Antisemitism as we know it has resulted from a complex witch’s brew of historical stereotypes, economic resentments, ignorance and political extremism. Antisemites believe that Jewish people “have too much power,” “have too much control and influence,” and “are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want.”

A central, paranoid canard of antisemitism is that Jews secretly manipulate the media, business, politics, academia and other institutions via a shadowy cabal. Rational people know this is not and cannot be true. One in five Jewish households in the U.S. is either poor or near poor, meaning they cannot make ends meet or are barely managing to do so. If practitioners of their 4,000-year-old religion are dedicated to conniving and getting rich, they’re doing a lousy job.

Antisemitism is poisonous and stupid. Yet after decades of subsiding, it appears to be spreading again. Zionism — or, more specifically, the tactics being deployed by some Zionists to stifle their political opponents — is a contributing factor to the recent increase.

Supporters of Israel have long argued that criticism of the Jewish state and/or the policies of its government is tantamount to antisemitism. Since many of the most strident enemies of Zionism are ultra-religious Jews and many of the most passionate opponents of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians are Jewish, this too is not and cannot be true. After Hamas broke through the Gaza-Israel barrier and attacked Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, Americans who back Israel have come closer than ever before to institutionalizing a presumed equivalence between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly declared the two to be one and the same in a bipartisan resolution, the once-staid Anti-Defamation League began counting reports of anti-Israel speech as antisemitic incidents, and Ivy League universities like Columbia and Harvard adopted disciplinary codes that ban speech against Israel, including protest demonstrations.

Criticizing Israel has long been fraught. Now it’s more dangerous than ever. You can be doxxed, fired, blacklisted, suspended, expelled, stripped of your college degree, arrested, overcharged with felonies or disappeared and deprived of medical care to the point of imperiling your life. You can even have your application for citizenship summarily denied or be deported.

If the idea is to make people afraid of speaking their minds, these strongarm tactics are working — discussion of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East has all but vanished from campuses and workplaces. Zionists and their Trump administration allies don’t seem to mind. They say they’re fighting antisemitism, a goal all decent people agree with.

One wonders if they’ve considered the consequences of their aggressive approach, which brooks no dissent or criticism — and operates ruthlessly behind the scenes to get people. When you violate the privacy of and endanger passionate young antiwar protesters, and you derail their educations, and you pull strings at the White House to get them violently deported, will they start supporting Israel? It’s far likelier that they, their friends and family members, and those who read about what happened to them, will conclude that Zionists are vicious, disgusting people — that they “have too much control and influence.” Since Zionists have conflated their loyalty to a country with the practice of a religion, some may start to resent Jewish people as well.

Let’s say you’re one of the 30% of American voters, according to the ADL, who already believe Jews control the media. Supporters of Israel are working overtime to confirm your bigotry.

News coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza spills nearly as much ink on the few hundred hostages seized by Hamas as the thousands of Gazans killed by Israel. Few Democratic or Republican politicians are willing to criticize Israel, much less call for severing military and diplomatic relations to force Israel to stop its war — because they’re both afraid of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group. That, obviously, is influence.

Or, let’s say you think American Jews are like the man behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz,” pulling strings to get their way. Then you read how Angelica Berrie, a wealthy donor to Columbia, lit up her private direct line to that university’s president for months, threatening to withhold future payments unless the school provided “evidence that you and leaders across the university are taking appropriate steps to create a tolerant and secure environment for Jewish members of the Columbia community.” Yet when you scour the internet for evidence that Jewish students at Columbia have suffered intolerance, there’s little there there. Instead, the university has banned Jewish groups that support Palestine, suspended and expelled their members, had them arrested and roughed up by the cops, and when that wasn’t enough for the donors, they got the president fired and convinced President Donald Trump to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research grants.

Even after all that, Columbia didn’t issue a peep of protest when one of its recent master’s degree graduates, Mahmoud Khalil, was dragged off into the night by unidentified goons in an unmarked car in front of his eight-month-pregnant wife and dumped in a private Louisiana prison, where he remains. His crime, according to Trump: peacefully protesting Israel’s war against the people of Gaza. Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk, currently out on bail, was similarly kidnapped off the street; her offense, according to the authorities, was coauthoring an op-ed in the student newspaper asking Tufts to support the Palestinians. The president and his secretary of state say these and other recent roundups are just the beginning, and that anyone who criticizes Israel risks deportation and similar abuse at the hands of the U.S. government.

