Guess Where All Your Words and Ideas Came From, MAGA? Because You Didn’t Invent Fascism

By Mabel Doge Luhan for Mabel’s Table, Kandit News & Views

They’re eating the dawgs! They’re eating the cats! No matter how many times the mayor and police chief of Springfield, Ohio publicly said this is a lie, Donald and JD just kept repeating it. And they still keep repeating it. The base believes all their other lies, so why not this one too?

MAGA peddles that dawgs/cats lie along with completely fabricated tales of MS-13 memberships, fentanyl smuggling, and whatever other red-state dysfunction they can pin on immigrants.

Which is extremely ironic, because their policy direction is to stop pursuing criminal immigrants, and focus on the non-criminals. Maybe that’s not exactly what they call it, but that’s what they do. There are only so many ICE agents and dollars and vehicles in the world. If they are doing more pursuing of non-criminals, it follows, by pure conservation of matter, that they have to do less pursuing of criminals.

Catching actual MS-13 gangsters and drug dealers is what the American people have always wanted ICE/HSI/ERO to do — and what it was doing, mostly successfully, before Trump came along. He told a lie that those agents’ good work was null and void, and that he’d now send them chasing after Home Depot handymen. Because that’s what’s posing a real danger to America: Home Depot handymen.

Of course, when you’re 39 years old, a literal Jewish Nazi, and look like an ageless AI-generated villain, you might be looking for someone to blame. Even more so when a richer, more hirsute African American billionaire — an illegal immigrant at that — steals your wife away! Or your beard, or whatever “Katie” is to him, but it’s still humiliating. Yes, yes, it’s the immigrants that did it. Of course.

And Stephen Miller would know all about policy, statistics, immigration, and law enforcement. After all, he has extensive experience in immigration law, public management, public policy, law enforcement… no, wait, he doesn’t. He has absolutely zero experience in any of those fields. He has an undergraduate degree in political science, and in college he mostly distinguished himself by being the brave lone defender of some lacrosse-playing rapists! Well, you can’t ask for a better resume for MAGA. And now Stephanie, oops, Stephen tells stories that all those big bad immigrants are murderers. (He’d be a lot more sympathetic if they were at least rapists!) And of course, the Haitians are still eating the dawgs.

What a coincidence that the KKK claimed that immigrant men are all rapists, and the Nazi Party claimed that Jews eat babies. Have we heard the MAGA song before? They also got their idea of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” from the Soviets, the Nazis, and the CCP, all three of whom created actual psychiatric “diagnoses” based on not following their appointed leaders.

Why do they tell these lies? Not because it’s fun. These people have no idea of fun. They do it because it feeds into the only project they care about: their quest for power.

Stories create deeper political commitments than dry facts do. [See Polletta & Lee (2006). Is Telling Stories Good for Democracy? Rhetoric in Public Deliberation after 9/11. American Sociological Review, 71(5), 699–723.]

[See also Westen (2007). The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.]

That’s why the word “narrative” has now come into the right-wing lexicon. They know the power of stories, whether Ronald Reagan’s (fictitious) Cadillac-driving welfare queen, or George Bush’s (fictionalized) Willie Horton.

So it’s no wonder that the completely amoral, fact-free, opportunistic MAGA right will make up whatever stories advance their cause. Their stories are lies, but what do they care, in their post-truth universe?

So it might be useful to serve up some other stories in this column. Real, true stories. From the CNMI. From the removal proceedings case files, from the Karidat records, from the depths of my microfiche file. Names changed and Bates stamps redacted.

YOUR HATE IS DESTROYING LIVES

Ming Came Here Legally and Was Duped by Chinese Gangsters

Meet Ming. He came to the CNMI in 2014, during the casino construction boom. A recruiter had come to his construction worksite in Beijing with promises of much better work — 30,000 RMB ($4,000) a month with free housing in America, with eventual green cards for him and his family. That was a lot better than the 3,000 RMB ($400) a month he was making in Beijing. All the recruiter needed for Ming to secure this job, is for him to prepay his immigration processing fees and US income taxes: just 100,000 RMB ($13,000). Don’t worry, he told Ming: you’ll easily make that back in just a few months!

Spending 100,000 RMB to soon get a reliable job paying 360,000 RMB a year was definitely worth it. But Ming didn’t have that kind of money. 100,000 RMB was three years’ (pre-tax) salary for him. In China, poor people like Ming can’t get loans from banks. What they can get is loans from mafia loan sharks. A loan was lined up. Normally Ming’s passport or national ID card would be held as collateral, but since he was going to work abroad, the gangsters accepted to keep Ming’s sister’s and mother’s national IDs as collateral.

He went on his electric scooter from the back-alley office of the gangsters who loaned him the money to the back-alley office of the “American labor recruiter” who’d offered him the job. Hands shaking, he handed over 100,000 RMB to the recruiter: more money than he’d ever seen in his life, and maybe as much as he earned in three years. The recruiter said it’s all set and he’d be calling him to tell him his departure date to Saipan.

The recruiter did call a few days later, telling Ming to go to a travel agency office to buy his ticket to Saipan. Ming complained to his recruiter: He still had to pay for travel costs?

