Greg Sargent: This is the Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Gillian Brockell: Thank you for having me.
Donald Trump (voiceover): These people were brought to our country to vote and they vote illegally. And the you know, amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say we want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many… 15 places, the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting and that we have states that are so crooked and the county votes. We have states that I won. that Joe I didn’t win. Now you’re to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with the court order and the ballots. You’re see some interesting things come out.
Brockell: Yeah, of course. I mean, it was a huge scandal in 2020 when there was a secret phone call where he was trying to mess with votes in Georgia, you know, that the Washington Post reported at the time, right? The “find however many votes.” You know, that was a massive scandal. Now he’s just doing it in public. You know, now he’s just, sort of, wish-casting about it, you know, talking to Dan Bongino.
Brockell: You know, it’s funny because he’s been able to have a pundit career based on having been in law enforcement briefly—and then was, what, deputy director of the FBI in the second Trump administration, but couldn’t hack it and had to go back to podcasting. So I’m glad he’s back where he’s most comfortable, I guess.
He’s talking in part about Somalis in Minnesota because that’s a state he sometimes claims he won, which he didn’t. But Gillian, I think you see here the ICE crackdown in Minnesota—the deliberate use of violence and terror to subjugate populations that Trump and MAGA hate—kind of dovetailing with Trump-MAGA authoritarianism on the electoral front. You take all this together and he’s clearly threatening to try to use ICE to disrupt the midterm elections.
Brockell: Look, I mean, I think that it’s terrifying because we have a bunch of fascist leaders who are trying to consolidate power. But I do tend to be more of the view of Jamelle Bouie about their actual ability to achieve what he would like—it’s just not there. I mean, if you just look at the number of ICE agents that there are, even if they are deployed as a secret police to sort of take over the midterm elections, there simply aren’t enough agents to be able to do that at enough of the polling centers.
There’s no mechanism for him to actually press a button and now I’m managing those votes, I’m counting, you know, those votes. There’s no mechanism to do that. And as terrifying as these ICE agents are, there’s just not enough of them to actually take over an election.
Brockell: Yeah, voter intimidation, absolutely.
Brockell: Yeah, I mean, you know, let’s not count our chickens before they hatch, but like the midterms are likely to be such an overwhelming win for Democrats that, you know, even if they can disrupt a couple of congressional elections—you know, probably blue districts in a red state—you know, it doesn’t seem like they can actually, you know, really stop this wave that is coming at them that they created through their own cruelty, through their own, you know, fascist behavior.
Laura Ingraham (voiceover): So how do you defeat these well-funded, well-organized revolutionaries? Well, certainly not by caving, that’s for darn sure, but that’s exactly what people like liberal Republican Susan Collins wants. But we defeat the revolution by staying the course, by prosecuting criminal conspiracies to impede ICE, and also their funding networks.
Tucker Carlson (voiceover): This is proof that what you’re watching is not a series of protests about immigration. What you’re watching are the beginnings of a color revolution, of a kind of insurrection against federal authority.
Steve Bannon (voiceover): In the fog of war, right? Just look through it. We have to hold the line. There can be no de-escalation at all. You don’t need to bring down the temperature. Raise the temperature.
Brockell: Yeah. And I think that, you know, for many years they may have been able to convince some people to go along with that. Immigrants have been used by the Republican Party and by conservatives for a long time as this sort of “boogeyman” to win elections. And Democrats have just sort of been like, “What if we just don’t talk about immigration at all?”
I mean, there’s an opportunity to make a moral claim and say, “No, you may have fallen for this boogeyman for a long time, but now you see it doesn’t exist.” Immigrants are not our enemies and we can vote to stop this right now. We just need Democrats to stop avoiding the subject of immigration.
Brockell: My hope is that the people who have been, sort of, falling for this for a long time will finally see how morally bankrupt it is, how evil it is. And hopefully someday justice will come for the people who are calling for this. But I don’t think there are that many people who are buying this anymore.
Brockell: Sure. So what I do is I track ICE flights, and this story in Mother Jones is about a company called Omni Air International. But the thing about ICE flights is that every single immigrant—every single adult, and some children—on ICE flights are shackled at the wrists and ankles, attached to a chain around their waists. This is incredibly dangerous. They can’t evacuate in an emergency; they couldn’t reach an oxygen mask if they had to.
I spoke with a forensic pathologist who is an expert on restraint, and she talked about [how] if you’re shackled for a couple of hours, you can experience bruising, chafing, you can get permanent nerve damage. Another huge problem is blood clots. How many times have you been on an international flight and you’re told, “Wear special compression socks and get up and walk around, make sure you’re hydrated enough”? Well, they can’t do that on these flights. They’re not allowed to stand up.
And so it’s just extremely painful. And so this man—he was shackled for more than 73 hours on his removal flight. They’re doing multiple stops now. I tracked a flight in September that did nine stops. And the people on the last stop—they’ve been shackled the whole time.
Beyond the flights, in a very general sense, these MAGA figures see ICE as a dehumanization force to be unleashed on the parts of America they consider to be “enemy territory” to be conquered. Isn’t that what ICE is becoming in the Trump—Stephen Miller—MAGA worldview?
I just think we have a government of sadists right now, and they may have been able to trick enough people into winning the election, obviously, but I think they’re wrong that this many people are sadistic about their neighbors. And yeah, so I don’t know. I’m just trying to do my part by exposing what is happening on these planes.
But the thing that they haven’t prepared themselves for is that there’s a far larger chunk of people out in the United States that absolutely hates this stuff. And they’ve set in motion this kind of machine of cruelty that can’t be contained anymore, that can’t be reeled back anymore.
Brockell: Yeah. I saw this incredible post this morning from this man named Tom Cartwright, and he’s a really interesting person. He’s a retired J.P. Morgan executive. And for about six years, he was tracking ICE flights and releasing monthly reports basically by himself, just out of concern for the migrants on board. And like I said, [he] largely did this work alone.
And I was just thinking how long Tom has done this work—trying to witness the cruelty being inflicted on immigrants by himself. And I hope that he was heartened to see all of his neighbors now engaged in the same work.
Brockell: I just don’t think there are that many people who are that sadistic. And I hope that one of the things that we can take away from this dark period that we’re going through is a renewed love of our real-life neighbors.
Brockell: Nice to talk to you too.
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