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'Don't Stream Fascism': ICE Recruitment Ads Spark Calls to Cancel Spotify Subscriptions
"A platform built to connect creators and listeners is helping an authoritarian regime build up its secret police force," said Indivisible.
Oct 28, 2025
Outrage over Spotify running advertisements for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement ramped up on Tuesday, with the progressive advocacy group Indivisible urging users to cancel their subscriptions until the ICE ads are removed, engage in peaceful protests outside the streaming giant's offices and events, and call on artists to boycott the platform.
Aiming to deliver on President Donald Trump's campaign promise of mass deportations, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) this summer launched an ICE recruitment campaign, with incentives including a $50,000 signing bonus, student loan repayment and forgiveness options, enhanced retirement benefits, and more.
With 276 million subscribers and 696 million monthly active users last quarter, Spotify is the world's largest streaming service. Earlier this month, a Spotify spokesperson told The Indepedent that the ads encouraging listeners to "join the mission to protect America" and "fulfill your mission" by applying to become an ICE agent do not violate the company's advertising policies.
The spokesperson added that the ads are "part of a broad campaign the US government is running across television, streaming, and online channels."
The British outlet noted that "they mirror similar advertising that has been seen on cable television, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Meta," and subscribers to ESPN, HBO Max, Hulu, and Pandora have also complained of encountering ICE ads.
As Trump's anti-migrant rampage continued in Chicago and other cities across the country on Tuesday, Indivisible sent out an email with the subject line: "Don't stream fascism. Cancel Spotify."
Spotify is now running ICE recruitment ads. We asked them to stop. They ignored us. Let's show them what we showed Disney. No Kings, No Collaborators, No Capitulators. indivisible.org/cancel-spotify
[image or embed]
— Ezra Levin ❌👑 (@ezralevin.bsky.social) October 28, 2025 at 5:24 PM
"Spotify is running ads recruiting agents for ICE," the email says. "Let that sink in. A platform built to connect creators and listeners is helping an authoritarian regime build up its secret police force. They're choosing complicity over the artists, podcasters, and fans who make Spotify what it is—and when users and musicians called them out, Spotify's first act was doubling down."
"But we're not going to idly accept that. We're going to make them listen," the email continues, pointing to the boycott of Disney in September, after the Trump administration's bullying briefly got Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show yanked off of ABC.
Indivisible also published a video tutorial for canceling a Spotify premium account and a webpage with its demands for the company's founder and chief executive, Daniel Ek, as well as incoming co-CEOs Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström:
- Immediately terminate all ICE and DHS advertising contracts with Spotify;
- Spotify must update its advertising policy to prohibit government propaganda and hate-based recruitment campaigns; and
- Spotify must commit to defending civil rights and standing up for communities under threat from authoritarian actions.
As for Spotify users who cancel their accounts and peaceful protesters, Indivisible is calling on them to promote their actions on social media with the hashtags #CancelSpotify, #DontStreamFascism, and #StopICEAds.
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Americans Don't Want a King, But We May Be Getting One Anyway
We’re not quite a year into Donald Trump’s second term in office. Under the circumstances, three more years could prove a long, long time for him and his crew to perhaps even literally crown him as the first American king.
Oct 27, 2025
Yes, in the ever more ominously unsettled (dis-)United States of Donald J. Trump, I recently went to the “hate America” rally in New York City. Or at least that’s what Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson insisted it was. Who knew that so unbelievably many Americans, millions of us across the United States, would “hate” this country enough to go out and march in the recent No Kings demonstrations, even in places where we might have feared being in distinct danger from the troops of “our” president?
In the days before the latest No Kings demonstrations, no matter whom I talked to or where they lived, they seemed to be planning to go to their local version of that march or rally. My neighbors, other city people, suburbanites, even friends living in the countryside. And despite the people I knew who had marched in the first round of No Kings rallies, as I did, that wasn’t true then. This time, just about everybody turned out, or so it seemed!
Oh, wait! I suddenly thought of someone who wasn’t there. Oops, let me take that back. He was there, he just didn’t know it. He was on sign after sign after sign, doing this, doing that, doing the inconceivable—or do I mean, sadly enough, the all-too-conceivable?
Take this one that I copied down, for example:
“Tyrant
Rapist
Usurper
Madman
Pedophile”
And I’m sure you know just what the first letters of those five words spell out!
