Michael Nigro/Sipa USA via AP Images
People participating in the “Take Our Border Back” convoy gather in Dripping Springs, Texas, February 2, 2024.
We interrupt our regularly scheduled column—I’d planned to write about a 15-year-old novel I believe paints the best imaginative canvas of how Trumpism works at the level of the human soul—to write about some woefully not-breaking news.
As a voracious consumer of political media, you probably already know part of the story about the constitutional crisis brewing in Texas—at least, the elements taking place in marbled offices in Austin, Texas, and Washington, D.C. That has been well covered.
To summarize: In 2020, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott put into effect something called “Operation Lone Star,” a quasi-military strategy to turn back the massive numbers of migrants and asylum seekers arriving at the U.S. border with Texas. The next year, Abbott raised the stakes in an official letter to President Biden calling this an “invasion.” This, perverse legal minds on the right insisted, licensed Texas to literally make war against it—Article I, Section 10, of the Constitution stipulating that states can do this sans interference from Washington when they are “actually invaded.”
Which, apparently, is what starving mothers with babes in arms, like the GIs storming Omaha Beach on D-Day, are presently pulling off.
Meanwhile, because enormous, unmanageable numbers of migrants are arriving in America, thanks in part to various crises for which the United States bears historic responsibility, the Biden White House undertook negotiations with certain willing Republicans in the Senate to clarify immigration rules, adequately fund their enforcement, and keep vulnerable people from suffering biblical levels of misery under our care.
Also meanwhile, at the most crowded illegal point of entry, a park in a town called Eagle Pass, federal border guards sought to block the Texas National Guard’s practice of submerging razor wire in the Rio Grande—that is to say, wire designed to draw blood, like a razor blade.
As The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer explains, this is “essentially an elaborate and truly kind of cruel and callous photo-op”: When federal agents disentangle them from the barrier to lead them ashore to apprehend them, it looks on camera that they are helping migrants enter the country. A cunning coup de théâtre, to be sure. Though one that proved fatal for a woman and two children who drowned in the river on January 12.
A week later, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that this was not the kind of “invasion” the authors of the Constitution had in mind—and Gov. Abbott answered like President Jackson when faced with an adverse decision about his authority in 1832: The Court had made their decision; now let them enforce it.
You can’t accuse Abbott of not knowing his history. In his definitive biography The Politics of Rage, historian Dan T. Carter explains how former Alabama Gov. George Wallace mastered stunts just like these, as when he “stood in the schoolhouse door” to physically block a Justice Department official accompanying a Black student seeking to register for classes at the segregated University Alabama. Wallace got to enjoy a double dip of martyr-y deliciousness when he lost the accompanying court battle, which he often did in such showdowns, sometimes on purpose. This was the 1960s version of the current fable of the deep state pushing Texas around for simply doing what the Constitution says.
And the tableau just looked too good for another actor observing the drama to ignore.
Donald Trump instructed loyal Capitol Hill minions to block immigration negotiations, so as not to hand Joe Biden a “win” going into the presidential campaigns, and to keep his followers frothing. A deal appeared imminent. Maybe because some naïve Republicans actually wanted to improve the situation. Or maybe they judged this was going to make things worse for migrants, given that Biden was granting Republicans considerable concessions, even stating he might use the law to “shut down” the border himself. Be that as it may, for much of the party, Trump was calling the shots. Deal negotiator Sen. James Lankford (an otherwise garden-variety racist who soon lied that “all of the 9/11 attackers were present in the U.S. illegally”) was immediately sanctioned by his own Oklahoma Republican Party for putting “the safety and security of Americans in great danger” by even sitting down at the table with Biden.
That much garden-variety news junkies already know. What they might not, because it’s been so under-covered in the most influential media outlets, is, potentially, the most important part: On the ground in Texas, a storm is gathering that might produce the next January 6th—or something worse.
IN THE INFERNAL TRIANGLE, MY BOOK-IN-PROGRESS, I write of how, in the early 2000s, if you wanted to stay on top of what was actually happening on stories as diverse as George W. Bush’s looming war in Iraq and the Tea Party movement, so-called “alternative” media—lefty blogs, nonprofit watchdog websites, magazines like this one—were often more worth following than institutions like The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN. Just so, if you want to grasp what may turn out to be the deeper stakes of this constitutional crisis drummed up by Gov. Abbott.
Start with Tucker Carlson, tweeting the day of that Supreme Court decision to over 13 million views and 186,000 likes:
One man of Texas—the governor—announced he’d defy the Supreme Court’s ruling. He received messages of support from some 25 fellow Republican governors—another thing you probably know. But maybe not the thoughts of one Rep. Keith Self (R-TX): “I think we’re going to have to be aware that the president can federalize the National Guard, but it would be much harder if 25 governors sent their National Guard troops to the border to support Texas.” Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota all but promised she would do so.
