Great Stuff but No Call for Sustained Mass Resistance to Remove Trump from Power
From the Paul Street Report
I dig here into the important interview that the centrist New York Times columnist Ezra Klein did with the brilliant libertarian police state critic/expert Radley Balko last week – an interview I put up in full on the Paul Street Report (PSR) three days ago. As I was reading through that interview a second time, I was struck by the contrast and contradiction between:
(1) The remarkable amount of good information and analysis Balko and to some extent Klein provided on the Trump fascist regime’s insidious assault on civil liberties and democracy through the attempted creation of a militarized police state…
and…
(2) the absence and even arguably the discouragement of any call for meaningful mass and popular resistance to the Trump fascist regime.
1. The Good Stuff (with some caveats and critique)
Let’s start with the mostly very good information and analysis, noting some strong points and a few weaknesses (from my perspective) in Balko’s take on the Trump fascist regime (TFR):
Hiding Faces
+ “When the agents of the government hide their faces,” Balko said, referring to the masked ICE and Border Patrol thugs who are kidnapping people on the streets of America, “it speaks volumes about the relationship between the government and the people. This is a sign of a totalitarian state. And now it’s just routine… over the country.”
Street: I’d say “authoritarian” and, above all, “fascist,” not “totalitarian,” but yes, face-hiding and badge-disappearing represent smug unaccountability on the part of oppressors who aren’t even pretending to be part of a democratic society committed to the rule of law.
“So Many Fronts That It’s Impossible to Track”
+ Balko on the disorienting speed with which the TFR s moving to consolidate a military police state in the US:
“I was at a conference on liberalism and democracy last weekend, and one of the keynote speakers was a Russian dissident who saw Putin’s rise. And what I found particularly haunting were the similarities between the quick speed with which he started dismantling institutions. That is Project 2025. Part of the strategy there is to move so quickly on so many fronts that you overwhelm people, and it’s impossible to keep track of everything that’s going on now.”
Street: Yes! I make it my business to try to track it all, and it is in fact impossible to do. It’s like I keep saying here in my PSR videos, “I’m just trying to capture some of the biggest boulders and rocks in the Trump fascist avalanche that is falling all around us!”
“A Terrifying Spiral”
+ “We’re in a terrifying spiral right now,” Balko says:
“we have entered kind of the worst-case scenario, and it’s hard to see how we get out of it…. the worst-case scenario is that Trump sends active-duty military troops into any city that displeases him — any city where there are protests. During his first administration, we know that he wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act …to send active-duty military in to put down the George Floyd protests. openly floated the idea of just shooting the protesters.”
Street: we are in the beginning stages of this “worst case scenario” for sure, The TFR did in fact send active-duty Marines into Los Angeles last June. Trump is threatening Chicago and other US cities with occupation by active-duty US military troops, not just National Guard units, and may well follow through with that threat very soon. And, as Balko notes, the TFR may well not likely to invoke the Insurrection Act because it doesn’t need to: It can find less provocative ways to claim to legally justify military deployments in US cities.
“Due Process Itself is ‘Woke’ Now”
+ Balko on how insanely far racist Amerikaners have gone in rejecting foundational civil liberties:
“there’s a sentiment that I am increasingly seeing on Facebook — and occasionally when I just check in to see the horror show that is Twitter or X — that due process itself is woke now. [Laughs.] The idea of letting people who are here illegally have access to the courts is just beyond the pale to people. There’s no understanding that’s always the way it’s been…said, this is a civil violation that we are now treating — I mean, literally, we disappeared people to a prison in El Salvador without letting them ever consult the courts…”
Street: Wow…Jesus Fascist Christ, I had no idea about this!
Trump’s Own Paramilitary Force
+ “Trump,” Balko notes:
“is attempting to build his own paramilitary force. They want people whose first and ultimate loyalty in this job is going to be to the president. I’m a journalist, not a historian, but I’m a student of history. There aren’t very many countries in which the figurative political head of the country assembled his own personal paramilitary force that was loyal only to him where things turned out well.”
