Ilhan Omar’s Defiance, Trump’s Hypocrisy, and The Hierarchy of Humanity in U.S. Policy

Research Over Mesearch is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.What does it mean when the President of the United States leans into the oldest, dirtiest racial tropes about Black women? When he reduces a Black Congresswoman—a whole entire elected official—to the caricature of a drug dealer? You know the one. It’s dusty. It’s unoriginal and stale. It’s violent. It’s meant to erase her humanity and her office in a single breath replicating the logic of pale supremacy. The real question, the one that sits heavy in my gut, is this: If the head of state has no regard, no dignity, no respect for this Black woman—one with a title and a platform—what in the actual hell does that mean for the everyday Black woman? For the regular, degular, everyday Black woman just trying to make it home, pay a bill, exist in a body that is constantly politicized and policed? It means his deputizing his base to incite more attacks this Black woman and those her look like her.The thin veneer of professional courtesy, the performative respectability we’re told to clutch like a shield? Shattered. This brings me to the device in your hand. Right now.When we’re dead and gone, historians will hold up the cell phone as the definitive symbol of our era. Not just for the selfies or the doomscrolling. But because of the blood in its circuitry—the cobalt mined with the blood, sweat, and tears of Congolese people. And because of the blood it has witnessed—from George Floyd to a thousand names we don’t know, captured in shaky, undeniable truth.This little rectangle is a paradox. It is a product of the same global extraction that fuels empires and yet, it has become the only shield left for the rest of us. “Phones don’t stop bullets / phones don’t feed people.” True however they are the ledger. These phones become vehicles for our testimony. The evidence that refuses to be erased.We’ve seen this pattern before—that specific flavor of surveillance, suspicion, dehumanization, and state violence has been franchised. It’s no longer just for Black folks what Alex Pretti and Renee Good illustrate. It’s the default setting for anyone deemed a threat to the narrative. The machinery perfected on Black and Brown bodies domestically, and on colonized people globally—the ICE raids, the international policing, the algorithmic targeting—is now being calibrated for wider distribution here domestically.When you hold that phone up to livestream, to document, to testify, they don’t see a citizen using tools of democracy. They see a threat. A threat to their story, because your footage, your truth, disrupts the official script. It makes the hidden violence legible.The old compact is unraveling. We used to pretend there were rules. That laws mattered. The line between foreign and domestic policy is a fiction. The surveillance tech tested in Gaza gets imported to your local police department. The rhetoric used to demonize a Black Muslim woman in Congress (shoutout to the relentless attacks on Ilhan Omar—a case study in racialized, gendered political violence) is the same rhetoric that justifies a no-knock warrant in a Black neighborhood.The media flood? It’s deliberate. It’s meant to numb you and make you desensitzed. To fragment your attention. To make the outrageous mundane, so the violence can proceed without accountability.So here we are.Your phone, your camera, your act of witnessing: it is now criminalized. The Black Treatment has become the universal treatment for potential dissent. To carry this device—this descendant of mines, this holder of ghosts—is to sign up for that treatment. It’s to pick up the only weapon they haven’t yet figured out how to completely disarm. These damn phones.As many of you know, I was nominated for a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Digital Content Creator Politics/Culture and I need yall help! You can vote everyday until February 13th and I’m going to need every vote because the category is STACKED! I appreciate yall so much for the love, engagement and support.. it’s because I have such an amazing online community that I get nominations like this and IM HELLA GRATEFUL!! VOTE WITH LINK HERE: CLICK HERE KEY TAKEAWAYS:* The Overwhelm is a Weapon: The constant media deluge isn’t an accident. It’s designed to numb, fragment, and make us feel helpless. It enables violence in the shadows of our distraction.* Attacks on Figures like Ilhan Omar are Blueprints: They are not isolated. They are highly orchestrated campaigns of racialized, gendered, and political delegitimization. Learn the blueprint. It’s being used on smaller scales everywhere.* Identity Politics is Being Weaponized Against Us: The old trick of “divide and conquer” is on steroids. They use our identities to fracture solidarity, to reduce us to stereotypes, and to maintain power.* Surveillance is a Seamless Global Project: What happens abroad doesn’t stay abroad. The apparatus of control is interconnected. The target list is always expanding.* Witnessing is Now an Act of Defiance: Your documentation is not passive. It is disruptive. The system will try to make you the problem for recording it. Your footage is the answer.* We Must Document Defiance, Not Just Trauma: Our survival is revolutionary, but so is our joy, our strategy, our community. Point the camera at the resistance, too. Not just the wound.CALL TO ACTION:This is the moment, y’all. This is not the time for silence. Not for turning away. It’s for doubling down on Research Over MeSearch and THESE DAMN PHONES.Watch. Record. Archive. Share.When you hold your phone up, when you speak a hard truth in public, when you refuse the seductive induction of forgetting—you are no longer just a bystander. You are resistance itself. The system’s only hope is that we believe our eyes lie. That our voices don’t matter. That we get tired.Let your documentation be the proof that we didn’t.Let your shared testimony be the new compact.The shield is in your hand. Use it.Thank you RSV, Bebop, Frank Johnson, Holly S., Beema, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe