Prior to last month’s killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, many white American citizens felt obligated to use their privilege to actively disrupt unjust ICE activities in their cities. But the stakes just got higher for everyone.
In the wake of these tragic deaths, we look at how the MAGA propaganda machine dehumanizes opposition and demands loyalists not trust the evidence of their own eyes and ears. In segment two, Matthew will look into how renegade religious leaders, then in segment three Derek discusses brave community organizers in Portland currently resisting ICE and the authoritarianism it advances.
Show Notes
Christians, Let’s Stop Abusing Romans 13
As a resident of Minnesota—Bishop Barron
Bishop Barron's tendentious attack on Mayor Mamdani distorts doctrine | National Catholic Reporter
Leo ally: defund ICE
BBC Audio US Military Archbishop, Faith and Gen Z, 'Understanding British Imams' project
Fact-Checking Trump Admin Claims of Paid Protestors
“Womanosphere” Influencers Urge Against the “Sin of Empathy”
‘Oregon was next’: Trump targeted state after Minnesota, report says
Feds at Portland ICE facility again deploy chemical agents against protesters
PDX ICE Watch
This nonviolent stuff'll get you killed : how guns made the civil rights movement possible : Cobb, Charles E., Jr., author : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Brief: Beyond Violence and Nonviolence (Part 1) — Conspirituality
Omar Wasow on Non-Violent Protest Effectiveness
Charles Tilly on Public Perception of Protest Movements
William Gamson’s Strategy Of Social Protest
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism, and maybe even the Epstein files.
Misinformation Epidemic00:08:33
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Conspirituality 294, Ice Resistance.
Prior to last month's killings of Renee Goode and Alex Pretty, many white American citizens felt obligated to use their privilege to actively disrupt unjust ICE activities in their cities.
But the stakes just got higher for everyone.
What does it mean to our shared political psyche when civilian protesters are gunned down by government agents in the street?
Today, in the wake of these tragic deaths, we look at how the MAGA propaganda machine dehumanizes opposition and demands loyalists not trust the evidence of their own lion eyes and ears.
In segment two, Matthew will look at how renegade religious leaders are responding.
And then in segment three, Derek discusses brave community organizers in Portland currently resisting ICE and the authoritarianism it advances.
32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, and an additional eight were shot and killed by ICE and or CPB.
So far this year, deaths involving ICE are already at eight, including the high-profile broad daylight murders of Renee Goode and Alex Pretty, and a 55-year-old father of two named Geraldo Campos, who died in detention in El Paso, Texas, due to neck and torso compression by guards.
The medical examiner has now ruled all three of these deaths as homicides, though no one has been charged in any of these cases.
On the street and online, the intensity keeps escalating.
It makes me wonder if we're approaching a tipping point.
Like, might a growing number of Republican civilians, police, military, and elected officials begin to defect over this issue and join a pro-democracy coalition?
Might the country descend into chaos and outright street warfare as the stormtroopers shoot to kill and more protesters show up with guns?
Will we even have midterm elections?
That second question is asked often, and I think about how difficult it would be nationwide because we're such a big nation.
You know, often in other countries, it's usually in the capital city when you see actual revolution like that.
But in America, it's just kind of bonkers in terms of there are cities who can just not believe what's happening with ICE is actually believing because they don't see it at all.
Whereas, as I'll get to in my third segment, Minneapolis is sucking up all the oxygen for good reason in our media.
But Portland has never not protested since Trump took office.
Like it has been going on every single night since.
And it just amazes me how the media, you know, will look at certain cities and not others.
And so creating some sort of national protest in terms of chaos would be very, very difficult.
I couldn't imagine it.
So as you just mentioned, Goode and Pretty were both killed in Minneapolis while protesting ICE actions.
And this has in turn led to tens of thousands taking to the streets there and around the country.
But the Trump administration and right-wing media have been swift and definitive in their pre-investigation public statements that Renee Goode was weaponizing her vehicle to try to run over ICE agents and was shot in self-defense, while they say Alex Pretty had come armed with a semi-automatic handgun and extra ammunition, intending to enact a massacre.
They're fucking liars who lie.
And, you know, folks have identified the six hour from the video, but we don't know actually where the clips were.
I don't think we've seen any concrete information about that, except for the picture that they released of the weapons lying on some car seat.
And yeah, these just, these guys lie about everything.
I think it's going to be difficult to figure out what exactly happened there.
Six hours is the type of gun, eh?
Yeah, that's the role.
That's the semi-automatic.
That's the nine millimeter he was using.
Uh-huh.
Now, despite video footage that is clearly at odds with their descriptions, public opinion divides predictably along party lines.
So a YouGov poll from January 28th found that 85% of Democrats and just 9% of Republicans thought that ICE was mostly to blame for violence at protests.
Nonetheless, 82% of Americans approved of peaceful protests against ICE, and 67% approved of filming them during operations.
And then those numbers go down into the 30s in relation to escalating and more direct confrontations against ICE.
Around 55%, including 19% of Republicans, believe that agents were not justified in killing Alex Pretty, but 41% of Republicans still say those agents were justified in their actions.
So now, in addition to seeing multi-angle videos, and I know everyone has, of these sickening street executions, we are confronted with the fact that fellow Americans are able to be convinced that they're seeing something else, something legitimate, justified.
They're seeing dangerous criminals getting what they deserve.
Many left-of-center people on social media have been posting this quote from George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984.
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
It was their final and most essential command.
The MAGA cult spin playing into this has leaned heavily on identity politics and moral smearing.
About mother of three Renee Goode, Jesse Waters of Fox News said, the woman who lost her life was a self-proclaimed poet from Colorado with pronouns in her bio.
