Do Americans still care about real problems, mundane things like their health insurance premiums? Or are they more upset by imaginary problems, the kind that make for exciting videos on the internet?

I don’t know the answer to this question. But the Trump administration is betting that exciting videos are more important. By sending the National Guard to Chicago and by militarizing ICE, our new internal police force, they hope they can get Americans to watch those exciting videos and focus their attention and outrage on imaginary emergencies.

The astonishing military raid that ICE carried out at an ordinary Chicago apartment building, early in the morning of September 30, fits that pattern. Federal agents stormed the complex as if it were a terrorist hideout, even rapelling onto the roof from Blackhawk helicopters. Ostensibly they were there to arrest illegal immigrants, but according to the South Side weekly, they “detained nearly every resident of the 130-unit building—including children and babies—placing them in zip ties and separating them by race into vans for more than two hours.” Among them were many US citizens:

In video footage from NewsNation, whose camera crew was invited to join the raid, masked agents are shown surrounding the building wearing green uniforms, with vests and yellow lettering spelling out “U.S. Customs and Border Patrol”.

Some officers pointed handguns equipped with tactical lights at the building; others held long rifles and wore helmets equipped with cameras and lights. Helicopters hovered in the sky, and agents on the ground threw flashbang grenades. Hastily awakened residents were only given a few seconds to open before agents broke doors down and forced their way inside, according to recordings by residents witnessing the raid.

The scenes that followed have dark echoes, lifted straight from the middle of the 20th century. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, one man let a woman and her seven-year-old daughter hide in his apartment:

“I wasn’t planning on letting her stay, but I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” the man said of his Venezuelan migrant neighbors. But he quickly relented. The little girl was inconsolable and hid under his bed.

“I didn’t want them to take her,” said the man, who didn’t want to be named because he fears he’ll be targeted by federal authorities for his actions.

“I gave her my bedroom, and I just told her, ‘Just stay there. Don’t open, don’t, shh, just stay quiet,’” he recalled telling the mom and daughter as he choked back tears.

The fear the raid created was real, but the goal was different. “It was like a movie,” one of the residents told the BBC. Which was the point: the Department of Homeland Security has since produced a recruiting video that uses footage from the raid. It resembles an advertisement for a video game.

This isn’t merely performative violence, because the violence is real. But the performance matters a great deal. Clearly, the Trump administration’s propagandists, led by Stephen Miller, want Americans to believe that people who are dressed and armed like the U.S. military are invading American cities for good reason. After a federal judge blocked Trump from sending actual troops to Portland on the grounds that there is no crime emergency (or any emergency) in Portland, Trump described Portland as “a burning hellhole” anyway. But the real situation in Portland is irrelevant to an administration that wants Americans to forget about insurance premiums and instead choose sides—us or them.

How to fight back against this drama? Chicagoans are banding together, creating neigborhood watch groups and trying to help one another. Some are protesting. Some, like the man in the apartment building who hid the little girl, are quietly defying the federal agents.

In Washington, Democrats in Congress are trying to redirect national attention to real problems: By refusing to allow the government to function normally, they hope to prevent huge rises in healthcare insurance premiums. Some think they are succesfully drawing attention to this authentic crisis, and maybe they are right.

As Greg Sargent argues in The New Republic, Governors JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom have taken a different road. Instead of changing the subject, they have leaned in to the drama. Pritzker refers to the operations in Chicago as “Trump’s invasion.” Newsom has warned that America could be on the brink of martial law. Sargent, noting that the majority of Americans oppose the use of the National Guard in U.S. cities, thinks that they are using the right language:

Despite months of effort, Trump and Miller have not come close to manufacturing the sense of fear or trauma out in the country they’d hoped for. But in the nascent Pritzker-Newsom understanding, assuming this will all take care of itself—that voters will resist Trump-Miller agitprop without prompting—is insufficient. We’ve learned, hearteningly, that majorities seem to harbor a deep attachment to liberal rights and liberties, one that instinctively recoils at masked kidnappings, at hypermilitarized vehicles on urban boulevards, at the trappings of totalitarian dictatorship. But this must be activated. That takes conflict and controversy—powerful imagery and language that rivets attention.

