The Machinery of Terror

 

The Machinery of Terror The Trump administration is consolidating the familiar machinery of terror of all authoritarian states. We must resist now. If we wait, it will be too late. The Missing Link - by Mr. Fish I have seen the masked goons who terrorize our streets before. I saw them during the “Dirty War” in Argentina, where 30,000 men, women and children were “disappeared” by the military junta. Victims were held in secret prisons, savagely tortured and murdered. To this day, many families do not know the fate of their loved ones. I saw them in El Salvador, when death squads were killing 800 people a month. I saw them in Guatemala under the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt. I saw them in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I saw them in Iran under the rule of the ayatollahs where I was arrested and jailed twice and once deported in handcuffs. I saw them in Hafez al-Assad’s Syria. I saw them in Bosnia, where Muslims were herded into concentration camps, executed and buried in mass graves. I know these goons. I have been a prisoner in their jails and spent hours in their interrogation rooms. I have been beaten by them. I have been deported, and in several cases banned, from their countries. I know what is coming. Terror is the engine that empowers dictatorships. It eliminates dissidents. It silences critics. It dismantles the law. It creates a society of timid and frightened collaborators, those who look away when people are snatched off streets or gunned down, those who inform to save themselves, those who retreat into their tiny rabbit holes, pulling down the blinds, desperately praying to be left in peace. Terror works. The iron doors have not yet shut. There are still protests. The media is still able to document state atrocities, including the Jan. 7 murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross. But the doors are closing fast. ICE has deported over 300,000 people and detained nearly 69,000 others — as well as been involved in 16 shootings, including four killings — since Trump began his campaign against immigrants. ICE, our Americanized Gestapo, is being birthed. A bloody airbag seen where Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. (Photo by Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images) Resistance must be collective. We must assert not only our individual rights, but economic, social and political rights — without them we are powerless. Resistance means organizing to disrupt the machinery of commerce and government. It means preventing arrests by patrolling neighborhoods to warn of impending ICE raids. It means protesting outside detention facilities. It means strikes. It means blocking streets and highways and occupying buildings. It means providing photographic evidence. It means sustained pressure on local politicians and police to refuse to cooperate with ICE. It means providing legal representation, food and financial assistance to families with members detained. It means a willingness to be arrested. It means a nationwide campaign to defy the state’s inhumanity. If we fail, the dimming flames of our open society will be snuffed out. Authoritarian states are constructed incrementally. No dictatorship advertises its plan to extinguish civil liberties. It pays lip service to liberty and justice as it dismantles the institutions and laws that make liberty and justice possible. Opponents of the regime, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist. They throw up temporary roadblocks, but they are soon purged. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago” notes that the consolidation of Soviet tyranny “was stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed.” He called the process “a grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now.” “What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?” Solzhenitsyn asks. “Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!” Czesław Miłosz, in “The Captive Mind,” also documents the creep of tyranny, how it advances stealthily, until intellectuals are not only forced to repeat the regime’s self-adulating slogans but, as our leading universities did when they caved to false allegations of being bastions of antisemitism, embrace its absurdism. Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes a population — often unconsciously — conform outwardly and inwardly. It conditions citizens to relate to those around them with suspicion and distrust. It destroys the solidarity vital to organizing, community and dissent. The historian Robert Gellately, in his book “Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany,” argues that state terror in Nazi Germany was effective not because of omnipresent state surveillance, but because it fostered a “culture of denunciation.” Rat out your neighbors and coworkers and survive. If you see something, say something. The worse it gets, the more established institutions, desperate to survive, silence those who warn us. “Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people emerges, people who are that and nothing more,” Solzhenitsyn writes of those who