It began in mid-September in Créteil, in the suburbs of Paris, with lycée students marching in solidarity with their striking teachers. Three weeks later, hundreds of schools are closed, the Place de la Bastille has filled again, and the protests have spread to Belgium, Italy and now Greece. The demands are embarrassingly modest: enough teachers; classrooms that are not overcrowded; buildings that are not falling apart. The state’s response has not been modest at all. Almost 7,000 arrests, 86% of them minors. A 15-year-old lost his left hand to a stun grenade. A 16-year-old was partly blinded by a rubber bullet. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister lectures them against “violence” and lambasts politicians who “use this anger to conduct their electoral battles”.

I keep watching the videos. Many of the students could put our parliamentarians to shame with their free-flowing speeches. Others cannot string two sentences together. And, to be fair, some indulge in ugly violence. As I watch them, my mind races back to my own student days in England. To our rage at Margaret Thatcher’s determination to slash and burn our universities’ budgets. And to my friend Fiona — whom I wrote about in my last book as well as in my last piece. As student activists, Fiona and I shared one political defeat after the other, from the Miners’ Strike to the Wapping Dispute. One day, exhausted, I asked Fiona if it was time to surrender, to give up. Her answer has stayed with me for 40 years: when you join a good struggle, she said, you learn to live in near proximity to giving up without ever actually doing so.

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That’s the political passion that can beat in young chests. It is not always articulate, it is rarely disciplined and, as I learned in Thatcher’s England, it is usually on the losing side. Fiona’s one regret was that we were fighting splendidly to defend communities that deserved defending, but for causes that screamed anachronism. “Why can’t we bring the country to its knees to demand clean energy and a free press?”, she asked, as we fought in solidarity with coal miners and printers whose labor resulted in abominable rags like The News of the World and The Sun.

The French lycéens have no such problem. Their cause is anything but anachronistic. They are demanding the one thing that every social economy needs, and which ours have refused to fund since at least 2008, well before that in Britain and my native Greece: investment in the future, beginning with the people who will live in it.

Here is the cruel irony. For 15 years, centrist politicians have been telling French families that there is no money: for teachers, for classrooms, for anything that does not yield a quick rent. Yet after 2008, that same center found unlimited sums for the bankers and, today, finds gargantuan sums for armaments. Even Renault is at it, pivoting from quirky cars to killer drones. For almost two decades, austerity for the masses and “socialism” for bankers and corporations choked investment.

There is no puzzle here. Why would big business invest the rivers of money the central bank was providing them for free: when the masses were too impecunious to purchase high-end goods? Naturally, big business took the funds and bought back their own shares. As these shares skyrocketed in price, so did the managers’ bonuses, house prices in Paris’ leafier neighborhoods, and the price of everything — from crypto to art — that the rich buy when they have money to burn. And here’s the rub. In the midst of all this money-making, productive investment collapsed. Why invest productively when you can make more by buying houses, paintings and Bitcoin?

This is why German industry is withering, why France’s schools are crumbling, and why so many young people wonder what life will look like in a decade, especially now that AI is pulverizing entry-level jobs hitherto reserved for the “good” kids who did their homework and followed the proscribed bourgeois path. It is bizarre for the grown-ups to dismiss the students blocking their lycées as rebels without a cause. They are the first generation to receive the sky-high bill for the combination of austerity for the many and socialism for the very few that their parents bequeathed them.

As I watch them, a darker thought creeps in. The incredible youth uprising of May 1968, when students urged us to demand the impossible, ended up reinforcing conservatism. Will today’s uprising end up feeding the extreme Right that loathes them, the very forces that thrive on their despair? Six months before the presidential election, Marine Le Pen leads in the polls. We have already seen how her side will play this.

The demonstrators from the banlieues of Créteil and Seine-Saint-Denis are being painted as black and Arab hooligans, foreign bodies burning the Republic. As for the furious white bourgeois kids of central Paris, they are portrayed as spoilt brats, too clever by half, privileged products of elite lycées who understand nothing of what it means to work to put food on the table, to be real victims of mind-numbing inequality. The far Right’s strategy is tried and tested: divide the youth along the lines of race and class; set the frightened middle classes against both; then walk into the Élysée promising order. It seems the young cannot win. Or can they?

Seeking hope, I turned to an article by novelist Arundhati Roy, describing another youth uprising half a world away. In India, the Chief Justice contemptuously dismissed unemployed young Indians as “cockroaches”. A student, Abhijeet Dipke, replied on Instagram with a single question: “What if all cockroaches come together?” Millions answered. The Cockroach Janta Party was born, first demanding the resignation of an education minister whose ministry had allowed exam papers to leak, devastating the lives of millions. On 20 July, tens of thousands of young “cockroaches” descended on Delhi and marched towards parliament, through tear gas, batons and the barrels of assault rifles. Months on, they are still out on the streets.

The parallels with France are striking. In Delhi, as in Paris, it began with education: with the state’s contempt for the young people it was meant to prepare for the future. In Delhi, as in Paris, the demand that sparked the fire quickly became, in Roy’s words, “small change”. The real target was the rot across the entire system of governance. And in Delhi, the police reportedly prepared trucks of stones and pre-damaged vehicles so that the young would look violent and the state would look as if it were acting in self-defense. Remember that the next time a French minister speaks about “violence”.

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But the most important lesson from the cockroaches is what they got right. Instead of lecturing, Roy writes, they showed Indians what their country could look like: Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, people of every caste and class protecting each other as they faced down the police. Dipke, a Dalit, dared say out loud what cautious opposition politicians would not: that if his name had been Khalid, he would already be in jail. In short, the cockroaches refused to be split along the fault lines that the Modi government has spent a decade deepening. They did what my friend Fiona always demanded of us: they stopped explaining oppression and started practicing solidarity.