He continued, she leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage.
She was a disruptor, but considered herself a legal observer, though there's no evidence she had a law degree.
Yeah, that's not what legal observer means.
It means you can observe and it's legal to observe.
It's amazing how his description of her just sort of transfers over from the sort of the rhetoric of libs of TikTok describing somebody who's just doing something distasteful.
But he's talking about somebody who was just murdered in the street, right?
It's like he took the libs of TikTok description of Renee Goode and thought that that was a good way of framing a state murder.
Yeah, the person who lost their life.
Let's talk about her in completely dehumanizing ways with all of these dog whistles, right?
She was divorced.
She has a kid.
She's a lesbian.
She calls herself a poet.
She has pronouns in her bio.
It's so gross.
Conservative pundit Megan Kelly described Goode's death as her own doing because she failed to comply.
And she said the local and state government were actually putting ICE in danger by condemning the shooting.
MAGA podcasters and influencers with millions of followers spread misinformation about Alex Pretty in the days after the shooting, claiming he was actually an illegal alien or a soldier for the communist revolution, and that he tried to pull his gun during the altercation, or that he was already brandishing it, expecting a firefight from afar.
This is sort of the narrative that he's going to do some kind of maximum damage.
As everyone's favorite Nazi-styled CBP commander, Greg Bovino said, it was clear that Pretty wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.
And here he's echoing the outrageous party line from Christy Noam and Stephen Miller.
Ironically, these lies come from the free speech champions who also argue that the over 1,300 child deaths from gun violence each year is just the price we have to pay for the right to bear arms at all times and in all places.
It's the same argument Charlie Kirk made.
No little irony there.
Compassion for the Brutalized00:03:47
It's just not when you're protesting the actual form of tyranny that their founding fathers warned us about.
Then having a gun on you is absolutely not okay.
They also reiterate Donald Trump's claims that ICE protesters were highly paid professional agitators and anarchists, as well as these sort of indirect implications that there's some conspiratorial link between the Somali daycare fraud cases, which is the pretext for the current ICE invasion, and that money supposedly funding protests.
He never says this directly, but he'll flip back and forth between the two topics when he's talking to the media.
And then there's JD Vance, who asked rhetorically at a White House press briefing: when someone throws a brick at an ICE agent or tries to run an ICE agent over, who pays for that brick?
Yeah, because nobody can actually be resourceful, right?
Nobody can find their own materials.
Nobody, like they're doing the same thing with the water and the groceries.
Totally.
It's like, how can they possibly have put together this pallet of water bottles for protesters?
Where is that coming from?
Who gave them that $17 to go to Costco?
Whose Costco card was that on?
They did the same thing with the tents in the encampments, too, right?
Oh, look at all these tents.
Look at where they came.
I wonder where they came from.
Who paid for them?
It's like, it's incredible.
Nobody can do anything, right?
Everybody's completely helpless.
Yeah, helpless and obviously corrupted by outside forces who are injecting huge amounts of money to destroy America.
Huge amounts of money.
You can tell.
That's why people are making like shields out of old rain barrels and duct tape, right?
On the influencer side, prominent anti-trance activist Riley Gaines joined a chorus of MAGA women urging followers not to be swayed by the sin of empathy.
She commented on her podcast that she thanked ICE agents for taking a five-year-old child named Liam Ramos from his driveway instead of abandoning him as his father had done.
But eyewitnesses say that Liam's father was arrested by ICE, and then they tried to use the child to lure other family members out of the house.
And the same detention center they got sent to now has a measles outbreak.
Yeah.
So they had to lock it down earlier this week.
Well, what, and when they lock it down, they don't want people coming in and out, but I mean, I assume they're providing some kind of treatment or.
You would assume so.
Yeah.
I mean, RFK Jr. is down there.
And he's handing out milk or whatever.
Cod oil.
Cod liver oil.
Codliver oil and organic raw chicken broth.
Kids are going to die in that facility.
Yeah.
And actually, it turns out that the sizable number of deaths in ICE detention come from lack of medical care.
Yeah.
Well, people get separated from their medications or they can't make an appointment.
Yeah.
Or they miss dialysis.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yep.
Speaking of Pretty and Good, Riley Gaines told her listeners: do not let what you believe to be compassion cloud you or suspend you from thinking critically.
It's like the next step in the 1984 narrative.
Hugely influential podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey told Megan Kelly that Christian women are being completely duped by anti-ICE propaganda that relies on emotionally evocative images and messaging.
Don't let yourself feel compassion for people who are being completely brutalized.
She's the author of a 2024 book called Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.
Contradictions In Yoga Leadership00:05:56
And this was written in response to the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
It's just hard not to laugh.
Other womanosphere figures, like self-described Christian mother Haley Williams, shared posts with her 50,000 Instagram followers about the simple ways I reduce my risk of being shot by ICE.
And these essentially listed being a good stay-at-home dradwife who cuddled her baby and hung out at home with her husband.
It's a good way not to get shot by ICE.
Now, Matthew, I know you're going to get more into Christian responses on both sides in a minute.
But let me just add here first, in terms of our beat, that it's been good to see calls for solidarity with protests from some prominent American yoga leaders.
And I totally support that.
But perhaps due to me being a curmudgeonly stickler, I have felt a little bit critical of their using Indian religious texts to imply that being a true yogi means being anti-ice.
And don't get me wrong, I'm glad they're anti-ice.
And I think it's fine to draw political inspiration from spiritual traditions.
But I can't help but feel it rings a bit hollow when texts that were not only never critical of monarchical power or the grotesque oppressions of the metaphysically based caste system and actually argued in some cases that believers had a duty to perpetuate those power structures are cited today as a basis in America for progressive social justice politics.
