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Are We Already Living in Trump's Police State?
The unaccountable killings, the show trials, the informant bounties, the door knocks over emails, the leader’s praetorian guard, the captured press, the rewritten history, and now the reach for the ballots themselves: Every component is now built, tested, and humming.
Jul 12, 2026
Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at 5:00 am, kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s Mexican American community for a century.
He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already done.
By 7:00 am he was lying face down on Canal Street with a bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says he rammed their vehicle and “weaponized” his van to run down an officer, who fired in self-defense. His family says he almost certainly thought the unmarked cars tailing him were thieves after his work tools, because the men following him wore no insignia identifying them as law enforcement.
What we still have, and what the DDR and the Third Reich did not, is one more election in which the machine’s operators can be stripped of their power by the people they’re trying to frighten.
The League of United Latin American Citizens says photographs of the vehicles show little visible damage, which is a strange thing for a van that supposedly rammed a law enforcement vehicle hard enough to justify lethal force. David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute reviewed newly surfaced footage and concluded it appears to show ICE initiating contact with Salgado Araujo’s vehicle, not the other way around; Norm Ornstein looked at the same evidence and called it “cold-blooded murder.”
The federal government has released no body camera footage, no dash camera video, and no photos of the damage it claims exists. The three eyewitnesses who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s own brother, are in ICE custody and can’t speak out. The Harris County District Attorney is trying to investigate, but her office says access to key evidence “remains under federal control.”
The president of Mexico announced this week that her government will pursue legal action against the United States over the killing. The historical inversion packed into that sentence is complete: Mexico is now appealing to international bodies to protect its citizens from American police violence.
Which brings us to the question people keep asking me on my radio show and on social media: “Are we in a police state yet?” And the question underneath it, the one that really matters: “How would we know?”
I lived in Germany for years, working with Salem International, some of that time in the little village of Höchheim hard up against the East German border, where the guard towers and the death strip were part of the landscape you saw on your way to buy bread.
I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin in 1986 and felt what a mature police state does to ordinary people: the lowered voices indoors, the glance over the shoulder before anybody said anything real. (If you’ve never experienced that world, watch the brilliant film The Lives of Others; it captures the East German surveillance state better than anything else on film.)
My spiritual mentor and employer in Germany, Gottfried Müller, had been an intelligence officer in Adolf Hitler’s army who renounced Nazism, was captured by the British in Iran, and spent most of the war in prison; he devoted the rest of his life to peace work.
And my dear old friend Armin Lehmann, who was the teenage Hitler Youth courier in the Führerbunker who delivered the news to Hitler that the war was lost (I still have a picture of him with Hitler, that’s on the cover of his book), spent his last decades in America as a peace activist.
Both men told me essentially the same story about how it began. It started getting scary, they noted, when the regime began to explicitly come after verbotener Gedanke, “forbidden thought.” For example, the radio stations, they said, used to encourage ordinary Germans to call in—to the shows and to the police—and “out” their neighbors who weren’t sufficiently loyal to the regime. Informing became one of the highest expressions of patriotism.
The Germans even have a word for the process by which their entire society was brought into line during 1933 and 1934: as Timothy Snyder notes, it’s Gleichschaltung, a coordination, a synchronization.
Germany didn’t become a police state in a day, and there was never an announcement.
There was just a series of Fridays, each one slightly worse than the last, until one day the question, “Are we in a police state?” had become dangerous to ask out loud.
So instead of waiting for an announcement that’s never coming, let’s do what Herr Müller would have done and run through the inventory necessary to create a fascist police state:
1. A police state is a nation where the police answer to the leader rather than to the law, and where nobody outside the leader’s circle is permitted to hold them accountable. It’s a nation where they can arrest, beat, torture, imprison, and even kill with both anonymity and impunity.
In January, ICE officer Jonathan Ross reportedly shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, through the window of her car in Minneapolis, and Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, on a public street days later. Within hours, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was calling both dead Americans “domestic terrorists,” a slander she refused six times under oath to retract.
Murder is a state crime, and in America state investigators have always worked police shootings alongside the feds. Not this time. The FBI agreed to a joint investigation with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension the morning Good was killed, then reversed itself the same day after President Donald Trump declared Minnesota officials “crooked.”
Federal agents physically blocked state investigators holding a valid judicial warrant from the scene of the Pretti shooting. Federal prosecutors who wanted to pursue the Good case as a civil rights matter were pressured until they resigned. Today, Good’s car sits shrink-wrapped and unexamined in an FBI warehouse in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and the state has been forced to sue the federal government just to learn the names of the agents who killed two of its citizens.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty called the categorical withholding of all evidence “unprecedented in American history.” Now the same machinery has closed around the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. It won’t be the last time.
2. A police state imprisons its dissidents, and it makes the sentences spectacular so everyone else gets the message.
On June 23, federal judges in Fort Worth sentenced eight members of a local book club who held a July 4, 2025 protest outside the Prairieland ICE detention center to a combined 450 years in prison, a figure the Justice Department bragged about in its own press release. Benjamin Song, who fired at an officer after the officer drew his weapon on the crowd, got 100 years.
Maricela Rueda, a doula and mother who was acquitted by the jury of every violent count against her, got 70 years in prison. Five others who were likewise acquitted of the attempted murder and firearms charges got 50 years apiece, because prosecutors persuaded the jury that wearing black and using the Signal messaging app constituted “material support for terrorism.”
And Daniel Sanchez Estrada, a Denton teacher and poet who wasn’t even at the protest, got 30 years for moving a box of anti-fascist political zines at his wife’s request, literature the prosecutors admitted was protected by the First Amendment.
For comparison, Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years for orchestrating the seditious conspiracy of January 6, and Trump pardoned him anyway. In this America, leading an armed attempt to overthrow the government earns you a pardon, while a book club that protests ICE earns its members what amounts to life without parole.
3. A police state criminalizes thought itself, as well as any expression of or action on that thought, no matter how “otherwise legal” it may be.
Last September, Trump signed NSPM-7, a national security directive that names “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as “indicators of domestic terrorism” and calls anti-fascism the “organizing rallying cry” of domestic terrorists. Consider how many of the roughly 75 million Americans who voted against Trump it could plausibly cover.
In December, then-AG Pam Bondi ordered every federal law enforcement agency to mine five years of data for anything “Antifa-related” by average Americans and hand it to the FBI, and directed the bureau to publicize its domestic terrorism call-in tip line and establish a cash reward system for informants.
The FBI has since retooled its roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces and their 4,000-plus personnel toward the American “left” and stood up a new Joint Mission Center that’s investigating the funding of anti-Trump protest movements and payment of bounties while actual crime fighting goes begging.
When Herr Müller and Armin told me about German radio hosts urging listeners to inform on their neighbors, I thought I was hearing history, but it turns out I was hearing a forecast, and the American version pays cash.
4. A police state knocks on your door in reaction to your opinions, should you dare to express them out loud or in print.
In January, a Rochester software professional named David Streever sent a three-paragraph email to then-ICE Director Todd Lyons after watching the videos of ICE killings in Minneapolis.
“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” he wrote. “You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”
The email contains no threat of any kind, just a prophecy about a man’s conscience, the kind of furious letter Americans have been writing to powerful officials since before there was a Constitution to protect the practice.
Five months later, two federal agents rang his doorbell while he was in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter and handed his wife a document headed “WARNING NOTICE” and “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.” When he flew home, an agent showed up at his New York City hotel, a hotel whose location his wife had never disclosed, meaning Homeland Security found him anyway.
He’s now suing with the help of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which could, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and multiple DC law firms, cause the Trump regime to put FIRE in their crosshairs next.
That same week, federal agents confronted Paigelynne Gonyea while she was working the polls during New York’s primaries, over an Instagram post about the already-publicly-identified officer who killed Renee Good. Federal agents questioned this poll worker, at her polling place, during an election, about her opinion of a federal agent who killed an American citizen on live video for the world to see.
5. A police state builds a security force loyal to the leader and his oligarch cronies rather than the nation.
Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post describe a new National Guard “quick reaction force” of roughly 23,500 troops across all 50 states, trained for domestic riot control, with the first units ordered ready by last January 1 and the rest by April, timed neatly to the midterms.
Trump has claimed “unfettered authority” to deploy troops into American cities, boasting, “I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, I can send anybody I wanted,” while governors are cut out of the chain of command and Pete Hegseth has barred military personnel from even talking to Congress without approval.
Vladimir Putin built exactly this in 2016; he called it Rosgvardiya, and its job was never national defense but regime preservation. Hitler built his version too, and it started small, as a “protection detail,” which in German is Schutsstaffel. History remembers it as the SS.
6. A police state needs a compliant press, and you don’t have to nationalize the networks when you can simply arrange for a friendly morbidly rich oligarch to buy them.
Last month the Justice Department approved Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, placing CNN, CBS News, HBO, and two major studios under David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s nepo-baby and a Trump ally who, The Wall Street Journal reported, privately assured administration officials he’d make “sweeping changes” at CNN if he got that network, too.
7. A police state rewrites the past, because people who remember accurate history make poor subjects. As George Orwell wrote of fascism, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
In March of last year Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” and the sanitizing began: The National Park Service was ordered to strip signs and exhibits about slavery from national parks, including “The Scourged Back,” the famous photograph of the whip-scarred back of a man named Peter who escaped enslavement in Louisiana, and materials about John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry.
In Philadelphia, the administration went to court to replace the interpretive panels at the President’s House telling the story of the nine human beings George Washington enslaved there.
Trump himself complained that the Smithsonian was “OUT OF CONTROL” because its museums discussed “how bad Slavery was,” and this past weekend, on the Fourth of July no less, the White House released a report declaring that the National Museum of American History “cannot be trusted” to tell America’s story, faulting its director for, among other sins, wanting to move the museum away from an “America First mentality.”
That’s the same slogan under which 20,000 American Nazi sympathizers rallied at Madison Square Garden in 1939 beneath swastikas and a three-story portrait of George Washington, a chapter of our history this crowd would clearly prefer you never learn.
Herr Müller and Armin lived through the original version of this, too: Within months of taking power the Nazis had burned the books, purged the universities and museums of “un-German” scholarship, and rewritten the textbooks so that German children would grow up inside a glorious past that never existed. Control what people remember and you control what they’ll accept.
8. And finally, a police state controls the vote.
In January, FBI agents raided Fulton County’s election warehouse and seized more than 650 boxes of 2020 ballots and voter rolls on an affidavit that omitted the state findings debunking its own claims, with then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on scene and Trump personally on the phone with the agents.
On Tuesday, the same day Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed, the Justice Department sent letters to the election chiefs of all 50 states threatening each of them individually with criminal prosecution if noncitizens are found on their rolls, giving them five days to respond, this after the department lost 11 straight court cases trying to seize those very rolls.
On Thursday, citing last week’s Supreme Court decision giving him essentially unlimited firing power, Trump removed from office all of the members of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan agency that, along with the now-paralyzed Federal Election Commission, have the power to call out election fraud; illegal campaign tactics and spending; and vote-rigging when it’s committed by candidates, parties, or state or local officials. Both are now effectively shut down.
And when senators asked, under oath, whether ICE agents would be kept away from polling places this November, both Kristi Noem and her successor and former plumber Markwayne Mullin refused to rule it out, while the White House press secretary said she “can’t guarantee” it and Steve Bannon openly muses that ICE at the airports was a “test run” for ICE at the polls.
So, are we in a police state yet?
Armin and Herr Müller taught me that we’re asking the wrong question—or at least at the wrong moment—because nobody ever wakes up one morning and notices, “Gee, I guess I’m inside a police state…”
Instead, a police state gets assembled around you, one component at a time, while officials assure you that each component is perfectly normal and even necessary to “maintain order” or, more insidiously, to “preserve freedom.”
