The Wild Reed

Friday, February 06, 2026

“A Gift for the Soul”

The following hour-long piece of ambient music was created by YouTuber HIGHWIND for those times when one “needs a break from this world.”

Notes HIGHWING: “My number one goal is to help you feel a little lighter, to ease the weight of your day. I hope life is treating you kindly and that you remember to treat yourself the same way.” Also, is heartening to know that “no AI was used” to make this piece of music, one described as “a gift for the soul” by one YouTube listener. Indeed!

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• A Renewed Mind
• Stepping Out of Time and Resting Your Mind
• Resilience and Hope
• Like a Lotus Flower
• I Need Do Nothing . . . I Am Open to the Living Light
• Clarity and Hope
• A Day of Renewal
• A Sacred Pause
• In This In-Between Time
• My Love, “Return to the Root of the Root of Your Own Soul”

Thursday, February 05, 2026

Photo of the Day

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Winter Sunset
• Photo of the Day – March 7, 2024
• Photo of the Day – February 26, 2022
• Photo of the Day – December 3, 2021
• Photo of the Day – January 14, 2021
• “Everything Is Saturated With the Sacred”
• Cosmic Connection

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

Lee Camp: “The Epstein Scandal Has Revealed the Revolting Depravity of the Ruling Elite”

There is one revelation of the overarching Epstein scandal that mostly goes unsaid. It surely cannot exit the lips of the corporate media titans who sold their souls to their yachts and their three uninhabited houses long ago. It also can’t be spoken by the independent media talking heads who have even the slightest, hair-thin allegiance to the Republicans or the Democrats or capitalism or perhaps even the patriarchy. And the grotesque revelation I speak of is barely whispered by even the independent media bravely holding the space outside the corrupt two-party system.

That revelation is this: The Epstein scandal is not just about Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s not just about the rich and powerful people deeply involved with him – Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Ehud Barak, [the former] Prince Andrew, Howard Lutnick, JP Morgan Chase, Jes Staley, Leon Black, Les Wexner, etc. etc. etc.

It’s not just about the national intelligence groups that were clearly involved – the CIA, the Mossad, etc.

It’s not just about the “justice” system that allowed Epstein to get away with this for decades.

The piece of this scandal that remains nearly unsaid is what it reveals about capitalism.

The Epstein story isn’t new, unique, or unusual. In fact, sex trafficking, blackmail, extortion, and grotesque criminality by the ruling elite is commonplace. Not only is it commonplace, but 99% of the time, it remains completely and utterly unpunished and unpublished. Many people believe this reveals that great power corrupts – becoming a billionaire or a high-level politician or a top businessman warps the mind and melts the moral core.

But in fact, that analysis has the causality backwards. It’s not that power corrupted these disgusting men (and a few women). It’s that capitalism is a socio-economic system in which the sociopaths rise to the top – reliably and undeniably. There are other systems in which this would not be the case. But in capitalism, those individuals who have no concern for the victims of their actions are the ones who take control, holding the highest spots and raking in the most cash.

Their victims (human and non) are myriad – poor people, young women, elderly people, misinformed people, people in developing countries, wildlife, the air, the future, trees, rivers, dugongs, fucking spotted owls. . . . The list doesn’t end.

I’m not saying every sociopath is a billionaire or big-time CEO. But I am saying that nearly every billionaire or big-time CEO is a sociopath. And once a sociopath has that level of power, no crime seems unacceptable. Why would it? Laws do not apply to them.

Laws – in our capitalist society – are mostly designed for people who don’t have the money or power to get away with breaking them.

The Epstein scandal has revealed the revolting depravity of the upper echelons of the ruling elite. But it’s not a matter of corruption. It’s a matter of a system that rewards people with no concern for humanity, no concern for others.

Those people are handed the golden keys and told “do your worst.”

We must evolve to a system that puts humanity first, not money or power. Until that happens, the castle on the hill will always be filled with Jeffrey Epsteins.

