Attacks on Immigrant Communities Are Attacks on All of Our Health

The White House and their congressional allies are funding ICE’s brutal dragnet operations in our communities by cutting health coverage, defending clinics, and making it harder for families to get the care they need.


Nurse practitioner Sarah Malin-Roodman attends a protest outside of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland in Oakland, California, on Monday, January 26, 2026.
(Photo by Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images)

Anthony Wright

Adriana Cadena
Jul 06, 2026

Common Dreams


Congress just passed $70 billion in additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and beyond, children have been detained, families separated, and neighbors stopped based on their skin color or spoken language. ICE violence has killed a mother and an ICU nurse, separated more than 100,000 American children from their families, and left people detained in inhumane facilities.

The decision by congressional Republicans to double down on President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda through new funding is not just another attack on our immigrant friends and neighbors, including those who are legal residents, but it is also a direct attack on our public health and healthcare systems.

The tens of billions in additional funding is on top of an unprecedented $170.7 billion for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including $30 billion for ICE and deportation efforts, approved last year under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R.1)—a law which also slashed more than $1 trillion in federal healthcare funding. These cuts have and will continue to kick people off their healthcare coverage, give Americans fewer options for affordable healthcare, and drive up costs at clinics and hospitals across the country, all while billions of dollars have been funneled into ICE raids and violence that threaten the safety and well-being of immigrants and US citizens alike. All the while, American families are facing an affordability crisis, struggling to make ends meet to pay for essentials like groceries, rent, and healthcare.

Put simply: The White House and their congressional allies are funding ICE’s brutal dragnet operations in our communities by cutting health coverage, defunding clinics, and making it harder to get the healthcare families depend on—and it affects everyone’s health.

What makes our neighborhoods healthier and safer isn’t ICE enforcement. It’s communities that can access the care, services, and resources they need to thrive and remain resilient.

The divergence of federal dollars away from healthcare and into ICE has led to an influx of poorly trained enforcement agents in our cities, in our airports, and on our streets. The aggressive policing and surveillance of our neighborhoods create an environment of fear, turning our streets, schools, workplaces, and hospitals into places of threat rather than safe community spaces. As a result, community members, including vital immigrant healthcare workers, are staying home, unable to contribute to the economic vitality of our neighborhoods or seek and provide necessary healthcare. In addition, as more people lose health coverage, uninsured patients seeking emergency care results in higher uncompensated care costs, putting financial pressure on health facilities, and forcing them to scale back services for all.

We cannot afford to let ICE enforcement gut the health system we all rely on. What makes our neighborhoods healthier and safer isn’t ICE enforcement. It’s communities that can access the care, services, and resources they need to thrive and remain resilient. We should all be treated with dignity and be able to safely access healthcare and other neighborhood resources vital for our health and well-being.

A new poll from the Protecting Immigrant Families coalition finds that most Americans agree. Sixty-four percent of Americans disapprove of how ICE is handling their job, and 83% of Americans support access to healthcare and social services for lawfully present immigrants. The data overwhelmingly show that Americans, no matter where they stand politically, believe in and want to protect the humanity of their immigrant neighbors, despite actions from the federal government.

We urge congressional and state leaders to act. Stand in solidarity with immigrant communities. Codify sensitive locations protections that prohibit ICE raids or presence at schools, places of worship, hospitals and health centers, and other places that are meant to be safe spaces for everyone. Ban local officials from inquiring about immigration status. Secure our sensitive personal and health data from inappropriate federal access. Make future DHS funding conditional on real oversight and accountability for the families being torn apart, the neighborhoods being destabilized, and the dismantling of the healthcare system we all rely on.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Anthony Wright
Anthony Wright is the executive director of Families USA.
Full Bio >

Adriana Cadena
Adriana Cadena is the executive director of Protecting Immigrant Families.
Full Bio >

‘A Slap in the Face’: Trump Moves to Gut Biden-Era Rules Reining In Meatpackers

“We need robust enforcement of antitrust and fair trade practice laws to finally protect producers from meatpackers’ fundamentally unfair and illegal practices,” said one campaigner.