Milton Mayer, in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview 10 “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.
The stories he heard are so familiar to me, as I heard the same things over and over when living in Germany in the 1980s while talking with people who’d kept their heads down through the 1930s and early 1940s just to survive day-to-day:
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” a German college professor told Mayer, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....”
As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:
This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter...
To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop… [O]ne no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just assume that ultimately the good guys will win:
“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next…"
"But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”
In a police state, everything seems the same, Mayer’s friend told him. You still go to work, cash your paycheck, have friends over, go to the movies, enjoy a meal out. The regime even backs down from time to time, making things seem ever more normal. Little victories, you tell yourself.
Except, as the German professor told Mayer, they’re not. One day, he said, you inevitably realize that:
The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.
So, here we are. The unaccountable killings, the show trials, the informant bounties, the door knocks over emails, the leader’s praetorian guard, the captured press, the rewritten history, and now the reach for the ballots themselves: Every component is now built, tested, and humming.
But what we still have, and what the DDR and the Third Reich did not, is one more election in which the machine’s operators can be stripped of their power by the people they’re trying to frighten.
That’s precisely why they’re working so hard on the machinery of that election, and precisely why the single most subversive act available to a free American this year is to vote, and to help everyone you know do the same.
So call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative to defend state authority over elections; demand independent investigations of the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo; and put a statutory ban on federal agents at the polls.
Check your registration right now at vote.org, because voter roll purges are already happening in red states.
Sign up to be a poll worker in your county; they want poll workers intimidated, and the answer to that is more of us, not fewer.
Program the Election Protection hotline into your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and share it.
Support the people fighting this in court, from FIRE to the Blue state attorneys general.
And if this piece helped you see the machinery used to construct a police state more clearly, please share it and support independent media like my Hartmann Report, because a free press that can’t be bought by billionaires is one component of democracy they haven’t figured out how to seize.
At least not yet.
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The Answer? Not to Be Silenced: We Everyday People Wield Tremendous Power
Join me in adding your voice to the millions of other people who are choosing to stand and speak up for their neighbors, our communities, the rule of law, the Constitution, and democracy.
Feb 28, 2026
In 2004, I wrote about a peaceful protest I had just attended with my young children that turned into a sudden melee, with riot police shooting pepper bullets into the crowd.
Desperate to find a place to share what felt like important information I discovered after the experience, I decided to take a chance and submit my piece to Common Dreams, a progressive news and opinion website. I was shocked to log on the morning after my late-night submission and see that they’d published it: "To Be Silenced, Or Not to Be: That is the Question."
At the time, Common Dreams didn’t have, as they do now, a section for comments or discussion following a piece they published. I did receive, however, over 600 emails. Those emails helped me know that something I—an everyday American without a collegiate degree—had written about not being silent had resonated, informed, and inspired.
I no longer have access to those emails, a few of which were from well-known people, but I often think of one in particular, in which a couple wrote to say that they were installing new stairs in their home and they wanted me to know that they’d printed my piece and put it under the stairs in a small time capsule they had created.
I’ll Admit It, Though, I’ve Been Pretty Silent the Last Few Years
While I attended the two local No Kings protests last year, and a local ORD2 Indivisible protest this year after the murder of Renée Good, I did think twice before going, and mostly hung quietly around the edges (in order to try and make a hasty exit if anything went awry).
I’ve barely written about any of the administration’s growing atrocities, other than notes in my journal.
And, until the horrific murder of Alex Pretti by federal agents, and the administration’s immediate lies, including saying he was a domestic terrorist (just as they’d lied about Renée Good and others), I hadn’t posted anything “political” on Facebook for over five years. (Mostly due to a friend on the platform telling me a mutual friend didn’t like my political posts, even though they’ve been minimal, respectful, and mostly with a reach-across-the aisle sentiment. This “friend” said the platform is only for “fun” stuff.)
Yes, the masses of everyday people have power in any society. Power to do nothing, or power to rise in resistance.
Yes, fear has kept me silenced. Fear of what may happen to myself or my loved ones if I choose to stand up and not be silenced, be it at a protest, or by sharing things on social media, or if I write something critical of President Donald Trump and his administration.
Following are just two new examples leading to what I’d suggest are rational fears, and are specifically intended to chill and silence dissent and criticism of Trump and his regime:
- There are new reports about the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) using secretive administrative subpoenas (which don’t need a judge’s approval) in order to try and gain personal information of individuals online who have been critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or the Trump administration. In one case, a retiree simply sent an email to a DHS agent, imploring him to reconsider trying to deport an asylum-seeker. Within five hours, Google emailed to let him know that DHS wanted to subpoena his information, which he later learned included any credit card numbers on file as well as his Social Security and driver’s license numbers. They also wanted a list of services he used, along with dates, times, and the length of online sessions.
- There are also alarming new details about an enormous domestic spying infrastructure, paid for by our tax dollars, with frightening implications regarding privacy and our constitutional rights.
In a recent opinion piece published at the Boston Globe, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) wrote:
This pervasive surveillance doesn’t just undermine our privacy. It also changes how we behave. If you know that DHS can identify you at a protest, track your movements, or pull up years of personal information with a single inquiry, you may—consciously or unconsciously—begin to self-censor. You may think twice before criticizing the government online or showing up at a rally. This chilling effect is real. It’s dangerous. And it’s a direct threat to our freedom of speech.
“Each Act, Each Occasion, Is Worse Than the Last, But Only a Little Worse”
At the end of the piece I wrote in 2004, I’d shared a chilling quote, an excerpt really, from something I’d recently read. It has stuck with me ever since, and started reverberating more loudly once Trump’s second term in office began.
The excerpt comes from chapter 13, “But Then It Was Too Late,” from Milton Mayer’s book They Thought They Were Free, The Germans 1933-45 (1955, University of Chicago Press). In it, the person doing most of the talking in this eight-page chapter—who Mayer only names as a colleague of his, a philologist who lives in Germany—speaks of trying to understand the silence and inaction of masses of everyday people, including “learned men” like himself, that allowed the horrendous evil of Nazi Germany:
What no one seemed to notice... was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people... And it became always wider... The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway...
Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes fascinated, by the machinations of the "national enemies," without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us... Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.
Clearly feeling regret and wondering how it might’ve been different had they resisted, Mayer’s colleague finally admits a painful realization:
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you... The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays... Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves...
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing)... If one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood...You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
Ever since learning about Nazi Germany as a youth, and the monstrosity of horrors committed therein, I’ve been curious why many everyday Germans responded (or not) the way they did. At the same time, I’ve wondered how I would have responded if living in Nazi Germany. Shortly after the end of World War II, Mayer, an American journalist and author, traveled to Marburg, Germany and took up residence for a year to try and learn the answers to these questions as well.
Via extensive interviews, “a year’s conversations, in their own language, under informal conditions involving meals, ‘a glass of wine,’ or, more preciously, a cup of coffee, exchange of family visits (including the children), and long, easy evenings, Saturday afternoons, or Sunday walks,” Mayer sought to understand the thinking of 10 men, “little men” he called them, who were members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, aka, Nazis. He also interviewed women related to these “little men,” but alas, did not include those interviews.
Mayer, a German descendant (and also Jewish, though he didn’t admit that to the interviewees he came to call friends), wrote:
Every one of my ten Nazi friends... spoke again and again during our discussions of “wir kleine Leute, we little people.”
These 10 men were not men of distinction. They were not men of influence. They were not opinion-makers...Their importance lay in the fact that God... had made so many of them. In a nation of 70 million, they were the 69 million plus.
Those 69 million plus everyday people in Nazi Germany had power, but the majority didn’t recognize or use it. As Mayer wrote, “The German community—the rest of the 70 million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere.”
I’m just an everyday person, too, in a nation of mostly 349 million other everyday people—minus those few at the top seeking to control us, and those few among us who seem to only know hate (maybe because they’ve never known love). An everyday American who is increasingly concerned about the frightening and escalating actions of the current “administration” of my country, and what they portend for us (and also the rest of the world and planet).
Thankfully, Many Everyday Americans Are Standing Up and Speaking Out!
As recently reported by The Guardian, based on data from the Crowd Counting Consortium: “There were more than 10,700 protests in 2025, a 133% increase from the 4,588 recorded in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term... An overwhelming majority of US counties—including 42% that voted for Trump—have had at least one protest since he was re-inaugurated last year.”
According to other informative data compiled by Britannica regarding No Kings demonstrations in June and October of last year: “Both demonstrations were some of the largest single-day protests to occur in US history, with more than 5 million protesters attending in June and almost 7 million protesters attending in October.”
And then there’s the recent massive and predominantly nonviolent demonstrations in Minneapolis and the surrounding region.
But, until now, aside from cautiously attending a few local protests, I’ve still been too silent.
Other Things That Have Kept Me Silent: the “Forms,” and Then Also the Paralysis
Interestingly, it was the colleague of Mayer’s mention of the forms that has stuck with me the most from that particular excerpt: “The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.”
None of the above forms, nor the addition of so many others since, such as TV, computers, cell phones, social media, streaming programs, and more—most forms that I, too, partake of—are bad forms in and of themselves. But is it possible that at least some are used to manipulate us masses? Or, at the very least, used to take advantage of our attention being, as the excerpt from Mayer’s book says, diverted?
Think of all the time, work, and money that we exhaust just to (hopefully) make ends meet. There’s the skyrocketing rent or mortgages, utilities, transportation, groceries, childcare, household insurance, etc. There’s the medical bills, health insurance (which I and millions of others can no longer afford), taxes, college tuition (which is now leaving graduates with difficulty finding work), Social Security and Medicare—which we’ve paid into, and more, along with all of the attendant literal forms that keep us busy. There’s all we spend trying to pay for the myriad of things they tell us to need or want, and then all of the time we spend organizing and taking care of those things (and often later getting rid). And then, exhausted from it all, if we even have time or energy left over, we (yes, me, too) often check-out with our never-ending sports and streaming programs.
All of these things, and more—including any debt we go into, not only keeps our attention diverted and out of their way, effectively silencing us, it also makes those seeking to control us wealthier than the majority of all Americans combined (if you figure those seeking to control us are likely in the top 10% of the population owning 63.77% of all wealth in the country, per the following data).
Regarding Wealth Inequality in America
We can look at new Federal Reserve reporting, assets by wealth percentile group in 2025:Q3. Using their data, I have created the following to make it easier to follow:
- 1% of the population owns 28.98% of all wealth (with 0.1% owning 13.04% of that).
- 9% of the population owns 34.79% of all wealth.
- 50-90% of the population own 30.91% of all wealth.
- The bottom 50% of the population owns 5.32% of all wealth.
I certainly can attest to this effective silencing in my own life (aside from having an amazing landlord who charges fair rent). But I definitely see at least some room where I could choose differently.
In addition to allowing myself to be silenced through both covert and overt means, there has also been the very distinct paralysis I’ve felt after trying to follow the absolute barrage of appalling things coming from Trump and his administration. It’s a constant blitz, which comes from “blitzkrieg” of course, which Britannica deftly explains as a military tactic “calculated to create psychological shock and resultant disorganization in enemy forces.”
The speed and seeming chaos of these shocking and growing anti-democratic and authoritarian actions by the current administration are surely no accident, and are instead more intentional attempts at diverting our attention with the common authoritarian modus operandi of Ruling by Distraction and Chaos. Oh, and a Barrage of Outright Lies.
