Infinite Casualties

Share: X · Facebook · LinkedIn · Reddit · Bluesky · Threads · Email

This morning on Reddit, in a thread about an ICE arrest video that the subreddit itself had flaired “Misleading title,” a man asked me the question. How many dead Americans is acceptable to you? I answered him exactly as I think it. An infinite amount. The reply is, as I write this, collecting downvotes like a church plate. I forecast eight hundred. I have rarely been prouder of a number.

Here is the part the thread cannot process: my answer is the common one. I am not an outlier with a rare and monstrous tolerance. I am the median American on an ordinary morning, saying out loud what the country believes in bulk and only disputes in captions.

The 80/20

This is an 80/20 country now, and on this question I live comfortably inside the 80. Most of the American public considers FAFO—fuck around and find out—a rite of passage, practically a sacrament of citizenship. Step in front of the vehicle, absorb the consequence, and the country shrugs the shrug it has shrugged since the republic was young: you found out. The outrage you see online is the 20 performing for each other in a room built for the purpose, mistaking the room for the nation. The nation is outside, watching a man stand in front of a federal SUV with an umbrella, and reaching the oldest verdict in American life: well, what did he think was going to happen?

The auction

The question is an auction. Name a small number and you have confessed, in public, to pricing human life. Name zero and you have lied in public, because zero has never been on offer from any state that enforces anything. The auction has one approved ending: you squirm, you soften, you concede the premise that your principle comes with an expiration figure, and the room moves on feeling moral. I decline the auction. My principles have no expiration figure. That is the entire difference between a principle and a preference. A preference expires at a price. A principle is the thing still standing after the price has been named, and named, and named again.

Alex and Renee

The outrage that produced the question runs on two names. Alex. Renee. Two Americans, two faces, two biographies the whole country can recite. I understand the mechanism; a movement needs faces the way a fire needs air. What I notice is whose faces work. The cause is, on paper, the poor and vulnerable here illegally—the unnamed, the unphotographed, the ones whose deaths in deserts and rivers and the backs of trucks arrive as statistics and leave as statistics, and whose brutalization, somehow, is always priced into the sermon as background. They have never once powered a national week of mourning. The mourning ignites when an American throws himself in front of a federal vehicle and gets hit, or drives at an agent and gets shot, or plants himself in a car’s path and gets shoved out of it. Heaven forbid. Which means the grief runs on the same hierarchy the mourners spend the week condemning: an American death counts more. They will never see it. Seeing it would cost them the one thing the outrage is actually for, which is knowing they are the good guys.

The litany

Then comes the litany, and you know the litany by heart. Look how many babies have been killed by guns. Look how many children have been killed by guns. Look how many innocent people have been killed by guns. Look how many people ICE has killed. Look how many school shootings. The numbers march past like a float in a parade, and the expected response is surrender: surely now, surely at this figure, you will change your mind. It doesn’t mean anything anymore. The litany reads as what it is—a political tactic. Optics. Manipulation. Power pushing. It reads as the strategy of an Edelman, the counsel of a Hill & Knowlton, the brainstorming of a vanguard that has mistaken its messaging calendar for a conscience. The wolf has cried wolf for fifty years, and the village has learned the sound of the cry. How many people are killable until I make a change against ICE? Wrong auction. The number was never the argument. The number is the costume the argument wears to the fundraiser.

Plenty

The litany's unit of measurement is a word, and the word is plenty. Down the same thread, a man informed me that ICE is our Gestapo and has killed plenty of American citizens who were protesting. I said plenty was a loose interpretation of plenty. The auctioneer arrived on schedule: how many human lives is plenty to you—from a government agency, no less? Plenty is thousands, I told him, because we have a country of 340 million. So plenty is thousands. He went away and did his research and returned with the harvest: eleven deaths by shooting from immigration agents. Eleven—drawn from the fullest public tally of two agencies across twenty-one months of a continental deportation campaign—and of the eleven, exactly two were citizens killed in the protest commotion the word plenty was summoned to describe. The rest were shot at traffic stops and arrest attempts, most of them in cars, most of them mid-flight, at the last step of the staircase. Every one of the eleven is a result of escalation, not of execution. Nobody was rounded up and shot in a ditch. Somebody ran, somebody floored it, somebody stepped in front, and the encounter climbed to the rung where people die. And having produced eleven as plenty, he retreated to the auction's approved ending anyway: even one death by a rogue government is too much. Zero, wearing a number as a hat. I told him what I believe. Eleven is an insignificantly low amount in a country of 340 million where armed agents cruise the streets in bulletproof SUVs conducting what his side calls a war. I don't think a lot is a lot until there are thousands. A lot is an order of magnitude more. To me. Plenty is the hardest-working word in the litany: eleven when counted, infinity when felt, and deployed precisely so that nobody ever has to do the division.