see what is coming. “And how they were laughed at! How they were mocked!” The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, whose early warnings about the rise of fascism were largely dismissed, and who told fellow intellectuals to stop naively appealing to “the remains of a European conscience,” saw his books tossed into the bonfires in the spring of 1933 during the Nazi book burnings. So far, we have not burned books, but have banned nearly 23,000 titles in public schools since 2021. The authoritarian state cannibalizes the institutions that foolishly aid and abet the witch hunts. It replaces them with pseudo-institutions populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts, pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-citizens. Columbia University is a shining example of this willful self-immolation. Nothing is as it is presented. There are increasing numbers of violent kidnappings by masked ICE agents in unmarked cars on our city streets. People are ripped from their vehicles and beaten. They are arrested outside schools and day care centers. They are raided at work, thrown onto the floor, handcuffed, driven away in vans and shipped off to concentration camps in countries such as El Salvador. They are seized when they appear at court for a green card application or interview to finalize a visa. Once detained, they disappear into the labyrinth of over 200 detention centers, where they are moved from one facility to the next to hide them from family, lawyers and the courts. Due process, once a constitutional right afforded to everyone in the United States, no longer exists. “Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.” The FBI, in an example of how justice is perverted, refuses to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies in Minneapolis, blocking access to any evidence that would allow them to file criminal charges against Jonathan Ross. Killing of unarmed citizens by the state is carried out with impunity. ICE has more than doubled the size of its force since early 2025 — to 22,000 agents — hiring 12,000 new officers in four months from a pool of 220,000 applicants. It plans to spend $100 million over a one-year period to hire even more recruits, part of the $170 billion for border and interior enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE, to be spent over four years. Salaries for these new recruits, poorly trained and often haphazardly vetted, will range from $49,739 to $89,528 a year, along with a $50,000 signing bonus — split over three years — and up to $60,000 in student loan repayments. ICE is building new detention centers nationwide in 23 towns and cities. It promises that once it is fully operational, it will go door-to-door as part of the largest deportation effort in American history. ICE agents, intoxicated by the license to kick down doors while wearing body armor and firing automatic weapons at terrified women and children, are not warriors as they imagine, but thugs. They have few skills, other than weapons training, cruelty and brutality. They intend to remain employed by the state. The state intends to keep them employed. None of this should surprise us. The repressive techniques used by ICE and our militarized police were perfected overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Occupied Palestine, and earlier in Vietnam. The ICE agent who murdered Good was a machinegunner in Iraq. A night raid in Chicago, with agents rappelling from a helicopter to storm an apartment complex filled with terrified families, does not look any different from a night raid in Fallujah. Aimé Césaire, the Martinician playwright and politician, in “Discourse on Colonialism” writes that the savage tools of imperialism and colonialism eventually migrate back to the home country. It is known as imperial boomerang. Césaire writes: And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack. During the interregnum between the last gasps of a democracy and the emergence of a dictatorship, the nation is gaslighted. It is told the rule of law is respected. It is told democratic rule is inviolate. These lies mollify those being frog-marched into their own enslavement. “The majority sit quietly and dare to hope,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!” Maybe, the fearful say, Trump and his minions are only being bombastic. Maybe they don’t mean it. Maybe they are incompetent. Maybe the courts will save us. Maybe the next elections will end this nightmare. Maybe there are limits to extremism. Maybe the worst is over. These self-delusions prevent us from resisting while the gallows are being constructed in front of us. Authoritarian states start by targeting the most vulnerable, those most easily demonized — the undocumented, students on college campuses who protest genocide, antifa, the so-called “radical left,” Muslims, poor people of color, intellectuals and liberals. They strike down one group after the next. They blow out, one by one, the long row of candles until we find ourselves in the dark, powerless and alone. Share The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The man who saved 740 children