Street: I was a historian before I became a journalist and a political commentator and here I can only say “exactly right.” For what it’s worth I just did a PSR on this very topic. The two classic examples of what he’s talking about here are Hitler’s SS (Schutzstaffel), Mussolini’s Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale,(MVSN), and Pinochet’s Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA).
It’s Hard to Talk About Trump’s Fascist Police State “Without Sounding Crazy”
+ “It’s hard,” Balko says, “to describe what is actually going on right now without sounding crazy: The idea that the president is going to deploy the military into cities and states that didn’t vote for him because he’s angry at them for that — or he is going to stop sending them disaster relief because they didn’t vote for them — that is clearly the stuff of totalitarian regimes.”
Street: Again, yes! People have been calling those of us who have been warning about the rise of a fascist militarized police state under Trump “boys who cry wolf.” We have been accused of being “hysterical” and in the throes of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” But the wolf arrived, just as we warned! In national politics as in day-to-day personal relations, sociopaths thrive by exploiting the failure of many if not most people to accept as real the depth and degree of transgressive evil that is staring us in the face.
Miller the Menace
+ Balko on Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor since 2025 – the leading individual behind Trump’s racist mass deportation program:
“Stephen Miller is a menace. He’s been very clear about what his intentions are. He has been very clear that he does not believe the United States should be a place that takes in refugees from other countries. He has been very clear that he thinks the United States should be a primarily Western culture country. We’ve read investigative journalism about his being influenced by white supremacists. He has not pretended to hide who he is.”
Street: yes, but “influenced by white supremacists” is serious understatement. Miller is a malignant, arch-racist and arch-nativist who has long taken his world view from Jean Raspail’s 1973 fascist dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, which depicts the destruction of supposedly superior Western white civilization through Third World mass nonwhite immigration to France and the Western world, aided and abetted by Western radical leftists and liberals. Miller is a virulent flat-out genocidal racist and fascist.
The Two Most Trumpist Federal Policing Agencies: ICE and Border Patrol
+ Balko on why big ugly fascist budget bill gave huge money to ICE and Border Patrol while cutting funding for other key federal law enforcement agencies:
“ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have long been the most rogue, renegade and certainly pro-Trump police agencies in the federal government. So I think Trump sees those two as the most loyal to him. Also, obviously, the mass deportations are going to ensure that those two agencies remain relevant throughout his administration…The F.B.I. has had a long, proud history and culture. There are a lot of stains on that history and culture, but it’s an institution that has prided itself on its independence. Same with the A.T.F., which is often bucked by Republican administrations. I’ve certainly had my problems with the D.E.A. over the years, but there is a separate culture and sense of independence there….I think this an effort to build up the two federal policing agencies that Trump sees as most loyal and deferential to him.”
Street: Bulls-eye! I would add one thing here, a point made years ago by the smart bourgeois historian Timothy Snyder: there’s a particular fascistic violence and lawlessness about the culture of gendarmes assigned to policing the racialized border. They inhabit a particularly brutal zone of unaccountable and unregulated policing and terror inflicted on stateless and racially Otherized people.
“You Can’t Hit the Figures”
+ Balko on part of why the ICE thugs are mainly kidnapping everyday working and taxpaying immigrants and NOT “the worst of the worst” criminals Trump said his deportation program would target:
“you can’t hit the figures that they wanted by just targeting the dangerous people. Dangerous people don’t make themselves available to ICE — they hide. It’s a hell of a lot easier just to send a couple of ICE agents to a courthouse to arrest people as they show up — as they’re supposed to be doing — for their [immigration] hearings.”
Street: sure, but let’s be clear: it was always about deporting ordinary hardworking and brown-skinned immigrants, consistent with the white supremacism and xenophobic nationalism at the heart of the fascist Amerikaner MAGA agenda, driven by demographic fears of “white replacement.”
