Welcome to Post-Extremism
When the state goes radical, the radicals become paramilitary
The Sde Teiman detention center sits in a barren stretch of sand between the Gaza Strip and the Israeli desert city of Be'er Sheva. Inside, the law doesn’t apply. Not Israeli law, not human rights law, not international law.
Sde Teiman is not a prison per se, but a processing center. Roughly 100 detainees are kept there at any given moment, as they wait to be moved elsewhere. A recently-passed Israeli law allows those deemed “unlawful combatants” to be detained for up to 45 days without a warrant, meaning they are deprived of legal representation or contact with the outside world. To make that point clear, the Israeli Defense Forces, who run Sde Teiman, keep some of the detainees blindfolded and restrained for the duration of their stay.
The prisoners may only be there temporarily, but the IDF makes their stay brutal. Most are packed into mesh cages, which the guards call “pens,” forbidden from speaking. Prisoners are handcuffed so long some have had their limbs amputated. Detainees are lined up, face down, on the floor as heavily-armed soldiers patrol with attack dogs. Some are ostensibly in hospital: Strapped to beds, force-fed through straws. There is ample evidence of physical and sexual abuse at the facility.
An Israeli reservist recalled their time at Sde Teiman:
At first, it was like “This is a just war,” and on my last day on reserve duty, I woke up in Sde Teiman and simply saw how an Abu Ghraib-like thing was taking shape. You see normal, pretty ordinary people, reaching a point where they abuse people for their own amusement, not even for an interrogation or anything. For fun, to have something to tell the guys, or [for] revenge.
Another whistleblower told CNN that it was the IDF’s job to strip detainees “of anything that resembles human beings.”
The New York Times estimated that, between October 2023 and June 2024, some 4,000 Palestinians have been detained at Sde Teiman: Of those, 35 died.
Some of these detainees had been involved in the deadly October 7 massacres. Others may be affiliated with Hamas. But it’s hard to say for sure: Israel also detains Palestinian men, women, and children based on nothing more than their status as Palestinians.
One of those Palestinians who saw the inside of Sde Teiman was Adnan al-Bursh, the head of orthopedics at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. He was arrested, along with 10 other medical professionals as they treated the injured, when Israeli forces moved into a Gaza refugee camp. Al-Bursh was moved to Sde Teiman, where a fellow inmate — also a surgeon — told Sky News that al-Bursh was beaten so badly that he could not use the bathroom alone. He was eventually transferred to the main Israeli prison system. Not long after his transfer, Israel quietly announced that al-Bursh had died. Said another way: Israel killed him.
Israel has not revealed al-Bursh’s cause of death, and they have not released his body to his family. Nor has Israel explained why, exactly, the surgeon was arrested, detained, and transferred at all. But there is no removing the state’s culpability for his death.
Outside of Sde Teiman, Israel is still a country of laws. And, in July of last year, the Israeli legal system tried to attack this cancerous cell. Military police entered Sde Teiman with orders to arrest nine IDF soldiers for their alleged role in abusing and torturing inmates at the facility. It should have been a sign that, even at war, even if it was only on Israeli territory, the law was still the law.
Not everyone saw it that way. Protesters started to amass outside Sde Teiman with a different idea. The crowd swelled to over 200, some of them armed. The reservists barricaded themselves in the base and wielded pepper spray to keep away the military police. A tense stand-off ensued.
The mob broke into the detention center, attacking an Israeli reporter in the melee. They had a singular goal: Protect the IDF soldiers, protect their ability to torture and kill Palestinian prisoners, make sure the law does not apply to Palestinians.
Inside this mob of violent extremists were some recognizable faces: Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu and parliamentarian Tzvi Sukkot amongst them.
The military police ultimately gained control, and the IDF soldiers were arrested as planned. Some, ultimately, were indicted. Justice may yet be served, but it will be a pyrrhic victory. The riot at Sde Teiman served a broader purpose: A loud pronouncement that the independent mechanics of the state — the military, the justice system, the rule of law itself — were subordinate to the will of the people, and the politicians they support.
The riot at Sde Teiman is a sign of a broader insurrection against those institutions. Israel has already shredded international law and humanitarian norms which it helped develop. Netanyahu is a corrupt, polarizing, political psychopath who has weaponized racists and demagogues to continue his stranglehold on power. There is no telling where this ends.
Meanwhile, in America, Donald Trump is trying something incredibly similar.
This week, on an especially dour Bug-eyed and Shameless, I argue that we are in a dangerous new phase where lawlessness and political violence has become central to the political regimes in America and Israel, and that things are about to get much worse.