Yeah, I've seen some of those posts too, and I have mixed feelings about them.
Like I think that anybody in yoga culture who takes any steps towards joining some sort of anti-fascist activism or discourse, that's like a chairman.
That's a huge win.
And I mean, it kind of counteracts the entire reason that we had to start this project.
So that's really good.
But the thing that I had come up was that, you know, if somebody uses, for example, the Bhagavad Gita to say, well, actually, this is a really good text for getting people to understand courage and selflessness and duty.
Like, obviously, there's all kinds of difficulties with that.
There are going to be contradictions.
There's going to be the whole history of that text being used by fascists, you know, like Himmler carrying it around in his trench coat, his Bovino-style trench coat.
And so there's going to be historical problems with that, and there's going to be tensions.
And then at a certain point, though, like sometimes people take things from older, very sort of contradictory traditions and they make something new out of them.
And I'm just sort of like sensitive to that process because it's like if anybody had told, for instance, Gustavo Gutierrez in the 1960s that, oh, you know what?
If you start reading Marxism, your Christianity is going to be totally fucked.
He would never have said, well, maybe he would have anyway, because I think he was pretty stubborn.
But he would have been discouraged from going ahead and saying, oh, there can actually be a type of Catholicism that I develop into liberation theology along with my comrades.
And at a certain point, the contradictions between conservative Christianity or Orthodoxy and then, you know, and Marxism become resolved for a certain number of people who go on to make something new.
And so I'm kind of, I like, I'm kind of wondrous at that process.
That seems a bit contradictory to what Julian was saying, though, because I agree with everything you said.
And I think Joseph Campbell argued that religion should have reformation every generation because the times have changed.
But there's a difference between that and saying that the texts are saying that these yogis at the time the Gita was written would imply that they're anti-ICE when the instruction of duty that you just referenced is Krishna telling Arjuna to go kill your cousins because you have a duty to me.
So those that I think that's important to disentangle those because progress, progression good, but romanticizing something you have no idea about of the cultural conditions, that's also where I take issue.
That's exactly it.
Because if you do too much of that, you kind of wind back in the sort of in maybe a sort of fascist vulnerable state because you're concentrating on the problem of authenticity and authority rather than the actual challenge of development, right?
And those are two very different projects.
Like we don't have to locate, you know, excellence in the past.
We can locate yearnings and poetry and wisdom.
And then we also have to just own that we're making stuff, right?
That's right.
Yeah, yeah.
So you risk falling into a different kind of lost golden age romanticism.
And I think to your point, I would, and again, this is just because of my own nerdy preoccupations.
I would be impressed by yoga leaders who were saying, hey, these texts that are kind of central to what we share in our teacher trainings are flawed in the following ways from a social justice perspective.
We're actually wanting to update and repurpose them and think about how we apply them to today with this social justice emphasis that they didn't have back in that time because nobody was really talking that way in those times.
To reclaim and reconstitute the kind of juice that we felt when we first heard the Gita and it spoke to us somehow, but somehow then we realized through the history that it didn't really, you know, it didn't really speak to our times.
Bishop Barron's Message00:09:36
But yeah, you're right.
And I think included in that would be yoga people saying, hey, let's also not forget that the Gita is central to the soft power of Hindu nationalism today.
And that's not necessarily something that we want to, you know, encourage or be on board with.
So there are a lot of religious responses to fascism at the moment.
And I'm going to get to a kind of larger picture that I'm working on on why I think that's happening.
But I want to run down first some news bullets.
And, you know, the takeaway is that I'm thinking this is one of those religious revival times in the American story.
Now, in the full-on Nazi white Christian nationalism zone, we have Pete Hegseth's former pastor and podcaster, Joshua Hames.
And he's out there on his Reformation Red Pill podcast, which is about all you need to know about him, like Reformation Red Pill, saying stuff like this.
I don't know if you guys have seen him, but he kind of sets himself up like a kind of young William F. Buckley smoking a pipe, but he also has this sort of Gavin McGinnis vibe going on with the facial hair grooming, but also the just, it looks like he's about to get in a hockey fight.
We need an immigration moratorium.
We need some breathing room so that we can actually establish our national identity, so we can actually assimilate people into that.
And right at the core of our national identity is Christianity.
We were founded as a Christian nation.
And the left is actively seeking to flood our nation with God haters.
They are doing this on purpose.
So no, we're done with the immigration.
We are in favor of ICE.
We are in favor of deportations and denaturalizations and repatriation.
By the grace of God, we will have our country back.
Christ is king.
Yeah, I mean, 1933 called and they want their asshole back.
Like there's even a reference to Laban's realm in there, our breathing room, living space.
Hames doesn't have a huge account, but he does have Hegseth on there quite a bit.
And I think, you know, that influence is going to percolate up into the cabinet.
Now, then there's this argument floating around the evangelosphere that tries to answer the old what would Jesus do question in relation to Minneapolis.
So there's a number of white Christian nationalist influencers who are reading Romans 13.
Okay.
And this is where Paul is in peak Roman bootlicking mode as he tries to discipline the radical flank of his new budding Christian movement and then move it into the empire with some kind of respectability.
So Paul says, let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.
The authorities that exist have been established by God.
Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgments on themselves.
Now, that actually is not too far from what Krishna is saying to Arjuna in the Gita.
Interesting.
So we have this response on threads that shows up.
Well, it's on a number of platforms, but I found this one from an account called By underscore Faith Elizabeth, where she says, I keep seeing people argue that Jesus would not support ICE.
Jesus abided by laws.
Not only that, but he fulfilled the law of the Lord.
May he pour his spirit out on this country.
