From an outsider's view, everything looks so performative and fabricated to be consumed by a tv target audience. I mean, if there is so much illegal immigration in the US, is it the most effective use of resources to target a TV cliche that would gather a residual number of people?
I think the whole point of these stupid stunts is to mobilize the base and distract critics. Your random redneck racist might feel strongly about the Hollywood caricature of Mexicans wearing sombreros at a Home Depot parking lot, but the truth of the matter is that Trump is mobilizing the US armed forces against a governor's will while threatening him with imprisonment.
They is doing lots and lots of heavy lifting here. At the same time things are very confusing, because it seems like your fellow American is out for blood in a manner that shows no humanity.
Your fellow American on the right is plugged into a Matrix that traffics in its own narratives and can now freely manufacture or amplify its own fringe facts and narratives.
They are actually fighting very hard for the soul of america - as they see it. Virtuous efforts to stop the villainy and stupidity of the venomous yet weak liberals, leftists and democrats.
There’s a system in place to manufacture narratives, the closest analogy would be wrestling - except the President doesn’t treat it as fiction, he acts as if it’s real.
And since you can make and sell narratives incredibly quickly, while facts and analysis are days of effort - well, you have a structural change to the market place of ideas.
It happens everywhere in democracies now. See Brexit - entirely predictable. Yet completely unable to “sell” the known and clear problems to a majority of the citizenry.
Same with tariffs.
There’s a floor to people’s capability in navigating our current information environments - and partisan groups of experts are happy to use it to their advantage.
The problem began empirically with conservative positions, but the efficacy of the technique has now created its own political force.
So in late May, Stephen Miller, a top White House aide and the architect of the president’s immigration agenda, addressed a meeting at the headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. The message was clear: The president, who promised to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally, wasn’t pleased. The agency had better step it up.
Gang members and violent criminals, what Trump called the “worst of the worst,” weren’t the sole target of deportations. Federal agents needed to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” Miller told top ICE officials, who had come from across the U.S., according to people familiar with the meeting.
Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/protests-los-angeles-immigrants-...
I think this makes it even scarier. This means the goal is clearly not establishing sound policy, but to output propaganda that is designed to be easily consumed by TV audiences. It is beyond reality because it is not designed to make sense, it is designed to make sense to TV consumers by feeding on the context they get from their TV tropes. The Mexicans hanging around in Home Depots is a TV cliche that's recognized by people living wel beyond any Home Depot.
The best is Trump crowing about historically low unemployment numbers, and then peddling hysteria about illegals "taking American jobs." None of his degenerate followers care that this argument is stupid, and calls them stupid.
Now it's been papered over with other excuses, like the mythical "fentanyl" that's pouring in from Canada.