 

             

When 740 children would have died at sea, and every country said "no," one man—who had reason to remain silent—said "yes."         

The year was 1942. The ship drifted in the Arabian Sea, like a floating coffin. There were 740 Polish children on board. Orphans. Survivors of Soviet labor camps, where their parents had died of the flu or starvation. They had escaped through Iran, but a more terrible punishment awaited them.

No one would accept them. The British Empire—the most powerful power of its time—refused entry to port after port along the Indian coast. "It's not our responsibility. Sail away." Almost finished with food. No medicine. Time was running out. Twelve-year-old Maria held her six-year-old brother's hand. She had promised her dying mother to protect him. But how do you protect someone when the whole world turns on them?

And then news came to the small palace in Gujarat. The ruler was Jam Sahib Digvijay Singhji, Maharaja of Navanagar. In the royal system, he was just a minor prince. The British controlled the ports, trade, and army. He had every reason to obey and remain silent.

When his advisors told him that 740 children were stranded at sea after the British refused to take them to any port in India, he asked one question: "How many children are there?"

"Seven hundred and forty, Your Majesty."

He paused and calmly said: "The British may control my ports. But they do not control my conscience. These children are docked at Navanagarh."

The advisors warned him: "If you challenge the British—"
"So, I will stop. " He sent a message to the ship: You are welcome here.

When British officials protested, the emperor remained firm. "If the strong refuse to save the children," he said. I, the weak, will do what you cannot.

In August 1942, the ship struggled to enter Navanagara harbor under the blazing summer sun.
The children walked like ghosts—exhausted, blank-eyed, many too weak to walk. They had learned to hope for good. Hope had turned dangerous.

The Maharaja was waiting for them on the dock. Dressed simply in white, he knelt down to be at their eye level. Through interpreters, he spoke words they had not heard since their parents died.

"You are no longer orphans. You are my children now. I am your Bapu—your father."
Maria felt her brother's handshake. After months of rejection, these words seemed surreal.
But he was serious. He didn't build a refugee camp. He built a home.

In Balachadi, he created something amazing—a little Poland in India. Polish teachers who understand trauma. Polish food flavored with memory. Polish songs in an Indian garden. A Christmas tree under a tropical sky.

“Suffering tries to erase you,” he said. “But your language, culture, and traditions are sacred. Let's keep them here.”

Children who were told they had no place in the world finally found a home. They laughed again. They played again. They returned to school. Maria watched her brother chase a peacock in the palace garden, and her body remembered again what safety meant.

The emperor used to visit them often. He remembered names. He celebrated birthdays. He watched high school plays. He comforted children crying for parents who would never return. He paid for doctors, teachers, clothing, and food—from his own wealth.

For four years, while the world was torn by war, 740 children lived not as refugees, but as a family. When the war ended and it was time to leave, many wept. Balachadi became the only home they had ever truly known. These children have grown and moved around the world—becoming doctors, teachers, engineers, parents, grandparents. And they have never forgotten.

Warsaw's Good Emperor Square appeared in Poland. Schools bear his name. He was awarded Poland's highest honor.

But the original monument wasn't made of stone. It cost 740 lives. Today, at 80 years old, they still gather. They tell their grandchildren about an Indian king who refused to turn compassion into political calculation.

In 1942, when kingdoms closed their doors, one man—without obligation and with every reason to remain silent—looked at the suffering and said: "They are my children now." And so the world changed—silently, forever, and irrevocably.

Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji Jadeja (September 18, 1895 - February 3, 1966)

Schumer, Jeffries Refuse to Join Democrats’ Growing Calls to Slash ICE Spending

 

The killing of Renee Good by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis this week came as Republicans in Congress were planning to bring a homeland security spending bill to the House floor, deciding on whether the agency that’s surged thousands of armed agents into communities across the country should have increased funding—and progressive lawmakers are demanding that the Democrats use the upcoming government funding deadline to hopefully reduce the department’s ability to wreak further havoc.

“I just don’t understand how we provide votes for a bill that funds the extent of the depravity,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told CNN Thursday. “I know we can’t fix everything in the appropriations bill but we should be looking at ways we can put some commonsense limitations on their ability to bring violence to our cities.”

But the top Democratic leaders, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) both appeared to have little interest in discussing how their party can use the appropriations process as leverage to rein in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies that have taken part in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation operation.

Both Schumer and Jeffries sharply criticized Wednesday’s shooting and the Trump administration’s insistence that, contrary to mounting video evidence, the ICE agent who shot Good was acting in self-defense. But Jeffries said Thursday that he was focused on passing other appropriations bills that were ultimately approved by the House. “We’ll figure out the accountability mechanisms at the appropriate time,” Jeffries told reporters.

With Congress facing a January 30 deadline for approving government spending packages—and with public disapproval of ICE at an all-time high—several lawmakers have said this week that right now is the “appropriate time” to rein in the agency in any way the Democrats can. “Statements and letters are not enough, and the appropriations process and the [continuing resolution] expiring January 31 is our opportunity,” Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) told Axios.

Schumer also refused to say whether the Democrats would use the appropriations process as leverage to cut funding to ICE, whose budget is set to balloon to $170 billion following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year. Republicans will need Democratic support to pass a spending bill in the Senate, where 60 votes are required.