One Great Shocking Occasion
I’d been shocked and stunned by the murder of Renée Good, of course, but, for me apparently, Pretti’s murder was the “one great shocking occasion” that spurred me back into speaking up more publicly. Regretfully, I admit there were many, so many, shocking occasions before Pretti’s murder which should have done so.
The Monday after Pretti was murdered, doing chores while listening to and watching the reporting out of Minneapolis, I stopped myself short, asking: “If I received an emergency alert on my phone that a wildfire was on its way, would I continue trying to ‘finally get my house and life organized’ before I evacuated?” It was an incredibly clarifying question, as that’s exactly what I’ve been doing regarding the fire raging in our country.
Almost immediately, I ceased everything else and sat down and started writing. And have been writing for weeks since.
We have a five-alarm fire going on in our country that is getting terrifyingly close to, among other things, incinerating the rule of law, our civil liberties and constitutional rights, and democracy.
It can be difficult to track, especially when most media are only able to report on the immediate fire(s) of the day, but the following are just some of the Trump Regime’s current blitzkrieg. It is not necessarily in order of importance, nor is it exhaustive by any means.
- According to newly released data, the “worst of the worst” make up less than 14% of the nearly 400,000 ICE arrests last year. According to the FBI, violent crime consists of four crimes: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Most agree that they want violent undocumented immigrants deported, via due process; however, the majority of those who’ve been arrested and detained, approximately 86%, have not committed violent crimes. Nearly 40% have no criminal record at all!
- US citizens—in addition to Renée Good and Alex Pretti—are being shot, injured, and detained for standing up for their neighbors or just being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Afterward, the administration has immediately lied before there’s even been time for an investigation, and those injured or murdered have been routinely called, by the administration, “Domestic Terrorists,” and “Agitators.” Just two examples are Marimar Martinez, and Aliyah Rahman. Martinez was shot five times by a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent. Aliyah Rahman, was violently pulled from her car when she was on her way to a doctor’s appointment and happened upon an ICE operation. There are other US citizens, and also noncitizens, who have been injured, shot, and also killed by federal agents. How many times did agents and this administration lie the same lies about those cases? And how many more instances do we not even know about?
- The regime’s intentional and routine labeling of protesters, activists, groups, organizations, anyone critical of Trump and his administration, (or those like Rahman who was just on her way to a doctor’s appointment) as “Domestic Terrorists” is not only an attempt at restricting or silencing our First Amendment right to free speech. It also comes with actions they can take, via National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM)-7, against those they decide to deem “Domestic Terrorists.” (Sure, we expect our government to keep a watch out for true domestic terrorists. How many are they actually missing, though, with all of their focus on the “radical left democrats,” “paid agitators,” and others simply standing up to exercise their First Amendment rights to criticize Trump Regime behaviors and policies?)
- Among many of the falsehoods he uttered during his recent State of the Union address, Trump described the horrible killing of Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, as being the fault of “open borders.” However, the man charged with her murder is a US citizen. There have been horrible murders committed by undocumented immigrants; however, according to many studies, native-born individuals are much more likely to commit violent crime. (Also, out of curiosity, since Trump introduced Zarutska’s mother at the SOTU, what does he think about the tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees who are losing work visas and Temporary Protected Status, and fear increasing risk of deportation?)
- An ICE attorney, who also trained cadets at the ICE training facility in Glynco, Georgia, resigned on February 13 and then testified as a whistleblower on February 23. In Ryan Schwank’s testimony, he described the training he witnessed as, “deficient, defective, and broken.” He went on to testify that ICE was training new agents to violate the constitution by entering homes illegally, and that they had “ceased all of the legal instructions regarding use of force.”
- There is the unnecessary and heartbreaking toll—which is already a massive source of trauma, and will likely remain so for years to come—that CBP agents, and masked, heavily armed, and usually unidentified ICE agents, are inflicting on millions of young children in communities around the country as they seek to fulfill the “quotas” of mass deportations set by the demonstrably white nationalist White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
- ICE, with $38.3 billion of our tax dollars, is seeking to purchase (and already has in some cases) giant warehouses across the country to convert into detention facilities (concentration camps) in which to house tens of thousands of immigrants who they plan to arrest and slate for mass deportations.
- There are already widespread inhumane and dire conditions at existing ICE detention facilities (concentration camps).
- There will likely be many negative long-term effects on children who are already living in the abysmal conditions at ICE detention facilities (concentration camps).
- In addition to many concerns regarding how Trump could try to disrupt the 2026 midterms, he recently said, in yet another attempted abandonment of established law, “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
- The SAVE America Act, in its current writing, could make voting much more difficult for millions and millions (and millions) of eligible voters. (It passed the House recently and is currently stalled in the Senate as of February 26.) BTW: it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote, and voter fraud is exceedingly rare. Even the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation researched voter fraud going back decades and found it was less than 1%. And that number, when it comes to noncitizen registrants and voters, according to CEIR (The Center for Election Innovation and Research) falls even more upon further investigation.
- The Trump administration is attempting unlawful seizure of states’ voter data, which includes private information. Many states have already complied.
- There’s the alarming reporting from NPR back in August of last year regarding our Social Security data: “A whistleblower says that a former senior DOGE official now at the Social Security Administration copied the Social Security numbers, names, and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to a private section of the agency's cloud.” It’s an ongoing story that could have tremendously alarming and troubling ramifications for the majority of the US population with Social Security numbers.
- There’s Trump’s brazen graft and personal profiteering. (Not to mention similar graft by so many others in his administration.)
- There’s the ongoing genocide in Gaza despite a supposed ceasefire; concerns regarding what Trump’s “Board of Peace” is really about; and fear that the US government master plans for “New Gaza” are nothing more than money grabs for investors while facilitating the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
- And what about the Epstein Files? Which are full of known pedophilia, sex trafficking, abuse, suspected bribery and money laundering, and more. An enormous ring of abuse and deceit, at high levels, that may likely be even worse than is already known. Prior to millions of Epstein files being released (still only a little over half, though the Department of Justice says it’s final), Trump claimed they were a “Democrat hoax.” However, in recent days and weeks, the files have triggered multiple reactions from or regarding many implicated in the files, which definitely does not support Trump’s “Democrat hoax” claim. Around the world, there have been multiple high-level government officials, attorneys, industry moguls, influencers, a Nobel laureate, former royalty... who have—just since the release of the files—either resigned, retired, gone on leave, been replaced, stepped down, announced they were selling, canceled their charities, or have been arrested. There is a there, there. (And, in new investigative reporting from NPR in the last few days, we learned about missing files regarding Trump and a woman who claimed he sexually abused her when she was 13. According to NPR’s reporting, “The FBI interviewed this Trump and Epstein accuser four times.” Why weren’t those files released?)
Again, that’s just a partial list. Just a small bit of the scope of what we everyday people should be deeply concerned about. Each have been important factors in helping me recommit myself to doing what little I can to add my voice to the millions of other everyday people who are currently refusing to be silenced—often at risk to their own safety—and are choosing to stand and speak up for their neighbors, our communities, the rule of law, the Constitution, and democracy.
Some of the Ways to Speak Up and Get More Involved
For those who are ready to act but haven’t yet—or, like me, haven’t done much more than attend a protest or two in recent years—here are just a few ways we can start speaking up more:
- Write or call our leaders in Congress;
- Attend local rallies;
- Consider joining groups like Indivisible, MoveOn, or the 50501 Movement—all groups that have helped organize No Kings events. (Indivisible and MoveOn also make the top two items in this list easy.);
- Join the next No Kings event, scheduled for March 28, with events planned (and growing) all over the country (and world);
- Attend (or host) local Know Your Rights training sessions, which can be scheduled through a variety of organizations and also hosted by community groups. These sessions also likely have information on how best to monitor ICE and CBP locally, and other ways we can get involved and help;
- Minneapolis, who has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, suggests that getting organized before ICE comes to town is important, and one of the things they most recommend doing? Getting to know our neighbors;
- Consider subscribing to Project Salt Box in order to stay up-to-date and learn what can be done regarding the DHS-ICE attempt to purchase massive warehouses across the country and turn them into immigrant detention centers (concentration camps);
- Respectfully share honest concerns, opinions, news, and details on current and important events on social media accounts and elsewhere (as more and more are doing now);
- Engage directly again—being willing to listen and dialogue compassionately and respectfully—with family, friends, neighbors, people we work with, and people we care about even though we know they may currently disagree with our views and concerns; and
- Reevaluate where we spend our resources and attention.
Whatever we are motivated to do, nonviolently, helps. It all matters. It all adds up. And in doing so, together we millions of everyday people will intensify and help sustain the needed resistance to an attempted authoritarian (or fascist) takeover of our country. An attempted takeover by this administration and its allies that is clearly devoid of heart, truth, justice, rule of law, conscience, empathy, or any concern whatsoever for anything other than their own selfish and unquenchable thirst for control, money, and power.
A Few Hopeful Notes
Many have probably already heard of the “3.5% rule.” It was coined by political scientist Erica Chenoweth following research she and a colleague undertook over a decade ago at the Harvard Kennedy School. In an updated paper in 2020, she explains the rule again: “The ‘3.5% rule’ refers to the claim that no government has withstood a challenge of 3.5% of their population mobilized against it during a peak event.”
Chenoweth also shared new data showing there has been at least one time where the 3.5% rule didn’t work, as well as other times where it took less than 3.5% of the population to resist. Chenoweth also has cautioned that the 3.5% rule is more a “rule-of-thumb,” and that it’s a “descriptive finding but not necessarily a prescriptive one.”
To be up front, Chenoweth is also, as noted on her website, currently working to understand why the “rule” has appeared to be less effective over the last decade. From an interview with Harvard Magazine last year, we learn, “Chenoweth sees a number of factors at work, such as regimes managing to control the information environment, or provoking violence within a movement to discredit it, or criminalizing protests.” She believes autocrats are catching on, and it is likely going to take more than just mass nonviolent protests going forward.
There are clearly many factors that may affect the success of a particular resistance. Nevertheless, the data on the 3.5% rule remains impressive concerning the potential power of even just a small percentage of a population participating in a sustained and organized campaign of nonviolent resistance.
Let’s look at just Minneapolis for a moment. Population estimates vary, but according to Minnesota Monthly, in March of last year the combined population for the Twin Cities was 724,630, with Minneapolis being 423,250 and St. Paul being 301,380.
Applying the 3.5% “rule of thumb” here: Minneapolis proper would need 14,814 people to actively protest, and St. Paul would need 10,548.
According to estimates, the amount of people who marched in the massive “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom” event on January 23 in Minneapolis was widely estimated to be at 50,000, with some reports even suggesting it was closer to 100,000. Not even one month after that historic and peaceful march of at least 50,000 everyday people—in sub-zero temperatures—border czar Tom Homan declared in a news conference: “I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude.”
The population of the United States sits at around 349 million people; 3.5% of that is a little over 12 million. Seven million of us already showed up around the country at the October 18, 2025 No Kings peaceful protests. Imagine what might happen at the next one coming up on March 28? Will we everyday people become Democracy’s 12th man?!
The regime’s mass deportation plan clearly has little to do with deporting the “worst of the worst.” We can have a dream, however, with so many of us everyday people standing up and speaking out across the country, in greater and greater and greater numbers—that Trump, Miller, and the rest of the regime will be quickly forced to agree as they did in Minnesota: “We concur that all mass deportation operations conclude.” (And may they concur thusly before spending billions of our dollars creating more unnecessary and inhumane concentration camps.)
From a spiritual perspective, I tend to believe that what we focus on expands. I also believe we are all intrinsically connected. So, even while fighting (nonviolently) against the abhorrent is necessary, I believe it’s important to remember (and I have to remind myself often) that it’s also important, perhaps even more so, to also focus on what we are fighting for.
