Jonathan Blitzer: Our New Internment Camps

**Tim Miller** (0:00)
Hey, everybody, we got Jonathan Blitzer today, talking about his article Locked Away and The New Yorker, and it is enraging. And that is appropriate because my blood pressure has been getting up the last few days. I was ruminating on the various news and the podcasts we've been doing this week on the planes, trains, and automobiles that took me to get back from Des Moines on Monday night. And I was thinking about what it is that has me so riled up about everything this week. And I think that there's an element that connects the three main stories we've been covering, the Ice Murder in Maine, my interviews with Rokana and Pete Buttigieg. And I wanted to talk about that a little bit with you guys before we got to the guest. Because I think that there's one element of it that ties everything together that really animates me and the show and Bulwark and I'm hoping animates all of you. I'm not a superhero guy, okay? I actually didn't even know. I was like, who said with great power comes great responsibility? This was banging around my head on the airplane. And I guess Spider-Man said it. I was hoping it was going to be like Churchill or Locke or something, but it was Spider-Man. So anyway, it's right though. Spider-Man got something right. With great power does come great responsibility. And there really isn't any greater responsibility than the ability to inflict state violence onto somebody. The state's control of your body, of your person, like that is the maximum amount of power. The founders recognized that the state could wield this kind of power and that there would be people that would wield it corruptly, wrongly, viciously. And so they put it right there in the 14th Amendment. Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. The state could not use its violence and its power against you without giving you a chance to defend yourself. Staring to rid of habeas that the president of the United States and the vice president were trying to get rid of earlier this year. And it is the fundamental bedrock principle of the American rule of law, the American system. It's a principle that has spread all over the world. And we talk about, you know, when the conservatives talk about the West and protecting democracies and, you know, defending ourselves from, you know, the, you know, the enemies of the West, the enemies of freedom. Like, one of the things we're supposed to be protecting is this, like this notion that, you know, people cannot be deprived of life or of property without being able to defend themselves. You can add that to the list of American ideals that these so-called MAGA patriots don't celebrate. They're more into, like, Caudillo style governance. They'd love what's happening in El Salvador. They practice what the Peruvian dictator once called, to my friends, everything for my enemies, the law. That's what, that's what they like. That's the system that they want. This morning, Donald Trump pulled back on the, I guess, for 20 hours. The administration said that they're going to put some guard rails around the Kavanaugh stops that have led to two murders this week, two deprivations of life. The president said this, We cannot give up one of ICE's most important and effective crime fighting tools, the traffic stop. Once we do, we are playing right into the criminals' hands.
But the people that the state killed this week, and the criminals this week were the ICE agents. The people they killed weren't criminals. In Maine, Johan Guerrero was in the country legally on a work permit, and Houston, Lorenzo Araujo entered illegally 30 years ago, 30 plus years ago. But since then, he's been working, raising a family. He has no criminal record, and both were summarily executed in the street for existing while Hispanic. So on Friday, when Stuart Stevens is on the podcast, talking about death squads, I have to admit there was a moment when I was like, that might feel slightly overwrought. But within days of him calling them death squads, they killed another innocent person. They shot him six times in front of his daughter.
Not that it would have made it better if he was the person they were looking for, but he wasn't even the person they were looking for. It's fucking clowns.
Some of you resonated, it seemed like, with a comment I made last night on the next level. Sarah was talking about the focus groups and how people are just kind of numb by all the news right now. I was like, I'm not fucking numb.