Authoritarianism with an Economic Twist

Contributed by: Stacey Patton, journalist

I’ve been reading the headlines:

The Pentagon drawing up plans to send troops into Chicago.

Trump threatening to withhold Key Bridge funds from Baltimore while hinting at a military occupation.

National Guard already armed in the streets of D.C., and warnings that New York and Los Angeles are next.

At first glance, it looks like just another authoritarian stunt. Militarize Black and Brown cities, criminalize migrants, and put on a show of “law and order” for the cameras.

But then it dawned on me…

This crackdown isn’t only about optics. It’s doubling as a jobs program for MAGA America!!!

Look at where they’re building or expanding migrant detention centers: red-state counties in Florida, Indiana, Nebraska. These are mostly white, economically struggling communities desperate for jobs.

Trump is quietly reviving the same formula that drove the prison boom of the ’80s and ’90s: carceral industries as economic development. A modern plantation economy, with detention centers instead of cotton fields. And that’s the sinister genius of it: the people cheering the loudest for Trump’s war on “crime” aren’t just animated by racism, they’re being promised a paycheck that depends on locking up Black and Brown folks.

Meanwhile, in the very cities being targeted (Baltimore, Chicago, D.C., L.A., New York) this crackdown serves another purpose speeding up gentrification.

So you flood a neighborhood with troops, slap on curfews, sweep migrants into cages, criminalize resistance, and you soften the ground for developers who want “safety” for their new condos and coffee shops. Black and Brown residents become disposable. They're either displaced or funneled into the same carceral system feeding jobs to rural white communities. TF.

And this is why it frustrates the hell out of me when I hear some Black folks say that what’s happening to Brown folks “isn’t our fight.”

White supremacy doesn’t operate in silos. It’s fuckin' ruthless, vicious, kaleidoscopic, holistic, and adaptive.

The same machinery that cages migrants in Nebraska is the one militarizing D.C. neighborhoods, the same system gentrifying Baltimore is the one arresting asylum seekers at the border. All of it is one web of white supremacist aggression designed to destabilize, divide, and dominate us.

It’s so sick. This is authoritarianism with an economic twist. The war on “crime” is also a war for capital, designed to squeeze Black and Brown bodies for labor, land, and votes.