The Senate leader said only that he has “lots of problems with ICE” when asked whether he would support abolishing the agency—a proposal whose support has gone by 20 percentage points among voters in just one year, according to a recent survey. Both leaders also would not commit to slashing the homeland security budget should the Democrats win back majorities in Congress this year.

“It’s hard to be an opposition party when you refuse to oppose the blatantly illegal and immoral things being done by the opposition,” said Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health.

Sharing a clip of Jeffries’ remarks to reporters about the agency’s funding, historian Moshik Temkin said that “people need to understand that at its core ICE is a bipartisan project, increasingly funded and normalized over multiple Democratic administrations and congressional majorities, and a few of them (not this guy) are starting to realize how foolish, weak, and misguided they were.”

Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are among the progressive lawmakers calling on the Democrats to demand reduced funding for ICE—even if it means another government shutdown months after the longest one in US history late last year, which began when the Democrats refused to join the GOP in passing a spending bill that would have allowed Affordable Care Act tax credits to expire. Ultimately, some Senate Democrats caved, and the subsidies lapsed.

“We can’t just keep authorizing money for these illegal killers,” Jayapal told Axios. “That’s what they are, this rogue force.” Ocasio-Cortez told the Independent that Democrats should “absolutely” push to cut funding.

“This Congress, this Republican Congress, while they cut a trillion dollars to Americans’ healthcare, and they exploded the ICE budget to $170 billion making it one of the largest paramilitary forces in the United States with zero accountability as they shoot US citizens in the head—absolutely,” she said.

On the podcast The Majority Report, Emma Vigeland and Sam Seder called on progressive Democrats to demand Schumer’s ouster in light of his refusal to take action to rein in ICE as its violence in American communities escalates.

“Change the news cycle and show that you’ll be an opposition party,” said Vigeland. “Call for his ouster.” Seder added that Schumer “has the ability to wage a fight to prevent the funding of DHS. He has the ability to do that, and he doesn’t want it. He’s running away from any leverage he has, deliberately.”

-Julia Conley, Common Dreams

"Abolish ICE"

Eight years ago, I wrote an article for Slate arguing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was an out-of-control agency that had become a “sinister” and “draconian” force “harassing and detaining people who pose no threat to the United States or its citizens.” 

The American people, I contended, needed “an honest discussion about whether ICE can be effectively reformed or if it must be abolished and replaced by an agency that can carry out its mission in a more effective and humane way.”

Now, however, we are past the point of conversation. In the hands of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, ICE is virtual secret police. Masked and heavily armed, ICE agents are sent to cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis to terrorize immigrant communities and brutalize people who challenge their efforts to stop and detain anyone deemed suspicious. 

To expand its reach, ICE greatly lowered its recruitment standards, effectively enlisting anyone who cares to sign up. To attract new officers, ICE advertises the chance to do violence to people deemed “enemies” of the United States, likening civil immigration enforcement to a war on a dangerous, alien force.

The result is an agency whose agents’ first recourse appears to be violence or the threat of violence. According to The Trace, a newsroom dedicated to reporting on gun violence, immigration agents have opened fire in 16 separate incidents since last June: “At least three people have been shot observing or documenting immigration raids, and five people have been shot while driving away from traffic stops or evading an enforcement action.”

This week, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old resident of Minneapolis. She was sitting in her S.U.V. when agents ran up and demanded she exit the vehicle, pulling on the door in an effort to compel compliance. Soon after, three shots rang out. An analysis of video footage by The Times strongly suggests that Good had been moving away from the agent in question when he fired, killing her and causing the vehicle to crash nearby.

Since then, the Trump administration has been engaged in a relentless effort to tar Good as a dangerous militant who was using her S.U.V. to attack ICE agents, an act of “domestic terrorism,” according to the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem. “This was an attack on law and order, this was an attack on the American people,” said Vice President JD Vance. Good can be seen in a different video telling her eventual killer, “I’m not mad at you dude.”

Immigration enforcement seems to have ramped up its efforts even further in the wake of Good’s death. On Thursday, during an operation in Portland, Ore., Border Patrol agents shot and wounded two people. The administration, as it did with Good, immediately accused the victims of being dangerous threats to the nation.

It is true that the country needs some form of immigration enforcement. But it doesn’t need ICE. It doesn’t need an agency whose institutional identity is wedded to wanton cruelty and the apparent hair-trigger use of lethal force. It doesn’t need an agency that has been transformed into a paramilitary enforcer of despotic rule. It doesn’t need roving bands of masked thugs shooting and killing ordinary people under the cover of law.

