MANY THINGS CONSIDERED: The Lying Will Continue

I began today by reading a remarkable story with a dateline from a tiny flyspeck of a town in extreme northeastern Montana.

Nora Mabie with the Montana Free Press wrote about a local mechanic in Froid, Montana – 42-year-old Roberto Orozco-Ramirez – who, after many years owning and operating the areas only auto repair shop, is now in federal detention five hours away in Great Falls.

Orozco-Ramirez, a business owner with no criminal record who has coached Little League baseball and who many consider a pillar of the community, has a wife and four children and, of course, a birthplace in Mexico.

Mabie’s story goes on to recount how many of Orozco-Ramirez’s neighbors, many Donald Trump voters, made the trip to Great Falls courtroom this week to display solidarity with their friend and neighbor. ¹

The judge handling the case set two hearings for Orozo-Ramirez in early February, potentially leading to his deportation. Meanwhile he’s in jail on a charge of illegally reentering the United States more than a decade ago.

Here’s a sample of the Montana Free Press story, both heartbreaking and, in a strange way, hopeful.

Exiting the courtroom after the hearing, Orozco-Ramirez’s son, Roberto Orozco Lazcano, 18, hugged his two younger brothers. Neighbors embraced, wiping tears from their eyes. “It’s nonsense,” Brittney Nordlund, who works in Froid Public Schools, said of the allegation that Orozco-Ramirez is “dangerous.”

“They’re lying,” Rachel Sundheim, another Froid resident, said through tears. “He is the role model we want in our community.”

Their decision to travel nearly 400 miles — one way — to the hearing, which lasted all of eight minutes, was just the latest of many community efforts to show their support for their neighbor. Though the vast majority of Orozco-Ramirez’s neighbors voted for President Donald Trump, who has made vows to deport “illegal aliens” a centerpiece of his administration, the town has rallied to support him — since his arrest they have demonstrated their outrage at Border Patrol through protests, letters to lawmakers, public Facebook posts and now their presence in the courtroom.

“The community responded more than I ever thought,” said Orozco Lazcano, a freshman at Williston State College in North Dakota, who returned to Froid last week when his dad called and said Border Patrol was staged outside his business. “They’re giving us help I didn’t know we needed.”

Help they didn’t know they needed.

The first big lie that comes to mind reading this story from a little town in rural Montana is that the massive immigration crackdown orchestrated by Donald Trump and his fascist-adjacent assistants was designed to go after “the worst of the worst.”

That certainly doesn’t sound like a community involved auto mechanic who coaches Little League, has no criminal record and who is vouched for by the local sheriff.

Here’s the Associated Press from last July:

There has been an increase of arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement since Trump began his second term, with reports of raids across the country. Yet the majority of people currently detained by ICE have no criminal convictions. Of those who do, relatively few have been convicted of high-level crimes — a stark contrast to the chilling nightmare Trump describes to support his border security agenda.

So “the worst of the worst” – the murderers, rapists and child molesters – was a lie from the very first day. There have been many arrests of people with criminal records, but the great crackdown rapidly spread to people like the Froid auto mechanic with no criminal record and often with pending immigration cases. And this continues today, even as the administration postures about scaling back.

The ugly, deadly events of the last three weeks in Minnesota mean, I think, that the community there has responded as it has because the lie about “the worst of the worst” is so obvious. The government scarcely conceals this lie while conducting immigration raids on schools, churches, hospitals and restaurants.

The lie even meets resistance in Froid, Montana.

But lies move quickly and multiply like cancer cells.

The street protesters in Minneapolis and the neighbors of a mechanic in Montana are now, in the eyes of many on the far, far right, another real problem.

Here’s Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson, once a Trump critic and a standard issue conservative Republican who has gone all in on the lying:

Across the country, including in Idaho, left-wing agitators have taken to the streets to defend child sex offenders, drug traffickers, murderers, and other violent criminals, simply because they oppose a president who is actually enforcing the law.

Let me repeat: these individuals are not protesters. They are agitators.

Not protesters. Agitators.

The people who drove 400 miles to Great Falls to support their neighbors are agitators? The people who cover the Statehouse steps in Boise, Idaho are agitators? The folks who have been turning out rain or shine for weeks in tiny Nehalem, Oregon are agitators?

