The Cosplay Is No Longer Play: Terrorizing Americans in Their Homes
One of the laments that I have seen more and more in the Trump II era is some variation on this rhetorical question: "How is this not the only thing that we are talking about?" There are so many outrageous things happening at all times that we lose track of too many truly terrible things in the maelstrom, with a new outrage always there to move attention away from ongoing horrors. Sometimes the next distraction is silly, like so-called escalator-gate, in which the Foxiverse recently went insane claiming that a slow-moving set of stairs lurched to a halt and nearly injured or killed their favorite autocrat. But usually, the next news cycle is filled with some other genuinely horrible thing that should hold everyone's attention, only to be replaced again with something else, ad infinitum.
None of which is to say that I do not understand why some big stories disappear. But "something else horrible happened, so we need to talk about that now" does not allow any time to assess degrees of evil or to decide not to move away from one evil thing because the evil acts that followed are not as evil. This is impossible as a practical matter, because there is no way to coordinate news coverage in a way that would prioritize stories based on seriousness and not breaking-ness. And it is also uncomfortable, because no one wants to tell the victims of some horrible injustice that their stories will have to wait (possibly forever) because someone else has it even worse.
In any event, my candidate for the top story in this category is the ICE raid on an apartment house in Chicago last week. How is this not the only thing that we are talking about? Seriously. With the thinnest of veneers (claiming that there might be some gang members living in the building), Trump's shock troops turned an apartment building into a war zone, without even the hint that they cared how many innocent people were harmed or terrorized in their homes.
Notably, a BBC story about the raid quoted a witness saying that "[i]t was like a movie." That is hardly a surprise. People have noted sardonically (but seriously) that Secretary of Defense (not War) Pete Hegseth seems to have gotten his ideas about military prowess from the movie "300," with one commentator writing that "[w]hen I hear Hegseth talk endlessly about the need for trim, beardless military men doing pull-ups it’s that cartoonish image of Sparta that springs to mind. He wants to make soldiers that look and feel to him like timeless killing machines, extras from 300."
Similarly, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was appropriately raked over the coals by the "South Park" guys for her glammed-up cosplay, noting that she seems constantly to be posing for photo ops rather than doing her job. In April, only a few months into the job, she had already earned the derisive nickname ICE Barbie, and her lack of seriousness was seen not only in the way she insisted on being photographed in full gear. Her idiocy was deadly serious (and I do mean deadly): "ICE Barbie Kristi Noem Mocked for Pointing Gun at Officer’s Head." Yes, she did that.
I therefore had to wonder if someone at ICE is secretly a fan -- a truly confused fan, but a fan nonetheless -- of 1985's anti-fascist film "Brazil," directed by Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam. Notwithstanding its title, the movie is set in a near-future dystopian Britain that is being run by a fascist government. At the beginning of the film, a mechanical error by an automated typewriter results in an arrest warrant being issued for a man named Buttle rather than the actual target, an anti-government activist named Tuttle (played by a brilliant Robert De Niro).
That plot point alone brings up another "How is this not the only thing that we are talking about?" candidate, given that the arrest and illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was (according to ICE's own court filing) the result of an "administrative error." In addition, a federal judge recently wrote that there is a "realistic likelihood” that the continuing legal hell that the Trumpists are inflicting on Abrego Garcia (and his family) is a vindictive prosecution, which makes the story all the more shameful.
My focus here, however, is on the ways in which Trump's people seem to want to reenact movie and TV scenes, which does not seem to be what is motivating their disgusting harassment of Abrego Garcia. Instead, the ICE action in Chicago last week seems more likely to have been motivated by the numerous scenes in too many action movies that show heavily armed agents/soldiers crashing into buildings without concern for human life. Indeed, reports out of Chicago indicate that some agents rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters and broke through windows and doors. Again: "It was like a movie."
I invite readers to watch the key scene from "Brazil" (2 minutes and 37 seconds long). I repeat that I do not in fact think that the cosplayers at ICE (and more likely their bosses) were thinking of that film, preferring some version of, I dunno, a random Steven Seagal movie that I have never seen. For that matter, maybe every Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris movie has one or more scenes like that.
