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“They let—I think the real number is fifteen, sixteen million people into our country,” Donald Trump told a crowd in December 2023 before stumbling into language that sounded more ominous than usual. “When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”

The stage for Trump’s particularly bloody equation of the border with the fentanyl crisis was set long ago.

When he had first tried out the language three months earlier, the Biden administration and other liberals were quick to point out the resonances with Hitler. “It seemed as if a perpetual stream of poison was being sent by some mysterious power to the very uttermost blood-vessels of what had once been a hero’s body and was crippling common sense and the simple instinct of self-preservation more and more,” the would-be Führer wrote of Germany in 1925. Trump would have none of it. “I never read Mein Kampf,” he sputtered at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, doubling down on the metaphor. Illegal immigrants, he insisted, “are destroying the blood of our country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country.” Soon after, J. D. Vance swooped to Trump’s defense. “First of all,” said Vance, “he didn’t say immigrants were poisoning the blood of this country. He said illegal immigrants were poisoning the blood of this country, which is objectively and obviously true to anybody who looks at the statistics about fentanyl overdoses.”

Vance’s excuse is neat: cause meets effect and the blood is poisoned. In this story, illegal immigrants are “obviously and objectively” linked to the fentanyl overdoses that so many Americans have now experienced, personally or from a distance. The story is at once tautological, resistant to evidence—89 percent of apprehended fentanyl traffickers are American citizens, and the majority of fentanyl crosses the border at legal ports of entry—and unidirectional. It begins with Chinese labs and flows through the southern border, carried on the bodies of Mexican illegal immigrants, invading and wrecking the bodies of innocent American sons and daughters.

This invasion story, which Trump codified by executive order on Monday, echoes other body-snatching narratives today—the border is a “child trafficking delivery service”; migrants bring “very contagious diseases”; a parasitic worm eats away at the brain of Trump’s pledged nominee for director of Health and Human Services—but the opioid crisis feels singularly cruel in its grip upon the body politic. Driven by a spike in fentanyl consumption over the last several years, drug overdose deaths increased by 50 percent in the United States between 2019 and 2021. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 109,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2022 alone, and overdoses by synthetic opioids are likely now the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45.

Last July, in response to these terrifying statistics, the Biden-Harris administration announced new policies “to counter the scourge of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs,” actions that start with the “442 million potentially lethal doses of fentanyl . . . seized at U.S. borders.” Chief among these proposed policies: a promise “to invest in detection technology” and add “dozens of new inspection systems” to the U.S. border regime. While increasing detection technologies and inspection systems at legal points of entry might in fact be necessary at this point, the Biden-Harris scheme also reiterates the longstanding orientation toward drug policy adopted by Democrats and Republicans alike: it assumes that the problem begins and ends at the border. In this, the focus of the Biden-Harris proposal mirrors Barack Obama’s National Southwest Border Counternarcotics Strategy (released in 2009), George W. Bush’s Operation Jump Start (launched in 2006), and goal four of Bill Clinton’s National Drug Control Strategy (announced in 1997): to “shield America’s air, land, and sea frontier from the drug threat.”

In other words, the stage for Trump’s particularly bloody equation of the border with the fentanyl crisis was set long ago. He needs no Hitlerian inspiration for his rhetoric; both Democrats and Republicans have been building this common sense for years, renovating and expanding its capacities over time—including with bids for ever more border patrol agents, counterinsurgency funding, and technology. According to this homegrown conventional wisdom, “lethal doses” of drugs flow in a single direction: from the outside in. They are never “of us” or “from us.” When Trump began linking fentanyl to immigrants in 2016, he simply moved into the house built by his predecessors, amped up the vitriol, and promised to stop the invasion.

This time around, Trump says, the war must be brought to Mexico itself. He assured us he would target drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations—and already started that process by executive order. He says he will order the Pentagon “to make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare, and other covert and overt actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.” He promises to deploy the U.S. Navy to impose a blockade, pass legislation to ensure that drug smugglers receive the death penalty, invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport drug dealers, and end birthright citizenship. The question, a senior Trump transition member told Rolling Stone, is not if the United States should invade Mexico, but “how much.” As crusader and favored Secretary of Defense head Pete Hegseth might intone, this time the blood of the infidels must be spilled to protect the blood of the lamb.