“Only Butterflies Should Become Monarchs”
For me, that march began not at 50th Street and Seventh Avenue where I came out of the subway, but at the subway platform uptown where I was waiting to get on a train to the march. I suddenly noticed that the elderly woman (and I say that advisedly as an elderly man) standing next to me was carrying a handmade sign—the first of literally thousands I would see that day—that said, “No dictators, no kings” and, when I asked her about it, she promptly replied, “I would have called Trump a cunt, but he lacks the depth and warmth.”
I finally made it off that subway train with literally hundreds of other soon-to-be protesters and ever so slowly managed to make my way up the packed stairs onto an instantly packed Seventh Avenue at the edge of New York’s Times Square. At least as far as I could tell, President Trump wasn’t there himself, preparing to march down Seventh Avenue in his old hometown of New York City with staggering numbers of other New Yorkers and me. News reports, based on police estimates, suggested that “more than 100,000” of us in my hometown and “nearly 7 million” Americans in “more than 2,700” demonstrations nationwide actively protested—and when it comes to anti-Trump demonstrations, those doing the figures never exaggerate but almost invariably underestimate. (All I can tell you is that it was a stunning vista, with protesters, unbelievable numbers of whom carried homemade signs, literally packing the streets in a rally that would stretch from 47th Street to 14th Street with no space to spare.)
Despite what Donald Trump may think, this is no longer his America in a country where a genuine majority of us “disapprove” of him in the latest polls and—best guess—more of us will do so in the months to come.
And yet, though he wasn’t in New York that day, it isn’t that Donald Trump never appears anywhere. In fact, only the previous Saturday, I’d actually (almost) seen him. I was visiting an old friend in Washington, DC, and we were taking a walk along a canal that leads to the Potomac River when suddenly we came upon a man with an elaborate camera on a stand and began chatting. He was, it turned out, working for a TV news network and his camera was pointed at an extended grassy area across the Potomac, which, he told us, was a golf course. At that very moment, it seemed, America’s king—oops, sorry, Donald Trump—was evidently playing a round of golf there and the cameraman was waiting for him to make it to the seventh hole, which, he said, was right where we were then looking.
Hey, and it was a relief to know that Donald Trump, just two years younger than me, was outdoors, too. As it happens, in my 81-plus years on this planet, I’ve only been on a golf course once in my life. Still, on that recent trip, I was indeed nearly in the presence of “our” president who, on the weekend of the No Kings demonstrations, was at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for a $1 million-a-plate dinner and undoubtedly playing golf again. And on that more recent Saturday, when I took that long walk (or, in terms of pacing, more like a crawl) down Seventh Avenue in his former hometown, from 47th street to 14th street, with—or so it seemed to me—a trillion other New Yorkers, I felt as if I were again in “his” presence, given all the fantastic handmade signs people were carrying, which said things like: “Only butterflies should become Monarchs” (with, of course, an image of the president on it).
Or how about the two women in those dinosaur costumes with signs that said: “Eat the Tyrant,” “Eat the Oligarchs”? Or the poster that said “King of Fools” or, for that matter, the one that had “Kings belong in fairy tales, not government” scrawled on it. And here are just a few of the others I scribbled down (something I could have done steadily for hours without ever coming close to copying them all): “Hey, Donald! George called and he’s pissed” (with an image of George Washington); “Keep your tiny hands off our Constitution” (with two tiny hands sketched on the sign); “No crowns for clowns” (with a drawing of Trump with a crown flipping off his head); and there were endless signs that had yellow king’s crowns with lines slashed through them. Or what about “King of Fools”? There were also a remarkable number with swastikas on them, while the phrase “the Turd Reich” was distinctly popular.
And don’t forget the woman carrying a sign that read, “The Pilgrims were undocumented.” Then there was that little girl with a handmade sign of her own that said, “The President shouldn’t bully,” while her mother carried one reading, “May I please remind you that it does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty.” Oh, and don’t forget “Grab ’em by the Epstein files”; “No Kings since 1776”; “Put Trump on ICE” (or “I prefer my ICE crushed” or “Fight climate change, send ICE to Antarctica”); “The American revolution was the first No Kings rally!!”; “We don’t bow to billionaires”; “No Fuhrers!” (with a swastika crossed out); and from a white man of a certain age, “My Dad Fought Fascism, too!” (And yes, I asked, and his father, like mine, did indeed fight in the Second World War.)
And then there was a Hispanic protester carrying a sign that said (movingly), “I’m using my one Saturday off to be here. #No Kings.” And don’t forget that image of an umbrella with the words, “I can’t stand the reign.”