– Lee Camp
“The One Epstein Revelation That Can’t Be Spoken”
Lee Camp – Truth and Freedom
February 5, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
The Epstein Files Show How Powerful Men Protect Each Other: An Interview with Helen Rumbelow – Times News (February 4, 2026).
“Billionaire Boys Club”: What the Latest Epstein Files Reveal About Elite Impunity – Democracy Now! (February 2, 2026).
How Epstein Helped Ruin Gaming and Engineered the Modern Online Reactionary Movement – Mike Figueredo (The Humanist Report, February 4, 2026).
Why Is the Media Not Touching Jeffrey Epstein’s Clear Connection to Israel? – Prem Thakker (Zeteo, February 5, 2026).
Stop Calling Epstein’s Youngest Victims Underage – They Were Children – Sophie Heawood (The Independent, February 3, 2026).

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

What Will Be Enough?

Asks Butch Ware, Green Party candidate for Governor of California . . .

If genocide, fascism, and pedophilia are not enough to get you to leave the Democrats and Republicans, then what will be enough?

You are teaching them that they can do whatever they want to you, and you will accept it, make excuses for them, and come back for more.

Elect me in California. Teach them that there are consequences.

– Butch Ware
via social media
February 4, 2026

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:

BUTCH WARE
• Introducing California’s Gubernatorial Candidate Butch Ware
• “People Really Want New Options in Politics”
• Butch Ware on “Red & Blue vs Green Politics”
• “We Have the Power to Stop the Flow of Money and the False Legitimacy Upon Which Empire Depends”
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – November 26, 2025
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – June 5, 2025
• Butch Ware on His Run for California Governor and the Wider Goal of Disrupting the Duopoly
• “The Moment Is Ripe”: Butch Ware on Building a “True Oppositional Alternative” to the Duopoly
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – January 30, 2025
• The Green Party’s Jill Stein and Butch Ware Give Their First Post-Election Interview
• “This Is a Tragic, Heartbreaking Moment in the History of Humanity”: Butch Ware on the Gaza Genocide
• Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Butch Ware in Minneapolis
• Butch Ware: “You Can Actually Vote Your Conscience”
• Butch Ware: “I’m Not Here as a Spoiler”

THE RISE OF FASCISM IN THE U.S.
• Steven Donziger: “Let’s Get Real . . . ICE Is a Domestic Terrorist Organization”
• “This Is What Fascism Looks Like”
• James Greenberg: “I Am in Mourning for America”
• An Incident That Feels “Ripped from a Dystopian Novel”
• The “Creeping Fascism of Trump’s America”: A View from Australia
• Will Potter on Trump’s War on Dissent: “This Is What Fascists Do”
• Derek Johnson on the “Courage to Call Fascism by Its Name”
• Jason Duchin: Quote of the Day – September 24, 2025
• Staying Strong in Trump’s Fascist America
• James Greenberg on the Identity Politics of MAGA
• “This Is What Fascism Looks Like in Practice”
• Garrett Graff: “America Tips Into Fascism”
• Marianne Williamson: “We’re Moving Into Totalitarianism”
• “It’s Here, and We Are Sleepwalking Through It”
• Khalil Gibran Muhammad on Donald Trump’s Militarization of Law Enforcement
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – June 20, 2025

THE FAILURES OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
• Mike Figueredo on the “Political Malpractice” of the Democratic Party
• Ted Rall: Democrats Are Not “the Left”
• Exposing the Dark Money Network Secretly Funding Establishment Democratic Influencers
• Progressive Perspectives on Kamala Harris’s Book, 107 Days
• Why the Democratic Party Is Not Going to Save Us From Fascism
• Howie Hawkins: “The Democrats Are Not the Answer to the Trump/Fascism Problem”
• The Longstanding Fault Lines Within the Democratic Party Have Surfaced Again in Minnesota
• Jeff Cohen on How Obama’s “Corporate Liberalism” Led to the Rise of Trump
• Progressive Perspectives on Bernie Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” Tour
• Eric Fernández: Quote of the Day – May 14, 2025
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – July 26, 2025
• How Democrats Can Start Winning Again
• Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in 2024
• And So Here We Are

