🔍 Uncovering Border Tales with Christopher DeSimone: Cartels and Colonial Commentary
Delve into the complex realities of border issues and the narratives shaping them.
Based on the Wake Up Live with Chris DeSimone for 2/17/25.
🙊 Notable quotes from the show
Jeff Brabant (NFIB Vice President of Government Relations):
"We have about 300,000 small independent businesses around the country and they tell us what to do via ballots."
Context: Discussing NFIB's organizational structure and small business representation
Quote reveals the performative nature of corporate "democracy"
On Small Business Challenges:
"We've seen a drop in folks who want to do more capital investments in their businesses."
Context: Discussing economic uncertainties and potential tax changes
Highlights the ongoing economic precarity for small businesses
Christopher DeSimone (Host):
"Why is it us saying that an illegal group of organizations, cartels, are terrorists who participate illegally in guns, drugs, human slavery, sex slavery, terrorism, they murder government officials, journalists, and take over entire towns?"
Context: Discussing Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum's potential legal action against US gun manufacturers
Reveals the racist undertones of border discourse
Brother Joe (Horse Racing Enthusiast):
"Mr. Lucas said this very clearly. We have a legitimate Derby horse."
Context: Discussing a horse race at Sunland Park
Symbolizes the casual colonial attitude towards land and movement
😽 Keepin’ It Simple Summary for Younger Readers
👧🏾✊🏾👦🏾
🎙️ The radio show talked about small businesses, 🐎 horse races, and 🌍 border issues. It explored how businesses often pretend they listen to everyone, even when they don't. 🏇 Horse racing was seen as part of a bigger story about who controls the land. Finally, when talking about border problems, some words showed fear and unfairness, but there are always people ready to challenge these ideas. 💪
🗝️ Takeaways
💰 Performative Democracy: Jeff Brabant's views on NFIB's structure reveal the façade of corporate representation using "ballots."
🚨 Economic Precarity: There's a noticeable decline in capital investments among small businesses, highlighting ongoing economic instability.
🌐 Colonial Narratives: Brother Joe's horse racing enthusiasm underscores a colonial mindset around land ownership and displacement.
💥 Manufactured Consent: The rhetoric on border issues exposes underlying racist and imperialistic undertones in media narratives.
🎭 Narrative Gaps: Despite pervasive colonial narratives, there remain gaps where resistance and alternative stories thrive.
Borderlands Dispatches: Echoes from the Colonial Soundwaves of February 17th, 2025
¡Órale, compañerxs. Another morning, another colonial narrative machine grinding away on the airwaves of Tucson - that contested terrain where Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui lands continue to breathe resistance beneath settler infrastructure.
On February 17th, Wake Up with Christopher DeSimone spun its usual web of conservative mythmaking, featuring Jeff Brabant from the National Federation of Independent Business and a horse racing enthusiast Brother Joe.
These mornings feel like a battleground, I think, stirring my morning café de olla, the cinnamon-rich aroma a reminder of resilience older than these radio waves. Another day of parsing colonial language, another day of survival.
🏢 Jeff Brabant: The Small Business Fairy Tale Machine 💼
When Jeff Brabant from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) began speaking, the colonial economic fantasy machine roared to life. "We have about 300,000 small independent businesses around the country, and they tell us what to do via ballots," he proclaimed - a statement so loaded with capitalist mythology it practically sweats settler privilege.
Listen to this performative democracy, I muttered, tracing the outline of my abuela's serape hanging on the wall - a real testament to independent entrepreneurship, not this corporate whitewashing.
Brabant's economic narrative revealed the true violence of capitalist "opportunity." Discussing potential tax changes, he warned of impending doom for small businesses if Trump-era tax cuts expire. "We've seen a drop in folks who want to do more capital investments in their businesses," he lamented.
Investments? I thought. Let me tell you about real investments - generations of indigenous and migrant labor that built this economy, invisible in these sanitized discussions.
