Like millions of Americans, Nancy Hoch experienced the first year of the Trump administration as a slow-moving horror movie that left her anxious and exhausted. In mid-November, she attended a training session with people who wanted to learn more about how they could assist immigrant communities targeted by ICE, the paramilitary, secret police force that has moved to the center of Donald Trump’s second presidency. In her beautiful cover story (P12) about her journey into a New York City’s burgeoning nonviolent resistance movement to ICE, Hoch writes about how she discovered two things she hadn’t anticipated — the enormous feeling of relief of being in community with other caring, like-minded people who had each other’s backs and her own growing feeling of bravery from having moved from fear to taking action. 

In her first-person report (P16) from Minneapolis, longtime Twin Cities resident Cara Letofsky describes an urban war zone. Locals continue to non-violently oppose thousands of marauding federal agents who have tried to terrorize their community into submission and have instead created a grave political crisis for Trump as his poll numbers continue plummeting and the midterms loom on the horizon.

This quiet, unblinking courage of ordinary people doing extraordinary things  can be found throughout this issue. In addition to mutual aid organizers protecting their immigrant neighbors, we have nurses (P4) walking the picket line in the dead of winter, NYCHA residents standing up to public housing privatizers (P6) and young socialists (P9) knocking on their neighbors’ doors and inviting them to have conversations about breaking with the failed party machines of the past in favor of something better. 

We’re going to need all that courage and public spiritedness and then some in the months ahead. We are in a volatile, see-saw moment in which an authoritarian regime is trying to consolidate its power and crush all dissent, but has only partially succeeded. This country, with all its flaws and contradictions, was founded 250 years ago out of a rebellion against an autocratic king by people who insisted on speaking their mind and not being pushed around. That same rebellious spirit would later help fuel the abolitionist movement against slavery, the women suffragists who insisted on the right to vote, the great factory strikes of the 1930s that birthed the modern labor movement and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s that gave us a more inclusive society.  And now we see a surging opposition to Trump and his authoritarian MAGA movement. The habits and beliefs of a people accustomed to having lived in a democratic republic are not easily vanquished, as Machiavelli noted 500 years ago in The Prince. 

Meanwhile, despite their patriotic pretensions, Trump and MAGA are deeply hostile to everything and everyone that has made this country good and decent. The forever wars of the 2000s and 2010s have come home. For our government, the “enemy” is now the American people, or at least the majority of the population that lives in urban centers, college towns and anywhere else where inclusive, cosmopolitan values are commonplace. For them, it’s a war without end and rounding up the “worst of the worst” immigrants is just the pretext. 

How this struggle between white nationalist authoritarianism and multi-racial democracy turns out is still up for grabs. MAGA has the guns and state power. We have the people and the resolve – think of Renee Good and Alex Pretti calmly facing down their killers in their final moments — that comes from refusing to live in the dystopia they would impose on us. When one falls many more have stepped forward. 

Amid the darkness, we are finding something within ourselves that is giving us the fortitude to push through the current nightmare. It will also give us the clarity to create a more just and compassionate world when we get to the other side. Here at The Indy we look forward to continuing to cover this struggle as it unfolds. To do that, we need your help. Please see the fund drive update below and do what you can to pitch in if you have not already done so.

In Solidarity,

The Indypendent is a New York City-based newspaper and website. Our independent, grassroots journalism is made possible by readers like you. Please consider making a recurring or one-time donation today and help us reach our winter fund drive goal of $50,000.