What Are The Venezuelan Gangs Going To Do To Taylor Swift? And Wait, What Venezuelan Gangs?

SCARY! SCARY! GANGS!

Instead of the face of some gross racist, how about a nice screenshot of the US’s (probably) favorite Venezuelan-American, Miguel Cabrera?

With 55 days left until the election, gird your loins for what’s sure to be a firehose of right-wing propaganda demonizing immigrants! It’s a page right out of the Viktor Orbán election-winningness playbook (and the Nazis, and the Know-Nothings, etc. etc., infinity). Back in March we did a deep-dive on how Orbán was literally using a playbook written by a guy named Arthur Finkelstein, who was best pals with Roy Cohn and Roger Stone. Lesson one, demonize those immigrants! Convince voters that a big strong rrr ggrr tough man is the one thing protecting them from murderous foreign hordes, and letting that guy do whatever he wants is the only way he can keep everybody safe. The right wing demonizes immigrants it because it works.

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LEARN SOME HISTORY.

Trump Hosts Viktor Orbán For Mar-A-Lago Playdate

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Of course, it’s long-established that immigrants get arrested at less than half the rate that native-born Americans do, a fact just re-confirmed by a study in Texas that came out today. Which is not to say no immigrant has committed a crime ever, or that gangs do not exist. In a population of millions, of course there are criminals, and all criminals are bad. But that doesn’t mean it’s cool for the GOP to do a remake of Birth of A Nation, with immigrants playing freedman Gus and Taylor Swift as Flora, just because it’s election season. How about that confirmed Russian asset Dave Rubin?

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How Did Evil Russians Manage To Fool Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, AND Benny Johnson? Wow!

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Taylor Swift has endorsed a person Dave Rubin thinks she should not endorse? Open your mouth hole, Rubin, let’s hear a mouth full of human shit.

“It’s like, Taylor Swift, you are a young, pretty girl. Do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young, pretty girls? It ain’t pretty,” Rubin skeezed.

Whatever might he mean? Try to make her arepas and burn them? Surely this gross creep who goes to JD Vance’s barber is not sitting there fantasizing about some kind of violence against America’s sweetheart, because that would be disgusting.

You can’t help but notice, there’s been a sudden influx in fake news about Venezuelan gangs on social media. Such as the myth last month that Venezuelans tried to hijack school buses, an entirely fabricated lie that disgusting creep Elon Musk immediately co-signed and sent out to his millions of followers.

Quite simply, this bus hijacking did not happen at all. Possibly some migrants knocked on a school-bus door, thinking it was their bus by accident, but even that is not confirmed to have happened. But that didn’t stop Republican San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond and others from trying to make hay! “Today, two illegal immigrants attempted to board a school bus meant for transporting children. This is what happens when you have open borders,” he Xitted. “Over 250,000 illegal immigrants have entered San Diego in the past year, and this is just one more example of the chaos we're facing. Thousands continue to pour in every single day.”

Then there was the news that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over a block of apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado, and were trying to collect rent, the proof being a video of armed men standing at a door. The armed men standing at the door did happen. The man inside, Oswaldo Jose Dabion Araujo, was murdered. That is very scary! That’s a lot of armed men!

The gang is real, in Aurora, and nine gang members have been arrested over the past 10 months, for two shootings, several assaults, thefts and instances of threatening people with guns. What is not real: that this gang has taken over the entire city of 400,000 people, or that the crimes are evidence of broad, organized, systemic gang-led extortion or control at the apartment complexes. There is no evidence that they tried to extort rent.

After the news clip above showed scared residents moving out due to the “gang takeover,” other residents said, ACTUALLY. Actually, residents are moving out because it’s a shithole run by a slumlord management company, and the city’s been trying to get them to deal with their slumlord shithole for years before the Venezuelan immigrants came.

Tenants at the company’s buildings said they’ve received racist messages and threats of violence from unknown individuals in the wake of last week’s national media attention, and have been alarmed by social media rumors like one claiming the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club was en route to Aurora. They fear they’ll have nowhere else to go if the city moves forward with plans to clear the buildings out.

“There’s nobody charging a fee to live here, nobody threatening us,” Sarimar Marin, who lives at Whispering Pines, another CBZ-owned property in Aurora, told Newsline in an interview. “There’s only working families and good people who live here.”

And Aurora city officials say the problem is “isolated.”

So who’s hopping on the Venezuelan-gang train today? Well, if it isn’t the Wall Street Journal! Even the WSJ acknowledges, “Federal crime data show homicides and other crimes have dropped—and that the U.S. is far safer than it used to be. The gang isn’t a household name, but its activities are a source of fascination on social media.” 

I’m fascinated by that TikToker Matteo who takes all those videos of himself applying lotion, but that doesn’t make it news. Still, the WSJ couldn’t pass up the chance to get their panties in a pinch. Mass Venezuelan gang activity isn’t happening, but it could.

But every freakout has a truth nugget, and here it’s that Venezuelan immigration to the US and everywhere has gone up. There are about 710,000 Venezuelan immigrants in the US with Temporary Protected Status. Which is to say, LEGALLY.

Millions have been fleeing Venezuela because the country’s been in complete economic freefall with thousand-percent inflation — which, interestingly, is not the same as two-percent inflation or even three-percent inflation — while dictator Nicolás Maduro has been clinging to power there since 2013. Venezuela used to be one of the richest countries in the world, but to make a long story very short, declining gas prices and Maduro’s dictatorship have made it a hot mess.

And Many People Are Saying™ that Trump shares blame for that. While Obama levied targeted sanctions, Trump opted for a ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions strategy. Trump was warned that this would fuel more migration, and he went through with it anyway. This helped worsen the collapse, and about 7.7 million people, or about a third of the population of the entire country, has fled the country so they do not starve to death.

The GOP demonizing immigrants is shitty, it is wrong, and it is not based in fact. It’s un-American and gross, in fact, and if Russian-asset shills could STFU, that would be nice.

Now let us all enjoy Chilean reporter José María Del Pino reading Stephen Miller for filth after he spouted some made-up numbers, while Miller sputters and sputs.

[Washington Post gift link/ National Institute of Justice/ Wall Street Journal gift link/ NPR]