So yeah, Jesus was a good boy.
He was a rule follower.
That's why he was executed by the state.
Yeah, I mean, which is crazy, but I just, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Matthew, but the back and forth, the sort of category error around authority and law.
Yeah.
And the different and like basically saying law and authority is ordained by God because otherwise the people who are making the laws and who have the authority wouldn't have it.
So you have to obey them.
It's like the opposite of Christ's message.
Also, you know, this, I don't know if this happens in evangelicalism.
I'm not familiar with it, but this notion that he fulfilled the law is odd to me because what I grew up with is that he fulfilled prophecy that was obviously cherry-picked out of the Old Testament, right?
So, you know, Isaiah speaks in certain ways with certain metaphors and then, you know, Jesus makes them come true.
But he did he, I think she's saying he fulfilled the law of the Lord.
And I think it's additionally ironic because maybe the subtext there is that his law was that he should be executed, right?
So much of it seems rooted to this fetish for patriarchal authority, right?
Which is then projected onto God.
Yeah, absolutely.
Speaking of patriarchal authority, Bishop Barron of Minneapolis is worth a deep dive at some point.
He's the founder of, he's a podcasting bishop like Bishop Strickland.
So he's the founder of the Word on Fire Tradcath Media Network.
He has 421,000 followers on X. He's a popular, popular guest on the Peterson, Friedman, Shapiro circuit.
So he's bishop of Winona, Rochester.
This is South Minnesota.
And he took that seat in 2022.
Politically, he's staying just on the leftish side of Bishop Strickland from what I've seen, who was demoted by Francis for basically fomenting Catholic QAnon BS during the pandemic.
Barron pretends that he's above politics all the time, but then he's on Trump's Religious Liberty Commission.
He shows up to be the black and red robe at the White House events.
He's had little to say about the murders of his fellow Minnesotans, including Alex Predi, who was a Catholic, except, you know, he's given a simpering both sides statement pleading for ICE to be more moderate and for people to stop yelling at the good agents who are just trying to do their jobs.
But about priorities, Barron was, you know, doesn't have much to say about what's happening in his home state, but he was a lot more forthcoming when Mamdani used the word collectivism in his inauguration address in New York.
And he also pulled out the old Black Book of Communism quote, quote, collectivism in its various forms is responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people in the last century.
For God's sake, spare me the warmth of collectivism.
Catholic social teaching has consistently condemned socialism and has embraced the market economy, which people like Mamdani caricature as rugged individualism.
I think he should have a conversation with Leo because I think that's a little bit different these days.
But a lot of outrage from the progressives in the comments are really pushing back on it.
And it's kind of surprising to see.
Like there's a real divide emerging, I think, in Catholic discourse.
He drew even more fire by responding to the inside the church protest of Pastor Dave Easterwood in Minneapolis, who parishioners and community members outed as an ICE field commander in Minneapolis.
So Barron tweeted out, I don't care what is animating or annoying you.
I don't care what your political persuasion might be.
Invading a church is unacceptable and is a violation of religious liberty.
So yes, people are being very animated and annoyed by state executions.
But then there is a lot of pushback.
So there's a cohort of Catholic bishops that signed a detailed condemnation of ICE.
We have Bishop Broglio, who's the head Catholic chaplain for the United States Armed Forces, telling the BBC that Catholic soldiers, quote, within the realm of their own conscience, it would be morally acceptable to disobey orders to invade Greenland.
And as we've mentioned in previous episodes, women and men clerics from a long list of other denominations and religions are still in the front lines of protest.
And I'm seeing some organizational links back to the advocacy of the rabbis, imams, and priests at the anti-genocide encampments 18 months ago.
So there's also a cultural history here that's developing.
Spiritual leaders are presiding over memorials and vigils for those gunned down.
And you might remember from that Rene Goode vigil in Concord, New Hampshire, that the Episcopalian Bishop Hirschfeld said that he was instructing his priests to make up their wills.
He said that the time of martyrdom is nigh.
And he pointed back to Bishop Romero and other liberation theologian religious assassinated by right-wing ghouls in Latin America in the 1980s.
That was an incredible speech.
Yeah.
And you know what?
You know what I loved about it so much?
And I'm really interested in this.
I want to know what you guys think.
Is that when a dude like that makes a statement like that, he doesn't rely on the typical affects of politics or spiritual influencing that we're familiar with, right?
There is nothing more normy than that guy.
There is nothing more sort of mundane, straightforward, you know, uncharismatic about, you know, Bishop Hirschfeld is just a guy.
And he was probably just a good student in school.
I don't know anything about him, but like he strikes me as this kind of person who just attained a position of administrative power within this organization because it's an institution, because it has these sort of stages of verification and vetting and review and so on.
Strategic Speculation on Faith00:11:56
He advances, and then it's just part of his sort of office daily work to go and make this statement that, oh, we're maybe at this state of martyrdom and we should probably get our affairs in order.
It wasn't like overly emotional.
It wasn't, I don't know.
I think people were impressed who was moving to people because it was so straightforward.
But there's something about the Christian cleric not needing charisma in these moments that I find super interesting.
And it says something to me about all of the other religious influencers that we've followed over the years is that They have to sort of create something in order to, I don't know, substitute for a lack of institutional support, maybe, or validity.
So, a recurrent theme, you know, around here on this podcast centers on the American pastime of political crisis that provokes religious revivalism.
So, we have, you know, early great awakenings that were grappling with a fallout from the Revolutionary War.
And then we have, you know, the industrial explosion that, and then, you know, when we get to the Civil War and Reconstruction, we have Union and Confederate armies that experience revival waves as well, going in different directions.