During the first Trump administration, left-wing activists demanded that the nation abolish ICE. They were right then, and they are right now.

-Jamelle Bouie, NY Times

Kick ICE Out of Our Communities

Ezra Levin is the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, a grassroots organization made up of thousands of group leaders and more than a million members taking regular, iterative, and increasingly complex actions to resist the GOPs agenda, elect local champions, and fight for progressive policies.

The following transcript has been edited for formatting.

Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. I’m delighted to have back our dear friend, Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, who was getting outraged with me even before we got started. Welcome, Ezra, great to see you.

Ezra Levin
Happy New Year, Jen, I always love getting angry with you.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. We have had a cold-blooded murder in Minnesota. We’ve had the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Homeland Security not only lie to our faces, but defame a mother of three, Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered for doing nothing but trying to remove her vehicle as directed by the ICE agents. What is the reaction in the community? What do you think can be done about this, and what do you think the appropriate response is?
Ezra Levin
Look, the reaction has been horror, and the reaction has been outrage, and I think that’s the appropriate reaction. We’ve been talking with Indivisible groups on the ground, since this occurred, and… look, they’re devastated. Their community is being terrorized by a secret police force led by a would-be fascist ruler, and that’s not editorializing, that’s just what’s happening on the ground, and now a woman with a young child is dead, and the regime is actively shielding the perpetrator from any kind of accountability. It’s horrifying.

The only piece of good news in response that I can say is that while this regime is trying to make everybody feel scared and alone, that’s not what we’re seeing in Minnesota, and that’s not what we’re seeing around the country. We just held this launch call last night. It was Indivisible hosting, but it’s not just Indivisible as us and 50501, and ACLU and, Move On, a lot of organizations and a lot of folks on the ground, coming together to talk about what do we actually do in response. Because what we hear from the Republicans right now, they said it explicitly, one member of Congress said, stop protesting, stop getting out there. No, we’re not going to do that. We are not going to do that!

When a regime like this comes for us. attacks our communities, murders Americans, and asks us to not protest. You know what we do? We protest, because it is our job, as Americans, to express our outrage peacefully, but powerfully in this moment. And not just to be on the right side of history, not just to remember Renee Goode, but it’s our job to express outrage because it is our elected official’s job to act. And they are only going to act if they see that we are outraged and demanding action. I’ve seen a lot of elected officials out there expressing the right emotions, which I appreciate. What we want to get them to do is beyond emotion. We want to get them to act.

The way you get elected officials to do their job is by doing your job, and as an American resident of any community in this country, your job over the next 48 hours is to show up, and the good news is since we launched the ICE Out for Good weekend of action yesterday night, there are hundreds of vigils and protests and events scheduled for this weekend, and more every single hour being registered. People are coming out in force. I think this could be an inflection point against ICE.

Jen Rubin
And where do people go if they want to find one near themselves?

Ezra Levin
You can find it at Indivisible.org, just click the link and get there, or to your favorite partner, whether that’s Move On or 5051 or others. Look, I love Indivisible, I’m biased towards Indivisible, I just want you out there. I want you organized in whichever community you’re organizing with, and if you go to that map, and you say, there’s not one in my neighborhood, what a bummer, put it on the map, get your friends together and say, no, we’re going to stand up against ICE in our community. We’re going to join together and tell this fascist force that we’re not going to just lay down or constitutional rights, we’re standing up for them. Protest is not the only thing we can do. Showing up is not going to magically fix everything, but again, if we, as Americans, don’t do our job to protect our rights, to stand up against this force that is terrorizing us. It’s over. That’s the tool we have at our disposal. And if we do that, the politicians will follow. They won’t lead on their own, but they will follow us.

Jen Rubin
And I want to be clear, it’s not only to put pressure on the bad guys, on the administration, on ICE, it is to put pressure on Democrats federally, in Congress. And in Minnesota, at the state and local level, that this must be investigated. This is not going to be pushed under the rug. The state has its own capacity. The sheriff has her own capacity. This does not get shoved under the rug because Donald Trump doesn’t want us to know the truth. And I think people should be clear about this, that the state can do something, the sheriff can do something, they can investigate in parallel to the feds.

