Episode 279
All eyes are on Minnesota’s Twin Cities, where the people there are showing the world how to unite as a community to reject fascist oppression. Coast to coast, the demand is ICE Out Now. But for ICE to go, Trump has to go.
This past week, Sam talked to Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld, author of Responding, Teaching, and Learning Race & LGBTQ Topics as Acts of Resistance in a Declining Democracy: An Activists’ Guide. Read their recent article Trump is a textbook fascist. It will take all of us to bring down his regime and check out their slide presentations on social justice topics.
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Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown
Episode 279 ICE Out of Everywhere, Trump Must Go Now
Sun, Feb 01, 2026 6:36PM • 35:52
Warren Blumenfeld 00:00
The narrative from the Trump administration that dehumanizes people that are protesting. You know: These are terrorists; These are assassins; These are paid whatever — We’re not going to allow them to take away the humanity of the two people who are murdered! We’re not going to allow them to take away the humanity of the people who are resisting. We’re seeing the biggest mass protest in the history of the United States, happening; spontaneous rallies from around the country, from people of all different backgrounds are joining together in coalition. I think that will eventually save us.
Mark Tinkleman 01:01
Welcome to Episode 279 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Mark Tinkleman, one of those volunteers and guest host of the show. Refuse Fascism works to unite all who can be united in mass relentless nonviolent resistance to drive the Trump fascist regime from power.
This week, we’re sharing excerpts of a conversation our regular host, Sam had with Warren Blumenfeld, author of ‘Responding, Teaching and Learning Race and LGBTQ topics as Acts of Resistance in a Declining Democracy, an Activist’s Guide’. Warren is a social justice educator at UMass Amherst, and you can also regularly find their work in LGBTQ Nation. Before we get started, a quick thank you to everyone who rates and reviews the podcast, picks up merch, supports us on Patreon and subscribes on Substack. That support really does make this work possible. If you’re listening and you don’t do those things yet, now is a great time. After listening, rate the show, grab some merch, become a patron or subscribe. It all helps us keep building this platform and getting these ideas out where they need to go.
Mark Tinkleman 02:02
All right, let’s get into it. Right now, Minneapolis, Minnesota, is, for all intents and purposes, the center of the universe. The events playing out there may shape history for generations to come. Most of today’s commentary will be focused on events happening in Minneapolis and about Minneapolis, but first we’re going to take a detour to Fulton County, Georgia. Trump’s FBI raided Fulton County’s election offices this week, ostensibly searching for evidence of meddling in the 2020 elections. You may remember a recording of Trump cajoling Georgia’s top election official, Brett Raffensperger, to find 11,000 votes that would tip the scales towards Trump, but it seems that’s not the meddling they’re talking about.
Instead, we have the same kind of bogus claims that Trump took to dozens of courts in 2020 and 2021 trying to overturn the elections, all of which were thrown out. But these same old claims are serving a revitalized purpose — namely, to assert Trump’s control over the 2026 midterm elections, and they’re taking place in a new context, where many election officials across the country are openly loyal to MAGA over the rule of law, where Trump has tightened his hold on the federal judiciary, and where his regime is openly interfering in the election process with the intent of either throwing out votes that don’t go his way, annulling the results or even canceling the elections altogether.
Which brings us back to Minnesota, where the same day that border patrol agents ruthlessly gunned down Alex Pretti, Attorney General, Pam Bondi, told the Minnesota State government that they would be willing to bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota if the state accepted a list of demands. One of those demands was access to the state’s voter rolls. The events of that day epitomized the three converging interests of the regime in this battle: 1) terrorizing immigrants, 2) intimidating and murdering those who oppose them, and 3) bringing to an end the constitutional mechanisms that can limit their power.
Since that day, Trump has said unequivocally that they are not backing down in Minnesota, and has sent in the notorious Tom Homan to lead their operations. The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has promised the use of military assets in the region, and it’s come to light that the Department of Homeland Security has been buying up massive warehouses across the country, some of which could hold up to 9,500 detainees. Federal agents seized independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort in retaliation for covering, not even participating in, but covering a protest that disrupted the services of a church whose pastor is an ICE official.