White Angel/Supremacist ICE Posts
+ Balko on the virulent white nationalism evident in ICE’s recent social media posts:
“There’s… one of white settlers chasing Native Americans off the land and a kind of a white angel hovering over the landscape — which history books actually teach as an embodiment of the worst excesses of Western expansionism. They’re embracing these ideas that we’ve always looked at as kind of a regrettable part of our history…Then there was another one where they explicitly refer to a textbook that was written by an unapologetic white supremacist. You have to know that name and that book to get that, but those are the people they’re appealing to. Why do you make that reference, if it’s going to be opaque to most people? You’re appealing to people who know what the reference is.”
Street: Wow, I didn’t know about these online ICE posts. Chilling, no? They are making their white nationalist/white supremacist – I would add fascist – essence evident to anyone with a modicum of knowledge about these pathologies.
Selling Cruelty
Balko: “they’re prioritizing the cruelty. They want the images, they want the video, they want the social media hits, and they want to project to their hardest-core supporters. They want to fulfill that kind of thirst and glee for seeing cruelty done to people who they think are, as Trump himself put it, less than human — people who poison the blood of the country.”
Street: This makes me think twice about sharing more of the terrible videos decent people are sending around depicting horrific ICE kidnappings. I think I will prioritize sharing videos depicting resistance to the federal terrorists. That last line, “poison the blood of the country,” is straight out of history’s ultimate mass-murderous fascist so far – Adolph Hitler. And yes, it’s a Trump 2024 campaign line.
Who They Want to Hire
Balko: “The personnel numbers that they’ve set for ICE in order to meet the mass deportation figures, the goals that they’ve set — they’re going to have to hire a lot of people. And they’re going to have to lower standards, which they’re already doing. But also, they’re going to have to hire the kind of people who are going to be looking at these videos that are coming out of ICE — terrorizing families, arresting children and pulling grandmothers out of their homes. They’re going to be hiring people who look at those videos and say: ‘That’s what I want to do for a living.’ Then we’re also seeing these pretty explicit appeals to white supremacy and white culture. I think in one of the social media posts, they had said something like: Defend the homeland — join ICE.’
Street: Balko might not want to say it in The New York Times but the bottom line here is that ICE is recruiting sadistic fascists.
Post-Bivens: “Whatever the Hell They Want”
+ Balko: “One of the first things Trump said when he sent the National Guard into D.C. was that he specifically told them when he takes over the D.C. police department, police officers will be able to do ‘whatever the hell they want.’ …Federal agents are almost completely immune from civil liability. There’s a case called Bivens from the early 1970s where the court created a way for people to sue federal agents for violating their constitutional rights. In 2022, the current court basically all but completely overturned that ruling. Gorsuch, in fact, in a concurring opinion, said: We might as well admit what we’re doing here, which is we’re obliterating Bivens.”
Street: yes, complete unaccountability beyond the rule of law. The rule of force instead. I am almost ashamed to say that I never heard of the Bivens case. I will look that up.
Powerful Institutions Crumbling Out of Fear
+ Balko on the pessimism he feels after witnessing the capitulations of the powerful:
“…we see these powerful institutions cave and crumble out of fear. Watching the Ivy League schools falter — even the most cynical Supreme Court watchers seem pretty certain that they would win in court and what Trump is doing to these schools is pretty clearly an attack on free speech, free expression and academic freedom. Watching the law firms cave. The case that they would have in court is even stronger. Watching media companies cave. The ‘60 Minutes’ edit of the Kamala Harris interview was just basic, standard journalism. The idea that their parent company capitulated over that…These are extremely powerful, wealthy entities that could stand up to Trump if they wanted to. They’ve chosen not to. I think that watching them fall one by one has been really disheartening and disorienting.”
Street: Sure, but big corporate law and media firms are not tribunes of the masses, popular power, and democracy. Neither are the leading institutions of so-called higher education. They are all ruling class institutions and to me at least, there’s nothing particularly surprising (to me at least) about their capitulations. I don’t see that surrender and submission stopping until there are millions of people in the streets making a powerful statement that the American system will be ground to a halt unless and until the deranged fascist maniac atop the state is removed from power, for starters.
