The paranoid fantasy world of the American right wing, NCAA tournament edition
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As always, it’s hard to sort out the grifters from the marks when it comes to the pervasiveness of right wing propaganda:
A Republican state representative in Michigan, Rep. Matt Maddock, claimed on social media on Wednesday night that he had photo evidence of “illegal invaders” arriving at Detroit Metro Airport.
One of the two photos Maddock posted on the platform called X, formerly known as Twitter, showed an Allegiant Air plane. The other photo showed three buses. Maddock wrote: “Happening right now. Three busses just loaded up with illegal invaders at Detroit Metro. Anyone have any idea where they’re headed with their police escort?”
It turns out the “illegal invaders” were the Gonzaga University men’s basketball team, which had flown into town for the NCAA tournament.
But Matt Maddock isn’t fooled, no not one bit:
I don’t know about Maddock, who may well be on the grift. but the average Trump voter absolutely believes the Biden administration is chartering flights into the US to bring in countless immigrants, to continue the ongoing great replacement of the White Race.
In reality, it’s hard to imagine how the D.C.-Baltimore Beltway region where Trump so desperately seeks to return could even function without immigrants. Gustavo Torres, executive director of the Baltimore-based Latino and migrant support group Casa, told me on Wednesday that some 39% of the region’s 331,000 construction workers are immigrants, most from Central America or Mexico.
These new arrivals are willing to take some of the most dangerous jobs in America, with construction ranked “a high-hazard industry” by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration because of risks like falling or getting crushed under heavy equipment. It’s revealing that while Latinos comprise about a third of the U.S. workforce in construction, they accounted for more than half of those who died in falls in 2022, 286 out of 423. The way Suazo and his five coworkers died was both shocking and yet numbingly routine.
Casa’s Torres, who knew Suazo and one of the other missing men, El Salvadoran native Miguel Luna, now mourns not onlythe loss of his friends but also the toxic climate in which they died. “Our families and these workers feel under attack all the time by media and people angry about immigration,” he said, “and the reality you see is the contributions from our families and community — not only in construction but in health or education and other areas.”
When the Dali cargo shipdemolished that bridge support on Tuesday, it also obliterated all the ridiculous lies and myths our demagogues have been spreading around immigration. There were no sex traffickers aboard the Key Bridge that night. Nobody was dealing fentanyl. They were not “animals,” but fathers and husbands like Suazo and Luna, whose wife occasionally showed up in her food truck to bring the men tacos and pupusas. They were filling potholes so their children could have an even better life.
These six workers who perished were not “poisoning the blood of our country,” they were replenishing it. This is a moment of clarity when we need to reject the national disease of xenophobia and restore our faith in the United States as a beacon for the best people like Suazo. They may have been born all over the continent, but when these men plunged into our waters on Tuesday, they died as Americans.