Striking While The Iron is Hot

“Following last week’s anti-ICE economic blackout in Minnesota and national Free America Walkout, organizers are once again urging Americans to stop working, attending school, and spending money to protest the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown surging across the country.” Stores closed, protests scheduled in all 50 states. I’m noticing the protest on several blogs and newsletters, and locally at my daughter’s high school. But it seems like this effort was put together quite quickly, so we’ll see how widespread it gets.

+ There’s no doubt that the (often heroic) protests in Minneapolis have had an impact in terms weakening ICE’s role in the state and stiffening the spine of the political opposition in Congress. But has anything about this week really changed the policy or the administration’s goals and strategies? “After a wave of public revulsion over the President’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, he offers a familiar playbook: distraction, disinformation, denial, delay.” Susan Glasser in The New Yorker: Operation Trump Rehab. “Is this, then, the inflection point—or whatever you want to call it—that so much of sane America has been waiting for? The beginning of the end of the madness that has gripped our nation? Would that it were so. There is no doubt that the wave of revulsion among everyday Americans, of all political persuasions, to the videos that we’re seeing from Minneapolis, and Chicago, and other cities targeted by Trump’s paramilitary immigration goons, is real. No amount of gaslighting by Trump and his advisers can prove otherwise. It is also reassuring to observe that the President can feel the need to dial back his power-tripping by something other than the bond market. But some caution is in order. We are, after all, still living in post-January 6th America. The Donald Trump who could never recover politically from inciting a mob of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol not only recovered but was reëlected President.”