You might also not have seen what Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, has been saying, that “all they do is commit crime on the streets,” and that he’s been rereading the Book of Revelation to gird his loins for the fight against them. The good folks at People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch captured Patrick telling the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins how much Biden, Kamala Harris, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas remind him of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: “Death rides with them.”
Talk of scripture’s final battle between good and evil is all over the discourse about the Texas standoff. Steve Bannon had on his show his old White House colleague Sebastian Gorka, who was particularly fulsome on what he had discerned to be Christ’s will:
Yes, we’re Christians. Yes, we believe that all men are made in the image of our creator. But at the same time we understand that evil is real, that evil lurks in the hearts of man. We are not the lambs of the Bible; that is Jesus, our savior. We are to turn over the tables of the money lenders. We are there when he calls, “Sell everything you own and buy a sword.” That is the Christianity we believe in. Turn the other face is not the message that we believe in. The message of Christ is truth in God. And as a result, I have to say this unequivocally to everyone listening, and it may be tough for some people who think that the church is some Sunday social club, but this administration is evil. And I mean it. In terms of the heart of darkness, black hearts of evil. Because they know what they’re doing … putting in place a legal system that allows anyone—it could be terrorists, it could be the cartels—to pre-screen and clear themselves as quote-unquote “asylum seekers” … When they get on a plane with my wife, with your daughters.
Gorka suggested as a solution a government shutdown of at least six months—“When the government shuts down it’s delightful, it’s absolutely superb”—and offered a counterexample of a model White House official from his day, back when the executive mansion was free from any such enemies of Christ: his friend Stephen Miller.
Bannon welcomed his next guest, introduced as an expert on a separate category of the ungodly: greedy money-grubbers like Catholic Charities and Caritas. (“Every single kid is worth $270 a day for these NGOs,” another guest observed.) Another Bannon guest, on an episode entitled “Lights Out on Globalist Cabal,” claimed video evidence of “long lines of African Muslims, on their prayer rugs, praying east, with the border wall behind them.”
Funny/not funny stuff like that is coin of the realm in my line of work. When it stops being funny is when they start talking about spilling blood.
Like the man of Texas who goes by the online moniker “SteveLovesAmmo,” who advised his 90,000 followers, Vice’s Tess Owen discovered: “Buy guns and ammo. Your government isn’t coming to save you.” Or the South Texas Proud Boys, who, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism reports, have advised followers to “grab your guns.” Or the Aryan Freedom Network, who’ve roused their own Texas chapters.
Or the man of Texas suffering under a $1.5 billion court judgment for defaming Sandy Hook parents. Alex Jones said: “I don’t want a secession, I don’t want a civil war, I don’t want to dissolve the country. But the left knows they’re putting all of us in a position to where we have a hijacked federal government, we have to have the states pull out of the Union and then have another convention, and then reconstitute it, again … that’s in the Declaration of Independence. It’s not just our right, it’s our duty. So there’s a lot of ways to skin the cat, or skin the rabbit, as they say.”
His callers had some rabbit-skinning suggestions. One was turning loose an alligator for every migrant let into the country. Another was for Texas to provision “law-abiding citizens with AR-15s and a few hundred rounds per adult so we can defend ourselves in the event of some sort of Red Dawn event, which looks like it’s very possibly gonna come”—then John in Texas was interrupted: We were already in a Red Dawn situation, Jones insisted. That, for those unfamiliar with the film in which high school students repel a Communist invasion of Colorado, means actual guerrilla warfare.
“And that’s all fine with me. I think everyone should be armed. We should bring back civil defense and the militias in the Constitution.”
Or the people organizing the “Take Our Border Back” convoy, who first started planning their ingathering a month ago, and call themselves “God’s Army.” Vice’s Owen reports that they insisted at first they wanted nothing to do with weapons or militias. They since have been changing their tune: “Side arms” were OK, as long as they were left in their cars during the scheduled “spiritual revival.”
It was only a matter of time, explains Tucker Carlson: “The media, the government at all levels in both parties, big business—there’s not one power center in the United States that would like to see secure borders, and so of course we haven’t had secure borders. And now we’re being invaded, and no one’s really doing anything about it. So it was just a matter of time before citizens who love their country and in many cases who have served their country overseas decided to get a little more active in protecting their country. And that’s why we’re about to see the Take Our Border Back convoy.”
He then interviewed “Doc” Pete Chambers, a retired Army physician who claims to have been a Green Beret, and has told Alex Jones that they were out to “hunt” migrants. (“We will engage decisively, and if it gets worse, in the infantry we call it ‘fix bayonets.’”) Chambers was reported by Wired to have intoned in an online video, “That’s war, we don’t want to go there, but that’s where we’re at right now.” After all, “We have to understand that there is a Constitution.”
