Fat, dumb and fascist is no way to go through life. Unless you work for ICE and get to carry out revenge fantasies on all of the other identities who have wronged you.

What did neoliberals, who’ve deployed identity politics for the last 50 odd years, think was going to happen as they identified and celebrated gays, lesbians, trans, ethnicities and illegal immigrants? The bitter, left behind, white working-class men were always going to seize upon an identity too.

It’s not like there’s a history of grievance or anything. Where a charismatic leader rides a cult of resentment to power, convincing millions that they are victims of shadowy enemies consisting of immigrants, gays, Jews, communists, intellectuals, journalists and anyone who challenges his authority or contradicts his narrative. This grievance is not merely rhetorical; it is weaponized. It transforms resentment into loyalty and anger into political energy, binding followers to him not through policy or principle, but through shared outrage and perceived humiliation.

I’m aware that no one reads anymore and it’s the United States of Amnesia, but what the fuck!

Watch the video of the murder, where a goon from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fired point-blank into the windshield of Good’s car as she tried to avoid a confrontation. Jonathan Ross, the murderer, then fired twice more at Good, the last of these shots from behind. Look at the body language at the start of the incident. It’s aggressive and predatory. As the ICE officer approaches Good’s vehicle, he shouts–“Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the fucking car.” This is not someone who is enforcing the law in a professional manner.

No, this guy, seething with animosity, is not a legitimate authority or law enforcement. He is a straight-out expression of resentment and grievance, expressing the poisonous mix of hatred and envy shared by any group that feels itself spurned or scorned or disdained–socially, economically or politically. This is the defining feature of the MAGA. Most ICE trainees are MAGA people who nurse their feelings of inferiority and resentment behind badges. What we see in the videos of Good’s murder is not the enforcement of anything. It’s payback.

We’ve had decades of neoliberalism, where the owners and their professional/managerial/class (PMC) lackeys thought it a great idea to offshore US manufacturing to parts unknown, while encouraging rampant illegal immigration. And while it might be uncomfortable to discuss in polite company, the results have been devastating for the working class, especially white male workers, who not only lost their jobs but lost their “manhood” in the ability to support a family. Since then, they’ve been lectured that they are racists by a PMC, who’ve gained massively from cheap imported products and cut-rate domestic and landscape services, provided by illegal immigrants. Moreover, wages for ordinary Americans have been stagnant for forty years and I’m pretty sure that it’s not a coincidence that the last forty years also have witnessed one of America’s greatest waves of illegal immigration. 

To cover their betrayal the PMC embraced identity politics. Because solidarity and class politics are for losers. The right behavior is to maximize your human capital and broadcast your identity through social media. In a neoliberal society there are no traditional links of family, community friendship, even mutual commitment. There are only coincidences of interest, to be exploited for as long as they last, and then to be abandoned. The truth is that the PMC is like a cult, where certain ideas are held to be true because they are emotionally and aesthetically satisfying, and no opposition to them is allowed. If it’s true that uncontrolled immigration, or the export of jobs overseas accompanied by de-industrialization, are good things, then any evidence suggesting the contrary is by definition wrong and can be ignored or demonized as racist. 

None of this should be a mystery. The resentment that we witness with ICE was how Trump won in 2016. Then after attacking Trump as a Russian secret agent, liberals went out to brunch with Biden in 2020 and forbade any critical examination of how their policies allowed Trump to win the presidency. We let it happen. Our leaders went corporate decades ago. The CEO’s have worked against us for generations. They captured the Fed. Captured the regulators. Wrote the trade deals. Shuttered the factories and built condos in their place. Shipped the jobs. Kept the money.

The elite lawlessness trickles down. It doesn’t stay in the White House or the DOJ or Wall Street. It hits the pavement. The desperation that produced men willing to join ICE is a result. ICE just killed Renee Good in the street. Meanwhile, we’re losing our hearts. Our souls. Our minds. Turning on each other. More tribal every day. Looking for someone weaker to blame.

Instead, we must fight the system that produced Trump and his minions. The Fed that failed us. Regulators owned by industry. A Supreme Court that said presidents are above the law. Fifty years of our country being sold off. If we just replace Trump while electing a neoliberal infested Democratic Party we lose. Beat Trump but leave the system? We get another Trump. Smarter. More disciplined. Riding the same desperation because nothing underneath changed.

Fortunately Americans are rejecting ICE brutalities and murders. Furthermore, the crackdowns and weaponization of ICE reflect a presidency under mounting pressure. Trump’s recent actions, from economic subsidies to kidnapping Maduro and threatening Iran, don’t signal strength, they signal a presidency losing its grip on its own coalition.

Stay safe.

Update: If you think that ICE’s rampages are about immigration laws then I have a bridge to sell you. The idea of expelling tens of millions of people via violent roundups is completely bat-shit crazy. You are not going to pick them up one at a time in the Walmart parking lot. Any administration serious about eliminating illegal immigration would simply make it a felony to hire or rent to such an individual. But, of course, that would inconvenience Trump’s supporters, the corporations and their billionaire owners who enjoy maintaining a desperate army of immigrants laborers.

No, ICE is Trump’s personal paramilitary, a brand new army of fully militarized federal cops trained to drive around the country and disappear people into vans in broad daylight while murdering those who interfere.