“If what you are doing is legitimate...why do you need to cover your face?”

We're at an inflection point, as the Trump regime pushes ICE to arrest far more people and the public starts to really push back.

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” –Fred Rogers (aka “Mr. Rogers”)

According to Axios, Reichsführer* Stephen Miller and Reichsminister* Kristi Noem held a “tense meeting” last week with top immigration officials, demanding that they triple the number of daily arrests they were making to 3,000 a day. (Miller later said that he wants even more.) The Washington Examiner, a conservative news outlet, reports that Miller screamed at ICE officials, “What do you mean you’re going after criminals? Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?” Miller reportedly “eviscerated everyone,” telling the room, “You guys aren’t doing a good job” and “you’re horrible leaders.” ICE leadership is reportedly “demoralized” and “fearful” as officials say they’ve been “threatened” and “told they’re watching their emails and texts and Signals.”

This is both horribly terrifying and possibly encouraging. Miller, as has become clearer with every day, is the power behind the throne of Trump II, the person with the greatest authority to speak on Trump’s behalf. He’s quite a thug, ruminating publicly about suspending habeus corpus, claiming that “Marxist judges” are conducting a “judicial coup” by blocking Trump’s actions, and telling the White House press corps that as part of the regime’s purge of DEI from public school curricula, “Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding. So as we close the Department of Education and we provide funding to states, we’re going to make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology.”

Nasty stuff. Miller has one setting, which is to bully everyone around him (except the Orange Cheeto, who he always praises). And that’s his Achilles heel. This has not been a very leaky White House, much less so than in the first Trump term. Thus the Washington Examiner story is unusual, suggesting that Miller has made some enemies inside the ranks.

Obviously, Trump and Miller got to where they are by preying on people’s fears. It’s not surprising that their approach to governing is to make people fear them. And ICE, even before this tongue-lashing, has been getting more and more aggressive in its tactics, not only showing up at immigration hearings but also conducting more visible raids at restaurants and construction sites as well as just grabbing high school students out of their cars. Miller’s imperial berating is likely going to make ICE even more aggressive.

Your tax dollars at work in San Diego, Friday

This, however, isn’t going down so easily. As ICE’s raids get bolder, more people are pushing back. In San Diego on Friday, patrons and neighbors of the Buona Forchetta restaurant instantly responded as heavily armed masked men descended on the popular Italian eatery. Community members surrounded their trucks and chanted “shame, shame, shame,” getting heavy local media coverage. (This clip on Bluesky shows the crowd calling them “Nazi* f---ing cowards” as they retreat. If you can’t access Bluesky, try here.) A man who asked to be identified as “John Brown” (a signal, perhaps?) told NBC 7 San Diego:

“The entire community was disgusted, furious, and enraged. They don’t want people in military tactical gear playing soldier and playing like they’re in Afghanistan coming in here and just screwing with people on a nice Friday afternoon, where people just want to go out and have lunch at these restaurants and you know just have a good time.”

Last Thursday in New York, Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman held a rushed news conference after masked ICE agents arrested a least a dozen immigrants who had shown up for scheduled hearings at immigration court in downtown Manhattan, in the same building as Goldman’s district office. As City & State reported, “Goldman compared the masked ICE agents making arrests inside a federal building to the secret police in Nazi Germany* and the Soviet Union. ‘This is Gestapo-like behavior, where plainclothes officers wearing masks are terrorizing immigrants who are doing the right thing by going to court, following up on their immigration proceedings, and trying to come into this country lawfully,’ he said.” Goldman, a former federal prosecutor, reamed the agents for hiding their faces. “If what you are doing is legitimate, is lawful, is totally above board, why do you need to cover your face?” he asked.

We’re approaching an inflection point. ICE’s raids are going to get more brazen, and in turn, public backlash will rise. Polls suggest that while a slim majority of the public supports limiting immigration, larger majorities do not support deporting people who have been in America for years, who have no criminal records, and/or who have children who are American citizens. And while I haven’t seen any polling on the topic, I bet that most of us find ICE’s Gestapo-like behavior abhorrent. The question is whether we fear it more than we hate it.

Fresh Signs of Courage

—A week ago, hundreds of students from two dozen high schools across New York City staged a walkout and gathered at Union Square to protest Trump. My favorite sign: “We’re not radical. We just pay attention in history class.” And they’re organizing “We the Students” chapters across the city.

—While the #TeslaTakedown effort continues even as Elon Musk has (officially at least) left his post at DOGE, #StopAvelo is rising. That’s a grassroots effort to boycott Avelo Airlines, a budget carrier that recently chose to contract with ICE to fly people out of the country on so-called “deportation” flights. Coordinated by Defend and Recruit, a project of Siembra NC, protestors gathered over the Memorial Day weekend at many of the airports that Avelo flies out of, including Manchester, NH; Albany, NY; Rochester, NY; Wilmington, DE; Medford, OR; Houston, TX; and Detroit, MI, to name just a few. (Here’s a fuller list—many of the actions were organized by local Indivisible groups.)

