From: fedora@fea.st   
      
   NY Times,   
      
   January 14, 2026   
      
   The war on terror comes home once again   
   By David Wallace-Wells   
      
   Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have discharged their   
   weapons at least 16 times since President Trump and Stephen Miller   
   launched their mass intimidation and deportation campaign last summer.   
   Renee Nicole Good, who died last Wednesday in Minneapolis, is not even   
   the first of these victims to have been killed.   
      
   We have been told by the Trump right that these are officers of the   
   law struggling to do their jobs in the face of unlawful disruption.   
   But when Americans catch glimpses of ICE agents on social media, they   
   are not typically in orderly pursuit of undocumented migrants. Quite a   
   lot isn’t really immigration enforcement at all, but moments of   
   escalatory panic and rage — chaotic episodes in which often masked   
   agents scramble to intimidate, coerce and ultimately pacify groups of   
   civilians whose sympathies lie not with the state but with its nominal   
   targets. Increasingly, what we are seeing resembles a war against the   
   liberal resistance.   
      
   The spectacle looks from one vantage like a horrifying break with   
   soft-focus American history. But there are also obvious continuities,   
   not just with the country’s long history of vigilantism but also with   
   a very recent period of militarism: empowered mercenaries treating the   
   cities in which they’ve been deployed like intimidating war zones,   
   seeing opposition and hostility around every corner and treating   
   anyone who dares stand in their way as a terrorist or insurrectionist.   
   This isn’t border enforcement; it is a kind of blundering   
   counterinsurgency.   
      
   For more than two decades now, left-wing critics of the war on terror   
   have warned about the possibility of what they often called the   
   “imperial boomerang,” drawing on the work of Aimé Césaire, who argued   
   that it was European colonial brutality that eventually enabled the   
   rise of fascism at home, and Hannah Arendt, who endorsed the theory in   
   “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” (Michel Foucault later picked up the   
   thread, too.)   
      
   Sometimes the prophecy seemed to suggest an element of karma — that in   
   launching an open-ended war of choice America might reap what it had   
   sown, with that cruelty and excess abroad returning from the imperial   
   periphery not just in the form of soldiers’ trauma but also in the   
   form of blood lust and violence, too.   
      
   But journalists, including Evan Wright and Radley Balko, and   
   intellectuals, such as Chalmers Johnson and Julian Go, also offered   
   some particular and pretty concrete predictions, including about the   
   way that advanced military equipment, once purchased, would eventually   
   find its way into the hands of domestic law enforcement officers, who   
   would surely find something to do with all of it — helicopters and   
   tanks, tactical gear and flash-bang grenades and sniper rifles. As the   
   active campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan subsided, giving way first to   
   less visible military operations and increasingly to remote-control   
   warfare, the writers Noura Erakat, Connor Woodman, Richard Beck and   
   Spencer Ackerman have warned of the paranoid logic of the forever war   
   and the authoritarian drift of the state, and about the growth of   
   repression and surveillance and the curtailment of civil liberties,   
   the militarization of normal police action and the elevation of any   
   conflict to a kind of “Clash of Civilizations” status.   
      
   And here we are, with an Iraq veteran in tactical gear, surrounded by   
   comrades swarming a car partially blocking his way, firing point-blank   
   at its driver. In the immediate aftermath, sympathetic nativists   
   justified the shooting by describing a Minneapolis taken over by   
   Somali refugees, but also by pointing to the victim’s divorce and   
   sexuality, the social justice curriculum at her child’s elementary   
   school and the obstinateness of liberal white women.   
      
   The crisis in Minneapolis began when the Trump administration sent ICE   
   surging into the cosmopolitan city, which just five years ago had   
   given rise to the largest protest movement the country had ever seen,   
   not because there was some sudden burst of migration but to respond to   
   a large-scale social-services fraud scandal, an obsession of the   
   right-wing online ecosystem. This was the equivalent of dispatching   
   the military to clean up a failed state, with “blue” now effectively a   
   Trump administration synonym for “failed.” And the immigrants accused   
   of perpetrating the fraud scheme were Somalis — many of them former   
   residents of the quintessential failed state, a Muslim country in   
   Africa that has been hit by more than 130 U.S. strikes since   
   Inauguration Day. On the very day of Good’s shooting, the Fox News   
   host Jesse Watters proposed to Vice President JD Vance that the   
   Democrats in Minnesota have “a little bit of a Somali problem.” The   
   vice president laughed, “America has a bit of a Somali problem.”   
   Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath   
      
   Over the last few years, noting pandemic-era peaks in crime and   
   homelessness, it was possible for conservatives to demagogue blue   
   cities as hell pits of social disorder, discrediting liberal   
   governance of any kind. But crime has fallen so far and so fast that   
   national murder rates are now lower than they ever were in records   
   dating back to the 1960s. The migration surge that produced a spasm of   
   American nativism is inarguably over, too. Since Trump’s second   
   inauguration, actual border crossings have fallen close to historic   
   lows.   
      
   But the logic of the forever culture war is that it must continue. In   
   the last year MAGA has grown obsessed with government fraud, even   
   after an empowered Elon Musk failed to find any meaningful major waste   
   in federal spending. At the same time, it has embraced a throwback   
   Islamophobia that has probably generated more references to Sept. 11,   
   2001, than we’ve heard in years.   
      
   In 2025, ICE has brought the border to blue strongholds quite   
   literally, turning whole sanctuary cities into zones of open conflict   
   — between state leaders and federal ones, city police and federal   
   agents, resistance liberals and a descending force of outsiders who   
   see a “The Future Is Female” bumper sticker and imagine the driver is   
   a domestic terrorist.   
      
   Officers have already arrested and assaulted and harassed many dozens   
   of citizens, many of them for the supposed crime of documenting ICE   
   operations, as though journalism is a form of violence. They have   
   arrested elected officials engaged in protest under false pretenses,   
   too, as though political opposition has been criminalized. Agents have   
   reportedly dragged pregnant women, pointed guns at children and left   
   victims to seek out medical attention on their own. They have used   
   banned chokeholds, according to ProPublica, at least 40 times.   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)