I wish I could share this whole piece by JV Last on what he found on the ground in Minneapolis but you’ll have to subscribe to the Bulwark. (The site is very good, so if you have the means I recommend it.) I can share this one excerpt however:
Nearly every person I spoke to in Minnesota told me about a web of clandestine services that have sprung up to support neighbors targeted by the government.
The Twin Cities have tens of thousands of residents who cannot leave their homes for fear of being abducted by DHS. These people cannot go to work. They cannot shop for groceries. They cannot go to doctors’ appointments. Many of them cannot send their children to school.
Various civic groups have self-organized to help them. Food banks deliver groceries. People donate money to pay rent. Doctors finish their shifts and then make house calls. The governor told us about a group of doulas who make secret home visits to deliver babies to mothers who cannot go to a hospital, because DHS agents view health care facilities as abduction traps.
Think about that: You now live in a country where volunteers deliver babies at home, in secret, off the books, because mothers fear that if they go to the hospital, they will be abducted by masked, armed agents of the state while giving birth.
This is not a hypothetical. It is your lived reality. It is America.
It’s both a beautiful and a horrific thing all at once. That we have to have a clandestine, underground railroad in 2026 in a major American city is almost too much to absorb.
The piece goes on about how ICE is adapting its tactics to the resistance and how the resistance is doing the same. It’s war whether we want to admit it or not.
This piece in the NY Times by Ian Buruma discusses how the Germans adapted to the horrors all around them and he surmises that their apparently ability to carry on with everyday life was because people kept thinking it was just temporary and everything would return to normal any day. He writes:
This is the problem when the destruction of moral norms and the rule of law is incremental. Germans should have known that politics would take a criminal turn as soon as Hitler and his brutal paladins grabbed total state power in August 1934. The racial laws of 1935 robbed Jews of their civil rights. But Jews made up less than 1 percent of the German population. So most people could live with the racial laws. In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria and grabbed a chunk of Czechoslovakia. OK. Perhaps that would satisfy the Führer’s imperial lust. He surely wouldn’t go any further.
By September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, it was clearly too late for normal life to resume. But even then, many Germans believed that Britain and France would not resist. Surely, the war would soon be over. Erich Alenfeld, a Jewish banker married to a Gentile wife, wrote a letter to Goering asking to serve in the invading army. After all, he was still a German patriot. He never received an answer.
And so life continued. People kept hoping that the next act of war and assault on decency would be the final one and the nightmare would finally end. Even in 1945, when terrifying Soviet artillery was within earshot and much of Berlin lay in ruins, there was still hope that wonder weapons — fearsome missiles that would destroy and demoralize London or machines that would pull Allied bombers from the skies like giant magnets — would turn things around.
I worry that we are on that sort of delusional merry-go-round. We really need to fight the temptation.
Buruma says that this comes from the natural human default to hope. And that’s important. We can’t do without it. But as he also says, we can’t let that cloud reality. He concludes:
What was unthinkable only yesterday we now take in stride, and we wait for that moment when things really have gone too far this time, when the fever breaks and things will revert to normal.
But that moment probably won’t come. Things have gone too far too many times already. Hoping for better is still the right attitude, but only as long as we prepare for the worst.
How do we prepare for the worst? I’m not at all sure I know what that looks like. I just know it will be bad.
