The ASMR of Deportations
Relaxing, tingly feelings from people in chains
ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is a sensory phenomenon that some people profess to experience in response to certain audio and visual stimuli. Go to YouTube, and you’ll find thousands of videos with ASMR content, which if you are one of the people who experience the phenomenon (I have), you will feel a sense of relaxation and perhaps even a tingling sensation along your scalp and spine that you might find pleasant.
People use ASMR to calm themselves, to alleviate mental states like anxiety and depression, and generally to make themselves feel good. Note that part.
Today, in what I think might very well be the most purely evil statement from the Trump administration among so many evil statements, the White House account on X posted the following video. Click on this link to see the post and watch the video.
Note the title: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” If you watch the video, you will see several scenes, including chains and handcuffs being dragged across the tarmac and various individuals in chains presumably in preparation for loading onto an airplane for deportation. ASMR techniques are very specific, e.g., whispering or rustling sounds and soft lighting with slow movements, to elicit a physical response. You can see some of that in the video.
Note that by labelling the video as ASMR, the White House is saying that the audio and visual content is supposed to relax you and give you tingly feelings. Put most simply, the video projects nothing about whether the deportations are necessary or proper, but rather that watching people being chained should feel good.
This goes well beyond the question of what our immigration policy should be. The video refers only to “illegal alien deportation.” The White House didn’t specify that these are violent criminals or even those who are being deported following legitimate due process. Given how the Trump administration refers to “illegal migrants,” the video can be taken to refer to any immigrant who isn’t properly documented.
But even if these were violent criminals or those ordered by a judge to be deported, the video would remain just as evil. No civilized person should find this kind of content to be relaxing, to alleviate anxiety or depression, to make them feel good. The fact that the White House published the video — by their own admission — to evoke those kinds of feelings is more disturbing than I can adequately communicate.
You have TDS. No objective observer sees this video as anything but a joke. If your definition of evil is jokes in poor taste, you know you have lost touch with reality.
And the idea that you can never feel good about someone being put in chains is absurd. One should feel good about defending oneself from violent criminals who have run uncheked for years under the previous administration. Tom Homan stated that they would go after violent offenders first. So its more likely than not these are violent offenders, if you were to assume either way.