Black churches become sites of politicized community protection.
White evangelicals laid the groundwork for a white Christian nationalism to carry the lost cause forward.
And in the Depression era, the emergent social gospel visibly challenged intensifying exploitation.
And then we have Catholic paranoia adding jet fuel to the red scare a generation later.
And then again, with the Reagan era satanic panic.
So now the crisis is fascism.
And historically, religious culture en masse responds to fascism, I think, along a familiar political spectrum from pro-fascist to conservative to liberal to radical.
So in the 1930s, some religious folks blessed the fascists as messianic saviors from the disorder of the modern world.
In 1936, there's this gaggle of Irish bishops who stood on the dock at Galway and blessed with holy water Irish volunteers sailing off to fight for Franco in Spain under a swastika flag.
But then in some other port at the same time, I can't remember this story, like I can't remember where it was, but Irish volunteers for the brigades included Catholic monks and Protestant vicars.
Then there's another faction of religious who I think usually try to preserve the status quo, at least within this church walls, by just continuing on, doing what they do, bypassing what they can as if nothing new was happening, or because their objective, and this is true of the Vatican and World War II, is basically to preserve influence and assets through neutrality.
And Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who I've done a couple of episodes on, identified this kind of moral and political disengagement in the liberal German Lutheran church of the 1930s.
And this made him start wondering whether Christians, through apathy or inaction, or just self-interest, would they wind up running cover for the Nazis?
And so then he goes on his journey and he figures out how he doesn't want to do that.
And then I think there's always maybe, I don't know, often at least, a minority radical flank that sees the political moment as a call to champion whatever revolutionary themes it finds in its heritage and liturgy, or as we were saying before, what it can pull out and develop from those histories.
So in the 1960s, there was a guy named Camille Torres Restrepo, who was a classmate of Gustavo Gurieres, the founder of liberation theology.
And Restrepo leaned into his Marxism so hard that he gave up his collar and he joined guerrilla forces battling the U.S.-backed government.
And he would say things like, if Jesus were alive today, he would be a guerrilla fighter.
And the Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin, which if I had heard that when I was like 12 years old, I don't know what I would have done.
I guess I'm grateful I didn't because I might have just gone totally off the rails.
But I've got three last thoughts.
For me, what this moment clarifies is the coherence of religious and political cultures.
And I think it seems to me that any denomination you can look for that you look at, you will probably find within it a radical flank.
And my strategic speculation is that finding understanding and standing with that flank will pull it into more prominence in the denomination.
And that's of potential benefit to those in more conservative streams.
Like there's a lot of literature and influencers out there talking about leaving religion altogether.
Like that's the ex-vangelical story.
But I also know there's another group, I don't know how large, and that group upgrades their religion by moving churches or considering new views, generally in response to political conditions.
Yeah, I like how you're referencing this whole spectrum of possible religious responses and historical religious responses that have been catalogued, Matthew, because I often think that one of the big problems for someone who tries to base their progressive politics on religious texts is that the other side frequently does the same using the same texts.
And I think that they often, or at least sometimes, have a stronger argument, given that these are ancient texts that predate democratic values, as many other things as they may have to recommend them.
Yeah, now you do mean like modern liberal democratic values, like not the direct democracy of communal sects who might break away and want a different life at various points in history, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, modern democratic values, one person, one vote, you know, human rights, just that whole sort of trend towards open societies and structures of power that are more democratic.
I think there's also this implied supernatural authority.
And this goes back to our conversation from earlier about the yoga folks.
So it's like the implication is that if you're a real Christian or a real Muslim or a real yogi, then you have the same political interpretation that I do of those texts.
And I think I can see the value of giving believers progressive options, as you just mentioned, Matthew.
But I also think that for a lot of people who've made this link between politics and religious faith, it cements an exponentially more unchangeable stance.
Well, I don't think anybody's giving anyone options because the way I see it, radical flanks emerge in response to their own conditions, often rebelling against their own clergy.
And then they become believers in ways that are just new.
But what do you mean by unchangeable stance?
Well, when I say options, you had said, let me scroll back a little bit here.
You talked about upgrading the religion or moving churches by considering new views, right?
So that's what I mean by options that like, oh, there actually are political, there are alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between politics and faith.
By unchangeable stance, I just mean, you know, if you have a very strong political commitment, that's a hard thing to change.
If you have a very deeply held religious faith, that's a hard thing to change.
When you combine those and put them together, I think it just, you get into a situation where it's very hard to talk someone out of what they believe.
I'd love to know if there's research on that, whether that combination of rigidities really does double things or whether when one cracks, the other one has to crack too.
You know what I mean?
Yes.
I don't know.
Yes.
It would be good to find research on it.
I think the faith of evangelicals in MAGA, regardless of anything that Donald Trump does, is a pretty strong case study.
I also think we should pay attention to how fascism may force some faithful people in liberal Christian traditions to get very honest about their politics and maybe investigate the toothlessness of what they've been doing.
So as I referenced, that's what happened with Bonhoeffer, who felt empty and bored after filling himself up on two theology degrees.
And then he wondered whether his Lutheranism had anything to offer against the rise of fascism.
So he goes to Union Theological Seminary in New York.
He spends most of his time in Harlem.
He gets radicalized at Abyssinian Baptist Church, and then he takes that fire back to Germany to run a Christian underground resistance.
And then he's executed for his involvement in an assassination plot against Hitler.
Which brings me to my last point, which is I haven't heard of any priests plotting assassinations.
I haven't seen any Ristrepo types walking around in collars carrying ARs.
So far, the religious resistance to fascism is adhering to the Berrigan era and ethos of nonviolent direct action while avoiding the use of force or violence.