By looking to India, I feel I now have an answer about France. The Republic’s youth can win if the kid from Créteil and the kid from the Lycée Henri-IV refuse the roles that the far Right and the extreme center have written for them. If they see that the crumbling classrooms of the banlieue and the overcrowded ones in central Paris have the same author. If they understand that their dignity is indivisible, that, as Solomon Burke once sang, “none of us are free if one of us is chained”.

But Roy also issues a warning, one that we, the adults, must heed. Spontaneous rage dissipates, she writes, unless accompanied by real political work. “States have the power to wait. People don’t.” The French government is already waiting, promising a “plan” by the end of October and hoping the students will be back in class, exhausted, by Christmas. Here I find myself closer to my mother, a second-generation feminist, than my friend Fiona. Whereas Fiona distrusted every organization, as a finishing school for future bureaucrats, my mother, who for years faced down organized misogyny alone, knew that without organization, life is dreary and struggles are short.

The young have lit the fire. It is now the duty of trades unions, teachers, parents and, yes, the parties of the Left to stop jockeying for position and to turn this moment into a program: money for schools; an end to the austerity that starves them; and a public-investment drive in the sectors of the future, funded by the means some of us have been proposing for years.

If the Left fails them, the far Right will harvest their anger, just as it harvested the anger of the gilets jaunes. Yet get it right, and France’s young cockroaches will achieve more than what their predecessors did in 1789, 1871 and 1968: not merely warning Europe, like a thermostat, that a boiling point has come, but helping us turn away from fascism, racism and mindless conflict. The canary is singing again. This time, let us not wait until it falls silent.

He wasn’t wrong. After winning in November 2024, Trump seemed invincible. He’d practically dumped Joe Biden in hospice and drained the fighting spirit out of the #Resistance, too; old opposition standbys like Katy Perry and Timothy Snyder decamped to Canada. The libidinal economy of opposition politics during Trump’s first term — when every outrage instantly produced a march, a slogan, a crying congresswoman, or a sassy slogan on a tight dress or a tote bag — had finally burned through its own glucose. In early 2025, Americans watched the Department of Government Efficiency cripple several federal agencies without making a noticeable dent in federal expenditures — but also without putting anyone in the streets. The anti-DEI blitz drew mostly faculty-lounge outrage. Democratic politicians went on soul-searching sabbaticals. The pussy hats were mothballed.

But no more. As Saturday’s “No Kings” protests proved, the period of resigned apathy is over. An estimated 8 million people marched in 3,300 events across the country, reportedly making it the largest single-day demonstration in US history. Nearly half of the events took place in Republican strongholds; Texas, Florida, and Ohio each had more than 100 scheduled protests, and one demonstration took place in lonely little Kotzebue, Alaska, which has about as many wind turbines as Democrats. There’s even a new, brightly hued protest hat: a red knit Melt the ICE cap, modeled, for better or worse, after those worn by Norwegians in the 1940s to protest the Nazi occupation.

Marches, of course, aren’t magic, and a few million people with signs aren’t automatically a durable political force, much less a revolution. And those who turned out for No Kings events were typically older, whiter, and more college-educated than the electorate. That’s a feature of the graying Resistance: Boomer and Gen-X libs are the key demographic (the Millennials who made Left populism feel hipster-cool a decade ago have tuned out, and the Gen-Zs are either disillusioned or voted for Trump). Still, the protests matter as a temperature check of America’s political mood and a preview of a coming Republican wipeout in November.

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Trump only has himself to blame. In the year since the inaugural No Kings rally, he doubled down on his authoritarian antics and acted more like, well, a king. He has treated Congress and the courts less as coequal branches than as ceremonial bodies occasionally invited to applaud and rubber stamp his agenda. Instead of slowly backing away from the old neoliberal model of foreign policy, the so-called rules-based international order, he tried to blow it up entirely on his own authority. He launched what he called a strike against Venezuela and captured its president without notifying Congress in advance. He blew up civilian vessels in the Caribbean for alleged crimes that don’t carry the death penalty in the United States. He threatened half the countries in the Americas, and even rattled his saber toward Greenland. An invasion of Iran followed in February, another war of choice conducted without a declaration, without a vote, and without apparent interest in what anyone outside the Pentagon thought (he may not have solicited many opinions from inside the Pentagon, either).

Now he’s coming for the money supply. The Treasury Department announced that Trump’s signature would appear on all new paper currency, the first time a sitting president’s John Hancock had been placed on dollar bills since the practice began in 1861. In other words, the man who told reporters that “I’m not a king” had, in 14 months, annexed a performing arts center, renamed a gulf, stamped his face on the Department of Justice building and his signature on the currency, and launched two wars without asking anyone’s permission. Hail Caesar?

Yet judging by the signs, the speeches, and the people I spoke to at the No Kings rally in Harrisburg, Pa., what finally jolted the anti-Trump public out of its stupor was mass ICE mobilizations. At that same Quantico speech last fall, Trump boasted that he had signed an executive order creating “quick reaction forces” that could help quell civil disturbances in large cities, essentially a personal domestic strike force aimed at what he called “the enemy from within.” Seen in this light, Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis was less a specific border enforcement initiative than the opening act of something larger, an emerging framework in which federal military power flexed its muscles domestically, and American cities were recast as new theaters of operation. 

