A Nation of Immigrants at the Hands of Master Propagandists

 

                                     Jack Doppelt

Feb. 28, 2018

[A version of this article was published as How Master Propagandists Linked Immigrants to the Florida School Shooting in Yes! Magazine on Feb. 28, 2018]

Ann Coulter, and the bizarre link between the Parkland, Florida, shooting and America’s missing “promise as a nation of immigrants.”

No, Nikolas Cruz is not an immigrant. But his name has helped people like Ann Coulter stir the xenophobic melting pot.

Beneath the surface of our wrenching national conversation in the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida, is a case study in how propaganda works in the hands of masters to sow demagoguery at the expense of basic humanity. 

After the Valentine’s Day school onslaught that left 17 people dead, conservative pundit Ann Coulter wrote a column. 

Coulter is one of only 45 people whom President Donald Trump follows on Twitter, according to a

Huffington Post piece, “Who Is Ann Coulter And Why Is She So Friendly With Donald Trump?” Coulter and Trump share similar social media ambitions—“stirring up the pot,” as Coulter puts it, and being noticed. As a conservative megaphone, she is Trump’s most vocal supporter who matters. 

At the time Coulter’s book In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! was released in 2016, she warned Trump that she’d be riding him on immigration. She’s kept her promise. 

In response to the Parkland shootings, Trump stirred the pot with fulminations about arming teachers. But Coulter had a different mission. Her column, “Amazing New Breakthrough to Reduce Mass Shootings!” was syndicated widely among conservatives via Breitbart, Townhall, Free Republic, Trapshooters, Fort Bend Herald, Trendolizer, Glock Talk, The Patriot Post, Infowars, and Veterans in Defense of Liberty. 

In it, Coulter identified “16 immigrant mass shootings” since 2000. That’s out of a total of about 34 mass shootings, as she counts them: 47 percent. The number plays into the polarizing characterization of immigrants as a scourge on safe American communities. A fuller characterization is this: Immigrants commit fewer crimes than the population at large and are a driving force of American growth and productivity. Even the Cato Institute, the conservative think tank, knows that.

So who are these immigrants prone to mass shootings? She claims they are first- and second-generation immigrants. 

What’s a second-generation immigrant? It’s an odd, confusing term that seems oxymoronic. It’s a person born in the U.S. I thought we referred to them as Americans. Some have one immigrant parent, some have two, some have naturalized Americans as parents and have immigrant grandparents. 

According to the Pew Research Center, that’s about 20 million adults and another 16 million minors, or 15% of the U.S. population, who apparently aren’t “real” Americans, according to Coulter, and their numbers are growing. They tend to earn more and are better educated than their immigrant parent or parents. They are less likely to live in poverty. 

As Ann Coulter insinuates convincingly to those who see the world as she does, mass shootings would be cut in half and the FBI would not be as incompetent if it weren’t chasing immigrants who should be deported. As it is, the deported just get replaced by others in the perpetual motion immigrant chain. 

I have to admit that all this hits close to home. I’m one of those second-generation immigrants, though I’ve never thought of myself that way. Born in Chicago and all. 

I wonder if it hits close to home for Trump, who is a second-generation immigrant, thanks to his Scottish mom. Or to his wife, Melania, who is a first-generation immigrant. 

I wonder if it hits close to home for Ann Coulter, too. Don’t get me wrong. She doesn’t have immigrant parents to stain her pedigree that on one side goes back to the American Revolution. 

But she did have a father, John Vincent Coulter. So let’s follow her in another equally ridiculous direction. If I get her line of reasoning, a second-generation immigrant is an immigrant (rather than a first-generation American) because he/she/they are one generation removed from an immigrant and live in the same house. 

Coulter is one generation removed from her father, and they lived in the same house, which according to my calculations, makes her, among other identities, a second-generation male. 

I’m no more an immigrant than she is a male. 

The irony, or the mastery, is that Coulter wrote the column in response to the Parkland school killings, which appear to have been perpetrated by Nikolas Cruz. Nikolas? Not a common American name spelled that way. Cruz? Hispanic. Could be Spanish, Portuguese, Mexican, Honduran, Nicaraguan, or American, in that it’s the 12th most common surname in Puerto Rico and the most common surname of all in Guam, according to the lifelong learning site ThoughtCo. 

When the name Nikolas Cruz emerged on Feb. 14 as the perpetrator in the shootings, alarm bells were set off on far-right websites, Twitter feeds, and chat groups. Of course, he’s an immigrant. Some said he was a Dreamer, which means an immigrant with illegal status in the U.S., and that he is a DACA recipient, which means to the far-right that he is being allowed to stay in the U.S. because of a suspect executive order by President Obama. Craig Brittan, the far-right Republican candidate to replace Jeff Flake as U.S. Senator from Arizona, jumped on. 