And so their ride or die belief is that faith itself is a veil of protection against the ICE bullet.
But religious radicals, I'm learning more about, haven't always acted that way.
And I'm just into an incredible book now by historian James Cobb called This Nonviolent Stuff Will Get You Killed, in which he argues that the nonviolent direct action of civil rights leaders, including the clergy throughout that time, and for which that clergy is best known today, was made possible because groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which were led by super disciplined World War II vets, provided armed protection for clergy.
They fortified homes.
They provided armed escorts.
They coordinated with nonviolent leaders to just push back white supremacist terrorism by signaling that they were willing to defend themselves.
Now, they never killed anyone, but they did exchange fire.
Usually they would keep their aim low or in the air, and then the Klan gangs would usually scatter.
And that was just a strategy that was deployed for years.
It's an amazing story.
I mean, these people sound incredibly brave and they sound like they were disciplined and noble and really, really doing it the right way.
I'm just not convinced that adding guns to today's resistance would do anything but hasten martial law and create more dead protesters.
And then, you know, there's a significant body of research that suggests that it keeps away huge numbers who might otherwise participate peacefully.
And then I would be concerned about, you know, the protest movement willingly stepping into the manipulative frame that MAGA has been crafting for a long time, that the protesters are just violent domestic terrorists.
Yeah, so the deacons are amazing.
They mainly showed up, as I said, as armed protection for the nonviolent actors.
And then, you know, Klan and police violence went down.
And, you know, Cobb refers to tons of interview data and personal experience as a SNCC organizer that shows, contrary to what you're saying, I think intuitively, Julian, that the presence of armed support actually made nonviolent participation rise.
And so this is built on his history of black folks consistently taking up arms for community defense, you know, going all the way back to the Civil War.
It sounds like a fascinating book.
I can see in these situations how that made a lot of sense.
I'm not just going on intuition here, though.
I think you and I have a difference, a well-established difference of opinion here that would take hours to unpack with lots of citations.
For now, I'll just say I'll direct anyone interested to links in the show notes about the research of Omar Wasso and then also Charles Tilley, and they've examined what types of protest tactics are more likely to sway public opinion, you know, speaking Speaking more contemporaneously, as well as William Gamson's book, The Strategy of Social Protestant.
Yeah, it's more than intuition.
We are totally coming from different backgrounds and paradigms.
I haven't read those books.
Strategic Follow-Ups00:15:56
We have unpacked it a bit.
So I'll link to my interviews with Ben Case on various roles and intensities of protest and how they inspire or scare off participants.
And then you have a bonus where you criticize Case's scholarship.
But I'm bringing all of this up because it's not well known in the history of resistance movements.
I think it's pretty important in an era in which there's street executions because this kind of exact discussion between us on our center left to left spectrum with regard to how you fight and why, it was met head on by the communities that Cobb is studying, specifically in relation to how religious people committed to nonviolence, how they could be safely given their freedom to do their thing.
So with a lot of history and study, they were able to parse out the various roles they needed to act and then to enact them with discipline.
I also learned from Cobb that MLK Jr.'s parsonage in Montgomery was like chock full of weapons, an arsenal, people described it as, and the local Klan and the police knew it.
And so as the religious response to fascism matures today, you know, I'm just wondering whether that memory of full spectrum resistance with all of its discipline and rigor will somehow resurface in the streets.
Last week, NBC News broke the story that Trump planned to send ICE to Oregon to ramp up operations.
The reporter spoke with 15 people and an ex-White House official said that my state, my now adopted state, was next in line, which inevitably means Portland.
The unnamed official told NBC: The reality is, you can't stop what you're doing.
This is the whole point of ICE existing in these cities, and Minnesota is not going to be the last state that ICE goes to.
Oregon was next.
We're not done.
We need to keep going.
Now that the news is out, it's unsure if the administration will turn their focus back to us, but protests have certainly ramped up since the murders of Renee Good and Alex Priddy here at the ICE facilities.
As I mentioned earlier, the reality is they've never stopped.
People have been out there every single night since Trump took office.
In fact, the media only swings by when things get really heated, which is what has been happening lately.
And this past weekend, they really heated up because ICE agents were firing tear gas, pepper balls, rubber bullets, and flashbang grenades at protesters on both Saturday and Sunday evening.
Marchers reported being affected by gas blocks away before they even made it to the facility, with local social media blowing up with videos of those grenades from in front of the ICE building.
There have been zero reports of any protesters being armed, which, to your point, Julian, if they were, it'd be a lot uglier here at this point.
And the city government has now sued the federal government as of Monday because they're trying to force them to stop using chemical agents on the protesters.
A person of color immigrant-run collective called PDX ICE Watch has taken things into their own hands by tracking ICE the way that ICE tracks anyone who is non-white.
I first became aware of them through a share on my feed that ICE was in my neighborhood.
So I live in a largely Asian and Mexican neighborhood.
There's a number of Asian malls and shopping centers on Southeast 82nd Avenue.
And apparently they were trolling around at the one mall that we shop at regularly, though I have not heard word of any incidents.
Members of PDX Ice Watch surveil ICE agents when they're leaving the ICE facilities, then they follow them and film them.
I think it's a brilliant and completely ballsy move because sometimes there are confrontations and members of PDX Ice Watch are also not white, which puts them in even more danger, at least some of them.
Most of the videos just feature music like Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, Black Star, and Los Lobos, which makes me think they're Gen X.
But sometimes they do record agents.
In this case, in the first video, they are recording a Portland police officer.
You're at the police station.
Are you okay?
Yes, I am.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, what can I help you with?
Nothing.
He's here filming people.
Yep.
Okay.