The beautiful Boy is hunched over on a park bench jamming the burrito I’ve just bought him into his mouth. He is all shades of grey. Grey sweatshirt and sweatpants that hang off his once bulky body like a moldy blanket. Grey feet, poking out ashy, from the tips of his grey flip flops. Grey, skittish face that chews and cries and sniffs and stares. When he talks about the maggots in the food, the violent dealer, the multiple overdoses, his voice stays flat. Grey. As if to match the palette. When he shuffles off the park bench beside me, I wonder—as I do multiple times a day and several times (upright, with a “bang!” in my head) in the middle of the night—if this is the hour the beautiful Boy goes home, falls asleep, and never wakes up.

He smokes his fentanyl, no need for injections. The messiness of heroin, with its elaborate, needle-ridden ritual, seems quaint by comparison. Except for plasma donation, and the occasional punch in the nose, this is a bold new blood-free universe. And in this universe, where he is almost always dying, I am almost always cracked in two. I am shattered. Raw. I want, need, a story that connects cause to effect. I want—need—to find the monster that clawed inside him and stab it to death. I want—I need—a straight line that ends in salvation. Or in answers. Or at the very least, revenge. I crave blood.


In the early 1990s, when Richard Sackler and Purdue Pharma set out to make OxyContin the best-selling pain medication of all time, they were also thinking about blood. Specifically, about the fact that the only thing that distinguished their new drug from run-of-the-mill Oxycodone—and thus, from run-of-the-mill heroin—was a time-release coating that allowed it to dissolve over a supposedly twelve-hour period into the bloodstream. OxyContin’s meteoric commercial success was entirely the product of Purdue’s uniquely aggressive marketing strategy, which originally targeted some of the most economically decimated regions of the country and poured millions of dollars into speaker’s fees, free lunches, and other forms of compensation for doctors. The goal ultimately was to get physicians to prescribe opioids and downplay the possibility of addiction. The time-release coating, sales reps assured everyone, kept the drip of opioid to a trickle.

Many of the right’s conspiracies function as funhouse mirrors—reflecting a twisted but not entirely invented version of American political reality.

As we now know, this privately held company understood full well that the product it was peddling was a highly addictive “nuclear weapon” of a narcotic. It knew that its coating was porous and that each dose did not last twelve hours. It was also aware, from its own data and from reports by its sales reps, that OxyContin was being widely abused. And yet, Purdue not only continued to expand sales; it started a program of free samples. In 1996, the year OxyContin went on the market, the company brought in $48 million in revenue. By 2010 it was making $3 billion annually. That same year, the company finally introduced a tamper-proof, crush-proof coating to discourage abuse, but the damage was done. Deaths by opioid overdoses in the United States had nearly quadrupled since 1999, and millions of people had developed crippling addictions. The foundation was laid for a heroin epidemic, creating a ready-made market for the much more powerful, much cheaper, synthetic opioid that appeared on the scene: fentanyl.

It is tempting to lay the blame for this crisis squarely at the feet of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma. After all, doing so reverses the one-way narrative of the alien invasion story, transforming the epidemic into a homegrown problem of corporate greed in the heartland. And yet, this story is only partially satisfying. While it may explain the American origins of this crisis, it fails to explain why this crisis is so uniquely American—why statistics on opioid addiction and death in this country continue to dwarf figures from any other wealthy nation. Indeed the United States has the highest rate of overdose deaths in the world, a figure that has remained constant throughout the early 2020s even as other countries have seen decreases. Even the singular rapaciousness of the Sacklers cannot explain the singular hold of opioids on America.