This is extremely ominous, but there have been some positive developments as well, stemming from the growing actions of people taking to the streets. Early in the week, Greg Bovino, the former public face of the assault on Minnesota, was removed from his post, and Trump did at one point openly support an investigation into the death of Alex Pretti. Clearly, the outrage over the murder of Pretti put the regime on their back foot for a moment, and it’s important that people got to see a crack in their armor, so to speak. That crack was put there not by people silently seething or keeping out their outrage confined to social media or calling their reps or by registering more voters.
No, it was put there by people taking to the streets, both to protect their neighbors and to express their outrage, often simultaneously, disrupting business as usual. Possibly the most important element of this story so far is that even after we had that effect, people kept coming. Throughout the course of this last week, resistance has grown even stronger. In the dead of winter, tens of thousands are coming out in Minneapolis and across the country. This past Friday, in particular, students have entered the conversation in a big way. Answering a call from student groups at the University of Minnesota, walkouts surged out of high schools and colleges across the country.
A small, but not insignificant number of small businesses also joined in the strike, and following that day of action, there are at least 300 protests planned for this weekend. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine hosted a concert in Minneapolis explicitly to pump up the resistance, and Bruce Springsteen showed up with one of the most powerful new protest songs in decades. Athletes and other celebrities have raised their voices in support of the people of Minneapolis. Even as this resistance continues to grow, there are important lessons to be learned and big questions about the way forward. For ten years, we’ve heard people complain of so called protest fatigue. That complaint has rung hollow the whole time, let’s be clear — it’s largely been a cover for succumbing to hopelessness or sticking your head in the sand.
But it’s worth noting that now that people are actually taking meaningful action in an ongoing way. People are feeling more energized than ever. People in this country are so heavily trained to limit their imagination as to what protest entails and what it’s for, but actually seeing it in action can play a big part in breaking that down. We also need to talk about demands. Driving ICE out of Minnesota is an extremely righteous demand and even possibly a viable one in the short term, and defeating this particular assault would be huge, but Operation Metro Surge is part of a nationwide campaign of state terror aimed at instilling fear amongst everyone who isn’t white, silencing opposition and consolidating power. ICE in Minnesota is one component of that.
To stop that campaign, we need to drive out the fascist Trump regime. We cannot afford to set our sights any lower than that. History can sometimes clarify a thing. Opposing the Gestapo in 1930s Germany would have been righteous. Opposing slave patrols in this country would have been righteous. But both of them were clearly tied into the broader regimes of Nazism and slavery. Back then, to stop the violent enforcers, you had to end the regime that they served. Today, it is the Trump fascist regime that needs to be defeated. We are seeing the way that people can actually make change in real time in the streets continuing to grow.
Yet, even before it reaches the scale and depth necessary to actually stop the regime, we’re seeing vast attempts to redirect people’s energy away from the streets and into the midterms, as though just electing more Democrats will magically stop a regime who already refuses to abide by Congress’s mandates. In the wake of the shooting of Alex Pretti, we’ve seen some Democratic politicians in the house and in state governments begrudgingly put up some demands on Trump’s federal government. We see this playing out in the partial shutdown. If this was a question of having enough blue seats, these politicians would have been making much stronger demands since the opening of the fascist assault on Minneapolis.
It should be clear to everyone that these particular Democrats taking some action now are not reacting to the horrors of the fascists, but instead they are reacting to the veracity of the people standing up. To funnel people’s outrage out of the streets and into the midterms in this moment would have the effect of maybe a few more Democrats appeasing the fascists. But to grow the resistance and focus it with the demand that the whole Trump Fascist Regime Must Go Now! we have the potential to burst through the cracks and create a political situation where people in power are compelled to legitimately remove the whole regime. With that, here’s Sam’s interview with Warren Blumenfield.
Sam Goldman 08:48
Fascism is no longer a distant danger or a creeping threat, it’s here — though not yet fully consolidated — and it’s already killing people. In Minnesota, federal law enforcement agents shot and killed two innocent observers, a poet, and an ER nurse at a VA hospital, both done in cold blood. And it doesn’t stop there.
