“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
— Victor Hugo
On April 7, 1968-just 3 days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Nina Simone performed this song in New York:
Simone’s bassist Gene Taylor had composed it right after Dr. King was killed; the song (and Simone’s emotional performance) is all the more remarkable for being at once so timely, and timeless.
In 1968, music was our social media. Otis Spann was another artist who paid musical tribute to Dr. King, writing and performing two songs about the slain civil rights leader just days after his death. His “Blues for Martin Luther King” gives us the news and preaches the blues:
On May 4, 1970, 4 students at Ohio’s Kent State University died when National Guard troops opened fire on protestors. When Neil Young saw the photos of the incident in Life magazine soon afterwards, he was moved to write the now-iconic protest anthem “Ohio”, which was recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young just two weeks later and rush-released as a single one month to the day after the killings:
The following year, Bob Dylan felt similarly compelled to express outrage in song, after Black Panther leader/author/prison activist George Jackson was shot to death by guards during an escape attempt at San Quentin (there was contention over whether or not his killing was a set-up). Dylan’s single “George Jackson” was released just three months after the incident:
Flash forward to 2026. Folk singer Phil Ochs once said, “A protest song is a song that’s so specific that you cannot mistake it for bullshit.”
When they came for the immigrants I got in their face When they came for the refugees I got in their face When they came for the five year olds I got in their face…
You may be thinking: “Those lyrics could have been written this week!”
If that’s what you’re thinking…you’re right. They were written this week, by political song smith extraordinaire/activist Billy Bragg, who posted this song on YouTube yesterday:
And we got this memo from the Boss today, posted on BlueSky:
I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
Stay free
You can’t mistake that for bullshit. It’s tough not to despair right now, but as Kris Kristofferson advised:“Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
Big protests are “a tactic in search of a strategy”
Charles Duhigg contrasts political efforts based on mobilizing and on organizing. Mobilizing succeeds at garnering national attention (sometimes through large spectacle), at raising funds, and at building national advocacy capacity. On the downside, it tends to concentrate power at the top of organizations and not grow leadership farther down and locally. The latter focuses on building lasting community among its local members. Organizing works better as a franchise model: give local people basic tools and let them loose to find their way and raise up local leaders:
As the Johns Hopkins political scientist Hahrie Han likes to say, “Mobilizing is about getting people to do a thing, and organizing is about getting people to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done.” For a social movement to create real change, it helps to be skilled at both mobilizing and organizing. But that doesn’t mean that both skills are equally important.
The New Yorker article compares the Democratic Party’s and conservative organizing. The latter is less doctrinaire:
Today’s Democratic Party is great at mobilizing: it can propel people into the streets with big marches, raise billions of dollars for national candidates, and get liberals to bombard congressional offices with letters and phone calls. However, it’s less talented at organizing—building the kinds of local infrastructure and disparate leaders that are needed to sustain a large and ideologically diverse coalition. MAGA, on the other hand, is great at organizing—after 2020, the movement launched the so-called Precinct Strategy, which encouraged thousands of people to run for leadership positions within their local Republican Party chapters, and to become poll workers. This is a reason Donald Trump is in the White House again—and liberal and conservative activists alike say that it will be hard for the Democrats to start consistently winning until they mimic some of MAGA’s strategies.
It’s a useful read. Particularly regarding the penchant the left has for giving side-eye to people whose views don’t check enough of the right lefty boxes for acceptance by insiders.
Whereas MAGA welcomes anyone wearing the red hat, Democrats often require people to use new terms on pronouns and race, and they can punish or exclude anyone who strays.
Newcomers come out of curiosity, feel unwelcome, and leave. That’s no way to build a movement.
Duhigg recounts the infighting that broke out among leaders of the 2017 Women’s March. Anand Giridharadas devotes a section of “The Persuaders” to how purity tests undermined that effort. A repeated theme is “Is there room among the woke for the waking?” The issue at hand is whether those on the left edge of the left possess enough critical mass to move the culture in their direction by themselves. They do not. And they need to get over themselves. They need more allies. *
The sociologist Liz McKenna, of Harvard, told me that movements succeed best when people feel welcome. A movement becomes sustainable when members feel empowered and find friends. “The left loves big protests, but protesting is a tactic in search of a strategy,” she said. There must be some shared core values among a movement’s members, of course, but the requirement can’t be that every value is shared. “Making room for difference isn’t a nice-to-have thing—it’s table stakes,” she told me. “The rallies are by-products of the community, not the goal.” Most of all, even though anger can be useful, a movement also needs to provide some joy. “Trump rallies are fun,” McKenna noted. “The Turning Point campus debates are fun.” For a long time, she said, the left was less fun and more angry, “and so the right was out-organizing them at every turn.”