For that, you have to look at what makes life in the United States fundamentally different from life in every other wealthy nation in the world: its lack of a universal, publicly funded health care system and even a modest social safety net. Countries with functioning social support programs do not see such radically high levels of economic precarity and homelessness—conditions that significantly increase the likelihood of turning to drugs. And countries with universal, publicly funded health care have a markedly different relationship with the pharmaceutical industry because governments in these countries have an incentive to use consolidated negotiating power to bargain with drug companies over prices.

Not only does this incentive not exist in the United States; the financial ecosystem surrounding the for-profit health care industry works in tandem with a weak regulatory structure, permissive marketing laws, and a highly decentralized system of oversight that makes individual doctors more susceptible to direct manipulation by pharmaceutical companies. In a for-profit health care environment in which doctors measure consultation with patients in minutes, and where so much basic health care takes place in the high-pressure environment of the emergency room, it is often easier to simply write a prescription than devote the time to discuss pain management. To add insult to injury, despite U.S. health care costs accounting for 17.6 percent of GDP (higher than any other country in the world), around 8 percent of the population—some 26 million people—has no health insurance at all, while another 23 percent of the population is underinsured. To be uninsured or underinsured in the United States is to be one bad diagnosis away from financial ruin or homelessness. Ultimately, this means that Americans are both more susceptible to the economic factors associated with a higher likelihood of opioid addiction and, once addicted, less likely to have insurance to pay for treatment.

In short, it is Americans’ exceptional exposure to capitalism that makes them exceptionally vulnerable to the opioid epidemic. And yet American exceptionalism also makes that fact so roundly impossible for anyone in the political establishment to acknowledge. Instead, for the last thirty years, a succession of Republican and Democratic politicians have focused—laserlike—on the border. Biden temporarily expanded the U.S. welfare state only to preside over its further contraction and vow to “address our broken immigration system.” After having publicly backed away from her 2020 commitment to Medicare for All, Harris devoted barely a word of her 2024 campaign to health care, pledging, instead, to fund more agents, buy more drug detection equipment, and prosecute more traffickers.

Into this crackling vortex—where the fentanyl crisis and border militarization expand hand in hand—a crowd of fulminating reactionaries descends, whispering in your ear, then pounding on the table, raging that Biden has “the blood of American citizens on his hands.” Into this vortex, Trump roars like the wrath of god, promising again and again to rain down fire and brimstone on these “bloodthirsty criminals” crossing the border in a tidal wave of contagion. Into this vortex—both preceding and responding to Trump like a frantic, proleptic chorus—descends a popular movement with a mystical, phantasmagoric vision of reality and a parallel story about cause and effect, in which Trump will save “thousands upon thousands” of children from the underground bunkers where the Clintons and a host of Democratic deep state operatives are holding them captive. Harvesting their adrenochrome. Draining their blood.


In his 1933 classic, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, psychoanalyst, sociologist, and political economist Wilhelm Reich looked closely at fascism’s conflation of racial purity and “blood poisoning” and concluded that one “does not render the cause of human freedom a service by merely deriding this mysticism instead of unmasking it.” He went on to explain the affective appeal of fascism for what he later called the “broadest masses,” whose support, he argued, had fueled the worst abuses—“predatory imperialism, exploitation of workers, racial suppression”—of the capitalist era.

Far from the invasion story, it is Americans’ exceptional exposure to capitalism that makes them exceptionally vulnerable to the opioid epidemic.

Unmasking the enormously popular, QAnon-inflated conspiracy theory—now firmly established in the mainstream Republican Party—about a global cabal of vampiric, child-trafficking, deep state actors also requires attending to its mass affective appeal. Like the Nazi rhetoric that Reich analyzes, it is anti-Semitic in blood-libel form, if not precisely in content, and it overlaps substantially with the equally conspiratorial, anti-vaccine movement that also gained momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic. One cannot appreciate the appeal of these views without recognizing them as funhouse mirrors, reflecting a twisted but not entirely invented version of American political reality. In their obsessions with the Clintons, at least, there is a tiny kernel of truth pulsing within the bizarre Weltanschauung of the conspiracy theorists, about the origins of the opioid crisis and the politics of the southern border.