Ezra Levin
You are a thousand percent right, Jen. One of the most frustrating things over the last year is hearing from some Democratic elected officials, and this is the local, state, and federal level, what do you want me to do? We’re in the minority; we have no power! ...Do not accept that. Do not accept that. I’m under no illusion that protest is suddenly going to lead Donald Trump or any one of his Republican goons to listen to their better angels if they even have them. That’s not going to happen. The elected officials that could listen to you are the Democrats who do indeed have power, and I’ll give you a specific example, Jen. The funding for ICE runs out at the end of this month!

Democrats are going to be asked to vote to give ICE more money in weeks. And so, a question is: Are Democrats in the Senate and the House going to vote for Trump’s warmongering? Are they going to vote to give more money to a secret police force? Or are they going to use the leverage they have? And I’ll tell you what they’ll say. Some of them, not all of them. You got great ones. Maxwell Frost, and AOC, and Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie, and Chris Van Hollen, Chris Murphy. There are fighters out there that are on the right side of this, but some of them will say, well, if we try to fight back. The Republicans in the Senate, they’re just going to eliminate the filibuster; they’re just going to steamroll us, they’re just going to pull other shenanigans, so we shouldn’t fight on this. I’m sorry. Make them do it. Make that happen.

Use the leverage that you’ve got... make a big political deal about it and stomp them in the midterms, because you know who doesn’t like ICE terrorizing their community? Democrats don’t like it, Independents don’t like it, and normal, everyday Republicans don’t like it. This should be a massive political issue for Trump if he refuses to scale back, but the way you make it a political issue is force them to defend it if they don’t backtrack.

Jen Rubin
Absolutely, and the biggest example of this just happened in the House. Remember we were told. We shouldn’t have a shutdown, we shouldn’t make this an issue, we’re in the minority, they have all the votes. Well, thank goodness for Hakeem Jeffries and the House members who stuck it out, made it the top issue and drove Trump’s numbers into the ground, kept it in the public eye, even after those senators caved, and lo and behold, 17 Republicans crossed the aisle yesterday to vote for this. What more proof do we need that this works? You force them to do things they don’t want. That’s what politics is about. What was your reaction yesterday when you saw 17 of these cowards who, a few months ago, were unwilling to extend the ACA, suddenly crawling after the Democrats in order to save their skins? Were you relieved? Were you disgusted? This is how we have to make it so, because this is what it takes to get these people to move.

Ezra Levin
I think it’s about all of the above, Jen, honestly. This was the entire theory of the shutdown fight. We knew that Republicans did not want to face their constituents for catastrophic increases in healthcare costs. We knew that many frontline Republicans themselves in the House wanted to extend the ACA tax credits. We knew that the public wanted Congress to do that, which is why we knew this was strong firm ground to fight on, and that’s why the Senate Democrats were winning the fight right up until Chuck Schumer and the rest of them decided to throw in the towel. So, I think what is frustrating is I don’t want to be right. I want to win. And so, it is cold comfort to me to be validated by the events that come after the Senate Democrats surrender. I want ACA tax credits extended. I want ICE rolled back. I don’t want to just be proven to have had the right strategic argument.

It is deeply frustrating to me when what everybody on the streets on No Kings 2 was saying "fight back, hold your ground," when those millions of people are proven right, but you’ve got a handful of Democratic senators who are just cowards, who are feckless leaders, who are unwilling to rise to the moment. And what this leads me to is, I’m sorry, Jen, we’ve been trying to convince these people for over a year, with three of the five largest protests in American history, that the people demand action, demand leadership, and Day after day, week after week, month after month now, they refuse to embrace anything other than status quo politics. 

It leads me back to the primaries. I’m sorry. The time for trying to convince these feckless leaders to actually stand at the moment is over. The time to replace them is here, and I’ll give you an example. We’ve got the first of the Senate caucuses, the competitive Senate caucuses or primaries, happy in mere weeks. It’s in Minnesota, of all places. You’ve got Angie Craig, who wants to be the next Democratic senator for Minnesota. You know what Angie Craig did last year? She voted for Lakin Riley to empower ICE, the first bill that landed on Donald Trump’s desk to empower ICE. Angie Craig voted for it. You know what else she did last year? She was part of a crew of Democrats who voted for a resolution thanking ICE for their service to America. You know what she’s doing this year? She’s accepting money from Chuck Schumer in order to run for Democrat in the Senate. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. This is not the kind of leadership that we need in this moment, unless she has some kind of very visible, come-to-Jesus moment about the current state that we’re in that’s beyond just empty promises to fight back, we need different leaders. We need different leaders, and the time to demand them is in the primaries, and that’s coming up all over the country.