The NFIB's perspective deliberately erases the economic realities of borderland communities. While Brabant speaks of "small businesses," he means predominantly white-owned enterprises that benefit from generations of stolen land and suppressed labor. These aren't entrepreneurs, I thought, they're modern-day colonizers with spreadsheets instead of land grants.
The workforce challenges Brabant described aren't economic mysteries - they're direct results of systemic racism, educational inequality, and generational poverty. When he claimed workers are hard to find, what he really meant was workers are refusing to accept poverty wages and dehumanizing conditions.
Imagining the real small businesses, I thought of the taquerías, of the mercados where real economic survival happens - not in corporate boardrooms, but in community kitchens and family-run shops.
Llamada a la Acción:
Map your local cooperative economic networks
Support Indigenous and migrant-owned businesses
Challenge corporate narratives of economic "success"
🐎 Brother Joe: Horseracing as Colonial Performance 🏇
Brother Joe's segment about horse racing at Sunland Park was a living diorama of settler colonialism - a performance of ownership played out on lands that have known millennia of indigenous movement and resistance.
"Mr. Lucas said this very clearly. We have a legitimate Derby horse," he announced, his voice dripping with the confidence of someone who believes "legitimate" is anything a white man declares.
Legitimate, I scoffed. Legitimate like the borders that slice through indigenous territories? Legitimate like the fiction of ownership on stolen land?
The race itself - happening at a venue literally straddling New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico - became a metaphor for colonial violence. Horses thundering across landscapes that have known forced migrations, systematic displacement, and ongoing resistance.
Each hoof beat is a gunshot, I thought, each race a reenactment of territorial conquest.
Brother Joe's excitement about horse ownership reveals the profound disconnect of settler leisure. While he celebrates a potential Derby horse, entire communities fight for survival, for land, for basic human dignity.
Llamada a la Acción:
Support Indigenous land reclamation efforts
Challenge colonial sporting traditions
Learn the true history of land and movement in the borderlands
🌍 Borderlands Narratives: Violence Disguised as Commentary
The show's discussion of USAID, educational challenges, and border issues was a masterclass in manufactured consent. When discussing potential legal actions by Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum against U.S. gun manufacturers, host Christopher DeSimone's rhetoric exposed the colonial imagination's deepest fears.
"Why is it us saying that an illegal group of organizations, cartels are terrorists who participate illegally in guns, drugs, human slavery, sex slavery, terrorism, they murder government officials, journalists, and takeover entire towns?" he demanded - a question so loaded with imperial violence it practically vibrated with racist undertones.
Illegal? I thought. Tell me about illegal occupation. Tell me about systematic violence.
What DeSimone refuses to acknowledge is the intricate economic violence that creates these conditions. Cartels aren't spontaneous phenomena - they're products of decades of imperial intervention, economic manipulation, and systemic oppression. They are the grotesque flowers growing from the poisoned soil of colonial capitalism.
The 2024 American Family Survey segment reduced complex social dynamics to a simplistic cultural comparison - another attempt to flatten lived experiences into digestible, white-friendly narratives.
They want stories, I thought, but only stories that don't challenge their comfort.
Llamada a la Acción:
Develop transnational solidarity networks
Challenge imperial narratives of violence
Center migrant and Indigenous voices in discussions of border communities
🔥 Conclusion: Resistance is a Constant
Wake Up with Christopher DeSimone represents more than a radio show - it's a colonial technology of consent, a machine designed to naturalize systemic violence. But in every narrative gap, in every unexamined assumption, we find spaces of resistance.
They think their words control the narrative, I smiled, but our resistance is older than their microphones.
Preguntas para la Comunidad:
How do these media narratives attempt to limit our collective imagination?
What stories are deliberately silenced to maintain these power structures?
How can we transform these violent narratives into spaces of healing and resistance?
Resistimos. Seguimos. Venceremos.
The coffee grows cold. The struggle continues.
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