And it is up to this Army of God to decide what the Constitution means.
At a briefing this past Thursday, Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, said convoy organizers have “discussed calling out militias or posses and needing to ‘show force.’” One militia leader threatened, “We’ll do whatever we got to do to put a stop to it.” Wired paraphrased chatter from “leading border-conflict figures” that the border assemblage “is meant to pick up where January 6 left off. Moreover, they’ve amplified the specter of kicking off a second civil war.”
Fox Business certainly seems to consider violence a live concern. Their host asked Rep. Self nervously what they would do about “bad actors” in Eagle Pass out to make “peace-loving Americans look bad.” He replied, “That’s always a probability.”
AND NOW, THE NOT-BREAKING NEWS—and why it matters.
As of this writing, since the January 22 Supreme Court ruling, unless LexisNexis and ProQuest are malfunctioning, news articles in The New York Times have mentioned neither Tucker Carlson nor Steve Bannon’s incitements concerning the doings in Texas, nor Rep. Self, Lt. Gov. Patrick, or Gov. Noem’s advocacy of what amounts to secessionist rhetoric, nor the 25 governors affirming it. The word “militia” has only appeared in either referring to the ones overseas that Shiites belong to. A characteristically mild article on the convoy in the Times downplayed the lingering danger, and skipped the simultaneous gathering in San Ysidro, California, which was crawling with neo-Nazis and Proud Boys.
Neither the Times nor The Washington Post, however, had anything on stepped-up police patrols this weekend around “places of worship and major infrastructure points” in Dearborn, Michigan, after Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed this past weekend labeling the heavily Arab city “America’s Jihad Capital.” (Language like this in my hometown of Chicago, in October, caused the stabbing of a Palestinian mother and her six-year-old son. The boy died.)
Just as The New York Times never covered Gov. Abbott’s expressed disappointment that he wasn’t allowed to treat migrants like actual enemy soldiers: “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border,” he said a month ago, “because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder”—an incitement to vigilantism at least as robust as anything Donald Trump uttered on January 6th.
NOW, EDITORIAL JUDGMENTS ABOUT WHAT STORIES deserve newspapers’ limited space resources are hard, and it may be unfair to second-guess them. The “Take Our Border Back” assemblage was far smaller than organizers boasted, and peaceful—so far. (One Eagle Pass resident said she never felt any danger from migrants, whereas the right-wingers now invading her town made her feel scared “just walking down the street in broad daylight.”) Immigration news holes were mostly filled by the announcement of a Senate bill, reported to include more stringent enforcement provisions than any previous reform on the table. Maybe some in those rarified editorial precincts imagine, as they so often do when they view the rightward ratchet of the Republicans, that now, finally, the fever will break.
Not bloody likely. As the negotiations progressed, one Bannon guest labeled the bill on the table “end-of-the-Republic type legislation.” When the drafting was done, at least one Democratic senator found the results so distorted toward Republican desires that he hesitates to support it—not that conservatives will ever be appeased. Elon Musk got over 47 million views and 260,000 likes for his opinion on the draft: It proved Biden’s goal is to “get as many illegals in the country as possible,” and to “legalize them to create a permanent majority—a one-party state … Simple, yet effective.”
And what true “patriot” wouldn’t step up to spill blood to stop something like that?
Now, for all I know, one of these newspapers is currently dotting i’s and crossing t’s on a massive takeout on just these violent insurgent energies building up around this alleged “invasion.” Even if that’s so, this is what bothers me. If you’ve been reading my recent work, you know how passionately I believe the normal journalistic routines of horse race–style coverage of elections and tick-tock–style narratives of legislative negotiation fail utterly in conveying how right-wing politics actually works. Steve Bannon, Grover Norquist, even the mild-mannered Heritage Foundation intellectual Stuart Butler, once known for introducing the health care reform idea that became Obamacare, admit it outright: They practice politics the way Vladimir Ilyich Lenin taught it. Newt Gingrich used to quote Mao: “Politics is war without blood. War is politics with blood.”
I felt this lacuna most acutely at an unexpected time: two years ago, in the days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when front pages were saturated with staggeringly detailed analyses of the movement of men and materiel, a polyphony of unnamed sources within both belligerents’ camps, giving nearly hourly odds of whether war might break out.
This kind of journalism is simply not part of the story that editors and reporters covering “national politics” or “presidential elections” think they’re covering. But let’s face it. When one of the parties in our electoral contests encompasses within it a smooth continuum from the explicit advocacy of vigilante violence by its titular leader, to attempted murder, to outright massacre carried out by supporters who believe themselves to be advancing his agenda—that is the kind of reporting alternative media does as a matter of routine. The New York Times ought to catch up.
Research assistance by Chris Nolte
