Conspiracy Theory as Policy: The Trump Administration and The War on Gangs

• In Event: Public Discourses and their influence in policy creation

Abstract

The war on gangs has involved contradictory explanations and justifications because the same population that the state has supposedly been at war with has also been recognized as an integral, aggrieved part of American society. Thus, every redeclaration of the war on gangs has included at least lip service to the idea of needing state-sponsored programs that provide disaffected youth with viable alternatives to gangs and, more generally, a need for greater economic and social justice. In contrast, the Trump administration has offered a morally unambiguous justification for an intensified war on gangs by attributing the cause of reported increases in gang violence to the nation's failure to secure its borders against perceived invading hordes from Mexico and Central America. Correspondingly, the war on gangs becomes part of a larger effort to reclaim the nation from outsiders who seek to become insiders for the purpose of infiltration, subversion, or wanton destruction. The following essay examines the nativist turn in the war on gangs and what it portends for American political culture and civil discourse.

Author

• Louis Kontos, John Jay College of Criminal Justice