OU BOUM: The Gulag gave us a very good deal!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 19, 2025

So the Fox friends all said: It's just exactly as we told you in yesterday morning's report:

The key word there is "alleged."

Except in the realm of Fox & Friends, "alleged" is still the key word. We highlight the word in this excerpt from a report from today's Washington Post:

Trump and his aides cheerily celebrate deportations

As the Trump administration battled with a federal judge over the use of wartime powers to deport alleged gang members to El Salvador, the White House X account on Monday posted a video of migrants being handcuffed and sent away, to the soundtrack of the 1998 Semisonic hit “Closing Time,” a song that’s often associated with the end of a party.

“You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here @CBP,” the White House posted, with musical note emojis—a reference to the song lyrics. The video was also posted on Team Trump’s TikTok and reposted by the official account for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, with the caption: “It’s closing time. We are making America safe again.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that the video “sums up our immigration policy pretty well” and that the White House is “encouraging illegal immigrants to actively self-deport, to maybe save themselves from being in one of these fun videos.”

[...]

In addition to the “Closing Time” video, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a high-production video from Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday that showed alleged gang members escorted off deportation flights and transported to a megaprison at night, where their heads were shaved. The White House also posted a video in February of migrants shackled before they boarded a deportation flight, with the caption: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”

And on Valentine’s Day, the White House posted a poem on Instagram, with a pink background and cutouts of Trump’s and border czar Tom Homan’s faces: “Roses are red violets are blue come here illegally and we’ll deport you.”

Rubio and Leavitt and Homan oh my—but also the Central American strongman! Everyone was having big fun with respect to the "deportation" of the "alleged" gang members—and again, we stress that key word.

With his famous "Oopsie too late" tweet, the strongman had mocked the much larger nation to the north. Leavitt and Human had chuckled along—but still, there sat the key word: 

"Alleged."

According to the Washington Post, "alleged gang members" had been "deported" to El Salvador. According to the Post's formulation, there's no question that the people in question were "migrants"—but were they also "gang members?"

According to the Washington Post, that part of the story is only "alleged!" That said, even the Post was being polite in the passage we've posted. 

For one thing, this wasn't exactly your grandfather's "deportation." For starters, the alleged gang members had been "deported" to a third nation, not to their country of origin. But also, they'd been directly deported into something the Post described as a "megaprison." 

The Post was being polite. More accurately, the alleged gang members had been "deported" into the maws of a Central American gulag—into a dystopian gulag from which the alleged gang members are unlikely ever to emerge.

In that sense, this wasn't you grandfather's deportation—and there sat the key word "alleged!" Staring into the face of the term, we ask you to ponder the following question:

Who were the hundreds of actual people who'd been spirited into this realm? 

Does anybody actually know who those people actually were? Over at the New York Times, a news report offers this: 

Judge in Deportation Case Draws Ire of Republicans as White House Pushes Back

[...]

A separate legal fight has been quietly simmering about the level of danger presented by the Venezuelan immigrants who were deported by Mr. Trump under the extraordinary powers of the Alien Enemies Act.

Lawyers for some of the men have claimed they are not members of Tren de Aragua at all, but instead were targeted by the gang while living in Venezuela. And recent court filings the government has submitted to Judge Boasberg have provided a murky view of who these migrants might be.

In one recent filing, the Justice Department cited an immigration officer who acknowledged that several of the people suspected of being gang members did not have criminal records in the United States—largely because they had not been in the country very long.

Others appear to have been arrested while merely in proximity to Tren de Aragua members during law enforcement raids, according to the officer, Robert L. Cerna II, the acting field office director of the deportation arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Sad! Sad on the part of ICE, but also sad on the part of the New York Times for including this infelicitous phrase:

"Largely because they had not been in the country very long."

Sad! Perhaps due to an editing error, the Times chose to publish that formulation from ICE seemingly in its own voice!