GREEN PARTY
• Meet Some of the “People-Powered” Green Party Candidates for 2026
• An Opportunity for Organizing Against Duopoly
• “It Is Our Responsibility to Make a Third Party Viable”
• Something to Think About – December 8, 2024
• The Green Party’s Jill Stein and Butch Ware Give Their First Post-Election Interview
• “We Give Reasons for People to Come Out and Vote”
• We’re Witnessing a Liberal Meltdown Over Jill Stein
• The “Green Smoothie” Option
• Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Butch Ware in Minneapolis
• Butch Ware: “I’m Not Here as a Spoiler”
• Jill Stein: “Americans Deserve Choices”
• Elise Labott on How Third Parties Can Revitalize Democracy
• Something to Think About – August 15, 2024
• Howie Hawkins: “The Democrats Are Not the Answer to the Trump/Fascism Problem”
• Demolishing the False Narrative About Jill Stein and the 2016 Election
• Cornel West: “The Next Step Is a Green Step, a Progressive Step”
• Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein: Is a “Historic Collaboration” in the Making? (2016)
• Voting Green: Hope Over Fear

“It Is Up to Us”

Nothing can stay the same after Gaza. There’s no returning to normal after this.

There is no compromise to be had with people who can facilitate this level of barbarism. They have to be defeated. They have to go to prison. Their careers have to be destroyed.

We have a responsibility to fight for justice and accountability, because if we don’t, we do not just deprive the Palestinian people of justice, but we normalize endless barbarism. Anything is possible after this. Any level of evil is possible after this – unless we do something about it and we hold the architects of this genocide to account.

That’s up to us. We’ve got a responsibility, because if we don’t, we degrade ourselves; we lose our own humanity because we know we will have allowed our rulers and our media to impose unimaginable evil which we failed to do anything about.

It is up to us.

– Owen Jones
via social media
February 4, 2026

Tuesday, February 03, 2026

Quote of the Day

Above (from left): Bad Bunny, who will be headlining this weekend’s Super Bowl halftime show; Kid Rock, who will headline Turning Point USA’s alternative “All American” Super Bowl halftime show; and Erika Kirk, widow of Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk and current CEO of the conservative youth group.

The Turning Point USA “All-American” Super Bowl Halftime Show, like every venture in the MAGA/Trump ecosystem, is a grim, sinister, mean-spirited fight against progress, evolution, and diversity disguised as sincere virtue.

The fact that the Right feels compelled to create an “alternative” to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl appearance speaks eloquently about their desire to secede from a culturally and racially diverse nation, how committed they are to perpetuating the myth of oppressed white Christians, and how determined they are to manipulate every event into a racist holy war in order to keep their hateful rank-and-file foaming at the mouth.

Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said in a statement that the show “is an opportunity for all Americans to enjoy a halftime show with no agenda other than to celebrate faith, family, and freedom.”

But whose faith are they celebrating?

Not the spiritual beliefs of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Unitarians, or non-MAGA Evangelical Christians.

Whose families are they talking about?

Not Latino families, or black families, or immigrant families, or LGBTQ families, that’s for damn sure.

And exactly whose freedom will take center stage on Sunday?

Not the people with brown skin being relentlessly terrorized by ICE, not the thousands of sexual assault survivors brutalized by Jeffrey Epstein and his collaborators, not the tens of millions of women who deserve autonomy over their own bodies, and not the migrants and refugees being persecuted by these cosplaying Christians.

Trump and his supporters don’t want an alternative halftime show; they want an alternative white, gated community nation where only they benefit.

In these days, we are in a brutal battle for an America where everyone will find opportunity, safety, and welcome.

It’s time we all got in the game.