That’s why I’m the fool spinning signs and dancing on the street corner every week, Bluetooth speakers blasting dance music, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. As Anat Shenker-Osorio says, if you want people to join your party, throw a better party.
The successful mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, the Harvard researcher Liz McKenna notes, “was by all accounts joyful, hopeful, creative, and reflected a real sense of collective possibility. And that emotional culture translated into a major electoral upset.”
Duhigg sees The Faith & Freedom Coalition as “one of the most powerful conservative groups in the nation,” yet remains below most people’s radar.
Ralph Reed reminded me that, for Faith & Freedom and many similar conservative organizations, there are no showy national rallies. And there’s little strictness about ideological consistency. But during elections the group turns out millions of voters. When Reed looks at the left today, he said, “a lot of times it feels like they’re trying to hook people with big parades and free Beyoncé concerts.” That’s not how you win, he went on. “You win by offering people a set of values that give them meaning. Celebrities don’t deliver that. Small groups of neighbors do. And, as long as we’re building those groups, we’re gonna win.”
That’s happened in Minneapolis, but it took a paramilitary invasion and neighborhood organizing to give the less-engaged “permission” to join get off their couches and join the fight. Is that what it’s going to take everywhere?
* The pink pussy hat was an instantly recognizable symbol of resistance. A phenomenon. It disappeared as quickly as it came. We do that.
[A] man is legally observing ICE activity in his own neighborhood. Agents walk up to his car window and ask, “Are you following us?”
The man replies, “Yeah.”
An agent immediately escalates and says, “What you are doing is called impeding federal law enforcement. It’s an 18 U.S.C. §111 charge. This is your first and only warning. If you continue to impede and follow us, you will be arrested.”
The man then correctly responds, “Yeah, but I’m not impeding you.”
Another agent jumps in and says,“You just openly admitted you were following us, so…”
And again, the man correctly explains, “I am following you. I’m not impeding you. I’m observing you.” Which is a constitutionally protected right.
The agent responds anyway, “It is impeding.”
The man replies, “No, it’s actually not.”
At that point, the agents become visibly angry that he knows the law and threaten him again, saying, “This is your one warning. If you keep doing it, we will pull you back out and arrest you.”
Just to be very clear… Following and observing law enforcement, without interference, is not a crime. Threatening arrest anyway is an abuse of power. Threatening to “pull him out” of his vehicle is a threat of unlawful force. These agents are not enforcing the law, they’re misstating it, weaponizing it, and hoping intimidation will do the rest.
They don’t understand the laws they claim to enforce. They just parrot a few buzzwords and statute numbers, and expect the public to fold. And when that doesn’t work, they threaten violence.
Because the biggest threat to an ICE agent is someone who knows their rights.
Trump said yesterday that they were going to “de-escalate a little.” I guess maybe that means they don’t plan to shoot anyone in the face or the back in the next few days. Their deeply un-American tactics appear to still be in full effect.
I think this guy speaks for a whole lot of conservatives, particularly the white men. And sadly, he probably represents a fair number of non-conservative men as well although they wouldn’t put it quite this plainly.
Agatha Christie never spun a mystery as perplexing as that of white liberal women going all in on protecting criminal illegal immigrants. Screaming, screeching, blowing whistles, cursing like sailors with Tourette’s who just hit their thumb with a hot hammer….
Theories abound. Perhaps it’s the middle-age equivalent of dating the “bad boy” in high school. Except, we’re not seeing any indication that the women blocking ICE from its noble work have any interest in transforming the killers, rapists, and traffickers they’re protecting.
Perhaps it is, as some have speculated, a generation of women who have been taught to discount the value of motherhood, and their hardwired instinct for nurturing and protecting has been short-circuited in the service of the criminals. Think of Renee Good leaving her own child behind before trying to turn an ICE agent into a speedbump.