Workers process meat at a Triumph Foods plant in St. Joseph, Missouri in this 

 United States Department of Agriculture photo.
(Photo by USDA)

Brett Wilkins
Jul 06, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A leading government accountability watchdog group on Monday ripped the Trump administration’s move to rescind Biden-era rules enacted to protect ranchers and farmers from abuse by meatpacking corporations and boost competition in the key industry.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced the reversal of three Biden administration rules under the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921. One of the rules prohibits meatpackers, swine contractors, and poultry companies from retaliating against producers for actions like joining associations, speaking with regulators, or seeking other buyers.

Another rule mandated improved transparency in poultry grower contracts. The third rule‚ which was set to take effect this month, would have limited how poultry companies use the tournament payment system.

USDA said it plans to start the revocation process with proposed rulemakings scheduled for later this month and October.

Farm groups and antitrust advocates argue the move removes protections against monopolistic, deceptive, and retaliatory practices by dominant meatpacking and poultry companies.

“For years, meat corporations have abused hardworking farmers and ranchers. Now, the Trump administration is proposing to undo long-overdue progress made to level the playing field,” Emily Miller, staff attorney at Food & Water Watch, said Monday in a statement. “This move is a slap in the face to all those who have long fought for fair treatment in livestock and poultry markets.”

The USDA’s move comes amid increased meat sector consolidation, which studies by Food & Water Watch, More Perfect Union, and others have found results in higher consumer prices and lower farmer profits.

Over the course of his two terms in office, Trump has boosted the meatpacking industry at the expense of worker rights, competition, and public health. His administration refused to issue binding rules requiring businesses to institute safety measures amid the Covid-19 pandemic, and he invoked the Defense Production Act to classify meatpacking plants as critical infrastructure and force them to stay open even as the coronavirus ravaged industry workers.

Trump has also supported corporate monopolization in meatpacking, and his administration has shut down a Department of Justice antitrust probe of alleged industry collusion. Just four meatpackers control approximately 80% of the market. Meanwhile, cattle producers who in 1980 received 63 cents for every dollar paid by consumers for beef were receiving just 37 cents four decades later.

“We need robust enforcement of antitrust and fair trade practice laws to finally protect producers from meatpackers’ fundamentally unfair and illegal practices,” Miller said on Monday. “These rollbacks will do the opposite. We won’t rest until USDA does its job by putting producers above corporations.”

Opinion
The July 4 white supremacist march exposes an uncomfortable truth about our country

(RNS) — If we take our nation's long history of exclusionary politics seriously, it illuminates how white supremacist groups frame themselves as patriots. They believe they are not viruses to the American project, but white blood cells.

Patriot Front members gather on July 4, 2026, in Washington, DC. (Video screen grab)

Andre Henry
July 6, 2026 

RNS

(RNS) — It should be a contradiction that the Confederate flag was marched alongside the Betsy Ross flag through the streets near the U.S. Capitol on Independence Day.

The rebel banner was brought to the Capitol by hundreds of masked agents associated with Patriot Front, a white supremacist hate group founded after the 2017 showdown over a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Virginia. It waved in the wind alongside the flag of the 13 colonies and upside-down U.S. flags — a symbol of national distress — seeming to imply they were calling a nation in peril back to, or closer to, the exclusionary democratic vision of its founders. They echoed this in their chants to “reclaim America.”

But the hateful demonstration recalled a dissonance that has always been present in America’s politics.

Erin Wilson, intelligence project director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in response: “The white nationalist hate group, the Patriot Front, hid behind masks and marched the streets of Washington, D.C., ironically representing the opposite of patriotism.”

Many Americans fall prey to the temptation to agree with Wilson that overt racists marching Washington, D.C., streets on the nation’s birthday are “not us.” But these rebuttals are lazy at best.