This is post-extremism.
America has run black sites before, secretive government detention centers where human beings disappear into the security bureaucracy to be detained indefinitely, tortured, sometimes even killed. Today, we are witnessing their construction on an industrial scale.
Over the past few months, the Trump administration has dispatched armies of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents — sometimes backed up by actual armies of national guardsmen — to kidnap and detain immigrants, be they undocumented or in America legally, shipping them off to unregulated detention sites in America and around the world.
The White House, of course, insists that these are targeted raids to arrest and deport dangerous criminals. But this is a lie. Arrests of migrants with no criminal records have surged. For those with no criminal past, the government is happy to invent it.
That’s what happened to Kilmar Abrego Garcia. At 16, Garcia left El Salvador for America at the behest of his mother. The family had been extorted by a powerful criminal gang, and the young men of the family had been pressured to join. Instead, Garcia fled. He met and married a woman, who had U.S. citizenship, and they raised three children together.
Garcia was arrested in 2019 and ordered deported, but the order was blocked by the courts based on the likelihood that he would be targeted by the gangs if he returned to El Salvador. In the years that followed, he was even granted a work permit and dutifully checked in once per year with ICE.
Under Trump, Garcia’s status, an ICE officer said when he pulled Garcia over in March, “changed.” Garcia had been surveilled by the agency, and the officer opted to roll him up as he drove his son, who has autism and is non-verbal, back from his grandmother’s house. Garcia was secreted from one ICE detention facility to another. He insisted, correctly, that he had no gang affiliations and had been working legally in the United States for years. It didn’t matter. ICE officials told Garcia that he was being transported to Texas to appear in front of a judge. They lied.
Garcia was put on a transport plane and sent to El Salvador, a move that a judge had expressly forbidden just years prior. When he arrived, Garcia wasn’t released — he was sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center, known by its acronym CECOT. There, Garcia was beaten, kept in his cell for all but 30 minutes per day, denied sleep, and under-fed. He was tortured.
When he arrived, a prison official warned Garcia: “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn't leave." America tried to make that true: Refusing, repeatedly, to bring Garcia back, despite increasingly-irate court orders. After weeks of legal wrangling, the government agreed to repatriate Garcia, but with a catch: They would prosecute him for human smuggling.
As Stephen Miller, architect of this whole deportation infrastructure, said: “He will be tried, jailed, and then deported again to El Salvador."
Presenting that case in court has not gone well for the government. The court has trashed the state’s evidence as flimsy, invented, and reliant on two informants who have proven themselves to be unreliable, at best; liars, at worst. Garcia is still in custody, in large part because that’s where he wants to be: If he is on the street, Garcia fears he will be deported back to El Salvador. The court agrees.
Garcia’s case has become emblematic of this new cruel absurdity, but his case is just one of thousands of others. Each case is an opportunity for the Trump administration to change the law in some meaningful way. The government may lose most of the cases it tries, but its victories are enormously significant.
One of the most absurd cases features a group of migrants who ICE tried to send to South Sudan. When a judge blocked that effort, mid-flight, they were re-routed to a military base in Djibouti, where they spent weeks living in converted shipping containers. After a flurry of litigation, the White House successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to greenlight the transfer to South Sudan. In a scathing dissent, Sonia Sotomayor explains what this means:
Sotomayor: The United States may not deport noncitizens to a country where they are likely to be tortured or killed. International and domestic law guarantee that basic human right. In this case, the Government seeks to nullify it by deporting noncitizens to potentially dangerous countries without notice or the opportunity to assert a fear of torture.
In nullifying that right, that basic expectation, it opens the door to all future lawlessness. It creates the expectation that the law is determined based on the whims and prejudices of the regime in power. And, as the Trump administration mulls cancelling green cards, study permits, even citizenship from whomever it deems undesirable, this threat only rises. The Supreme Court’s recent decision to clip the wings of lower courts in blocking executive orders highlights the degree to which the guardrails are being uninstalled.
In her dissent, Sotomayor cites a decision a 60-year-old case to put an exclamation point on her warning:
Sotomayor: “In a democracy, power implies responsibility. The greater the power that defies law the less tolerant can this Court be of defiance. As the Nation’s ultimate judicial tribunal, this Court, beyond any other organ of society, is the trustee of law and charged with the duty of securing obedience to it.” [United Mine Workers v. Pennington]
This Court continues to invert those principles. Today’s order clarifies only one thing: Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial.
In its fight to disappear these men to a black site in South Sudan, the administration has legalized the indefensible and given itself nearly-unconstrained power to abduct and deport.