Whatever one’s opinions on Israel, it’s impossible to deny that this tiny country the size of the state of New Jersey, with no natural resources to speak of, enjoys unique lese-majeste status — a special don’t-go-there zone that has become even more ferociously defended under Trump. France is a close U.S. ally, yet Americans can say anything they want about it or its president, Emmanuel Macron. If you’re a green-card holder or attending an American college on a student visa, you need not fear deportation for insulting Eritrea on social media, or protesting Brazil on campus, or penning an op-ed about the rascals who govern South Korea.

The right-wing crackdown on anti-Israel commentary orchestrated by Zionists and their MAGA allies of convenience did not evolve organically, resulting from a vigorous and open exchange of views in a free society. There has been no buy-in, nor any effort by individuals and organizations who support Israel to reach out to people with moderate views, much less those who believe Israel is waging genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. There has only been bullying. If you dare speak out against Israel, sinister forces that you may or may not ever be able to identify will declare you an antisemite and crush you.

Which might prompt you to conclude that you’d been the victim of people who “use shady practices to get what they want.”

The philosopher Nigel Warburton shrugged: “Users of slippery slope arguments should take skiing lessons — you really can choose to stop.” But slippery slopes are a thing precisely because people often choose to keep cruising along until they smash into Sonny Bono’s tree.

Critics from both parties describe Donald Trump’s behavior and policies as unprecedented. This presidency, however, did not emerge from a vacuum. Everything Trump does builds on presidential politics of the not-so-recent past — mostly, but not always, Republican.

Trump has shocked free speech advocates and civil libertarians by ordering his masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons to abduct college students off city streets for participating in campus protests criticizing Israel for carpet-bombing Gaza. (An aside: What will he say when someone avails themselves of their Second Amendment rights rather than allow themselves to be chucked into an unmarked van by random strangers?)

Government oppression of dissidents in America has a rich and foul history. During the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests, which included many college students, Bill Clinton’s Immigration and Naturalization Service (the predecessor of ICE) detained and initiated deportation proceedings against students from Canada and Europe who were arrested for opposing free trade agreements. Under Ronald Reagan, the INS moved to deport African students who participated in rallies urging colleges to pull investments out of apartheid-era South Africa. Richard Nixon’s FBI and INS worked to revoke the visas of students who protested the Vietnam War, particularly those from Canada and Latin America. George W. Bush conducted “extraordinary renditions,” including off U.S. streets, where individuals like Maher Arar, who was entirely innocent, were detained without charge and sent to third countries for interrogation that included torture, under the guise of national security.

Trump is demanding that universities and major law firms bend the knee, insisting that college administrators surrender to federal oversight and eliminate DEI policies, and that attorneys allocate hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono legal work to clients allied to Trump.

It’s freaky — but there is precedent for this kind of bullying.

Even though universities like UC Berkeley, Columbia and Kent State viciously suppressed anti-Vietnam War protesters, Nixon threatened to cut federal funding unless they unleashed even more police violence. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program spied on professors and students, and Nixon’s Justice Department fired off letters to university presidents demanding that activist students be suspended or expelled. Nixon’s INS visa revocations normalized targeting student activists; Trump exploits that now.

Under Reagan, the Education Department threatened to withhold federal funds from colleges whose admission and financial aid policies included affirmative action. Bush went after universities like MIT, NYU and the University of Michigan for allowing international students and faculty to criticize U.S. foreign policy. The DOJ and FBI demanded student visa records and monitored campus groups — especially Muslim student associations — for links to radical Islamists.

Franklin Roosevelt attacked “Wall Street lawyers” for obstructing his New Deal, and his top officials leaned on firms to represent labor unions pro bono in order to make up for their alleged pro-business bias.

Though the Trump administration will almost certainly fall short of its goal of deporting a million people it alleges are in the United States illegally, this White House looks exceptionally aggressive against illegal immigration due to moves like deporting 238 alleged (but probably not) Venezuelan gang members to a private for-profit gulag in a third country with which they have no affiliation, El Salvador, and refusing to bring back one it admits was expelled illegally as the result of an “administrative error.”

