Informants

 According to the Wall Street Journal yesterday, far-right white supremacist groups have apparently been resharing a meme online that invites people to inform on their neighbors' immigration status by contacting ICE. The image shows Uncle Sam tacking up a "wanted" poster, with an actual phone number people can use to contact the feds. The text under the image bids people to "Report all foreign invaders." 

That's disturbing enough. But far worse is what happened next: official government accounts, including the actual Department of Homeland Security profile on X, reshared the image—"foreign invaders" rhetoric and all. Good god; what is happening to this country?

It would seem the Proud Boys and other far-right terrorists—despite all their complaining against the feds—now seek to "add to [their] other laurels the ambition of those of an informer," as Byron once said of Southey. In other words, they want to be "rats," as Shelley once termed the same individual—with less delicacy.

Example: one of their number is also reportedly offering "crypto" pay-outs to anyone who calls ICE in order to rat on their neighbors. Could one imagine a more perfect distillation of the MAGA attitude? The combination of financial rip-off, pyramid scheme, odious cruelty, and bootlicking worship of state power is the epitome of the Trump cultural moment. 

It's impossible to imagine a lower form of life than the person who would re-share that "foreign invaders" meme—unless, I suppose, it is the person who would actually act on it. 

When ICE has not only been deporting people under normal legal authorities, but has been testing out such outré abuses of power as shipping people to offshore detention sites in Gitmo, in El Salvador, or on a military base in Djibouti—anyone who deliberately pushes someone into the agency's clutches is also sending that person to potential death or torture. 

To which I say, with Edna St. Vincent Millay—it won't be me that places such a call. I may not be the best person. I may have my flaws and my own selfishness and weakness. But the one good news about the Trump era is that it has set the moral bar incredibly low. It's easy to clear it now. At the very least, I am not someone who would ever call ICE on their neighbors. 

Why? Because I am "not on Death's payroll," as Millay once put it, in her poem about the "Conscientious Objector":

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends

nor of my enemies either.

Though he promise me much, [crypto schemes and all!]

I will not map him the route to any man's door.

Am I a spy in the land of the living,

that I should deliver men to Death?

Brother, the password and the plans of our city

are safe with me; never through me 

Shall you be overcome.