A week of Trump stopping visas for Palestinian children, the national guard being deployed to DC, and Rwanda accepting people being trafficked from the US

Hi, I’m Marcela: I’m a comedian, I live in Brooklyn, and I really like to tell people how to feel about the news. After wowing zoomers all over on TikTok by giving them news with a sense of humour and anarchy, I decided to start a weekly Sunday newsletter to share my feelings about more news. 

My newsletter has evolved into this beautiful news column for shado which also covers international news. I hope the newsletter keeps you informed and makes you laugh a little. We live in hell and I believe humour helps keep this place a little bit cooler.

Today I’m sharing my feelings about Trump administration halting to issue visas for Palestinian children seeking healthcare, the national guard being deployed to DC, and Rwanda accepting people being trafficked from the so-called US.

Onto the news… 

News that made me remind everyone white supremacy is expensive!

In another significant act of cruelty, the Trump administration cancelled visas for Gazan children seeking medical treatment in the so-called United States of America. I guess if you are vicious enough to bomb people, you’re heartless enough to prevent their treatment from the injury your bombs caused. Despite the abundance of cruelty in Trump’s administration and his minions, I’m still shocked at such sadistic behaviour.

I know I should just accept that Trump and his minions drink from the neverending fountain of cruelty like a freshman doing a keg stand at his first college party to celebrate freedom from his overbearing parents. However, who sees a video of an injured child arriving at the airport to receive treatment then raves about the children’s parents being terrorists? Laura Loomer, a malignant human who would cause Darth Vader to clutch his pearls at her hatred.

Laura Loomer, a proud racist (I’m not saying this, she is) wrote a short hateful essay on Twitter demanding the Trump administration fire whoever had a speckle of humanity left in them to let injured Palestinian children receive care. I really wish Twitter kept its character limit so racists would have to do more labor to post their diatribes. Nonetheless, the Trump administration obliged by halting the visas. Don’t you just feel safe knowing government policy is being sourced from Twitter’s racist bowels?

The wickedness displayed by the Trump administration coupled with lies utilised to carry out cruelty should remind everyone that these fascists will do anything to maintain white supremacy. I was having a conversation with someone at a party who commented that this administration just wants to kill people who are not white because they enjoy it, while the previous administrations did it for power and money. Yes, I’m very fun at parties. Please invite me to your next one.

I asked this person why they didn’t think Trump was carrying out these vile acts of racism for money and power. They believed it to be because it’s expensive to carry out all these acts of hate, like deporting immigrants. What money and power could they possibly be getting from this costly endeavour? I responded that white supremacy is the power they are seeking – to which the person nodded. I love it when people agree with me at parties because this usually never happens. (Actually, Trump and his evil friends are getting rich from the deportations we are paying for so that’s the money aspect of this).

I’m not sharing this party story to sound like I’m cool enough to be invited to parties – I’m really not, please invite me. I’m sharing this because I do believe that people don’t fully understand that everything the US government does is in service of white supremacy, because racial capitalism depends on maintaining whiteness as a privileged class. 

This is why the United States is spending money to denigrate Black, brown and Indigenous people with the occupation of DC, the genocide in Gaza, and the internment camps. These actions enrich the capitalist ruling class while maintaining white people’s loyalty by reminding them their whiteness is a privilege that shields them from state violence. As Saidiya Hartman states in her book Scenes of Subjection, “security of whiteness depended upon black subordination.” 

News that made me feel like we should abolish the police

Trump. The man who I wish I didn’t have to think of or speak of, yet here I am being forced to think of him and write about him because he is on an autocratic bender. Trump declared federal control of the District of Columbia’s police and has deployed the national guard for the purpose of making DC safer. If Trump really cared about the safety of DC, he would step down as President and abolish the United States of America.

Trump claims DC is an unsafe place roving with “dangerous” teenagers, while he entertains literal war criminals at the White House. An adorable group of teens did make my ovaries quiver the other day on the train, so they are guilty of spreading the nefarious “children are cute and you should totally have them propaganda.” So I guess the teens of DC are dangerous, only to certain people who’ve had their uterus evicted but their ovaries don’t know.

