Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian woman who was detained by Ice for two weeks, says while the private companies who own the facilities are run for profit, there’s no incentive to get people out quickly. But in the era of Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency (Doge), it seems counterintuitive for public money to be deliberately wasted on detaining illegal aliens with the will and means to return home. Trump’s border tsar, Tom Homan, promised “shock and awe” from day one of his administration. Perhaps Becky’s incarceration was political theatre – or performative cruelty. Whatever the reason, in Trump’s America, a tourist who makes a mistake can be locked up, seemingly indefinitely.

The thing about Fox is that their audience is built on fear and hate. Their audience is kept in the manufactured rage echo chamber, where demonizing migrants, “the woke,” and gay people are cycled with a hypnotic frenzy throughout the day. Paralyzing people with fear necessarily has its limits, as it entraps its prey in virtual rage algorithms, transfixed and glued to television sets. Real and lasting movements of change are not built on hate. They are based on love and the desire to burst out of our bubbles to make real connections with others to find common purpose. That is the magic of the most formative movements of generational change. I feel we are in one of those moments right now, where the hate-fueled MAGA movement and its regime propaganda—Fox—have shocked the consciousness of our country and the world. A resistance and opposition has formed with a force whose full potential is seismic and that cannot be stopped. We are honored that the MeidasTouch Network can play a role as a catalyzing agent to bring people together and fight for hope, joy, freedom, love, and democracy.

Propaganda played an important role in implementing the Holocaust. In 1939 Joseph Goebbels ordered the creation of a film titled The Eternal Jew, and he was heavily involved in its production. It was so over the top, portraying Jews as subhuman parasites, that it is unimaginable that people could believe it or be swayed by it. Thing is, the target audience wasn’t swayed by it. They weren’t supposed to be swayed. The film is far too ridiculous for anyone to believe it. They’re not supposed to believe it. The film was used as a signal of loyalty. Embracing and repeating the blatantly untrue and the stupidly inane is a badge people wear to show they are committed to the cause. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the dogs.” Ivermectin cures the measles. Same kinda shit.

Goebbels’s propaganda was mostly used to further secure the loyalty of those who already aligned themselves with Nazis and despised Jews. It bound the in-group ever tighter so they could be used to commit unspeakable atrocities. As an example, in 1940 the Hamburg Reserve Police Battalion was given the order to “cleanse” a Polish village of its 1,500 Jews. The leader of the Battalion, Major Trapp, said to his 500 men that anyone who did not wish to participate in the slaughter did not have to, and that there would be no consequences for those who refused. This was not even a case of “Just following orders.” They were allowed not to murder those 1,500 people, but only about a dozen failed to participate. That’s the power of propaganda for binding an in-group toward a hateful cause. We’re going to keep seeing shit like this, shit that is wholly ridiculous and unbelievable and we’ll scoff and ask how fucking stupid are these people who believe such nonsense? And yeah, a lot of them are stupid. There is no shortage of research revealing that the more extreme a person is in their conservative beliefs, especially regarding the embracing of bigotry, the less intelligent they are. But it’s also about showing loyalty to their group, along with hating your group and being happy that the propaganda triggers you. They are being primed to commit atrocities. I see these “Elon Is So Great” ads on Facebook that are so obviously paid for yet lack the “Sponsored” indicator which additionally exposes some backroom fuckery, and I view it as a warning sign for worse things to come. They are trying to make Elon and Trump seem like gods who are worthy of unquestioned obedience, while at the same time pushing others far in the opposite direction so that we—the ones who see the bullshit and the hate for what it is—become the enemy worthy of extermination.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid. There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing. Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue. The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.