The Trump regime doesn’t need to import its form of terrorism. It’s an American original.

Vol. 82

In This Issue: Essay | Take Action | Now Read This | Final Frame |

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It has been heartwrenching to watch the ways that ICE has been terrorizing communities throughout the country. This is a massive understatement, of course, and the anger and anguish I feel is nothing compared to what the people directly impacted are dealing with. 

A good friend of mine who lives in Minneapolis recently told me about how simply walking to and from their job now involves the very real calculus of whether or not they’ll be targeted. They are a U.S. citizen. They also happen to be a person of color. Eyewitness accounts from a diverse array of Twin Cities residents tell us that ICE is attacking and detaining just about every person of color they come across, warrants or due process or common decency be damned. Their goal is very explicitly to make numbers; 3,000 people a day, if Stephen Miller gets his way.

All of this is very bad and very scary and should make anyone with half a heart and brain feel outrage and determination to fight back. The most heartening thing to come out of this otherwise very dark time is seeing so many people do just that. Minnesotans in particular have and continue to show us the way forward, and it’s a world based in meaningful mutual aid, community connections, networks of solidarity and organization. I encourage you, especially when you’re feeling overwhelmed by the awfulness, to read/listen to the folks doing this work. It’s truly beautiful. You can also support their work by donating money and/or goods to the many neighborhood groups dedicated to helping out. I’ll include a list in the next section.

All that said, something in the discourse caught my eye the other day that I think is worth digging into. It’s about how we talk about ICE and the Trump regime and what the methods they’re employing in their fascist rampage. I’ve been calling them Nazis for a while now, along with a lot of other people. And that’s not inaccurate, per se. But it hides a much more painful story and it’s one that we as Americans would do well to engage with more seriously if we ever want to truly move forward and build something better.

As Nina Turner rightly pointed out in a recent post, to call ICE and the Trump regime “Nazis” is to displace blame for their toxic ideology and destructive actions to somewhere else. When, in actuality, what they’re all about is very much rooted in the history of this country. She suggests that it would be more accurate and more poignant to call them Confederates. In an open letter on her Substack, she elaborates:

This regime is not made of Nazis, it is pure American fascism, the same authoritarian ideology that allowed Black Americans to be held and tortured in this country for centuries. The same authoritarian ideology that sees Black men, women, and children gunned down by police officers without accountability.

Before America was ever called a “nation of immigrants,” it was foundationally a nation of enslavement. We cannot move forward until that reality is acknowledged and accepted.

To take it further, it’s worth noting that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis explicitly looked to the United States and its Jim Crow laws, along with the 1924 Immigration Act, as inspiration for the laws eventually passed in the 1930s that targeted Jewish people. Nazis were impressed in particular by the harsh extremes of America’s anti-interracial marriage laws and laws stripping citizenship from Native Americans and/or barring it for people from Asia and Eastern Europe.

The white supremacist extremism of the early 20th century in America was the direct descendant of Confederate ideology. Johnny Reb may have lost the armed conflict that ravaged the country from 1861-65, but thanks in large part to the utter failure of the victorious Union leadership to stick with meaningful accountability for former Confederates (when they weren’t outright complicit in unraveling the efforts of Reconstruction), white supremacists ultimately won the peace. 

The initial effort to bar all ex-Confederate officers from running for or holding elected office, and the eventual dismantling of those rules during the anti-Reconstruction era, comes to mind. I can’t help comparing it to the way the Biden Administration and most Democratic leadership shit the bed when it came to prosecuting and holding accountable the people responsible for the January 6 insurrection. Trump very much included. He should never have been allowed to run for president again. It’s right there in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. But here we are, because we refuse to learn from history (or, in too many cases when it comes to the people with the most power, because they want to replicate it).

The twin foundational sins of this country are the genocide and displacement of its indigenous people and chattel slavery. The consistent refusal of white America and its allies to meaningfully own up to and make reparations for those sins continues to haunt our efforts toward real change.

And to be clear, when I suggest that we should be calling ICE and the Trump regime a bunch of Confederates, I do not at all mean to imply that the source of this evil is limited to slave holders in the South. There has never been a regional boundary on white supremacy in this country. The North benefitted just as much from the enslavement of Black people and the forced displacement of Native people as the South. Diehard racists continue live everywhere. Thankfully, so do abolitionists. 

This is not about blaming a particular region (the South, indeed, has the most Black residents of anywhere in the U.S. and, in my experience, some of the most radical, dedicated, kickass leftists and progressive activists you’re likely to meet anywhere). It’s about owning up to our country’s history and responsibility for what’s happening now. I think that may also be the only way we can really, truly love what’s good about it, too, and use that love and unflinching seeing to build towards something better. Because, throughout the darkest times, there have been people (often Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, immigrant) finding ways to grow joy and resistance, to dream of and fight for a different world. 