Winning an Election Doesn’t Justify Destroying the Bill of Rights
+ Balko on why it’s wrong to claim that Trump’s 2024 election victory after campaigning on the promise to carry out mass deportations makes his terrible police state actions in power legitimate:
“we have the Bill of Rights for a reason. You can’t vote away basic constitutional rights. They aren’t subject to the whims of a majority. What we’re seeing is suspensions of due process for people who are here and undocumented. We’re seeing people being arrested when they show up for their [immigration] hearings. When they’re abiding by the law, doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The Trump administration has revoked protected status for refugees from countries who were fleeing violence, political persecution, famine and natural disasters all over the world — and is now detaining and moving to deport them. These are people who came here legally — who were invited here, in fact. They’re firing immigration judges who aren’t ruling the way they want them to rule. They’re freely admitting that they’re racially profiling.
My bottom line is: The government is not allowed to start violating our basic constitutional rights just because people voted for that in an election — or thought they were voting for that.”
Street: Strong agreement here that winning power through the existing constitutional order (as both Mussolini and Hitler did) does not make it legitimate for the winner to tear down that order and replace the previously existing rule of law and elections with a military police state attached to fascist dictatorship. Two differences here: (a) Trump would probably not have won either the popular vote or the Electoral College in 2024 without steeped up racist voter suppression across the country; (b) a significant share of Trump voters probably did not think they were voting for a presidential candidate who would violate their basic constitutional rights.
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2. The Lack of and Indeed Seeming Discouragement of Any Call for Sustained Mass Resistance
There’s lots of great, insightful, and empirically and morally rich stuff in the Balko interview! My main difficulty with the interview is the lack of any call for sustained mass action to bring down the Trump regime as soon as humanly possible, before it’s too late. And here the problem is bigger than silence. Balko seems to think that serious mass resistance is a losing game and that there’s not much way out of the box that the TFR is putting around us:
Ezra Klein/Times: “So you could imagine them really stepping up ICE raids and then using some kind of backlash to that as pretext for sending in the National Guard, as they did in Los Angeles. Or sending in, as Phil Hegseth wants, the National Guard plus more Marines and other kinds of military officials or soldiers. And you could imagine something going really wrong — or maybe from their perspective, right. So in D.C., there was a case of a guy who appeared to be drunk. I think he threw a sandwich at a federal agent, and they made a very big deal out of this. Maybe in New York or elsewhere, maybe it’s not a sandwich — maybe it’s a rock. Or maybe there’s gunfire. Or maybe there is a car backfiring that some member of the National Guard thinks is gunfire and they open up retaliatory fire. Maybe there’s, all of a sudden, a bunch of people dead. Maybe there’s violence. There has already been tear gas at these things. It’s there for a crisis point to be reached, where then they’re saying: It’s an insurrection — and now we’re invoking the powers of the Insurrection Act. The conditions they’re creating seem very frightening.”
Balko: “Yes. And I think it puts the residents of these cities in a really can’t win position. You either submit and allow this to happen and get accustomed to the idea of looking out your kitchen window and seeing soldiers march by. Or you put up resistance, in which case you create exactly the kind of scenario that you just described — which I think they want. Let’s say Pritzker in Illinois activated the Illinois National Guard to protect immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago from these raids — particularly if we see they’re arresting or harassing U.S. citizens and people who are here legally. And then you’ve got this standoff….Especially if you get what we’re seeing in D.C., which is that red states are now sending National Guard troops into Washington D.C. to assist with whatever it is they’re doing there — all of a sudden, now you’ve got red states sending guard troops into blue states that don’t want them there. It is a recipe for exactly the kind of catastrophe you’re talking about. I think the Trump administration relishes the idea of an incident like that. Because it will give them an excuse to grab more power and to become even more aggressive.”
