From: fedora@fea.st   
      
   On Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:57:39 -0800, Dude wrote:   
      
   >On 1/14/2026 12:08 PM, Noah Sombrero wrote:   
   >>   
   >> 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.   
   >>   
   >So, I can't believe that people would be crazy enough to put their lives   
   >in danger inciting a riot protesting armed US Border Agents doing their   
   >job, led by an ICE Barbie enforcing the law, the people voted for.   
      
   Some people does not equal the people.   
      
   >You can't make this stuff up!!   
   >   
   >Since Democrats are once again engaged in violence because the   
   >electorate rejected their policies, a reminder that all Democrats are   
   >fascists at heart.   
      
   Either that or they insist on standing on their principles. Innocent   
   people should not be shot or dragged away for one thing. You cannot   
   vote that right away from us.   
      
   >On November 9–10, 1938, the Nazi regime coordinated an antisemitic riot,   
   >called Kristallnacht.   
   > >   
   >> 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   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)   
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