As far as I can tell Simpson and most other Republican members of Congress have had nothing at all to say about the violent tactics of ICE and Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Nothing about the shooting deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Nothing about guys like Roberto Orozco-Ramirez.

Their comments are reserved for those who protest the actions of their government.

Agitators

The bad guys in Mike Simpson’s lies are the “agitators.”

And he’s far from alone in spreading this garbage. At least he stopped short of calling them “paid agitators,” a term the president of the United States has used repeatedly.

Here’s The Guardian:

At the White House on [January 9], Donald Trump endorsed his vice-president’s baseless claim that Renee Good, the 37-year-old woman killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday, was part of a shadowy “leftwing network” trying “to incite violence” against federal agents.

Asked by a Fox News correspondent to expand on JD Vance’s comments about Good, the president said that the vice-president “is generally very accurate” and then cited what he referred to as evidence that at least one person in Good’s vicinity when she was killed was “probably a paid agitator”.

The claim that none of the protesters who oppose his mass deportation campaign are motivated by horror at what is being done to their neighbors, but must be paid operatives, is a familiar one for Trump, who has made it repeatedly in recent months.

What Trump, Simpson, Kristi Noem, Senator Markwayne Mullin (my candidate for stupidest member of the Senate, but it is a close contest) and others are doing with this agitator, paid or otherwise, is an attempt to delegitimize political dissent, to argue that Americans exercising their First Amendment rights are unworthy.

By this logic the guys with the guns are always right. The people with the cell phone cameras are the agitators.

There is a lot of history with this word “agitator.”

As a thought experiment I unlimbered my Newspapers.com subscription and went on a search for that word “agitator” checking a variety of dates in American history, like 1917 when many Americans opposed U.S. entry into World War I.

Not surprisingly a Montana socialist newspaper hit back at the use of the word to demean war protesters.

In 1934 Minnesota, a time of considerable labor unrest during the Great Depression, the word “agitator” pops up over and over, including the “paid” label.

In California in 1940:

And during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s – racial agitators.

It’s an old story and all of piece with our moment. There are a thousand other examples of labeling protest as agitation, and it’s all in the service of denouncing Americans for protesting government or police actions, the very essence of what the First Amendment allows, you might even say encourages.

Who are the agitators?

I’ll leave you with a suggestion: Read Adam Serwer’s outstanding reporting in The Atlantic – here’s a free link – about the protests in Minnesota, including 50-year old Trygve Olsen (now there’s a Minnesota name for you).

Among much else Serwer describes the different way Americans in the very cold north have stood up to an out of control federal government, a sentiment – standing up to an out of control government – that use to be the essence of conservative thought.

The largest [group] is the protesters, who show up at events such as Friday’s march in downtown Minneapolis, and at the airport, where deportation flights take off. Many protesters have faced tear gas and pepper spray, and below-zero temperatures—during the Twin Cities march on Friday, I couldn’t take notes; the ink in my pens had frozen.

Then there are the people who load up their car with food, toiletries, and school supplies from churches or schools to take to families in hiding. They also help families who cannot work meet their rent or mortgage payments. In addition to driving around with [Trygve] Olsen, I rode along with a Twin Cities mom of young kids named Amanda as she did deliveries (she asked me to use only her first name). Riding in her small car—her back row was taken up by three child seats and a smattering of stray toys—she told me that she’d gotten involved after more than 100 students at her kids’ elementary school simply stopped coming in. Parents got organized to provide the families with food, to shepherd their kids to school, and to arrange playdates for those stuck inside.

These are the “agitators.”

Over the last year so many American “institutions” – including universities, major law firms, corporate CEO’s, big media companies, most of the conservative movement – crumbled during an authoritarian takeover of the federal government. In fairness, many “institutions” have been failing for a long time, yet it was still shocking to witness how quickly, willingly and cravenly they tumbled.

These institutions and the people who run them aren’t going to save a fragile democracy. The millionaire CEO’s take dinner with the authoritarians, the big media companies pay protection money, the Mike Simpson’s of the world make their peace with the true worst of the worst.

They all caved at first fight.

But not so the bundled masses in frozen Minnesota. They, and like minded Americans everywhere, including from Froid, Montana – and a protest song from Bruce Springsteen – just might save us if we’re lucky.

The agitators are on the rise and they have the power of righteousness on their side.

Thank God.