What Happened to Ilhan Omar Was Inevitable
How racism becomes the harbinger of a superpower choosing to decline.
What Happened?
Ilhan Omar was the victim of a spray attack at a town hall meeting last night due to the racial demagougery she has been forced to endure at the hands of Donald Trump, who has not apologized for the negativity and lies that he has spread about Ilhan Omar. This has been a systematic attempt at weaponizing xenophobia, American racism, and misogyny against the strong woman who has come out of the outbreak of a Somalian civil war that can arguably be connected to some of the most excessive aspects of U.S. and Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War years.
Last night, meaning January 27, 2026: multiple sources reported that a man attacked Ilhan Omar near the end of a town hall meeting in Minneapolis and sprayed her with an unknown substance from a syringe. The police reported that the man was arrested on suspicion of third-degree assault. Initial reports gave different names for the suspect, but the main reports identified him as Anthony Kazmierczak, a 55-year-old man.
She was doing her service at a town hall meeting, or one might say “practicing politics the right way,” and thus she was attacked for being a Somali refugee, a Black woman in America, and is obviously more equipped and worldly than her bigoted opponents and opposition. It is the classic American tale.
And because America is nothing if not consistent in how it polices who is allowed to be “American,” Omar has been marinated in years of insinuation, less “criticism” than a rolling fog of suspicion: the recurring foreign loyalty subtext, the insinuation that she doesn’t belong, and the insistence that her very presence is an offense.
This was the inevitable response to the way Trump, who continues to say demeaning and awfully racist and sexist things towards her, and his Republican allies continue to raise political capital at her behest and manipulating the cultural, racial, and intellectual insulation faced by a large plurality of Americans designed to be myopic and self-destructively angry at minorities in order to get siphoned by wealthier Americans.
That demagoguery has a paper trail. In 2019, after Trump attacked Omar and other congresswomen, his rally crowd famously chanted “Send her back!” a neat little summary of nativist politics, delivered with stadium energy. And after the January 27, 2026, assault, reporting says Trump downplayed the incident and suggested, without evidence, that it was staged.
The Libel Ecosystem
The libel ecosystem around her has also been repetitive in its themes, focusing less on specific claims than on manufacturing distrust. The most durable smear is the “married her brother” rumor, periodically revived, loudly amplified, and repeatedly found by major fact-checking outlets to lack credible evidence. Another evergreen tactic has been quote-snipping to suggest she downplayed 9/11, a frame that outlets have repeatedly contextualized as a distortion of a larger point about civil-liberties backlash after 9/11.
We should all be ashamed of what we’re witnessing, which is the unfinished legacy of learned bigotry becoming the harbinger of a global superpower committing seppuku on the world stage. As a result of the fact that too many moderates and centrists have treated racism, xenophobia, and sexism as a sideshow or a fringe element of our politics despite their centrality to our culture and our politics, we’re not prepared to address the white nationalist uprising that’s tied to the nation’s browning population.
It’s the way it’s always been. You don’t have to convince everybody of a particular lie. You simply have to make a target feel permanently controversial, permanently explicable, and permanently suspect, so that when something happens to them, a portion of the public shrugs, laughs, or worst of all, views violence as a punchline.
Too many centrist, donor-driven political storytellers refuse to acknowledge this reality and end up having the wrong conversation.
References:
Bargfeld, Laura, and Hannah Schoenbaum. “Man Arrested After Spraying Unknown Substance on Rep. Ilhan Omar at Minneapolis Town Hall.” Associated Press News, January 28, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/ilhan-omar-town-hall-sprayed-7f6ad0b9ece2ae8804b2efe5badd2991.
Farley, Robert. “Rep. Ilhan Omar’s 9/11 Comments in Context.” FactCheck.org, April 16, 2019. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/rep-ilhan-omars-9-11-comments-in-context/.
Farley, Robert, and Lori Robertson. “Trump’s False Claims About Rep. Ilhan Omar.” FactCheck.org, July 16, 2019. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/07/trumps-false-claims-about-rep-ilhan-omar/.
Jacobson, Louis. “Did Ilhan Omar Marry Her Brother? Her Hometown Newspaper Investigated and Told Us What They Found.” PolitiFact, July 18, 2019. https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/jul/18/did-ilhan-omar-marry-her-brother-her-hometown-news/.
McCarthy, Tom. “Trump Rally Crowd Chants ‘Send Her Back’ After President Attacks Ilhan Omar.” The Guardian, July 17, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/17/trump-rally-send-her-back-ilhan-omar.
Parker, Ashley, and Colby Itkowitz. “At Rally, Crowd Responds to Trump’s Criticism of Somali-Born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with Chants of ‘Send Her Back!’” The Washington Post, July 17, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-says-hes-enjoying-fight-with-democrats-over-his-racist-tweets/2019/07/17/3c315510-a8ad-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html.
Reuters. “Fact Check: Ilhan Omar Was Not Arrested 23 Times, and Other Inaccuracies in Meme Targeting Congresswoman.” Reuters, February 19, 2021. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-ilhan-omar-was-not-arrested-23-times-and-other-inaccuracies-in-meme-idUSKBN2AJ2BG/.
The “Polarization” Story Is Too Small
Barbara A. Biesecker argues that what we lazily call “political polarization” often functions as a rhetorical stopgap, a fog machine to conceal what is newly dangerous about our time: the struggle for the national common sense, pursued through competing origin stories, enforced through institutions.
Two Americas, Two Myths, One Fight Over Reality
In “Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State,” Barbara S. Biesecker writes about the concept of polarization. In her work, she discusses different stories about what America is and how Americans see America.
Is America a gigantic commercial empire built on racial capitalism?
Or is America a place of idealistic democracy, a beacon of democracy to the world, a symbol of the triumph of democracy in the history of the world?
The latter has become more and more impossible to prove, making centrist liberals and conservatives look more like the descendants of Cold War propaganda and Disney history than actual scholars. That might be giving the latter too much credit, since there is significant scholarly weight to America’s attempts to live up to the ideals and goals set forth in the country's founding. However, there is also the election of Donald Trump, and the inability of American pundits and political strategists to deal with the reality of the role of race in creating irrational politics, which suggests that the former is more accurate in the current state of the world.
Narrative War, Not Just “Different Opinions”
But Biesecker’s approach to honing that question is stark and effective: she argues that the conflict is not only over “facts,” but over world-building—two incompatible narratives locked in a struggle to be the “new national common sense,” with no happy medium waiting in the wings. Indeed, in Biesecker’s formulation, the conflict between The 1619 Project and The 1776 Report is a conflict of “imaginary syntheses,” and she argues that the stakes are existential: “No synthesis. No mediation. (Race) War.”
But what makes Biesecker’s argument cut so deeply is that she recognizes these narratives as civic pedagogies (i.e., as instruction manuals for citizenship) rather than as dispassionate scholarship.
Ilhan Omar and the Price of the “White-Centric” National Story
The attack on Ilhan Omar is another example of the way the power of anger and bigotry can unleash the worst aspects of the human condition and become a feeding frenzy for opportunists and politicians, and put our very lives at risk, no matter what our color. The story of America is one of a land for the White and the advancement of the White race and the White-centric approach to democracy, civilization, and the American people.
This is the way to look at America as a great land while ignoring the tools of empire it has used to get there. This is completely unexceptional to the tools of empire that past societies have used.
