that the Trump administration didn’t invent bureaucratic incompetence; they merely raised it to an art form. 

Ultimately, though, that doesn’t change the narrative.  Trump and his minions simply lied unabashedly, and the minions were too stupid, too sycophantic, and/or too cowardly to do anything but cheerfully admire their emperor’s fabulous but non-existent new wardrobe.

Curmie, being Curmie, immediately thought of one of his favorite riddles, sometimes attributed to Abraham Lincoln.  (Yes, he’s cited it here before.)  Q: How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?  A: Four.  Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one. 

Similarly, calling a several-month-long period less than a calendar day doesn’t make it so, and declaring someone dead doesn’t mean they aren’t alive and well.  Indeed, such instances are not merely contrary to reality, they’re so obviously mendacious bullshit that even suggesting they might be something other than that is an insult to the American citizenry.

But the question about dogs’ legs also reminded Curmie, who is (or was) a theatre historian with a particular interest in the Theatre of the Absurd, of one of his favorite scenes from Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.  In Act I of that play, the Logician gives an example of a syllogism: All cats have four paws.  His companion’s dog has four paws; therefore, that dog is a cat.  Moreover, since all cats are mortal and Socrates is dead, Socrates was also a cat.

It doesn’t take an enormous imagination to get from this nonsense to something more contemporary: Some Social Security recipients are retirees.  Some Social Security recipients are five years old.  Therefore, five-year-olds are receiving retirement benefits.  Elon and Baby Bobby had better be looking over their shoulders; the Logician is coming for their jobs.

Of course, Rhinoceros is a play about the dangers of unthinking conformity, specifically with respect to the rise of fascism, and submission to, if not actual collaboration with, its evils.  The Logician is apparently a respected professional with an important position.  He, like, well, virtually any member of the MAGA hierarchy, is also either a pompous moron or a liar (or both).  The townspeople, all of whom except our hero, Berenger, turn into rhinos by the end of the third act, are pretty much parallel to our countrymen and -women in the red caps: lumbering, stupid, and enormously destructive.

They, or at least most of them, weren’t always that way.  They just found it easier, perhaps safer, to just go along, even at the expense of individuality.  Maybe it was fear; maybe it was just the allure of fitting in, irrespective of fitting in to what.  But the herd mentality, whatever its source, is directly contrary to the American spirit.  It’s more than a little scary.  So far, however, Curmie has been able to echo Berenger’s most famous line, “Je ne capitule pas!” 

As we await the latest illegal, immoral, and downright idiotic action of the Commissariat of Trumpistan, Curmie would like to take one moment to whisper to the MAGA faithful that Abe and Gene would like a word.