While standing up and speaking out about the Trump regime and its clearly authoritarian push and inherent ills, we are also standing and nonviolently fighting for: kindness; compassion; empathy; joy; respect; dignity; forgiveness; equality; diversity; understanding; love; a healthy life for ourselves and our loved ones; and a just, equitable, safe, supportive, peaceful, inhabitable world for all.
Wouldn’t we masses of everyday people—which far, far outnumber both those who seek to control us, as well as the small percentage among us who only know hate—agree on most of those ideals?
As former President Barack Obama said in a recent interview:
Right now, we’re being tested, and the good news is, what we saw in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and what we’re seeing in places across the country... has been the American people saying... at least a good number of the American people saying, "We’re going to live up to those values that we say we believe in." As long as we have folks doing that, I feel like we’re going to get through this.
I’m going to conclude here the same way I concluded another piece back in 2020. It was a piece about questioning so-called truth, especially as disseminated by organizations, corporations, governments, etc. It was also, more importantly, about the power of everyday people:
In George Orwell’s all-too-prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the proles are the proletariat who make up 85% of the population of Oceania… In Orwell’s novel, the proles came to represent hope, if for no other reason than the power their sheer numbers represented. Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith observed: “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles… If only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength.”
Yes, the masses of everyday people have power in any society. Power to do nothing, or power to rise in resistance. We could choose to ignore what is going on before our very eyes, like the mostly 69 million that Mayer mentioned doing so in Nazi Germany before realizing it was too late. Or we can choose to become more and more conscious of our own strength, which is already being evidenced across the country as more and more of us everyday people are standing up and saying, nonviolently and in unison: We Will Not Be Silenced.
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The Nazi Political Theory That Explains ICE's Impunity
Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become the violent face of the country’s transformation into a new 21st-century dual state.
Jan 23, 2026
Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, will not be brought to justice. Let that sink in. Ross is going to skate, because in Donald Trump’s America, his agency operates above the law. As Vice President JD Vance put it at a White House press conference the day after the shooting, Ross has “absolute immunity for doing his job.”
Vance’s comments shed light upon the larger legal design behind ICE’s newfound power. In Trump’s second term, the United States is rapidly devolving into what the late German émigré legal and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel called a “dual state,” in which acts of violence perpetrated against designated enemies of the regime are not only tolerated, but often celebrated as acts of valor and redemption.
A socialist attorney who practiced labor law in Berlin, Fraenkel fled Nazi Germany in 1938, eventually settling in Chicago. There he would write his most famous work, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, a study of the legal system implemented by the Third Reich in the 1930s.
Fraenkel’s central thesis is that the Nazis did not dismantle the legal structure of the Weimar Republic all at once or entirely, but replaced it with a bifurcated system in which state functions were divided between a “normative” sphere—which operated according to set rules and regulations—and a “prerogative” sphere, where violence was permitted and traditional legal restraints did not apply.
The struggle against ICE and our emerging dual state is now approaching a critical inflection point.
To keep capitalism up and running, Hitler’s government had to maintain the façade of a stable “normative” legal system that permitted businesses and Christian Germans to engage in commerce and settle contract cases, employment disputes, landlord-tenant matters, and other civil issues in court. As University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq noted in a March 2025 Atlantic magazine essay, this duality allowed capitalism to “jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.”
But as the judiciary surrendered its independence through a combination of cooptation and intimidation, the “prerogative” system came to dominate. “On any given day,” Huq explained:
… people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one. In July 1936, for example, Fraenkel won a case for employees of an association taken over by the Nazis. A few days later, he learned that the Gestapo had seized the money owed to his clients and deposited it in the government’s coffers.
The case was closed with no further appeals.
Fraenkel largely attributed the theoretical underpinnings of the dual Nazi state to the work of the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. Often referred to as the “Crown Jurist of National Socialism,” Schmitt joined the party in 1933 and went on to serve as president of the National Socialist Association of Legal Professionals.
Schmitt was an unrelenting critic of liberalism, decrying its weaknesses for embracing universal human rights and what he deemed its hypocritical and indecisive fixations on discussion, debate, negotiation, and compromise. As a counter to universalism, he promoted a “friend-enemy” concept of politics, insisting that all states necessarily distinguish between those whom it embraces as friends worthy of protection and those who are forever considered enemies, outsiders and invaders deserving of its wrath, retribution, and punishment.
As a complement to the friend-enemy concept, Schmitt promoted the idea of the “state of exception,” arguing that the sovereign in a well-functioning state must be vested with emergency powers to suspend the rule of law to maintain public order and ensure the survival of the nation. Soon after joining the party, he declared that the Enabling Act, which effectively made Hitler a dictator, had become the provisional constitution of Germany. He would go on to enthusiastically support the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, stripping Jews and other “enemies” of citizenship, and to defend Hitler’s right as sovereign to define the enemy as he saw fit.
All of this will sound eerily familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the news. Since retaking the presidency, Trump has declared nine states of emergency on a range of issues stretching from the imposition of bloated tariffs on foreign goods to designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and proclaiming a national emergency at the southern border. The border proclamation, issued on January 20, his first day back in office, cited the now-familiar charge of an “alien invasion” of “criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers,” and laid the groundwork for both his mass-deportation program and for giving ICE the largest budget of any police agency in the country.
ICE is now a formidable paramilitary force, having hired 12,000 new agents in the past year, more than doubling its size, and ramping up to hire more. It has been deployed into American cities on orders from Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to root out the invaders. It has become the violent face of the country’s transformation into a new 21st-century dual state.
Undocumented immigrants remain ICE’s primary target, but citizens like Good are also in jeopardy. Good’s case stands out because she was white, and her killing was caught on video. But she is not alone. While there are no official figures that specifically track how many citizens have been victimized by immigration agents, ProPublica reported last October that it had found more than 170 cases where citizens were detained during raids and protests. According to the report:
Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.
To date, not a single federal agent has been prosecuted for these incidents. Nor are any prosecutions likely.
In “normal” times, we could at least expect Agent Ross to face a rigorous Justice Department investigation. It is not true, to return to JD Vance’s comments, that Ross enjoys absolute immunity under existing law. It has always been difficult to prosecute federal law enforcement officials, but no such immunity exists.
But these are not normal times.
Trump, who now openly directs the Department of Justice and the FBI, has precluded the possibility of any serious federal investigation. Nor can we count on a state investigation conducted in concert with federal law enforcement. The FBI has announced it will exclude Minnesota authorities from participating in any fake pro-forma probe of Good’s death.
Perhaps most regrettably, we cannot count on the Supreme Court to hold Ross and other offending agents to account. The Supreme Court has endowed Trump with the powers of the unitary executive, holding in Trump v. United States that the president may exercise his pardon power however he pleases to excuse anyone from any federal prosecution.
The struggle against ICE and our emerging dual state is now approaching a critical inflection point. We can be heartened by the fact that the United States is not Germany in 1933, and Trump, for all his bluster and megalomania, is not Hitler. The country’s fate remains open, and dependent on the nonviolent and lawful collective action that we—all of us—take in the coming weeks, months, and years.
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Is ICE Trump's Gestapo?
All of us have a dark side, and Trump has been successfully summoning the darkness of his supporters. Go get ’em, boys! And wear your masks.
Jan 15, 2026
“Renee sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time. You might think it was just my love talking but her family said the same thing. Renee was made of sunshine.”
The words are those of Renee Good’s wife Becca. They cut to our heart—our humanity. She was shot in the face by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, who then muttered: “Fuckin’ bitch.” The murder of this 37-year-old mom as she tried to drive around the ICE guys who stopped her is national news, of course. Almost everyone has seen at least one of the many videos of the incident and, you might say, the national dialogue about virtually anything else has been put on hold.
At least it seems that way. Is ICE keeping us safe from vicious, radical terrorists, along, of course, with those horrific immigrant invaders, or is it obliterating humanity’s sunshine?
President Donald Trump hasn’t simply handed us a new enemy of the moment, something most US presidents have loved to do, certainly in my lifetime: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan... uh, Gaza. Trump has declared that our main enemy is here at home, the ones fleeing chaos and poverty in their home countries and crossing our borders—you know, the rapists, murderers, drug dealers, insane-asylum escapees, etc. (Trump explains it all clearly on X.) But the enemy is also you, if you question his racism and belligerence in any way. If you are outraged by the killing of Renee Good and so many others, not to mention the kidnapping of hard-working Americans and their deportation to concentration camps, well, maybe you’ll be next.
Whether or not Trump is “being Hitler” is beside the point. He’s feeding not just hatred to his supporters—contempt for the radical left—but he’s also feeding them a chance for actual victory over the left: the chance to create the world they want.
Trump is at war with half—maybe two-thirds—of the country. He’s invading the cities—including Minneapolis, where Renee Good lived—that voted against him, that dared to declare themselves sanctuary cities. Where is this all going? Unsurprisingly, a lot of people see a parallel with Hitler and the Nazi era. They call ICE Trump’s Gestapo.
Of course, there’s plenty of disagreement and criticism about this. Come on, this ain’t the Third Reich! And I agree, to an extent. I see little value in comparing Trump to Hitler simply to intensify the insult you’re throwing back at him. But in a larger sense, God help us! What is going on here?
The US has waged hellish and unnecessary wars before, but what’s going on now under Trump is different. What I sense here is looming social change: the undoing of any semblance of democracy. Trump is seizing hold of the hatred and political rancor that exists in this country and is attempting to use it to his advantage. He’s feeding it to his supporters, empowering them with it. He has no interest whatsoever in uniting the country, finding common ground between sides, or embracing complex values as he governs. He just wants to eliminate the bad guys, the anti-Trumpers. All of us have a dark side, and Trump has been successfully summoning the darkness of his supporters. Go get ’em, boys! And wear your masks.
Whether or not Trump is “being Hitler” is beside the point. He’s feeding not just hatred to his supporters—contempt for the radical left—but he’s also feeding them a chance for actual victory over the left: the chance to create the world they want. This would be a world without political correctness, a world with the freedom to be racist and misogynist and, what the hell, tear down the Statue of Liberty. He and his believers believe they are creating white America.
How do we push back against this? How do we stop it before it gets politically entrenched and starts pulling in the American center? I can’t think of a harder question to answer. So let me quote some more words from Becca Good about Renee:
Renee leaves behind three extraordinary children; the youngest is just six years old and already lost his father. I am now left to raise our son and to continue teaching him, as Renee believed, that there are people building a better world for him. That the people who did this had fear and anger in their hearts, and we need to show them a better way.
We thank you for the privacy you are granting our family as we grieve. We thank you for ensuring that Renee’s legacy is one of kindness and love. We honor her memory by living her values: rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love.
Marianne Williamson, who quoted these words in an email post, contrasted them with JD Vance’s comment that Renee Good’s real tragedy was that she had been “radicalized by left-wing ideology.” “If that was ‘left-wing ideology,’ Mr. Vice President,” she wrote, “I’ll take it.”
Every life is precious. Never let knowing this be stolen from you. When it comes to reclaiming the country, that’s the starting place, even—especially—when you’re face-to-face with an armed guy wearing a mask.
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How Many Laws Will Trump Break to Make America Predominantly White Again?
Much of Trump’s domestic and foreign policy can be understood only by examining them through the lens of his obsession with deporting people and restricting immigration from non-white parts of the world.
Oct 25, 2025
The Trump administration aspires to deport a million people in its first year of office. The president has also spoken of the more ambitious goal of deporting 15-20 million undocumented people overall, even if that category probably covers only 14 million folks. The discrepancy of a couple million people shouldn’t bother President Donald Trump. He’s happy to deport those with green cards, H-1B visas, and even American citizens.