When he was elected president in 1992, Bill Clinton was in the unique position of making two fundamentally transformative changes to both the national and the global economic and political landscape. First, he came in with a clear mandate to transform health care in America. Both Jesse Jackson’s surprisingly successful primary campaign in 1988 and Harris Wofford’s equally surprising senatorial election in 1991 suggested that there was widespread public support for ending the dysfunctional, for-profit health care system. And yet, despite this mandate, both Bill and Hillary Clinton—who chaired the president’s task force on health care reform—made it clear from the beginning that they were uninterested in a public solution.

Instead, the Clintons championed “managed care competition,” the approach preferred by the insurance industry, in which private companies still exercised near total control over prices and health care providers. They ostracized supporters of single payer and national health care from their deliberations. And they brought to Congress a hugely complicated bill that no one understood, which Republicans gleefully branded as socialist. President Clinton devoted the rest of his administration’s work on health care to deregulating the pharmaceutical industry and weakening the Food and Drug Administration, both of which contributed substantially to the opioid crisis.

In one fell stroke, the Clintons thus transformed health care reform into the third rail of American policy issues and suppressed discussion of any meaningful change to the for-profit system for the next thirty years. Indeed, this fall, when Senator Elizabeth Warren attempted to draw attention to the outpouring of frustration and rage at the insurance industry following the murder of CEO Brian Thompson, she was forced to “clarify” her statements by a Democratic and Republic political establishment fixated on the moral question of violence and incapable of acknowledging just how bad the crisis in capitalist-driven health care had become.

Second, as commander in chief, Clinton had the unprecedented opportunity, and the mandate, to reconsider America’s embrace of global primacy, the reigning foreign policy ideology in Washington since the end of World War II. As a worldview and a policy commitment, primacy aims to ensure that the United States remains the dominant military, economic, and political hegemon in the world, to integrate other states into U.S.-designed markets (by force if necessary), and to do so in a way that, in Patrick Porter’s words, goes “well beyond what it minimally needs to defend or deter threats.” Throughout the postwar period, the U.S. commitment to primacy has resulted in the expansion of America’s military capacities (to over 750 military bases in 80 countries and more at-ready military personnel in more places than any other people, nation, or empire in history), multiple deadly wars, interference in the internal affairs of roughly fifty sovereign nations (that we know of), forced regime changes, assassinations, counterinsurgencies, and support for authoritarian, antidemocratic regimes throughout the world (including Obama’s support for the 2009 right-wing coup in Honduras, which has contributed substantially to the spike in Central American asylum seekers). At this point in America’s history, maintaining global primacy requires that the federal government pour nearly a trillion dollars a year into its security budget.

While in office, Clinton could have taken the end of the Cold War as an opportunity to rethink America’s relationship to its military and to the rest of the world, starting by redistributing the “peace dividend” in other ways. As with the Marshall Plan, he could have poured resources into the public sector of a struggling and transitioning Russian state. He could have reassessed America’s role in NATO and the role of NATO more generally, worked with his counterparts to begin denuclearization, and redistribute America’s security budget domestically toward public spending in health care, education, science, and the arts. This was a moment when it was possible to reimagine the global economy in broadly more equitable terms and to reorient toward a true internationalism in which the United States was one among equals rather than a hegemon constantly driven by the need to maintain its supremacy.

All of this was possible. None of this happened. Instead, Clinton chose to sanction reckless privatization and economic “shock therapy” in Russia, to studiously avoid talking about denuclearization, and, most importantly, to leave unchallenged the underlying policy faith in the necessity of America’s total military, political, and economic power.

In both domestic and global arenas, whatever platitudes Clinton mouthed to his adoring Democratic fans about a more equitable world were ultimately overruled by his even stronger commitment to American capital. According to one study, at least fifteen of Clinton’s key policymakers had direct ties to a total of forty-one corporations. The Clinton administration facilitated unprecedented and lucrative mergers among major corporations associated with the military-industrial complex, that congeries of defense companies that relies upon an unchecked flow of public money for their private profit. Rather than reconsider America’s military spending, Clinton expanded it. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the administration spent roughly $30 billion more on defense in 1995 than Nixon did in 1975 during a period of Soviet expansionism. It was also equally committed to assuring “open and equal U.S. access to foreign markets” for the post–Cold War era. This was to be a “world of free trade,” a world Clinton helped breathe into being when he signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993.