When ICE officers killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti — a mother of three and a Veterans Affairs nurse, respectively — the federal government’s response was to justify both shootings before any probe was complete, contradict its own account on video, and then refuse to share evidence with state investigators. Good and Pretti became martyrs, victims of the sort of jackbooted federal thuggery conservatives once liked to imagine happening to themselves.

There is a reason that this weekend’s rally in Minnesota’s capital city became the symbolic flagship of No Kings, with Bruce Springsteen performing “Streets of Minneapolis” to a crowd of at least 100,000. Operation Metro Surge had effectively made Minneapolis a laboratory for the “war from within” doctrine, and even many people who aren’t especially ideological can recognize when a government starts to feel tyrannical.

The numbers tell their own story. No Kings, for all its messy ideological sprawl and boomer-heavy demographics, had 8 million souls marching outside, with an overarching sense that people who had been sitting on their hands for months had finally been jolted out of the house. There’s also some data showing that the people showing up aren’t just venting for a single day. One analysis of DC marchers showed that town-hall attendance rose to 38%, up from 31% prior to their participation in the protests, and that four-fifths had boycotted or deliberately purchased products for political reasons, up 16 points in 14 months. 

Compare all this to the Right’s attempts to muster a crowd. At the Conservative Political Action Committee gabfest, held the same weekend, a few hundred sat in a convention hall in Texas. The usual blowhards tried their best to spin the new Iran war as an expression of “America First” foreign policy, rather than a sudden and dramatic reversal of its core promise. Trump skipped it, and judging from online footage, the conference less resembled MAGA’s victory lap than a convention of Republicans nervously assuring one another that the king was still wearing his clothes.

The deeper irony is that Trump is now the one stripping off his own garments. He benefited, at least for a while, from a country too demoralized to oppose him with the theatrical intensity of the first term. That lull created the illusion of a blank check for enacting MAGA’s policies, no matter how extreme, and let Republicans imagine that the public had finally adjusted to him, that Americans had accepted a more openly punitive politics as the new normal. But that was before the bodies started dropping on the sidewalks of Minneapolis and missiles started flying in Iran.

It turns out the best organizer the American Left has had in years is Donald Trump in a crown he couldn’t stop himself from trying on.

This was Sammee’s first real action as a protester since moving to Minneapolis from Duluth a few years ago. “I just cannot in good conscience just sit home and do nothing while these people are terrorising my neighbours, my community,” she told me. On Monday, her first day picketing ICE’s local headquarters, she came unprepared and got pepper-sprayed in the face at this exact spot with only sunglasses to protect her eyes, and soon felt the pain of chemical burns on her skin. She returned the following day clad in a rainbow-striped ski suit and bright orange goggles placed over her silver-rimmed glasses for protection.

She’s tougher than she looks because of a roller derby hobby, a sport that trains you to stay upright when momentum is working against you. So when ICE agents failed to knock her down, more piled in, throwing her down into the filthy snow piled along the curb. As she lay there, they yelled at her to get back up, even as they continued to shove her back down like grade-school tormentors. The moment she rose to her feet, she received a dose of harsh pepper spray to the face that got partially deflected by her anti-ICE sign. 

“Do it again!” she responded in a fearless taunt. The agent who sprayed her looked nervously at his colleagues for guidance on how to respond. “If you look in their eyes, a lot of them look fucking scared,” Sammee told me. “I think they’re just genuinely afraid of the crowd, even though they’re the ones being violent toward us.”

She expected to be handcuffed and detained inside the federal building, but ICE instead escorted two of her fellow picketers past the gates and into detention; they’d likely be released back onto the street in a matter of hours. Minutes later, Sammee and her fellow protesters returned to screaming obscenities at unmarked black trucks full of masked ICE agents, who sometimes cursed at them, in turn. 

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Most interactions between protesters and federal agents in Minneapolis play out this way. By and large, they aren’t a matter of life and death. They’re more like a Tom and Jerry cartoon pitting an outmatched-but-fearless provocateur and a mean-but-incompetent bully. But since another white female activist who sought to observe or impede agents, Renee Good, was shot and killed by agents last week in a similar scenario, there’s an ominous cloud of danger hovering over these encounters. Yet Sammee managed to keep an unwavering smile on her face while recounting the story about how she just been assaulted by ICE.

But for how long? These days, the happy-go-lucky Midwestern demeanour that defines this place seems like the exception rather than the rule. What’s clear in my time touring the southern part of the city is that the weight of five years of stressful events, including the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge, a targeted deployment of ICE and border agents to Minneapolis, has taken an enormous psychic toll. 

Federal officials have billed it as the largest deportation operation ever undertaken in America, and have characterised last week’s deadly encounter with Good as a self-defence shooting, a version contested by local leaders and eyewitnesses and many Minnesotans who’ve watched the video of the incident.

Residents I spoke with also insist that Trump is employing ICE to sow chaos here to provoke a violent reaction and footage dramatic enough to justify escalation. One longtime local described it bluntly after showing me a video taken by his neighbor of ICE agents throwing gas and flashbang grenades on his block from out their car windows: “They’re trying to provoke people into confrontation,” he said. “They want the bad stuff to happen so they can send in more people, call it a civil war.” For his part, Trump has encouraged political protesting in Iran — “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he posted on Truth Social — but demonises it in Minneapolis, dismissing it as “unrest that anarchists and professional agitators are causing.”

Collectively, Minneapolis is pissed and scared. But most of all, the city’s tired in a world-weary way. Even the signs hung on houses or held in protesters’ hands reflect this attitude. The gentle virtue signaling of “In This House” signs of the early 2020s are gone, replaced by blunt or angry ones reading simply “Fuck Ice,” “Ice Out Now,” or “No Trespassing.” What this city really needs right now is a cigarette or a drink, preferably both.

