Please Don't Let Evil Win

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | May 25, 2018 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | May 25, 2018 |

I saw a Reuters poll a day or two ago that showed that, in the generic ballot between Republicans and Democrats, the GOP has actually pulled ahead, showing a 10 point swing since the last such poll was taken. I’m very reluctant to read too much in that — it’s one poll, and election results around the country have shown otherwise (and Nate Silver still shows a fairly healthy lead for the Democrats).

It doesn’t really matter what the polls say right now. Ultimately, as always, it will come down to turnout, and right now, Trump is eager to inflame, anger, scare, and energize his supporters, largely through racist rhetoric. That’s what calling MS-13 “animals” was all about (in fact, he repeated it in an official statement ten times). That’s what suggesting that deporting NFL players who kneel was all about. He wants to divide the country, and then he wants both sides fighting each other, eager to go to the polls. He wants Democrats to come out and defend MS-13. He wants liberals to defend NFL players who kneel, because the more we do, the more excited his racist supporters are about eliciting liberal tears.

There’s a piece that came out in the Washington Post today about the dysfunction at DHS, and about the hostility Trump has for his DHS Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen. “No one likes her,” Trump told John Kelly, while Nielsen was in the room. He regularly berates her, blaming her for the number of undocumented folks crossing the border. He yells at her for the lack of The Wall. He criticizes her for abiding by the existing immigration laws. She has no allies, other than John Kelly, and Kelly himself has fallen out of favor with Trump.

But then there was this paragraph in the article, too, about a meeting Trump had with Kushner and Miller:

Trump reminded them the crowds loved his rhetoric on immigrants along the campaign trail. Acting as if he was at a rally, he then read aloud a few made up Hispanic names and described potential crimes they could have committed, like rape or murder. Then, he said, the crowds would roar when the criminals were thrown out of the country — as they did when he highlighted crimes by illegal immigrants at his rallies, according to a person present for the exchange and another briefed on it later. Miller and Kushner laughed.

This is the kind of evil in the White House right now. People that snicker at the pain of others. Trump believes — and he’s probably right, to some degree — that folks cheer and applaud the idea of Mexican families being rounded up and imprisoned, deported, or worse.

I don’t know how Democrats offset that. I don’t know how to convince a racist not be a racist, except to expose them to more diversity. I don’t know if it will do a damn bit of good to tell them that the people who cross the border — who only do so because they want a better life for their family — are being separated from their families, that children are being taken away from their mothers and fathers and put in warehouses.

It’s inhumane.

“One of my lawyers came back from meeting his new client at the jail — and this is a very experienced criminal defense lawyer — who was shaken by the experience of talking to a parent whose child was literally ripped from their arms,” said Maureen Franco, a federal public defender for the Western District of Texas.

“The human cost of this will be great,” Franco said.

Maybe Trump supporters still wouldn’t care if they knew the reality of the situation. I don’t know.

Would they care if they knew that DHS has lost 1,475 children? LOST.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement reported at the end of 2017 that of the 7,000-plus children placed with sponsored individuals, the agency did not know where 1,475 of them were.

Republican Sen. Rob Portman said, “It’s just a system that has so many gaps, so many opportunities for these children to fall between the cracks, that we just don’t know what’s going on — how much trafficking or abuse or simply immigration law violations are occurring.”

A documentary from the PBS program “Frontline” said that the federal government has actually released some of the minors to human traffickers.

These children are being released to human traffickers. I’m sure you all know what sorts of ungodly things happen in those situations.

I don’t know if Trump supporters know this, either. Or if they care.

But good people care. Good people don’t want children — regardless of where they are from or what their circumstances are — being sold as sex slaves. Good people wouldn’t want children separated from their mothers and their fathers and put into warehouses. I just hope that more good people than bad people show up at the polls in November, because if you’re not voting against these policies, you are supporting that evil.