Ken Scott Baron Podcast

ICE may go too far

Militarized federal encroachments on public life provoke strong, even violent responses — even among those who agree with their aims.

Trump and Stephen Miller set a goal of deporting 1 million undocumented immigrants each year —ICE will now become the largest law enforcement agency in the country.

Is this a major victory? Maybe not because there's reason to believe it could backfire.

Mass deportations on this scale require brute displays of force that may shock the public conscience, even among people who theoretically support the broader goals.

In Los Angeles the administration deployed guardsmen and active-duty military and ICE arrested over 1,600 persons, including workers at car washes and farms — even people making lawful appearances in immigration court.

The American public, which broadly approved of Trump’s tough stance on immigration during the 2024 election, is shifting the other way. A recent CNN poll shows 55 percent think Trump has gone too far in his pursuit of undocumented immigrants.

We’ve been here before — and there is a warning in it for the president.

Take for example the Fugitive Slave Act (FSA) of 1850.

The act inspired widespread disgust throughout the North. The law stripped accused runaways of their right to trial by jury and allowed individual cases to be bumped up from state courts to special federal courts. Most obnoxious to many Northerners, the law stipulated harsh fines and prison sentences for any citizen who refused to cooperate with or aid federal authorities in the capture of accused fugitives — much in the same way the Trump administration has threatened to jail persons who impede its immigration raids.

The parallels to today are fairly obvious.

Voters who, on paper, support the deportation of undocumented persons are beginning to see just what Trump’s dragnet looks like, in close and intimate terms. Some are recoiling at the idea that law-abiding people with legal or protected status, even citizens, might be detained by masked, unidentified agents and deported or swept away to brutal prisons in South America or Africa, without the benefit of a trial.

Many believe that, like the formerly enslaved who built new lives in free states, immigrants who have established themselves as productive and valued members of their communities, and who have otherwise abided by the laws where they live, have earned the right to a pathway to citizenship.

More ominous, still, is the potential for violent reaction. In a country as heavily armed as the United States, where many states allow gun owners to use lethal force when they believe their property or lives to be at stake. The protests that rocked Los Angeles this year, while largely disciplined and peaceful, devolved into instances of violence as police clashed with protesters, some of whom lit cars afire. As the administration’s raids intensify and spread, particularly to states like Texas, where gun ownership is more prevalent, the potential for violence will only increase.

History suggests the story will not be linear. It could radicalize the broader electorate and make the politics of the 2020s more violent, similar to the 1850s. That outcome would make Americans neither more safe nor more free.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nabwmt.substack.com

This is from an earlier post at Youtube but is relevant today.

The Republican Party is effective at campaigning and winning elections, but sucks at governing. For all the huffing and puffing on the campaign trail in 2016, the first Trump administration largely amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy, 500 miles of a border wall and a destructive pandemic gone viral. We now have the most incompetent cabinet in modern history: a health and human services secretary who is already targeting federal vaccination efforts; a director of national intelligence who was devoted to an allegedly abusive yoga-centered cult; a former WWE tycoon turned head of Department of Education; and a former cable news talking head as defense secretary. There is nothing the American public despises more than disorder and a broken economy. With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight, and make the American people miss them.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nabwmt.substack.com

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My skin is light, but my curls reveal my Blackness. It only takes one drop. Being half Black and half white means I cannot easily check off one box or another. And I’m not alone — the number of people identifying as multiracial in the United States has surged in recent years.

I am too Black to be white and too white to be Black..

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “mulatto,” as many of my friends were, it is an offensive, archaic term to describe a person with white and Black parents.

A white guy came up to me in the bar and tapped my shoulder. He didn’t greet me before asking, “Are you half white, half Black?”

Then: “I love mulattos,” he said, before doubling down and going even further, saying in vulgar sexual terms what he’d love to do to “a mulatto.”

I felt like I was being mocked, sexualized and dehumanized.

This was a deliberate act of racism, meant to provoke me and my biracial friend, whom he pointed at while repeating the slur.

I’m aware that racism has pervaded the United States since before its founding. But hearing it from people my age, Gen Z, is disorienting. Knowing they find humor in it is deeply unsettling.

“In the current political moment, I think we’re really seeing a turning back of the clock, a return to sort of these past, older ideas about race, and especially about racial superiority and inferiority,” Morning said.