Except mothers are bringing their children to the protests, sincerely believing it’s good for their budding Zohrans to witness Mommy standing up to the Gestapo.
Why do they do this? Obviously, they’re so ugly that they’re sexually frustrated.
Perhaps noted feminist Naomi Wolf hit the mark with her theory that the lashing out stems from sexual frustration, that the aggression toward ICE officers is a physical release. Yes, it’s clear from their unhinged antics why most of those women wouldn’t be getting any action. Hunter Biden would turn down those women even if they were wearing parkas packed with cocaine.
It’s personal for him:
Around 2020, a strange thing happened. In short order, three women who’d been important in my life—three wonderful, intelligent, women—got uncharacteristically, disproportionately, perplexingly irate at me over politics.
My college girlfriend, who I’ve known since I was 12, never got mad at me back when I deserved it. If temperament were a city, she’d be San Diego. But one day, she snapped at me like a starving crocodile for defending Rush Limbaugh’s Presidential Medal of Freedom. Shocking? Like Rep. Ilhan Omar applying for membership to Mar-a-Lago.
Then there’s my former colleague, partner, and office mate. We worked side by side for years, with a closeness, chemistry, and intimacy that had people assuming we were hitched. Never an argument. Twenty years later, we reconnected on Twitter. Within 10 minutes, she was going full Joy Reid on me over politics. (OK, maybe not full Joy Reid. Never go full Joy Reid.)
Strangest of all, a woman I briefly dated in the mid-90s, and had not had any contact with since, tracked me down after coming across an article I’d written. Not to say, “Hi, how’s it going?” But: “Is this the same Al Perrotta who used to live in Southern California? You used to be so tolerant!”
“I hope it’s me,” I replied. “I’m using his driver’s license.”
Helpful Guy Hint: When you’re getting chopped down by childhood friends, smacked around by professional soulmates, and harassed out of the blue by sensitive, gracious clairvoyant poets, it’s wise to ask, “What gives?”
But I missed it, males missed it, and conservatives missed it. The anger festered during the Biden years, turned into rage with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And the reelection of Donald Trump, King of the Alphas? Like hitting the nucleus of Uranium-235 with a neuron.
King of the alphas? The narcissistic, make-up wearing freak who grabs women by the pussy and thinks they like it? Believe me, if he didn’t have money…
He thinks that even if Trump were a liberal the women would be angry and asks what this is really all about:
Perhaps at its core the women are suffering PTSD. The psychic injury from the Sexual Revolution indoctrination, the radical mutation of the women’s rights movement, the desecration of motherhood at the altar of “abortion rights,” even the transgender usurpation of what it means to be a woman.
White, liberal women have been told, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”
“Yeah,” they replied. Looked around, and asked, “But where am I?”
I think I’d be lashing out too.
Lol. Right. Or maybe, more to the point, if we had just agreed to have sex with assholes like guy we would have been happy.
The truth is that once women had the freedom to make their own decisions and their own money they knew they didn’t have to put up with mediocre little men like this just to keep a roof over their heads. And he knows it.
Don’t kid yourself. This is one of the underlying issues in our society that’s driving a good bit of the divide. And the condescending bullshit from men like this jerk is something we confront all the time in real life.
In Virginia, 65 percent of women voted for Democrat Abigail Spanberger for governor, according to the Fox News Voter Analysis conducted from Oct. 22 to Nov. 4, compared to just 48 percent of men—a 17-point gender gap.
In New Jersey, women backed Democrat Mikie Sherrill by 62 percent, compared with 49 percent of men—a 13-point gap that proved decisive in her win.
Gender divides within adults ages 18 to 29 show up in questions ranging from how Americans feel about President Donald Trump to their views on what constitutes success. Young men and women also feel very different about mental health, cultural issues and questions about gender and the workplace.
Among Gen Z overall, 64% disapprove of Trump’s job performance versus 36% who approve. But young men are more evenly split (53% disapprove, 47% approve) than young women (74% disapprove, 26% approve). The 21-point difference in Trump’s approval rating is unchanged from April.
Naturally everyone sees this as a sign that nobody cares about men and their issues. Same as it ever was. But maybe, just maybe, this is really because women are sick of being treated like vassals and being forced to accede to the desires and demands of whiny creeps like that author or the likes of Andrew Tate, the rapist abuser Trump treats like a brother. There’s a reason Jeffrey Epstein was Trump’s best friend all those years.
