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Many of the refugees who have arrived at the United States’ southern border in recent years were fleeing the gangs that the president claimed they belonged to.
My father was a Mexican citizen until the day he died. He lived here in the U.S. on a green card. A former military man and federal agent under several Mexican presidents, he remained patriotic and deeply conservative. Though he had been chased out of his beloved Mexico City by the toxic whims of a presidential strongman, he stayed loyal.
He loved Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He joked that if he were an American citizen, he would have tried to vote for Nixon twice in 1968. He used to boast that Nixon was the first Latin American– style president America had ever elected. My father was a law-and-order man—once a cop, always a cop. He might have fallen for Donald Trump if he’d lived long enough. But Trump would have talked him out of it in his first televised anti- Mexican rant. At least I think that’s what would have happened.
DURING 2020’s apocalyptic summer, photographs circulated of immigrant farmworkers toiling in fields amid walls of smoke and fire as California burned around them. The pictures have visceral impact— they are frightening yet beautiful. But their effect on me was epiphanic: Here were perfect metaphors for the harvest of nearly four years of recklessly vicious rhetoric and policies, of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and cruel family separations, of toxic propaganda and the relentless boondoggle of the border wall. Here was the theater burning down as the hypnotist kept working the mic, like Jim Jones calling us all into the delirious excitement of sheer nihilism. The Book of Revelation for Suckers.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der November 2020-Ausgabe von The Atlantic.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der November 2020-Ausgabe von The Atlantic.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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THE GLACIER RESCUE PROJECT
Can the mighty Thwaites be stopped from tumbling into the sea?
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A Novel Without Characters
Rachel Cusks lonely experiment
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The Industry That Ate America
The long and lurid history of lobbying
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Kafka's Not Supposed to Make Sense
“The incomprehensible,” he explained, “is incomprehensible.”
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Tornado Watch
How Lee Isaac Chung reimagined Twister, one of the biggest climate-disaster thrillers of all time
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Too Cute to Fail
Koalas are threatened by climate change, cars, and chlamydia. Can Australia find a way to protect its most beloved animal?
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THE FIRST THREE MONTHS
What I saw inside the government’s response to COVID-19
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THE VALLEY
Searching for the future in the most American city
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THE AIRPORT-LOUNGE ARMS RACE
Inside the ever more extravagant competition to lure affluent travelers
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Hypochondria Never Dies
The diagnosis is officially gone, but health anxiety is everywhere.