Deporting a million people in a year is a heavy lift. The previous record, 409,849 people, was during the Obama administration, as part of the 1.5 million deportations he conducted in his first term. Trump, no doubt, wants to best Barack Obama in this category, since he’s determined to outshine the former president in every respect, even the dubious ones.
Despite all the high-profile seizures by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the deals to dump Venezuelans to Salvadoran prisons, and the truly crazy efforts to send people to countries they’ve never even visited like Eswatini and South Sudan, the Trump administration has managed to deport only about 350,000 people through the end of August. That includes the 200,000 by ICE and the rest by Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard, plus some self-deportations. Another 60,000 are languishing in ICE detention centers. The government is currently monitoring about 180,000 families and individuals in its Alternatives to Detention program, which may end up becoming a Preparation for Deportation program.
Most of the people currently in detention—over 70%—have never committed any crime, which undermines the claim by the Trump administration that he’s going after the “bad hombres.”
German citizens failed to stop the Nazis. Will Americans stand up and be counted?
Detention is pretty much a fast track to deportation. After all, detainees often don’t have access to lawyers. As the American Prospect reports, “ICE uses bureaucracy and location transfers to isolate their detainees from both their families and their lawyers, limiting their ability to get out of their predicaments and increasing misery and hopelessness.” One immigration lawyer told me that some of his clients have disappeared for several days in ICE detention—and these included people who were willing to self-deport.
Trump is not close to meeting his ambitious deportation goals. That’s no comfort to all the immigrants whose lives he has already upended.
ICE Is Not Nice
The scenes involving the roundup of refugees and migrants have been harrowing. Consider this description:
Buses backed up to apartment buildings and were filled with screaming, crying people. Hospital beds were emptied. A cancer patient operated on the previous day was carried away. One woman gave birth while police waited to haul off mother and baby. Younger children were permitted to be left behind, and many parents desperately accepted that choice in the hope that neighbors or orphanages would take them in.
Oh, I’m sorry, I got mixed up. That’s a description of the French police rounding up 13,000 Jewish refugees in 1942 at the behest of their Nazi overseers, as reported by David Wyman in his seminal book, The Abandonment of the Jews.
Here, by comparison, are three snapshots of recent ICE actions:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have in recent days deported the Cuban-born mother of a 1-year-old girl—separating them indefinitely—and three children ages 2, 4, and 7 who are US citizens along with their Honduran-born mothers, their lawyers said Saturday.
In Chicago:
Agents used unmarked trucks and a helicopter to surround the five-story apartment building. NewsNation, which was invited to observe the operation, reported agents “rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters.” Agents then went door to door, woke up residents, and used zip ties to restrain them. Residents and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which canvassed the area, said those who were zip tied included children and US citizens.
In New York:
On the morning of September 4, dozens of masked federal agents raided a snack bar factory in the small town of Cato, New York. They claimed there was a “violent felon” in the plant, but proceeded to siphon off and hold anyone who looked Latinx. At least 69 workers were initially detained, with 57 still in custody or deported, though some say that could be an undercount. There are multiple reports of aggression—knees on necks, blows to heads—used during the raid.
This is happening not just to the undocumented and those on the rock-strewn path to citizenship. Quite a few American citizens have also been caught up in the ICE dragnet. At least 170 have been detained, according to ProPublica:
Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched. About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones.
Much of Trump’s domestic and foreign policy can be understood only by examining them through the lens of his obsession with deporting people and restricting immigration from non-white parts of the world. The question remains: How many laws will the Trump administration break and how many crimes will it commit in this effort to make America predominantly white again?
German citizens failed to stop the Nazis. Will Americans stand up and be counted?
Trump’s Immigration-Obsessed Foreign Policy
In exchange for a payment of about $5 million, the tiny country of Eswatini in southern Africa has agreed to receive up to 160 deportees from a variety of countries. Human rights groups in Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, have challenged the arrangement in court. A US District Court judge also blocked the removal of deportees to third countries back in April, but the Supreme Court lifted that ban in June.
The $5 million is only part of the sweetheart deal. In August, the Trump administration waived all tariffs on Eswatini goods entering the United States—in contrast to the 30% rate that South Africa will be paying. A number of countries hoping for tariff reductions or similarly favorable treatment from the Trump administration—Costa Rica, Guatemala, Kosovo, Panama, Rwanda, South Sudan—have also accepted the transport of deportees.
Eswatini does have its limits. It refused to accept Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national that the Trump administration sent to a prison in El Salvador. Garcia was freed and sent back to the States, only to be arrested again by the US government and charged with human trafficking. Afraid that Garcia will be released by court order, the Trump administration is scrambling to find some country that will take him. Garcia is living proof of the administration’s lies—contrary to what Trump has said, he is not a gang member or a human trafficker. No wonder Trump wants him out of the country.
He has put a sign on America’s front door that reads: Wealthy, Christian, Right-Wing Whites Only.
El Salvador has been an enthusiastic backer of Trump’s deportation plans. The country received $5 million to house deportees like Garcia in its horrific prisons. In addition, the State Department recently gave the country its highest safety rating, ahead of France and Spain. Trump has also backed Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s bid to become the country’s leader for life. Finally, the country faces a mere 10% tariff on its goods, Trump’s lowest tier.
In one of the least savory parts of the arrangement with El Salvador, Secretary of State Marco Rubio cut a deal with Bukele to return several members of the MS-13 gang who were cooperating with US authorities. Bukele wanted them back because they had information about members of his administration who had cut their own deals with the country’s various gangs. It’s best to keep your enemies close, as the expression goes, particularly if you can put them in a dangerous high-security prison.
The immigration issue also affects relations with Venezuela, where the Trump administration has used the threat of Tren de Aragua, and the alleged inroads the gang has made in US society, to step up its efforts to topple the government of Nicolas Maduro.
Trump has attempted to tilt immigration policy in favor of English speakers and white people more generally, even as the overall quotas for immigrants are radically reduced from 125,000 per year to 7,500. Among the proposals considered by the administration is one that would give preference to such groups as Europeans who support the radical right and white Afrikaners from South Africa. The overall purpose is a reduction in American diversity because, as one of the internal proposals argues, “The sharp increase in diversity has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity.”
The administration has also radically increased the fee for a work permit—the H-1B visa—to $100,000. Although there are some exemptions to the new fee, it is clearly designed to restrict entrance to the United States to the wealthy.
Taken together, Trump has treated the “shithole” countries he identified in his first term—the poorer countries of the Global South—as dumping grounds for undesirable elements. And he has put a sign on America’s front door that reads: Wealthy, Christian, Right-Wing Whites Only.
Barack Obama wanted to create an administration that looked like America. Donald Trump wants to create an America that looks like his administration.
How Deportations Shape Domestic Policy
Trump knows a hot-button issue when he touches one, and immigration remains a great way to defeat Democrats who, however anti-immigration some of them have become, will never stoop to the race-baiting lows that Trump uses to wow his supporters. The invading “army” of migrants approaching the Mexico border, the fictitious pet eaters of Springfield, Ohio, the “murderers” and “rapists” from points south responsible for all the crime in America: These mendacious memes propelled Trump to victory in 2024.
His immigration policies are no surprise: They were all laid out in detail in Project 2025: stopping refugee resettlement; ending Temporary Protect Status for Haitians, Venezuelans, and others; ending visas for foreign students. Trump has gone further. Even Project 2025 didn’t propose revoking birthright citizenship and ignoring the Constitution.
The militarization of the United States, at the expense of social welfare, is now directed not just at China or securing access to critical raw materials: it is directed at the US population.
Trump has put ICE raids at the center of his approach, but there has been pushback from Democratic-controlled cities and states. So, the president is sending in the National Guard to ensure greater access and mobility for ICE agents. The use of the US military for domestic operations is unprecedented, of course, and several judges have ruled the president’s actions unconstitutional. Trump, meanwhile, has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress “rebellion,” which would allow him to use the military to impose civilian law (his government’s laws). It’s not quite martial law—which is the imposition of military laws on civilians—but it certainly aims in that direction (and the two may well be conflated in Trump’s mind).
ICE, meanwhile, has received a huge surge in funding—$170 billion in new money—at a time of cutbacks in virtually all non-military parts of the federal government. If ICE and associated agencies constituted a military, it would be the 13th largest one in the world, as Sarah Lazare and Lindsay Koshgarian point out. The militarization of the United States, at the expense of social welfare, is now directed not just at China or securing access to critical raw materials: it is directed at the US population.
Trump is attacking diversity more generally, as the changes in federal immigration policy suggest. Because birthright citizenship has changed the demographics of the United States, its repeal has been a priority for white nationalists, and they have also cheered Trump’s moves in this direction. Meanwhile, the president is going after diversity in federal institutions, federal grantmaking, and across the US educational system.
At the moment, lawyers and judges are the thin line that holds back the lawlessness of the Trump administration. A few civic groups like the Immigration Defense Project and Freedom for Immigrants are fighting the administration. But it will require a lot more public outcry to defend America’s disappeared and preserve diversity in this country.
As Bad as Nazis?
The Nazis were also obsessed with the diversity of German society in the 1930s. They ultimately decided not just to stigmatize and imprison Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others. The Nazis killed them in huge numbers.
Trump and his white nationalist allies are currently at the stigmatize and deport stage. They’re content for the moment to let the killing take place elsewhere. The administration is not only erecting higher walls against refugees and immigrants—leading to more deaths among the desperate overseas—it is sending those who thought they’d already made it to safety to warzones (South Sudan), certain imprisonment (Afghanistan, Russia), and failed states (Haiti).
The US business community is heavily reliant on immigrant labor, much of it undocumented, in agriculture, construction, and the food industry. But it has failed to stand up for its immigrant workforce. The international community is busy making deals with Trump, not censuring him. Congress has been largely silent (though it recently announced an inquiry into ICE treatment of US citizens).
At a time when countries around the world are shrinking in population, the United States has remained strong because of all the people who have come here from abroad to work, to contribute to the tax base and Social Security, and, yes, to have babies. So, who will combine the necessary moral and practical arguments to convince the mass of Americans that the very survival of this country depends on immigrants?
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How to Live Under Right-Wing Rule
Fascism, like communism, is an abstraction to Americans. We know little about it. We have not lived under it. Given current circumstances, let’s see if we are fast learners.
Oct 22, 2025
The right-wing takeover of our country—make that much of the developed world—has changed the calculus for the individual citizen. The clamping down has begun. Repression is the order of the day. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s grotesque behavior is a first order tactic in a strategy of intimidation.
Why are we so obedient? Because the orders are legal? Rulers can always produce lawyers to provide legal justification. Alberto Gonzales provided George W. Bush a legal exemption for torture.
Put starkly: Were the criminal verdicts rendered against the Nazis at Nuremberg due to the failure of their lawyers to provide the necessary legal exemptions?
The myth we enjoy repeating is that the United States is a beacon to the world. In some respects it was true. We did herald a new contract with the people born out of the principle of individual freedom from hierarchical rule. The monarchy is long gone, but hierarchy remains in its lasting form as wealth.
A lesson from the history of the Third Reich is that to do nothing changes nothing. Not being on the side of the weak is the same as being on the side of the strong.
The three great powers of the United States, Russia, and China are each authoritarian, as are an ever increasing number of subordinate powers. Israel is the United States of the Middle East, a technological superpower built on displacement of the Indigenous. The United States is the Saudi Arabia of the West, built on enshrinement of wealth as a first principle to which all other principles must be secondary.