It turns out that Nikolas Cruz is not a DACA recipient or a Dreamer or an illegal immigrant or an immigrant, even a second-generation immigrant, as far as anyone knows. Cruz was adopted in infancy by the Cruz family, who had recently moved from Long Island to Florida. It is not publicly known who Cruz’s biological parents were before Lynda Cruz and her husband adopted and named him.

Among the accounts of Nikolas Cruz’s social media outbursts are those in the private Instagram chat group Murica, on which Cruz talked about keeping Blacks in chains, cutting their necks, killing Mexicans, and hating gays and Jews, and his affiliation with the Republic of Florida, a White nationalist militia that has advocated for a White-only state in Florida, according to the Associated Press. CNN added that during one of Cruz’s chat group rants, he said, “My real mom was a Jew. I am glad I never met her.” 

No, Nikolas Cruz is not an immigrant, though his name ensures that Coulter, a touchstone for millions of alienated, angry Americans who are few generations removed from their own immigrant forebears, can keep Trump’s feet to the fire by blowing on the Nikolas Cruz dog whistle. The dog whistle works, no matter how off-key it is. 

Long after we’re sapped of mourning, and the urgent voices of both gun control advocates and 2nd Amendment rights defenders have become hoarse in anticipation of another round, masters of propaganda like Coulter will have stretched the web of inhumanity that weaves together illegals, immigrants, second-generation immigrants, chain migrants, terrorists, Muslims, refugees, and troubled 19-year-olds with names like Nikolas Cruz into one xenophobic melting pot. 

I’m being alarmist? 

The mission statement of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is to administer “the nation’s lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.” It says so right on the agency webpage. 

The page was amended last week, on Feb. 22. Before that, it included the phrase “USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants …” 

Replaced mission statement above.

New statement, as of Feb. 22, below. 

Is that promise really gone? 

It will be up to this nation of third- and fourth- and fifth- and sixth- and seventh- and eighth-generation immigrants to make sure this “nation of immigrants” is not replaced by “nation of enough immigrants.” 

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T-Rump and the March to Extinction

                                    Jack Doppelt

Feb. 10, 2018

[A version of this article was published in The Satirist.]

The man who’s now President of the United States, with authority to call together two houses of Congress for a State of the Union address, is more aptly seen roaming the earth as a predator whose bite is fierce and who has a keen sense in tracking his prey. That he is the most powerful man who lords over the most powerful nation on earth is testament to his dominance over his species. 

Yet, he’s mocked for having small hands, a big rump, a massive head, and a brain, though itself much more advanced than people want to admit, that contains a cerebrum (associated with thought and higher brain function) that is tiny. 

T-Rex [Photo credit:
Public domain]

That is the textbook description of the Tyrannosaurus, or T-Rex, as we’ve come to call it. 

Other dinosaurs had more complex social behaviors. What made T-Rex so daunting is it would strike hard and fast; get in, take down his prey and get out. 

Though the similarities between T-Rex and T-Rump are uncanny for metaphorical purposes, the world has evolved in 65 million years. 

T-Rump uses the cunning of an evolved species to take down his prey. T-Rex was a dinosaur, after all. T-Rump is a con artist, a much more highly evolved reptile. 

T-Rump marks his prey

T-Rump is driven by four core impulses – power, money, attention, and rubbing the noses of everyone who thinks they’re better than him or smarter than him. They are his prey, and there are enough prey to feed a mammoth appetite. 

Over the years, they were competing real estate moguls, businessmen who boasted of greater wealth, a TV industry and critics that mocked reality shows. T-Rump could claim to make the biggest deals, be richer than the rest, and be the most talked about talent behind the most popular TV show. And he has made those claims. 

But claims are one thing. They’re open to dispute. The louder he claimed the mantles, the more people mocked him. More prey made him salivate. Politics presented an arena teeming with prey who mocked him. Not just any politics but the Presidency where it’s hard to dispute “most powerful man who lords over the most powerful nation on earth.” 

The prey fall into T-Rump's trap

The prey came at him, one at a time and in packs. Democrats, particularly the Clintons and Obama. The GOP establishment who ran against him for President or who awaited him in Congress. Political pundits who keep dissecting what he says and who try to snare him on inconsistencies. Activists who call him “the worst president ever” or “racist.” And the media (news and entertainment) who can’t find a way to find anything right in anything he does or says, even if he lumbers into it. 

All his prey use common sense metrics that just don’t matter to a T-Rump who thrives on power, money, attention, and rubbing the noses of the prey who think they’re better or smarter than him. They act like they don’t know who they’re messing with. 