In one fell stroke, the Clintons transformed health care reform into the third rail of American politics and buttressed the relentless pursuit of geopolitical primacy.

Through all this, in the course of eight years, the Clinton administration completed the reforms of the Reagan revolution and ushered in an era of neoliberal barbarism. In Mexico, the economic regime inaugurated by NAFTA has led directly to the loss of some two million agricultural jobs and a mass movement of Mexican workers toward the abusive maquiladora economy of the border. In this brave new economy, Mexican nationals work in foreign-owned export manufacturing firms, producing cheap goods for American consumers at wages that rapidly fell below pre-NAFTA rates. As economic hopelessness has grown, the number of Mexicans immigrating to the United States has also grown exponentially. At the same time, the 1996 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act and other legislation Clinton signed that year have increasingly allowed for the criminalization of those immigrants, harsher penalties for unauthorized entry, and impossible standards for family unification–based amnesties.

And yet, even as access to legal immigration shrinks along America’s southern border—even as the number of migrant dead and disappeared continues to grow and vigilantes join with law enforcement in Arizona and Texas to terrorize undocumented men, women, and children—the U.S. border regime finds creative ways to serve capital. Every year, the United States issues a number of time-limited, non-immigrant visitor visas to Mexicans, allowing them to cross into El Paso and other border towns. Many do so in order to “donate” plasma at commercial plasma centers. Once in these centers, men and women—including many maquiladora workers—are connected to plasmapheresis machines where blood is drained from their arms, usually in exchange for a $50 prepaid Visa card. Their plasma is then commingled with the plasma of millions of U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants throughout the country—usually poor, often unhoused, and often, like the beautiful Boy, addicted to fentanyl—and transformed into $35 billion of market value for the American pharmaceutical industry.


The story I tell about the beautiful Boy’s origins begins at the border. With maternal blood.

His mother was arrested for low-level drug smuggling in the southwest corner of Texas while sitting in the passenger seat of a broken-down car, her dealer boyfriend at the wheel, a screaming toddler in the back seat. (The Child Protective Services files emphasize the disconnect between miles traveled and dearth of diapers.) Out on bail in a medium-sized, West Texas town, her child in foster care, far but near (by Texas standards) from her home, and occasionally unhoused, she had a one-night stand with a man at a party and got pregnant. She never saw him again.

The beautiful Boy’s mother lived her whole life on the southwest fringes of a state that has been described as “the global epicenter for mass incarceration,” within a racist ecosystem of policing that sat (and still sits) cheek by jowl with an increasingly violent, cross-border, drug trafficking economy that grows exponentially in response to worsening economic conditions in Mexico and rising levels of addiction in the United States. The beautiful Boy’s mother clearly participated in this economy. And she was also clearly its victim. One can’t help but imagine that she understood herself to have very little control over anything that was happening to her at the time, that she bounced along on waves of addiction and waves of events in a sea of other people, other systems, and other forces that existed outside herself and the accidental fetus burrowing within.

Even twenty years ago, Texas’s now near-total abortion ban was already well in the making, and access to abortion services was extraordinarily limited, especially for women in rural areas of the state. The state is currently ranked among the three worst states for access to maternal health care and has long had the highest proportion of citizens without health insurance in the United States—twice the national rate and five percentage points higher than the next worst state, Oklahoma. As with limited access to abortion, these are long-term trends in health care disparities—trends that would not exist if the United States had a public system of universal health care.

Throughout those early months of her pregnancy, the beautiful Boy’s mother abused multiple substances. They leeched though the placental barrier, flowing along the blooded passage from mother to fetus, settling into the beautiful Boy’s developing brain, reorienting what would be his future executive functioning—his perception of time, of cause and effect—rendering him susceptible to, among other challenges, addiction.

