ice – Samuel Cohen

Not a How-to

So a week from today, on February 19, 2026, a book I edited and wrote a little of is officially appearing in the world. It’s about something I think is important–the widespread effort to limit access in classrooms and libraries to books some people think should not be readily available. My press, Bloomsbury Academic, thinks the topic important and timely enough to do things like produce the beautiful banner below and market the book for a general audience.

The Washington Examiner thinks it’s important enough to give space to (and presumably pay for, though I hope for their sake not too much) an op ed willfully misreading a book about it to score points against “liberals.”

Needless to say, our book isn’t a novel (I imagine this is not the author of the op ed’s fault, but it’s somebody else’s fault that this headline has been up for days). And it doesn’t “blast” “liberals.” It’s a collection of essays about attempts to keep certain books away from certain people. To the author’s glee, I write in the preface that we don’t ban books in the US but we use the phrase as shorthand for efforts to curtail access to books short of official government censorship. Saying this is not the same as admitting the whole thing is a hoax. In fact, when I say it, I say it in a way that someone reading in good faith would have to note is responding to exactly this kind of gotcha. (Please forgive the fading behind-the-paywall print.)

Okay, fine. The author is also very excited that a couple of contributors (I can’t tell if he talks about others–I won’t pay to get past the paywall, being familiar with the Washington Examiner, and interlibrary loan hasn’t come through yet, though believe me, it always does) say things that are similarly available to him as evidence, only if purposefully misunderstood, that book banning isn’t real or that actually only the left does any of it. The whole thing is pretty shabby.

I mention this op ed not to settle scores (because, honestly) but to point out the strain it puts on itself to make its point–that this book about book banning, a thing it is not in favor of, is actually somehow a book that criticizes liberals for believing such a thing even exists–and the contempt that strain emerges from. The day after the op ed appeared, Attorney General and Mean Girl Pam Bondi appeared before Congress and put on a display of lies and contempt for the occasion and the institutions and people involved in it. Watching, I thought it displayed the same strain Mark Judge’s op ed shows: the strain of pretending not to be lying, shabbily. And it showed the same contempt for everyone and everything involved–in the op ed’s case, the readers of the op ed, the people who wrote the work he’s misrepresenting, publishing, intellectual work itself. People arguing that books say what they don’t or book banning is a hoax, or that the Department of Justice isn’t engaged in a coverup or, for that matter, that ICE isn’t racially profiling and kidnapping people off the street and putting them in concentration camps–these people have to put in a lot of effort just to make the effort, and the strain is really showing. And they put in the effort because they have no respect for the occasion, for the people they’re lying about, for the people they’re lying to, for the institutions they represent and the larger institutional context.

This might seem a little overblown. An op ed about a skinny collection of essays is obviously not an appearance before Congress or a press conference to lie about extrajudicial rendition or whatever they’re calling kidnapping people off the streets these days. But it’s a dishonest political act, an intellectually shabby one that shows the strain involved in pretending so hard that it’s not. An op ed about our little book is obviously not important in anything like the same way these actual crimes are, if lying to congress is still a crime. If it’s worth mentioning, it’s because it’s part of something larger that’s running roughshod over our country right now–something that enables people to do things that somewhere deep down they have to know are deeply wrong and then to piss on our legs and tell us it’s raining.

It’s not raining.

We Have Met the Enemy

I’m writing this on the night of January 24, 2026, at the end of a day filled with news from Minneapolis, where, at 9 this morning, ICE shot an innocent man after dragging him to the ground and pistol whipping him. The people in charge of the occupation of American have been lying about this extrajudicial execution all day, in the same way that they have been lying about the Minneapolis killing of an innocent women behind the wheel of her car on January 7 and in the same way that they have been lying about the danger they claim Somali immigrants present to the city. They are lying about this murder like they have been lying for the past year about the people they have been brutalizing, dragging to concentration camps, disappearing. They lie brazenly, insultingly; they lie like they breathe.

One day there will be a reckoning for these people, for the things they have done and the lies they have told. For the kidnapping of children, for the violence, for the abuse of the legal system that has allowed them to claim that they are all immune from legal responsibility for the crimes they are committing. I can’t make myself believe in the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, any more; at the very least, it’s too damn long. But with King in my ears and the beautiful bravery and stubbornness and outrage of the people of the Twin Cities in my eyes, I can hope that day is coming, and coming soon.

Maybe we can follow their example and brave the cold and put ourselves between our immigrant neighbors and these people who’ve decided that they—and those who don’t want to see them brutalized and disappeared—are the enemy within. What could be more American than wanting to become American, than coming here from somewhere else for the promise of becoming one of us? The people criminalizing this desire–ICE, the ironically named Department of Homeland Security, the administration championing their crimes–could in one way not be less American, but they’ve always been here, always been part of us. To borrow from Walt Kelly on a very different threat: in Minneapolis, we have met the enemy, and he is us. We need to catch these people out in their lies and give them their day in court. And we need to welcome the people Mainers (who are under attack in Lewiston as we speak) call “from away”–we need to welcome them to stay and help us be better.