But the real deporters in chief were Clinton, who “removed” 11.4 million undocumented workers from the U.S., and Bush, with 8.3 million. The Bush administration kidnapped “enemy combatants” without due process and shipped them the U.S. concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. Detainees from countries like Afghanistan and Yemen were held in a third country (Cuba) without being returned to their home nations. Some were later transferred to fourth countries like Albania or Qatar for resettlement or further detention.

You have to go back further to find antecedents for Trump’s 10% universal tariff on all imports, up to 145% tariffs on China, and reciprocal tariffs on about 90 countries. Still, here too, there’s nothing new under the sun. Biden continued Trump’s first-term 25% tariffs against China. Reagan slapped tariffs against Japan and Canada. Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which added an average of 45% tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to try to protect farms and industries during the Depression.

Then there are the Department of Government Efficiency mass firings orchestrated by Elon Musk. Musk’s chainsaw-wielding theatricality aside, going after federal bureaucracy with an axe instead of a scalpel is anything but new.

Through his National Performance Review (later renamed “Reinventing Government”), Clinton eliminated 377,000 federal jobs — 17% of the total workforce. He got rid of about 100 programs and consolidated 800 agencies. Not unlike Musk’s “fork in the road” mass email offers, Clinton offered buyouts up to $25,000 to about 100,000 federal workers. Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Nixon each fired tens of thousands of federal workers. Like Trump, Reagan called for the elimination of the Department of Education; probably like Trump, he failed.

In most cases, such as Nixon’s surveillance or Clinton’s deportations, liberals and mainstream media offered brief, muted criticism. If there had been broader and more sustained outrage in response to these previous outrages, odds are that Trump would be operating with somewhat less untrammeled volition today.

We can’t go back in time. Hopefully this moment will remind us that there are consequences for every decision not to protest and not to raise hell — and that those consequences may play out in the distant future.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.”

My mom had an uncanny ability to size up current events and accurately predict their long-term effects. Fifty years ago, I sat in my mom’s colonial dining room and watched the fall of Saigon on her black-and-white TV with two folds of aluminum foil dangling from the rabbit ears. America was not riding high. A year earlier, gas rationing went into effect and a president reelected in a record landslide resigned in disgrace.

As desperate Americans and South Vietnamese scrambled to evacuate, embassy staffers burned millions of dollars in cash to prevent it from falling into the hands of the victorious North Vietnamese. As landing decks on aircraft carriers in the South China Sea became overcrowded, UH-1 “Huey” helicopters, each worth at least $1 million in today’s dollars, were pushed into the ocean to make room for incoming aircraft. The estimated value of the military and other equipment left behind by retreating U.S. forces ranges between $1 billion and $4 billion, plus an additional $1 billion to $2 billion in corporate assets.

“The United States will never recover from this,” my mom said. “They’ll never learn anything from it, because they’ll never understand why it happened.”

Half a century later, she was clearly right. We lost but we didn’t learn.

The big lesson of the Vietnam catastrophe, one we haven’t begun to internalize, is that self-determination is a universal value. No one wants to be told what to do, much less exploited, by foreigners. There’s a corollary to that lesson: Superior military and economic power cannot overcome the universal human desire to independently pursue one’s destiny.

The U.S. won many battles but, in the end, lost the war. That’s what happened in 1975. And in 2011 in Iraq. And in 2021 in Afghanistan, where the $7 billion in abandoned war materiel and the falling bodies of our Afghan employees raining over Kabul created a perfect echo of the collapse of South Vietnam. Sooner rather than later, the same fate will befall Israel in Gaza.

Movies are a window into America’s political soul. American films about its invasion and occupation of South Vietnam depict a barely revised version of Kipling’s patriarchal “White Man’s Burden” with heavy dollops of confusion and self-pity. While “The Deer Hunter” (1978), “Apocalypse Now” (1979), “Platoon” (1986) and “Full Metal Jacket” (1987) all depict the brutalization of Vietnamese civilians by American troops, the primary effect of those narratives is to portray naive young men corrupted by forces beyond their control and forced to cope with their physical wounds and psychological guilt in the aftermath. The Vietnamese play bit parts or none whatsoever, relegated to background scenery as their U.S. oppressors blow them to bits and struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder — failing to make the ethnically correct decision to refuse to kill.