The law in America is, increasingly, no law at all. The state gets to decide what is legal and what, or who, is illegal.
"The settlers attacked and set on fire a house in the village, and the youth came outside to protect it. They set cars and houses on fire,” Jaafer Hamayel told Haaretz, “and the army shot at us.”
Hamayel lives in Kafr Malik, just northeast of Ramallah. His community has faced more and more violence at the hands of a band of extremist settlers.
In this most recent wave of violence, the IDF was dispatched to, ostensibly, keep the peace: Instead, they shot three Palestinians dead. Some of the settlers, who instigated the violence, were arrested but promptly released without charge.
This is a grim illustration of the double-standard of Israeli enforcement — where the instigators aren’t punished and the victims get shot. This isn’t a rare case, but increasingly life in the West Bank. This movement of settler-extremists, ones who are clawing more and more territory for Israel at the expense of Palestine, even have a moniker: The Hilltop Youth. It is a cute name for a violent, dangerous organization.
After the IDF intervened in Kafr Malik, the Hilltop Youth got little more than a slap on the wrist. Unsurprisingly, the settlers continued to occupy and terrorize the Palestinian community. And they turned their ire to the ones trying to remove them: The IDF.
"They brought us to a point where 90 percent of our time is spent on preventing Hilltop Youth from setting whole areas on fire," a battalion commander told Haaretz. "They threatened us that we would not leave there alive," he continued. "We saw them choking one of the soldiers, I myself got punched, one of the vehicles had stones thrown at it, they punctured the vehicle's tires."
For years, Israel has allowed settler violence in the West Bank to continue largely unabated: Police investigate, yes, but only about 6% of cases result in charges. This violence rose perilously in 2023 — both before, but especially after the October 7 attacks. These settlers, who hope to chase Palestinians off their land and seize it as their own, have proved remarkably successful: 15 Palestinian herding communities in the West Bank have been depopulated in just the past couple of years.
The Hilltop Youth have grown emboldened. Their attacks on the IDF are a sign of the impunity they feel.
Yes, this violence has been condemned by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and charges may be laid against the settlers for their attacks on the IDF. But this condemnation comes with a wink, and the plain truth that if any Palestinian or Arab did the same, the response would be swift and without mercy. It is simply true that these settler-extremists, the Hilltop Youth, are now functionally an arm of the state.
Just weeks before the clashes in Kafr Malik, the Hilltop Youth constructed a makeshift settlement about 20 kilometers away, right next to the Bedouin village of Mughayyir al-Deir. The IDF refused to clear out this illegal settlement, which sits squarely on Palestinian land which Israel does not control. Within a matter of days, settlers from the outpost used violence and intimidation to clear out Mughayyir al-Deir. When the villagers tried to return, just long enough to collect their belongings, the settlers threw rocks, beat them with clubs, and even opened fire.
One of the extremists spotted at the outpost was Tzvi Sukkot, a legislator for the Religious Zionism party, the third-largest in Netanyahu’s coalition government. Despite a lifetime of extremism, including torching of a mosque in 2010, Sukkot was appointed chair of the Knesset subcommittee on the West Bank, on which he still serves.
Sukkot was one of the politicians who stormed Sde Teiman the year prior. And Sukkot was ordered to report for questioning over his role in the raid — Sukkot and several of his fellow politicians have mused about invoking parliamentary privilege and refusing this order.
"The deep state wants to put us in jail as quickly as possible," Sukkot wrote on Twitter. "They won't break us." National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir echoed that sentiment, calling the investigation of his fellow lawmakers “another classic [case of] selective enforcement by the deep state.”
Sukkot has not been charged nor sanctioned by the Knesset. But another lawmaker, the leftist Ofer Cassif, has. He was suspended from the Knesset for two months for, amongst other things, calling Netanyahu a “psychopathic murderer.” The legislature denounced Cassif’s “systematic and consistent pattern of statements that accuses, both explicitly and implicitly, IDF soldiers of committing serious war crimes.”
One lawmaker leads a violent assault on an IDF base, and is defended by the government. Another criticizes the IDF’s bloody war, and has his democratic rights suspended.
But the fact that Sukkot and his ilk are being investigated at all remains a positive sign. The courts have also convicted one reservist for abuses of prisoners at Sde Teiman, and have ordered the IDF to abide by the law at the site. (The High Court, however, did not order the site closed.)
Netanyahu is doing all he can to ensure that prosecution of his government’s crimes go unpunished. With the cover of his miserable war in Gaza, Netanyahu finally passed his illiberal judicial reform package in March, giving the government sweeping new powers to handpick the judiciary.