– John Pavlovitz
Excerpted from “Bad Bunny, Kid Rock,
and MAGA's Super Bowl of Racism”
The Beautiful Mess
February 3, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
Bad Bunny’s Historic Grammy Win Delivers a Powerful Message to Trump’s Divided America – Kevin E G Perry (The Independent, February 2, 2026).
Bad Bunny and Billie Eilish Among Celebrities Criticizing ICE at Grammys – Rebecca Cohen and Nicole Acevedo (NBC News, February 1, 2026).
Why Bad Bunny Won’t Get Paid for the Super Bowl Halftime Show – Matt Craig (Forbes, January 30, 2026).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Michael Jochum on Bad Bunny and the “Great American Meltdown”
• John Pavlovitz: Quote of the Day – September 30, 2025
• James Greenberg on the Identity Politics of MAGA
• Jason Duchin on the “Trumpian White Supremacist Lie” That Must Be Confronted
• Brent Molnar on the MAGA Cult and Its Intentions
• Calvin Michaels: “I Really Don’t Want to Hear What Charlie Kirk’s Supporters Have to Say When It Comes to Morality”
• A Simple and Brutal Truth

Monday, February 02, 2026

A Renewed Mind

I’ve previously mentioned that a spiritual resource that many of my Christian patients find meaningful is Sarah Young’s devotional, Jesus Calling: Enjoying Peace in His Presence. It’s a collection of daily reflections written as if Jesus is speaking directly to us. They are words of encouragement, comfort, and reassurance based on Jesus’s own words of hope, guidance, and peace within Scripture.

This book’s readings for today particularly spoke to me. I should also say that I’m drawn to understand and envision the speaker of these words as “the Beloved,” one of any number of names we can use when seeking to describe our experience of the loving and transforming Presence within and beyond all things. These names include “Holy One,” “Divine Presence,” “God,” “Jesus,” “Living Light,” “Great Spirit,” “Sacred Mystery”. . . the list goes on.

Following is my slightly-adapted version of the today's reading from Jesus Calling, a reading that is inspired by Romans 12:2, Hebrews 3:1, and Psalm 105:4.

________________

I am renewing your mind. When your thoughts flow freely, they tend to move toward perceived problems. Your focus gets snagged on a given problem, circling round and round it in attempts to gain answers and solutions. Your energy is drained away from other matters through this negative focus, Worst of all, you lose sight of Me, your Beloved One.

A renewed mind is Presence-focused. Train your mind to seek Me in every moment, every situation. Sometimes you can find Me in your surroundings: a lilting birdsong, a loved one's smile, golden sunlight. At other times, you must draw inward to find Me. I am always present in your spirit. Seek My Face, speak to Me, and I will light up your mind.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Be In My Mind, Beloved One
• Stepping Out of Time and Resting Your Mind
• Returning the Mind to God
• The Soul’s Beloved
• You Are My Goal, Beloved One
• Your Peace Is With Me, Beloved One
• Finding Balance in the Presence of the Beloved
• Resting in the Presence of the Beloved
• Beloved and Antlered
• Meeting (and Embodying) the Lover God
• Aligning With the Living Light
• The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment
• In the Stillness and Silence of This Present Moment
• A Prayer for the Present Moment
• Eckhart Tolle on Going Beyond the Thinking Mind
• I Need Do Nothing . . . I Am Open to the Living Light
• Giving Thanks: A Spiritual Act of Trust
• Surrendering in Sacred Trust
• “Occupy Your Mind”: A Song and Challenge

Image: Artist unknown.

Michael Jochum on Bad Bunny and “the Great American Meltdown”

I didn’t know much about Bad Bunny until recently. I’m old, I’m tired, and the Grammys tend to feel like a corporate hostage situation. But credit where it’s due: the man is a gentleman, an artist with spine, and, most importantly, someone who understands that silence in the face of cruelty is complicity. His unapologetic stance against ICE’s lawless deportations and the casual erasure of due process matters. A lot.

So the fact that Bad Bunny has been chosen to perform the Super Bowl halftime show feels less like a booking decision and more like a cultural stress test. And judging by the early howling from the usual corners, the test is already breaking them.

