In education, we talk a lot about product vs. process. If your kindergartner comes home with a beautiful piece of artwork, worthy of being displayed in the front hall, odds are very good that your kindergartner didn’t really make it. Their teacher made it. Your kindergartner just sort of helped. That’s what we call product-oriented instruction.

However, if your kindergartner comes home with a piece of art that aggressively sucks ass, and that looks like it was made by, well, a kindergartner, it’s a good bet that your kid really made it. And that their teacher is one who believes that the artistic process holds more instructional value than its outcome.

Politics is like this sometimes too.

Ink Blots

There’s nothing really new about political Rorschach Tests. Example: Trump tosses some red meat to his base, his base devours it in orgasmic frenzy, and the left has a conniption fit over the very same material. Swap out Trump for Obama, dial your time machine back a few years, and you see the same thing. Over and over. It’s a feature, not a bug, of tribal political landscapes. We all see what we want to in the ink blots.

But a weird thing is happening on the left that is, I think, both newer and more worrisome (if you care about the left). Lefties keep finding themselves the subjects of political Rorschach Tests without appearing to know they’ve signed up. Increasingly, they’re lab rats, rather than volunteer participants.

As recently as a few years ago, a leftist who rage-shared a Trump video could be expected to caption it with something like, “CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW MANY DEMONIC FASCISTS VOTED FOR THIS???” Now, they’re more like to lead with, “This is so scary,” or “I’m so sad for my country,” and leave out their awareness of the offending material’s appeal to folks with different politics and priorities.

Has anyone else observed this? Is it just me? I’ll warrant, it’s a very fine line, and maybe I’m making too much of the distinction. A lot of this is just down to the accelerating balkanization of social media - X going right, Bluesky going left, and all that.

Burying the lede just a bit deeper, I noticed this trend when I started to see the following chart shared approvingly by both liberal white women, and also by people who think liberal white women are ridiculous. Both considered it a dunk. A gotcha.

Party politics is zero sum. Both sides can’t win. They certainly can’t both win at the same time by playing the exact same hand. Here, the well-educated liberal white ladies considered this table validation of their brilliant correctness, while conservatives took it as evidence of the liberal white ladies’ cognitive inadequacy. Both groups banked a W, both took a victory lap, and both went home smugly satisfied.

That’s odd, right?

A more recent instance of this dynamic materialized when Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, shared a video to his X feed of Venezuelan deportees arriving from the United States to be incarcerated at El Salvador’s mega-prison, CECOT. The Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. That’s all cognates, so I trust you to work out the translation for yourself.

For today, we’re going to focus on the politics of this more than the policy. But as we do that, we need to keep in mind that the policy implications here are profound. And that their profundity is fueling the intense political reaction.

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At issue isn’t just the controversial decision to house these men outside the United States (we’ve been down a similar road with the Guantanamo detainees) and it’s not just the Trump administration’s decision to use irregular legal tools to do it (The Patriot Act was more radical and than the decision to use the Alien Enemies Act in a novel way). What exploded so many brains was the Trump clan’s bold defiance of a federal judge’s order to turn the plane carrying these detainees around, and their subsequent gloating in the aftermath.

This is not a mere news blip over which people are flipping out. There’s plenty of meat on this bone. We’re just going to have to tupperware most of it for later.

It’s interesting to me that the fuming Trump critics who shared Bukele’s video, typically invoking their rage and fear at what it represented, appear to have missed something quite important: how enjoyable the film’s target audience was going to find it.

This isn’t really a new phenomenon either. If we consider that the members of what we once called the “intellectual dark web” were at the vanguard of the great woke pushback, we might also take note of how many of those guys owe their fame and status to the people who hated them the most. Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, Nicholas Christakis; these guys were obscure, mostly unknown college professors whose rough treatment at the hands of woke mobs made them all virally sympathetic. So it’s not a fresh observation that the left’s inability to control its outbursting often hurts its causes.

But in the case of the Bukele film, something that should have been glaringly obvious didn’t seem to be: Bukele wanted everyone to see this.

This wasn’t some phone video that took Youtube by storm. This was an expertly-choreographed, professionally-shot, big-budget advertisement for El Salvador’s hardcore approach to criminal justice. It’s got danger music and everything!

This wasn’t for Salvadorans, who do not need to be sold on their leader’s greatness. This was created to show Americans a different, supposedly better way to handle dangerous criminals. We can be sure of this because Bukele’s post about it was in English. Which is actually not the language they speak in the country he leads. The thing is basically a giant Trump ad. And with the good help of a great many leftists, 10s of millions of people (so far) have watched it.

The whole episode was a corollary to the Streisand Effect, but on meth. It’s like if you somehow managed to round up the membership of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and trick them all into passing out shots in bar parking lots.