No other country, including the United States, can dismember a dissident in full view of the world and still attract the leading international sports organizations as it has to its kingdom, including the very recent bailout the kingdom has proffered to the Metropolitan Opera. It is a marvelous feat of image building.
We must cast aside all allusions and put the matter straight. We are not “losing our democracy.” It slipped away long ago under the shadow of finance capital. Intellectual appeals to preserve it conceal hidden support for the status quo and are, in fact, reactionary. Thankfully, that approach seems doomed to fail.
Nobody feels democracy in their bones. What we feel, what all humans feel deep down, is a thirst for freedom. And that is what we are losing.
What to do? A lesson from the history of the Third Reich is that to do nothing changes nothing. Not being on the side of the weak is the same as being on the side of the strong.
Many people in our communities have begun to resist the terrorist practices of ICE, with precious little to resist with. Some law enforcement agencies say that they will not “cooperate” with ICE. This should not be mistaken for solidarity. ICE is happy with them on the sidelines.
Why Real Patriots Should Worry Us
Surely any true American will accept without question the obligation of patriotism. There’s some things all patriotic Americans come to learn. The world is a better place because of us. We only fight to defend ourselves. We stand for democracy. We are the good guys. God is on our side.
Since these things become transparently false upon serious examination, something else must be behind the fervor with which most Americans hold their patriotism. We know a lot about conforming behavior and how destructive it can become. We know enough to worry us.
In the case of patriotism, conformity has clearly won out. Its victory can be as uncomplicated as understanding the dynamic of fan mentality. The sports fan does not complicate things. You root for the home team.
Somehow we have failed to notice the patriotism of our own political enforcers, our armed and masked federal agents loyally dragging people off the streets.
But pastimes are of little consequence. They are not national secrecy, national security, or national criminality. Did I say national criminality? What dare I speak of to true American patriots? I can speak of nothing to true patriots but only to those whose patriotism is less true. Who manage to retain a critical faculty when it comes to taking orders.
People are not born to follow orders. We have to be trained. In order for the training to be thorough and lasting, it has to come drip by drip. So that we are convinced that it is a good thing. The only thing. Patriotism is the product of this training.
Democracy, as a concept, plays an active propaganda role. If the country is ruled by “us,” there is no question of disloyalty to it. That we discuss our “loss of democracy” is an indication of how well trained we have become. Real democracy has never been with us, nor was it sought after by the founders. The very opposite. Government is safely in the hands of the wealthy and powerful.
The good news is that we needn’t lament its loss. The bad news is that dangerous rifts have developed among the ruling class, the only class capable of restraining a presidential administration that is completely out of control. Capitalists are not a monolith. They compete against each other. Some factions will easily accommodate to authoritarianism. That puts us in a stall.
I said earlier that we know enough about conforming behavior to worry us. This leads to a disturbing question—was Hitler patriotic?—and its relevance to the subject at hand since patriotism is not a moral value. It’s a habit. A habit of thought.
The SS (Schutzstaffel) was the completeness of Third Reich patriotism, the loyal enforcers of the political will of the Nazi state.
Somehow we have failed to notice the patriotism of our own political enforcers, our armed and masked federal agents loyally dragging people off the streets. They are true American patriots.
Fascism doesn’t come for a visit. It comes to stay. The 21st century version doesn’t have to align perfectly with those of Europe past. Fascism, like communism, is an abstraction to Americans. We know little about it. We have not lived under it. Given current circumstances, let’s see if we are fast learners.
The first lesson is that law enforcement is not, has not been, and should never be expected to be on the side of the people. Law enforcement serves the state. The state is not accountable to the people.
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Trump's Anti-Immigrant Violence Is a Message for the Rest of Us
This is how it always starts, this process of getting citizens used to the government using violence that will one day be turned against them.
Oct 13, 2025
For the Trump regime, the brutality is the point. It’s the means to the end of a violent, single-party state that they’re openly proclaiming, even though our media insists on turning away from it.
Back in the 1980s, I lived with my family and worked in Germany for a bit short of two years. The international relief agency I worked for (and lived at the HQ of) jumped through all the necessary hoops to get me a work permit, but if I’d overstayed my permit or visa nobody would have kicked in my front door or invaded my home with flash-bangs and automatic weapons drawn.
Nobody would have smashed in the windows of my car, or shot me with pepper balls or rubber-coated bullets, or snatched our three children and put them into a privatized “Christian” foster care system from which thousands of kids simply vanish.
Instead, a polite fellow from the Ausländerbehörden (“Immigration Office”) would have dropped by, perhaps with a local police officer, to tell me how to navigate the system to either acquire the right to stay, or work out how I’d be leaving. He’d give me a few weeks, or possibly even a few months, to get everything together and leave the country.
The brutality, in other words, is the point. It’s not an accident, a side effect, or the result of poor training. It’s intentional. It’s a signal of their broader intentions. Following the classic dictator’s playbook.
I knew a few German police officers; they’re incredibly professional, having to have graduated from a three-year college program and undergone what’s typically a yearlong probationary period before they can publicly handle a firearm.
This is how civilized countries handle “illegal immigration.” So, why are Border Czar Tom Homan, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, President Donald Trump, et al., engaging in and celebrating such wild violence against people here?
There are now so many videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs unlawfully beating, kidnapping, and terrorizing brown people, their supporters, protesters, and journalists—even maliciously spraying pepper gas at peaceful protesters in inflatable animal costumes—that it’s getting impossible to keep track of them all.
From ICE agents smashing a car window to pull a man from his vehicle in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Apr. 16, 2025), to an ICE agent shooting Eric Díaz-Cruz in the face in Brooklyn (February 2020), to masked agents breaking a car window during an arrest outside a Beaverton, Oregon preschool (July 21, 2025), and even pepper balling a Chicago pastor in the head during a protest (September 2025), the videos keep piling up.
Add to that a viral clip of a cuffed Portland protester being wheeled away on a flatbed cart (October 2025), neighbors in Nashville forming a human chain to stop an ICE pickup (July 2019), and the on-camera violent throwing to the ground and arrest of a WGN journalist during a Chicago raid last week, and you get the picture.
This is how it always starts, this process of getting citizens used to the government using violence that will one day be turned against them.
When a regime wants to turn the police powers of the state—with all the brutality and violence they can legally wield—against its political opponents, it never starts with the members of the opposition party. But it always ends up there, be it in Germany in the 1930s or today’s Russia, Hungary, China, Turkey, Iran, etc., etc.
Hitler didn’t start by arresting and imprisoning lawmakers from or supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Centre Party (Zentrum), or even the Communist Party (KPD) even though all of the three major German parties openly and outspokenly opposed his Nazi Party.
ICE doesn’t need to rappel from helicopters, smash windows, zip-tie shivering naked American citizen children, and terrorize their parents to get noncitizens to leave the country.
German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer people.
A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.
In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.
Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people—with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people—across German media.
German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.
Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled over 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire. It was followed by open and widely publicized violence against gay men and trans women.
It was the first major Nazi book burning and violence against an “other,” and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation. It wouldn’t be the last: Soon it spread to libraries and public high schools.
Having established the legal precedent for dragging people from their homes and imprisoning them, Hitler then began arresting members of the non-Nazi political parties and their followers.
But first, he knew he had to get Germans used to the idea of authorities of the state kicking in doors and dragging screaming people into the street.
When the only victims of this brutality were queer people and “non-Aryans,” ethnic Germans let him and his Stormtroopers get away with it because the objects of the violence were “them.”
But it never ends with “them.”
Fascist regimes always turn their police powers against their own people, first going after those who ridicule, oppose, or have turned away from support for their leader.
ICE doesn’t need to rappel from helicopters, smash windows, zip-tie shivering naked American citizen children, and terrorize their parents to get noncitizens to leave the country.
Instead, like in Germany and most other civilized nations, they could simply give people the equivalent of a speeding ticket with a certain amount of time to get their affairs in order and leave the country before a next step—arrest and forced deportation—takes place. And they could threaten their employers with large fines, like my employer in Germany would have faced had I overstayed my visa.
But not here in America. Here, the agenda is quite different and involves explicit and highly publicized violence against undocumented people and their property.
For a reason.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told us, when talking with Sean Hannity on Fox “News” in August, what that reason is, what their ultimate goal will be:
“The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” (emphasis added)
Immigrants are just the Trump regime’s warm-up act, just like trans people and Gypsies were in 1933 Germany. The real goal of this administration—by their own declaration—is to turn America into a one-party-rule nation.
To get there, though, they first must get us used to Trump’s masked secret police using violence on the streets and in our homes, right in front of us.
This is why DHS is proudly producing videos showing people being brutalized to upbeat music, why their agents are concealing their identities to increase the terror and minimize the possibility of accountability, and why complicit Republicans refuse to even use the correct name for their ultimate target, members of the Democratic Party.
Back in the 1950s, Joe McCarthy advised Republicans never to use the actual name of the Democratic Party, but instead to slander them with a slur.
Never say Democratic Party, that sounds too nice, too democratic. Instead, always say "Democrat Party," with an emphasis on the "rat."
It’s why they’re flooding social media with celebrations of their violence, and why the millionaire talent on billionaire-owned Fox “News” are cheerleading them. It’s why Trump is openly talking about arresting Illinois’ Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson. It’s why his masked thugs tackled a US senator, arrested a congresswoman, and imprisoned the mayor of Newark, all with great fanfare.
If you think Democrats—including registered Democratic voters—aren’t next, you’re not paying attention. They’re already trying to make sure our votes aren’t counted; when that fails they’ll proceed to Miller’s step two and start dealing with us as “domestic extremists.”
The brutality, in other words, is the point. It’s not an accident, a side effect, or the result of poor training. It’s intentional. It’s a signal of their broader intentions. Following the classic dictator’s playbook.
And if we ever get used to it, G-d help America.
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The Murder and Myth of Charlie Kirk
To propel American fascism, the real Charlie Kirk had to be replaced by a mythologized one, something masters of deceit promptly manufactured.
Sep 23, 2025
For years, fascist forces in America have been loosely bifurcated along spiritual and secular lines, one turning a hijacked faith into a holy war against “godless Liberals” and the other using metastasized political power to cripple democracy, curtail free speech, and crush the “lunatic Left." The murder of Charlie Kirk changed all that, and brought the two trajectories together, dramatically and dangerously.
A broad united front for fascism now confronts us. To propel its potency, the real Charlie Kirk had to be replaced by a mythologized one, something masters of deceit promptly manufactured.
The MAGA Martyr
In the wake of his death, comparing Charlie Kirk to martyred saints of the church, especially Stephen, was standard fare for MAGA pastors. Rob McCoy, who claims to have been Kirk’s pastor, declared that “we are in a spiritual battle; the same murderous spirit that raged against the prophets, that crucified Christ and martyred Stephen is raging again in our day.” A podcast called Reasons For Hope*Jesus produced a slick video on “Parallels in the Death of Stephen (Acts 7) and Charlie Kirk.” Garret Cuzick, a pastor in Kentucky, delivered a sermon on “The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk” the Sunday following his murder pointing out that “Saint Stephen was killed and thousands rose up; I pray that because of Charlie Kirk’s death, thousands, if not millions, rise up. The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.” Bob Lonsberry, a member and former missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the same church affiliation as Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s assassin), broadcast a “sermon on the death of Charlie Kirk” also comparing Kirk to Stephen, both as martyrs: “We saw that with Stephen, and saw it with Charlie. When you speak divine truth to the powers of darkness, the cost can be very high.” Timothy Dolan, cardinal of NYC and former president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, identified Kirk as a “modern St. Paul.” Ralph Hathaway went a bit further in his September 20 article in Catholic365—“Charlie Kirk, JFK, RFK, MLK and St. Stephen: All Heroes and Saints for the Courage to Speak Out for Righteousness.”