If there’s any justice left in this country, poetic, karmic, divine, take your pick, I sincerely hope Bad Bunny struts onto that halftime stage in a full-length gown that sends conservative group chats into cardiac arrest. I hope he waves the Puerto Rican flag like it’s the Second Coming, refuses to utter a single damn word of English, not even a polite “hi,” and delivers fifteen minutes of pure, unbothered Spanish.

No apologies. No subtitles. Just rhythm, defiance, and cultural truth.

And I hope Fox News spontaneously combusts in real time.

Because nothing terrifies self-styled “patriots” more than a brown man who is wildly successful, beautifully androgynous, politically awake, and utterly uninterested in kissing the ring. The MAGA cult doesn’t hate him because of his music. They hate him because he exists on his own terms. Autonomy is the real threat. They worship “freedom” until someone else exercises it, whether that’s freedom of expression, freedom of religion, or the radical freedom to speak in a language they don’t control.

They’re already sharpening the knives. Spanish lyrics are suddenly “divisive.” Gender-fluid fashion is somehow a national emergency. And, as always, someone inevitably questions his legal status, as if Puerto Ricans haven’t been U.S. citizens for more than a century. Facts, of course, are optional accessories in the MAGA wardrobe.

Bad Bunny’s activism is what really rattles them. He’s been outspoken about ICE brutality, deportations without due process, and the casual cruelty inflicted on immigrant communities. He doesn’t wrap it in euphemisms or patriotic cosplay. He says what he means, and he means it. That kind of clarity is dangerous in a culture built on denial.

And yes, right on cue, Kristi Noem, the patron saint of cruelty and dead dogs, has reportedly floated the idea of an ICE “presence” at the Super Bowl. Because nothing says “land of the free” like threatening brown fans at a football game. Her translation of “law-abiding Americans” remains unchanged: white, obedient, and grateful for the boot.

Trump, meanwhile, is said to be “not weighing in,” which is MAGA-speak for sulking somewhere, hoarding ketchup packets, and counting how many times his name comes up. The man who spent years calling the NFL unpatriotic now gets to watch a Puerto Rican global icon command the world’s attention without asking his permission.

Karma is nothing if not efficient.

This was never about music. It’s about control, over culture, bodies, language, and who gets to claim Americanness. They don’t love this country; they want to own it, the way a bored child clutches a toy they no longer enjoy but refuse to share.

I hope Bad Bunny walks onto that field like a living act of resistance. I hope he sings every note in Spanish, waves that flag high, and gives not one inch to the people who mistake cruelty for strength and ignorance for virtue.

Let Fox News hosts rupture blood vessels trying to translate his lyrics. Let ICE threats ring hollow. Let Trump stew in silence, wondering how a kid from Vega Baja managed to capture the world without ever bowing.

Bad Bunny doesn’t need their approval. He already has something they’ll never understand: authenticity. Truth without permission. Power without cruelty.

And in a country that worships domination and punishes conscience, someone who refuses to bow is the most dangerous thing of all.

And the most necessary.

– Michael Jochum
“Bad Bunny and the Great American Meltdown”
via social media
February 1, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
Bad Bunny Wins Grammy for Album of the Year – Isabella Gomez Sarmiento (NPR News, February 1, 2026).
Bad Bunny and Billie Eilish Among Celebrities Criticizing ICE at Grammys – Rebecca Cohen and Nicole Acevedo (NBC News, February 1, 2026).
Bad Bunny’s Historic Grammy Win Delivers a Powerful Message to Trump’s Divided America – Kevin E G Perry (The Independent, February 2, 2026).

See also the previous Wild Reed post:
• John Pavlovitz: Quote of the Day – September 30, 2025

Sunday, February 01, 2026

Honoring Renée Good and the “Astonishing Surge of Courage” of Minneapolis

Earlier today on this snowy first day of February I visited the people’s memorial for Renée Good, the legal observer and mother of three who was shot to death by ICE agent Jonathan Ross just over three weeks ago in Minneapolis. Renee was the first of two U.S. citizens to have been killed by federal agents. The second was Alex Pretti. Their deaths took place during the Trump regime’s ongoing “immigration crackdown” in Minnesota, an operation that started in early December last year.