Americans weren’t victims in Vietnam. We were the bad guys. We lost 58,000 soldiers, who were sent to the other side of the earth to prop up a corrupt, unpopular regime against an enemy that posed no threat to us. Our troops killed 2 million Vietnamese. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C., is slightly less than 500 feet long. An analogous structure dedicated to the Vietnamese would be more than three miles long.

We have never admitted that we had no business being there. “Rambo: First Blood Part II” (1985) marked the beginning of something even worse than mawkish self-pity: a string of right-wing negationist releases, such as “Hamburger Hill” (1987) and “We Were Soldiers” (2002), that attempted to retroactively justify the war as a noble patriotic cause — don’t feel guilty, be proud of your service to your country. Similar imperialist whitewashing of the wars in Iraq, in works like “Jarhead” (2005), “The Hurt Locker” (2008) and “American Sniper” (2014), followed.

The second big lesson of Vietnam for a United States that continues to pursue international monetary, economic, political and military hegemony is that it’s cheaper to rent than to own. The United States currently has a $150 billion-a-year bilateral trade relationship with Vietnam, and hundreds of thousands of Americans visit Vietnam every year as tourists. Business is good. There was no need to control their political system.

Finally, war is expensive. Eight million Vietnam war veterans require care for PTSD, exposure to Agent Orange and various psychological and physical injuries. Resources diverted to the Vietnam War contributed to the hollowing out of Rust Belt cities, declining schools and insufficient spending on infrastructure — problems we’re still dealing with, with no end in sight. The war cost approximately $1 trillion in 2025 dollars.

A crisis can be an opportunity. So can a defeat.

At the end of World War II, Indonesian nationalists waged a brutal war of independence against their colonial oppressors, the Netherlands. Forced to withdraw in 1949, the Dutch turned to their domestic needs. They prioritized postwar reconstruction and expanded the welfare state, funding affordable housing, pensions and health care. Losing Indonesia was great for Holland. France performed a similar pivot after losing its war in Algeria in 1962; it decolonized most of its African possessions and invested in massive public works like high-speed rail. Belgium did the same thing after losing the Congo War in 1965, as did Portugal after 1974, when it lost to the liberation movements of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, we should learn from our fellow former colonial powers. Stop starting wars we’re bound to lose. Invest in ourselves.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.”

Wars end. Bombs remain. In December 2020, the crew of an English fishing boat was pulling in a string of crab pots 22 miles northeast of Cromer, a town in Norfolk, England, when they noticed a tug on the main line. An explosion blew the Galwad-Y-Mor into the air, injuring five crew members, one of whom lost an eye. The cause was a bomb dropped by Nazi Germany three quarters of a century before.

America’s complex tapestry of federal, state and local laws, which has evolved over centuries through legislation, judicial rulings and amendments — a system that includes over 80,000 pages in the U.S. Code and millions of state regulations — contains numerous obscure laws and obsolete case decisions. Like unexploded ordnance from World War II, they lie hidden until they detonate without warning.

A case in point: the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which grants a president the authority to detain, deport or restrict noncitizens from nations deemed hostile during times of war, or when a foreign government invades the U.S. The Trump administration revived this ancient law, deemed “outdated and dangerous” by the Brennan Center for Justice, to justify deporting hundreds of Venezuelan men whom the White House calls gang members.

The Supreme Court will soon consider whether or not they buy President Donald Trump’s dubious claim that the Tren de Aragua gang is acting on behalf of the Venezuelan nation-state, his tenuous argument that their presence in the U.S. constitutes a military-style “invasion” under the meaning of the statute signed into law by John Adams, and his sketchy declaration that the men are all gang-affiliated, no due process required.

A better question is: Why is this law still on the books? The last time it was used was by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who invoked it after Pearl Harbor to round up, detain and deport noncitizens of Japanese, German and Italian descent. While two-thirds of the 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to U.S. concentration camps were American citizens detained under a presidential executive order, the Alien Enemies Act was used to imprison law-abiding noncitizens. With such an infamous history of abuse and executive overreach, it’s weird that Congress didn’t repeal the Alien Enemies Act in the 1980s, when the U.S. formally issued apologies and reparation payments to FDR’s internment camp victims.