One of the hardest parts about witnessing Patriot Front march the streets is knowing that they’re not entirely wrong. The United States was founded by racists and constructed through an unfathomable amount of racial violence, and its future continues to move forward on the tracks of racial discourse established by its founders. Just as they chanted in Charlottesville that they will not be replaced, and as they intruded upon the edited official story that officials would like to tell in the Capitol on America’s 250th birthday, Patriot Front stood in for all white supremacist groups saying they will not be erased from the story of how the U.S. became “great.”

If we’re honest about American history, we will have to admit that the current exclusionary politics the rebel flag represents are not a bug, but a feature of U.S. politics. The very Declaration of Independence — what Freedom 250 was celebrating — includes those exclusionary politics in the same document that contains our most cherished language about human rights and belonging. In it, Thomas Jefferson invokes the imago Dei (image of God), and then redlines it by invoking human hierarchy. He calls Indigenous peoples “merciless Indian Savages” — rhetoric that has always served as justification for racial violence. Exclusionary politics of the United States sits at the founding of this nation.
RELATED: A Christian nation? At 250, America is still fighting over what that means

If we take that notion seriously, it illuminates how white supremacist groups frame themselves as patriots. They believe they are not viruses to the American project, but white blood cells. History gives them some reason to see themselves in that light. If the U.S. was founded as an unequal society, justified by the lie of human hierarchy, then it follows that when America extends the bounds of humanity, some fighting cells must be deployed to maintain homeostasis.

Historically, hate groups like Patriot Front have arisen to preserve that same boundary when freedom movements threaten to permanently expand who truly belongs here. The Ku Klux Klan, co-founded by Confederate veterans and clergy, arose to preserve the racial order or restore it after Emancipation and Reconstruction. At the time, Klan members were often local business owners and aided by police, showing how they were an accepted form of social control.



The fact that Patriot Front is allowed to march the streets and intimidate minorities by virtue of their presence, protected by the shield of free speech rights, while activists who criticize Immigration and Customs Enforcement are locked up, is telling. The U.S. still accepts this kind of behavior as part of its DNA. On paper, white nationalism is called one of the U.S.’s greatest terror threats, but in practice is not treated that way, or else there would be some consequence for parading the banner of a failed insurgency against the Union and becoming a walking banner of harm to other U.S. citizens.

Oppressive regimes across the globe and throughout history have studied and even praised the U.S. as a model of systematic racial oppression. Nazi scholars studied Jim Crow, as did the Afrikaners of South Africa. And nations today are still taking notes on America’s exceptional way of transmuting xenophobia into policy, as seen in Colombia’s recent election, where a President Donald Trump fan and political doppelganger who promises to deport masses of immigrants was elected.

But what the selective agents of freedom throughout history forget is that, as my brother-in-law says, if you poison the well, everyone gets sick. Americans must realize that a threat to anyone’s freedoms is a threat to everyone’s freedoms. We are now living through an authoritarian power grab facilitated by antidemocratic currents that we have allowed to exist since the founding of the nation.
RELATED: After 50 years of death row, resistance has never been stronger

Perhaps a white nationalist group will never be welcomed with open arms into the Capitol on the Fourth of July; perhaps they’ll never be given the podium to speak plainly about the Great Replacement and to celebrate the fact that the U.S. continues in its systemic racism. But they can collect the winks and dog whistles in the president’s speech — when he shamelessly plugs the SAVE Act, which winks at the racist discourses that still dominate the U.S. social imagination, and gives support to racist policies like mass deportation and voter suppression. May we not forget that Nazi politics were not just unmoored racial animus but a political movement deeply concerned with borders and citizenship.

If Americans want to finally become the nation its founders claimed it was — a land with liberty and justice for all — it must do more than recite the mythology of the U.S. as a paragon of democracy, as Trump tried to do in the first third of his address to the public. We are not the world’s leader of democracy just because we say so. For as long as we parrot the ideals of human rights but practice the way of the brutal colonizers that founded this country, we will only be participating in the ancient practice of imperial ideology, which always finds some beautiful metanarrative as moral cover for obscene violence.