After the murder from the highest offices in the land comes a rush to pre judge and slander the dead, inventing outrageous lies to justify the killings and shield those responsible. Career prosecutors and FBI agents are resigning rather than pervert the rule of law. Federal agents contaminate crime scenes and stonewall state investigators. This is not the rule of law breaking down. It is being deliberately broken. Toddlers being sent to detention centers. Liam, a five year old child seized and shipped out of state to a so called detention facility, a concentration camp and all but name. An Asian man is dragged from his home and forced to stand outside in the freezing cold in his underwear while armed agents questioned his citizenship, though he is a citizen. Intimidation and violence are now tools of rule. People are afraid to leave their homes. They fear arrest. They fear beatings, they fear shackles. They fear death.
Whether they’re citizens, asylum seekers or long term residents, there can be no living with this fascism, no retreat into talk of midterms, while each week brings new leaps down the same ever more precarious road. So the question becomes: How do we wake people up, not just to see what’s happening, but to act before the window closes? Which is why I’m so glad today to be joined by Dr. Warren Blumenfeld, author of ‘The What, the So What and the Now What of Social Justice Education’, Co-editor of ‘Readings for Diversity and Social Justice’. Welcome Warren. Thanks for joining me.
Warren Blumenfeld 10:39
Thank you so much Sam for inviting me.
Sam Goldman 10:41
So one of the things that you write that feels like a real moral fault line of this moment is: Even if you claim you don’t do politics, politics does you. I feel like what you’re describing is so true in its description of this fascism. So I wanted to kind of frame our entire conversation around: If we’re able to see this as a textbook fascist regime, what does it actually mean for us, ordinary people right now? Connected to that: What kind of illusions do we have to break with if we’re serious about preventing something far worse than most of us can even imagine?
So I just want to use that as the overarching frame for our discussion, because it’s something that that you’re writing explores a lot. I think that one of the things that, in talking with so many people about fascism, also about the history of this country, global experiences with fascism, one of the things that always strikes me is where it takes a route from shapes its character. We see that in all fascisms, but there is something very striking about the American fascism and how it is shaped by the American experience, and that that’s why it looks different than fascism in Latin America, or why it looks different than European fascism. Your point there is very well taken.
I think that one of the things that people struggle with — as an educator, I like to get a better sense of breaking this down — is for some people who listen — there are people that have been following this for some time, but — there are many, many people in this country that I feel, look at what’s happening with Trump and feel like it’s all escalated so suddenly. If you had to explain this moment to somebody who feels that way — Oh, what’s happened? Why is this happening right now? — How would you describe that process that led us here?
Warren Blumenfeld 12:44
We didn’t see it escalate as quickly the first term, because he had guardrails in his administration. He had knowledgeable people who respected the Constitution, who respected the rule of law, who put some parameters around him. He learned from the first administration that if he was going to push his plan, which was based on The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — it was all prepared for him, it was like this menu. So the second term, he purposely brought in sycophants who would not put constraints on him and basically be his puppet[s].
In many ways, Stephen Miller is holding Trump as his mouthpiece, as his puppet. Stephen Miller is his ideological mentor in many ways. Stephen Miller, using Project 2025, is saying: Okay, we’ll only have two years. Invariably, at least the House of Representatives is going to be taken over by the Democrats, and they’re not going to pass your policies. We have to really be quick. From the first day he was inaugurated, he pardons, what was it 600 or 700 protesters who stormed the Capitol building. So he realizes that he doesn’t have very long to go, and also, he is desperate to keep the focus off of the Epstein files, so he puts all these shiny objects that are going around that he’s going to be pushing. He has a complicit Supreme Court who are not gonna be putting many constraints on him.