In a redemption fantasy I sometimes have when I am most crushed by helplessness, I find his mother the day after the party, and I physically interject myself between her mouth and the bottle. Her mouth and the pipe. Her arm and the needle. Somehow, by sheer force of will, I inspire force of will in her, and she throws away the bottle, pipe, or needle with a dramatic fling of her arm and rises to her feet, gripped with a newfound determination to live a sober life. Then, in my mind, I see an image of the beautiful–fetus–Boy stretching out in her womb, his glistening brain untouched, sucking clean blood from the umbilical cord. Like tea through a straw.

In the real version of the story, the beautiful Boy is born prematurely into a community with among Texas’s highest rates of childhood poverty, childhood asthma, homicide, and opioid addiction. In the real version of the story, the beautiful Boy’s chances were scrambled, from the pre-beginning, by the precarity of the world around him.

Of course, the deep background to this real and felt sense of precarity and helplessness in the face of external forces—the drug trade, racist law enforcement—is the history of Anglo-settler occupation and violence that has long stalked this southern fringe of Texas. Since well before the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848, when Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory and recognized the Rio Grande as the new border with the United States, the Texas Rangers—half police, half armed gang—played a pivotal role in securing the region for white settlement, wresting land by force from indigenous people and Mexican ranchers alike and hunting down runaway slaves for good measure. During the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century, Rangers and white vigilantes intensified this violence, waging a campaign of racial terror along the Texas-Mexico border during which at least 500 Mexicans (some estimates are as high as 5,000) were shot, lynched, or executed without trial. The decade reached its bloody zenith in 1918 with the massacre of nearly all the men and boys in the border town of Porvenir. Among Mexicans and Tejanos, the decade came to be known as La Hora de Sangre: The Hour of Blood.

At the core of this campaign of racial violence was white ranchers’ and settlers’ intolerance for Mexican and indigenous control of the land. But it was also driven by anxieties about land redistribution—specifically, the expropriation of wealthy hacendado land for Mexican peasants under the banner of figures like Emiliano Zapata. The idea appealed to small land holders and agrarian radicals on the American side of the border, too. From this perspective, La Hora de Sangre resembles what W. E. B. Du Bois describes in Black Reconstruction as the “counter-revolution of property.” Writing on the post–Civil War South, Du Bois saw that an alliance was forged between northern industrialists, southern oligarchy, and white peasants to prevent Black freedman and white laborers from joining forces. The coalition of interests that ultimately came together in Texas to enforce the “white man’s west” for white settler and white capitalist expansion served much the same purpose.

In his book Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano draws on the insights of Du Bois and other Black radical thinkers—George Padmore, Aimé Césaire, and Angela Davis among them—to highlight the constancy of this “counter-revolutionary” racial violence against subaltern populations both within and at the fringes of “actually existing liberal democracies”—in the colonies, in the prisons, along the borders. This violence, Toscano argues, is integral to the process by which settler and colonial capitalist democracies sustain themselves. An anti-fascist political consciousness, he concludes, must recognize the link between these everyday practices and the emergence of mass movements, reactionary and resentful, oriented toward purging the body politic of leftist poison.

At these historical junctures, the braided relationship between capitalism, liberal democracy, and fascism bursts through the color line. Some deep inkling of a real threat against “the people” by elites—today, an American opioid epidemic, forged in the bowels of the American pharmaceutical industry—peeks above the waves but quickly coils back into itself, transformed through conspiracy theory and the racist logic of the historical present into a revanchist politics foaming at the mouth for impure blood. The low thrum of racial containment resonating all around us all the time suddenly fills the air with the clamorous scream of a mighty, apocalyptic chorus. Meanwhile, as Césaire put it in his 1950 classic, Discourse on Colonialism, the “very distin­guished, very humanistic” bourgeois looks around, aghast, and discovers he “has a Hitler inside him.”

