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“Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both.”– Frederick Douglass 

You can’t stop people who build power through killing by simply telling them that killing is wrong. If that were so, countless innocent lives would not have been destroyed by genocide, war, and repression across time. Presently in the U.S., there’s a far too common shock about the willingness of fascistic elements, state-sponsored and otherwise, to kill. That willingness is not a coincidence or accident; it’s a coordinated tactic used to withhold power and gain more. If there’s nothing forceful to counter and subdue that power, then the reactionary right-wing will achieve all of their goals undeterred. 

That’s why it’s not just important to look at violence closely in the present, but also across the societal, political, and institutional forces that normalize and condition violence in U.S. society. From public violence rewarded by the right-wing base to the police’s extrajudicial executions, nothing about where we are is random. The violence that shapes this country is smothering it, and those who want to escape this chaotic misery will have to make hard decisions about how to defeat what we’re up against, not reform, pacify, or accept it. 

The killings of people like Keith Porter Jr., Renee Good, Silverio Villegas González, and Alex Pretti are a part of a cyclical condition. Each of their killings by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers boosts a bloodlust connected to the culture of white supremacist violence in the U.S. CBP and ICE, like local policing, provide an opportunity to make a job out of white supremacism. That’s why the Trump administration is openly using far-right white supremacist cultural references to recruit for the agency. And despite efforts by authorities to portray local police departments as possibly “infiltrated” by white supremacists, at no point in U.S. history has policing deviated from enforcing racist policy and upholding racial subjugation. 

For those who long to kill, the opportunity to do so for ICE—shielded by immunity, offered to regular police too—is the fulfillment of a white accelerationist mandate.

In other words, whether it’s local or federal, these forces are doing the job. The problem many liberal reformers seem to have is that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Kristi Noem is conducting raids to an extreme that isn’t feigning self-criticism or pretending to be an inclusive public good. It’s naked discrimination and terror instead of polite destruction in the name of safety for all. For those who long to kill, the opportunity to do so for ICE—shielded by immunity, offered to regular police too—is the fulfillment of a white accelerationist mandate. It’s not just state-sponsored murder that feeds into this calling. 

White vigilante violence also helps to lay the foundation for the state to justify public killings. As I once wrote in The Nation on No Map, “The police and military are, in an important sense, merely the legitimate and institutionalized extension of social forces that, in other circumstances, would be called extremists.” They walk among us and kill when they see an opportunity. That careerism, paired with white supremacist aspiration, can be officially or unofficially deputized when the murder falls under ideal circumstances. This is also why it’s long been important for racist killers to be visibly rewarded. Positive reinforcement helps the right-wing promote opportunities for the thirst to kill. 

People like George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny, Darren Wilson, Daniel Pantaleo, and Derek Chauvin all received praise and support for killing with right-wing approval. Be it fundraisers or political reinforcement, the echoes of these moments ring into the present when ICE agent Jonathan Ross was rewarded over $1 million after killing Good. This is about motivating others to rise to their deadliest potential too. It’s how they sustain power through fear and torment, so there must be a realistic conversation about truly resisting violence instead of trying to negotiate with it. 

What is the cost of killing us in terms of accountability? At this moment, there’s nothing that comes close to the impact of a lost life. The high-profile killers celebrated by the right-wing sign autographs and get crowdfunded. They actually get paid, but we don’t make them pay nearly enough in return. They walk around safe and unscathed while liberals try to appeal to moral sympathies. At the same time, sectarian leftists promote confrontational rhetoric and glorify violent revolutionary histories that many seem unwilling to actualize in the present. As long as things remain this way, fascism will successfully continue to grow unless it is countered. This is about an opposition countering with equal ferocity or superseding what’s being done. That is an important way to fight back that mustn’t be neglected. People cannot only react to what they’re being subjected to and demand that their tormentors stop with words that aren’t backed by actions that make it stop. 

In his essay, “The Question of Violence,” former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member Russell Maroon Shoatz stated: 

It would be suicidal for creative revolutionaries, and the diverse elements we hope to join with, to be caught off guard believing that our collective situation will be adequately handled without being fully prepared to defend ourselves against the global forces of financial, corporate, transnational, state, and surrogate capital. These forces show signs of assuming a twenty-first-century neofascism—with its sham elections and its historical, ever-growing violence toward and domination of wimmin, the indigenous, national minorities, nonheterosexuals, and our entire ecosystem. A posture and practice that has led to the normalization of what has been called ‘exterminism,’ or ‘ecocide.’

Lack of preparation has contributed to so many of our problems. So what should people do? Plenty of radicals wanting to build what must be an unrelenting opposition will need to separate themselves from the expired quandaries muddying the minds of moderates, liberals, and sectarian left ideologues. Let go of traps, cycles, and debates that produce nothing other than go-to doctrinaire lines. None of that nonsense is stopping fascist bullets, freeing people from prisons, or overrunning agents of the state. Instead, embrace self-organization that’s not about being predictably programmatic. 

Don’t just think about responding to crises surrounding resources, governance, or violence as they arise. The authoritarian state and its ground forces have to be subverted and gotten ahead of. They have to be made to pay, and that cannot only happen on a case-by-case basis when disaster strikes. People revolting against them can work to turn the tables and make them respond to our decimation of their capacity to do us harm instead. 

Meeting needs is of the utmost importance, but oftentimes people only emphasize the lack that’s related to material issues like food, housing, and education. This shouldn’t happen at the expense of the need to be able to build self-sustained power that is not subservient to the state and corporate rule. Labor activist and anarchist Lucy Parsons clarified this over a century ago, writing: 

There are actual, material barriers blockading the way. These must be removed. If we could hope they would melt away, or be voted or prayed into nothingness, we would be content to wait and vote and pray. But they are like great frowning rocks towering between us and a land of freedom, while the dark chasms of a hard-fought past yawn behind us. Crumbling they may be with their own weight and the decay of time, but to quietly stand under until they fall is to be buried in the crash.

If, as Frederick Douglass once famously said, “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress,” then how much more should we endure? The language of compromise is not one that the fascists will be fluent in while they’re bearing down on us with everything they have. Although unfortunate, we’ll have to speak to them in a language that they understand. And this is a dangerous, but necessary, endeavor because one can get subsumed at the level evil lowers you to when you have to fight by any means. Yet, there’s not much other choice in this matter if the only options are to continue doing what’s been done or to let a freshly unrelenting rage drown the life force of fascism, white supremacy, and capitalism in the USA.

Editorial Team:
Lara Witt, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor