Who Must Be A Terrorist, And Who Can Never Be
If Ilhan Omar and Lauren Boebert are in an elevator, Omar isn't the dangerous one.
Sorry to any of you Muslims who got offended just because I called Ilhan Omar a suicide bomber, said Lauren Boebert, the GOP congresswoman from Colorado. Her Friday statement, destined to be misreported as an apology, was not a repudiation of her Kendall Roy-esque just-joking-or-am-I stand-up about Omar and an imaginary backpack we’re meant to understand was rigged to detonate, but a continuation of the riff. “There are plenty of policy differences to focus on without this unnecessary distraction,” she tweeted, managing to leave out the Cam’ron you-mad gif that captures the subtext of Boebert’s pantomime of interest in policy differences with legislators she called the “Jihad Squad.”
The episode is helpfully clarifying. Boebert is flexible about political violence. Like several colleagues, she’s offered an internship to Kyle Rittenhouse – who drove across state lines to shoot people protesting on behalf of Black Lives Matter; succeeded; and got away with it – and did so with characteristic grace. Last month, Rolling Stone reported that an organizer of the Stop The Steal rally on January 6, the waystation for the insurrection, was in contact with Boebert’s staff: “We would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team like back to back to back to back.”
And the elements of the right that Boebert aligns with are in a mood for righteous violence. Her ally, the white nationalist congressman Paul Gosar, did another of those joking-or-am-I riffs, this one about murdering Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Their other ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, remarked that the Boeberts out there should “never apologize to Islamic terrorist sympathizers, communists, or those who fund murder with our tax dollars,” a useful distillation of how she understands the coalition opposing her. (You can also hear the more respectable versions of this mood, the ones that attempt a sufficient distance from advocating violence, discussed on the episode of Know Your Enemy about the recent National Conservative conference.) If Ilhan Omar and Lauren Boebert are in an elevator together, Boebert is the danger to Omar, not the other way around.
Here we find the solitary, exclusive point Boebert is making, one forged in the fires of 9/11. Ilhan Omar is a terrorist because she is a Black Muslim. You can layer on the other aspects of Omar’s identity and program that offend Boebert – a refugee from Somalia turned democratic socialist Minneapolis congresswoman – but those layers are embellishment. Boebert, propelled by the the cultural force of the War on Terror, is saying that terrorists, definitionally, are people like Omar. The cultural force of the War on Terror fills in the rest: terrorists can’t be white people who, say, cheer on vigilantes who murder their political opponents or seek to steal elections they lost. The War on Terror has a different word for white people with a flag, a gun, a cross and a will to power: counterterrorists.
I’m writing this out as a broader piece for my newsletter, Forever Wars, that will be out later today. Right now, if you subscribe to Forever Wars for a year, you’ll get six months at the subscriber tier to Luke’s Welcome To Hell World and Derek’s Foreign Exchanges. Meanwhile, here’s the rest of the Discontents team. Happy belated Thanksgiving and Hanukkah to all who celebrate.
Welcome to Hell World
Luke O’Neil
Yesterday I looked at a truly puzzling piece of propaganda in the NYT, a travelogue type photo essay about Guantanamo Bay. It’s all so matter of fact that if I’m being charitable I might say the entire ordeal is attempting some sort of straight-faced arch commentary — especially since the author in question has also written a lot of critical pieces about Guantanamo! — but coming as it does from the New York Times, the literal Consent Factory, that reading may be a touch optimistic.
Unless you’re a paid subscriber you probably missed the prior three issues of Hell World. Ryan Ross reported for us on the lack of space for the unhoused to recover when sick or injured and the need for medical respite shelters around the country.
“It’s not the getting sick that imperils the homeless it’s the inability to get better.”
Homelessness is a precarious existence. Homeless people are routinely subjected to verbal harassment, physical and sexual assault, and theft. An unsheltered man died last week after he was set on fire while he slept in the stairwell of a public housing building in New York City. The de facto criminalization of street living means unsheltered people have, on average, 21 encounters with police per six-month period, which often leads to increased rates of incarceration and in turn makes the prospect of exiting homelessness even more dim.
These are the most attention-grabbing examples of the perils of homelessness. But the true danger, the thing that kills more than anything else, is far less sensational: a lack of space and time to rest and recover from illness.
Before that I wrote on the horrific car attack in Waukesha and the Rittenhouse verdict and Biden’s completely tone deaf decision to go through with the turkey pardoning charade just after it was announced.
And prior to that I wrote on some of the violent abuses police get away with as a matter of course and what happens when the rare “good apple” among them tries to do something about it. Spoiler: he gets fucked. Also in that one a contrast showing how felony murder laws are used against civilians to convict them of crimes they had little or nothing to do with.
Subscribe for a year to Hell World and you’ll also get a 6 months paid subscription to Foreign Exchanges by Derek Davidson and Forever Wars by Spencer Ackerman (or vice versa).
The Flashpoint
Eoin Higgins
This week, I talked to workers about the salaries companies offer in job listings—and the salaries they offer with the job.
Alex, a 35-year-old who recently moved to Miami, answered a posting through the online employment marketplace Snagajob offering $16 an hour to work in a technology sales position at Staples. At the end of the interview, the manager revealed that the pay was actually $10 and hour.
“When I replied that the posting for the job clearly said $16 an hour, he chuckled a bit and said ‘key holders don't even make that much, I think the highest paid position is about $13 an hour,’” Alex told me. “I had no choice but to take the job while pursuing other opportunities but I was very put off that companies are allowed to outright lie about a position's compensation.”
The low pay has a ripple effect, Alex explained.
“I'm sure I don't need to remind you that $10 an hour in Miami, even at full-time, doesn't even cover rent and utilities, let alone food, gas, and car insurance,” Alex said.
Also, I interviewed the economist Richard Wolff on vaccine mandates, labor, and the state of the left.
EH: To me, as somebody who studies and writes about these anti-vax conspiracy theories, this is what I see: People on the right are not saying that this is about the pharmaceutical companies, that they're saying that the vaccines don't work, that COVID is like the flu. It's the same thing that we've been hearing for a year and a half, right?
RW: I have a clearer sense, maybe, of where you and I may disagree.
I understand the right-wing effort. I understand exactly what you're saying. We see that as the same. I particularly would pick up on your last point that the right-wing is very careful not to attack the pharmaceutical companies, as they are always careful not to offend the hand that feeds them in many ways. And so they have to come out against the vaccine itself or the science that's involved.
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Wars of Future Past
Kelsey D. Atherton
How new autonomous war machines are depends on exactly how one defines autonomy. Last week, I was one of several guests on the excellent “ROBOTS: Should A Robot Be Allowed To Kill?” episode of Flash Forward, where we talked about the ethics, applications, and state of armed machines.
Between that episode and a recent return to the Real Time Strategy games of my youth, I’ve been thinking a lot about how games model war through the autonomous actions of player-directed units. In the upcoming Wars of Future Past, I intended to look at how the gameplay of Starcraft-likes, paired with the historical trappings of the Age of Empires franchise, leaves players with not just distorted understanding of history, but of an especially warped understanding of war.