Jen Rubin
Absolutely, and I want to reiterate what you have said a million times, which is fight like hell in the primaries, and then whoever the Democrat is, of course, get behind them in November. Let me go to, perhaps the next battle that is coming up, or it’s not even the next battle, it’s the continuation of this battle. The Senate now is going to vote, most likely next week on the ACA, or some variation of it. What is possible, and what do you want folks to do in order to force the Republicans and the Democrats in the Senate to follow what the House did?

Ezra Levin
Look, I think that the Democrats should be fighting for this because it is wildly popular and good for the country. That’s it, is good politics? And it is good for people. What is the three-dimensional or seven-dimensional chess thinking that would lead them to not do it? Unfortunately, I’ll get pretty cynical with you, Jen. It’s clear to me, some Democrats would prefer this to be a campaign issue in the midterms than to actually solve the problem and do some good. That is the reality of it. I think that’s inexcusable. They would say, well, this is smart politics. We hang the Republicans out to dry by blaming them for failing to do anything about healthcare prices. And I say, make it an issue right now. Fight right now. Because you are living on a different planet if you think that you can hold this and bottle it right up until the midterms.

You’ve got to fight the fight when the fight is available to you, and it’s available to you now. And I think we should be pushing all of our Senate Democrats to fight that thing. I’m willing to back any. If Chuck Schumer announces tomorrow this is where he’s showing the line, I’m behind him. I’ve been plenty critical of him. I do not believe in just choosing the folks who we need to get out and never coming back to the table. If they announce a plan to actually unify this opposition party and fight meaningfully, I’m there with them, but I am done accepting excuses. If they refuse to fight, we should hold them accountable.

Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Now, we have seen, again, like, we need any more examples, that putting pressure, making Republicans do what they don’t want to do, is possible. We had by a 52 to 47 vote margin, something you never see, which is Republicans voting for a war powers resolution against a sitting Republican president. In this case, because he launched a unilateral, unconstitutional war for oil against Venezuela, and has announced potential other targets. So beyond this, we’re going to need resolutions, I suppose, for Denmark and every other country on the planet. But Republicans move because they saw the reaction, and because Democrats, like Representative Himes, like Representative Smith, have been pounding away at this issue, even before the double tap. boat strike. They have been pounding away. What do you think we now need to do as this potentially now moves to the House, perhaps it’ll take a discharge position, to get the same result in the House?

Ezra Levin
So, you named it, but I just want to underline, Jen, this is about Venezuela, but it’s about much more than Venezuela. Think about how Trump operates. He’s a bully, and he’s a bully who’s always testing the limits. He’s always trying to figure out, where am I going to get pushback? Oh, I didn’t get pushback there. Let’s double down. Let’s do more. So this is about Venezuela, it’s about Denmark and Greenland, it’s about Cuba, it’s about Mexico, it’s about all of the imperialism that this president would like to engage in, it’s about.

Do not push back now. He takes that as a sign, and I’ll tell you why we know that. There was very little pushback against him bombing and murdering Venezuelans in boats off the coast. The thing we heard was, this is a distraction, and people don’t care about that, and why do we need to focus on that? Let’s talk about healthcare prices, or let’s talk about inflation, that’s what people really care about. And look, I’m not saying that cost of living isn’t an important issue, but you’ve got to engage in the issue of the day, and you’ve got to push back when he is testing his limits. So, what I want to see is people in elected bodies fight. I want them to see this is, this is the fight. This is where they need to actually push back, and it’s not just good politics.

Look, I don’t think the Democrats who are refusing to push back are in favor of regime change in Venezuela. Most of them are not. I don’t think they would like to see a war with Denmark. I don’t think they want to see the destruction of NATO. I think they have a model in their head of politics that is just simply outdated. They think that this guy is dangerous, and the best way to confront him is to focus on what the polls say people care most about, which, if you look at it, it’s always going to be healthcare, it’s always going to be jobs, it’s always going to be the economy. So, whenever a different issue comes up, they view that as a problem to be ignored so they can focus on the real winning issue. And I’m here to say that’s old politics that doesn’t work anymore against this authoritarian. You engage him on the ground in front of us right now. You have to fight back here. I think I understand the well-meaning political analysis that leads them in a different direction, and I think it’s for a different era.

