Two days before a shouting cluster of its agents surrounded the car of a Minneapolis mother and shot her to death last week, ICE was demanding answers from the Hilton hotel group on X.com. "Why did your team in Minneapolis cancel our federal law enforcement officer and agent reservations?" the government account of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency asked, repeatedly tagging Hilton's corporate account per the longstanding suite of best practices among the population of squeakers prone to this kind of social media crashout.
The meltdown continued in a subsequent post, which began with the capitalized sentence NO ROOM AT THE INN!: "When officers attempted to book rooms using official government emails and rates, Hilton Hotels maliciously CANCELLED their reservations," the agency, which had a $28.7 billion budget in 2025, posted. "This is UNACCEPTABLE. Why is Hilton Hotels siding with murderers and rapists to deliberately undermine and impede DHS law enforcement from their mission to enforce our nation’s immigration laws?" The hotel group and the independently owned hotel in question both apologized later that day, both taking care to note that they don't condone any kind of discrimination. In the streets, the horrors continued.
It is not accurate to say that the current government of the United States speaks with one voice; there are too many half-sociopath influencers and podcasters and unstable television personalities scrabbling around in high positions for there to be anything like that kind of shared purpose, and the reactionary social media gremlins working under them are all too busy signaling to their own degenerate micro-communities to get into anything like harmony. But, one brutal and stupid year into the second Trump administration, it seems fair to say that the federal government has cohered into a sort of collective personality. It is maybe more accurate to say that the public-facing part of the federal government is identifiable at this moment as a specific and repellent type of American Guy.
You do not have to know this guy personally to know what he is about; you do not need to understand what he believes to grasp how dangerous he is or why. You need only to put some tactical gear and a gaiter on him, dress him up with whatever weaponry looks toughest, and drop him behind the wheel of a rented Jeep Wagoneer. Instinct and panic and a gnarled suite of anti-values will do the work from there; you can't trust him for much, but you can trust that this guy will point that vehicle's enormous snarling grille at a smaller vehicle being driven by someone the guy in question has identified as a target. They would be doing this, or spending hours every day fantasizing about doing it, even if they had not been told that their right do it now supersedes every other right in public life.
This type of person exists in American life—"our neighbors, friends, and loved ones," in the words of Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin—in sufficient enough numbers that everyone who does not want to become a character in the incoherent first-person shooter videogame that plays over their every waking moment knows to avoid them. They are all around us, but contra Sen. Mullin they are not really our neighbors or friends; they do not quite fit that concept, and cannot really buy into it. They are self-deputized; their personal defects make them unstable in a way that leads inexorably to car crashes.
In his weepy tweet defending their negligible honor and that of the work they do, Mullin calls them "red-blooded American patriots," and that, too, is both directionally correct and plainly laughable on the merits. They're American, all right, and the patriotism they claim—an old, small, ignorant version, but one that for those reasons nevertheless has some claim on the word—is just one of many. Before they put on plate carriers and masks and threw themselves into the dirty business of terrorizing their neighbors and breaking their families, they were still identifiable as who and what they are and always were—seething, unappeasable, deliriously and defiantly pig-stupid, and absolutely a threat to the peace and comfort and flourishing of everyone and anything else. The masks only make them easier to see.
There is no disjunction between the political movement that is so frantically preening and whining and lying on social media and into any camera lens it can find and the one prosecuting an aimless, endless, brutish reign of terror in the hospitals and outside the preschools and across the big-box parking lots of the greater Twin Cities metropolitan area. They are two sides of the same coin, or the same side of this particular personality type—baffled, brutish, plainly terrified and out of control, incapable of self-regulation or basic self-soothing, never learning a single thing and making as big and violent a mess as they can on principle. There is no legible strategy in the ICE-led offensive in Minnesota beyond trying to make the situation worse to see what might happen, and no sense of what victory might look like; when "get told to eat shit by dozens of bystanders" and "drive off amid a cloud of tear gas" represent this big a part of the tactical stack, it becomes easy to doubt that there actually is any broader goal.
