We are in a moment of fascist abundance.
The Law
ICE in Autumn
On Operation Midway Blitz
Oscar Martinez’s remarks were emblematic of a more general response to Midway Blitz: an aggrieved, futile attempt to correct someone who has violently misinterpreted reality. Over and over, I heard Chicagoans point to the normality of life as a kind of defense against the menacing accusations and absurd theories that ICE, Border Patrol, and national politicians had promulgated about the city and then, through the government’s own violence, manifested into being.
April 2, 2026
The State vs. the Emma Goldman Book Club
At the Prairieland trial
The prosecutorial strategy is a puerile one: completely overwhelm the jury with unrelated images of leftist protest—for ten full days!—and then hope for guilt by association.
The Deepest State
On Claudio Lomnitz
Both the neoliberal turn and the nationalist backlash, Lomnitz argues, are parts of a single process that has given rise to a new kind of state — one characterized by “an excess of sovereignty and a deficit of administrative capacity.” It’s hard to imagine a stronger sovereign for Mexico than AMLO, but his administration failed to make the state more accountable or trustworthy.
July 16, 2025
Sickness and prison and Orlando had merged.
The Prison Conference Money Shower
June 30, 2025
A Crisis Deferred
New York's prison guard strikes
My students didn’t volunteer much about the intervening six weeks, except that they had been grateful for all the reading. Time in prison is always slow, counting down, and for the prisoners, the strike was primarily experienced as an excruciating further slowdown.
June 9, 2025
I’d begun receiving messages from people telling me that their friends had been taken by ICE.
At Immigration Court
March 7, 2025
Muskism and McCarthyism
A conversation with Corey Robin on fear in the workplace
The left understands the idea of collective provision. We understand the idea of solidarity. You don’t just go out on strike. You have a strike fund; you have alternative means of provision. But I don’t know what those are in this case, if what’s being threatened is an NIH grant that funds an entire chemistry department, for example.
February 19, 2025
The Fork in the Road
There is everything to be gained from every refusal, from plain unwillingness to fall into line
There may well be normalcy again. But it lies on the other side—not in accommodation to this malevolent insanity, run by lackeys and toads. The risk of overreaction is trivial compared to the risks of accommodation.
October 23, 2024
The White Kids Are Alright
Bringing the drug war home
In the end, it was this coalition of suburban centrists, rather than the more openly villainous Anita Bryant types, who paved the way for the drug war’s worst racialized harms. By killing federal marijuana decriminalization and pushing Carter toward a “zero-tolerance” approach, networks of affluent white parents sponsored the patterns of disproportionate arrest, prosecution, and incapacitation of Black and brown youth on marijuana charges that would come to a head under Reagan and Clinton.
The anti-trans panic builds wide-ranging suspicion of teachers, who are cast as the villains in a baroque drama.
Inventing the Crisis
January 12, 2024
Acts Harmful to the Enemy
Within the paradigm of international humanitarian law, waging a revolutionary war will always be illegal
Civilians are innocent, they have done nothing to make themselves liable to be killed. That war entails their killing, in vastly greater proportion to the killing of combatants, often under the color of law, means that our primary concern should always be on evaluating the justness of the cause of war—whether a given war can be justified at all in the face of the manifest immorality of civilian death—not the legality of the inevitable slaughter that follows.
