Just say no to outrage overload

In what sort of country do teenagers enact locking babies in cages?

Says Virginia Heffernan: "A nice place for departing Trumpites like Nielsen to rest up & get away from our stressful nation might be The Hague" The Hague in the Netherlands is the location of the International Criminal Court which tries human rights abuses in countries that won't do the job.

Michelle Goldberg summarizes some of fired DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's transgressions of decency:

Nielsen did not create Trump’s monstrous policy of separating migrant families, but she should be known forever as the person who carried it out. She put babies in cages, traumatized children for life, and then appears to have lied to Congress about what she had done. She did this evil work with either blithe incompetence or malicious sloppiness, failing to create a system to properly track kids who were ripped from their families. On Friday, the Trump administration said it could take up to two years to identify thousands of separated migrant children.

Goldberg is not ready to let Nielsen prance off gaily, now that Trump has given her the hook. And she hopes that citizen mobilizations can prevent many of Trump's cast-offs from finding cushy landing spots, at least those who were not millionaires before they came in and might try to resurface in corporate and academic settings.

There's such an effort to exclude Nielson from landing in in academia and environs.

There's the inevitable internet petition Goldberg reports:

“Allowing her to seek refuge in a corporate corner office or a boardroom, university, speaking agency or elsewhere poses a significant reputational risk for those involved,” said Karl Frisch, a spokesman for Restore Public Trust, the group organizing the campaign.

... There are plenty of places that will hire a disgraced child-torturer — private prisons, which often hold undocumented immigrants, are a big business. And Henry Kissinger’s storied social life shows that America’s elite is far from inhospitable to ghouls. But as the country hurtles into a dangerous new phase of unbound Trumpism, those who want to say no need to muster whatever leverage they can, including public shame and economic sanctions. Either the leaders of corporate America and academia want to be associated with terrorizing toddlers, or not.

I have no beef with making life uncomfortable for these people and the institutions that might hire them, but I have trouble believing that such campaigns are enough.

Unfortunately, working for a better country and against Trumpist cruelty and criminality requires us all to sustain outrage. That's hard. Millions of us worked our butts off to elect a Democratic Congress and we did the job. We're tired and disgusted. But we can't look away. #Resistance is not a laugh line; it's our path toward survival of democracy and decency.

David Nir, Daily Kos elections wizard, reminds us that all the upcoming elections matter. We have to win the presidency -- but we also have to win the local judgeships, the District Attorney contests, as well as legislative seats.

We desperately need to reawaken the spirit of 2018, when Democrats won resoundingly from coast to coast at every level of the ballot because progressives invested themselves everywhere. We need to take back the Senate, protect the House, flip and defend state legislatures, and, yes, win a bunch of state Supreme Court races.

But more than that, we have to root out the disease of Trumpism—the corruption, the rot, the violence, the disregard for the rule of law, the abject cruelty, all of it. Donald Trump himself is a symptom and an accelerant, but he’s not the cause. If we defeat him but leave the rest of the apparatus that props him up in place, we’ll again find ourselves in the same situation before long, only worse.

The work is the sole remedy for the pain.