Hey You Assholes

An ICE agent points a crowd control weapon at a protester Tuesday in Chicago.
Photo Credit: Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

I haven’t written a thing on this blog since June because I’ve been busy and because I’ve been angry. Like maybe most of the people reading this, should such a thing happen, I’ve been moving back and forth between helpless angry and motivated angry, between there’s nothing we can do angry and we have to do something angry, between what on earth is there to say angry and there is too much to say to ever get it all said angry.

One good thing about all the things that are making me angry–the destruction of our institutions, the troops in the streets, the attacks on education, the attacks on immigrants, the attacks on journalism and health care and science–is that there are identifiable people to be angry at. I can’t prove that this is more the case than it has been in the past, but it feels that way, maybe because there’s so much showboating, personalizing, and video and audio and text from and about the people doing these things. What’s good about it, for my mental health, debatably and ask me again tomorrow, is that I can be angry at these specific people, these people who are doing these bad things everybody knows or should know are bad. It’s invigorating, the focus. They want to take responsibility for the illegal mass firings and the illegal defundings and the illegal kidnappings and the illegal tear-gassing? Okay, but then they get to take the anger too.

I’ve stolen the title for this post from one of my favorite recent books, a short fiction collection by a former student named Kyle Seibel that I can’t recommend highly enough because it’s dark and it’s edgy in the good way and it loves words and it’s got forty thousand pounds of heart. I hope he doesn’t mind my borrowing it.

Hey you assholes, if it’s somehow not clear, is what I want to say to the people I’m angry at for all the bad things they’re doing to my country. I’ve been trying hard not to say it so much in public lately because it’s becoming increasingly clear that respect for the First Amendment, academic freedom, the patriotism of protest, &c., is not at an all-time high. The identification of assholes and the naming of the bad things they are doing is not within my field of expertise, it could be argued, and so therefore maybe I will not be seen as protected by the traditional and hard-won protections of academic freedom for such acts of identification and naming. Nonetheless, I am angry at these assholes. We should all be angry at these assholes and we should say it and not stop there. We should get these assholes fired, voted out, and, if appropriate in individual cases, jailed for a long time. At the very least they should be shunned, hard. The men playing GI Joe in the picture up there but with real guns? The people who work hard all day to turn us against each other, to make some of us see others as enemies within? Shunned within an inch of their lives.

One of the things I’ve been busy with in addition to all the everything–all the teaching of books and editing of books and writing and reading of things and administrating and all that–is talking in public about one of the things I’m angry about, which is the attempts by certain people to get books they don’t like out of libraries and classrooms. I have traveled far and wide, if by far and wide you mean to coastal Maine, northwestern Wisconsin, to the local public library in my neighborhood, and to my university’s library across the street from my office, in order to talk about this subject. Why book banning? Because it’s got everything–astroturfing, culture wars, white Christian nationalism, anti-intellectualism, intolerance. Because it runs counter to everything good about our experiment in democracy; because it embodies everything bad about post-Tea Party America’s hostility to that experiment. Is it less urgent than the disappearing of our neighbors, which has even reached to my little town? In one sense, certainly; in another, maybe not: if these concerted efforts to get books recognizing and exploring difference disappeared from our children’s schools and our public libraries are successful, even fewer of us will have encountered difference and even fewer of us will stand up against efforts to eradicate it, deport it, erase it. Are the attempts to blackmail our universities to stop teaching about difference and uncomfortable parts of our history, the attempts to send foreign students home for bad reasons and no reasons, less urgent than the soldiers tear gassing our own streets? Again, in one sense, certainly; in another, not at all: if our universities turn away from the world and from the difference within our own country, what will we have left worth saving?

I’m swinging, as I write this, from too much to say angry back to what is there to be said angry. Writing this has done nothing to make me feel better about what’s happening all around us as the leaves start to fall, the football games get played, the lives go on, but maybe that’s not much of a goal. We shouldn’t feel better. We should open our front doors and step out onto on our stoops, climb out on our fire escapes, stand in the middle of the street and say Hey you assholes. Hey you assholes, what you’re doing is bad and we’re going to get your asses shunned but good. Then of course we have to call all the representatives, sign all the petitions, run for all the school boards, canvas all the doors, write all the letters and op-eds and funny heartfelt and -breaking signs, walk together in big crowds, saying Hey you assholes all the livelong day. Sound your barbaric yawp, to quote a guy whose book got banned 150ish years ago in Boston and then sold like hotcakes in Philly because it turns out people don’t want to have books kept from them and don’t find obscenity where there’s only joyous celebration of difference. They don’t.

Hey you assholes: we don’t want this.