With that, we return to our basic question:

Who were, or are, these deportees? Is it possible that some of the people shipped off to the gulag aren't even gang members at all? Is it possible that some of the deportees were actually targets of the gang in question?

Could such claims be accurate? Taking things even farther, we now ask you this:

Is it possible that most of these deportees aren't members of the gang in question? Stating what is blindingly obvious, we'll tell you this: 

Yes. Of course that's possible!

"Trust us," the Voices said. 

That's the closing line of a lesser-known Robert Frost poem, The Lovely Shall Be Choosers. (If memory serves, it's said to be a poem about the way Frost's mother was treated by an unfeeling world.)

The lovely shall be choosers! Today, we're told to trust the laughing Voices which come to us from the disordered organization which recently sent its figurehead onto a national stage to tell us the people an array of gargantuan nonsense. 

With apologies, we republish that figurehead's words again, along with the attendant (LAUGHTER) from some of the many Voices in his audience. We apologize for having to post this lunacy again:

THE PRESIDENT (3/4/25): We’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors and that our seniors and people that we love rely on.  Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.

It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119.  I don’t know any of them.  I know some people that are rather elderly, but not quite that elderly.  

(LAUGHTER) 

3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129. 

3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139.

3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149.

And money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now. 

In fact, Pam [Bondi], good luck.  Good luck.  You’re going to find it.

But a lot of money is paid out to people because it just keeps getting paid and paid, and nobody does—and it really hurts Social Security and hurts our country.

1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159.  And over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old.  

We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby [Kennedy Jr.]. 

(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)

Including, to finish, 1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229; one person between the age of 240 and 249; and one person is listed at 360 years of age—

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Joe Biden!  

(LAUGHTER)

THE PRESIDENT: —more than 100 years older than our country. 

But we’re going to find out where that money is going, and it’s not going to be pretty. 

By slashing all of the fraud, waste, and theft we can find, we will defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, lower car payments and grocery prices, protect our seniors, and put more money in the pockets of American families. 

 (APPLAUSE) 

They sent the figurehead out to make those lunatic claims as (LAUGHTER) emerged from the Voices. Days later, a certain user of ketamine was repeating the same crazy claims.

Along the way, he and his nameless / faceless "engineers" had made a seemingly endless array of major clownish mistakes as they claimed to bring a brand of efficiency to the workings of the federal government.

Sad! But in the face of that mammoth dysfunction, the Voices were saying, "So what?" 

Voices like the silly child Leavitt (she's 27) and the furious Homan (he's 63) were vastly enjoying the "fun" as the alleged gang members were shipped off to the gulag. Along the way, we the people were told that we should make a highly unlikely assumption:

We should simply assume that what the Voices were saying simply had to be accurate! The figurehead had clowned us with his insane oration about all that fraud—but now we should simply assume the accuracy of this!

This brings us to the morning's key question. How many of those alleged gang members are actual gang members?

How many of them are really gang members?

"Trust us," the flyweights now said.

That's what we got from the people who sent the figurehead out to make those ludicrous claims about the non-existent recipients of all that Social Security fraud—ludicrous claims of a type which have largely been normalized by this point in time.

The lovely were laughingly making their choices about the fate of the deportees. They'd shipped them off to a gulag, laughing about it the whole way.

This brings us to the conversation which took place on yesterday morning's Fox & Friends. The four Fox friends were all on the couch. We'll say their names tomorrow.

Yesterday morning, there they sat. It was 6:15 a.m. 

The friends began to discuss this case. We got a very good price from the gulag, these corporate Voices now said. 

Tomorrow, we'll transcribe their remarks. 

"Ou-boum" was a sound once heard in some (fictional) Indian caves as certain cultural frameworks melted away, disappeared. The Gulag gave us a very good price, these multimillionaire Voices all said.

Trust us, the friends happily said.

Tomorrow: Ou-boum! We transcribe what the four friends actually said

Friday: Jeffrey Goldberg mentioned ketamine. But who was he talking about?