He has a complicit Senate and House of Representatives. So he’s going for it. He’s pushing as fast and as hard as he can. That’s what has been so amazing to a lot of the political pundits, because they see Orban, they see Erdogan in Turkey. It took them incremental amount of times to get to the point at which we are in the first year. That’s what has been so amazing to many people. He’s had such a crackdown, and he has still his sycophants. I found a quote which it’s a fairly brief quote that I’d like to read. It’s from Madeline Albright’s book called ‘Fascism.”’n that book, she talks about some of the ways that dictators really mold the population by the fact of grievance.
We talk about all the time, that Donald Trump, his entire platform is a grievance platform. Madeleine Albright wrote this book, Fascism: a warning, in Trump’s first term, and she basically, in this one paragraph, talked about his platform for his entire policy: “Unlike a monarchy or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above, fascism draws energy from men and women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of humiliation, or a sense that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier it is for a fascist leader to gain followers by dangling the prospect of renewal or by vowing to take back what has been stolen.”
This is basically the grievance platform. He has appealed to people from working class, but also middle class who think that their standard of living is going down. Who feel that their status in society is unfair — it’s not high enough. Basically, that’s how he got some minoritized people to vote for him, when he plays to their grievances as well. It’s starting to backfire now. Basically he doesn’t read, but he understands the fascist playbook. He understands Machiavellian politics, really well, translated through Stephen Miller, who is brilliant as a statistician and also as a policy analyst, in knowing how to manipulate the populace.
Sam Goldman 17:26
That’s really clarifying. I wanted to get your thinking on what is the single biggest misunderstanding people have right now about what we’re facing and why that misunderstanding leaves people dangerously unprepared for what’s coming? Linking to your point about how fast they’ve unleashed, where people, especially the commentators, are having trouble making sense of all of it.
Warren Blumenfeld 17:56
The siloed media outlet — the people who are listening to and watching right wing media are getting a whole different narrative than those who are watching the mainstream media, or CNN, or MSNOW, or the BBC, or the Guardian, The New York Times. That’s a very different narrative that they are getting. Just listen to the narrative around the two innocent people who were murdered in Minneapolis. Within seventeen days, they were. Renee Good was murdered seven blocks from where George Floyd was murdered.
The people of Minnesota, my heart just goes out to them, because they’re in constant trauma. The narrative from the White House and from the administration generally, is: These two were domestic terrorists; They were there to cause trouble; They were there to interfere with the legal process of the ICE agents. In reality, they were observing. They were just observing. They were not trying to get in the way. They were observers. They have their constitutional right in terms of the First Amendment, to protest, and also ICE is basically ignoring the first ten amendments to the Constitution… even the Second Amendment. The person who was murdered had a legally registered gun in a holster that he was not in any way trying to use. So he was exercising his Second Amendment right. They called him a terrorist who was there to assassinate the ICE people.
But the administration defended Kyle Rittenhouse when he took an AR-15 and shot people at a Black Lives Matter rally. The narratives are constantly shifting, and people who only watch or listen to the right-wing media many times follow them and continue that. So I think we are a split country because of the siloing of the information that we’re getting. I try to watch Fox News sometimes, and it’s either continue watching Fox News and destroy my television — because it’s just such blatant lies. Basically, they’re following the Nazi playbook. I mean, Joseph Goebbels says: If you tell a big lie enough times, people will believe it, and that’s what’s happening.
People still believe that the 2020 elections were stolen away from Trump. 28% of Republicans still believe that Trump was the bonafide winner in the 2020 election. And people are starting to believe the narratives from the right wing media that these two innocent bystanders were there to cause trouble, and they are basically left wing paid terrorists. The whole thing is antisemitic, because it always comes back to George Soros, who are supposedly paying. The Jews have been the scapegoats for, you know, 2,000, 3,000 years, basically with the Greeks too. So the Jews are always the scapegoat as, basically this entire immigration policy is based on the concept of the great replacement theory — that Jews are behind trying to smuggle in Black and brown people to replace the white people and vote in the Democratic Party to replace the Republican Party.
