One commentator has compared Gregory Bovino, Trump’s Customs and Border Protection chief, to Nathan Bedford Forrest, possibly the Confederacy’s most vicious general. As a former Confederate officer—as repentant as I may be for wasting my life on behalf that terrible cause—I couldn’t agree more. Known as “The Wizard of the Saddle,” Forrest was a hateful racist bastard of the worst sort (and thus a hero for those who still worship the “lost cause.”) In particular, there’s strong evidence that he massacred dozens of surrendered Black Union troops, and after the Confederacy’s defeat, he became the Klan’s first grand wizard. In the waning days of the war, when it was clear the slave power had lost on the battlefield, Forrest used his cavalry to indiscriminately strike terror among the civilian populace. Sound familiar? Isn’t that what ICE is doing when it attacks one American city after another—Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Portland, Memphis, and now Minneapolis—striking homes and businesses, breaking down doors and pulling people out of their cars?
As David Frum recently wrote in The Atlantic, “for MAGA America, ICE is an instrument for cleansing violence,” an excuse for armed ICE agents to hunt down and hurt unarmed nonwhite people. MAGA’s definition of “violence,” of course, isn’t crime in the usual sense but the threat of displacement posed by the “other.” What about Trump’s promise to go after “the worst of the worst,” the murderers, rapists, and other criminals that he claimed were let out of prisons and insane asylums? Somehow they’ve been forgotten—assuming they ever existed—amid the indiscriminate attacks on people who often turn out to be innocent American citizens.
As Frum sees it, enforcing the law is incidental to the Trump administration’s true purpose: “the point is to prove that the fearsome power of the American state is being wielded by righteous MAGA hands against despised MAGA targets.” In other words, much of the violence committed by ICE can be attributed to the fact that “its main purpose has become theatrical…. ICE is less a law-enforcement agency than it is a content creator.” The violence shows Trump’s MAGA supporters that a government controlled by their leader “can demand respect from those overeducated coastal elites they so disdain.” The ICE agent who shot Ms. Good in Minneapolis made sure she wasn’t allowed to disrespect him/them.
Among its many unfortunate origins, this spate of ICE violence against the dreaded “other” can probably be traced to the Republican Party in the 1980s, mostly white men who claimed the government had been corrupted by Blacks and other people of color, as well as the scourge of “liberal women,” and set about defending their mythical “real” America from people they considered anti-American by definition.
Nathan Bedford Forrest Doesn’t Belong on the Streets of 21stCentury America.
Remember what White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the prime architect of the ICE deportation effort, said about Trump seizing Venezuela and its oil: “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Well, that’s certainly the philosophy embodied by Nathan Bedford Forrest, ICE, and the Trump Administration. Right now Miller has the president’s ear, so it’s easy for him to believe in the “iron laws of the world.” But when Trump is no longer president and Miller has lost that iron, maybe not so much.