This feeling is most pronounced in south Minneapolis’s leafy Powderhorn neighbourhood. The street where Good was killed by ICE and the intersection where George Floyd died sit at the heart of a cluster of largely residential blocks a few miles south of downtown that took shape in the early 20th century as a streetcar suburb of single-family homes, duplexes, and low-rise apartments. It’s home to institutions like the Minneapolis Institute of Art. 

Over the decades, this area evolved into one of the city’s most economically and racially diverse neighbourhoods, drawing middle-class artists, working families, and immigrants, while anchoring a vibrant local culture around Powderhorn Park. But it’s not a place historically accustomed to being the center of the universe. “Minnesotans generally like things quiet — shut up, get to work, get things done. It’s a very German Lutheran mindset,” said John Davis, a resident who embraced that low-key lifestyle when he moved here from New York City three decades ago.

Yet, Powderhorn is now a living-history museum of the current decade. Walking here as an outsider feels like an act of dark tourism, a term that describes sightseeing of destinations known for death, disaster, horror, or misery. Within a few square miles, you can trace nearly every pressure point of the 2020s. Five years ago, the neighbourhood became globally recognisable, almost overnight, when George Floyd’s killing at 38th and Chicago transformed an ordinary intersection into a hub of protesting and riots, and a pilgrimage site. Streets were closed, helicopters circled, and fires burned close enough that people kept hoses ready, just in case. Residents adjusted as best they could. Some embraced the transformation, but others merely tolerated it or were disgusted by it. “I was so distraught about (the Floyd protests),” said an elderly woman who asked not to be identified. “We shopped at places where people were stealing TVs and burning buildings, and we said this is not what Minnesotans do!”

Then came the long tail. The pandemic dragged on. Schools went remote, then hybrid, then back again. Teachers went on strike for multiple weeks in 2022. Businesses closed or limped along. In October 2025, a gunman shot through the windows of Annunciation Catholic Church during Mass, killing two children, ages 8 and 10, and injuring 17 other people, including 14 children. The neighbourhood began to resemble something like normalcy when the ground shifted and Trump announced on Jan. 6 that he’d deploy as many as 2,000 federal agents to the area for a sweeping crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents.

Residents here — immigrants and activists, along with everyone else — have been under the constant threat of low levels of violence, random catch-and-release-style kidnapping, tear gassing, and other forms of lawlessness from federal law enforcement for more than a week. You can walk down Powderhorn sidewalks and sometimes spot what looks like blood marking the ice, but is actually leftover reddish-hued chemicals from non-lethal weapons discharged by ICE. 

Federal officers are also sending agents into the parking lots of churches and schools; they’re marching into Targets to detain people. It often feels improvisational, reactive, and thin-skinned. Locals here were already on edge, but the slaying of Good has escalated those nervous feelings into a kind of existential dread. “Y’all, they’re shooting white ladies in the face in the street! What’s going to happen next?” exclaimed a black pastor to his flock at an evangelical church. Some churches, schools, restaurants, and other institutions have spent the last week closed or partially closed, and others are alerting their patrons or members when federal agents are nearby.

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Peter Vircks, a professional saxophonist, described Powderhorn as an open wound that cannot heal. “Everyone’s feeling like they’re in limbo, waiting for the next thing to happen,” he said. For Vircks, that next thing happened on January 9 after the killing of Good. He was walking his dog on 28th Street, where his teenage son goes to Roosevelt High, when he stumbled upon the aftermath of an incident in which armed US Customs and Border Patrol officers entered school property during dismissal, roughed up people (including students), handcuffed two staff members, and fired pepper spray and pepper balls on bystanders. 

“It’s really beyond the pale,” Vircks told me. “It’s not a suburban campus. It’s a neighborhood. Grandmothers and grandkids.” Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, a Roosevelt graduate, agrees. He arrived at the school shortly after Vircks to condemn ICE. “We’re a third-world country now,” he told a Fox News affiliate. “You want to know why? Because in third-world countries, they have the military doing their police work in the cities.”

Vircks’s son was not involved in the Roosevelt clash with ICE and hasn’t talked much about it — or about anything, really. “My wife is convinced he’s angry at adults for screwing up his world. Between riots, the strikes, murders, a kid can’t do anything about it — he can’t even vote.” Vircks is an adult and a voter, but even he feels exhausted and helpless in the new status quo. He has trouble sleeping because of the bright stadium lights illuminating the park across the street from his house since last week, and the constant din of helicopters hovering overhead. During the George Floyd protests, he was worried about his property, to the point of regularly dumping water on his woodpile to keep rioters from setting it ablaze. But the ICE invasion feels different because there is no end in sight, he says, and no authorities to appeal to.

“They say to email or call your representatives. But that seems like screaming into the void. You try to live your everyday life, pay your mortgage, and then you add this on top of it?” he said. Today, for his job as a professional musician, he’s supposed to write an upbeat pop song. But how?

Not everyone I encounter is as open as Vircks or as chipper as Sammee. Multiple Minnesotans tell me they aren’t talking to anyone, much less the media. Can you blame them? This city has already served as a battleground once this decade — symbolic and literal — and understands how quickly local tragedy can be nationalised, flattened into content, and weaponised by people who don’t have to live with the consequences. When this season finally passes, the deeper question will linger: how much cumulative strain can a neighbourhood absorb before something essential gives way? Not a riot or a revolution, but a collapse of the quiet civic trust that binds communities together.

Minneapolis will certainly endure the winter of ICE, but the deeper, more permanent damage may not be seen until the season’s deep freeze melts away and spring arrives.