Comparing Charlie Kirk to St. Stephen was also a common theme at his memorial service held in a packed NFL stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Donald Trump Jr. even claimed that Charlie, like Stephen, likely saw Jesus standing next to God welcoming him to heaven. Other speakers enhanced his hagiography with comparisons to St. Francis, Moses, Washington, Lincoln, JFK, and MLK. Robert Kennedy Jr. even has the audacity to explicitly (and incorrectly) assert that both Christ and Charlie died at age 31 and that both “changed the trajectory of history” with their lives and deaths.
The memorial service, which attracted a MAGA pantheon of elected and appointed officials, was held on September 21, World Peace Day, yet speakers repeatedly talked of a spiritual war engulfing America and the need to put on “the full armor of God.” Benny Johnson of Turning Point opened his tribute with shouts of “fight for Charlie Kirk” and then referenced Romans 13 to substantiate his call for godly rulers to “wield the sword against the terror of evil men in our nation.” Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, asserted that the opposition “cannot conceive of the army they have arisen in all of us,” and confidently proclaimed that “we will defeat forces of darkness.” Ben Carson, perhaps the only African-American at this event, raged against Marxists and proponents of the Social Gospel. US President Donald Trump raised the specter of “Antifa terrorists” and “radical left lunatics,” contrasting them with “the immortal” Charlie Kirk, “a great American hero” whose “voice will echo through the generations.”
The Nazi Martyr
Instead of these contrived comparisons of Charlie Kirk with saints of the church and heroes of the state, there is a strikingly real one with another racist reprobate glorified by fascists. Horst Wessel was the son of a Lutheran pastor and raised as a devout Christian. During the turbulent 1920s in Weimar Germany, he joined several right-wing political gangs before settling on membership in the Nazi Party in 1926 as part of the notorious and brutal SA, the Brown Shirts. His passion and pugnacity caught the attention of the Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels, who sent him to a Nazi youth camp in Vienna for training in militancy and agitation. He returned to Berlin as the SA leader of his neighborhood and eagerly took part in many fights, verbally and physically, against communists and other anti-fascists.
In mid-January 1930, the 22-year old Wessel was shot in the head during an eviction action by Albrecht Höhler, a reputed communist though the German Communist Party denied he was a member. Nevertheless, Goebbels capitalized on his murder to demand that “the degenerate communist subhumans be crushed to a pulp.” Sensing the enormous propagandistic value of having a young Christian fascist as a martyr, Goebbels characterized Wessel as “Christlike,” as “a man who calls out through his deeds—‘Come, follow me, I shall redeem you… a divine element works in him, making him the man he is and causing him to act in this way and no other. One man must set an example, and offer himself as a sacrifice.” Wessel died of sepsis in late February.
The parallels between the now defunct Horst Wessel myth and the rapidly growing Charlie Kirk myth are painfully obvious, as is the intended propagandistic function by their respective fascist creators.
His funeral in early March was attended by several dignitaries, including a son of Kaiser Wilhelm, as well as key Nazi leaders such as Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. Out of security concerns, Hitler did not attend the funeral, but did give a speech at Wessel’s gravesite in early 1933 calling him a “Blutzeuge” (martyr) and stating that his sacrifice was “a monument more lasting than stone and bronze.” In his eulogy, Goebbels said, "His spirit is lifted up to live with us all, he marches on with us.” Some 30,000 residents of Berlin lined the streets to witness the passing of his coffin. Along with the SA regiments, they joined in singing the “Horst Wessel Song,” (“Die Fahne Hoch”), which subsequently became the Nazi co-anthem from 1933 until 1945. Every Nazi ceremony included its performance, and every school child throughout the Third Reich was required to sing it as part of the curriculum. It is not unlike the song “Carry the Flame: Charlie Kirk Tribute Anthem,” which went viral after its Apple Music release on September 13.
The Horst Wessel myth became a core ingredient of the Nazi propaganda machine. Several schools, streets, districts, and military units were named in his honor as was a naval vessel. A popular 1933 biographical film about Wessel emphasized his Christian background. His myth along with the Nazi regime came crashing down in 1945. In 2011, anti-fascists vandalized his grave marker with the words “Keine Ruhe für Nazis” (No Rest for Nazis).
Growl of a Dying Empire
The parallels between the now defunct Horst Wessel myth and the rapidly growing Charlie Kirk myth are painfully obvious, as is the intended propagandistic function by their respective fascist creators. The target in both cases is democracy, particularly its anti-fascist defenders and promoters. Although the outcome of the current dialectical conflict between the two emergent fronts, one for and one against fascism in America, is not absolutely certain, progressive forces have a distinct advantage. Much has changed since WWII when the USA inherited economic and political supremacy in the world. Unilateral US hegemony is no more. A multilateral world of shared power has steadily and irreversibly emerged over the past several decades.
Accordingly, the boisterous outcry and desperate attempt to use the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk as a divinely empowered sword to make America supreme again represents the growl of a dying empire.
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The Disappearance Machine
If this machine succeeds, it will not stop with immigrants. It will become the blueprint for domestic control and the silencing of millions.
Aug 30, 2025
"What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it from happening again."—Anne Frank
US President Donald Trump has federalized the DC police department and put more than 2,000 National Guard troops on city streets, even as crime remains at historic lows. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seizing more than 1,000 people every day. Palantir is rolling out its AI-powered “ImmigrationOS,” designed to fuse the private details of millions into a single surveillance grid. These are not accidents or isolated headlines. They are pieces of a larger architecture: a disappearance machine that erases lives quietly while making absence look routine.
The system is not hypothetical. It is funded, operational, and expanding. What began with undocumented immigrants now extends to visa holders, asylum seekers, parolees, aid workers, and dissenters. By the government’s own numbers, more than 20 million people are potentially vulnerable. Many are not accused of crimes at all. They are flagged by association, by proximity, by the digital trails of daily life. And still there is no clear plan for where millions would be sent.
This is not only about immigration. It is about what happens when disappearance becomes policy, not error. It is about how authoritarian systems succeed, not through spectacle alone, but by presenting themselves as orderly, legal, and necessary. History offers its warning: Absence becomes normal, silence becomes institutional. If this machine succeeds, it will not stop with immigrants. It will become the blueprint for domestic control and the silencing of millions.
The Enforcement System
The machine does not announce itself with spectacle. Its danger lies in its efficiency, humming beneath the noise of everyday life. The quotas, contracts, and deployments pile up like the hum of an engine, so constant that many people stop hearing them.
ICE has already blown past its legal detention limits, booking more than 31,000 people in June alone. Overflow has been moved into tent camps on military bases and newly leased private facilities. But the real innovation lies beneath the numbers: the wiring of the system. Department of Motor Vehicle records, school rosters, medical files, protest photos—all are now drawn into ICE’s databases, where AI-driven analytics map not only who people are, but who they know.
That wiring has corporate architects. Palantir. Amazon Web Services. Anduril. Palantir’s AI engines feed the machine with millions of cross-linked records, turning raw fragments into actionable targets. Anduril watches from autonomous towers. Amazon stores the data that makes it possible. Each contract transforms misery into revenue, turning deportation into a line item on a balance sheet. Together they prove a brutal truth: Deportation is not just policy. It is profit.
What binds people to one another—love, kinship, faith, compassion—becomes evidence against them.
Congress has widened the channel further. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” earmarks $170 billion for detention, deportation logistics, and 10,000 new ICE agents. If enacted, ICE would surpass the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Marshals combined budgets and operational reach. Contracts like these rarely expire. Facilities like these rarely close. Permanence is the point, and permanence is the profit.
The military presence seals the fusion. Guard units have been mobilized in 19 states. Marines handle logistics. In Los Angeles, Washington, and other threatened cities, troops now patrol the streets. Each deployment erodes the line between military and civilian. Each step embeds martial presence deeper into ordinary life.
This is the machine. Arrests that exceed the law. Contracts that bind the future. Corporations cashing in. Soldiers on our sidewalks. A van arrives. A door closes. A name disappears. It does not need to announce itself loudly. It hums through budgets, contracts, and signatures. It looks procedural. It looks harmless. And that is the danger.
Silence allows it to run. And what it runs toward is not enforcement, but disappearance.
When Bureaucracy Becomes Disappearance
Once the machine is in motion, it does not deliver justice. It delivers absence. Disappearance is not a malfunction. It is the product the system is built to deliver.
When ICE takes someone, the trail goes dark by design. Families call and hear nothing. Lawyers search and find no records. Facilities deny they are holding anyone. Transfers happen within hours, often across state lines. A man leaves for work and never returns, his vehicle still running, lunch packed, a child’s car seat strapped in. Fields go unharvested, animals untended, trucks unloaded. This is not error. It is method. Not accident. Design.
Authoritarian regimes have long understood this power. Nazi Germany perfected registries, codes, and camps placed far from public view. The parallel is structural, not identical. Then it was files and cattle cars. Today it is biometric databases and chartered flights. What once took days can now be done in seconds with AI-driven servers and algorithms.
This is the innovation: speed. A protest photo flagged. A clinic visit cross-matched. An address linked to a file. Palantir’s AI system merges millions of fragments into real-time triggers. ICE no longer needs loud raids. It can knock softly, often. A van at the corner. A name missing the next day. Absence hardens into fact. Silence hardens into complicity.
The Logic That Criminalizes Connection
This system punishes not only identity but connection. In it, solidarity itself is criminalized. The machine does not only target individuals. It ensnares through association.
If you share an address with someone flagged, your file may be tagged. If your number appears on a church roster, a school list, or a protest sign-in sheet, it can be enough. If you drive a neighbor, open your home, or hand someone food, you may be prosecuted for “harboring.” AI-powered algorithms do not need guilt. They need only connection.
This logic makes solidarity itself dangerous. What binds people to one another—love, kinship, faith, compassion—becomes evidence against them.
We are already seeing it in practice. Arizona volunteers charged for leaving water in the desert. Texas laws making it a felony to drive undocumented neighbors to church. In Florida, vehicles parked near churches or immigrant-serving sites were scanned and flagged by law enforcement using surveillance data accessible to ICE. The ordinary acts of care that sustain community are reclassified as crimes. The message is unmistakable: Kindness itself can put you on the list.
These are not outliers. They are the system. Piece by piece, the fragments form a net.
A Net Cast Over Millions
Public debate still circles around the figure of “11 million undocumented.” But that number is a mirage. The government’s own statistics show a pool of vulnerability far larger.
In fiscal year 2023, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported nearly 400,000 visa overstays. US Citizenship and Immigration Services lists 1.1 million people on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and another 525,000 enrolled in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DHS reports show more than 530,000 parolees admitted from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Executive Office for Immigration Review and Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data confirm over 2 million asylum cases pending and 3.7 million in active removal proceedings. To this must be added parolees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, more than 200,000 new foreign F-1 student visa recipients each year, and several hundred thousand seasonal or temporary workers.
The risk is not only to millions already vulnerable. It is to every one of us, to the very possibility of a society that remembers, that dissents, that refuses to be silent.
Taken together, these categories already exceed 22 million people potentially at risk. And that does not include the at least 4.4 million US-born children in mixed-status households, whose futures hinge on their parents’ deportability.
This is not just a pool of migrants. It is a blueprint: proof of how entire populations can be flagged, managed, and erased.
Most chilling of all, many of these groups—DACA recipients, TPS holders, parolees—were once granted provisional protection. Their status was designed to provide safety, but now those same categories function as easily revoked permissions. What was once stability has become a list. What was once recognition has become a trap.