Even if the teens were causing other types of mayhem other than ovarian quivers, the solution is not to deploy the military or police. If the military is being deployed to keep DC safe from teens, then every single white suburban neighborhood should be occupied by the national guard given white teens’ relationship with mass shootings. It’s the same relationship I have with eating gushers before I go to bed. I shouldn’t do it, but I do it because society has empowered me to do so.

The reason why Trump is able to federalize the police force in DC and deploy the national guard is because we live in a carceral society that has normalised state force. A lot of the repudiation of Trump’s power grab is that the crime rate in DC is low and this has nothing to do with safety but power. Which is true but what if the crime rate was indeed high? Does that give Trump the right to deploy the military and federalise the police?

The short answer is no. The long answer is noooooooooo. 

Our society’s carceral mindset permits the disposal of people who’ve been labelled as criminals for safety purposes. Hence, a tyrant knows they can simply label specific groups as criminals to excuse oppression. What if we as a society rejected the notion that people who cause harm should be disposed of unless they are part of the ruling class?

The truth is that the people committing most of the crimes are part of the ruling class and will never be held accountable by our injustice system. Who is perpetrating genocide and wage theft? It’s not Karl from down the street. When was the last time a serial killer who didn’t have a title was allowed to drive around in a motorcade? If your career goals are to be a serial killer, there’s no better job than the leader of any country.

What if we said no to the carceral state and actually abolished the police? Trump wouldn’t have an oppressive force available for abuse. If we don’t want autocrats to grow stronger, maybe we shouldn’t fund and build the tools they can use to further their autocracy. It’s like giving a baby a rattle, then being shocked when they shake it.

News that made me describe the coloniser compass

The in-house colonisers of Rwanda have agreed to accept people being trafficked from the United States of America by the Trump administration. You know how the saying goes: colonisers that commit human rights violations together stay together. I call the “leaders” of African countries who giddily coordinate with Western autocrats colonisers, because that’s what they are.

Their purpose is to provide the pretence that Africa is free from colonialism by implicitly stating, we’re African so there is no way we could be running a global criminal enterprise based on the extraction of our own resources. When in reality that is exactly what they are doing: coordinating Western colonialism of Africa for personal gain. They are like the teacher’s pet who will pretend to be cool and fun but will remind the teacher that homework is due when the teacher clearly forgot. Really, Chad, is maintaining a 110% average more important than childhood friendship?

One shouldn’t be surprised that the Western puppets of Rwanda are willing to participate in Trump’s human trafficking ring, because Rwanda supports the genocide in Congo. Once you are willing to support genocide, nothing is beneath you. No one has ever said, you know that person there committing genocide, they would never [insert any evil deed] just like no one has ever said I’m a chill person. Okay, one person said I was a chill until five seconds into knowing me, then they quickly changed their mind. I think I might be chill when colonialism is over. Until then, I will be flipping off every cop car I see drive by me, thank you very much.

Rwanda’s in-house colonisers have been funding M23, a known terrorist organisation, to murder civilians in Congo so colonisers can sell cell phones, so it’s pretty clear the moral compass of Rwanda’s leadership has long been broken and replaced by the compass of the colonisers. What is the colonisers’ compass? It’s the compass that turns your eyeballs into dollar signs so your only purpose is obtaining wealth like Mr. Krabs from Spongebob.

So, when Trump offers you the opportunity to participate in an international human trafficking ring for money, your eyeballs become dollar signs and you say yes please! It’s cartoonishly villainous but what more do you expect from a system built to oppress the majority so an annoying white man can get T-Pain to write a song for his anniversary. Yes, I did spend time going through Mark Zuckerberg’s instagram so I could find a post to hate on (which, it turns out, is all of them). I can’t unsee this cringey photo of Zuckerberg trying to convince all of us he is cool by standing next to T-Pain, so you have to experience the cringe too.

Speaking of cringe, Rwanda’s in-house colonisers have stated they will only accept immigrants without “a criminal background record.” Okay, it’s more than cringey to say you will not accept so-called criminals into your country when you’ve just agreed to committing the crime of human trafficking and are currently committing genocide. I guess the only acceptable criminals in Rwanda are the ones who run the country.

I took a break from the news to talk about Black August

@feelthenewswithmarcela We are currently collectively being forced to pay for our own oppression. What if we all collectively liberate each other? #feelthenews #jokes #comedy ♬ original sound – Feel the News

See ya later,

Marcela