On Monday, news broke that the Department of Homeland Security had raided the home of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. The raid was carried out by Homeland Security Investigations, the criminal investigative wing of ICE. The pretext officials offered for the raid was an alleged investigation into immigration paperwork completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child.

No thinking person should lend any credence to the idea that this attempt to terrorize Omar, her constituents, and the Somali community was remotely investigatory. This was an armed attack on the home of a Black woman who is a sitting Congresswoman. Like Greg Bovino’s use of tear gas in Chicago and Minneapolis, the agents rappelling onto the roof of a South Shore apartment complex in Chicago, the shooting of Marimar Martinez, and the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, this attack was a political spectacle. It was intended to instill fear in some communities, while emboldening and exciting others. Once again, DHS has been weaponized to act out of the racist fantasies of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.

Shortly after news of the raid broke, Katie Miller, wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, posted on X: “Promise made, promise kept.” She deleted the post shortly thereafter.

Omar has publicly pressed for accountability for DHS agents who have committed violence in Minnesota and elsewhere. The raid also follows a recent social media tirade by Trump, in which he claimed Somali immigrants were taking over Minnesota and declared that residents “must fight back.” Trump’s rhetoric was widely condemned as an incitement to violence against Somali residents. Days later, federal agents attacked the home of Ilhan Omar, one of the country’s most prominent Somali Americans.

Omar responded to the raid with a statement on social media, saying:

"I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.

“I will not be silenced.”

I spoke with a number of people yesterday who were understandably rattled by the attack on Omar’s home. While it’s not the first time the Trump administration has targeted a political opponent using the criminal legal system, the brazen nature of the raid, its proximity to the elections, and Trump’s recent incitement against Somali Americans all make this moment particularly disturbing.

Organizer Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson offered steadying words on social media, recognizing the attack on Omar as part of a broader assault on the midterm elections. “Let’s get real: the intended audience for all of this is voters, especially immigrant, Muslim, and Somali voters in Minnesota, and the goal is to make people afraid to show up,” she wrote.

“And when a bad guy doesn’t want us to do something, what do we do? We do it. So show up. If early voting is open where you live, bank your vote and bring somebody with you to do it too.”

In a recent conversation for Movement Memos about how activists are defending the midterm elections, Woodard Henderson and I discussed a number of ways that concerned individuals can help people vote, defend the integrity of the process, and fight for the realization of electoral outcomes.

To move effectively in this moment, we need a thoughtful orientation. I recognize that some people have hung their hopes on the midterms, sharing and resharing posts about Trump’s lagging approval rating with great enthusiasm. It’s worth noting our enemies’ weaknesses, as they are real. It’s also important to take stock of the harm they are still poised to do.

So here’s my quick check-in on the state of fascist power in the United States:

We are living under a fascist, authoritarian administration. It has not yet fully consolidated power. Some of its efforts to do so have been frustrated. Trump is a doddering, confused egomaniac who started an unpopular war that’s costing everyday people a lot of money. His demagoguery doesn’t work as well when people are paying high gas prices. The GOP is in bad shape ahead of the midterms. This is going to be a time of desperate Trumpian shenanigans because, as we are all aware, they don’t believe in fair fights and never admit to losing anything.

Some people in this administration have been crossing lines, committing crimes, and making enemies with abandon, as though they would never again face a consequence. They never planned on losing power. Now, they are being confronted with that possibility. That means there are a lot of desperate moves ahead.

The Republicans can lose. But it’s going to be messy and dirty.

It’s also important to note that despite the GOP’s disadvantages, the midterms are not a lock. They have gerrymandered, they have launched intimidation campaigns against election officials, and they are currently waging terror against communities of color to depress turnout. They will pull every dirty trick in the book, and then some. We are playing at a disadvantage against people who cheat, and we have to win anyway. That’s no easy task.

If the Republicans take heavy losses during the midterms, we still have an ugly road ahead. The right will not go down gently. They will thrash, kick and kill. They continue murdering, jailing, kidnapping, and bombing.

This is going to be a long fight.

I am not saying any of this to discourage anyone. I simply want us to orient ourselves.

I also want us to remember that this is a tale of two fascisms. The tech industry has married its aspirations for a world of corporate fiefdoms, ruled by CEOs, to the MAGA political project. This is, after all, the industry that helped put its man JD Vance in the White House. But technofascism has the staying power to outlive its ideological mate. The industry is racing to embed LLMs in every layer of the federal government and upend as many industries and workplaces as possible, pursuing an agenda that will not fade with the Trump administration, or even with the defeat of a Trump successor.

Few Democrats have demonstrated the nerve to push back against these oligarchs, despite the unpopularity of AI and data centers. The land grabs and energy chugging we are witnessing at unthinkable scales will continue until they are forcibly stopped.

AI, which is not a coherent set of products and services, but rather a commercial and political project, can be understood as a full-spectrum class-war offensive. People talk about AI not turning a profit and how it’s a massive bubble—and they’re not wrong. But we should also remember that Uber was willing to take tremendous losses for years to engineer dependence and bleed out the competition. The AI boom has brought that strategy to system-wide scale. It’s a bleed-out of current conditions. Not every overinflated tech company is going to make it, but the billionaires are counting on a situation in which existing social relations can no longer be reproduced. It’s a reordering of society for the late capitalist age.

That effort is not about placing themselves at the top, because they’re already at the top. It’s about putting us more firmly under control. Deskilled, devalued, hyper-surveilled, desperate. That vision of fascism won’t be defeated in the next two elections.

This is going to be a long fight.

This isn’t the home stretch. It’s a violent slog.

Big Tech can lose, too. But we’re going to have to organize like we never have before. We’re in deep, and we’re going to have to fight our way out.

So, if you’re feeling tired, burnt out, or discouraged, take care of yourself. Tend your wounds. Hug your cat. Watch some bad TV. Do not argue in circles with strangers on social media. Do not circulate proclamations of doom. I promise, the world does not need your particular spin on giving up.

Find your team. We need a multi-tendency movement of movements.

Find your front. And trust, it won’t be the last.

Then dig in and hold the fucking line.

Organizing My Thoughts is a reader-supported newsletter. If you appreciate my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber today. There are no paywalls for the essays, reports, interviews, and excerpts published here. However, I could not do this work without the support of readers like you, so if you are able to contribute financially, I would greatly appreciate your help.

Sign up for Organizing My Thoughts

Subscribe

Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

From Organizing My Thoughts via This RSS Feed.