Quiet Files, Loud Fear
The system works on two levels at once, and the tension is intentional.
It is quiet, bureaucratic, relentless. Arrest. Transfer. Conceal. Data-matched names pulled into custody. People erased without a headline.
It is also loud, theatrical, meant to frighten. Guard patrols in DC. Raids at food pantries and churches. And in the Florida Everglades, a detention complex nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” built in just over a week on an abandoned airstrip. With 200 cameras, miles of barbed wire, and capacity for thousands, the camp was raised almost overnight and showcased as proof of federal resolve. It was not only a camp. It was a message: that human beings can be caged faster than homes can be built. The spectacle was the point: Not only could the government erase, it could do so at speed, in full view.
These displays are not mistakes. They are signals, designed to spread fear.
The precedent is clear. Nazi Germany paired hidden registries with public raids. Bureaucracy made atrocity look like procedure. Spectacle made fear look like power.
The result is devastating. Efficiency makes absence seem administrative. Spectacle makes fear seem permanent. One normalizes disappearance. The other normalizes submission. Like two sides of a coin, the system flips back and forth, but the outcome is always the same.
We’ve Seen This Logic Before
Nazi Germany balanced quiet registries and files with public terror. The paperwork processed millions. The raids displayed the strength of the state.
The parallels here are structural, not identical. Then it was racial laws and household registries; now it is DMV databases and predictive analytics. Then it was cattle cars; now it is charter flights. Then it was propaganda films; now it is press conferences and televised ICE raids.
The point is not to equate outcomes, but to recognize how bureaucracy and spectacle normalize atrocity in slow motion. In Germany, disappearance was accepted because it looked like order—files, trains, uniforms, procedure. The danger now is the same logic in digital form. When arrests are by algorithm, when transfers vanish into databases, when detention is described as “routine,” absence can be made to feel like administration instead of atrocity.
Ordinary Germans tolerated disappearance because it looked like order. That is precisely the risk now: authoritarian disappearance creeping forward one administrative step at a time, while the public is told everything remains under control.
It Starts with Them. It Ends with Us.
What begins with immigrants does not end there. Once a disappearance machine exists, its reach expands outward.
The list is already long: undocumented residents, visa overstays, TPS and DACA recipients, parolees, asylum seekers. Around them ripple aid workers, clergy, family members, volunteers, neighbors. Association is enough.
And the warning is clear: If there is a list, there are many. No one’s record is spotless. To be added requires only an electronic click, a database match, a fragment of data. Protest and your photo may be flagged. Write and your words may be logged. Share a home or a meal, and your act may become evidence. The logic is merciless: No category is safe, no community beyond reach. It does not stop at the border. It does not stop at citizenship.
Nowhere to Send Them, Nowhere to Hide
Two hundred detention sites are already locked into contracts. Offshore deals with countries such as Rwanda and El Salvador, and negotiations with many others, are ongoing. Daily arrests now number over a thousand, with internal targets aiming for 3,000 or more. A deportation system scaled for millions now exists, but the government has offered no clear plan for where those millions would go.
History warns what happens when removal outpaces destination. Nazi Germany built camps faster than authorities could decide what to do with those inside. Bureaucracy outran policy, and atrocity followed. The United States is not there yet, but it is building a machinery of disappearance faster than it can credibly process.
When numbers overwhelm the system, detention becomes indefinite. The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch have documented cases in which migrants were kept in prolonged detention without legal basis, sometimes without access to lawyers or family, effectively leaving them with no country of return or lawful destination. Congressional Research Service reports flag the capacity gap. In practice, that means expanded camps, more offshore transfers, and prolonged detention for those who cannot be removed.
The time to act is not when the machine is finished. It is now, while it is still assembling.
The danger is that a system built in the name of immigration control becomes one of social control. People are held not because they will be deported tomorrow, but because their absence today serves the machine. This is not immigration enforcement. It is the architecture of social control. Giorgio Agamben called this the creation of “bare life”: existence reduced to custody and stripped of political standing. As Hannah Arendt warned, the first loss is political: lose the “right to have rights,” and a “rule by Nobody” normalizes erasure from public life.
What cannot be done is to pretend this is merely immigration policy. What should not be done is to accept disappearance in any form as ordinary. What can still be done is to name the system for what it is, to resist normalization, and to defend the human ties that the machine seeks to criminalize.
The risk is not only to millions already vulnerable. It is to every one of us, to the very possibility of a society that remembers, that dissents, that refuses to be silent.
Before It’s Too Late to Speak
What once seemed unimaginable is quickly becoming routine. Daily arrests in the thousands. Troops on city streets. Contracts that turn human beings into commodities. Each day the machine expands. Each day Americans adjust, telling themselves it is not their concern.
But immigration is not the endgame. It is the cover story. Behind it, a larger project advances. The same AI-powered system that is designed to erase millions will erase dissent. The same silence that excuses raids will excuse repression.
This is how atrocity is normalized: not with sudden rupture, but with forms, files, and procedures that look ordinary until it is too late to resist them. History shows how absence can be made to feel like order, and how silence can become institutional.
The time to act is not when the machine is finished. It is now, while it is still assembling. Before the erasure of those targeted becomes irreversible. Before mass erasure becomes routine. History will not care about our excuses. It will remember our silence as complicity. It will ask not whether we knew, but whether we spoke.
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Trump's Gestapo-Style Raids Mimic Nazi Dictatorship Playbook
As with Trump’s march to autocratic power, the parallels with Hitler and Nazi Germany are unmistakable and should be chilling to everyone.
Aug 25, 2025
In April, Jesús Escalona Mújicas, a 48-year-old construction worker near Bryan, Texas was grabbed, detained, and ultimately deported in shackles to Venezuela under false charges that he was a member of the Tren de Aragua gang.
His story was detailed last week by the Texas Observer. He’d worked for the same employer, a Venezuelan Pepsi affiliate, for nearly two decades, and had no criminal history or record of gang activity. They claimed his Air Jordans—a brand 24 percent of sneaker wearers in the U.S. reportedly own—were a symbol of gang membership.
Federal agents in President Donald Trump’s high profile military occupation of Washington, DC are zeroing in on food delivery drivers, many of them on mopeds, making them easy targets for abduction, the Washington Post reports. Gabriel Ravelo Torrealba, 22, needed hospital treatment for hand and leg injuries inflicted in his arrest. Christian Carías Torres, shot with a stun gun during his arrest, was branded a “suspected gang member,” an allegation, the Post noted, “the Trump administration has repeatedly used without providing evidence.”
Those rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal policing agencies are far from the “worst of the worst” boasted by Trump in his campaign mass deportation pledge. ICE’s own data shows 72 percent of those detained “have no known criminal convictions or pending criminal charges,” as Fortune magazine conceded in July.
To meet his arbitrary quota of seizures, deportation fanatic Stephen Miller scuttled any emphasis on the “worst” by racially profiling ordinary working people at Home Deport parking lots, farms, other work sites, and outside court hearings they’d attended to meet legal obligations. Numerous legal immigrants and even citizens continue to be grabbed. “The President does not want to see Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, or Venezuelans here,” Escalona Mújicas said one of his arresting agents told him.
Similarly, in the DC operation, ICE and other federal agents are avoiding “the city’s high-crime areas,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote this week. “There are soldiers patrolling the National Mall; armored vehicles parked at Union Station; and ICE agents manning checkpoints on U Street, an area known for its bars, restaurants, and nightlife. They’re not there for safety, but for show.”
“If Trump is genuinely concerned about the safety of DC residents, I would see National Guard in my neighborhood. I’m not seeing it, and I don’t expect to see it,” one resident of DC’s Congress Heights neighborhood told Times reporter Clyde McGrady. “I don’t think Trump is bringing in the National Guard to protect Black babies in Southeast.”
Corollary consequences for the Gestapo-style raids and domestic military campaigns extend to the distortion of federal budget priorities. The DC occupation alone is costing $1 million a day, according to an analysis by Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project.
One less publicized provision of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” was the gift of $75 billion in extra funding for ICE, “making it by far the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government,” CBS News reported.
National Nurses United researchers found far more useful ways to allocate that funding rather than on terrorizing immigrant families and communities. For the same $75 billion, we could eradicate all medical debt accrued by 31 million people, cover over two years of universal pre-K for all 3 and 4 year olds in the US, pay for nearly all tuition and fees for students in public universities across the U.S., and substantially reduce the costs of child poverty in the nation or most of the homeless crisis in California. The same amount could also end both extreme and chronic hunger around the world for two years.
The militarization has a deeper, malevolent purpose, wrote Monica Potts in The New Republic this week. “Trump isn’t actually worried about crime. He’s not trying to make the district safer for its residents, and he’s certainly not weighing the data and evidence when he calls on governors to send guardsmen. Parading troops through an American city is a brazen authoritarian power grab.”
"There is not a crime crisis in D.C.," former DC Metropolitan reserve police officer Rosa Brooks who now teaches at Georgetown Law School told NPR, which reiterated Justice Department data that crime in Washington has plummeted with violence reaching a 30-year low last year. "This is police state territory, banana republic police state territory," Brooks said.
“This is what it means to learn to live in an authoritarian police state, and people are using the only tools they have: cell phones and sandwiches," notes Potts. “The longer ICE raids and military takeovers go on, the more they will inspire protests around the country, which may be the only excuse Trump is waiting for to claim that cities are full of disorder and then crack down even harder.”
Trump says he is targeting Chicago and New York next for his next Democratic majority-city occupations. He may also have in mind “an intimidation tactic to try to suppress voters in cities ahead of the 2026 midterm,” Potts observes. “It’s definitely part of Trump’s only true and unwavering project: consolidating power (Italics added). Even as he’s posting on Truth Social about crime in D.C., he’s cheering efforts in Texas to redraw district maps to elect more Republicans to the House next year and launching an effort to get rid of mail-in ballots.”
As with Trump’s march to autocratic power, the parallels with Hitler and Nazi Germany are unmistakable and should be chilling to everyone. Within two months of being handed power by the conservative old guard Weimar Republic in January 1933, Hitler made two major moves, as Peter Fritzsche describes in Hitler’s First Hundred Days.
First, he persuaded his conservative coalition partners to call for new elections by early March. Then, the Nazis engineered or at least exploited a fire in the Reichstag in late February, Germany’s Capitol building, to invoke emergency decrees. They served, Fritzsche notes, to “suspend civil liberties, expand protective custody” and other authoritarian powers that “symbolized the death of representative government and the rule of law.” It also gave the Nazis the opening to complete a takeover of German policing to engage in arrests, detention, and violent assaults on all political opposition.
Coupled with the election, in which the Nazis increased their political power through domination of the media, mobilization of state resources, demonization of their version of “enemies from within” (mainly Jews and Communists), and the traumatizing impact of an increased militarization, Hitler and the Nazis had the means to manufacture mass consent, silence dissent, and cement fascist rule.
Potts is unimpressed with much of the Democratic Party leadership response. She cites Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s dismissal of Trump’s takeover of DC as a “political ploy” and an “attempted distraction” from problems like the tariffs and Epstein files. But, she emphasizes, “the federal agents and troops are not the distraction. They are the whole point—quite literally the spear in Trump’s increasingly fascist assault on American democracy.”
Democratic leaders, Potts added on the Daily Blast podcast with Greg Sargent, “should start calling things like they see them and they should say, you’re not coming to our cities, you’re not coming to our towns with the military, you’re not going to turn this country into a dictatorship. The idea that there’s still time is really critical. And voters like it when elected leaders fight for them.”
That is the immediate challenge we face with Trump and Trumpism today.
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