The pictures I share this evening of my visit to this sacred ground are accompanied by excerpts from Jacobin’s Eric Blanc’s recent interview with Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Twin Cities Sunrise Movement. Blanc’s interview is titled “Minneapolis Is Going on the Offensive Against ICE.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol’s terror campaign in Minnesota has taken the lives of Renée Good and Alex Pretti and led to the abduction of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, among countless others. Minneapolis has answered with an astonishing surge of courage. Neighborhood Signal chats and daily community-watch patrols have turned sidewalks into lines of mutual aid and defense, while the January 23 statewide general strike proved a willingness on the part of residents to stop business as usual in defiance of ICE’s violent repression.

The Twin Cities Sunrise Movement has pushed the resistance onto offense, targeting the Hilton hotels that quietly house ICE agents. This campaign has led to an impressive string of local victories, including getting a local Hilton to refuse service to ICE, sparking outrage from the Department of Homeland Security and the subsequent capitulation of Hilton nationally to the administration.

Jacobin’s Eric Blanc spoke with Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise Movement’s executive director and a lifelong Minneapolis resident, about Minneapolis’s organizing pushback and how ICE’s opponents can go on the offensive nationwide by pressuring companies like Hilton, Enterprise, and Home Depot to stop collaborating with the agency.

Eric Blanc: What has it felt like to be a Minneapolis resident and organizer these past two months?

Aru Shiney-Ajay: It feels like living in a war zone. I was really reluctant to say that at first, but every few hours I get a Signal message about ICE – usually within walking distance of me. Two weeks ago, I had a friend who had a gun pointed at their head by ICE agents, and I have friends who’ve been dragged out of their cars and detained. It feels like you’re walking around and at any moment you could be grabbed and kidnapped. It’s come to a point where something as simple as recording an interaction with ICE can be met by being shot, which is a really different level of fear to carry around.

At the same time, it’s also the most organized community I’ve ever experienced anywhere. We’ve hit a density in Minneapolis where over 4 percent of every single neighborhood is in a Signal chat at the neighborhood level – and it might be higher, because those are just the Signal chats we’re centrally tracking. In St Paul, there’s a neighborhood called Frogtown. It’s heavily Hmong. Every day, we create a rapid response Signal chat for people actively patrolling in Frogtown, and every day by 11 a.m., that chat hits its limit of a thousand people – which is to say that, at any given moment in one neighborhood, there are a thousand people out patrolling.

Eric Blanc: Can you speak more about the sense of community that has emerged?

Aru Shiney-Ajay: I feel more from Minnesota than I’ve ever felt. And I’ve grown up here. But now I know as I’m walking down the street that I have hundreds of people who will swarm to help me if needed, and that I will swarm to help them.

There are these intense protest moments – like the number of times you pick someone up after they’ve been tear-gassed and use snow to wipe the tear gas from their face. But there’s also this everyday feeling of solidarity, because everyone is walking around with whistles. If you hear a whistle, suddenly people start swarming toward you. I’ve never felt so backed up. It feels like we’re all on a giant team together as a city. It’s incredible.

It’s like building a muscle of solidarity across race, across class. It’s something the Left talks about a lot, but I’ve never experienced it like this. And it’s truly ordinary people – it’s not majority organizers or activists. It’s people who’ve never organized a day in their lives but know something wrong is happening and want to do something.

Eric Blanc: Can you speak more about the fear and how people have overcome it?

Aru Shiney-Ajay: Part of it is that it starts really small, and then the small things become more risky, and you don’t want to give them up. Standing and recording with a phone was what we were first training everyone to do. Monarca Unidos, an immigrants group here, trained something like 24,000 people on legal observer roles: standing and recording with a phone.

Everyone was prepared to do that, and then that became risky. But it was an identity people had taken up – “I can stand here and record with a phone” – and people didn’t want to back away from that.

Another example is that delivering groceries to undocumented people who can’t risk going outside was floated as a low-risk thing you could do. But in the last week, ICE agents have started following around white people carrying grocery bags, because they think that will lead them to undocumented people.

