Say it now or shut up forever

I believe there are political event horizons in our history—moments where our actions, or inactions, help or hinder our chances for real systemic change.

After Sandy Hook, when we didn’t burn it all to the ground (metaphorically speaking), we made gun reform all but impossible. Politicians now know there is nothing too horrendous that we’d (metaphorically) burn down a (hypothetical) Wendy’s about it. After George Floyd’s murder, when we stopped marching because they painted a street and cosplayed the Black diaspora, they knew we weren’t serious about defunding the police. And they were right after all.

This is that moment for ICE. If, even now, after the viral murder of Renee Nicole Good, our political and cultural leaders aren’t compelled to say the thing, then it’s a wrap.

Say the thing.

In the last week, I’ve seen lots of famously left-of-center white dudes getting real long in the tooth towards ICE suddenly. It has been surprising, but I love to see it. The only problem is, all of them have stopped short of saying the thing.

So, come on Stephen Colbert. Let’s get it poppin' John Gruber. Say the thing. Finish the damn job.

Because if it’s unjustified death that riles you up, boy, do we have some catching up to do. Imagine if we learned that at least 70 white people died in detention, or that they were issued forced sterilizations. There’d be riots in the Hamptons. If Mike Masnick can say it (finally) so can you.

Say the thing.

There’s a faction of the left who measures their intelligence by how reasonable they think they sound. The thought of being labeled frantic or unreasonable by their peers is so horrific that they’d sooner let the world burn before admitting we need radical change to put out the fire.

Even when they can bring themselves to call for meaningful change, they still must be wishy-washy about it. Even when it makes no sense.

maybe an unpopular position on this website but i think the moderate dem focus on ICE training can be, with political pressure, the pathway to more fundamental reforms. rhetorically it is not too hard to move from “more training” to “turns out they’re untrainable and we have to start all over.”

— jamelle @jamellebouie.net (bsky)

Jamelle understands what we must advocate for in this moment. He’s said as much. But like so many of his liberal academic peers, he can’t help but over intellectualize the problem, beating it until he achieves magical thinking.

Offering yet another concession to centrists in hopes that they finally see the light is silly. This has been going on for decades. The walk from “more training” to “turns out they’re untrainable” has proven over and over again too far for centrists.

Even if Jamelle has a valid point, why bring this up now, when people are looking for a little solidarity and certainty? Why martyr yourself on Bluesky?

Maybe what we need right now is less punditry and nuance, and more fight. We need the liberals with microphones to finally stand up for something, and not just against someone.

In the last decade, we’ve focused too heavily on the presence of one man. So that when he left, we had nothing left to object.

Yet, the infrastructure of fascism remained. Since 2020, ICE has grown in scope and authority. We’ve seen over eighty new militarized police bases break ground across the country. Because we bought into the lie that Trump was the root cause of the horrors we witnessed, a newly elected Biden was free to pass record-breaking budgets for the military industrial complex.

So, clearly, Democrats are not against fascist systems. They are against Trump’s access to them. And left-of-center liberals are not against the cogs of an ethnic cleansing, so long as they maintain control of the levers.

How lucky would we be if Trump had to start from a defunded DHS? But instead, we got the most productive 100 days of any president in recent history. We would not be where we are now if Democrats fought against the corporatization of our government, and the militarization of our police. To be clear, I’m not saying they tried and failed. Dems are largely pro-police state, pro-surveillance state and surveillance capitalism. That is a fact.

Militarized police bases, war-trained cops, record-breaking police budgets—all happened under the Biden administration. Trump doesn’t build weapons of fascism. He doesn’t build anything. Like all his failed businesses, he’s using what others have built and slaps his logo on it. So none of this ICE shit happens the way it is happening without the infrastructure built by his predecessors.

Now, the day Trump makes his final exit (that day can’t come soon enough), we’ll go right back to funding the dictator’s toolkit, assuming a dictator won’t ever get their hands on it again. When he inevitably does, we’ll act as if he built these systems from thin air.

I get things are objectively scarier than a year ago. I’m not saying Biden is as bad as Trump. Nor Democrats as bad as Republicans. What I am saying is, a big part of why Trump gets to be so scary is because we, on the left, don’t want to admit to ourselves that our preferred politicians put us in this predicament. We can acknowledge that militarized police are terrorizing the marginalized, but no one wants to ask why we have cops with tanks and the power to use them in the first place.

After George Floyd’s murder, liberals demanded reform, some even called for defunding. But we ended the conversation once we got back our plausible deniability from the American press; the day they stopped talking about it, and we stopped having to acknowledge it. As time went on, when the images of a man taking another man’s life were no longer fresh in our minds, we outright rejected the only viable solution for ending police brutality. And we did it in the name of centrist solidarity.

Liberals who declared the Defund the Police movement as “political poison,” do so as if they’re not the ones who get to decided if defunding police brutality is a worthy pursuit. So often, Liberals will play the role of political saboteur, then swap hats to become the political pundit observing their own undermining.

Say the thing.

A majority of Americans now support the abolishment of ICE. This is no longer a radical stance. But, people with the biggest microphones aren’t saying the thing. I love a good pithy monologue. But if it doesn’t end with “abolish ice, fade to black,” you’re wasting our fucking time, man.

Say the thing. Abolish ICE.