The Books of Bokonon

So Trump's prospective "border czar" is threatening the Denver mayor with arrest over the mayor's resistance to mass deportations . As an expert on authoritarianism (minor in comparison to Altemeyer or Duckitt, but I do have a few peer review publications to show for it) and an amateur history buff, I don't see how this standoff ends well. Trump's fascist tendencies are on full display - this time by one of his henchmen. Either the federal government goes forward with its mass imprisonment of undocumented residents (and anyone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) and the Denver mayor goes to jail, or the mass deportation happens and the mayor folds like so many others who were supposed to be our bulwarks of democracy.  The US has devolved to the point that a plurality of its citizens don't seem to be bothered with electing a convicted felon as their president and can't be bothered to care who gets hurt in the process. The US ha...

Nancy LeTourneau's blog, Horizons, has a wonderful post on the truth about the impact immigrants have on small towns and cities throughout the US. I would call it required reading. JD Vance may have made some headlines about how he needed to make shit up Haitian immigrants to get Springfield OH in the news, but the truth is that journalists have been writing about how small communities have been impacted beneficially by immigrants for quite a while now. Read for yourself. I can add my own personal perspective. I lived in a town called Goodwell, OK during the aughts. It's practically in the middle of Oklahoma's panhandle. There is a small university there where I was employed for about a decade before I moved to my current location. Goodwell is located about 10 miles southwest of the Texas County seat, Guymon, OK. I very quickly learned a few things about Guymon and the surrounding area. At some point in the 1990s a meat packing facility owned by Seaboard Farms opened for b...