Historically, as with our current situation, such moments have revealed both the fragility of liberal “democratic” institutions and their naked affiliations with racial power. In 1919, when the only Tejano member of the Texas legislature, José Tomás Canales, led a formal investigation into violent policing practices during La Hora de Sangre and brought nineteen charges against the Rangers, he was quickly confronted with the limitations of Texas’s democratic system. During hearings in which he submitted evidence regarding the massacre in Porvenir and questioned witnesses, Canales was himself cross examined by the lawyer for the Rangers. “Now, Mr. Canales,” the attorney queried, “you are by blood a Mexican are you not?” “I am not a Mexican,” a startled Canales replied. “I am an American citizen.” The lawyer’s follow up question was short and to the point. “By blood?”


In 1987, four years before he was diagnosed with the blood cancer that would ultimately take his life, Edward Said gave a lecture entitled “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors” in which he laid out the critical orientation that guided both his academic and political writing. “When we consider the connections between the United States and the rest of the world,” he insisted, “we are so to speak of the connections, not outside and beyond them.” Aimed in part at researchers in the American academy, Said’s words encouraged a dramatic methodological shift, away from presuming the neutrality of the observing subject who also happens to be living in an empire.

Politically, this reorientation begins at the point of overlap between American imperial power and American exceptionalism. For Said, who devoted so much of his life’s work to making the question of Palestine visible for a world committed its invisibility, being of the connections required recognizing the convergence between the destabilizing actions of the United States in the Middle East and the domestic narratives that rationalized these actions. By Said’s lights, fighting to make Palestine visible, and for the right of Palestinians to narrate their own experience, began at sites of connection—the border, the refugee camp, the exiled individual, the prison, the military installation, the occupied territory—and then sought to reconnect the past to the present, American foreign policy to Palestine, domination to resistance, the outside to the inside, and the practice of American imperialism to the common sense of American exceptionalism and the American habit of unseeing.

Every mainstream narrative about politics reaffirms the Manichaean universe of American exceptionalism, where cause and effect run only in one direction.

In our contemporary moment—balanced on the cusp of a full-blown military assault on immigrants, in the midst of an ever more debilitating opioid crisis—the impulse to unsee the connections between the past and the present, health care and fentanyl, primacy and the border, could not be more tempting. Every day, we are pulled toward the black hole singularity of American exceptionalism. Every mainstream narrative about American politics—Democratic and Republican, liberal and reactionary—reaffirms this Manichaean universe without connections where cause and effect run in a single direction. The opioid epidemic flows from China and Mexico. The “crisis at the border” is sui generis. Students protesting the genocide in Gaza are “outside agitators.” Trans and queer people—and the “woke” in general—are external threats to the white heterosexual body politic. From within this bifurcated vision, the rise of fascism in America today has nothing to do with the liberal democratic state’s historical relationship to racial terror, settler and border violence, gender oppression, imperialism, and capitalist accommodation.

In this universe without connections, the nearly trillion dollars a year this country spends on its security budget, the absence of public health care, and the evisceration of social services orbit around America, never touching, never visible at the same time. Like silent, dead moons.

When I walk down the street and I see the beautiful Boy in every folded-over human being, every head down U-shape, every slumped bundle on the bus, every toe poked through every sleeping bag, every scabbed visage, I feel the pull of that singularity. When I don’t hear from him for weeks at a time, and the terror shifts to that pulsing place behind my eyes, I can only think in one direction. I have authoritarian dreams. I crave blood.

But the next time I meet him for breakfast, there is a light in his eyes. He crushes me in a hug and presses my finger to the bump on his stomach where the opioid blocker is slowly dissolving under his skin into his bloodstream. I am wary—the rhythm of addiction is like this: “change talk” and failure, intention and reality, truth and lies, possibility and retreat. This could all fall apart tomorrow. I am all too aware that my own powerlessness—like his—can tip any moment into hopelessness. And yet in this moment, here we are. We eat our breakfast. He kisses me goodbye, takes my leftovers, and walks away.

He is not of my blood. I am not of his. But we are of the connections.

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