Mind you, since more or less every other person was carrying a sign of some sort, there were literally thousands more of them, mostly handmade. Meanwhile, as we walked, chants like “No KKK, No Fascist USA, No ICE!,” “This is what Democracy looks like!,” “What do we want? Trump out! When do we want it? Now!” rang out constantly.
The march was so big that, when I finally made it to 14th Street, my son, who had come to the rally later than me, was still at 42nd Street on a wide avenue still utterly packed with marchers. And consider all of this, nationwide, a reminder that, despite what Donald Trump may think, this is no longer his America in a country where a genuine majority of us “disapprove” of him in the latest polls and—best guess—more of us will do so in the months to come.
King Trump?
Sadly, as many of the signs at that rally suggested, this country seems to have a future that’s anything but bright, however low the president’s approval ratings may sink. (They’ve more or less leveled off for now, but don’t expect that to last.) And yes, he clearly does have the urge, whatever Americans may or may not approve of, to rule as the equivalent of a king. He and his key officials have already taken a significant amount of power away from Congress and, worse yet, he’s been itching to use the US military, the National Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, however haphazardly, in cities with Democratic mayors whom he obviously dislikes. And that’s something, if it finally happens, that no American since the Civil War has ever had to experience. Of course, he’s already asked the Supreme Court to permit him to federalize state National Guard troops and send them into Democratic cities to support his immigration enforcement and mass deportation plans.
While it’s all still experimental (if such a word can even be used for it), from the Caribbean Sea to Chicago, President Trump and his crew seem intent on militarizing and—if such a word can even be created—authoritarianizing the world he (more or less) rules over. Certainly, immigration raids are growing ever more militarized with, in one recent case, masked US law enforcement agents armed with rifles “rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter and swarming [a] 130-unit building in Chicago.” As that city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, would say afterward, “This raid wasn’t about public safety. It was certainly not about immigration. This was about a show of authoritarianism, a forceful display of tyranny.”
How long before such AI-generated fake videos might indeed become an eerie Trump- and Vance-generated version of reality?
And mind you, we’re not quite a year into Donald Trump’s second term in office. Under the circumstances, three more years could prove a long, long time for him and his crew to be able to do their damnedest, or perhaps even literally crown him as the first American king. After all, back in February, he had already posted an image of himself at Truth Social with a king’s crown on. Only recently (and all too ominously), in response to the No Kings demonstrations, he posted a fake AI video of himself wearing a king’s crown and flying a fighter plane (with “King Trump” emblazoned on it) over what’s probably Times Square in New York City filled with protesters and dropping what’s clearly a bomb-load of literal crap on them. Soon after that, he reposted another AI-generated video that Vice President JD Vance had put up (with the song “Hail to the King” by the heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold in the background). In it, he crowns himself and then unsheathes a sword, while those in front of him, including former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, go down on their knees and bow their heads to him.
So much for No Kings.
The question, of course, is: How long before such AI-generated fake videos might indeed become an eerie Trump- and Vance-generated version of reality? After all, in the wake of the recent congressional shutdown, we’ve found ourselves in a political world in which Congress functionally no longer seems to exist.
In some sense, everything is now being Trumped (or perhaps that should be put in capital letters: TRUMPED). It will certainly be (ominously) interesting to see just how long he can both trample on and Trumple on the American people.
Think of him as golfing while Rome burns.
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We Need Political Atheists in the Age of Trump—and Beyond
To win the country back is a good thing, but to keep it is difficult, and so we need the sentiment of political atheists who refuse to bow and demand that we refuse also.
Oct 27, 2025
Recently a friend was asked, "What church do you go?" to which he replied he was an atheist. I heard his response and was left contemplating what does that mean today and in this historical moment. What did his declaration have to do with what we were doing on Saturday mornings on a street in Washington, DC educating and asking people to join the economic boycott against the Target corporation?
Target was one of the first companies to announce a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative after the police murder of George Floyd. Target, being a Minneapolis-based corporation, evidently felt that it had a special responsibility to lead the country in terms of addressing racial injustice. This was until President Donald Trump came to office. Target was one of the first companies to bend its knee at the altar of the wannabe emperor, Donald Trump. Trump's attacks and demands on corporations and other entities to jettison DEI programs served as a litmus test of loyalty and patriotism. Nearly all of the other companies followed suit prostrating themselves before the gods of greed and political accommodation.