Trump is also exploiting the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, a relic of the McCarthy era that includes unconstitutionally vague provisions allowing the government to deport noncitizens for actions it deems to violate the foreign policy interests of the United States, however the government chooses to define it. According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, fighting antisemitism is a core national security policy (that’s new to me and everyone else), protesting in favor of the people of Gaza is tantamount to supporting Hamas, which is antisemitic, so supporting Hamas promotes antisemitism, so participating in a demonstration against Israel’s war in Gaza is harmful to national security interests. That’s the pretext for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s abductions and attempted deportations of college students Mohsen Mahdawi, Ranjani Srinivasan and master’s degree graduate Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University, and Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk.

Courts are trying to sort out which, if any, of Trump’s claims hold legal water. Really, though, they shouldn’t have to. Also really: It shouldn’t have been available for Trump to abuse in the first place.

As with the Alien Enemies Act, the INA remains American law after repeatedly being used as a tool of oppression — to deport labor organizers during the Red Scare of the 1950s, prohibit leftist intellectuals from giving speeches under Ronald Reagan, deport thousands of Muslims after 9/11, and even to deport HIV/AIDS patients. Its repeal is long overdue.

Other legal landmines abound.

The USA Patriot Act passed after 9/11 expanded government surveillance, allowing warrantless data collection, roving wiretaps and access to personal records under the guise of counterterrorism. As we learned from Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency abused the Patriot Act to collect millions of communications from innocent Americans, yet it remains the law of the land. The act’s vague definitions (“relevant to an authorized investigation”) and minimal oversight allow government thugs to target political opponents and suppress dissent. The Patriot Act is un-American. It should be shredded.

Civil asset forfeiture laws allow cops to seize your property. All they have to do is claim that they suspect the cash or cars or whatever of being tied to a crime, even if you are never charged or are found not guilty. Federal and state laws place the burden on owners to prove their innocence. It’s well documented that federal forfeitures totaling $45.7 billion between 2000 and 2019 often targeted low-income individuals unable to fight back. Supreme Court justices have repeatedly expressed skepticism about these statutes, but neither they nor Congress have acted to protect the public. Every time you drive past a police officer, one of those laws lurks like a highway robber, ready to devastate your personal finances in an instant.

Laws with potential for abuse often serve the interests of powerful political forces. The Espionage Act, a 1917 law used against whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and Snowden, remains in force. Both parties have exploited it — Trump prosecuted eight leakers, former President Joe Biden continued the case against Julian Assange. Suppressing dissent is bipartisan. Civil asset forfeiture is a cash cow.

Periodic attempts at reform, like the piecemeal Law Revision Commission of the 1970s and Congressional Research Service reports, are mostly ignored.

The current system, in which laws once passed are nearly impossible to repeal regardless of their flaws, is unworthy of a rational society. Congress and state legislatures should establish permanent standing committees to continuously review old laws for repeal or amendments to modernize them. Similarly, federal and state courts should regularly review case law to flag flawed decisions like the 1944 Korematsu decision — in which the Supreme Court upheld FDR’s internment camps for Japanese Americans — which has since been used to justify such outrages as former President George W. Bush’s extraordinary renditions and Trump’s first-term Muslim travel ban.

Insanely, Korematsu remains in force.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

France’s shocking surrender to Nazi Germany in June 1940 left citizens stunned and unsure how to resist the German occupation and Vichy’s collaborationist regime. Distrust was everywhere — few knew whom to confide in without risking betrayal. Prewar political parties, blamed for the defeat, lay discredited; the French Communist Party, later a Resistance powerhouse, stood down under Hitler’s nonaggression pact with Stalin. It took a year for the Resistance to gain traction. Backed by the Allies, Charles De Gaulle’s Free French in London parachuted agents into occupied territory, uniting disparate groups with clashing ideologies. After Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941, communists joined en masse, adding militancy. By late 1941, 10,000 to 20,000 fighters were sabotaging factories, cutting rail lines and assassinating German officers.

