Our country’s policies toward these people once they arrive here are broken and cruel and unjust, leaning deeply into our blameless society’s supremacist foundational lies; lies that insist some people simply do not matter.

DeSantis and Abbott and the fascists who support them have a big problem with these policies, to wit: they aren’t nearly cruel or broken *enough,* and they have recently seen disturbing signs that these policies might become marginally less cruel and broken and unjust.

These governors/total pieces of garbage are enraged about this opposition; enraged about this persistent belief in and expectation for repair of what is broken, and so they have decided to demonstrate their rage.

They demonstrate their rage by bussing and flying refugees to various places where their opponents live, in what they frame as a punitive act against those places—a stunt which among other things reveals their assumption that they do not see refugees as people, but as punishment.

DeSantis sent them to Martha’s Vineyard, home to the sort of wealthy liberals that total pieces of shit like DeSantis insist are the traitorous socialist globalists who want immigrants to come to America, a nation of immigrants, in order to destroy it.

That's their story.

The governors’ idea appears to have been to create as much chaos as possible, in order to use the chaos they created to demonstrate that refugees and immigrants cause chaos, which they then offer to justify their cruel attitudes toward other human beings.

The idea appears to have been to make the situation as systemically failed as possible, to demonstrate that migrants are not people but a disruption and a cost, and that systems built to support and aid them are always costly failures.

The idea appears to have been to manufacture a problem, and then to take people’s reaction to the problem they manufactured as evidence that everybody actually agrees with their grotesque beliefs about immigrants, which is that immigrants are not people, but problems.

The idea appears to be to demonstrate that people who despise immigrants and other kinds of refugee should be allowed to go on not caring about their fellow human beings without the consequence of being understood as inhumane.

They want this—not because it is good to be indifferent to human suffering, but because they have furnished themselves with adequate proof that people who claim to care are just pretending; that all other people are secretly indifferent about human suffering, too.

DeSantis and Abbott and their supporters don’t want to be good. They just want to reassure themselves that everyone else is similarly bad. And then they rejoice at any slight hint that this might be true.