Whether he knew it or not, that guy’s crude comment echoed a long history of racial fetishization, tracing back to when European colonizers viewed Black people as possessions and Black women were hyper-sexualized, in order to justify the violence that the colonizers inflicted upon them.

“Mulatto” used to be a racial category on the census, along with “octoroon,” meaning one-eighth African blood, and “quadroon,” meaning one-fourth African blood

Scientists included these categories on the census because they were trying to prove that biracial people were not fertile and a “doomed class of people,” a pseudoscientific justification to prevent interracial mixing.

Race is a political and social classification system, she said, which humans invented to divide people into different “categories of worth.”

My white mother is a likely descendant of colonizers, her ancestors being English and Irish. My Black father is a descendant of slaves. I am both.

My relationship with my mom was on the verge of collapse in 2020, shortly after George Floyd was murdered 10 minutes from my high school. We had spent the previous four years failing to understand each other.

But as I was leaving for college, I realized I needed her. The relationship between a mother and daughter is invaluable and irreplaceable.

I now understand that the deepest divide in this country is not one between Democrats and Republicans or conservatives and liberals.

It is one from which racism takes root: how we choose to treat each other.

Do we respond to our differences with hate and a desire to control, or with empathy and love? This is what defines our society.

I know my mom has no hatred for any group of people, and I love her dearly.

But racism isn’t always about hate. It can also stem from patterns we inherited or habits we’ve never questioned.

Racism is taught and exists in all of us. It is embedded in the systems that structure our lives.

The only way to overcome it is to have a burning passion to disintegrate it, within ourselves and our communities.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nabwmt.substack.com

President Trump believes that President Barack Obama committed treason, a crime that may be punishable by death. Seeking a distraction from his current political travails, Mr. Trump is attempting to bring up the nearly decade-old controversy over Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, asked the Justice Department to investigate whether intelligence officials in the Obama administration faked evidence of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.

Treason is the only crime defined in the Constitution, and it’s set out there, in relevant part, as giving “aid and comfort” to our enemies. Regurgitating a claim that Mr. Trump and his allies have made for years, Ms. Gabbard said that President Obama, after Hillary Clinton was defeated by President Trump in the 2016 election, “directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false.”

Every investigation of the 2016 campaign, including the one by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018, reached the same conclusion. “We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling,” said then-Senator Marco Rubio, who is now, of course, Mr. Trump’s secretary of state. In other words, the conclusion of the Obama administration, far from being a crime, much less treason, was a simple statement of fact.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nabwmt.substack.com

Hello, this is Ken Barron.

I'm with an NABWMT organization,

and I've been writing and publishing podcasts over the last 10 years directly on

the NABWMT website.

But I've moved to Substack to get a better audience,

a wider audience,

but the topics will still be the same.

It will be basically fighting racism and homophobia.

So the podcasts will also be accompanied by posts to Facebook and other platforms.

So I'm looking forward to being on this new platform and getting to know you more

and allowing you to make more comments and discussions on the type of content I

have.

Thank you for listening.

I appreciate it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nabwmt.substack.com

Rope-a-dope the Administration The Republican Party is effective at campaigning and winning elections, but sucks at governing. For all the huffing and puffing on the campaign trail in 2016, the first Trump administration largely amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy, 500 miles of a border wall and a destructive pandemic gone viral. We now […]

President Donald Trump owes his re-election in part to some gains among working-class Latino voters who rolled the dice on a change in economic policy — but that change is likely to hit them worse than anyone else. There are all the cuts to vital programs and services Republicans plan, including “changes to Medicare, the […]

Ken discusses Trump’s tariffs and the response of Canada in this reaction video and podcast.

Do the Democrats have a plan to take back power in Washington back from Republicans in two years? Democrats, have said they’ll oppose President-elect Donald Trump and his allies when their values collide but are open to cooperation on a range of issues, including immigration, federal spending and entitlements. The strategy marks a turnaround from […]

The US House decided to strip funding for 9/11 health care program The NYS city’s firefighter unions slammed a decision by the House to strip vital health care funds for 9/11 first responders from the federal budget after Elon Musk and Donald Trump nuked a stopgap spending plan, threatening a government shutdown. Firemen were able to fall […]