Americans who want to resist Donald Trump face similar disarray and demoralization. Liberals blame progressives for failing to turn out for Kamala Harris, while leftists point fingers at Democrats for failing to counter a hard-right turn. Unlike France, where a coalition of resistance eventually coalesced, the U.S. lacks a unified revolutionary force waiting in the wings.

Project 2025 isn’t Philippe Petain’s Collected Speeches — Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and deportations aside, this is still autocracy lite. Vichy’s dictatorship had already taken root. So what’s the point of this analogy? Resistance is hard, even in France, with its history of three revolutions and major uprisings like the 1871 Paris Commune before World War II.

In the U.S., where sustained political protests have not taken over the streets for over 50 years, many on the left haven’t seen real resistance. How can they know what actively and effectively engaging the government of the world’s most powerful nation-state looks like?

Last weekend saw the first major protests of Trump’s second term. Thousands marched in cities in all 50 states against the president’s policies and deportation orders, braving snow in some areas. For opponents, the turnout — estimated at a million nationwide — offers hope. Anger is palpable. Energy is high. Are the “Hands Off!” demos the start of a lasting movement or, like the 2017 Women’s March (co-organized by some of the same Democrat-allied groups), a fleeting outburst?

If sustained, can marches alone create enough disruption to force Trump to back off? The history of protests suggests no.

Economic pressure has historically worked. In ancient Egypt circa 1157 BCE, hungry pyramid workers withheld their labor over small rations, as recorded in the Middle Kingdom’s Turin Strike Papyrus. The pharaoh caved. In 494 BCE, Rome’s Plebeians walked out, threatening to create a new city and crashing the economy until the Patricians granted representation, debt forgiveness and other concessions. Without organization, however, such tactics are destined to fail. Occupy Wall Street’s call for a general strike in 2011 and a February 2025 anti-Trump consumer boycott fizzled, leaving leftists looking impotent and foolish.

In Nazi-occupied Europe, resistance meant defiance at mortal risk. Dutch families like the Ten Booms hid Jews in secret rooms, supplying food and forged papers despite Gestapo raids. France’s Maquis sheltered downed pilots, guiding them via the Comet Line. Polish partisans spirited fighters through forests, sharing meager rations. These acts — punishable by torture, execution or deportation — disrupted Nazi control and saved lives. They were a message to the outside world: We refuse to stand by passively.

Little of this is possible without a unified militant political movement to organize people and to defend them when they are in trouble. So it’s understandable that, at this time when events are moving quickly, opponents of Trumpism choose to take a stand in the streets — marching and chanting and carrying signs is something anyone can do, especially when they have the day off from work on a Saturday. But nothing can substitute for the long hard work of rebuilding the American left from the ground up. Moreover, protest marches can be counterproductive. Local police departments and other agencies photograph and use drones to track protesters and add them to their databases, making troublemakers easier to catch in the future.

Resisting Trump might mean hiding migrants from ICE’s anonymous kidnapping squads in homes or safe houses, offering food, medical care or fake IDs through modern underground railroads. This risks prison, fines or asset seizure under a vicious federal law (8 U.S. Code Section 1324) that bans harboring undocumented immigrants. In this surveillance state, it would be difficult to avoid detection. Discretion is essential.

Real resistance — the kind that matters — carries danger. In 2018, Ravi Ragbir, a Trinidadian activist, was detained by ICE in Manhattan for a nearly 18-year-old conviction. Protesters, including then-New York City Councilmen Jumaane Williams and Ydanis Rodriguez, blocked the ICE van; both were arrested and one injured, but they won. A judge later blocked Ragbir’s deportation, citing his activism as a First Amendment defense. In Portland that year, dayslong blockades of an ICE facility over family separations forced ICE to move and release some detainees. In Harlem in March, a white New Yorker named Dustin West and his neighbor physically intervened in an ICE arrest and were handcuffed and roughed up.

Resistance isn’t for everyone. Only about 2% of the French actively resisted the Nazis. But everyone understood what real resistance was. If you’re serious about opposing Trump and a perceived slide into autocracy over which he is presiding, you must first grasp what resistance demands — sustained commitment, risk and, sometimes, standing between the agents of the state and their targets.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.