Effigies

Underneath the litany sits the technique, and technique is the polite word for it. It is moral blackmail. If you do not stop this, you have blood on your hands. If you do not stop this, more people will die, and their blood will be on your hands. Blood, blood, blood—always your hands; never the hands of the man who stepped in front of the truck. Blackmail needs icons, and icons of this quality are manufactured. This country holds two million people in prison. Inner-city kids kill inner-city kids every day of the year, hundreds and hundreds of black youths annually, and the movement never marches for them, never learns their names, never paints the mural—because that is black business, inner-city business, black-market business. Black-on-black crime is self-rule, apparently, and self-rule is sacred and exempt from the litany. So the effigies are imported from elsewhere. Alex and Renee are effigies, avatars for a larger thing, exactly as George Floyd was an effigy before them: a man with a rap sheet a mile long, a reprobate, an addict, a bully, a criminal, transfigured into the beautiful effigy that bore no resemblance to him and was never meant to. An effigy is a person-shaped argument, and the person is the one part of it nobody is permitted to discuss. You march for the shape. You burn whoever points at the man underneath.

Look at the casting, because the casting is the tell. A beautiful woman. A lesbian, married, a mother of three. A male nurse out of an ICU—and hold the phone, legally concealed-carrying, just like you awful MAGA people, a detail couriered into every gun-owning household in America like a personalized letter. Spontaneous grief has no casting director. An op does, and this is an op: a political strategy aimed with precision at the exact audiences it needed to crack. The set dressing lies at the same scale. Alligator Alcatraz, the supposed death camp, is a detention facility in a swamp wearing a name built for headlines. Open the custody-death reports the litany waves around and read the causes: strokes, heart attacks, chronic disease, stress—the long untreated illnesses of people who addressed neither the illness nor the status, when the home country they left would have treated the illness for free. Every country but America has socialized medicine, we are told, all of it obviously better than ours. The plane home was also an ambulance. It never appears in the litany.

Older than the outrage

Enforcement is woven into the American experience at a depth the outrage never reaches. Go back to Cheech and Chong: the INS agent scaring off the men the era called wetbacks was a stock comic figure, a folk character, as American as the border itself. The fear of la migra was a punchline the culture told about its own permanent arrangement. And the saint of the farmworkers, Cesar Chavez himself, was against illegal aliens—fiercely, organizationally, on the record—because he understood what a flood of cheap, frightened labor does to the people already standing in the field. Deportation as American common sense predates the current tantrum by generations and crosses every line the tantrum draws. The 80 knows this in its bones. The 20 knows it too, which is why the litany has to get louder every year.

What I will not trade

The border. I want the people who are here illegally deported—all of them, as a matter of law and order and the elementary definition of a secure nation state. But understand what deportation actually looks like before you picture it, because the picture in the litany is a lie of compression. Between a visa expiring, or a green card lapsing, or a man simply being here illegally, and an armed team putting hands on him, there are something like twenty-five steps—notices, hearings, orders, appeals, deadlines stretched over months and years—and at nearly every step the government will pay him thousands of dollars to board the plane himself and self-deport. No handcuffs. No headline. The team at the door is the last step: the bail bondsman at the end of a skipped court date, Dog the Bounty Hunter with a federal badge. Owe the IRS millions and ignore them long enough and armed men arrive for you by the same logic. Every law in the code ends in a room with a lock. Immigration law is not the exception that makes the republic uniquely cruel.

