Solidarity vs. Scapegoating

 It turns out, when you are utterly unhampered by morality, scruples, or any devotion to the truth, it's actually very easy to be a demagogue. Thus, there was no great tactical genius behind Trump's decision to redirect blame for an aviation disaster—that occurred on his watch—by blaming "DEI" (code for women, trans people, racial minorities, and people with disabilities). Anyone could have done it—it's the oldest trick of scapegoating in the book. Yet—it worked, for all that. 

What actually happened here? Let's review. The Trump administration came into office a couple weeks ago vowing to dismantle the federal government. They proceeded to do so—imposing a hiring freeze and trying to strip federal workers of civil service protections in order to replace them with MAGA goons. Then—just a couple days into their campaign of destruction—there was a critical failure at a major federal agency that appears to have been due to understaffing. 

I'm not saying that Trump's hiring freeze directly caused the crash, or that air traffic controller staffing levels would have been at "normal" levels in the absence of his orders. But certainly—the disaster should underline why we need a functioning federal government in the first place—and why we need to preserve the federal workforce. They do crucial things that keep our country safe—like ensuring that aircraft don't crash into one another in the sky over major cities. 

Trump and his minions no doubt knew that this would be the logical inference from the incident—and that they—both as the administration in charge and the ones who had recently devoted themselves to hollowing out the federal workforce—would be the obvious ones to take the blame for it. So, they decided to pull one of the most hackneyed yet effective tricks out of the demagogue's playbook: "We didn't do this," they say, "it was women and people with disabilities and racial and sexual minorities!"

This then created a no-win situation in which the Army had to decide whether to disclose the identities of the helicopter pilots involved in the crash. If they held them back, it would appear they had something to hide. It would fuel Trump's conspiracy theory that "DEI hires" were responsible for the disaster. But if they disclosed them, it would expose all of their families to harassment at the hands of MAGA trolls—especially if any of them happened to be anything other than able-bodied straight cis white men. 

The Army ultimately thew gasoline on the fire by disclosing their identities in a staggered way. They gave out the names of two of the pilots—who were both white men. So much for the DEI theory. But their hesitation to disclose the identity of the third pilot—of course—was grist to the online MAGA mill. And when they ultimately did reveal it—their delay in doing so only seemed to draw the worst sort of attention to the fact that the third pilot was a woman. 

That's it: one white cis able-bodied woman out of three pilots in the helicopter. But, of course, the machine of MAGA propaganda does not need anything more than that to start minting its brain poison. They have been able to spin one woman into the impression of a whole "DEI" crew. I have no doubt that this poor young woman's grieving family is already receiving threats and harassment from online MAGA creeps. "The weeping parents wept in vain," as Blake once wrote; and they always will, in Trump's America. 

And so—instead of blaming the people actually responsible: Trump and J.D. "Wormtongue" Vance and "Foxy" Pete and Kristi "Kricket-killer" Noem and Sean Doofus, our Real World: Secretary of Transportation—they have successfully managed to turn us against one another. We are pointing the finger at other powerless people like ourselves, instead of blaming the powerful. We are blaming women and minorities and LGBT and disabled people instead of the elected officials who are actually charged with keeping planes in the sky. 

In short, they have applied the same tired old strategy of scapegoating that Bertolt Brecht analyzed in his poem, the "Song of the Stormtrooper." "Big Belly" in the poem—the stand-in for every rich autocrat—sidles up to the narrator and promises him "bread and jobs" in exchange for firing on other workers just like himself. The narrator is taken in, and shoots his brother workers down. He then realizes too late: "I know now by this victory/ I wrought my own defeat." (Hays trans.)

That's what Trump and all his creeps are trying to do—they are trying to get us to turn on our own brothers and sisters who are in the same position as us. They are saying: blame your sister in the helicopter. Blame people with disabilities who got a shot at a job in the federal government. Blame Black people and trans people. Blame anyone, that is—but us. "Big Belly" hasn't changed a lot in ninety years, it would seem. He's still trying to get us to turn on ourselves, instead of our real enemy: him.