It’s enough to make me wonder whether the left hasn’t lost its grip on the politics of immigration and deportation.

We might treat immigration as an sub-issue that exists under the wider umbrella of crime. Or, I don’t know, maybe that’s upside down. Maybe criminals are more conceptually similar to immigrants - to a foreign ‘Other’ - than my framework credits. Whatever the correct ordering should be, I find it useful to consider these things as two sides to the same coin, and as related, in terms of how both left and right react to them.

Media Matters

Discontent on the right has been brewing for a good while. Social media - X especially - is awash in videos of brazen criminals committing brazen crimes while looking effortlessly happy doing so. An entire subgenre of this content centers masses of border jumpers, waltzing past land barriers as if invited to do so.

Statistics can’t touch this stuff. Nobody is swayed by being told (correctly) that both crime and border crossings are down. Even if the folks insisting this were considered credible (which they are emphatically not) no chart or table could ever resonate as powerfully as something you can watch in live action.

Liberals may prefer to avoid this type of content, but they are every bit as susceptible to its influence. The 2020 slaying of George Floyd caused a nationwide eruption of riots and angry protests, all aimed at redressing the supposed epidemic of police violence against unarmed, black Americans. The raw numbers were quite out of proportion to the intensity of the public outcry, however. The year Floyd was killed, in a nation of nearly 700,000 sworn officers of the law, about 18 unarmed black people were killed by police. Which is less than half the number of police officers who died by violence during the same period.

The correct number, in both cases, should of course be zero. But based solely on the data, unarmed Americans in 2020, of any color, had about as much cause to fear being killed by police as they had cause to fear being killed by their pets. Point being: rightoids are not the only folks capable of getting one-shotted by a disturbing internet video. We all have this tendency.

Three things are universally true here: 1) viral depictions of true crime lead to outsized concern for the prevalence of such crime, 2) both left and right are vulnerable to having their minds bent by this content, and 3) those affected typically want to punish the forces they hold responsible. On the left, that’s usually cops or white people. On the right, it’s non-white folks, and of course, it’s immigrants. Perception will always trump reality, and will always leave members of blamed groups vulnerable to harsh retaliation, which is what we’re seeing now with immigration.

Floyd was something of a Rorschach test all on his own. When conservatives learned of his extensive criminal history - including an incident in which he’d held a gun to the abdomen of a pregnant woman whose home he’d broken into looking for drugs - both Floyd and his honorers on the left became highly unsympathetic. It didn’t seem worth it to righties to bend out of shape in response to such an obvious menace being removed permanently from society.

Liberals saw it quite differently, and considered the conservative fixation on Floyd’s history an outrage in and of itself. Floyd’s character wasn’t the issue, his unlawful killing was. Floyd had served his time for those other crimes. Those debts were paid. The day he died, all he’d done was try to buy smokes with fake money and struggle when confronted by police. Not great things to do, but not things for which we execute people.

Product & Process

Five years on from Floyd and we’re still having effectively the same fights. Conservative supporters of Trump’s decision to deport five suspected (and undocumented) members of Tren de Aragua are concerned with who the men are, what they’ve done, and how to get them out. Liberal critics are concerned with how the system has dealt with them.

In other words, Trumpers are focused on the product. Libs are focused on the process. It certainly isn’t the case that liberals want violent, Venezuelan gang bangers who entered the country illegally to set up camp. They just want an orderly method, one they can trust, to assign guilt and handle expulsion.

Trump supporters are coming from a very different place. They don’t view this in abstract terms. They see violent thugs who don’t belong in America anyway, and they couldn’t give two hoots over how they’re made to leave, or where they end up, so long as they get gone.

The left fears that if Trump can hopscotch over due process for these men, he’ll expand the power to cover native-born criminals. Then perhaps native-born non criminals? Annoying activists, Dem donors, Rachel Zegler!

I’m inclined to applaud this skepticism from critics. It’s certainly warranted here. We really do not want a system in which Trump or one of his goons can just disappear people they don’t like by punting them into Central American prisons. That’s f*****g insane. But this is also a political setup, and Dems are walking right into it.

Trump is bamboozling the left into helping him grease the skids for his immigration and speech crackdowns. He’s testing them out first on the least sympathetic people imaginable, knowing full well that the left will take the bait. If we want to restore normalcy, we’ll need to be more discerning and less flappable in how we freak out about this stuff, and we need to choose carefully what, specifically, we want to be freaking out over. We’re on quite solid footing with the process argument (this is a bad process). But we’re being tricked into making an utterly ridiculous argument over product: these poor gang bangers should have gotten to stay in the promised land.

