There are political positions and there are political positions that produce an incendiary device outside a federal building in Manhattan, and the suspect who detonated one on Monday has a documented “history of anti-ICE activity,” per Fox News’s confirmed reporting today, which is the detail that transforms a criminal act into a political story, and which the administration is using to connect anti-ICE sentiment to political violence in the same way that critics of the administration connect anti-immigrant enforcement rhetoric to violence against immigrants, and both sides are doing this simultaneously.
Fox News devoted its Rundown podcast today to what it calls America’s “assassination culture,” featuring a segment on the Manhattan incident alongside an interview with retired FBI supervisory special agent James Gagliano, who described a pattern of escalating political violence driven by radicalized individuals who view government institutions as legitimate targets. The Manhattan federal building attack is described as “the latest example in a growing wave of political violence,” which is the framing that contextualizes a single incident within a trend that the FBI tracks and Fox News covers.
The specific federal building targeted handles, among other things, immigration processing, which is the connection to the suspect’s anti-ICE history, and which is also the connection that makes the attack politically legible in both directions simultaneously. ICE operations have produced their own documented incidents of violence, including the death of Lorenzo Araujo in Houston, Texas, earlier this month and the fatal shooting in Biddeford, Maine, on July 14. The suspect who targeted the Manhattan building has a documented history of opposing those operations. The incendiary device is the action the history produced.
Raw Story and Fox News are both covering this story and reaching different conclusions about what produced it, which is the condition the story was always going to produce, because the question of what radicalizes someone to target a federal building is a question whose answer depends almost entirely on which parts of the preceding year you include in the context.
When a person with anti-ICE history detonates a device outside a federal building and both sides immediately find it confirms what they already thought, what exactly is the device blowing up?
Sources
Fox News Rundown: Assassination Culture
HuffPost: Person In Custody After Setting Off Fireworks In Front Of New York Federal Building
Raw Story: ICE agents privately admit to horrific conditions in Manhattan facility: report
