Don’t wait for the tipping point

ICE agents have kidnapped a Palestinian man, Mahmoud Khalil, who helped organize Columbia student protests against Israel’s genocide. He’s a green card holder. His wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, was also threatened, says his attorney. Just before the publication of this piece, journalist Prem Thaker reported that Mahmoud has been taken from New York to Louisiana.

Photo by Alexey Demidov on Unsplash

Outrage over this kidnapping has exploded. The detainment of a green card holder who has not been charged or convicted of anything, who has been taken by the state just for protesting apartheid and genocide, is both a clear First Amendment violation and a dangerous escalation from a regime that is steadily expanding its authoritarian overreach. In the wake of the outcry Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” In practice “Hamas supporters” of course means anti-Zionists, and signals more broadly that anyone could be detained and deported regardless of legal status.

The Department of Homeland Security also made a statement, not even pretending to make up a legitimate excuse for the kidnapping of a green card holder and simply concocting the idea that Mahmoud’s protests against the extermination of his people were “aligned with Hamas,” a meaningless phrase:

All of this is another way of saying the Trump regime will break the law and invent their own. It is yet another step on the fascist path this government is trotting down, and all of us should be immensely alarmed. In another world, this latest authoritarian goose step would be the one that crosses a line, provoking mass resistance and ultimately toppling the regime as we collectively realize that disappearing people for political speech means all of us are vulnerable.

But that’s not how it works. There are countless reasons for that, but one is that we’ve come to hope for and even expect spontaneous uprising. As Vincent Bevins writes in If We Burn; The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, the 2010s got us used to this model. As one mass movement after another popped off around the globe, it became normal. A regime goes too far, tear gasses the wrong crowd, mercilessly beats or kills the wrong person on camera, and boom—suddenly we have a revolution on our hands. But, as Bevins notes, most of these spontaneous uprisings didn’t lead to the change the masses were looking for.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

We can’t wait for our moment, we can’t count on spontaneity. Columbia has a strong union of student workers. Less than four years ago 5,000 of them shut down much of the university in a massive strike. This moment calls for that form of deliberate action. Faculty should join students in shuttering the institution until Mahmoud is returned to his family and community and the school agrees to cease all collaboration with ICE and other fascist officials. That is what this moment demands. The Trump regime has precipitated a crisis, and their attack will be allowed to roll on and on as long as business as usual persists. We need to insist that crisis demands a response, not the feigned continuation of normalcy.

This fascist administration is also precipitating another crisis, one that should call every union member and everyone who supports organized labor into action. The attack again comes from the Department of Homeland Security. This time, the Department announced that they are unilaterally and illegally breaking the collective bargaining agreement signed with nearly 50,000 TSA agents and their union.

In response AFGE, the biggest union of federal workers with over 800,000 members, including TSA agents, correctly says: "This is merely a pretext for attacking the rights of regular working Americans across the country because they happen to belong to a union... Let’s be clear: this is the beginning, not the end, of the fight for Americans’ fundamental rights to join a union."

But now comes the question, will they act like this is the crisis it is? Will AFGE strike? Will TSA agents shut down air travel in America until the Trump administration respects the right of workers to collectively bargain? They could halt air traffic right now if they wanted to. That action would hit the Trump regime hard, and this union and these workers have the power to make it happen. The question is whether they’ll use that power to match the emergency created by this regime with a countermeasure that meets the moment. They, like all of us, can’t afford to wait for some magical spark, some spontaneous righting of the ship. We all must act like this is a crisis, we must grind business as usual to a halt because even the most severe crisis does not register as an emergency if business as usual is allowed to persist.

Photo by Ivan Shimko on Unsplash

You might hate the TSA, I certainly don’t enjoy interacting with the agency, but that doesn’t matter here. What’s happening under the Trump administration is an attempt to break unions of federal workers before privatizing the services they provide so that oligarchs can profit. In illegally violating a collective bargaining agreement the fascist regime is attacking the entirety of organized labor in this country, and we need to respond accordingly. In kidnapping a green card holder the regime threatens all political dissidents, and we need to respond accordingly.

Our job is to not let business as usual persist. No matter how atrocious the fascist encroachment gets, they rely on the continued flow of daily life, of money and people and activity to create the continued illusion of normalcy. It’s our job to bring attention to just how abnormal and unacceptable things really are right now. Visibly fighting back and disrupting is one way to do that. The people protesting Tesla, and escalating consistently against the Nazi co-president, are showing us how it’s done. They refuse to accept Musk’s coup, and are increasingly acting accordingly:

We got used to a model of spontaneous combustion, mass protest suddenly erupting in response to horrific events. But this moment calls for something different. What the fascists bank on is society collectively behaving as we always do. The rhythms of routine keep us in complacency and force us to plod along, pretending that everything is normal as the rapid descent into increasing authoritarianism proceeds. We need to break that paradigm.

Right now we need to both break the illusion of normalcy and our reliance on spontaneous uprising. We need to deliberately shatter the illusion that what’s happening is okay. We need to show that what the regime is doing is wildly abnormal by acting like it, en masse. Organized people, in our unions and political formations, have the power to show the country and world that this fascist attack is an emergency by treating it as one, by refusing to go along with it, by intentionally creating moments of crisis for the regime instead of waiting for them to happen of their own accord. No spontaneous revolution is arriving, no perfect moment is coming, the only tipping point is the one we create.

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Some links for organizing below.

UAW General Strike: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/may-1st-2028

Check out Dream Defenders: https://www.dreamdefenders.org/

Join DSA: https://www.dsausa.org/get-involved/

Unionize your workplace: https://workerorganizing.org/

Talk to your neighbors and form a tenant union: https://tenantfederation.org/tenant-unions/

Federal workers (and others) check out the federal unionists network: https://www.federalunionists.net/

Organize against the war machine: https://wearedissenters.org/

Fight the coup: https://indivisible.org/coup

Take Down Tesla: https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/teslatakedown

People Over Profit: https://linktr.ee/putplanetoverprofit