We Should Be Even More Outraged About the Attacks on Ilhan Omar

I do not think the national media, members of Congress, or people in general are sufficiently outraged over what is happening to Representative Ilhan Omar. The feds have broken into her house and subpoenaed and harassed her family. They have stolen her laptop, notebooks, and phone. They took her passport. They are said to be “building a case” for denaturalization and deportation.

Omar is a literal refugee: Her family fled Somalia’s civil war when she was 8. She spent years at a refugee camp in Kenya before her family was resettled in the United States. Since then, she has become a naturalized US citizen and the first African refugee ever to be elected to Congress. It is precisely because her success defeats the white-supremacist narrative pushed by the Trump administration and the white-wing media that she is being threatened and hunted by this administration.

It would be easy to focus on the hypocrisy of the administration’s attacks on her. The South African–born Elon Musk and the Slovenian Melania Trump both came to this country under dodgier immigration circumstances than most people, including Omar, and Musk has been accused of working illegally in the United States.

It would also be easy to focus on the sketchiness of the timing of the attacks. The Department of Justice is not supposed to take public action on politically sensitive cases within 60 days of an election. The violation of this norm—when James Comey revived the “but her e-mails” nonsense just a few days before the 2016 election—has already benefited Trump once. It would seem the Republicans are hoping for a similar result by invading Omar’s home and forcing everyone to talk about it less than a month before the midterms.

Still, for me at least, the hypocrisy and sketchiness of this smear campaign fails to capture what’s happening here. A political figure, supported by the people, is facing exile from the country because the white-supremacist rulers running the joint can’t get rid of her any other way. The attack on Omar should be viewed as an attack on every immigrant, every person of color, and every outspoken activist in this country. The Trump administration is saying that no matter who you are, they, the white people in charge, can make you disappear.

It is racist. It is fascist. It is disgusting. It is something all of us should stand against.

Ilhan Omar is the physical embodiment of the idea—the dream—that you can start with nothing in this country and not only make a life for yourself but also lift up others on your way. In contrast, the people doing this to her represent the very worst this country has to offer: the idea that no matter what you have, the white man can take it from you whenever he feels like it.

The Bad and the Ugly

• A federal judge ordered Trump to stop airing his taxpayer-funded campaign ads. Trump… continued to air the ads anyway.
• Meanwhile, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration’s request to allow Republican PACs to receive the same discounted ad rates usually reserved for the candidates themselves. All of these ad wars have got me thinking: Who the hell still watches “television” anyway? How effective, really, are any of these ads? I feel like if any one of my actual friends told me they were influenced by a political ad they saw on TV, my natural inclination would be to delete them from my phone. Like, the person who is moved by campaign ads is also the person who is going to fall for phishing scams and send me links that put viruses on my computer. “Sorry, Billy, you quoted an AIPAC ad about Zohran Mamdani and now we can’t be friends anymore, not because of your politics, but because you evidently have the mental prowess of a head of cabbage.”
• A federal judge literally yelled at Trump administration officials after Trump, in defiance of a court order, removed trees from a golf course operated by the National Parks Service. It’s almost like… Trump doesn’t give a damn about court orders that stop him from doing whatever it is he wants to do.
• Bari Weiss has guided CBS News’s signature program 60 Minutes to its lowest fourth-episode ratings this century. Since Weiss is white and MAGA-friendly, I expect she will now fail-up to an even better job.
• The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down California’s “No Vigilantes Act,” which required federal agents, such as those working for ICE, to wear identification while on the job. A unanimous panel ruled that the federal supremacy clause prevents the state from regulating federal agents. Sadly, it’s the right decision. It’s also yet another reason that ICE must be dismantled by the next Democratic president.

Inspired Takes

• Obviously, the New York Knicks should not visit the Trump White House to celebrate their championship victory. Obviously. I don’t care what the team’s billionaire nepo-baby Republican owner wants. The team that represents this city should not go to the White House. For more on why this is clearly the right decision, read Dave Zirin in The Nation.
• If New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch insists on allowing the NYPD to collaborate with ICE, Jessica Tisch needs to be fired. In The Nation, Prajwal Bhat discusses Zohran Mamdani’s first real challenge as mayor.

Worst Argument of the Week

One of the things I desperately try to explain to self-identified liberals who nonetheless feel “uncomfortable” with trans issues is that there is no way to carve transgender individuals out of the protective shield of our equal protection laws but leave everyone else alone. To be clear, I hate that people want to exclude trans people from the grant of equal treatment and opportunity, but even putting my moral disagreement aside, trans people simply can’t be excluded if you want everyone else to have those rights. If you take away rights from trans people, the same legal justifications can and will be used to take away rights from someone else. In the fight against the (cis-heteronormative white) man, we are truly all in this together.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that will put all of this into stark relief. It’s called Trump v. Kingdom, and it’s nominally about Trump’s executive order preventing the Bureau of Prisons from using federal funds to support gender-affirming care. Now, I am well aware that among the people who still watch television ads, some of the Democratic ones feel they were hurt by Trump’s ads saying Kamala Harris is for “they/them, not you.” Harris had said that she supported gender-affirming care for people who rely on the state for their healthcare, including people who are in prison.

The whole thing was called a Harris “blunder.” Incarcerated transgender people are probably the very first people Democrats would nominate to be thrown under the bus, and “moderate” Democrats would further advocate running the bus back over them a couple of times for good measure.

