We ban people, hoping to justify our ignorance and hate by labeling people illegal.
We use the power of the state to harass, arrest, incarcerate or deport at home.
We kidnap, execute, or bomb abroad.
We lob the word terrorist whenever we need to avoid any critical thought or questioning at home and abroad.

All of our current crises are connected by the fact they require an enemy. The war on terror, the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians, the attacks on Iran, ICE occupation and oppression, attacks on the humanity of our Trans neighbors, private prisons, undermining unions and disempowering workers. Supporters of these ideas all point to an enemy to subvert your moral and ethical reasoning and common sense.

Someone argued with us at our weekly anti-ICE protest saying that we were un-American, for not accepting that immigrants are the enemy. He then immediately jumped to “Where are your Hamas flags?”

To a lot of people, this would seem like a huge leap, a very disconnected line of thinking. But it’s not if you’re driven by the zero-sum thinking of enemies. Reactionary politics is driven by pushing people from enemy to enemy, threat to threat.

To the right, cities are dangerous because in their fictional world view by going there you are at risk of scams, crime, victimization. They’re also dangerous because by going there you might benefit from a better life. They’re dangerous because you may meet someone who doesn’t look like you, who challenges your world view, who invites you to learn something.

Fear of losing your unearned privilege and structural advantage, is what connects immigrants and Hamas in that person’s mind. We do this all the time in what we label terrorism. If you are a world superpower, the people who oppose you must be terrorists. You have to justify your violence and oppression. But what is terrorism if not an organized, uniformed military killing children, bombing a wedding, or a funeral?

Referring to undocumented immigrants as “illegals” or declaring there are no real asylum claims attempts to establish the same precedent as declaring someone a terrorist. It’s an attempt to erase everything that happens both before and after that point. Because nothing you have suffered through, tolerated, attempted to resist peacefully, or resolve through negotiation can justify “terrorism.” Nothing you accomplish after “terrorism” is legitimate, it’s fruit of the poisonous tree.

Which of course, leaves the oppressed nothing. The system is not broken, it’s functioning as designed. If you were a terrorist in the time that pre-dates when you start the timeline, you have the money to build military equipment, to slap your flag on your uniform and your bombs, to act unilaterally, and kill civilians because they are collateral damage, not because you are a terrorist.

Those same voices are trying to paint opposing kidnapping your neighbors off the streets, the poisoning of your neighborhood by data center exhaust, or the poisoning of the world’s knowledge by the slop exhaust of AI as terrorism as well. When you can’t win the argument you have to make the debate illegal. But the real terrorists are those who are doing the oppression and seeking to remove the humanity of others.

Reading

The War on Terror Approaches Its Final Form by Spencer Ackerman

Recruiters like those encountering Brouillette were incentivized to get whomever they could into uniform, regardless of their fitness to serve. Nearly 20 years later, the surge in ICE recruitment did the exact same thing. If this one-man imperial boomerang killed someone in broad daylight in a quiet town in Maine, what did he do in Afghanistan?

Then, on Thursday, Secretary of State and Viceroy of Venezuela Marco Rubio convened an international conference designed to lay the narrative and policy cornerstones to finally designate the broadly-defined "left" to be an international network of terrorists. Foreign Terrorist Organization designations will open the full panoply of War on Terror options against anyone, citizen or otherwise, whose political speech, financing and activity they wish to suppress. 

...

The War on Terror had what I call its Decadent Phase in the early and mid-2010s. We are in a new phase of its varied assault on what remains of and passes for American democracy. Every day this apparatus is permitted to exist is another day when someone is sacrificed to it. But regimes confident in their durability do not act this way. Regimes seized with the tenuousness of their grasp on power do. Abolition is the floor, prosecutions are the stairs and liberation is the ceiling.

The War on Terror Approaches Its Final Form

ICE executes the nonwhite while the White House and State Department look to declare the U.S. left a Foreign Terrorist Organization. We've been heading here since 9/11

‘I would never release him’ by Muhammad Shehada

… In the months that followed, the family were forcibly displaced more than ten times. Each time they followed Israel’s ‘evacuation orders’ and walked under fire to a designated ‘safe area’, before that too was bombed or overrun with soldiers.

The first programmer I know who was murdered in a targeted strike was Haitham. His two children had already been killed by a bomb in Rafah. He and his wife, who had been injured in that attack, fled to the Bureij refugee camp, only to be killed in a direct strike there. Abdul Rahman, the top student in our class, was next. He was killed as he walked into his apartment with his father to collect food; his family were sheltering nearby. Musab, another member of the programming team, was killed soon after in a strike on a UN school.