If we want the America we speak of to be the America we live in, then we will have to become more organized than groups like Patriot Front and other white supremacist forces. Their current authoritarian movement has thus far been able to mobilize a base using rhetoric that has stirred heirs to the Confederate spirit since Trump’s first run for president.

It’s time for the nation to see that this element of U.S. politics is its Achilles heel. Just as Jesus once said, a house divided against itself can’t stand, a nation that persecutes its own citizens, that attacks its own citizens’ rights, that abuses those who flee to it for a better life will never be stable.

The Challenge in Facing 4 July in the United States

By Bill Fletcher Jr

July 6, 2026

Source: AlterInter

Illustration from R. G. Horton’s pro-Confederate propaganda "history" of the American Civil War

There has been something almost surreal in President Donald Trump’s efforts to both whitewash US history as well as make 4 July a celebration of his own delusional greatness. There is little that can be done about the latter, but for all progressive forces, there is certainly something that must be done regarding the efforts towards the former.

For the purposes of this essay, we shall leave aside Trump’s 3 July speech about the alleged threat of “communism.” Instead, we shall focus on the problem of history.

The challenge in the United States is that we are taught to be suspicious of history, if not hate it. Instead, we are encouraged to embrace myth. Though this may sound strange, if not implausible, it makes perfect sense when one understands the USA as having resulted from a settler-colony. Think about it for a moment. A factually accurate history of the origins of the United States would read something like this:

In 1607, a group of English colonists invaded a territory in what is now known as ‘Virginia,’ a territory occupied for thousands of years by an indigenous population, and began a process of seizing land and people, spreading disease and introducing slavery.

There is nothing in that statement that can be challenged. The problem, of course, is that such a telling is not a wonderful way to start a narrative about the greatness of one’s country. More importantly, the actual history of a settler-colony is one that always questions the moral legitimacy of the state established as a result of the colonization process. This challenge or question acts as a perpetual nightmare for the resulting state and those who support it, whether such support is passive or active.

Thus, “July 4th” is complicated by both the contradictory nature of the 1775-1783 war of independence, as well as due to being a part and parcel of a longer and equally contradictory history of what came to be the United States. It is this that Trump and his MAGA minions wish to suppress and, both literally and figuratively, whitewash.

The reality of US history is the actuality of contradiction. There are really two histories of the United States, each having its own respective subsets. And it is these two histories that are irreconcilable, even when they may agree on certain specific facts. There is the history of the United States from the standpoint of those who have sought to construct a capitalist state, in effect a white supremacist, male supremacist imperial state. Separately, there is the history of the USA from the standpoint of the subaltern classes and groups, a history of class struggle; a history of the struggles against white supremacist national oppression; a history of the struggles against patriarchy/male supremacy; a history of the struggles against the capitalist degradation of the environment; a history of solidarity with oppressed populations in other parts of the planet.

These irreconcilable histories—that of the ruling groups vs those of the subaltern classes—are what we find at stake when we are asked to celebrate 4 July. Do we uphold the rhetoric of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence regarding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or do we dig deeper and unpack their attack on Native Americans and their fury with King George III for the Proclamation of 1763, halting colonial expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountain range? Do we turn a blind eye to the signatories’ repudiation of the British King for attempting to turn the settlers into “slaves,” when the settlers overwhelmingly embraced slavery? Can we, in other words, remove myth, and grasp the facts and currents of history in order to understand the circumstances and actions that have led us to where we find ourselves today, both domestically and internationally? Can we utilize history, to be blunt, in order to grasp the roots of rightwing populism and neofascism in the USA and, perhaps, get a sense how to utilize the history produced by the subaltern classes against the tyrants?

Those are the questions with which I leave the reader on this, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a longtime socialist, trade unionist and international solidarity activist in the USA. He is a cofounder of standing4democracy.org and can be followed @BillFletcherJr; billfletcherjr.com.

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This article was originally published by AlterInter; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Bill Fletcher Jr

Bill Fletcher Jr (born 1954) has been an activist since his teen years. Upon graduating from college he went to work as a welder in a shipyard, thereby entering the labor movement. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice“; and the author of “‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.