Do you mind giving your name so I can talk about what they concern you with?
I do mind.
Okay.
Are you planning on staying here at the Boys and Girls Club?
It's a five-minute parking.
Got it.
You see it?
Got it.
Five-minute driver, remain at the wheel.
Got it.
Okay.
Got it.
So you have to remain at your wheel.
Got it.
All right.
So, not so bad.
You can hear the officer trying to hustle him along.
Nothing got too heated, but the officer was chatting with a couple of unidentified agents who the filmer then confronts as he walks to his car after the chat that you just heard.
So you're a polite domestic terrorist, huh?
Yeah, you're one of those polite fuckers, huh?
You're one of those polite fascist pieces of shit, huh?
Huh?
You're one of those polite ones, huh?
I just want to let you know they're not ice.
They're not ice.
What are they?
They'll know if they're not ice.
What's I?
They're not ice.
How do you know that?
What's that?
Identification of Ice Center.
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.
Just telling you they're not ICE.
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol?
So if you want to keep filming them, you can.
That is a violation.
This is a violation too.
Are you going to apply the law equally?
Right here.
Yep, that's a not, that's a no-parking area right there.
And they're parked right there.
They're feeling that you're threatening.
So let me know if it can help you that they are not immigration customs.
Thank you.
Wow.
Yeah.
So you're calling me out for parking in a five-minute spot, but they're in a no-parking zone and you ain't giving them shit.
And it's not because they're agents.
They're just regular people like me, right?
They're not ICE.
What are they?
I don't know.
Exactly.
So it's, you know, and I have to say, I mean, on one level, I feel for local police having to navigate the terrain because they're in over their heads in so many ways.
But when you're trying to tamp down, you know, the tension like this, the contradictions are going to come out.
There's no way that they can't.
And you can hear it.
Now, the PDX Watch guys, they are providing severe discomfort, which I personally think is one of the best applications of their constitutional rights.
They're not only at the facilities where ICE agents expect to meet resistance, or even when the agents are doing sweeps and raids and citizens jump in filming them, they're actually going after them on their off time.
Yeah, that's hard, man.
Yeah, that's dangerous.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've seen videos where communities will identify hotels where ICE agents are staying and they play instruments all night long so the agents can't sleep.
That's another great use of that.
But PDX Ice Watch also finds hotels.
They recently identified the AC Hotel in Lake Oswego, which is about 15 minutes east of Portland.
Then they post photos of the cars and license plates driven by agents so that other people can identify them.
I want to play one more video of one of the members after getting pulled over in Vancouver, Washington, which is just across the bridge from Portland.
It's literally 12 minutes from where I live.
Here an officer tries to explain why they should leave these guys alone, and I really value his response to that idea.
Do you think there's a point where if someone's on there off time, okay, and we continue to follow them after we've had this discussion about, okay, this is not someone that's out actively doing public work?
Like, so different example, okay, if you disagreed with a state employee, say an elected official, and at some point they're out trying to go home, trying to go grocery shopping, trying to whatever, right?
Just because they're an elected official, do you think that's the appropriate time and place to try and follow them?
Again, you're trying to make an equation between me disagreeing with somebody.
It's not that I disagree with him.
It's that I know he's part of an agency that is doing massive harm here in this state, in Oregon, and across the country.
Massive harm to our communities.
It's not a matter of disagree or agree.
So this is not like a public official where I have a different opinion about.
I don't give a crap what his opinion is.
He works.
The work that he does is destroying our communities.
Can I give you an example that I think is also not equivalent?
It's not the same, but it's also, you know, to prove my point.
Yes.
Do you think that Hitler during World War II should have been able to go around and just drive around in this car, not be noticed, and go to the grocery store without people calling him out for being a fucking Nazi?
Do you think he should have had that anonymity on his off time, when he wasn't doing his official duties?
I'm going to guess that your hesitancy is no.
Yeah, it's a tough one.
I mean, going to the Hitler comparison, I think, you know, it makes a point, but I think you probably could have stopped short of that and made the point even more strongly in a way that the guy could have actually kept going along with.
It's interesting too, this while I support the outrage and the desire to hold these massed anonymous people accountable by sort of following them and then in a way exposing them and meeting them as real human beings and saying, look at what you're doing, you do get into interesting or tricky issues around harassment and what it means to engage with someone in their capacity as a private citizen.
So yeah, it's very murky territory.
Well, I think it's the territory of liberal manners.
Like they're not talking about the law there, right?
The cop hasn't pulled.
The cop hasn't said to the PDX ICE guy, you know, you're violating a law by following these agents who are off duty.
They're not talking about the law.
They're going back and forth with their moral reasoning with regard to is this an appropriate action or not an appropriate action?
And I think what the guy is saying is the time for that is past.
We're not in the time of manners and private citizenship and anything like that.
This guy is an invading force.
We're living in a fascist occupation.
And the time for that discussion is over.
In a way, though, the thing that gives me pause is it's the kind of argument that Magas would make about the guy who broke into Nancy Pelosi's house.
You know, Julian, I think you bring this up very regularly, that we don't want to make the arguments that MAGA makes.
We don't want to make the same rhetorical mistakes.
I personally don't give a flying fuck anymore because it's not like there's any power of persuasion that is sort of institutionally recognized or there's no, they're already doing all of the things that we're afraid of them doing.
The notion that we could be hypocritical or something like that is just does not bother me at all.
Yeah, no, this is not an argument of like, you know, style and grammar.
It's more an argument that says, what if it backfires in terms of instead of providing more dislike of these kinds of agents, it turns them into more sympathetic characters in the face of people who are harassing them or, you know, engaging with them in ways that we wouldn't appreciate for people from our side.
