On Tape

I’ve written on a number of occasions about the way our declining culture obsesses about forms while ignoring substance; the rise of Donald Trump seems to have exacerbated the problem, quite possibly because while other politicians are at least hollow mannequins made of plastic, coated with duplicity and filled with money, Trump has approximately as much substance as a balloon animal.  So while other politicians can vomit out all the “sex trafficking” lies they want, even to the point of making outlandish claims that violate the laws of economics, mathematics and even physics, reporters and busybodies go along with them because most Americans are simply too stupid to notice the ludicrosity of the claims, even when a politician is practically playing pocket-pool behind a podium while regaling the audience with his masturbatory fantasies of traumatized preteen girls chained to radiators, shipped around the country in dog crates and raped by a hundred men a day.  Now, the soi-disant anti-Trump “Resistance” is, for the most part, every bit as painfully stupid as the MAGA crowd; however, they’re actively looking for fault in every single thing Trump does, no matter how meaningless.  So when Trump dives headlong into “sex trafficking” mythology and starts telling the same tall tales as every other politician and cop in the country (including “progressive” darling Kamala Harris) in pursuit of his border-wall boondoggle, how are his enemies to attack him without undermining the edifice of lies they’ve painstakingly built over the past 15 years?  By attacking the form of his fantasies rather than the (lack of) substance, naturally:

U. S. President Donald Trump has been painting a wildly inaccurate picture of human trafficking in his effort to sell a border wall that would not make a meaningful difference in fighting the problem, experts on trafficking say.  Over the past two weeks, Trump has repeatedly told lurid stories about women being “thrown into the back seat of a car, or thrown into a van with no windows, with no form of air,” and smuggled over undefended parts of the border with “tape over their mouths, electrical tape…They tape their face, their hair, their hands behind their back, their legs.  They put them in the back seat of cars and vans, and they go — they don’t come in through your port of entry, because you’d see them.  You couldn’t do that,” he said in [a] speech to the American Farm Bureau…

In other words, Trump’s repeating the same kind of crude BDSM porn that thousands of cops, politicians, and other self-anointed “sex trafficking experts” have regaled breathless cretins with on a daily basis for over a decade.  So how do the “experts” attack this?

Six trafficking experts from around the U.S. [said]…they had met no trafficking victims who had suffered anything like the experience Trump described…“he’s watching some…type of movie that involves handcuffs and tape over people’s mouths”…said [prohibitionist] Lori Cohen…[fantasist] Martina Vandenberg…[nitpicked] “I have never had a case where someone’s mouth was taped up and they were brought across the border in the way the president described”…Cohen has worked closely with victims of traffickers from Tenancingo, Mexico, a hotbed for sex trafficking…

If you’ll follow that last link, you’ll find that this supposed “hotbed” was actually two pimps.  The Tenancingo fantasy was exactly the kind of story Trump’s rhetoric was drawn from, despite the shockingly-disingenuous “wherever did he get THAT from?” these two opportunists gave reporters.  But what do they focus on so as to draw attention to the emperor himself and away from his nonexistent clothes?  Why, the tape, of course!   The Washington Post even went so far as to analyze the kind of tape:

…On at least eight occasions over a period of 12 days this month, the president has argued publicly for his proposed wall on the southern border by claiming without evidence that traffickers tie up and silence women with tape before illegally driving them through the desert from Mexico to the United States in the backs of cars and windowless vans…the adhesive is sometimes blue tape.  Other times it is electrical tape or duct tape.  In some instances, the descriptions are more salacious and graphic. “Human trafficking — grabbing women, in particular — and children, but women — taping them up, wrapping tape around their mouths so they can’t shout or scream, tying up their hands behind their back and even their legs and putting them in a back seat of a car or a van — three, four, five, six, seven at a time,” the president said in the Cabinet Room on Jan. 11.  (A timeline of the president’s taped-women remarks appears below)…

This is followed by quotes from a number of talking heads obsessing about the tape and pretending they have no idea at all about where Trump got this wanking fantasy, despite the ubiquity of moronic taped mouth imagery in “sex trafficking” propaganda.  Naturally, nobody but Frontpage Confidential bothered to mention the real story here:

…Come fire or flood (or wall), the federal government never seems to run out of money to throw at its war on sex workers.  On Tuesday, January 8, 2019…Trump signed the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act, earmarking $430 million to battle what it calls a sex-trafficking scourge but which is, in actuality, a sex-trafficking boondoggle — the product of hype and hysteria sown by politicians and others who stand to gain from the government’s largess.  The Douglass Act and its attendant windfall capped off a barrage of four anti-sex-trafficking bills that Congress pushed through just before Christmas.  Trump affixed his signature to the measures amid a government shutdown over his desire for a $5 billion wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and not long after tweeting that he’s thinking of denying California billions of dollars in emergency aid to help the state recover from the damage done by forest fires.  (Additionally, Trump’s advisors reportedly are considering diverting disaster-relief funds from several states and Puerto Rico to pay for the president’s wall)…But never let it be said that niggling financial concerns could obstruct the federal government in its goal of eradicating commercial sex among consenting adults…

Nothing to see here, citizens; the nation’s mainstream press knows you don’t really want to know the truth about prohibition.  So instead, they’re going to argue about what size Cinderella’s glass slippers were and consult “experts” about what Teletubbies eat for breakfast.