Such assumptions have seen Khamenei and his acolytes in the Revolutionary Guard, the clerical establishment and the Basij militia ride out crisis after crisis, starting with the Green Movement led by Mousavi in 2009, extending through the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022-3 and climaxing in the battering that the country received last summer at the hands of Israeli and US aircraft. Then, calls by Benjamin Netanyahu and Pahlavi himself for ordinary citizens to take advantage of the regime’s military disarray, by going out and toppling it, went conspicuously unanswered.

Now all has changed. Initially sparked by economic collapse, two weeks of protests have coalesced into a national movement, one whose aim is nothing less than the destruction of the Islamic Republic. Along the way, the regime’s tenaciously-held assumptions have become obsolete. The authorities have been caught unawares, and seem unable or unwilling to change course. On the contrary, the Islamic Republic remains fatally wedded to the old assumptions while the country enters an unpredictable and explosive new phase.

The scene was set by a summer of chronic water shortages and electricity outages. In December, the riyal collapsed and inflation touched 50%, the consequence of mismanagement, corruption and sanctions that the revolutionary oligarchy has knowingly courted and in some cases profited from. Tellingly, the initial protests, on 28 December, were staged not by the hijab-discarding young women, the sort who spearheaded the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Rather, the discontent was sparked by the revolution’s traditional supporters: grizzled, pious traders in the bazaar. They were soon joined by youthful members of the country’s dispossessed middle class: nouveaux pauvres with a Jacobin rage in their hearts and supportive compatriots by their side.

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The solidarity that is currently being shown between Iranians of different ages, classes and ethnicities is a far cry from the scenes I observed during the 2009 agitation, when bystanders watched with studied neutrality as protesters were dragged away to police torture chambers. Gone, too, is the inviolability of public property. These days, bystanders wade in with fists and kicks to save protesters from the security forces, while police stations and police cars are torched and — according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency — officers are killed. From the province of Kurdistan in the west to Baluchistan in the east and as far south as the refinery town of Abadan, no part of Iran is untouched. At least one small town, in the western province of Kermanshah, has been seized by rebels.

The regime has responded by killing dozens of protesters before cutting the internet on Thursday night. Behind the blackout, as is clear from video and audio files that continue to trickle out, more protesters are dying, more public buildings are being attacked and more hospitals are becoming war zones as parents smash down mortuary doors and remove the bodies of their dead children before the authorities can surreptitiously bury them. Such confrontations are a throwback to the 1979 revolution, which advanced to the rhythm of Shia mourning ceremonies, each funeral being a magnet for more protests and more deaths.

Only a few government services — notably regime propaganda conducted through social media — have been exempted from the blackout. Card transactions, on which the economy depends, have not. With shops shuttered, the protests seem to be growing. In one video clip of a huge nocturnal gathering, a voice is heard: “They say they are going to come and kill us. Let them try to kill this crowd!”

On Friday, the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence wing warned against “any refusal to act” on the part of other organs of the state, a rare public admission of concern on the subject of regime cohesion. The following day the regular army, which usually takes no role in maintaining law and order, announced that it would safeguard strategic infrastructure and public property, also urging Iranians to thwart “enemy plots”.

But such warnings, and Khamenei’s own denunciation of the protesters as “rioters” whose motivation is to curry favor with Donald Trump, derive from the old reasoning that equates any call by Iranians for foreign intervention with unpatriotic betrayal. The country has a long history of such interventions, not least the 1953 coup in which MI6 and the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s legitimate prime minister. Yet judging by the protesters’ cheerful calls for further attacks by the US and Israel, it is clear that they have rejected their parents’ squeamishness. According to the logic on the streets, another Western aerial campaign would be welcome if it advances the goal of toppling the Islamic Republic.

The main political beneficiary of the growing appetite for outside action is Pahlavi, who on Friday exhorted Trump to “be prepared to intervene to help the people of Iran”. And, for the first time, the self-styled crown prince is regarded as a serious contender for leadership of a new regime whose main attribute would be its good relations with Tel Aviv and Washington.

It is a remarkable transformation for the diffident 65-year-old who left Iran for Lubbock, Texas as an air force cadet in 1978, and was for years dismissed by liberal and Leftist opponents of the regime as an embarrassing reminder of his father’s corrupt and authoritarian rule. Pahlavi’s support for the joint Israeli-US attack on Iran this summer, furthermore, in which more than 1,000 Iranians were killed, appeared to put him at odds with his compatriots. No longer. On the burning streets of Tehran calls of “Long live the Shah!” ring insistently while Pahlavi’s former Leftist critics, in the words of one veteran Iranian analyst, “have started treating him with respect”.

Pahlavi rises, Khamenei falls. As recently as three years ago, the Supreme Leader’s will was unchallenged and his authority total; since then, the so-called “Axis of Resistance” he had built up across the Middle East has been obliterated by Israel, with his own intelligence services clearly compromised. Most significant, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer removed any possibility of an Iranian bomb, in the short term at least.

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“Rat Ali”, as Khamenei has been known since his scurrying departure for an underground bunker during the war last summer, looks every day of his 86 years. His death, preferably violent and painful, is being loudly petitioned. No one knows what conversations are going on between the Supreme Leader and his inner circle, which includes his son Mojtaba, for some time seen as a possible successor. But it is utterly implausible that Khamenei would, as The Times recently claimed, “flee to Moscow” if the regime looks close to falling.