The changes to the courts will play out over years and decades. But the message from the government is far more immediate: The law doesn’t apply if the crime is done in the name of the state. And crimes against Palestinians are state policy.
The state commits these crimes at sites like Sde Teiman. The military commits atrocities in Gaza, turning their aid distribution site into “a killing field.” And the settlers commit these crimes under the watchful eye of the state.
There are individuals and institutions inside these systems who object and resist. But they are gaslit, sidelined, attacked, and overruled. With time, they will lower their expectations, abandon their missions, and simply quit.
The message being sent by the Netanyahu government is clear, a blistering Haaretz editorial explains: “Quiet, let them carry out a pogrom.”
Vance Boelter was developing a plan.
He amassed supplies: A heavy-duty flashlight, a tactical vest, a makeshift license plate reading “POLICE,” a cache of ammunition, a lifelike latex mask. He drew up his targets: Using shady online data brokerages, he pulled a list of the home addresses of every Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota he could find.
And, on June 14, Boelter drove his SUV to the front door of a well-appointed home in Champlain, Minnesota, and knocked on the door. His ruse fell apart immediately. “You’re not a cop,” shouted the couple behind the door. He pivoted, pretending it was a robbery, and tried to force his way in. State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette fought back, trying to keep Boelter out while protecting their daughter and nephew. John was shot nine times, Yvette eight: Yet they won. Boelter fled, they were taken to hospital and survived.
Next he tried Representative Kristin Bahner — who, luckily, was on vacation. After that he drove to the home of State Senator Ann Rest, but was warded off by a patrolling police officer, who mistook Boelter for a real cop. Boelter moved down his list to Representative Melissa Hortman. Shortly before walking to her front door, just a short while after the sun came out, Boelter sent a message to his family group chat: "Dad went to war last night."
The real police were, luckily, quick to figure out what was going on. Officers had been dispatched to protect politicians across the state. The officers who pulled into Hortman’s driveway were just too late: Boelter was already standing on the front porch. He fired into the home and quickly moved inside. Police watched as Boelter assassinated Melissa, a well-liked, bipartisan-minded, hard-working member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and her husband, Mark.
Boelter escaped into the woods, firing at police along the way. It would take police 24 hours to pin him down: In a field, just a short distance from his family home.
It’s not quite clear what motivated Dr. Vance Luther Boelter, as he called himself in handwritten notes police discovered in his car. We know he was an evangelical missionary, a Trump supporter, and that he had drawn up a list of Democratic lawmakers in the state, devising a plan to murder as many as possible in their homes.
Boelter’s spree killings will go down as some of the most severe and brazen political assassinations in American history. It could have been much, much worse.
Trump’s team released a perfunctory statement about the violence. But the president himself made his views clear. When asked as to whether he would call Governor Tim Walz, who was on Boelter’s hit list, the president sniffed: “I’m not calling him. why would I call him?” He called the governor “whacked out.” He continued: “He’s slick1 — he appointed this guy to a position.”
That comment was a knowing nod to a well-honed tactic of the MAGA movement: Blame all political violence on your opponents. It’s a habit his supporters seize on.
Josh Lisec, a sycophant and stenographer popular with the president and his supporters, explained on Twitter that Boelter was, in fact, a left-wing radical. That the media was covering up his ties to the Democratic Party to try and smear Republicans. “You can see how the sausage is made, so to speak, of propaganda,” Lisec explained.
Plenty of others have tried to sell this false-flag narrative. But it is simply unnecessary: The right-wing press barely covered it, the mainstream news moved on, and the White House is continuing to turn up the temperature on anyone critical of the president’s policies.
For months, Trump and his mouthpieces have targeted democrats, journalists, and judges. Trump calls them corrupt, evil, radical, dangerous, criminals, communists, traitors.
The justice system has been particularly visited. The U.S. Marshals Service reports that the number of individual judges facing death threats doubled in the span of just six weeks this spring, as Trump’s rampage intensified. In just a matter of weeks, roughly one-third of the judiciary have received threats.
Meanwhile, those who have used violence and threats to target Trump’s enemies have received presidential pardons. Trump has pardoned members of the extremist Proud Boy fighting club and Oath Keepers militia, and the January 6 insurrectionists more broadly. He has elevated, celebrated, and even hired a litany of racists, neo-Nazis, and radicals.
The law doesn’t apply to those who act in Trump’s name. But Trump is certainly happy to weaponize the law to serve his own ends.
