"It’s simply not who we are"

Referring to the incident in which a Border Patrol agent was seen whipping Haitian asylum-seekers President. Biden said, “It’s simply not who we are”.  The sad truth is, it's exactly who "we" or at least some of us are.  

I suspect, anecdotally, that this behavior reflects attitudes held by a significant proportion of law enforcement and those in red states.  We are a deeply divided nation and anti-immigrant sentiment combined with the "othering" of those who are deemed to have broken the law paves the way for this kind of behavior. 

Combine the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiment, with declining trust in institutions including in the rule of law, particularity acute among rural conservative leaning folk, and you have a recipe for violence (they'd call it "self-reliance") against those they see as outsiders. This incident and January 6th insurrection, not to mention the killing of unarmed mainly black men by self-appointed vigilantes, are where this leads.