Lies You Will Be Told | Phil A. Neel

Already, completely unrelated to the protests, US citizens have been detained in raids and had the validity of their proffered birth certificates denied. Native Americans have been held for days — used, in part, as leverage to force tribal governments to open their territories to the agency. This is not an exaggeration: in the besieged city, anyone who does not look white enough (and white in just the right way) must carry their proof of citizenship with them at all times, lest they risk being detained and abducted. This is, nearly word for word, the scenario that was prophesied by “radical leftists” at the advent of agencies like Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE, following the passage of the Patriot Act by a bipartisan coalition during the War on Terror. It was at this same time that the National Security Agency (NSA) gained new, wide-ranging powers. The first interagency operation to target “violent transnational gangs” was initiated in 2005 under Bush, and prefigures much of the language still used today. But the new security state was a joint effort. In fact, although initiated under a Republican administration, it was the Democrats who built these out into working agencies and vastly expanded their powers.

Both ICE and the DHS were rapidly expanded under Obama, who oversaw the largest surge in deportations and a major build-out of deportation camps, constructed in part through a $1 billion no-bid deal with private prison contractor Core Civic (at the time Corrections Corporation of America).5 In fact, Johnathan Ross, the agent who murdered Good, was hired into the agency at the height of this Obama-era deportation wave. The same years saw an expansion of NSA data centers, including the groundbreaking ceremony for the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center in Utah, which is perhaps the core of modern mass surveillance infrastructure.6 Similarly, it was the Obama administration that signed the first deals with Palantir to track cross-border crime, establishing the foundation for the firm’s now longstanding collaboration with ICE.7 Today, the company has been contracted to construct an app “that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address…”8 These were the same years when calls to “abolish ICE” first gained traction, alongside calls to roll back NSA surveillance programs and dismantle Homeland Security. Needless to say, these demands were dismissed by Democrats and Republicans alike as nothing more than the shrill complaints of stubbornly unrealistic radicals. Now, we face precisely the “reality” we were promised.

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This all leaves little hope for a judicial response to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Shortly after the killing of Good, Ross was evacuated from the scene, which was cleared with no logging of evidence or investigation. Similarly, other agencies were prohibited from securing the scene of Pretti’s murder. The Department of Justice has pursued no charges, nor have city or state officials. The regime has maintained that Ross and all its other mercenaries have blanket immunity. They have repeated outright lies about the killing of Pretti, immediately disproven by numerous videos. At this point, as with any police murder, charges will only be filed in any of these killings if there are mass mobilizations of sufficient scale and intensity. Peaceful parades, even if enormous in size or costumed as a “general strike” (yet which shuts down not one major employer in the city), have no path toward achieving this. At this point, there is simply no imaginable mechanism through which parades performing protest for the sake of winning political attention might encourage anyone in power to even bring these matters to trial. Assaults on enemy property, hard blockades, and strike activity might force such an outcome, as the riots did in the case of George Floyd several years prior. In this case, however, even a trial and a conviction could easily be nullified through presidential pardon and, if the January 6th cases are any indication, there is every indication that the executive would pursue it. The state can no longer be trusted to deliver even an imitation of justice. Liberals are left to weep, whipping their blistered backs in futile acts of penitence hoping to regain the attention of their delinquent god. Eventually, their boils burst and the plague takes them like the rest.