My journey as a queer white person in this country has been and will likely forever be a continual seeking of and stumbling into those lineages. I take comfort and motivation from knowing that there are so many people, past and present (and future), clearing the path and showing the way.

In the meantime, we need to hold our elected leaders’ feet to the fire in this moment. There can be no “reforming” an entity that’s acting out its intended purpose. Giving more money to ICE for “better training” does absolutely nothing to stop their rampage, and redirecting funding toward “local law enforcement” just punts the problem, and I’m sickened by every Democrat that’s suggested either approach. I’m furious at Democrats who think they can negotiate with a Republican Party that has fully embraced fascism, our own Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin included.

Maybe if we all started referring to ICE and Trump and the GOP as Confederates, it would stun some reality into us all. Make elected officials talk about how they just want to negotiate with and fund the Confederate States while asking really nicely if they’ll please stop terrorizing people and pissing on the Constitution. I don’t know. Maybe that’s wishful thinking.

In any case, let the rest of us be clear about what we’re up against and who is–and is not–going to save us from it. No single individual leader, no political party, no corporation is going to save us. WE will save us. The people. That’s it. Nothing more complicated or less simple than that.

Take Action.

This is a great clearing house of links to verified mutual aid and other donation sites to directly support people in Minnesota dealing with ICE terrorism: www.standwithminnesota.com

Verified fundraiser page to support Union workers impacted by ICE and the upcoming general strike.

Donate to support the efforts of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center and their warming centers for unhoused folks during this harsh winter.

Right here in Wisconsin, Voces de la Frontera is the main immigrant rights advocacy organization and a good place to support and/or keep connected to for updates about ICE activity in the state.

Open Doors for Refugees provides basic needs and housing assistance for folks newly arrived in the Madison area. They do great work and also take volunteers.

Now Read This.

“What to do if ICE invades your neighborhood” [Wired]

There are no simple answers for how to protect yourself and others in every scenario, but there are frameworks you can use for weighing your options.

“Renee Nicole Good’s queerness isn’t an aside–it’s a key part of her story” [Katelyn Burns for Xtra]

We can’t ignore the outright misogyny and homophobia baked into this incident—and yes, erasing Good’s wife from the story of her life and death is also misogyny and homophobia. The same homophobia that drove Good and her wife from Missouri is the same homophobia on display all over conservative social media today.

The message is clear: looking wrong to a conservative, speaking wrong to a conservative man, not bowing and scraping to conservatives, or even just loving the “wrong” gender, means you are an enemy. An enemy that should be put down.

“This week in apocalypse” [Margaret Killjoy]

The country isn’t being run by politicians right now, it’s being run by thieves stripping the copper out of the walls of our society. They’re bankrupting us and leaving us in the cold.

The only question (and this is genuinely a question, one you should ask yourself and your family and your community, rather than listen to answers written by anarchists on the internet with newsletters) is “what is it going to take to change this situation?”

“Into the Abyss” [Andrea Pitzer]

My goal today is to warn you that the U.S. has already been seized by the same camp dynamic. It’s not that I’m trying to tell you that bad things are coming, and you have to look out for them. What I’m saying is that the camps have already taken root and are on a fast-track to get exponentially worse. We’re already deep inside the process.

Yet there is power in that knowledge, because in some big ways, we can know what will happen next. We have models for how other societies have moved out of our current perilous state. And we have a ton of tactics we can use to fight back against the expanding harm directed at all of us.

I’ll add right up front that nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.

“How much can a city take?” [Scott Meslow for The Verge]

We also know that we’ll win. Time is on our side. ICE may have the inflated salaries and the backing of a tyrannical federal government, but we’re the ones who live here, and as the city’s greatest musician Prince once said, the cold keeps the bad people out. And when the ICE agents finally take off their masks, leave their shitty chain hotels, and fly back to wherever they were before they came to terrorize us, we’ll still be here.

“Wisconsin Eye is offline. State Republicans are making matters worse.” [Dan Shafer]

…as the calendar turned from 2025 to 2026, state government entered this post-Wisconsin Eye world. Losing transparency and real-time video access to what’s happening in state government was invariably going to be a real problem.

That problem was soon made worse. Republican leadership in the state legislature began enforcing a set of rules — Assembly Rule 11, Assembly Rule 26, and Senate Rule 11, according to the Wisconsin Examiner — which essentially bar members of the public from recording, photographing or filming legislative proceedings, only allowing credentialed members of the media to do so.

Final Frame.

Given all the Civil War references in my essay this week, I thought I’d share this photo I recently rediscovered of yours truly, aged 12, posing in my Union reenactor uniform alongside my mom. Despite her efforts to get me to wear dresses and “be a lady,” she was, eventually, remarkably supportive of my gender-bending. She sewed the outfit she’s wearing in this photo so she could blend in while keeping an eye on me at reenactments. I miss her a lot.

‘Til Next Time.

Take care of yourself and of each other. Free Palestine.

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