So Jews are always considered responsible. Like the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, the person there went in and sprayed bullets and killed 17 people, I think it was, because that group was working to rescue refugees who were fleeing from oppression. That’s why he went in there, because the Jews are trying to replace white people. So Jews have always been the scapegoat. So, to me, the silver lining of all of this fascism that we’re seeing in the United States, that we’re seeing an intersectional movement, GLBT, people, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Atheists, black people, LatinX people, Asian people, former Republicans and current Republicans, liberals and those who are center right — people are coming together.
Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I see a movement happening. I have always — for the 90 years, I don’t know — studied the incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War Two, and I’ve been listening to Rachel Maddow’s brilliant podcast called The Burn Order, and what she said, and relating it to today, there was no mass movement demonstrating against the illegal internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two. There was one governor of Colorado who would not abide by the resettlement order of Japanese Americans in Colorado, and many Japanese Americans flocked to Colorado as a sanctuary so they wouldn’t be incarcerated.
Eventually the state came in and took them out, but there was one governor and one or two people in the central government who said: This is not good policy; This is not good politics. But there was no mass movement, and Japanese Americans remained incarcerated for, I think it was four years before they were finally let out, and then in 1988 survivors were given $20,000 in reparations and an apology. That’s not happening now. That’s why I said: You might not do politics, but politics does you. We are seeing mass movement. We’re seeing the biggest mass protest in the history of the United States, happening this year, in the first year, with the Hands Off rally first and then the two separate organized No Kings rallies, and also on a daily basis, spontaneous rallies from around the country, from people of all different backgrounds are joining together in coalition. I think that is what is will eventually save us.
Sam Goldman 24:59
The compare and contrast that you did with the similarities in in what’s driving this fascism, in how it’s taking shape, and the contrast of the forms of resistance that we’re seeing here and now that we didn’t see in times past is very important and significant. I work in Head Start, and so I spend my days working throughout North Philadelphia, working with teachers who teach children three to five years old. What we’ve seen in terms of a transformation in the American people — I’m not saying everyone,
I’m not being delusional, but — we went from a time where the polarization about immigrants was very bad, where even good people gave credence to “they’re taking our jobs,” or whatever — what I see now is much more when people saw the images of Liam and his little bunny hat, they saw their child. I don’t mean like they thought: oh, it could happen to my kid, but they saw him as their child. That’s a really important transformation that we’ve had where there was something similar, I think, in the first Trump term, where people heard the cries of the children separated from their mothers and the screams of them in the camps, and people were moved to act.
But it is on a whole other level now, and I think that it is not just because the outrage has gotten worse that people have been moved to make this transformation. I’m not exactly sure what all the factors are, but it’s a very good thing that people are seeing what’s happening to migrant, refugee and immigrant children, or the descendants of immigrants, these babies, and seeing them as our babies, in the same way that Tamir Rice was our child. The more that we can get people to act on that shared humanity and to refuse it on that basis, I think that the better situation we’ll be in. At the same time, I have this very gut feeling that — I don’t think is just gut, I think that there’s historical evidence behind it — that’s like: We’re not just going to be able to stop this in a rear guard fight where we try to protect as many of these kiddos and as many of these communities as we can.
As beautiful as all the resistance is and has been, and all the recording of ICE is important, but I feel that as long as this regime remains in power, they’re going to bulldoze even the best mutual aid, the best structures of community support and community care, until there’s no space for any of that. I’m just wondering what you think it will take to make that shift happen. I think in your writing, you talked about — I’m trying to remember all the characteristics that you talked about to move people from awareness to action, like danger and love and hope. How do we get people to finally, refuse to like, live with this, or wait it out, or believe that the pendulum is going to somehow just swing back, and get them to step into making history instead of being crushed by it? How do we make that happen in this short window?
Warren Blumenfeld 28:32
I think it is happening. The very fact that there were like five million people marching on the last No Kings rally. That is significant. The shift is happening. I was talking about how I don’t do binaries, but I do do one binary — I probably do others too, but — the split screen of the narrative from the Trump administration that dehumanizes people that are protesting. You know: These are terrorists; These are assassins; These are paid whatever — and the humanization of people that we’re seeing in some of the media and the protesters.