Yeah, I just think it's tricky territory.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be done.
But to whom?
Like, who are you concerned about?
that this is going to play badly for whom?
Because you're talking about...
The mass population who we want on our side.
The people who are not political junkies, the people who just can see something and go, well, that doesn't, I don't know if I go along with that.
Yeah, I don't think that the PDX ICE people can care about the fence sitter when they're defending their city.
I also, I appreciate, Julian, your, you know, your nuance here for civil liberties in general.
If these PDX ICE guys were pulling them out of their cars or harming them or throwing things or shooting pepper balls, I would be more sympathetic to that.
I think in this particular situation, acting as a mirror where all they are doing is trailing them in the car.
That is it.
They do not engage with them.
They don't do anything.
They just follow them, giving those guys a sense of what it's like to be watched.
Yep.
So maybe they can understand what they're doing.
In this one, I really appreciate what they're doing and the filming and identifying these guys as well, because I do have a serious problem with a fucking Gestapo that's wearing masks and you can't even identify them.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Emotionally, I'm all in.
I get it.
I get it.
Well, there's also the issue of when we get into is it okay?
Is it appropriate behavior to harass this person in their off-duty hours because they're a private citizen?
We really are in the I was only following orders territory of sort of moral character.
We're only in, well, he's not responsible for what he's doing outside of following whatever Greg Bovino sent him in the field to do that day.
He's just trying to get a snack.
And I just, yeah, that doesn't wash with me.
The time for that is over.
So what if there's an activist from our side who decides to track down Jonathan Ross and shoot him?
Well, it might happen.
And I think that adventurism and dilettanteism and sort of Wild West cowboy stuff doesn't really help anybody's movements.
So what I was saying about the hit on Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangioni way back in the day is that it does not serve a strategic purpose.
But what I'm very careful about, what I'm very careful about is that I'm not making a moral argument there because the fascists do not understand morality.
That's not the territory we're in.
We 100% are on the same page then, because I'm not really making a moral argument either.
I'm imagining strategically how it comes across to people who we want to be part of a mass movement against this stuff.
That's all.
Yeah.
And so anybody who puts a hit out on Jonathan Ross is going to be in a situation in which if they are alone, if it's not planned, if there's no sort of like sort of strategic follow through on what happens after that, then yeah, pretty disastrous.
And anarchists and most Marxists forever have said that for the last hundred years.
But, you know, Derek, I love these guys and I really hope they keep safe.
I think it's extremely dangerous.
I'm really worried that they'll get shot because what we've seen so far is that it doesn't take anything.
You're saying, you know, they're just following them.
They're giving them a sense of what it's like to be filmed or what it's like to be followed.
And, you know, it's like Ross just shot Renee Good in the face for just that, for just that.
And so it's like, I mean, and one thing that I am thinking about too is that there are many protesters who are doing this really great agit prop stuff that ends up winding.
Tension In Portland00:03:31
They're doing it for social media.
And a lot of them are also getting indicted.
So the vice is tightening on them.
I don't know if you saw that troop of New York comedians.
One of them is Dave Boswell.
One of them is Walter Masterson.
And they disrupted a town hall recently in New York, given one of the Democratic congressmen who voted to increase ICE funding.
Boswell stood up and he said, I've got a gift for you, congressman.
It's an adult diaper because I think that, you know, you really need this when you shit yourself in front of the fascists.
Just fantastic stuff.
And they are being indicted now.
The feds are throwing the book at them under that freedom of religion law because it was in a synagogue, even though it wasn't a religious meeting.
So with all these things, there's always a link where you can send money to a legal fund or a bail fund if you have money.
But what I wonder is, again, from a strategic and kind of like coalition point of view, is whether the social media focus of these actions is able to build enough networked support or if it becomes spectacular.
And I'm thinking about the book, If We Burn by Vincent Bevins, where he argues pretty convincingly, in my opinion, that the relative failures of mass protest in what he calls the lost decade of 2010 to 2020 were in part caused by the ephemerality of social media and how as quickly as it can grab attention, it can also disperse attention into kind of like entertainment almost.
And so on one hand, people got their message out, but on the other hand, a tidal wave of messages doesn't necessarily lead to coordinated action.
So that's some of the stuff I'm thinking about.
Well, it'll be interesting to see how it unfolds because Portland is a protest city and it will be different.
And the cops are used to protesters here.
I'm not going to give them a pass.
I've only lived here four years, but I've been to, I've been to and driven by and engaged in a few protests and the cops are there actually just directing things along.
So what will happen if Trump actually does increase the pressure here?
There is going to be tension because right now the entire city council is trying everything possible to get our mayor to get ICE out of the city, period, because they are renting the facilities.
And so there's going to be this tension here.
It will get heated if it continues because this city protests every single weekend on something.
My dog park that I go to every afternoon, there is a group of seniors out there with signs all the time.
It is just baked into the city.
So people don't take shit here.
But the flash point you're talking about, Derek, is what is the police chief going to do?
Yes.
What's the police chief going to do when ICE is doing something illegal in the streets?
And that is the sort of structural question and sort of barometer I think everybody has to look at is like, if the police step in to beat back the protesters for their own safety, then you kind of know, you kind of know what kind of world you're living in, right?
As I said earlier, the city government took the feds to court this week to stop them from getting chemical agents, from using chemical agents against protesters.
So, you know, hopefully they'll continue along those lines.
They have pushed back against ICE quite a bit, the governor as well.
So I'll link to PDX Ice Watch feed in the show notes.
They have a robust link tree if you feel compelled to donate to them to help pay for things like gas, or they link many local organizations they work with and support who are on the ground here trying to put a stop to this nightmare.