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nazi germany
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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