July 11 Friday roundup

This week’s episode of the podcast looks at why it matters what we call detention camps and includes a strategic approach to figuring out how to reverse the administration’s momentum on this front. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to read it instead of watching or listening, or if you’d like to explore links to people and events mentioned in the episode, you can find them in this week’s Tuesday post.

A number of people have been reaching out about the Everglades concentration camp, so I’ve been going on other peoples’ podcasts and radio shows to discuss immigration detention. On Tuesday, I talked with Dean Obeidallah for over half an hour. If you’re interested, you can watch our conversation on YouTube.

A fascinating development this week has been the Gallup poll showing that Americans who say immigration is a "good thing" for the country just hit a record high, at 79%. The biggest shift has been among Republicans, whose support for immigrants has surged more than 20 points since Trump took office, and now sits at 64%.

It made me think about how many people would self-identify as open-minded and good, imagining themselves the kind of person who only objects to bad or dangerous people. But if there’s one thing that’s become clear from history across the last century, it’s that propaganda works.

When you put those two things together, it reveals that each of us has a little bit of a mercenary or self-important seed of egotism that can be appealed to inside ourselves. It’s possible for demagogues to flatter the public while demonizing those seen as different. Emphasizing these shallow or false distinctions consistently can alienate people from natural affinities, even within their own communities.

This susceptibility and language used about immigrants today sometimes reminds me, oddly enough, about the strange dynamics of the gifted programs in public education in the U.S. Those programs began in the mid 1970s, when I was in elementary school.

The year I turned nine, a psychologist pulled me out of class and took me to an empty room. I sat for hours, drawing diagrams and answering logic questions about how to measure water in odd amounts with inconvenient equipment. A week or two later, my mother told me that the county was starting a gifted class at my school. In the end, there were four of us for the debut year of the program. My mother was very content.

I was pleased, too. My family still had years to go before we would hit rock bottom, but it was clear to me by then that my home life was abnormal. I could feel myself becoming stranger by the day, less and less like the other children in my classes. But if I were gifted, maybe the issue wasn’t that something was wrong with me. Maybe (or so my thinking went) the situation was that I was better than other kids.

This idea comforted me and, for a time, kept me from drawing bleaker conclusions. For a decade or more, I put a lot of energy into convincing myself against the available evidence that I was singularly exceptional. But the effort required was tremendous, and in time, it became clear that though I needed to be the most special child at every moment in every way, such a state was neither true nor possible.

The gifted category is built on what I think of as a wrongheaded way of looking at intelligence, and has probably harmed as many as it’s helped. It persists among tech bros and other caliper-wielders today. This way of thinking likewise parallels other ideas about human potential in America.

All of us are susceptible to messages that tell us that we’re better or owed something in a way that leads to others getting less. Sometimes we send those messages to ourselves to rationalize our good fortune. We’re even more vulnerable if we bathe in an information stew of people telling us how much more we deserve things than other people do. Everyone wants to feel special and seen, and that desire can be used to do tremendous harm.

This is one way conservatism has poisoned political thinking in America across my lifetime. The idea that one group of true, special Americans exists has done incalculable damage. A lot of people, including many immigrants, wound up hearing Trump’s message about only targeting criminal foreigners and—despite all the other flashing signs indicating what was coming—somehow told themselves that everyone they knew and loved would stay safe.

I feel much more empathy for people who have tried to stop the government or to protect others than I do for those who voted for what’s happening now. But I still feel empathy for the people who were fooled, because we can all be fooled and can fool ourselves. And nationwide, people have been targeted for disinformation not only with blunt instruments but also with fine-toothed digital tools. It’s possible to hold people accountable for their own actions while understanding that propaganda facilitates the manipulation of groups on a large scale.

As horrific immigration policy has gone into overdrive this year, we can now see that even members of the party Trump has managed to turn into a cult of personality are alarmed by what’s going on. They’re saying they want something different. This makes a path forward clearer.

However racist and xenophobic some people may be, the overwhelming majority don’t want this. So the answer is to reveal on an ongoing basis exactly what’s happening in our communities. It’s infuriating that it takes so long to see through the lies, but there’s both hope and power in knowing that people can come out the other side—that the illusion can’t be maintained forever.

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