30 seconds 

Call me confused. Here we go again. Iowa is sending National Guard troops to the Texas borderline this summer. Is this a really good use of Iowa’s tax payer money and manpower? I guess it depends on what lens you view it through.

If you are an Iowa taxpayer who has seen a legislature and a Governor enact any number of stupid policies such as dismantling our public school system or loosening child labor laws you might think this is yet another really stupid stunt meant to raise the far right fear machine while doing nothing that pertains to Iowa.

But if you are a far right wing Governor of a small midwestern state who might have her eye on a vice-presidential spot on her party’s ticket, a stunt like this is the perfect vehicle to raise the usual bogeymen of right wing politics while being fawned over by Iowa’s supplicant press. 

Raising the specter of bogeyman scary foreigners is one of the right’s favorite games. Meanwhile here in Iowa farms are in need of workers. As Art Cullen observes in a guest column at the iowacapitaldispatch.com that immigrants are vital to livestock operations and meat packing plants:  

It’s an open secret that the livestock economy vitally depends on immigrants, mainly from Latin America, to put cheap pork on your grill and cheese in your larder. Everybody knows we couldn’t get by without them. Yet we cheer on the most strident anti-immigrant outrage.

What gives? Do they resent that corporations have taken over pork and dairy production? Because they scarcely could exist without immigrants. Help-wanted signs are everywhere. You hear it all the time: We just can’t find help. The Legislature wants you to prove work for welfare with a 2.8% state unemployment rate. It just loosened up child labor laws, too.

In rural food processing hubs like Sioux Center or Storm Lake, it takes someone bent on the American Dream to scoop manure or work in the blood-drying room. Tyson pays $21.50 to start at the Storm Lake pork plant and cannot keep the roster full. How would you like to load turkeys on a truck at 2 a.m. when the sleet whips sideways and that squawking feathery rage is coming right at you?

Yet we clap when someone talks about keeping Venezuelans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Hondurans and Mexicans out. 

Cullen then goes on to note that:

Who’s going to milk the cows or cut the bung out of a hog hanging upside down? Billy went off to be a commodities broker at the Chicago Board of Trade, and his parents back in Sioux County are proud. But we still have work to do here. Honest work. Hard work. Few others want to do it. Those are facts, too. We rely on Latinos to git ’er done.

Why, then, would you want to deport people who are indispensable to your dairy?

As Cullen noted Iowa loosened child labor laws to meet some of their labor shortages. Yet Iowans will be cheering a string of far righters who will be waving the immigrant bogeyman in their faces for the next 8 months.

Once again I must be missing something.

And if every person at the southern border is a would be fentanyl entrepreneur, why is there such a demand for the drug in Iowa? Perhaps a Governor whose eyes weren’t focused on a promotion at any cost to her constituents would expend some effort on that question.

Lastly I was confused that the one time lunch time darling of the far right, Chik-fil-A, has seen a sudden reversal of favor as someone discovered that within the Chik-fil-A corporate structure there is a D-E-I office. For those unfamiliar with the latest in acronyms that is a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office. Such an office deals with integrating diverse people into an organization.

As you can imagine D-E-I is scorned in right wing world. Those on the right are calling for boycotts of Chik-fil-A. So if you are a MAGA think about where else you can get a crappy meal at noon. It is not easy being a bigot these days. And for Chik-fil-A they may have to open on Sundays to make up their losses.

And one small reminder. When Iowa’s 4 far right Republican congress members voted to raise the debt ceiling Wednesday, do not forget that just about a month ago they voted for a bill tat would make significant cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food programs. That is who Feenstra, Nunn, Hinson and Miller-Meeks really are.