After Ibrahim and his family left Jabalia, the Israeli army burned his apartment to the ground and bombed his parents’ home; a few months later they flattened the entire city. …

…

Many people have lost everything since 7 October. Tens of thousands have died. At the same time, many would also say that the situation on 6 October wasn’t much better. The operations Israel liked to call ‘mowing the lawn’ meant that Palestinians were steadily being killed. Two weeks before 7 October, Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza for three days in a row. On 4 October, it was reported that Gazan protesters near the separation fence had come under fire from Israeli snipers. Reflecting on 7 October, some Palestinians in Gaza say: ‘Well, we tried everything else and it didn’t work.’ Non-violence was pursued as a strategy for decades, most prominently during the Great March of Return in 2018-19, when tens of thousands of people, most of them young, would assemble every Friday near the separation fence, making speeches and waving Palestinian flags. Over eighteen months of demonstrations, Israel killed more than two hundred protesters, as well as paramedics, journalists and children, and injured at least 34,000 people. Israeli snipers boasted about how many people they could kneecap in one day – the record was 42. ‘Palestinian non-violence relies on global non-silence,’ as the Palestinian American political analyst Yousef Munayyar put it. …

…

Hamas also tried diplomacy, albeit cautiously. In 1997, Meshal offered Israel a thirty-year truce on the condition that it withdrew from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel responded by attempting to assassinate him in Jordan. Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s founder, offered a ten-year truce in 2003 and was assassinated four months later.

…

Whenever Gaza went quiet, it disappeared from international news bulletins and Israel escalated its violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. ‘They’re right,’ the veteran Israeli columnist Gideon Levy wrote. ‘If Palestinians in Gaza don’t shoot, no one listens.’ Some Palestinians argue that 7 October – and the genocide – put Gaza back on the map and reminded the world of its cause.

…

The situation would change, too, if Marwan Barghouti were released. Barghouti enjoys unparallelled popularity and is often described as Palestine’s Nelson Mandela. Like Mandela, he’s far from perfect, but his activism, his writings and his long imprisonment have made him a legend. His power and influence are unique. … Releasing Barghouti would be a step towards unifying the Palestinian leadership and energising the masses. Even Ron Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, has recently lobbied for his release, recognising Barghouti as a figure who could stabilise the occupied territories. But that is precisely why Israel will not release him. A source close to the discussions told me that when the then US secretary of state John Kerry asked Netanyahu to release Barghouti in 2014, Netanyahu replied: ‘Barghouti would unify the Palestinians. I would never release him.’

Muhammad Shehada · ‘I would never release him’: Marwan Barghouti and Palestine’s future

Marwan Barghouti enjoys unparallelled popularity and is often described as Palestine’s Nelson Mandela. Like Mandela,...

Yesterday's US-Iran escalation is a mere prelude to what is likely to come by Trita Parsi

This piece was published 7/18, so yesterday was Friday, 7/17. By Monday morning, there was leaks about renewed negotiations, because at least one root cause of this war is market manipulation by those close to the President.

It is, at best, a perilous gamble. Tehran has grown increasingly convinced that while Trump is unconventional enough to pursue diplomacy with Iran, he lacks the discipline and strategic patience to see negotiations through.

Herein lies the paradox of Trump: his willingness to break with convention makes him open to pursuing peace with Iran—a possibility previous presidents scarcely entertained. Yet that same disregard for convention leads him to dismiss the discipline, protocols and methods that successful diplomacy requires.

Indeed, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei issued a written statement today arguing that Trump’s conduct has proven that “the signature of the U.S. President is utterly worthless and devoid of credibility.”

As long as Washington retains the option of returning to war, some in Tehran argue, negotiations serve little purpose. The United States will always be tempted to improve its bargaining position through military force - if such military options are available.

Yesterday's US-Iran escalation is a mere prelude to what is likely to come

We have seen a major escalation between the US and Iran over the past 24 hours, but it is likely only a prelude to what appears to be coming next week.

ICE Officers at Maine Shooting Scene Were Wearing Body Cameras. They Were Not Turned On. by Karl Loftus

We don’t have body cams on our fascist slave patrols because that would break an exclusive contract. Like a sports team that has to sharpie over the logo on their shoes.

Yet the ICE officials who spoke with The Intercept, all of whom requested anonymity to protect their livelihoods, identified cameras among the equipment worn by two ICE officers nearby in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

The body-worn devices were not designed solely to capture evidential video, and are used primarily as remote microphones for ICE officers’ radio communications. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

ICE officials who spoke to The Intercept identified the accessories worn by ICE officers on the scene of the Maine shooting as Motorola SVX Video Remote Speaker Microphones, a wireless radio mic with one other important feature: a camera. (Motorola did not respond to a request to comment.)