Healthy political systems solve real problems, not imaginary ones. But that might not be possible at the moment. Read more here.

Maria Corina Machado and the Nobel Peace Prize

In years past, the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee has often recognized people who fight against dictatorships: Lech Walesa, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Shirin Ebadi and others. This year the committee gave the prize to Maria Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition. She fits into that same tradition. Last December I interviewed her twice, and wrote about the extraordinary grassroots movement that Venezuelans built around their stolen elections last year:

During both of our conversations, Machado sat in front of a blank wall, with no other backdrop. Both times she was also calm, assured, even elegant. She didn’t look tired or stressed, or whatever a person who hadn’t seen her family or friends since July should look like. She wore makeup and simple jewelry. She sounded determined, positive. This is because, Machado told me, she believes that the campaign and its aftermath altered Venezuela forever, bringing about what she describes as “anthropological change.”

By this, she meant that the grassroots political movement she and her colleagues created has transformed attitudes in Venezuela and forged new connections between people. Her organization, in concert with others, carefully organized a primary campaign that brought together old opposition competitors. Volunteer training, she told me, gave hundreds of thousands of people a real experience not just of voting but of building institutions from scratch. Those efforts didn’t end with last summer’s election. “The 28th of July was not just an event,” Machado told me. “It’s a process that has brought our country together. And regardless how many days it takes, Venezuela has changed forever and for the good.” Her team, with its leaders across the country, built not just a movement for one candidate or election, but a movement for permanent change. The scale of their achievement—the number of people involved, and their geographic and socioeconomic range—would be notable in a liberal democracy. In an authoritarian state, this project is remarkable.

In her acceptance statement, Machado dedicated her prize to the people of Venezuela. She also mentioned President Trump, and has praised him elsewhere too. I assume she did so for the same reasons that the NATO Secretary-General offers effusive praise for the American president, or the British prime minister invited him to an elaborate dinner with the King. This is now how foreigners build relationships with the United States of America, and I don’t think we can blame them for it. Nor am I going to make a woman who is living in hiding, in constant fear of arrest, pass purity tests.

The larger point remains: The prize committee, which is sometimes eccentric, did resist pressure from the White House this year, and did offer the award, instead, to an activist fighting an autocracy in a country that was once a democracy. The message they were sending was perfectly clear.

Kleptocracy Tracker

Continuing to monitor conflicts of interest, ostentatious emoluments, outright corruption and policy changes that will facilitate outright corruption. (Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc.)

October 4

• The Federal Election Commission has paused its work investing campaign finance violations and performing election oversight now that it has lost its quorum after the recent resignation of Republican Trey Trainor—which follows Trump’s firing of Democrat Ellen Weintraub earlier this year.

October 7

• BlinkRx, an online prescription drug delivery company with Donald Trump Jr. on its board, is poised to benefit from the president’s directive encouraging pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs directly to consumers. Cantor Fitzgerald—a financial services firm founded by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now run by his children—also stands to gain through its financial stake in a company investing in the reshoring of pharmaceutical manufacturing to the US.

October 9

• Prosecutors have reached a deferred prosecution agreement with Roger Ver, known as “Bitcoin Jesus,” in a fraud and tax evasion case. Under the deal, charges will be dropped if Ver pays the back taxes he owes the government—marking another instance of the Trump Justice Department easing enforcement in the cryptocurrency space.
• AmazonMGM set to release its Melania Trump documentary—for which she was paid $40 million—on January 30 of next year.

Óbidos

Once a year, the tiny, medieval Portuguese village of Óbidos holds an international literary festival, bringing in people from around the world. I saw Svetlana Alekseivich, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, in the corner of a restaurant in Óbidos, and said hello. László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian author who won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, was supposed to arrive a few days later.

Both in Óbidos and in Lisbon, I found myself trying to explain American politics to Portuguese colleagues, none of whom understand what is happening in the U.S or why. I don’t think Americans understand how dramatically the scenes from Chicago, and from Washington, have altered the image of their country in the world, probably forever.

Still, Óbidos was lovely, both the place and the audience. I particularly admired the bookstore created in a converted church.

Please enjoy what remains of the nice weather, if you are lucky enough to still have it.

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