“Do you want to go or not?” was the answer. “If you want to forfeit your 100,000, I’ll find someone else to take your place.” Of course, that 100,000 wasn’t even his to forfeit. It was his mom’s and sister’s IDs, and probably lives, he’d be forfeiting.

He borrowed more money from some other gangsters. The recruiter did actually obtain a CW visa for Ming. But the recruiter told him to buy tickets on a separate flight for his wife and daughter, because they’d be entering as tourists, and their green cards would be arranged later.

Ming arrived in Saipan to be shown to his company-provided housing: a filthy room where six guys were sleeping between shifts. This was where Ming was supposed to be living with his wife and daughter?

He asked the men why they have to sleep there on the job site; can’t they rent beautiful apartments with their pay?

“What pay?” one of the men sighed and laughed. They worked only for the vague promise of getting paid sometime, maybe $1,500 a month max — about a third of what Ming had been promised — but the boss always complained and deducted and they rarely netted more than $1,000 a month for their grueling sixty-hour construction workweeks.

That was when Ming knew he’d been had. But that didn’t mean he could walk away. He had no money, no return ticket, no English, and knew nobody in Saipan, which he was starting to realize wasn’t really the “America” he’d been promised. And leaving his job with 100K in debt in China would mean murder, or worse, of his mom and sister.

As Ming’s first year with his Saipan employer was ending, he remembered that his CW1 visa was valid for only one year. He asked his employer about whether he needs to get an extension. “Just give me $500 for the renewal fee and I’ll get it done,” Ming’s boss told him. Ming scraped up the money, even if it meant he ate only rice for the next two months.

When Ming’s employer’s company finally went out of business and the owners literally fled back to China in the middle of the night, Ming got some surprises. Not just that his CW1 visa had never been renewed and that he’d been out of immigration status for his second year of work: that much he pretty much had already known. But also that those taxes he’d thought he’d pre-paid in China, and then somehow again were deducted from every one of his paychecks in Saipan — those taxes had never actually been paid. And Social Security had no record of him, so his employer had also pocketed his social security deductions.

He’d managed to pay off about half of his 100,000 RMB debt, but because of interest, he still owed about as much as he’d owed at the start. And the gangsters back in China were getting itchy about their money.

So Ming didn’t mug anyone or stick up a poker arcade or even try selling drugs. He went around Chinese construction projects he saw and offered his work. $10 an hour, cash. It would give him some hope of feeding his family and paying off his debt so his relatives aren’t killed. That’s all he wants, and this is how he wound up here.

Lizelle the Filipina Barber Who Was Swindled

Meet Lizelle. She came to the CNMI as a barber just after federalization in 2009. Her labor recruiter told her that now that CNMI immigration is federalized, CW1 visa recipients will automatically become US citizens. He showed her some local newspaper articles about the federalization, and it kind of made sense and sounded true what the recruiter said. Lizelle came up with the money and got a CW1 visa for a job cutting hair at a salon in Garapan. Of course, her boss wasn’t great, made sexual advances, and always cheated her on pay — but what could she do? He controlled her CW1.

Then Ron, a customer of Lizelle’s, gave her an idea. He was a notario back in the Philippines, and now a document processor in Saipan. Instead of depending on her boss for her CW1, she could have Ron file for her CW1, and she could have her own hair salon. Ron would even put the business under his name, as a favor to her.

When Lizelle’s first boss approached her to demand the CW1 renewal fees (as 99% of CNMI bosses illegally demand of employees), she told him nothx. She was quitting, and setting off on her own. She used her savings to buy some haircutting equipment and pay a deposit for a rental space that already had a barber’s chair. Ron took care of the business side.

Ron’s business side had its own heterosexual plans for Lizelle, and she went along with them because Ron controlled her CW1 now. By the time Lizelle knew she was pregnant, Ron had already started shacking up with another woman, but Lizelle was still paying him $100 a month for managing her business and visa.

The money wasn’t great, but at least she’d safely have her CW1. And Ron had been nice enough to pay off Zoning, Licensing, Commerce, DPW, and everyone else who needed paying off, so she had all her business papers in order, proudly displaying her business license in the doorway of her salon. She asked Ron about her CW1 paper almost every week, and he just kept saying that the mail to Saipan is very slow, while always trying to entice her to come over for old times’ sake.

Ron was back in the Philippines by the time Lizelle figured out that the CW1 he’d promised her didn’t exist. Her child was a US citizen, so wouldn’t that allow Lizelle to get parole? No, sorry, dispensa yu, Lizelle is not eligible for parole, because she had a CW1! There is, in fact, no way for Lizelle to get legal status through her US citizen daughter. (THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE BUT I LOVE KOPIKO)

What should Lizelle do? Go back to the Philippines? What about her daughter, who’s a US citizen?

JD Vance and the like will confidently say, “She shouldn’t have had that kid in the first place.”

Our supposed leader saying that is like a weight-loss expert who advises you “You shouldn’t have had those bacon cheeseburgers in the first place.” (I’M TRYING TO USE AN EXAMPLE YOU CAN RELATE TO JD)

 

So, no, really, what should Lizelle do? And what should Ming do? And why is it worth a hundred fifty billion dollars (about $500 per US citizen) to kick them out?

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Mabel Doge Luhan is a woman of loose morals. She resides in Kagman V, where she pursues her passions of crocheting, beatboxing, and falconry.