How Pretexts Work
A manufactured crisis unfolds.
We are all criminals. Have you ever driven one mile per hour over the speed limit? Crime. Crossed an empty street outside of the crosswalk? Crime. Gone to a protest that temporarily impeded pedestrian foot traffic? Crime. Smoked a joint, been drunk in public, forgotten to report a ten dollar tip on your income taxes? Crime, crime, crime. If you are a member of a racial minority and you have done any of these things with a friend, you are also in a gang. Even worse.
All sane people understand that the virtual impossibility of living a life free of all “crimes” illustrates the fact that law enforcement is a subjective, not objective, exercise. (The few twitchy reactionaries who believe the opposite are genuinely dangerous ideologues, and should be locked up for public safety.) We all implicitly understand that in practice, enforcing the law involves making judgments about which “crimes” are important, and how to address them most wisely. It is a liberal art, not a science. Sensible, humane law enforcement will help you get home safely, and its opposite will body slam you and throw you in prison when presented with the same circumstances. Humans make laws and humans decide how best to enforce them in order to maximize human flourishing. Laws are not and never will be immutable orders that obligate us to make our own lives worse.
This subjective nature of law is the reason why it is the best pretext for ulterior motives that has ever been invented. “Crime” can be made to appear ubiquitous by any leaders sufficiently motivated to define it as such. Any community can be defined as lawless, if you care to judge it strictly enough. This bad faith two-step—to disingenuously bemoan “crime” as a pretext for exercising power—is one of the oldest political tricks in the book. It still seems to confound much of the media, for some reason.
Ironically, all you have to do in order to manufacture a security crisis is to flood an area with police. First, all of those cops will necessarily see more stuff happening, stuff that can be declared as crime, whether wisdom would dictate that they should let it slide or not; second, and even more important for the ultimate goal, the presence of all of these amped-up officers will eventually provoke a backlash from the public—and the backlash itself can be used to justify further crackdowns.
Put a bunch of storm troopers in a city’s streets and sooner or later someone will throw a sandwich at them. Uh oh! As you can see, the lawlessness is increasing. Call out more storm troopers.
This is the process that the Trump administration is now setting in motion in American cities. We already saw it in Los Angeles: Call out troops, protests ensue, show pictures of the protests to justify the necessity of the troops. Now we see it in DC: Call out the National Guard, flood the streets with federal agents, tout the (paltry) product of their (farcical) efforts as proof that the crime was there all along. The important thing is not the underlying reality of safety or lack thereof, but rather the creation of a crisis atmosphere. In that atmosphere, more power can be seized by the Trump administration itself. This same formula is about to be trotted out in Chicago and Oakland and other cities under Democratic control. It is, in an evil way, a very reliable plan. All the feds need to do is flood the cities with officers, and wait. Humans nature will take care of the rest.
It is delusional to believe that good behavior by the public will usher us safely through this. That belief assumes that these operations are being undertaken for their stated goals. They’re not. They are pretexts, and as such, you can safely assume that they will accomplish their unstated purpose. It is a trivial matter for hundreds of cops to find enough unimportant “crime” to look like a crime wave if you show it in tight focus on Fox News. Somebody somewhere will always throw a rock at the cops if you let them parade around long enough. The fact that these things are the result of fascist provocations will not act as a moderating factor, because it is the entire point.
Trump’s driving political instinct is to accumulate all power in his own hands. Those who are helping him do this want to use that power in service of a racist deportation campaign, a borderline neo-Nazi ethnic cleansing of America. Sending the National Guard into politically hostile cities aims to help accomplish both of these goals. The backlash will be used to justify seizing power away from local authorities, and that power will be used to carry out Stephen Miller’s purge of foreigners. That is what is happening.
Or, I should say, that is the goal. The success of this blunt plan is not inevitable. Indeed, the most important reason to be brutally honest about what is happening here is so that we can figure out how to effectively oppose it. “Nobody disrespect the officers and then they won’t have any reason to do anything” is clearly not going to work. I find that events in America in 2025 are conspiring to make me sound like, you know. an Elizabeth Warren t-shirt slogan, and for that I apologize, but we all have burdens to bear. So, yes, we, all of us, are going to have to Be The Resistance.
The good news is that the sentiment for resistance is already here. This year’s anti-Trump protests have been some of the largest protests in US history. Yet, in that spirit of brutal honesty, we must also say that protests alone are not gonna do it. Stopping this government from carrying out its plans will require principled refusal to go along by the institutions of civil society; it will require a unified political opposition party willing to fight fascists on their own terms; and it will require a public groundswell of direct action. Look back at all of the past century’s periods of social and political upheaval, where progressive movements stood up, and you will see that, yes, they marched and protested, but they also got arrested and jailed and deported and beaten up and shot for civil and less civil disobedience. Activists driven by deep care about the world went to protest Cop City in Georgia in 2023 and they are still being relentlessly persecuted more than two years later. People will suffer during this time. But we will all support one another, with the understanding that such things could happen to any one of us. Opposition to fascism is a buffet. There are many dishes for you to choose from.
Join an organization. Any organization that is doing stuff. Last night, I was on a call of more than a thousand activists hosted by May Day Strong, a group that is organizing actions across America on Labor Day and beyond. Join them. Join DSA. Join something. You have skills. Plug into a group and use them. If you’re an artist you can make art and if you’re a big badass you can do protest security and if you’re a chef you can cook food for activists and if you’re a lawyer you can do legal support. Whatever. Do not think that you must win this fight singlehandedly, and then get depressed that it seems too hard for you to win this singlehandedly, and then give up and just post angry things online. Instead, join an organization, and do what you can do. When you multiply that across millions of people, you will find that we have an opposition force bigger than ICE and the FBI and the National Guard put together. We have, in fact, a majority.
What is not useful—what actually contributes to the success of bad-faith fascist power grabs—is the unfortunately common tendency to deny the reality of what is happening here. Reporters and pundits acting as if these troop deployments are actually about crime and public safety? That is malpractice. Local officials welcoming in the feds as if they are good-faith partners in good-faith law enforcement? That is malpractice. Treating the ongoing ICE raids as if they are mere continuations of existing immigration policy? That is malpractice. Regular people like you and me just tuning out and going about our business and pretending that this stuff will not affect us personally? That is malpractice.
What all of these cases of malpractice have in common is that they result from the seductive embrace of the delusion of normality. Things aren’t normal now. Understanding what is happening when soldiers with machine guns start fanning out across American cities does not require any great expertise. All it requires is the ability to open your fucking eyes and be honest about what you see.
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Related reading: Building the American Brownshirts; When Do You Need to Quit Your Job?; Leave the Military; They Are a Minority.
This coming Monday, August 18, I’ll be in Detroit at Wayne State University doing a panel with some very cool labor journalists and activists about telling the stories of the working class. RSVP here and come see us. Free! And if you would like to get hype for Labor Day in NYC, you can come see me speak about Labor Against Fascism at the Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan on Sunday, August 31. Event info here. Free!
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“All it requires is the ability to open your fucking eyes and be honest about what you see.” And it also requires people like you who can frame and explain things in ways that help people open their fucking eyes. Thank you.
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