This is how dictatorial regimes work. They invent ways to distinguish the "believers" from the "non-believers," the trusted from those who cannot be trusted. Therefore, when my friend asserted boldly, proudly, and loudly that he was an atheist I was left to make a historical connection with what that meant in this heated political moment, and also what did that mean to me—a church person most of my life. "I am an atheist," he asserted, and that caused me to wonder what does that have to do with us boycotting Target these many months, and whether there was a historical correlation between what he was declaring and what we were doing?
After some time, I turned to my friend reflecting upon the history of the term atheist, and I shared that the term atheist was used in the first century CE to label and castigate those who would not participate in emperor worship or the trappings of all of the other Roman gods and goddesses. An atheist was a person that did not worship Caesar. The Caesars were generally deified, and the worship of Caesar and all of the Roman array of deities served as a test of loyalty. Those who fell into line and worshiped Caesar were loyal and patriotic, and those who resisted the test were seen as a threat. Early Christians were generally labelled atheists because they refused to worship the things of Caesar, and they generally resisted the Roman social order. It is rumored that John who wrote the letter Revelation, not the John of the gospel, was exiled to the Isle of Patmos for his refusal to "Hail Caesar" or worship all of the other trappings of the Roman order. I reminded my friend that he was standing in a time and place where his declaration, "I am an atheist" could mean something more than the fact that he did not believe in God. Without him even knowing, he was declaring the same sentiments that were stated in the first century that separated the believers from the non-believers. The non-believers refused to accept the false gods, deities of human making, and the trapping of those gods for the sake of money, position, and power.
Without honest critique and cynicism coming from non-believers not seduced by the Democrat-Republican beauty contest, or the quixotic notions of an independent candidate, we will find ourselves in this predicament again.
Given those historical facts it made sense as to why we were on the street in front of a Target store boycotting the business and urging others to do the same. We were doing historically what the atheists of the first century did, challenging the acquiesce to power and governments, and the business entities and people that have surrendered their dignity to satisfy the gluttonous appetite of a king. We have been demanding that Target and other corporations stop genuflecting at the throne of Caesar.
So, I was ecstatic over the "No Kings" rallies and marches held across the country. I could smell an aroma of atheism in the crowds. The marches declared that in America there are "No Kings," no Caesars, and no emperors. The marches confronted king Trump with the fact that people were not bowing or honoring the trappings of this Caesar-King. The marches across the country and in some cities overseas were a statement that for this moment some people were not bowing before this king. But even with the celebrations of the numbers of people and cities responding to the "No Kings" sentiment there were fears and perils that became apparent at least for me. I began to worry what would happen after the marches were over? What would happen after this administration is driven out and its power has faded? Will people bow before a new king—one of their liking?
This is why we need seasoned and committed political atheists who will demand that we not be seduced into the courtyards of this king or any new king. Democracy is fragile, and people can easily be fooled by the charms of charlatans. We need political atheists with their cynicism to shock us by reminding us not to be seduced in any way or any season by any king. Without honest critique and cynicism coming from non-believers not seduced by the Democrat-Republican beauty contest, or the quixotic notions of an independent candidate, we will find ourselves in this predicament again. We need our political atheist who will sound the alarm of the dangers of a king lest we become beguiled and seduced again by the flash and form of a new snake-oil dealer. We will have to march and march, demonstrate and demonstrate to hold on to our country. The demagogues and charlatans, like the people currently in the White House and administration, as well as the would-be kings of our liking, know how easily the country can be hijacked.
The average American citizen is a cultural believer worshiping the myths of goodness and benevolence, believing that it will do the right thing if the right king is at the helm. And, after the right person gets in, we can go back home and allow the "good" king to do the good things for us. We generally have placed our trust in the goodness of the American structures, but glaring before us is the reality that Congress and the Supreme Court as our protectors may not be the case. We have just seen how Congress and the Supreme Court can also prostrate themselves at the altar of political expediency. The political atheists however call us to be cynical, remain alert, remain in the streets, protest even when so-called "Good Kings" fill the so-called "Good Structures" of democracy, and to march on the king even when we like the king, but never again to prostrate ourselves before the throne of political satisfaction. To win the country back is a good thing, but to keep it is difficult, and so we need the sentiment of political atheists who refuse to bow and demand that we refuse also.
My friend caused me to appreciate the atheism that does not believe, that doubts, that questions, and does not fall into line. That is an important political posture to have at all times. The Christians of the first century were called atheists and were considered subversives because they did not salute the emperor or the emperor's men, but pushed toward a higher order, and so must we. But this is our calling not only today as we challenge and resist emperor Trump, but in all political seasons, and with all people aspiring to be king.
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