We’re All “Domestic Terrorists” Now |
“It was an act of domestic terrorism,” Kristi Noem declared, following Wednesday’s killing of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood of Minneapolis. With a straight face and no evident sense of shame, the head of Homeland Security added, “This goes to show the assaults that our ICE officers and law enforcement are under every single day.” During the same press conference, she assured the public that “anyone who is a citizen of this country or is here legally, has nothing to fear.”
It’s as keen an example of the emperor having no clothes as you’ll find: Though the video of Good’s killing shows no reasonable justification for lethal force, Noem, President Trump, and their MAGA acolytes are telling us that Good was not a victim but another “terrorist” who was somehow a threat to the American people. A year into Trump’s second term, we are used to him and his administration applying that label to migrants and antifa and journalists and even some Democrats. But now, it seems, all of us are potential terrorists, at risk of being gunned down by Trump and Noem’s trigger-happy goons.
The president first experimented with an expansive definition of who qualifies as a domestic terrorist during his first term. In 2017, in an effort that mirrored the COINTELPRO surveillance of civil rights leaders under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI created a designation of “Black Identity Extremists” that sought to conflate the shootings of police officers with an underground Black revolutionary movement connected to Black Lives Matter. Amid the protests over George Floyd’s murder by police officer Derek Chauvin, Trump lashed out at antifa,