Quick Cash for Rats: Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) launches "TruckSafe Tipline" to snitch on immigrant drivers

[Miles Archer]

Sen. Jim Banks launches tip line for truckers to snitch on immigrant drivers
The Indiana Republican wants people to use his “TruckSafe Tipline” to report drivers who they think don’t meet English-speaking requirements or are in the country illegally.

https://www.ms.now/opinion/sen-jim-banks-launches-tip-line-for-truckers-to-snitch-on-immigrant-drivers

As one of the most significant hubs of Ku Klux Klan activity in the early 20th century, the state’s history is rife with examples of bigoted fearmongers who have warned the white masses to stand guard against marginalized groups — be that Black people, Jews or immigrants.

*****

And this history was front of mind for me as I learned of a new “tip line” launched by Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., for truckers and others in the industry to report on drivers they allege are in the country illegally, or unauthorized to drive a truck, or don’t speak English well enough to meet requirements.

The context here is that the Trump administration, along with its allies in Congress and conservative media, has been cherry-picking recent traffic crashes to portray immigrant drivers as threats to public safety. Even Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, decried the racist scapegoating coming out of MAGA world after some of these incidents.
Nonetheless, Banks is calling on truckers to snitch on other drivers via his “TruckSafe Tipline” — and his anti-immigrant sentiment is hardly subtle.

“Indiana is the Crossroads of America and Hoosiers are getting killed because drivers who shouldn’t be here in the first place are behind the wheel,” he said in a news release.

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Odd they don't seem to target Republican consituencies

Business owners, professional classes such as doctors.

[harumph]

4. Hmmm. According to recent data - more than 50% of Doctors are Democrats.

Political alignment varies by specialty.

https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2016/10/11/political-affiliation-doctors

I think at one time the majority of docs were republican, but that has changed in the past 20 years.

I would also imagine that docs practicing at big public hospitals lean left, while docs owning their own "pain treatment" centers for example, lean right.

[David__77]

5. As medicine is amalgamated the profile will further change.

Physicians will increasingly be employees or something like employees, outside of certain specialties.

[Botany]

2. This is the Republican Party's M.O. in a nutshell. Just go ahead and make something up and then push the ...

… lie as a fact. See:

Hillary’s email scandal…. Nothing there and Colin Power as Sec. of State had the exact kind of email
sand I think the same I.S.P.

John Kerry was a coward in Vietnam. No he had a bronze star, a silver star, three Purple Hearts,
and didn’t lose a single man doing the most hazardous duty the war. This was a Karl Rove
and a Republican hit group’s work. (Creative Response Concepts)

Bill Clinton and the great blow job hunters of the 1990s but where are they now as Donald Trump
is mentioned 38,000 times injustice part of the Epstein Files aka sex trafficking, rape, kidnapping,
a 9 year old girl, money laundering, blackmail, kompromat, Vlad Putin, Musk, and cover ups?

Jim Banks of Indiana’s new story that brown people from are coming to Indiana from South of the
Border and killing good God fearing white Hoosiers driving trucks on those Hoosier Highways.
BTW if somebody is driving a vehicle in Indiana he or she has to be licensed and in insured they
aren’t crossing the border @ Brownsville, TX and then going to Muncie, IN and getting behind the wheel
of a semi truck hauling freight. What a total lie. Brown People in Big Rigs. Be Afraid White People
be very very afraid.

Where was a reporter pushing back on this obvious Republican lie?

[Miles Archer]

3. Fanning the flames of unreasoning fear and anger...it's all they've got.

There's a scene in The Simpsons, a dystopian fantasy that I believe was part of their yearly "Treehouse of Terror" Halloween shows.

Ned Flanders has become a Jim Jones sort of authoritarian cult figure. People get sent to "re-indoctrination centers" if they stop smiling. They're strapped in chairs and metal hooks pull the corners of their mouths into hideous smiles. Ned is on a series of giant video monitors, saying "Just relax, let the hooks do their work."

And this is what Fox News "accomplishes," 24 / 7. They keep their viewers angry and fearful and agitated so that when someone like Banks comes up with a scheme like this, they see him as the messiah.

[OldBaldy1701E]

6. Someone needs to do a study on exactly who causes accidents in his state.

I am betting that he will not like the results.

[cbabe]

7. A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61423989-a-fever-in-the-heartland

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

Timothy Eagan, 2023
Non fiction

The klan and its takeover of Indiana.

A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan's rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.

The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows – their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman – Madge Oberholtzer – who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.