So now the people delivering groceries – which, again, is a very low-risk thing – have been trained to know that in case ICE grabs them, they should never write the list of addresses down digitally. You write it on a physical piece of paper, and if ICE grabs you, you eat the piece of paper.

That type of thing is motivating courage right now. What we’re doing is very basic: it’s giving people food and walking around recording on our cell phone. And when you’re not allowed to do that – when that becomes high-risk – there’s a sense of, my basic rights are being violated.

Obviously it’s harder to go and directly confront an ICE agent. That’s high-risk. But delivering groceries shouldn’t be high-risk. It violates people’s sense of dignity and basic rights, and that’s what creates courage.

Eric Blanc: Can you speak more about your strategy of going on the offensive? Because a lot of people right now are trying to figure out how we can stop ICE. And what we’ve seen, beyond the important local defense and know-your-rights work, is mostly a lot of one-off protests or vague calls online to boycott companies. What you’re doing seems different.

Aru Shiney-Ajay: I think about it as leverage and power: looking everywhere ordinary people have leverage and seeing where we can pull those levers.

Under a functioning democracy, you play the game of public opinion. If you convince the majority, then you can get legislation or win an election. But what we’re living under right now is not a democracy. In many ways, the feedback loop from public opinion to outcomes has been broken for a long time. It’s broken because of money in politics, because of the setup of our Senate, because of gerrymandering. And now they might just try to steal the election outright.

Public opinion still matters. It’s important that we have majorities on our side. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think public opinion alone will translate into victories, or that the midterms and 2028 will be normal elections.

A lot of establishment advocacy groups seem to be hoping we’ll show America that Trump is really bad, then in the midterms, we’ll take back power – a rerun of 2018 to 2020. I don’t think that’s accurate: just look at what Trump is doing now and how similar it is to how authoritarians in other countries have grabbed power.

So you have to switch from purely persuasion campaigns to the logic of noncooperation. You have to look at the ways ordinary people are directly upholding a regime’s ability to logistically function: where the money flows but also how they eat, how they sleep, who is doing the literal work enabling everything to operate.

Corporations aren’t the only method of looking at that. There are many. Local governments are a piece. But I do think corporations are a really key one, particularly corporations that the public has a lot of access to and influence over.

A lot of the companies collaborating with ICE are shadowy and operating in the background. But there are also companies like hotels – places we all book, sleep at, and spend money at – that we can actually shift, because we have leverage over them. That’s the logic behind corporate campaigning: identifying the places where ordinary people are directly enabling Trump’s regime to function.

When you look at it that way, there are dozens and dozens of little buttons you can start to push. We’ve been brainstorming a lot of other ones, too. For example: ICE agents drive around on the roads – could we get the city government to do construction on the highway entrances in or out of the Whipple Building? Things like that. The question is: What are the concrete ways they’re moving around, and how do you put yourself in the way using every nonviolent lever you have access to?

We zeroed in on hotels because we wanted to pick something that anyone, anywhere can immediately recognize: “There’s a Hilton near me. I could book a reservation and cancel it. I could leave a bad review on Booking.com.” You want to pick campaigns that everyone has power over, because our strength comes from involving large numbers of ordinary people. If it’s just the same activists who have been doing this for years, we can’t win.

. . . Winnability is key. When you’re organizing a population against dictatorship, it’s important to understand what the main emotional barriers are that stand in people’s way. In a lot of countries, that ends up being fear. I look a lot to Otpor in Serbia as an example: they identified fear as the main barrier and said, “What’s the antidote to fear? The antidote to fear is humor. We’re going to be funny in all of our actions so that people aren’t scared.” It was great.

I don’t think the main barrier in the US is fear. It’s skepticism. Most people don’t believe in our ability to change things. So one of the most important things for organizers right now is to pick campaigns that are ambitious, tangible, and winnable – wins that aren’t so small they feel meaningless but are still actually achievable. Because one of the biggest things we need to prove to ordinary people right now is that we really do have power over how the government operates, and over what happens in our society.