It’s not like this is some next-level political psy-op either. This is basically what Ronald Reagan did when he used “welfare queens” to attack public benefits. But in Reagan’s era, we had the “Reagan Democrats” to bridge the gap between the two sides, and of course, the “welfare queen” was just a meme that Reagan made up to rile up his base. In this case, the people being argued about are very real, and the moderate Dems have been spooked out of pushing back too hard against the identity goblins in their own party over what codes as an identity issue.

Innocence Narratives

Hollywood absolutely loves stories about the falsely accused. It’s an enormously popular trope. So much so that it’s given people who lack firsthand knowledge of the criminal justice system the impression that the criminally charged are basically as likely to be innocent as guilty. This is wildly untrue.

If cops have arrested somebody on suspicion of being a criminal, the overwhelming likelihood is that this has happened because the person is a criminal. And since crime is rarely something a person just dabbles in once, when cops see a criminal history, they assume, with usually good reason, that they’re on the right track.

Anyone who watches television can recite the Miranda warning: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you…and yadda.” What I suspect fewer people know is that Ernesto Miranda - the subject of that case - was a lifelong scumbag. He was a deadbeat burglar and rapist who was put back in prison after his conviction was initially overturned, because even without his supposedly coerced confession, the evidence against him was so overwhelming. When paroled, he’d gained status as something like a famous outlaw, and even went on to sign autographs for other ne’er-do-wells until he died in a bar fight at the age of 34.

Miranda’s story is sadly much truer to life than better known stories like To Kill A Mockingbird. Even guys who actually do get shafted by the system are rarely choir boys. Clarence Earl Gideon (of Gideon’s Trumpet) was a thief and a drifter. Reuben Carter (of The Hurricane) was rarely out of trouble with the law. And you may want to dodge entirely the rabbit hole that is the actual conduct of the Central Park Five…

The checks we build into our system to give innocent men and women recourse to defend themselves are, in actuality, far more likely to be used by guilty men and women to gum up the system and try to get themselves back to the streets. Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t have these checks! We must have them! But the left’s failure to see American crime with the steely eyes it demands is letting the right run circles around us, and remain quite viable politically while doing so.

The Case of Jasmine Mooney

I’ve argued before that while technically a crime, we should think of illegal border crossings more like speeding or jaywalking and less like robbery. And even if you disagree, you should be highly disturbed by this story about Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian actor whose apparently lawful attempts to secure a work visa landed her in a Kafkaesque hellscape of indefinite detention that should shame any citizen claiming to belong to a civilized nation. From her account:

“When we arrived at our next destination, we were forced to go through the entire intake process all over again, with medical exams, fingerprinting – and pregnancy tests; they lined us up in a filthy cell, squatting over a communal toilet, holding Dixie cups of urine while the nurse dropped pregnancy tests in each of our cups. It was disgusting.

We sat in freezing-cold jail cells for hours, waiting for everyone to be processed. Across the room, one of the women suddenly spotted her husband. They had both been detained and were now seeing each other for the first time in weeks.”

This is - no other words for it - f*****g sick. And not ‘sick’ in the good way, like how the kids use it.

I don’t know if what happened to Mooney was a consequence of intentional cruelty, incompetence, or both. But as an American, it embarrasses me. And I suspect I am far from alone in that. I don’t think even the hardest core MAGA-hatters voted for Trump because they thought he’d twist the knife in a Canadian actor best known for her role in - I s**t you not - American Pie.

Is a big part of this racial? You bet. The architects of this crackdown have a particular image in mind of who they mean to target with it, and it is not cute white ladies from Canada. That will make Mooney’s case a vastly more useful rallying point, by the way, than the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. Which, I know, ouch.

But while race factors into the politics here, it’s not the whole shebang, and it’s not the only thing that makes Mooney’s case different. Mooney, if we believe her story (I do) was acting in good faith, trying to comply with the rules of our immigration system. When told she’d erred, she tried to fly back to Canada on her own dime, but was instead incarcerated on ours.

There are no metrics by which this qualifies as good policy. It’s pitiless, pointless, and expensive. The other women with whom Mooney was locked up had mostly all overstayed visas, which is at least something they might reasonably have known they did.

Now, I have overstayed visas. The notion that we should be lengthily imprisoning people for doing it is utter madness. At most, it warrants a modest fine and greater scrutiny on future visits. But if the idea here is to get tough on violators of all flavors, Mooney doesn’t even belong in that category. Which makes her case a useful one for pushing back, even if the racial dynamics give us the ick.

Libs are on point when we argue that designing a callous, Byzantine system that steamrolls due process, will quickly lose us control over who gets victimized by it. But if we ever want our politics to be digestible again, we need to start thinking about this in the micro, rather than just the macro. Because this isn’t a first year law school seminar. We’re playing with live rounds, aiming them in the direction of real people, who occupy the real world, not just a textbook page. And no, I’m not just talking about the detained and deported, I’m talking about crime victims.