Just this week, Trump invoked online chatter from his fans to suggest that Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is in the country illegally. “We don't need a communist in this country,” Trump said, “but if we have one, I'm going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation." Asked pointedly what would happen if Mayor Mamdani obstructed ICE agents from conducting their raids, Trump didn’t hesitate: "Well then, we'll have to arrest him."
Trump made the comments as he toured Alligator Alcatraz, his hastily-constructed detention facility in the Everglades, designed to hold migrants before they can be spirited away to some far-off destination.
The White House cannot legally strip Mamdani of his citizenship because Trump thinks he’s a communist. Nor can Trump dispatch the national guard to quell peaceful protest, build arbitrary detention facilities out of thin air, send migrants to black sites in Libya, or construct an unwaveringly loyal secret police that rivals the FBI. He’s doing it anyway.
Thanks to Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, ICE and its associated agencies will see $100 billion in new funding over the next five years. That will make ICE the largest law enforcement agency in America. It will also mean major new detention facilities, many run by private companies and a spate of new immigration judges to rubberstamp these deportations.
ICE is constrained by few of the rules and laws which apply to actual cops, hence why they can cover their face and badge and make arrests without warrants. Indeed, ICE and their allies have already arrested multiple Democratic lawmakers and judges: One state representative and a county judge are even facing federal indictment.
As domestic opposition grows, Trump is escalating to prevent protest. The National Guard has been dispatched to Los Angeles to put down unrest and allow ICE to move freely. As
reports on his Substack, the National Guard is actively considering turning a public park in the city into a “forward operating base,” effectively establishing a military outpost in the city.Each one of these troubling developments — every deportation to El Salvador or South Sudan, every migrant tortured abroad, every time the National Guard is used to quell unrest, every time a court order is ignored, every time a Trump critic is threatened or killed, every time an extremist is pardoned — the outrage decreases a little bit. The extremism becomes normal.
The point of violent extremism is to destroy the institutions that make our society work.
Terrorists may seek to undermine a sense of safety, separatists may attack facets of the central state, ideologues may use violence to promote their worldview, nihilists want to burn as much as possible.
At the risk of sliding into tautology: We call these non-state actors extremists because they are extreme.
What happens when the state shares the aims and tactics of those extremists? What happens when the state, through action or inaction, blesses their crusade?
In Israel, men once considered terrorists now occupy senior places in government. Settlers who have been condemned and sanctioned by the international community are enacting a pogrom against Palestinians and the military has either been cowed into inaction or complicit in worse. The IDF is violating the Geneva Conventions on Israeli soil and there is an open International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Netanyahu and his top commander.
In America, the state is using its power to intimidate, target, and disappear migrants — making clear all the while that even legally-obtained status can be revoked at the whim of the president. Men who are arming themselves for a coming race war have been pardoned by the White House. A loyal media ecosystem slavishly promotes the president’s propaganda while turning Americans against each other. The military is being used to impose order. A secret police runs the streets.
At its core, liberal democracy is a system designed to prevent, through the power of institutions, tyranny. That can be tyranny of a single person or party, the tyranny of the mob, or both. Violent extremists can only hope to chip away at facets of that system. But governments can dismantle them brick-by-brick, and that’s what we’re seeing right now.
There are still militias hiding in the hills, wannabe terrorists in encrypted group chats, and self-radicalized lone wolves out there. Some consider themselves the tip of the spear for Trump and Netanyahu, perpetrators of the dirty work necessary to hasten the death of this rotten liberty democracy. Others may use violence to oppose their government, or may be utterly nihilistic: Any violence they commit will be used as further evidence for the need to give the state more power and control.
When the state becomes extreme to meet its most radical supporters, the extremists become paramilitary.
That’s it for this week’s dispatch.
You may have noticed a real decline in the volume of Bug-eyed and Shameless dispatches recently. Let’s call it an unplanned early summer holiday.
As I mentioned in the last dispatch, I’ve been working on a little project that I’m excited to announce very shortly — unfortunately that project cannibalized nearly the entire part of my brain that strings words together.
But with that project now put to bed, I’m back in the saddle and there will be regular newsletters in your inboxes once more.
Until next time.
This is how the AP transcribed the comments. I suspect Trump actually “sick,” an insult he uses often.
I could not bear to "like" this because what you describe is so horrific. That said - thank you for writing it, painful as that must have been.
I had missed you. This was depressing, but so necessary. Thank you for exposing what is going on in Israel to the Palestinians. Too few in the mainstream media are doing so. Too many are afraid of the ‘antisemitic’ label. But there are those who agree that the greatest cause of the current rise in antisemitism are the actions of Netanyahu and his government. I would recommend the documentary No Other Land and One Day Everyone will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akad.