Jen Rubin
Absolutely. What we’ve seen is one victory leads to other victories. We won on the Epstein files. They’re screwing around with that, so we’re going to have to come back. We won on healthcare. We’re going to have to fight that same battle in the Senate. We won on the War Powers Act. It is not a coincidence that once you start wheedling away and peeling off Republicans on one issue, they come back on other issues. This is how you build momentum, folks. And so, it’s not a distraction, it’s a step, it’s an opportunity. Every one of these is an opportunity, not a distraction. And I think it’s critical for our folks to kind of see that in the big picture. Let me take a step back and look at the entire landscape. 

We have what we all feared was coming, and that is a domestic guard, a tyrannical bunch of street thugs who have been unleashed, who are killing Americans, American citizens. Frankly, it shouldn’t matter that it’s a white woman, it shouldn’t matter that it’s a citizen, everybody who’s harmed is a human being, but let’s just put it right there. I think it’s critical for folks, and maybe we can begin to do this on the events coming up, that everybody understand they’re coming for you. It doesn’t matter what color you are. It doesn’t matter whether you’re illegal, or you’re undocumented, or whether you’re a native-born or a naturalized citizen. They’re coming for you. So, I would hope, and I think we’re beginning to see this, that people say, oh, hell. I could be shot in my car. A relative could be shot in the car. Oh, this is about me. How do we get that message over, and is this an opportunity to just do that one basic thing?

Ezra Levin
Look, I do think it’s an opportunity. It’s a real tragic event, and I’ve been reading a lot about Renee Goode, and… Look, I have a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old, Jen, and the picture that I think will haunt me for quite some time is the picture of the car with the airbag out and blood covering the airbag, and in the glove box, what do you see? You see stuffed animals. You see stuffed animals. This is a mom… This is a suburban mom in Minnesota who was doing nothing illegal at all and was driving through a neighborhood peacefully, trying to support her community that was being threatened by masked, armed vigilantes who were terrorizing that community. It’s really scary stuff; I’m not going to lie. It is scary stuff, and it’s right if you’re looking at this to think, oh my gosh, it’s dangerous out there, I’m just going to stay at home. I understand that impulse. 

What I would highly encourage folks to do in this moment is not be alone. to reach out to their community. The good news is, your community is organizing right now. These, Ice Out for Good events, we’ve got literally hundreds in the span of 12 hours are already registered. There are more every single hour coming on the map. Check it out. Reach out to your friends and family members. If there’s not one nearby, put it together. 

This is a time to be in community, because while they are trying to portray themselves. as regime, as all power, as inevitable, as unstoppable. Their power is fragile. Their power is fragile. They do not have all the cards. They are a small, extreme minority. There are far more of us. This is not ideological. This isn’t there are far more Democrats, this is far more people on the left. There are far more people who believe in the Constitution, and believe in our First Amendment rights, and believe that our community should not be terrorized by a secret police force, then there are fascists who believe otherwise. The only thing standing between us retaking power and making our community safe is the organizing that we got to do, and that comes down to you watching this. If you are watching this and you are not yet connected to your community, find your indivisible group, or your 50-51 group, or your local group of friends. There are going to be folks who feel the same way as you. Find them. Organize and push back, because that’s how we’re going to win.

Jen Rubin
Absolutely. I couldn’t say it any better than that, Ezra. It is refreshing to hear that, those of us who have been thinking along the same lines are not alone, that we’re not on Planet Z, that we’re right here, rooted in reality. So, thank you. We’re going to look forward; we’re going to be participating in those events, over the next day or so, and we cannot thank you enough for everything that Indivisible is doing. It is the heart and soul of democracy. This is what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, and you folks are making it so. So, thank you so much. Best of luck. Stay safe out there, and stay angry, folks. Anger is good, righteous anger is good. So, we’ll look forward to speaking with you soon. Thanks so much, Ezra.

Ezra Levin
Thank you, Jen.

The Contrarian