No Holiday for the Indentured

By Philip A Farruggio

July 5, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Alexandra Curtis/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

Well, the propaganda they sell us like soda water is that ‘ We are a free country and everyone has the opportunities to succeed in life.’ Ok, and since we are immersed as a nation in the quicksand of non unionism ( less than 7 % of private sector workers are in unions) many working stiffs have become 21st Century Indentured Servants. In feudal times the indentured servant had to work for the boss just to stay above water financially. You lose a week or two of work due to illness and you’re up the creek. Gone!

Let’s take one example this writer found by chance today. This is what it means to be an indentured servant on the  250th anniversary of America: The retail clerk with a broken wrist. I will call her ‘ Ms T ‘ working for her 15th year at the place earning $10.50 per hour with no benefits etc. She said she fell at home, the one she rents for her family at $1800 a month in town. Had to rush to the ER, has NO insurance ( she said even ObamaCare wanted $ 300 a month with a one year wait for real coverage. Between the ER and then being admitted as a patient they charged her $20k, with her wrist surgery costing $50k ( believe it or not). Obviously she asked for some charity from the hospital and surgeon’s billing, and they will be getting back to her with an answer. The woman is 59 and to put it bluntly ‘ Up the creek!’ Is this what our founding fathers anticipated or is this simply the way it always was and is?

Imagine if that store clerk belonged to a union and had the same Medicare that I have. She would still owe money, and without a supplemental plan, at least 20% of said bills would be her concern. Is this what we should be celebrating on July 4th? You can take all the fireworks and hot dogs and burgers and stuff em until those in power act like working stiffs and not the indentured servants of the super rich! As my late great union organizing  pal Walt DeYoung put it : ‘Nuff Said’.Email

Philip A Farruggio

Philip A Farruggio is a free lance columnist, host of a radio interview show and lifelong Anti War Activist. He is son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, Class of '74. He has a blog on the itstheempirestupid.com website produced by Chuck Gregory. You can find Philip's work on many sites such as Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, Nation of Change and Muck Rack.

The Plot to Ruin America

Nick Estes

 July 7, 2026

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Image by Koshu Kunii.

Nothing encapsulates the decline of the American project quite like the optics of its 250th anniversary. While four hundred masked neo-fascists marched through the capitol in navy-blue button-downs and khakis chanting “Reclaim America!”—entirely unchallenged either by police or antifascists—the official Independence Day parade was canceled because of extreme heat. It’s a disturbing vignette for our era. The country is turning far to the right and becoming too hot to even celebrate its own founding myths, reaching temperatures that climate scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” before human-caused climate change.

So who’s to blame for this current mess? Predictably, the political class has no interest in examining the structural decay. In two back-to-back speeches this weekend, President Trump workshopped a new scapegoat: communism. The tone summoned the anger of his 2017 inauguration speech, “American Carnage,” when he blamed open borders and foreign nations for gutting the American Dream, carefully avoiding the corporations that plundered the working class and spoiled the land. But his second term is less focused on hardening borders and more focused on what he calls the “enemy within,” which has included immigrants and anyone potentially critical of U.S. foreign policy, especially the fanatical, bipartisan worship of genocidal Zionism. Trump has met that “enemy” with violent and deadly force, using the Department of Homeland Security as the main instrument of terror in places like Minnesota. That definition of the enemy has expanded to include antifascism, which he has designated a “domestic terrorist organization,” paving the way for the targeting of any organization or individual supporting actions considered “antifascism,” such as immigrant defense or even the broad set of movements and beliefs under the rubric of “anti-capitalism.” In other words, we’re reaching a moment when it’s illegal to be antifascist.

This rhetorical escalation is no accident; it is a calculated electoral strategy. More and more, as an electoral left movement makes key wins in the lead-up to the November mid-terms, Trump will most likely ratchet up his anti-communist rhetoric, painting even the most rabid, establishment anticommunist Democrats as party to a nefarious communist plot. That has already included targeting more organized formations of the socialist and anti-imperialist left.