Khamenei lost the use of an arm when he was blown up early in the revolution. He is not a quitter but a quietly stolid fanatic who will leave the Islamic Republic horizontally or not at all. And he has yet to turn the full force of his killing machine on the protesters. Observing all this, and fanning his tail feathers after his exfiltration of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, is the US president — who, by immediately reimposing his policy of “maximum pressure” on the Islamic Republic following his election last year, has, it is now clear, helped bring the Islamic Republic to its knees. “If they start killing people like they have in the past,” Trump declared on Saturday, “we’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts.” By that time, of course, the slaughter of protesters was well underway.

Trump has so far avoided meeting Pahlavi, perhaps judging that the regime remains a long way from collapse, or because, if the time comes, he favors a Venezuela-style decapitation and Khamenei’s replacement from within the current set-up. Hassan Rouhani, a former president known both for his moderation and his toughness, might be a candidate.

As if by providential design, the ousting of Maduro lends an aura of inevitability to the demise of the Islamic Republic. And yet regimes are not toppled by auras. They are not toppled because Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, who was born into a good family in Iran in 1969, says that he is looking forward to “investing aggressively” in his homeland in the “first 100 days” after liberation. They are toppled because the men with guns are killed or lose their stomach for the fight. And of that, so far as we know, there is no sign.

A lot has happened since the summer. Iranians have got over their horror of foreign interventions and have adopted the closest figurehead to hand. A people out of time, they are fighting for a liberal democracy, or — quainter still — a constitutional monarchy, just as the brand seems defunct. Behind the penumbra of the communications blackout, a country of 90 million, an ancient culture dishonored by its leaders, goes to work on itself.

We are told that the current uprising, sparked initially by anger over inflation, is different. But contrary to expectations, we’re unlikely to see a spectacular end to the regime in the manner of the ouster of Ceaușescu or the fall of the Berlin Wall — the 1989 moment whose eternal return liberals the world over yearn for. No, there won’t be a spectacular collapse, because the Islamic Republic of Iran has, in a sense, already fallen.

Its Arab proxies are defanged. Its nuclear program is partially buried under President Trump’s bunker busters. Its currency is reaching Zimbabwean levels. And it has largely given up enforcing its hijab and other Shiite morality norms in many urban centers. A much more likely ending is one in which more nationalist elements within the current regime take over, with or without a little push by outside powers.

What persists, for now, is a ghost regime: a sad remnant of the last of the great modern revolutions that, like some apparition in a haunted house, is condemned to remain at the scene of its own demise, faintly repeating the slogans of its former vitality, wondering if anyone still cares. Death to Israel! Death to the enemies of the jurisconsult! Death to the Great Satan!

The Islamic Republic clamored so much for death, sweet and glorious death, it lost sight of the basics of life: bread, water, electricity. . . . Ghosts don’t need such things, but people do. Especially people who look around at the likes of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, and behold gleaming prosperity, rising living standards, normality. Their own lot, meanwhile, is defined by diminished expectations, massive graft, and life and treasure wasted on building an arc of “resistance” against the Jewish state that was destroyed in a matter of months.

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Against this haunted backdrop, it’s up to the Iranian people to decide, now, how they want to live together, and with their region and the world. Will they forgive each other? Or repeat the cycle of totalizing politics, repression, and revenge that brought them to their current nadir in the first place? As it happens, Iran’s greatest living director, Jafar Panahi, addresses these questions in his latest film, It Was Just an Accident, which hit the screen in major cities just as the latest unrest began.

A taut thriller in the style of Jean-Pierre Melville, the film tells the story of Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri in a quietly stunning performance), a worker who happens upon, and kidnaps, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), the intelligence officer who’d tortured him when Vahid joined a labor strike over unpaid wages.

Vahid is about to bury Eghbal in the middle of the desert when he’s gripped by doubt. The real Eghbal had lost a leg fighting in the Syrian Civil War. But the man in the shallow grave insists that his prosthetic leg — whose squeaking sound led Vahid to believe he’d found his erstwhile torturer — is a recent addition. What if he’s got the wrong man? What if he’s about to murder an innocent? This simple doubt becomes the driving force of the film’s plot.

Vahid reunites with a fellow prisoner — Salar, a dissident intellectual — who urges him to free Eghbal, or whoever he is. “This business doesn’t have an ending,” Salar warns Vahid. This could mean that Vahid could face real-world consequences. But it also suggests that the blood in Iran will never run dry if people continually seek revenge. Vahid isn’t convinced. He’s lost everything to the regime Eghbal represents, and he’s bent on making him pay.

Salar refuses to help directly, but he introduces Vahid to a photographer, Shiva, who was also imprisoned for her political activities and tortured by Eghbal. Other former prisoners soon join the group. One of them, Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr), instantly identifies the man in Vahid’s van as their torturer (by his smell) and thrills at the thought of inflicting suffering and death upon Eghbal.

Others are more hesitant, partly out of the same doubt that initially stays Vahid’s hand, but partly over deeper qualms: Will torturing and murdering a killer improve anything? No, Shiva and others begin to think. But Hamid is adamant, and it’s notable that while the rest of them are professional-class types who’ve landed on their feet, he’s been less fortunate (and, the film suggests, he was something of a loser even before his prison stint).

Thus unfolds the unlikely moral and philosophical debate folded into the film’s thriller script — a debate that confronts many ordinary Iranians opposed to the Islamic regime. Panahi, to his credit, gives Hamid a decent chance to make his case: to wit, the fanatics who run the Islamic Republic have no regard for the lives they ruin, and anything short of a willingness to act politically — in the Schmittian, friend-enemy sense of the term — is just playing around.

But in the end, the other side “wins” the debate. The kidnapped man’s phone rings. It’s his daughter, crying for her father to come home because her pregnant mother is unresponsive. The gang treks over to his house and drives mother and child to the hospital, where the baby is safely delivered. The group even pools cash to tip the nurses, as custom demands.

