We Are All Domestic Terrorists Now

I was marching in a crowd of thousands of people through the streets of lower Manhattan last night when the imperial boomerang officially arrived. After a rally in Foley Square where activists and elected officials decried ICE’s ongoing persecution of immigrants, we all set out in a procession that snaked around the long blocks surrounding 26 Federal Square, the grim, looming building where New York City’s detainees are being held after being violently plucked out of courthouse hallways by masked ICE agents.

As we rounded the corner at Broadway and Chambers Street, I began reading on my phone the text of a new White House executive order titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” This was an odd experience. The EO in question purported to be an attempt to excavate and disrupt the planning of events just like the one that was happening right that moment ten floors below where lots of terrified immigrants languished in a federal lockup. Yet it seemed like a lot of unnecessary performative madness, an entire world of frothing lunacy concocted in the fevered minds of fascists who bring their own set of answers to the start of every investigation.

I can reveal precisely why so many New Yorkers were out there yelling at ICE: Because they do not like to see human beings abused. Because they dislike racist oppression. Because they find it undesirable to see the sort of people who are the backbone of New York City be grabbed and handcuffed and thrown around and arrested by secret police working for some of the most poisonous right wing racists in modern government history. Lots of people don’t like any of that. So they rally and march and wave signs and bang pots and pans and shout up at the dark, mute face of the building where the outrages are going down. There you have it. End the investigations. The culprit is: People are angry that the government is doing something evil.

There was never a mystery to begin with, of course. The “imperial boomerang” is the concept that all of the methods of oppression that a mighty nation visits upon its far-flung imperial subjects will one day be turned back upon its own population. And here we are. This is a decades-long process, ratcheting up in earnest since the post-9/11 War on Terror, and any declaration