QOTD -- Defeat, Not Victory

"... The Border Patrol retreated from Chicago in defeat, not victory.

"Writing about the Border Patrol a decade ago, I referred to it as a 'fiercely independent agency—part police force, part occupying army, part frontier cavalry,' and watching Bovino’s tactics, I’ve come to believe the analogy has even more truth in the current moment.

"Bovino is basically leading a rebel cavalry, a la Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who raided and terrorized communities in Kentucky and Tennessee in the Civil War. That latter analogy holds up particularly well in one specific respect: Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. In many ways, in fact, Bovino’s shock troops have the most in common with the Klan 'night rides' of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow era South, where hooded Klan members on horseback — often 'respectable' leaders of the White community like the local sheriff — terrorized Black families and abused their civil rights. Bovino seems focused on becoming the Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Trump immigration era, complete with the blatant racism, illegal tactics, and ignominious losing place in history..." -- Garrett Graff, at DoomsdayScenario.com, on Border Patrol gauleiter Greg Bovino's diminishing returns reign of terror in American cities.  People, not just in the cities that have been impacted by Bovino's authoritarian tactics, hate what they see happening almost every day -- the brutality, the arbitrariness, the "Kavanaugh stops" based on racial and ethnic profiling, etc.  It's even prompted the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Pope Leo XIV to condemn the inhumanity of the crackdown.  Graff goes on to point out how and why the Border Patrol under Trump lickspittles Bovino, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller are failing and, in the process, being exposed for their weakness as "ordinary Americans are stronger."

(Photo:  the Nazi analogy also pertains / AFP via Getty Images)