Although the Motorola SVX worn by ICE officers are designed to work as body cameras, the ICE official said the function isn’t used.

“They have multiple functionalities,” one ICE official who identified the Motorola SVX at the scene in Maine told The Intercept. “However, we are currently only using them as mics because of the AXON contract.”

ICE at Maine Shooting Scene Had Body Cameras, Not Turned On

ICE officers in Maine were wearing body cameras they can’t turn on, four sources said. The Trump administration said there was no footage.

The End of Trans Rights in the UK Is the Start of Democratic Collapse by Toby Buckle

And how they chose to do it was also profoundly anti-democratic: The bathroom ban is a sweeping legal change, but it has occurred without passing new legislation. Instead, elites across a number of bodies are aggressively reinterpreting existing legislation (namely the 2010 Equality Act). What this means is that the mechanism through which the bathroom ban will become official is a ‘Statutory Instrument’ meaning that it will not receive parliamentary oversight or a vote—a core part of democratic functioning. (See here for Ian Dunt’s full breakdown of how this works). Now that it has been ‘laid’, MP’s have 40 days to object, but a majority of them would have to agree to a virtually never used procedure, something nobody expects to happen at this point. 

…

This will all feel for many, I suspect, like a distant hypothetical. I’ve found from having this discussion many, many times during America’s democratic backsliding that you can’t reason people into intuitively Getting It. People can accept the logic of what you’re saying and it still won’t feel real. At a certain point, those of us who warn must make our peace with that. We can’t alert everyone, even if it's in their interest. 

But for those who might feel somewhat on the fence, let me leave you with this: democratic backsliding isn’t just about what happens to other people, or what may happen to you in some hypothetical. You are less free now because of what has happened. 

The End of Trans Rights in the UK Is the Start of Democratic Collapse

It's never just one minority.

Who is ICE detaining at NJ's Delaney Hall? Not as many criminals as DHS suggests. by Arya Sundaram

More than 10,300 people have been detained at Delaney Hall between May 1, 2025, when the privately run facility reopened as an ICE detention center, and March 10, 2026, the latest date for which data is available, according to a Gothamist analysis of ICE data obtained via public records request by academic research group the Deportation Data Project.

The vast majority of those people — more than 70% — have no criminal history, according to the analysis. Only 12% have criminal convictions and 18% have pending criminal charges that have yet to be adjudicated.

Who is ICE detaining at NJ's Delaney Hall? Not as many criminals as DHS suggests. - Gothamist

More than 10,000 people have been detained at the facility. Most have no criminal background.

Delaney Hall’s current crisis builds on decades of N.J. immigration detention by Ulla Berg, Mary Rizzo

Detention became more central to U.S. immigration policy in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1980, for example, the United States detained thousands of Cuban refugees who came during the Mariel boatlift. Private corporations, which governments had begun to turn to for running their prisons, expanded into new markets of immigrant detention. Today, more than 90% of detention centers are run by for-profit corporations.

…

In 2021, the political tide turned as county and state democrats came out publicly against ICE detention. Within the course of a year, the county jails depopulated their ICE detainees and Governor Phil Murphy signed a law (AB 5207) that banned the creation or renewal of detention contracts with ICE.

ICE detention was nearly eradicated in New Jersey. The EDC was the only facility still in operation. Under the new anti-detention law, when its contract came up for renewal, it, too, would close. Instead, CoreCivic sued New Jersey in a U.S. District Court, claiming the state law was unconstitutional. GEO Group soon filed suit as well. CoreCivic and GEO Group were joined by the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden, who saw New Jersey as essential to immigration enforcement.

…

The lawsuit shows a key tension that continues to play out. While immigration is managed by the federal government, the detention system that EDC and Delaney Hall are a part of, has been forged by bipartisan support at the county and state levels and motivated by economic interests. The overlapping “war on crime” and “war on drugs” caused mass incarceration and immigration detention to become intertwined. Trump has built on this foundation, not created an entirely new system.

Understanding the current situation at Delaney Hall requires this historical context. More than 30 years ago, the EDC proved to federal and state leaders that privatized immigration detention could “work” in New Jersey, as long as the mistreatment and abuse of detained people could be kept out of the spotlight. But history also shows us that when detained community members resist through complaints, lawsuits, hunger strikes and, even, an uprising, their voices and experiences reveal the system’s underbelly and inspire systemic change. We hope that history will teach future generations that such efforts are worthwhile.