Since the 2024 campaign, many Democrats, including some who are asking to lead the party, have done just that by adopting bigoted positions on trans issues. But those anti-trans positions aren’t just harmless campaign rhetoric. They can have real, disastrous legal consequences for trans people—and for everybody.

We’re about to see some of those consequences at the Supreme Court. As Ian Millhiser explains in this article, when you look at the Kingdom case, you quickly see that it’s not just about denying gender-affirming care to people in prison; it’s about denying medical care more broadly to people in prison, regardless of their trans status. That’s because once you open the door to politicians, instead of doctors, making decisions about what kind of medical care a person can receive, you open Pandora’s box. The Eighth Amendment does not say: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted… except to trans people because fuck ’em.” Once you say that the Eighth Amendment doesn’t apply to some prisoners in some situations, the list of people who can be denied human rights only grows. The Kingdom case could be used to deny people in prison the right to psychiatric care, prenatal care, preventive medicine, and even aspirin if the Trump administration decides that “criminals” don’t “deserve” pain medication.

And if you still somehow believe that what applies to people in prison doesn’t affect the rest of us, I’ll remind you that we are, at heart, talking about medical care supported by federal funds. The logic used against trans prisoners in Kingdom could easily be ported over to people who rely on Medicare and Medicaid, to say nothing of those in the US Army or federal employees.

I defend trans rights because it is the right thing to do. But if you are a Democrat who can’t figure out the right thing to do, you should at least be motivated by rational self-interest. Trans rights are human rights, and if you give them up, the damage will not be localized to people you can’t bother to care about.

What I Wrote

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether a 1988 law regulating Blockbuster Video can be applied today to protect Internet privacy. This is an asinine case, and I loved writing about it.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Football Coach Brian Flores is engaged in long-running litigation against the National Football League. Flores is a superb sideline tactician; nobody disagrees with that. But he also happens to be Black. He was the head coach of the Miami Dolphins from 2019 to 2022, leading the (very bad) team to a 24–25 record, at which point he happened to be fired.

Flores sued the Dolphins, alleging racial discrimination. When he couldn’t get another head coaching job, he sued the NFL. And then he sued the Dolphins again for retaliating against him, by bad-mouthing him to other teams, because of his initial lawsuit. Flores is currently the defensive coordinator for the Minnesota Vikings but he’s still not a head coach (for those unfamiliar with the sport, defensive coordinator is like a deputy coach), despite being very successful with the Vikings.

Flores’s lawsuits (which have been joined by two other Black coaches from around the league) are still in the discovery phase, but this week the closest thing you will see to a “smoking gun” in this kind of employment dispute was made public by the judge overseeing the cases.

It’s a document drafted by Korn Ferry, a search firm many NFL teams use when trying to find their next head coach. Flores had applied to become the Las Vegas Raiders head coach, and Korn Ferry produced a one-page memo listing Flores’s “pros and cons.” The document was produced in part through conversations with the Miami Dolphins organization, and it is explosive. Under cons, it lists things like “chip on his shoulder,” says his personality is “unpredictable,” and that he “needs someone strong at the top to reign [sic] in some of his worst behavior.” One Dolphins executive allegedly said Flores was the “worst hire we ever made”—an objectively untrue fact based on his record, and a pretty good indication of illegal retaliation against a former employee. Taken together, these all read like racist dog whistles: The angry Black man cannot be trusted without a white guy in charge holding his leash.

But it’s actually under the “pros” section where the racism swallowed the whistle and left me gasping on the floor. The search firm wrote: “Polished and a good presenter despite growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn (same as Mike Tyson). He was able to build a strong friendship with a billionaire’s son which gave him opportunities to socialize and learn how to build relationships with white-collar and upper-class individuals.”

These people wrote down, as a compliment, that “despite” growing up in a Black neighborhood, which happens to be the same neighborhood that a convicted rapist (and millions and millions of other people) grew up in, Flores made a rich friend who gave him “opportunities to socialize” and learn how to talk to “white-collar” folks. ’Cause, I guess, without the literal billionaire nepo-baby guiding him like Jane Goodall out of the mists, Flores would just grunt and beat his chest around “upper-class individuals,” completely unable to make polite conversation, and steal their good silverware… or something.

I must also point out that this document was prepared in 2024, years after Flores had already sued the NFL for discrimination. Korn Ferry put this down in writing after the man had sued the league for stuff like the statements memorialized in this document!

Flores did not get the Raiders job, by the way. Instead, they hired a white man, whom they then fired, before hiring the current white man who runs the team.

Many of you may remember Colin Kaepernick, the Black quarterback who was blackballed by the NFL for kneeling during the national anthem in protest against police brutality. There are many differences between the Kaepernick situation and the Flores lawsuit, but a key one to think about is that Flores is a coach, not a player. Unlike players, who have a limited shelf-life when they’re actually good enough to play professional football, Flores can coach for a long, long time. And he’s frankly too good of a coach to be ignored, because even if he gets drummed out of the NFL for having the gall to defend himself from racism, he can always be a top-level coach in college. He can be a thorn in the NFL’s side for exactly as long as he wants to be. The NFL is going to have to reckon with Flores.

I want Flores to get all the money, and then get another head coaching opportunity. The team that hires him will become my favorite team. Because I am not a wizard-level football strategist. But I know this is how they talk about me, as well. This is how they talk about all of us.

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