Love and Protect Your Neighbor

In this issue:

1. The List to Resist: A dive into recent fronts of the fight to save democracy.
2. Reading Corner: Book review of “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” by Jason Stanley
3. Yays and Nays: Who we’re celebrating and who we’re calling out.

The List to Resist, ICE Edition

If you haven’t downloaded the 5 Calls app or set up a Resistbot chat, do that immediately, if not sooner. As fruitless as it may seem sometimes (and believe me, the disembodied voice writing this list is from Texas - I know the joys of fruitless harassment of my representatives), we have to keep pushing Congress to do their job. And if you’re feeling particularly spunky, this list, compiled by volunteers, has contact information for Members of Congress, but also for Cabinet members and news agencies (tell Bari Weiss I sent you).

ICE is terrible everywhere and if you haven’t looked up an Ice Out for Good event in your area yet, here’s a handy link to get you started.

If you or someone you know lives in Minnesota, a general strike is being called for on January 23, organized by major local labor unions as well as faith and community groups. If you’re someone who does business with Minnesotan companies or people, you ought to take note of and observe the strike as well. For instance, if you’re unable to boycott Target year-round, at least don’t shop on or around the 23rd.

And while all eyes are on Minnesota these last weeks, ICE is still operating with impunity in other communities around the country. Sharing toolkits, resources, and explainers on staying safe and plugging in to community activity alerts are going to be vital for everyone, even if they’re in an area they think will be safe or off the radar.

But also, remember that - for as terrifying as the current moment seems - we have been here before - many, many times. Indeed, as Jamelle Bouie points out, these are the very sort of actions that led to the American Revolution.

“Faced with an angry public but committed to a rigid agenda of nativist brutality, the president and his coterie of ideologues are playing the only move they seem to have: wanton violence and threats of further escalation. They think this will break their opposition.

“But looking at the ironclad resolve of ordinary Minnesotans to protect their homes and defend their neighbors, I think the administration is more likely to break on their opposition and learn, as the British did in Boston, that Americans are quite jealous of their liberties.”

Comparison to the Nazi regime is extremely apt, though this is our own American flavor of fascism in action, but so too are the comparisons to our founding conflict. The right has been using the symbolism and language of the American Revolutionaries as a cudgel and a disguise for years now, but we must take these things back, if for no other reason than to highlight the un-Americanism of their actions and strip them of the patina of patriotism. They want their second Civil War, to own the language of our Revolution. But that language and that imagery is reserved for Americans, not the puffed-up bully puppets of a mad king.

Through whistles, through car horns, through standing unafraid in the face of bullies “having fun,” through community organizing against brutality, and by indentifying these warped cosplayers for the corrupt Klansmen and inept, state-backed gangsters they are, we protect us and we continue the centuries'-long revolution against the ever-present threat of tyranny and oppression.

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Reading Corner

by A. Glore, contributor

Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2024)

Of Project 2025’s many goals, the destruction of history may be its most insidious. In response, just before the reelection of Donald Trump, Yale professor Jason Stanley, an expert in fascist doctrine, published Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Succinctly and clearly, the book analyzes Trump’s first-term efforts to warp history and undermine trust in government, setting the stage for his second term assault on democratic ideals.

THE FASCIST HISTORY PLAYBOOK

Stanley details how through the centuries, authoritarian leaders have relied on the suppression and alteration of history as a quiet way to control certain populations. From slave-owners to colonialists to our current crop of White Christian Nationalists, fascistic groups understand that to control current events, it’s necessary to first control the past.

As Stanley points out, fascist-leaning groups like English colonialists in Africa, Russians in Ukraine and MAGA types in America create both antiseptic versions of their own histories (“the January 6th rioters are freedom-loving patriots,” for example) and false narratives about groups marked for disenfranchisement (such as “trans people prey on women and children”). To achieve their domination, fascists manipulate history to cast the “other” as unworthy, thereby justifying cruel exploitation.

Going hand-in-hand with the erasing of history by politicians and organizations like the Heritage Foundation are the far right’s attacks on public education and elite “Marxist” universities. Stanley chronicles how Florida’s governor Ron De Santis first targeted the state’s public schools with his censoring anti-gay laws, then dismantled its best-known liberal arts school, New College.

In illuminating the connections between the loss of critical thinking skills and the rise of knee-jerk nationalism, Stanley further makes the case that protecting history is a vital defense against fascism.

ADDITIONAL VIEWPOINTS

Other perspectives on the history topic can be found in this Architect’s Newspaper article about the planned destruction of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building in D.C. A change.org petition to save the building’s historic WPA artwork can be found here.

And for a varied, nuanced take on the subject, check out this New Republic podcast on YouTube, featuring several noted history professors from around the country.

Yays and Nays

In a week full of think pieces, I think the most powerful contextualization of the murder of Renee Good in the broader map of the American struggle to live up to our ideals was the most recent episode of the recent-history podcast “Weird Little Guys,” from journalist Molly Conger. I encourage everyone to give it a listen.

In the nays column, whatever grotesque blend of racism and hedonism this is. Trigger warning for Mar-a-Lago.

In the yays column, a planned white nationalist march in downtown Minneapolis put on by a January 6th rioter who was pardoned after beating a Capitol police officer with a bat drew only 10 people, dwarfed by the counter-protestors who showed up and chased them off.

Somewhere in the murky area between yay and nay, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shed light this week on internal ICE operations and strategies, as shared with him by a whistleblower. Similarly, Laura Jedeed from Slate managed to get herself hired by ICE with seemingly no effort put into vetting her or completing basic hiring procedures.

“The [recruiter] agent took the opportunity to gush about ICE’s new state-of-the-art semi-automatic tasers and brand-new pepper-ball guns. ‘It’s mostly very liberal cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles—where groups will come and try to stop ICE officers from arresting somebody. They’re like, “We’re going to form a human wall against you,” ’ he said. ‘When they do that, you can just pop ‘em up. Let them disperse and cry about it.’”

Cry about it, indeed.

In the yays column is that Texas Democrats are running for every single state and federal race in the state this year. This may seem basic to folks from blue states, but the Democratic momentum in red states is a slow, steady thing often advanced with little to no resources, especially in thoroughly gerrymandered states like Texas.

And finally, in the nay column, in DAN’s backyard, our governor has opposed the proposed one-time billionaire wealth tax and sought common ideological ground with Ben Shapiro about ICE this week, so that deserves some calls to his office.

Let us leave you with this post, however, to remind us all that facing these things is traumatic and acknowledging that it takes a toll on us, creating a real need to be gentle and kind to ourselves and to each other.