War on America, Chicago Theater of Operations

In counter-insurgency warfare, any civilian can be a suspect

Since February, I have been warning that President Trump and MAGA are waging war on Americans’ well-being, safety, education, free information, prosperity, and identity as proud inhabitants of a successful multi-racial and multi-faith democracy. Taking down that democracy for the benefit of global autocracy is the mandate.

Now the information, psychological, economic and institutional war on America has a kinetic component, meaning physical force and military-grade weapons are being deployed on civilians on the streets of American cities. Armed state security forces are occupying those cities to “liberate” them from internal enemies —an old authoritarian concept that Trump circulated during his electoral campaign.

Language is a main theme of Lucid: what we call things, how we talk about them, and the narrative frames we use to describe them to others, matter a lot. So it’s time to use the language and concepts of military conquest and counter-insurgency warfare (COIN) to describe what is happening in Democrat-run cities. I have studied Fascist and other authoritarian takeovers for decades and have remained in the United States to be a witness and real-time analyst of our own experience. Consider this as the first of a series of Lucid war bulletins.

To set the context for the Chicago theater of operations, here is my essay on the administration’s holistic plan to transform the United States military into an authoritarian institution with the job of helping Trump consolidate power. As I wrote:

Not only is there an intent to make the military an authoritarian institution on and off the battlefield, but also to adapt the very notion of the battlefield, and the enemy, for domestic use.

A Holistic Plan for an Authoritarian Military

Chicago Theater of Operations: Training for Further Cruelty

Trump told the U.S. military commanders convened in Quantico that “inner cities” should be used as “training grounds” for the military. This was evident in the Chicago theater of operations, where agents also enacted Trump and Hegseth’s redefinition of the battlefield and the enemy. After days of flooding the streets with troops, on October 1 the government staged a multi-agency raid on civilians in an apartment building in the middle of the night. State security forces used weapons of war —a Blackhawk helicopter, military-scale vehicles, flash-bang grenades —on families with the excuse of looking for undocumented immigrants and people supposedly connected to foreign drug gangs and cartels.

“I’ve been on military bases for a good portion of my life,” said Darrell Ballard, who lives in the building next door, of the Chicago raid. “And the activity I saw – it was an invasion.”

Some residents came back to find that state security forces had returned to wreck their apartments and removed furniture and electronics.

Private homes become targets in COIN warfare waged by a military abroad, where an occupation or invasion by a foreign power is being contested by the civilian population. When you are fighting irregular forces, everyone can be a suspect or collaborator.

But such thinking also guides the behavior of militaries staging occupations and crackdowns on domestic soil. Here it is Democratic-run cities that are enemy territory to be occupied, but in juntas that follow military coups it unfolds at a national level. I do not exclude that happening here if Trump starts to face resistance in Republican-led states and cities.

Chile is an instructive case. After the 1973 U.S.-backed coup, the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet used the excuse of foreign invaders to institute an extended state of emergency which it called the “time of war.” Declaring war on Chileans allowed for exceptional measures and the redefinition of civilians as enemy combatants who could be tried by military courts, tortured by soldiers, and so on.

I wrote extensively about Chile and the larger history of the “foreigners are coming over the border” propaganda theme in my book Strongmen. We are seeing a repetition of it with the Trump administration’s claims that foreigners are partnering with subversives inside America, and thus only an ongoing armed state crackdown can eradicate the double threat.

The Chicago assault reminded me of Pinochet’s attacks on neighborhoods inhabited by poor people, and more generally of the treatment the junta gave to “enemies of the state” of all social classes. Not only were they arrested, but their books and other possessions were thrown into the street, and objectionable books were burned by Chilean soldiers. Such public spectacles are designed to send a message that “we are all-powerful, we can humiliate and harm you” and terrorize the population.

Chilean soldiers incinerating books after raids on apartment buildings in Santiago. Source: Gonzalo Leiva Quijada, El Golpe Estético Dictadura Mlitar en Chile 1973-1989, (Santiago, 2012).

When civilians are redefined as enemy combatants, the path is open to treat them with maximum brutality and erase their humanity. Chicago was a teaching moment for police and other state security forces nationally: they are being told by White House shadow chief Stephen Miller and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth that they are now "unleashed" and their hands "untied." That is why naked children were tied up and placed on public display for hours in Chicago.

Pertissue Fisher was among those taken out of her home in the middle of the night. “They just treated us like we were nothing,” she told ABC7 news. That was the point.