It's a terror campaign, of course, but the people doing it are themselves so terrified and so manifestly out of their depth and incapable, and so deeply lost in their own single-serving fogs of war, that it all becomes recursive. Its purpose, to the extent one is visible, is to keep going. The original justification for the surge was an incomprehensible viral video by a conservative influencer, but it has since become both a campaign of indiscriminate punishment and cyclical content creation and omnidirectional retribution—a frantic tantrum unconvincingly dressing itself up as an act of stern paternal discipline, and a screen-addled movement of hair-trigger illiterates that has lost the ability to do anything but react, generating new scenes to react to.
It could only ever be incoherent, and was always going to be brutal. As a farcical re-enactment of the lost foreign wars of the last two decades on American soil, it could not be any other way. For the same reason, it is hard to know when or how it will end. In Trump's second term, the federal government has intentionally rid itself of the capacity to do anything but make things worse; it has quite literally traded Ph.D scientists and dedicated civil servants for the chance to hastily stand up this expansion team from the waiver wire flotsam of the violence worker community. The public money that was once spent, grudgingly and kludgily, on keeping people alive is now being spent on this mission and others like it, whose only purpose is to hurt those that the state has identified as enemies.
The people carrying this out have been behaving exactly as you might expect armed sadists to behave after they'd been told that they would be immune from any future consequences. None of them really seem to understand the mission they've been given beyond some atavistic mandate to violently pacify and punish everyone that Doesn't Look Right, to make everything clean and quiet and keep it that way, to patrol empty streets with their blood up and their guns out until such time as the threat, which was always just everything and everyone else, is somehow neutralized.
And that may well be what the mission actually is. Some people who did not know anything, and who kept themselves scared all the time, and who held a grudge against the whole rest of humanity because of how ignorant and frightened that bigger world's existence made them feel, handed weapons to other people who felt the same way, and told them to figure it out. All that war and the ways in which the rot it made weakened various important structures and edifices, the terrible use reactionary cynics found for that rot, the toxins that invariably showed up in the groundwater downstream from all that violence—all of these things made the culture stupid and cruel in new ways, or maybe just in very old ones. All of that made this awful moment, too.
The capacity to cry about being treated rudely on social media while carrying out this open-ended gambit is new, but the instinct to do so wasn't. There is something deeply, shamefully American about this strike force of out-of-town shitheads complaining about the customer service it has received from the people it is trying to oppress, and doing so in language—NO ROOM AT THE INN!—that stridently references and oafishly misuses one of the foundational stories of the faith that movement relentlessly claims. A lesson about humanity, and a whole humane way of seeing the world, shrinks so effortlessly into a preening, indignant, fundamentally meaningless complaint.
Minnesota, among other places, is currently in a stalemate between people who want to live their normal lives without fear of being brutalized or terrorized or beaten or even killed and an occupying force that understands preventing that from happening as more or less the substance and purpose of its mission, and that is awful. But just because the people doing all that shooting and crying don't know what they're doing doesn't mean anyone else is as deceived. Every day, those pissy goons go out looking for trouble, and every day people who never previously imagined that they would do such a thing tell them to fuck off, absorb outsized violence for doing so, and resolve to do it again the next day.
It's inspiring, this persistence of community and care in the face of a campaign to annihilate them, and the defiance of people who want to live their lives against a force that doesn't want anything at all, and all of these small and vital human things pushing up through the attempt to make those things and that resistance impossible. But it is also a reminder of how pathetic—how sincerely and deeply abject, how valueless and lost—this offensive is. There is all this rude and humble everyday life and all these different types of people who believe it is meaningful, and then there is this attempt, overseen by an elite that doesn't believe in anything at all, to replace it with something dumber, simpler, more demeaning, and more like content. They are going to lose, and not just because they are outnumbered.