ICE is not pest control; nobody is cruising the neighborhood with a .22, popping coyotes and raccoons. Its task forces mostly work warrants on named men, pulling in the collateral who happen to be standing in transit, with sheriffs and state and local police acting alongside. The people who die in the work are overwhelmingly the people who ran, or floored the truck at a traffic stop, or stepped in front—people who spent years walking past off-ramps, including a paid one, the way a man walks past a diagnosis because he feels fine. Untreated, the thing metastasizes. Treated in year one, it was an appointment. You do not have to be shot in the face fleeing a traffic stop. You had a hundred chances to be paid to leave like a gentleman. I accept the cost of the last step in advance, without a cap, because a country that will only enforce its laws when enforcement is guaranteed bloodless has announced that its laws are decorative.

The First Amendment. Everybody gets platformed, the worst included; I have argued it on this site at length. Speech carries costs too—ugly movements recruit in the open—and the room always arrives eventually with the auction question wearing a different hat: how many radicalized kids before you censor? My answer is the same answer. An amendment with an expiration figure has no meaning on the exact days it exists for.

The Second Amendment. My side has the most practice at this auction, so I will be plainest here. Guns kill people in this country every day—by crime, by accident, by despair—and the right stands anyway, because a right that evaporates at a body count was a permit all along. I am willing to suffer an infinite number of deaths in its defense, and an infinite number will not change my mind. I have simply said out loud what every honest holder of the right already believes in silence.

The borrowed shield

Now the dead themselves, and how they got that way. Every single person in the litany’s front rank put himself in the way of bullets, fists, and cars, and expected the other party to pull the punch. Physical interposition as a protest skill depends entirely on the more powerful person declining to use his power—depends on the old schoolyard immunities: you don’t punch a guy with glasses, you don’t hit girls. The whole technique is a borrowed shield, somebody else’s restraint worn as armor. I have limited respect for it. A tactic that only works while your opponent honors your protected status is a bet on his mercy, and mercy is a wasting asset. This is 2026. Nerds rule the world and women rule America. The four-eyes run the platforms, the girls run the institutions, and a shield made of other people’s chivalry is being carried into traffic by people who abolished chivalry. FAFO is the rite of passage the 80 still believes in. The 20 keeps volunteering for the ceremony and acting surprised at the liturgy.

This isn’t Denmark

Underneath the auction sits a fantasy about what country this is. This isn’t Denmark. America is a hegemonic imperial warmongry nation of some 340 million people, a continental state keeping an ocean-spanning order, and everything it does at scale arrives with a body count attached—its highways, its hospitals, its wars, its borders, its ordinary Tuesday policing. Denmark is a lovely small room where everyone knows the doorman. Comparing the two is a category error dressed as a conscience. The daily bread of an empire includes people getting between a federal agent and their task and learning, too late, that the task continues. You can grieve that; grief is free. What you cannot do is run an empire on the promise that no one will ever be hurt by it and call the promise compassion.

Roar

The verdict traveling with the downvotes is that this is animalistic. Consider the animal for a moment. An animal kills from appetite. It holds no principles to pay for, no abstractions it would rather keep than eat. A man who accepts a terrible cost to keep an idea alive is performing the least animal act available to our species—and a country full of such men, holding the same costs in silence, is performing it with him. I am not precious about the label, though. If holding the border, the First Amendment, and the Second Amendment past every casualty figure you can name makes me the beast in your story—roar. The beast, at least, never pretended the principle came with a number.

Meanwhile, in Mexico

A closing word for the country on the other side of the fence, because Mexico is quietly delighted, whatever its officials say into microphones. The border is sealed shut: encounters have fallen to their lowest level in more than fifty years, under ten thousand a month where millions a year once poured through, and Mexico has discovered the advantages of being the wall's southern face. Ten thousand of its National Guard stand posted along the line. The caravans get broken up down in Chiapas before they can ever become America's problem. The shelters of Juárez and Tijuana stand empty. And the whole backed-up migration of the world now camps on Mexican soil, working Mexican jobs, spending Mexican money, and waiting—openly, patiently, by their own advocates' cheerful admission, just a pause until conditions improve—for America to elect a Democrat again so the road north can reopen. Mexico holds the buffer, collects the leverage, and keeps the people. If this is losing, Mexico City will happily lose for another decade.

Share: X · Facebook · LinkedIn · Reddit · Bluesky · Threads · Email