For the second day in a row, immigration officials shot and killed civilians during the course of their alleged duties. This time, the offending agency was the U.S. Border Patrol, the victim count was two, and the location was Portland, Oregon. The Trump Administration is posthumously slandering the victim of the first shooting, claiming that she tried to run over ICE officers in her car when that was not what footage showed at all. Mainstream media is dutifully reporting government lies as valid.
It is difficult not to interpret these incidents as part of a deliberate, though not necessarily consciously coordinated, escalation in the Trump Administration’s reign of terror. They serve to strike fear into the hearts of existing or would-be peaceful protestors and students of direct action, and nip the nascent resistance in the bud. The gaslighting of activists and the general population, both by the government and by mainstream outlets (including the New York Times!) stands out as the most dangerous element of this crime. Not only will ICE shoot you for protesting or resisting its inhumane operations: your murderers will blame you for their crimes, and the media will obediently parrot what they say, relegating the facts to the status of a mere opinion on equal footing with outright lies.
Ladies, gentlemen, and gentlequeers (a neologism I intend in the most respectful and reclaimed sense), our Ministry of Truth is here. And despite reports of neoliberalism’s death, it comes to us in the guise of a de facto Reagan-Clintonite public-private partnership.
The question is not whether to act against this outright assault on human liberty, but how. I lack clear answers at this point. I do offer considerations.
First, there are two forms of resistance we might employ. The first is chronic friction, which is what most actions have been up to this point. The goal is to gradually slow the system to a stop, to compel its halting. The second is tactical occupation. I don’t mean “occupation” in the literal sense, but as action aimed at achieving a specific objective which permanently alters the exercise of structural power. The occupation is of strategic, versus physical, territory.
We stand at a point where we need a greater focus on tactical occupation. Chronic friction, one might contend, is what will bring the Trump government down eventually, but it offers no control over what replaces it. It could be a tepid neoliberal congress and White House warming the bench for the next far-right tyrant. It could be a military coup. It could be something worse than either. Regardless, the question of “what comes next?” is a discussion for another post, albeit one to which I have given considerable thought and to which everyone ought to. What matters today are what immediate objectives we must pursue in order to get there.
I see two goals we must achieve:
- Prevent the Trump Administration from killing any more protestors.
- Prevent the deportation or detention of any more U.S. citizens, such as Dulce Morales who, despite recently being released from ICE custody, still hasn’t had her case dropped.
Doing so on a permanent basis before removing Trump from power is unlikely to be viable. Therefore, what we must do is instigate a shift in conditions that delays or inhibits its ability to act on its goals. Either the movement needs to exact a cost from the Trump government that it cannot ignore and which renders it hesitant to act as it has, or something concrete must impede its ability to function.
There’s a third consideration, and that is one of initiative. In historical fencing, the principle of who controls the flow of battle stands amongst the most important. If you have the initiative, you retain the most options in how to handle an adversary. If you lack the initiative, you can only react, and reaction always lags behind action. Right now, American resistance in reaction languishes. And that is a problem, for resistance already is innately reactive. After all, resistance is about what you stand against, not for what you stand for. The question we ought to ask ourselves, therefore, is such: what do we stand for that precludes the very possibility of what Trump is attempting, and at which he is succeeding, right now? And how do we build that other thing right here, right now, in a way that places the regime on the defensive?
I offer this one thought: the very concept of nationhood lies at the heart of Trump’s bid for power. The institutions and metaphors he relies on hold so much power precisely because they have long been accepted as legitimate by most people in American-occupied territory. We accept that there is this thing called a “nation,” that people must “belong” to a nation, and that a nation has the natural right to exclusively possess territory, to be administered by an apparatus called a “state” which enforces its will by the sword.
I’m not sure how this isn’t an ethos of serfdom and slavery, but then again I am unsure of many things Americans hold dear. What I can say is that Trump exercises power by merely adjusting the conditions of nationhood. His opponents, having mostly already accepted the core premises of his rule, shrink in disadvantage. All countries arbitrarily exclude people. All states use violence and fear to attain political goals, first and foremost that of establishing their alleged sovereignty. All governments manufacture consent instead of deferring to it. I can attest from personal experience, having placed myself on the front lines and endured arrest while protesting in solidarity with the BLM movement, that the reckless and unethical conduct of ICE agents is not due to a lack of training. I’ve faced down scores of armed and armored police threatening to shoot nonviolent protestors. I’ve been kept in restraints that made my hands numb for days. I’ve seen them bring horses to fist-fights. I’ve heard from my fellow dissidents that the same police who arrested me ram into them repeatedly with bicycles (because Sacramento must go green!) while they detained me away from the rest of the group. (This was after the person in question had been struck by a police cruiser during a peaceful action a year prior.) I’ve heard stories of harassment from my black and brown compatriots from that day which made the badge’s contempt for them clear, as well as how they exploited that disparate treatment to drive a wedge between us and undermine our solidarity.
There is nothing new about ICE’s conduct. This is normal. Only the veneer of civility has vanished, along with a few customary limitations that permitted the illusion of liberalism to persist for a privileged and predominantly pallid few. And if we define “terrorism” as using violence and fear to achieve political ends, and nations and states by definition use violence and fear to maintain their power, then all governments are terrorist organizations. We have been negotiating with, and submitting to, terrorists our entire lives.
Make no mistake: opposition to the so-called President is not mere resistance, or dissent. It is a war: a cold war that was declared long before he even dreamed of entering office. It will be won not by returning everything to normal, but by finding liberation in the aberrant, the unprecedented, and the extraordinary. And one must begin, I think, by questioning the very idea of citizenship. Are you really content to surrender your political autonomy to a concept that is regulated by nations, legislatures, and tyrants? Will you find salvation in a standard of social membership which can be alienated at any time because you are too brown, too “godless,” too gay, too trans, too female, too “unmanly,” too “unpatriotic,” too dissident, too eccentric, too individual, too you? Shall you insist on practicing so-called democracy on the terms of institutions that reduce your consent to a bureaucratic formality, and a shoddy and fraudulent one at that?
Or is what we like to fancy “citizenship” really some quality that cannot be granted by persons, institutions, or collectives, but an intrinsic right to political power deriving from our individual and common humanity? Is it a membership card for the biggest, most bullisome ethnonationalist club that’ll take you, or a birthright to a natural aristocracy of equals that includes all and exiles none?
Think on that for a while. I already have my answers, for the most part, and will share them in time. But it’s not my job to do your thinking for you, so I insist you take some time to work on the problem yourself before we compare notes. And while you’re at it, ask yourself what things you cling to that prevent you—prevent us—from enjoying the liberty you so desperately claim to cherish.