We’re not going to allow them to take away the humanity of the two people who were murdered. One was a mother who was sitting there. “I’m not angry at you,” she says; I have a small child; I have a dog in my car; I have my child’s cuddly little animals in my glove compartment. We’re going to show you her humanity and how it has affected her wife. We’re not going to allow them to take away her humanity. The same with the nurse. He was a poet. He was specifically requesting to be a an intensive care nurse in a Veteran’s Administration hospital. I saw in the news today a recording of him giving a ceremony of a deceased patient of his, and he’s talking about this man’s service. The whole room is crying. This man is a human being. He tried to help this woman who they pushed down on the ground.
We’re not going to allow them to take away the humanity of the people who are resisting, even though they’re trying to do that. That’s how we are going to succeed, by continuing to counter their hatred with love. I’m seeing a lot of love and support and human feelings. Empathy — there is no empathy on the other side. I don’t think Donald Trump has an empathetic bone in his body. If you have two babies in a room and one of them starts crying, the other one will probably start crying too. I say: Empathy is the ability to walk in other people’s shoes. In an infant, it’s the ability to crawl in the diapers of another baby, to have empathy.
But life sometimes reduces that flame of empathy. People are traumatized, people are hurt. Sometimes they lose some or all of their capacity for that empathy. I want to do a shameless plug. I published this book this year. My students, many of them are now teachers, and they are in school districts that are banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs. I also teach queer studies, and many schools around the country, universities as well as grade schools, are eliminating, banning, discussions of sexuality and gender identity, and they’re not allowing professors to teach Queer Studies, LGBTQ studies anymore.
Also, they’re banning discussions of race in the schools and even in schools of higher education. So they’re saying: How do we get through these years, able to teach these courses to talk about these issues? I do a lot of commentaries for two websites, the LGBTQ Nation and the Good Men Project, and I put some of my editorials together and also combining them with new writing, to produce a book. It’s ‘An Activist’s Guide on Responding, Teaching and Learning Race and LGBTQ Topics as Acts of Resistance in a Declining Democracy’. We are indeed a declining democracy.
Sam Goldman 32:40
That’s a great place to stop. I want to thank you so much, Warren, for taking the time to share your insight, your perspective, your expertise, and, of course, your time. Besides linking to some of your most recent articles. Is there any other place you want to direct people to?
Warren Blumenfeld 32:59
Yes, I have a WordPress website where I’ve uploaded many of my PowerPoints. I have six PowerPoint sections: the History of Homophobia, or the History of Homosexuality, from Cave Paintings to the Present. It spans a distance. I also have one on the construction of race, the social construction of race. There is no such thing as race, that’s a human made condition that was invented by humans to place people in hierarchies. So there’s one on the social construction of race. One specifically on the history of immigration policies in the United States, which are de facto racial policy.
From 1790, the first immigration policy that wouldn’t allow indigenous people to be citizens, even though they had lived here, from twelve (thousand) to 33,000, years, they were not considered to be citizens because the terminology, the narrative was that they were domestic foreigners. It’s an oxymoron. So I have a whole presentation on the history of immigration in the United States. So I will give you that website, and I hope teachers, educators, activists use these PowerPoints, because I think they present and I’ll do say so myself, a lot of really good information, and feel free to give that basically outline of the autocratic playbook that I sent to you as well. So I will send you some materials and some websites that you can pass on. I would really appreciate that.
Sam Goldman 34:39
Of course, that sounds great. Thank you so much.
Warren Blumenfeld 34:42
Thank you.
Mark Tinkleman 34:43
Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. Support this show by becoming a patron. Join today at Patreon.com/Refuse Fascism, or subscribing to our Substack, Substack.com/@RefuseFascism, or getting our merch. For $0, you can help build our audience by sharing the show, rating and reviewing on Apple Podcasts, or you’re listening platform of choice, recommending our Substack, or more. Be sure to stay connected for developments and actions to RefuseFascism.org. And on social media @RefuseFascism. You can also text refuse to 855-755-1314, so you are always in the loop. We’ll be back next Sunday. Until then, In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!