In the real world, there is a pretty f*****g real difference between a Canadian performer who wants to come to America to work in the wellness industry, and a murderous vato who wants to come to America to exploit, terrorize, and kill people. Clarence Darrow might have regarded them as functionally the same. But friends, a significant majority of us are not Clarence Darrow. And should not pretend we have his job.

This isn’t my way of saying that I think Trump is right. I don’t. I think Trump is behaving very dangerously, and it strikes me as entirely plausible that we might only be on the edge of a much more significant crackdown on those he finds undesirable, their speech, and on the people who just sort of look like them.

But that makes it all the more important that we understand what resonates with normal-ish voters, and what reads as high-minded faffery.

What Trump is doing is mostly, for now, popular. And in control of all three branches of government, he can do it without meaningful oversight. To stop it, and stop him, we need to make it unpopular. And that is just not going to happen by crying crocodile tears over hoodlums who belong exactly where they’re ending up.

Politics & Policy

Another word on the El Salvador angle: I’m glancing over a lot of this because there’s a door-stopper book’s worth of material to cover already. I need to save some of it for future posts or this one is going to become even less manageable than it is now.

But some complicated aspects of this case made CECOT an appealing destination to throw these guys, and for reasons other than just Trump and Bukele wanting to flex. The men sent to CECOT are all from Venezuela, which is key, because Venezuela does not maintain formal diplomatic relations with the United States. They won’t accept our deportees from their country, but they will accept them from El Salvador.

Prison vs. detention center is largely a difference without distinction, except in terms of who goes to each place, and how they get there. Sending a criminal to prison, according to US law, requires high evidentiary standards to be met, and due process to be observed. Holding an undocumented immigrant in detention requires none of that, and neither does deporting them. Of course, merely sending somebody home is one thing. Sending them to a notorious prison, in a foreign country other than their own, with hardened criminals, and after no official determination of guilt, is quite another. Trump & co. are sidestepping these quibbles by blaming Venezuela’s obstinacy and saying they weren’t really left a choice.

I call b******t, but make of that what you will. However, it does give Trump’s move the veneer of necessity, at least to his supporters. And liberal critics should learn about the diplomatic dimension before getting puffed up and stepping to Trumpers over this. If social media is any indication, they mostly aren’t doing that.

The plan is to hold these men in detention at CECOT for roughly one year - this could vary - while their status can be assessed. El Salvador was an obvious choice because Bukele is openly pitching Trump on sending more American prisoners to his hellholes as a cost saving mechanism (and presumably, to scare straight any would-be banger considering taking up the colors). That’s a complicated question all on its own, and one about which I have very mixed feelings, but we’ll have to save it for another day.

I won’t claim that threading this needle is going to be easy. Take the case of Javier Garcia Casique, a gay hairdresser from Maracay who thought he was being deported back to Venezuela when ICE nabbed him, but has instead ended up in CECOT with the gangsters. Casique’s family insists he has no gang ties, in which case, tossing the poor guy in CECOT was a barbaric and unjustifiable move.

So what do we do about it?

I submit that we have to use cases like this to push for tweaks to the system rather than for its full upending. A full upending isn’t going to happen right now. Trump is too popular, and he (somewhat credibly) thinks he has a mandate for this. I think we may need to follow the guidelines laid out in the serenity prayer. We should accept the things we cannot change, be courageous in trying to change what he can, and be crystal f*****g clear about the difference.

Since nobody - actually nobody - wants violent criminals who’ve illegally entered the United States to be able to stay there, maybe we swallow, for now, the Trump team’s harsh tactics in going after them, and focus instead on reinserting checks to make sure we’re not snaring ordinary, decent folks in the net. Maybe we let them play a little rough with the bad guys so that we get some rhythm on helping the not-so-bad guys; the ones who just overstayed visas, or petitioned for asylum incorrectly.

Yes, there are broad, systemic concerns here. I do not need to be convinced of that. But we will make zero headway in addressing any of them if the folks driving this think we’re a bunch of bunny-hugging dipshits.

It sucks, but it’s true: Trump won. And he won by promising to do exactly what he’s doing. The silver lining with him though is that he isn’t ideologically wed to anything. If he thinks what he’s doing is unpopular, he’ll pull back (as he seems to be doing with DOGE). If he only thinks he’s owning the libs though, he’ll lean in hard.

Writers of fiction will know well the tipping point at which a short story is in danger of becoming a short novel, and needs to end before that can happen. That’s where this piece is now, so I’m going to leave it here. But this won’t be the last time we discuss this topic, or the last lens through which we view it.

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