Even so, there are three reasons to watch the "Brazil" scene. First, "Brazil" is actually a well crafted movie, as opposed to the schlocky actioners that were already easy to parody by 1985. Second, the scene includes the ridiculous overuse of excessive force that we saw forty years later in Chicago, including police officers in full riot gear coming through windows and doors and, yes, even rappelling from the ceiling (through a hole that they created). Even as the scene ends, there is a bit of mordant humor as the agents who are departing from the wrecked apartment shoot recklessly into the ceiling, where a cleanup crew has already been dispatched to fix the hole (incompetently, of course).
Third, consider the way that Buttle's wife and children are treated in that scene. The children appear not yet to be ten years old, and the daughter is carried out of her bedroom by a masked agent who relatively gently places the girl into her frantic mother's arms. Meanwhile, the Buttles' son tries to stop the agents from taking his father away, but the armed men merely pull him away and otherwise leave him alone. The neighbor through whose floor the agents rappelled was also unharmed and mostly left alone.
By contrast, the ICE agents in Chicago "went door to door, woke up residents and used zip ties to restrain them. Residents and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which canvassed the area, said those who were zip tied included children and U.S. citizens. Rodrick Johnson, a U.S. citizen briefly detained, said agents broke through his door and placed him in zip ties." According to a report in Vanity Fair:
It was reported that almost every single person in one apartment building was ripped from their home in the middle of the night by agents of the state, and those terrified residents—including elders and kids—were forced to sit in the street for hours, with some finally returning to wrecked apartments and missing possessions. “What is the morality? Where’s the human?” resident Eboni Watson recalled asking one agent. “One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.’” According to Watson, “trucks and military-style vans were used to separate parents from their children.” (A DHS spokesperson responded that children were taken into custody for their safety until they can be put in the care of a guardian or the state.)Yes, f*** them kids. So those are the three reasons to watch the scene from Brazil. But wait, actually there are four reasons. (I had to make a side-reference to an actual Monty Python sketch, did I not?) Fourth, part of the dark humor in that scene involves showing what were at least attempts to be efficient and competent on the part of the government agents. The on-the-spot repair crew is one example, but the more notable (and funnier) one is the brusquely polite bureaucrat wearing a bowler and overcoat who arrives with "your receipt for your husband" for Mrs. Buttle to sign (along with "my receipt for your receipt").
This is all to say that even the weird mind of Monty Python's animator -- the man who went berserk making "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" only three years later -- set himself the task of making up a story about a once-democratic government having gone full fascist, and although he was able to picture acts of cruelty and overkill by such a government, even he could not imagine something this recklessly cruel and deliberately excessive.
All of this is especially grim when we compare it to the Trump-led freakout after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in 2022 looking for (and finding) government records that Trump had taken from the White House and lied about possessing. The American right called it a "raid," alleging excessive force and all the rest, even though the action was carefully planned to be carried out when Trump was not there, and Trump's representatives had been informed about the details of the search. But to hear Trump's fans talk about it, one would think that Trump had been zip-tied and left to sit on a sidewalk while Ivanka was dragged away and thrown into a van.
In fact, all the way back in 1996, Senate Republicans allowed a man to lie under oath at a committee hearing, claiming that the IRS had "pulled his manager's [teenaged] daughter out of a shower at
gunpoint." That, and most of the rest of what that committee countenanced, was an outright lie. (See here at 59-60.) So Republicans are certainly capable of worrying about government overreach, excessive force, and not harming "them kids," but only opportunistically -- and, when necessary or merely convenient, dishonestly.
I do understand why we are talking about the government shutdown, the indictment of James Comey, and all the rest. But now that Trumpists' cosplay has gone from lip-augmented anti-immigrant porn to indiscriminately terrorizing people (including American citizens) in their homes, maybe we need to circle back around to this one.
- Neil H. Buchanan