As I said, this is a fundamental divide in our society and it’s one that nobody really wants to admit. It’s clear that one of the main reasons Donald Trump squeaked over the line to win the White House twice is because the Democrats had the temerity to run a woman against him.
*** And yes, there are plenty of female misogynists as well along with tons of decent men who don’t think this way. But those numbers do tell a story and it’s foolish to pretend it isn’t happening.
Slovakia’s prime minister told EU leaders at a summit last week that a meeting with Donald Trump left him shocked by the U.S. president’s state of mind, five European diplomats briefed on the conversation said.
Robert Fico, one of the few EU leaders to frequently support Trump’s stance on Europe’s weaknesses, was concerned about the U.S. president’s “psychological state,” two of the diplomats said. Fico used the word “dangerous” to describe how the U.S. president came across during their face-to-face meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Jan. 17, according to two of the diplomats.
The conversation between Fico and his European counterparts took place in Brussels on Jan. 22 on the sidelines of an emergency EU summit arranged to discuss transatlantic relations in the wake of Trump’s threats to seize Greenland. Leaders used that gathering to try to calm tensions after the U.S. president walked back his threat to slap tariffs on some European countries over the issue a day earlier.
The Slovak prime minister made his remarks in a separate informal huddle between some leaders and chief EU officials rather than during the formal roundtable talks, the diplomats said. While none of the diplomats who spoke to POLITICO were present, individual leaders briefed them separately on the content of the conversation shortly after it.
All the diplomats were granted anonymity by POLITICO to allow them to discuss the confidential exchanges between leaders. They come from four different EU governments. The fifth is a senior EU official. All of them said they didn’t know the details of what Trump had said to Fico that had triggered his reaction.
Fico seemed to be “traumatized” by his encounter with Trump, one of the European diplomats said. Fico characterized Trump as being “out of his mind,” a diplomat said, using the words briefed to them by their leader, who was directly involved in the conversation.
[…]
Fears about the U.S. president’s health are “rapidly becoming a more conversed topic at all levels,” said an EU official who is involved in political discussions in Brussels and between capitals.
Fico adamantly denied that it happened but we know it probably did because he behaves like a lunatic half the time in public. Imagine what it’s like in private.
When I arrived at the Oval Office in December to talk to Donald Trump about his health, the president was standing next to a couple of men clutching pieces of paper labeled TALKING POINTS.
“These are two doctors,” Trump told me before I could ask a question. “And by the way, I don’t know them, they’re not my best friends. They’re respected doctors that practice out of Walter Reed. And they happen to be taking care of me for anything — but I don’t need any taking care of because I’m in perfect health. I do purposely every year or less a physical, because I think the American people should know that the president is healthy so you don’t get a guy like the last one, who was the worst thing that ever happened to older people. Because I know people in their 90s that are 100 percent. Gary Player is 90 years old. He shot 70 with me the other day.”
It wasn’t only the doctors with ABSURD talking points. Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller and every single person he spoke with sounded like they were one of the brainwashed soldiers in “The Manchurian Candidate.”
Something clicked. Former federal prosecutor and ex-FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann spoke with MS NOW’s Ari Melber on Monday on how far removed DHS agents in Minneapolis are from professional law enforcement.
“They had the professional demeanor of criminals,” as one Minneapolis senior described his too-close enounter.
Weissmanm referenced a weekend statement by Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara on “Face the Nation.” O’Hara reacted to the Saturday killing of Veterans Administration intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in a hail of Customs and Border Patrol bullets:
“People have had enough. This is the third shooting now in less than three weeks. The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year, recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone. This is the second American citizen that’s been killed, this is the third shooting within three weeks,” O’Hara said.
“That’s training,” Weissman said of MPD, “that’s people who are not looking to terrorize a civilian population. But if you create ICE as a model of “Lord of the Flies” or the Stanford Prison Experiment, where you’re telling people they have unfettered power [and] absolute immunity … that is what results in a group of law enforcement officers who are really not doing what many, many law enforcement officers in this country are trained to do day in and day out.”