Viewed in this light, Trump’s speech last Friday at the so-called Shrine of Democracy was probably his most ironic. Under the shadow of Mount Rushmore, Trump went on a dark tirade naming the enemy as the “communist menace,” a movement made up of “illegal immigrants,” “criminals,” “radicals,” “thieves,” and “lunatics” who “come in and loot [and] pillage our nation.” This isn’t just typical rhetorical theater from one of the world’s greatest confidence men. It is the foundational myth-making required to justify a very real domestic police state.

There is no small irony in those accusations. The very ground beneath the president’s feet is stolen land, and the monument itself is a permanent testament to the exact kind of looting and pillaging he attributes to Marxist agitators.

If you possess even a baseline level of cognitive function and haven’t succumbed to total historical brain rot, Trump’s ultimatum should make you laugh and perhaps cry. He stood beneath the shadow of thieves and men who had looted and pillaged Indigenous land. The shrine had been built at the final destination for what was once known by the Lakotas as the “Thieves Road,” the trail Custer had illegally carved into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold. But don’t take my word for it. The Supreme Court declared the ground beneath Trump’s very feet stolen land—that is, pillaged and looted. In fact, it called the settlers and miners who had entered the lands known as He Sapa trespassers, ruling in 1980 that the starvation-driven coercion used to strip the Sioux of the Black Hills was a profound constitutional violation.

The irony is that the only thief present at Mount Rushmore that day was the very country holding the party. Trump’s warnings about a ‘communist menace’ threatening American heritage are just a projection trick—it’s an inversion of reality, where the oppressors have become the oppressed, and the invaders act in self-defense against the very people they have robbed and slaughtered. This projection and inversion is central to the very American identity Trump claims is under attack.

“You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America,” he said. “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” The ultimatums are spurious but appear to create a loyalty test, forcing a choice between standing with genocidaires and slavers, and their apologists, or with those who tried to overthrow those violent systems of oppression. (I think I know what side we’d all like to be on.)

Those supposedly loyal to the nineteenth-century German political economist spread “lies about our heritage” and “tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors.” But one has to wonder about the legacy of Marx as a European when he said of the historical reality of class revolution, “as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.” Or when he described just how the ascendancy of that bourgeoisie was achieved in the first volume of Das Kapital, where he dryly noted that the dawn of capitalist production was “[t]he discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population” of the Americas.

Understanding that modern capitalism required genocide and plunder is, apparently, quite scary. Trump has met rhetoric with action, and we should take note.

In his second term, Trump has waged an all-out assault on his political opponents, primarily those on the left. Specifically, that includes what he laid out in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” and signed on September 25, 2025. The directive fully recalibrates post-9/11 counterterrorism objectives to target domestic political speech, organizing, and funding. I wouldn’t say it is the darkest chapter in U.S. history, but we should take serious stock of how easily the post-9/11 security apparatus—originally built to hunt down and kill “terrorists”—has been seamlessly turned inward to criminalize domestic dissent, freeze the bank accounts of progressive non-profits, and treat local antifascist activists like insurgent cells. It has effectively implemented widespread counterinsurgency in the absence of an actual insurgency.

After all, fascism isn’t new to the United States, and it hasn’t historically had to don the mantle of fascism to operate. Whether it was the genocidal blood quantum laws of federal Indian policy or Jim Crow racial segregation, European fascists took much of their inspiration from the colonial and white supremacist legal regimes of their American counterparts when they drafted documents such as the Nuremberg Laws.

And climate crisis aside, it is worth making a controversial point: our present state of affairs is far from the most repressive or authoritarian era the United States has ever seen. I’m not saying it can’t get worse—it could. But it also could turn out another way, if people are willing to fight for an alternative. That’s not to minimize the real and terrible danger of the current moment and the necessity to confront it and build alternatives. Rather, it serves as a baseline for reality. As a student of history and a historical subject myself, it is humbling to read the stories of our ancestors—how they survived genocide through everything from everyday acts of defiance to organized resistance movements that undoubtedly staved off complete annihilation.

This piece first appeared on Red Scare.

Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).