Category: Blog

Welcome to the shitshow. Today I’m gonna point out some stuff that is really, really obvious but still warrants explanation and conversation nonetheless.

As you may have heard, the latest antics of the U.S. government and our Border Patrol officers have included locking children in cages, pulling screaming and crying infants from their families while having a good ol’ laugh, drugging detained youth to sedate them at government contracted “treatment facilities,” and chasing down an SUV of migrants leading to a high-speed chase, crash, and the deaths of 5 people.

Mainstream media recently picked up on this ever-darkening story when reports of ICE losing track of 1500 children came to light, and since then a plethora of information regarding the practice of family separation, assembly line justice, and “zero tolerance” border control have been published. The White House released a nice little comeback to let us know that this wasn’t true and that they knew perfectly well where “most” of the lost children were, which doesn’t really appear to help their case much, does it? 

Just a couple weeks before that, Trump and the White House released statements calling members of the gang MS-13 “Violent animals;” you know, the gang that was started due to xenophobia and racism toward Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles and made internationally notorious by Bill Clinton’s mass deportations to stem gang violence?

Now let me say here that on a basic, rhetorical level I kind of see where a right-wing politician would be able to get away with calling gang members whose motto is “rape, control, kill” animals; U.S. politicians seem to be fond of ignoring the enormous systems of inequality that we helped create, forcing  young men out of public spaces and into gangs to survive.

That being said, it is undeniable that gangs utilize brutal and ruthless methods of subjugation in Central American and Mexican communities, destroying lives and sending people fleeing to escape endemic violence. While I disagree in calling them “animals” (massive displays of violence are entirely and obviously a human thing to do, take a history class), I can at least see why on a rhetorical basis the word would be powerful and could be imagined in a situation where dehumanization was not the end goal. I tried to give the White House statement the benefit of the doubt.

But alas, I should’ve known better.

The confusion for me begins here, in that the Trump administration believes MS-13, a gang created and exported to Central America by U.S. policies and attitudes, are “violent animals,” but Trump also says that “illegal immigrants” who are fleeing that violence are going to “pour into and infest our country.” As I said before, this is all pretty obvious stuff, but I find it really hard to believe that the Trump Administration actually cares about MS-13’s violence if they’re also going to detain and deport people fleeing from gang violence and persecution in their home countries.

The problem with using dehumanizing rhetoric to characterize both perpetrators of violence and victims of said violence is that it makes it abundantly clear that the reason you’re worried isn’t the actually the violence: it’s the fact that they’re not white.

We don’t use words like “invade” and “infest” to talk about people white people from Europe who come to the U.S.. We have developed in our contemporary lexicon a word to define refugees and migrants as “illegal aliens” that utterly strips them of their humanity and makes them nothing but a legal definition that can be swept away and ignored while crisis after crisis threatens people’s lives. This rhetoric is saved for people who have fled their homes, leaving behind their livelihoods, their extended families and friends, and the lives they knew, in search of a place where they could be safe; but since they’re latinxs, it’s okay, right?

I don’t think so. I think the situation we’re in is shameful and disgusting.

To be quite frank, I think that it’s pretty rich for people who lock children in cages and tear refugee families apart, while threatening to deny them the already horrifyingly inefficient brand of justice they are even allowed, to go around banging pans together screaming “MS-13 are violent animals.”

So, how can you get involved?

You can donate money to local organizations that provide legal services for undocumented immigrants– just make sure you verify that they’re legitimate first.

You can also protest ICE, and for the Mainers reading this, yes, they’re shutting down highways all the way up by you.

Honestly, this whole situation is infuriating and painful for any reasonable person to watch, but this harsh immigration policy stuff has been going on for a long ass time, it’s time to step up and make it stop.

I wrote a paper about gang violence and media coverage in Cold War and Contemporary Latin America last semester, which you can check out here: Percepticide and Violence Against Journalists: An Analysis of Cold War and Contemporary Methods of Silencing.

If you want more info about the development of these issues, I’d suggest you check out The Daily, a podcast from the NYT with a couple excellent episodes covering recent events and highlighting the humans behind the rhetoric. In particular, “Father and Son, Forced Apart at the Border” and “What Migrants Are Fleeing” are both emotional and riveting accounts of the pain that people are going through.

If you’d want to listen to a story about the history of crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, check out Malcolm Gladwell’s episode of Revisionist History, General Chapman’s Last Stand.

Thanks for reading, and be good to each other out there.

Hey everyone!

This week I’m giving a brief overview of my experiences and classwork relating to media effects and will focus particularly on Fake News. I haven’t added much on how to spot false media, but there are plenty of articles out there that do this pretty well.

During my second semester at American University, the topic of Fake News came up more and more regularly in classes across the academic spectrum; you know the situation must be getting pretty dire when you find yourself discussing current events in your Finite Mathematics class.

Beyond the expected manipulation and slimy rhetoric of the American political scene, Fake News refuses to be defined by a single category such as propaganda or media bias, which just leads to frustration and polarization such that CNN viewers and Fox viewers viciously accuse each other of being easily swayed by the inaccurate reporting of their respective news source. According to a Monmouth Poll, as of April this year 3 out of 4 Americans “believe that traditional major TV and newspaper media outlets report ‘fake news.'”

This enormous application of an almost impossible to define term results in general confusion and anger as people become more and more hostile about information that does not fully encapsulate their beliefs. Every news article’s facebook comment thread has turned into a place where vitriol is spewed and people say stuff they’d never say if they weren’t behind their laptops– or maybe they would.

We seem to be utterly sure that the sources we follow are telling the truth, while others are reporting lies and inaccuracies, forcing ourselves into tinier and tinier bubbles or “walled gardens” where we block out anything that does not perfectly compliment our worldview. This, plus the added effect of constant information overload through TV and mobile devices, creates a climate where the impossibility to sift through all the articles, videos, and posts that appear on our newsfeeds plays a role in further polarizing us.

For my classwork, I wanted to look deeper into the way in which we observe and respond to media, and to highlight both the process through which stories come to be formed and how a society can be shaped by the media it consumes.

In my Writing 101 Course, I decided to look at the application of “post-truth” rhetoric and how information can be manipulated through a literary analysis of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus. I was drawn to her creation of a multilayered narrative and wanted to make a connection to the way in which contemporary news corporations have to choose how to present the information they receive. You can check out that paper here.

I also hope to be a part of the discussion about the ways through which media actually can reshape the conscience and ideologies of a society. One of the most interesting problems we face with media effects today is that everyone thinks they are immune to media influence– this is called the Third-Person Effect (Yeah, it’s a Wikipedia link, I’m lazy).

The point here is that while people tend to believe that they are less likely to be influenced by media than others, everyone is susceptible, and being aware of that is the first step to media literacy– no one is immune. I wrote an analysis of Social Learning Theory, a psychological theory of behavior, and hyper-masculinity as a specific media effect, which you can take a look at here.

Thanks for reading everyone, I am trying to fit a lot in at once so I can avoid barraging you with blog posts every week! If you’re interested in discussing anything I’ve written always feel to get in touch!