The first and only time I heard the term T-Rump was in an inspirational rap by Adam Gottlieb, a young Chicago poet and musician. In his poem, This Is The Year, he envisions 2018 as “the year we turn off the reality television show that governs us and start to govern our own reality.” 

Come one, come all: Ultimate Three-card monte is under the Big Top

To do that, we first have to recognize what we’re up against, the roles we’ve played, and the nature of the game. The reality show is The Grand Con, often known as the street hustle: Three-Card Monte. T-Rump has been playing it for years, and now that he has mastered the craft, he is tempting the gods and staking out his claim to the most masterful ever. 

Three-card monte has three key actors: 

The dealer or con. That of course is T-Rump, now as President. 

The marks. They’re the prey who play the game and think they can outsmart the dealer because they can keep their eyes on the one card that matters. They’re the Democrats, the GOP establishment, the pundits, the activists and the media. 

The rest of us are the crowd that gathers around them. We are not key actors. We are bystanders, and we are fascinated by the game. How does the dealer do it? We seem to see every move clearly. They’re right in front of us. 

What goes unnoticed is the work of the shills. The shills are the other key actors. They are situated in the crowd like all of us and they appear to be rooting for us – the people – to beat the dealer at his own game. But the shills are actually working for the dealer, building a false confidence in the marks and distracting attention so the hustler can work his sleight of hand even better. 

Shills traditionally get a take of the action. They do it wittingly. The sheer brilliance of T-Rump’s game at the Presidential level is how he’s gotten the marks to become his shills, wittingly or not, and make no mistake, they are getting a piece of the action. The Democrats, the GOP establishment, the pundits, the activists, and particularly the media get a cut of the attention T-Rump covets and distributes.

                                                     [Image credit: Jack Doppelt, 2018]

Every time the shills rant about the eccentricities T-Rump dangles as bait – calling immigrants people from “shithole countries,” mispronouncing Namibia, hiring and having falling outs with the Bannons, Sessionses, Flynns, Manaforts and Tillersons of the moment, the publication of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” (the “tell-all you could ever want if you’re Trump” book), and fomenting a debate on whether T-Rump is “a racist.” Each tweet beckons: Look over there. No, there. No there. 

Now there’s a memo by Republican Congressman Devin Nunes challenging a FISA court’s decision and putting the FBI in question. The Nunes memo beckons. Look over there. The FBI can’t be trusted, federal judges are patsies, Justice Department officials are biased and should be fired. Listen to the pundits: It defies logic. Not the logic of diversion. It’s textbook. 

Sometimes the distractions are so Freudian that they’re too luscious even for Freud. Before the Nunes affair pulled us away again, we were treated to T-Rump’s boast after a meeting he had on the immigration policy impasse: 

“It was a tremendous meeting, actually it was reported as incredibly good, and my performance, some of them called it a performance, I consider it work. But it got great reviews by everybody other than two networks who were phenomenal for about two hours.” The Grand Con show is hot. 

T-Rump’s son Eric ventured into the “look over there” racist diversion with a comeback on Fox and Friends that his father is not a racist. “My father sees one color, green. That’s all he cares about. He cares about the economy.” 

Power, money, attention, all rolled into the greatest show on earth. 

The public is educable: One way out. Don't play, engage

Don’t we get that framing his actions and statements as “unprecedented” in political terms makes them all the more priceless on the attention spectrum? Don’t we get that even though catching the President on brazen changes in position is needed, to T-Rump, it’s reruns and residuals. If we pay attention to a fulmination the first time, it’s money in the bank. If we replay it as often as the issue stays alive and fresh, it’s an investment in his pulsating notoriety. If we move on, there’s yet another rabbit and another hat. 

Don’t we get that invoking his “unprecedentedly” low favorability rating to make the point that the GOP is at risk in the mid-term 2018 elections is a carcass to a T-Rump who revels in watching the GOP establishment squirm as they try to play him. Don’t we get that distraction, any distraction is music to the hustler. The louder, the better. The fresher, the better. The Nunes noise jolts the nerves. Twitter is the golden goose. The marks-turned shills have no recourse but to take the bait. 

Check out the YouTube video to see how three-card monte works. Remember the invocation at the end: “Don’t gamble. You can’t win. End. These guys just take your money and run.” 

One bright spot is that three-card monte is the classic short-term con. By taking the game to the Presidential level, T-Rump counts on keeping it up long enough to emerge with aspirations intact – to be the most powerful, the wealthiest, and the most talked about human ever. 

If only we bystanders could figure out a way to mobilize the march to T-Rump’s extinction. 

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