Street: Okay, wait a minute. There’s some worthwhile scenarioizing here but the notion of Illinois governor JB Pritzker protecting immigrant Chicago neighborhoods against ICE raids with Illinois National Guard troops is pure fantasy (through I would love to be corrected by events on that). Pritzker doesn’t have that kind of chutzpah and knows that any effort on his part to do that would be quicky squashed through presidential deputization of the Illinois guard coupled with the sending in of active-duty military under the claim that the State of Illinois was in rebellion against the US government.
My main point though is that Balko here seems to be saying that mass resistance is playing into the TFR’s hands. What this misses is that capitulation and surrender would play even and far more into the regime’s hands. It’s NOT “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” It’s “you could be damned if you do, but you definitely will be damned if you don’t and you have a chance of the TFR being damned if you do and it catches on across the nation and takes hold in Washington DC.”
Does Balko really think the TFR won’t take an absence of resistance – submission – to mean that they can go even further and faster in constructing and consolidating a military police state across the nation? Does he really think that mass submission isn’t far worse than mass resistance? Does he not understand that true mass resistance in Chicago could inspire the same in other cities and towns across the United States, giving confidence to elites ready to challenge the institutional capitulation he bemoans and helping invigorate a bottom up and top-down movement to remove the fascist Trump regime before it cancels all prospects for a decent human future?
Does Balko understand that the Trump regime poses multiple grave existential menaces to Americans and the world including but hardly limited to the creation of a militarized police state: to public health (including pandemic response, gravely endangered by Trump’s insane antivax assault on the Centers for Disease Control), to livable ecology (including Trump’s insane determination to accelerate the climate catastrophe), to world peace (with Trump taking US attacks on the rule of international law to new levels), to truth, to science, to social protections, to decency and empathy, to women and girls, to LGBT people, to art, and more.
As Balko seems to know but doesn’t say, but as Ezra Klein briefly hints in their discussion, this is a fascist regime we are up against:
Klein: “I mean, we’ve memeified fascism.”
Balko: “Yeah.”
Klein: “And you could say fascism always memeifies itself.”
A fascist (and not merely authoritarian) regime that is bidding to consolidate and cement its rule without chances of reversal beyond truly disastrous consequences. As I wrote in Refuse Fascism’s Declaration of Independence from Trump’s Fascist America, which was delivered outside the White House last July 4th, right before Trump celebrated his funding of the Big Fascist Bill that made ICE’s budget “larger than the annual military budget of every country in the world except the United States and China” (Balko):
“The history of the current US President is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having the direct objective of establishing a dictatorship relentlessly fighting to entrench the three great overlapping principles of Amerikan fascism – genocidal white supremacy, virulent patriarchy, and xenophobic nationalism – while assaulting truth and decency, accelerating the climate catastrophe, assaulting public health, and raising the risks of global war
A harsh historical truth made evident at great human cost in the previous century is that it is devastatingly difficult to dislodge fascists from power once they consolidate rule over state and society, If they are not separated from authority prior to the cementing of their reign, it can become too late.
No matter how they attain power, fascist rulers are never legitimate. The responsibility to expel them from power is particularly urgent when fascism threatens to consolidate control atop history’s most powerful and lethal nation in a time of deepening global climate catastrophe and a world full of ever more lethal nuclear weapons. “
Please now everyone go read Refuse Fascism’s call for millions to flood the streets and public squares of Washington DC demanding the Fall of the Trump regime this fall, starting on November 5: https://refusefascism.org/featured-news/the-time-has-come-for-the-fall-of-the-trump-fascist-regime/
Speaking of sounding crazy, it’s hard not to call for the fall of the Trump fascist regime starting this fall without sounding a little off to many people. But here’s something even crazier: NOT calling and fighting for the fall of the Trump fascist regime as soon as humanly possible. It is by no means clear that decent human existence and a livable Earth can survive another year of this horrific administration. NOT rising up to unseat Trump this fall is far more daft than taking up RF’s call. For those who care about humanity and the planet, there’s just no neutral when it comes to this president, who Noam Chomsky accurately described nearly six years ago as “the most dangerous criminal in human history.”