End this experiment
For those needing a refresher, this is from Stanford University’s archive on the infamous 1971 psychology department experiment:
Carried out August 15-21, 1971, in the basement of Jordan Hall, the Stanford Prison Experiment set out to examine the psychological effects of authority and powerlessness in a prison environment. The study, led by psychology professor Philip G. Zimbardo, recruited Stanford students using a local newspaper ad. Twenty-four students were carefully screened and randomly assigned to groups of prisoners and guards. The experiment, which was scheduled to last 1-2 weeks, ultimately had to be terminated on only the 6th day as the experiment escalated out of hand when the prisoners were forced to endure cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. The experiment showed, in Dr. Zimbardo’s words, how “ordinary college students could do terrible things.”
Given total control over the “prisoners” (fellow students), “guards” in the mock prison quickly became abusive: “Over the course of the experiment, some of the guards became cruel and tyrannical, and a number of the prisoners became depressed and disoriented.”
Donald Trump and Shadow President Stephen “Trump’s Brain” Miller have operationalized the Stanford experiment and loosed undertrained, militarized immigration thugs with a penchant for violence and a need to dehumanize civilians. They are the guards. We are the prisoners. Comply or die.
The people of Minneapolis were not having it. Even in the face of arrest and even death, they resist.
From Instagram comes this warning: “If they’ll arrest veterans, they’ll arrest you too.”
Ecuador’s foreign ministry said it lodged a formal diplomatic protest with the United States after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent attempted to enter the country’s consulate in Minneapolis without permission on Tuesday morning.
Employees of the consulate stopped the agent from entering, the Ecuadorean foreign ministry said in a statement Tuesday night. Under the Vienna Conventions, to which the United States is a party, foreign consular buildings are off-limits to law enforcement from the host country without authorization from consular officials.
Video footage verified by The New York Times shows a member of staff rushing to an entrance to the consulate, where an agent appears to have opened the door. The employee can be heard saying, “This is the Ecuadorean consulate, you’re not allowed to enter.” The agent responds by saying, “If you touch me, I’ll grab you.”
🇺🇸🇪🇨 ICE AGENTS TRIED TO ENTER ECUADORIAN CONSULATE, GOT TURNED AWAY AT THE DOOR
Staffer ran to block them: "This is the Ecuadorian consulate.
You're not allowed to enter."
One agent threatened to "grab" him before backing off.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, notes that “there is a huge ‘consulate of Ecuador’ sign over the door” (image at top).
This retired couple had a close encounter with CBP/ICE goons who stuck guns in their faces outside their church. The gentleman says, “They were acerbic. They were obviously not trained at all….. These people were right off the streets…. They had the professional demeanor of criminals.”
ICE pointed semi-automatic weapons at a retired American couple in a church parking lot. No warrant. No rights read. Just terror.
This is not law enforcement. This is unconstitutional intimidation. Under the Fourth Amendment, ICE cannot detain or search without a judicial… pic.twitter.com/SzroJ3n0xD
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is under fire for issuing misleading and incendiary information that claimed immigration agents killed an armed Minnesota protestor Saturday because he wanted to “massacre” them.
That language has now become a source of controversy in the Trump administration. White House officials are now blaming Customs and Border Patrol for furnishing inaccurate information, while others are targeting Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and top Trump adviser, sixsources with knowledge of the situation told Axios.
You don’t say.
Miller’s power extends to de facto oversight of Noem, though she’s a Cabinet secretary who technically outranks him. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” Noem told a person who relayed her remarks to Axios.
Oh my.
Here’s the tick tock:
Immediately after Pretti was fatally shot in Minneapolis about 10:05 a.m. ET on Saturday, administration officials in Washington knew they had a potential disaster on their hands but had little information. The officers directly involved in the shooting “all shut up and got lawyers real quick so there wasn’t a lot of information,” one source briefed on the statement said.
The CBP officers on the ground furnished a report that, White House officials told Axios, left officials with the belief that Pretti had brandished a gun. Miller “heard ‘gun’ and knew what the narrative would be: Pretti came to ‘massacre’ cops,” a source briefed on the process of assembling the press statement said. “Any early comments made were based on information sent to the White House through CBP,” Miller told Axios in response to an earlier version of this story in which others blamed him for the “massacre” statement.
DHS posted the statement at 12:31 p.m. on X. Some White House officials had signed off on the statement. But others had not, leaving them frustrated.[…]
Minutes after the DHS statement, Miller posted on X and called Pretti “an assassin,” which a source said was also based on a preliminary report from Customs and Border Patrol.Vice President Vance then reposted it on his page.