Only afterward is it revealed that — spoiler alert — the man in the van really is the torturer who’d subjected them to dozens of mock executions; who’d beaten Vahid so badly, he’s developed kidney problems; who threatened to rape the women before killing them (since, under Shariah law, virgins go straight to paradise).

I won’t spoil more of the plot. What matters is that the Hamid temptation — let us torture the former torturers, execute the executioners — is all too real, and it can derail whatever comes next into another national dead-end. No foreign intervention and no Trumpian Delta Force can save Iran from that outcome. It is up to Iranians themselves to forgive each other, and finally permit the blood to run dry.

The crash was intentional. The maneuver, known as a Precision Immobilization Technique, is regarded as reckless, dangerous and not particularly effective — including by the Chicago Police Department, which severely limits the practice. But this is no longer their town. Donald Trump has vowed to bring order to the city he now describes as a “death trap” — and has called upon the federal officers of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agencies to make it safe again. Welcome to Chicago under Operation Midway Blitz.

Following the incident in the Southeast Side, a largely Latino neighborhood, a crowd gathered to protest. More federal agents were sent in to calm the situation, which they did by firing tear gas. Chaos ensued. Among those gassed were 13 members of the Chicago Police Department. The front page of the Chicago Sun-Times the next day depicted a federal officer pointing his weapon at a young man who had his hands raised.

Through the smoke and the havoc, it is possible to see the chaos as a win for both sides. For the MAGA Right, the protests are yet more evidence of the Soros-funded malignant forces Trump is trying to subvert. For the Left, here is a city united in a resounding rebuke of the President, the Resistance reborn.

That may help fundraising, and television ratings, but what about ordinary people who have bills to pay and families to feed? The truth, as I see it from reporting on Chicago over the last several years, is that Operation Midway Blitz will change nothing — no matter how aggressive its tactics. Instead, it will only exacerbate our existing divides, making solutions impossible. This is true of every major political issue. Vehemence trumps compromise. Vitriol trumps civility. We are all now living in Chicago.

***

Trump is right in his identifying of a chronic disorder that has plagued American cities since the Covid pandemic. Among big cities, Chicago has the highest per capita murder rate, far above that of a New York City supposedly backsliding into the bad old days. And the number of carjackings has soared in the last decade. But in trying to conflate illegal immigration, violent crime and general urban disorder, Trump has ensured that none of those issues will be resolved. This is the same intersectionality beloved by the Left, only applied to a different set of concerns.

The surge in National Guard troops and immigration officers in Chicago is the same approach the administration took in Washington, DC. There, violent crime dropped by 22%, and a long stretch of August, which can be a turbulent month, went by without a single murder. But this is an unsustainable trend: federal resources in Chicago were not directed toward the largely impoverished, majority-black neighborhoods — Garfield Park, Washington Park, Englewood — where responsible interventions like a gun interdiction task force might make a significant difference.

Similarly, in Chicago, Trump’s zealous lawmen are unsure of what they want to do and where they want to do it: “They’re so afraid to go where the crime is,” an iron worker named Caroline tells me. “They’re picking up the fucking guys trying to make a living at Home Depot. They’re pulling busboys out of fucking restaurants.” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino has thrust himself with rather disconcerting eagerness into the fray, apparently throwing a can of tear gas during one recent encounter with protesters. He now has to report to court daily, as if on parole.

As has been the case in Los Angeles, Washington and Portland, few believe Trump’s forays into Chicago will make much of a difference. But in an age in which politics is entirely performative, perhaps the performance of toughness is all that is required. Bovino may win an Emmy, when all of this is through.

The same, too, could be said about the performance of defiance. The protests by Chicagoans against this invasion of their city have been forceful and impassioned. Yet they will also change little in a lasting sense. American policy — whether it comes to immigration, crime, poverty, or just about anything else — will remain in a state of pervasive constipation. Maybe that explains the growing number of Americans (about a third of those recently surveyed in a recent poll from NPR, PBS News and Marist) who say violence is an acceptable laxative.

***

Outside the ICE processing facility in Broadview, a shabby Chicago ‘burb, I watch protests ebb and flow. Activists have set up a tent nearby. Tracy, a white, middle-aged protester, is all for securing borders. She is not especially political, she tells me, but she can’t square what she is seeing now in Chicago with what she thought Trump had promised.

“If ICE was actually doing what they said they were going to do, which is go after criminals, drug cartel people, I think that would be great,” she says. “But they’re really targeting people of color. They’re targeting brown people, and they’re targeting people that don’t look like they come from here.”

A poster flutters in the wind, bearing the name of a Chicago Police Department (CPD) officer who had allegedly aided in immigrant detention. An American flag also flutters. A pro-Trump counter-protester named Ben had driven to Chicago from Arkansas. He is holding a sign that says: “GOD BLESS ICE.” Some people honk in approval as they drove past. “I want them to know that America supports them and that we are not all crazy liberals,” Ben tells me. “We are not all these democratic socialists.”

At this point, events take a nasty turn. An activist runs up to Ben. A woman in a dinosaur costume has claimed that Ben put his hands on her. Did he put his hands on the woman in the dinosaur costume? Ben denies it. The activists bristle.

Another man, loud and irate, raises the name of Charlie Kirk, recounting the macabre details of the assassination and seeming to suggest that Ben deserves the same fate.

“Guess where he’s at now,” the irate man says ominously.

Ben does not miss a beat. “Heaven,” he replies.

Just as things seem like they could escalate, several state troopers step in. The ICE detention facility stands in the distance, a hulking symbol of whatever you want it to mean: fascism, law and order, something else altogether. The protester in the dinosaur costume remains near the fence, alone.