—Siembra and its Defend & Recruit project are emerging as some of the most creative and strategic organizers of the moment, IMHO. Another effort they are developing is called 4^th Amendment Workplaces, which seeks to engage local businesses in the fight to defend constitutional rights in America. The city government of Carrboro, NC, recently passed a resolution declaring itself a 4^th Amendment Workplace that could be a model for other localities as well. The 4th Amendment reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Unconstitutional, warrantless workplace raids are disrupting local communities and businesses; organizing to get more of them to adopt these declarations is a smart way to fight back.

—June is Gay Pride Month, and in Florida, where last year Gauleiter* Ron DeSantis instituted a ban on the tradition of lighting up bridges in rainbow colors, organizers swarmed a span in Jacksonville and, using flashlights, lit the bridge themselves, S. Baum reports for the Erin in the Morning newsletter.

—Weather forecaster John Morales, a 34-year veteran of south Florida newscasts, used his NBC-6 show yesterday to slam the Trump cuts to science funding and warn that central and south Florida National Weather Service offices are 19-39% understaffed, that there’s been a 17% reduction in weather balloon launches nationwide, and that “we may be flying blind” when it comes this year’s hurricane season.

—Yesterday, Greg Sargent of The New Republic talked to Carol Hui, a 20-year resident of Kennett, Missouri who was recently arrested by ICE, shocking the mostly conservative town. Her church has held a prayer vigil for her and patrons of the restaurant where she worked have donated $20,000 towards her welfare. “No one voted to deport moms,” one of Hui’s friends told The New York Times. As G. Elliot Morris notes, the Hui case creates a lot of cognitive dissonance for Trump voters, many of whom think they didn’t vote for this.

—Related: If you are looking for training in nonviolent noncooperation, check out Freedom Trainers.

Changing the Playbook (Cont’d.)

—Matt Browner-Hamlin, a veteran digital strategist who has worked the last decade for Greenpeace in various senior positions, has written a longish “genealogy” of digital teams and technologies that outlines three main eras, from the first days of MoveOn to the Obama ’08 campaign to today’s data-centric models. It’s an excellent guide to the field. My only addition would be to discuss how in the move from grassroots to the cloud, whether we’ve undervalued the power of self-organizing communities. In the earlier days of this field, campaigners often tapped “the power of the crowd” to get things done. We still have lots of distributed campaigning (as well as some negative experiences with the challenge of scaling between national leadership and local autonomy) but in addition to looking at how campaigns use staff and tools, which Browner Hamlin covers very well, I’d love to see more on how ordinary people as well as super-volunteers are either empowered, or entasked.

—Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run for Something, says there’s no silver bullet solution to what ails the Democratic Party. But she throws out some intriguing ideas that any candidate or local Democratic party organization could easily try, like opening low-cost or free indoor play-spaces. “Imagine how transformative it would be for anyone with kids under the age of 6 to be able to associate ‘Democrats’ with ‘the people who give me a very affordable place to take my kids when it’s raining, school is closed for the holiday, and I’ve already run out of toys to play with by 8am.’ (And what if that indoor playground welcomed candidates for office, or had voter registration tables, or hosted 9am candidate forums?)”

—Laura Dawn of Art Not War steps into the debate over whether Dems need to find (or create) their own “Joe Rogan” with a clear critique: “Too often, Democratic messaging sounds like a lecture—a series of didactic, scolding pronouncements that tell people what they should think, rather than inviting them into a conversation. We fall into blame-and-shame rhetoric, shutting down difficult discussions instead of engaging in them. The result? People tune out.” Her solution: “To cut through the noise, we don’t just need a message; we need a direct human-to-human connection. And the deeper the conversation, the deeper the potential for persuasion.”

Handwaving at the New York Times

-On January 20, 2025:

“Elon Musk ignited speculation and chatter online when he made a hand gesture twice during a speech celebrating President Trump on Monday. Speaking at a celebratory rally at the Capital One Arena in Washington hours after Mr. Trump was sworn in as president, Mr. Musk thanked the crowd for choosing Mr. Trump during ‘a fork in the road of human civilization.’ Mr. Musk…added, ‘I just want to say thank you for making it happen — thank you.’ The billionaire then grunted and placed his hand to his heart before extending his arm out above his head with his palm facing down. After he turned around, he repeated the motion to those behind him.”

-On January 24, 2025:

“So was it a Hitler salute or wasn’t it? Speaking at President Trump’s inauguration event this week, Elon Musk slapped his right hand on his chest before shooting his arm diagonally upward, palm facing down. He did it twice. It looked a lot like the salute used in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. But almost immediately, a striking number of different interpretations began to circulate. Some commentators called it a ‘Roman salute.’ Others described it as a ‘heartfelt’ expression of joy, or dismissed it as merely clumsy.

-On May 30, 2025:

“It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.” [Emphasis added.]

End Times

*In case you were wondering, Mike Godwin suspended “Godwin’s Law” back in 2017. Sadly that decision is more correct than ever.