Noem subsequently used that language at a news conference, as did the Border Patrol commander then overseeing operations in the Twin Cities, Greg Bovino.
Some members of the White House team blamed Bovino and Miller is saying that the Minnesota operation didn’t follow some new guidelines which would have divided the DBP between certain officers targeting the “criminal aliens” (which means all immigrants and anyone who looks at them sideways) and others deployed for crowd control to keep the “agitators” from interfering. Yeah, whatever. Like that would have changed anything.
Noem met with Trump for two hours on Monday night and Trump said today that he backs her to the hilt.
Noem has complained to others that she feels she’s being hung out to dry over the episode and has made sure to emphasize she took direction from Miller and the president, a source told Axios.
She may deny she said it but it wouldn’t have been leaked to Axios if she didn’t want it out there. Let the battle begin. (I have no doubt that in the end, Trump will choose Miller.)
There is also no doubt in my mind that just as the operation is 100% a MIller special so was the communications strategy that had them rush to the cameras and condemn Pretti. Miller knows the value of controlling the narrative and he wanted that out there. The videos killed the plan.
Miller, like Trump, just refuses to believe that reality will ever bite. They just got bitten.
I wrote earlier today about the fact that many of the “tree of liberty” types are suddenly defending the government saying people who carry guns should expect to be shot by police but as Garrett Graff points out in this piece, it’s not the only instance of the freedom-loving right suddenly feeling the love for Big Government jack-booted thugs:
The criticism was in line with another major recent rhetorical twist as the Trump administration’s heavy-handed crackdown on immigration has spread nationwide: The MAGA right, which just six years ago criticized Covid vaccine mandates as the first step toward concentration camps, have quickly fallen in line behind ICE and CBP raids — agreeing that Americans should just carry their citizenship documents everywhere and obey law enforcement demands instantly.
In the wake of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer, President Trump — who began his presidency by pardoning the 1,600 protestors convicted of federal crimes for their role in January 6th, including people convicted of assaulting police officers, and whose movement has made a martyr of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by Capitol Police after ignoring orders from officers to stop forcing her way toward the US House chamber — brushed off the shooting, saying, “That woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.”
Anyone who didn’t obey law enforcement, like Good, deserved the ICE death penalty, the argument appeared to be.
In a similar vein in recent days, Kristi Noem — who as South Dakota governor rose to national prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 over her refusal to issue a statewide mandate to wear face masks — now in her role as DHS secretary proclaimed that Americans should just get used to carrying citizenship documents and showing them as necessary.
At first the series of rhetorical flip-flops may seem nonsensical — as if the world is upside down — but all of them are consistent with decades of evolution of white nationalist ideology and the far-right movement, which isn’t against tyranny per se, just tyranny by the “wrong people”: Democrats, women, or minorities.
In fact, what many have long short-handed as “anti-government extremists,” from Ruby Ridge and Waco to the Bundy showdowns of the Obama years to the crowd that stormed the Michigan State Capitol amid the Covid lockdown, are not actually “anti-government” or even “anti-tyranny.” They are instead simply “extremists,” driven by secondary motives — often threads of white Christian nationalism or white supremacy that date their vision back to texts like the 1978 bible-of-the-fringe Turner Diaries.
And now, looking across the American landscape, those far-right white nationalists feel comfortable flipping their rhetoric because they recognize the Trump administration is doing their business for them. The government is their kind of extremist now.
He notes a very interesting phenomenon:
Terrorism scholars noted with surprise how extralegal right-wing violence plunged in 2025; according to a September study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, through July 4, “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right.”
Similarly, long-standing right-wing militia groups have gone quiet or dormant. An August article by The Atlantic asked, “Where have the Proud Boys Gone?” and concluded that there was little need anymore for the militia whose leadership was convicted of “seditious conspiracy” for their role in the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. “The group’s ideals are being pursued—but by ICE and the government itself,” the Atlantic wrote.
Who needs militias and domestic terrorism when the government is doing their work for them?
You could see this in the Reagan worship and the reaction after 9/11. Trump just pushed the envelope to the level of the Proud Boys because he comes out of that toxic petrie dish himself. Today it defines the Republican Party.