***

MAGA-friendly commentators have used videos of confrontations between ICE agents and local activists to depict Chicago as a war zone in desperate need of even more forceful intervention. Anti-Trump outlets have shown Chicago rising up in unison to offer the White House a resounding rebuke.

The truth is less satisfying. Chicago seems to be largely indifferent, as is much of the rest of the country — not just to the immigration raids but to, well, pretty much anything short of a nuclear strike. While there are a few stirrings of vigor in America — New York, for example, seems about to elect a socialist mayor — a strange passivity appears to have settled over much of the land.

Trump has used this moment to his advantage, while his opponents, motivated as they may be, have not found a way to attract the voters whom they lost in 2024. Having given up a huge share of the black and Hispanic vote, Democrats could now be losing the educated, city-dwelling whites who are their lifeblood.

“We’re completely fucked,” confessed an actor named Seth who was having a drink at Hemingway’s Bistro in Oak Park, a much nicer suburb than Broadview where no one would dare put an ICE facility. He voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election, but was furious that the Democrats could do no better than her or the enfeebled incumbent. He would go to the large anti-Trump protest organized for the upcoming weekend (which would turn out to be huge, as it would be in many cities), but he was not sure if the protest would do any good. Apathy could set in. Maybe it has already. If it does, MAGA will doubtlessly benefit.

***

People are surprised to learn that there is a Trump Tower in Chicago. Perhaps they shouldn’t be. It is a graceless building on the Chicago River whose defining quality is that it is tall, and that its proprietor’s name can be seen from many blocks away. But the President seems to have an uncanny understanding of the unspoken grievances that motivate people to vote. His immigration raids have been needlessly provocative and disruptive, but they give off the sense that something is being done.

In 2016, Chicago resoundingly repudiated Trump. That year, he earned only 12.4% of the vote. But by 2024, that share had jumped to 22%. To understand why his support almost doubled here, you need only look at how the city has handled immigration over the past few generations — and how MAGA has learned to exploit those failures.

In 1985, Chicago became a sanctuary city — with a policy of not asking people about their immigration status or cooperating with federal immigration agencies. The current Illinois Governor, J.B. Pritzker, supports the policy. “We’re not going to help federal officials just drag them away,” he said of undocumented immigrants earlier this year.

Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, feels the same. Three years ago, after the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, decided to bus Mexican migrants across to liberal cities such as Chicago — presumably to show big city mayors what Texas had been experiencing for years — Johnson seemed initially upbeat about the development. “We are going to do everything we can to make this home for you,” he told a group of migrants who were sleeping in a Chicago police station. Johnson further argued that these convoys did not constitute “a crisis” — even though the migrants had nowhere to live and no means to make a living and had not asked to be sent to Chicago.

The fact that Abbott was moving people like political pawns did not seem to feature in Johnson’s thinking. Overall, some 40,000 migrants ended up in Chicago, the vast majority of them desperate families wanting a better life. Many of the migrants Abbott met in the police station had fled deteriorating political and economic conditions in Venezuela. However, the visible presence of these new incomers — and evident lack of solutions — only reinforced the sense that Chicago’s leaders had lost control of the city they were supposed to lead. These highly unpopular progressives have proved easy foils for the MAGA Right.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, migrant women sat with their children on many corners in the downtown Chicago district known as the Loop, with desultory boxes of candy for sale on the pavement before them. Some of the women coddled infants. Sometimes, toys were scattered on the ground. They looked helpless and you, passing by, were helpless in your own way. The nature of the modern American city is such that the comfortable are too comfortable, and the afflicted too afflicted, for things to ever really change.

At a City Hall hearing in the summer of 2023, I watched a man in a baseball cap with the motto “Power Pussy Peace” berate legislators for what he saw as their hypocrisy. “On every corner there’s an undocumented immigrant,” he told the members of the subcommittee on fire and police, who surely knew as much. “Single mother, with two to three kids, with a box of candy, all downtown.”

The man in the Power Pussy Peace hat pointed out that the migrants were generally not harassed by the cops. This also bothered him. “If this would be us,” he said, referring to black people, “all our kids would have been taken, they would’ve been arrested, they would be going through family court.” The migrants got a free pass. He couldn’t understand why.

Undergirding all this is the resentment of downwardly mobile whites who reasonably expected to enjoy the same lifestyle as their parents — only to see job security, affordable home ownership and a pension vanish. When Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, in what most serious people thought was a joke, he appealed to them directly in his speech from the lobby of the original Trump Tower, in Manhattan: “The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”

***

It is not too hard to find Chicago residents who feel the same way about their own city — and perhaps understandably so, given the Texan migrant-bussing “experiment”. One local poll from 2024 found Chicago residents less favorable towards immigration than the general US public. Where only about a third of the general US population wanted to see “immigration reduced”, half of Chicagoans did.

But immigrants — including the 257,000 undocumented immigrants living in and around Chicago — know that Trump Tower cannot function without them. Nor could just about any of the city’s services or businesses. And while they are scared, they are also indignant.

I meet Esmeraldo at an ice-cream shop in the North Austin neighborhood, close to where there have been ugly confrontations between ICE and immigrants. Tables are packed, but nobody is eating ice cream. They are here for a WhistleMania event, making kits that included whistles which could be used to issue an alert when immigration officials were approaching.

Esmeraldo is a student at DePaul University and a native of the Austin neighborhood on the West Side of the city. Her parents are undocumented. “I’m doing this event for them,” she tells me. “They are fearful. They can’t go outside to work.”

Migrants helped power the great American urbanization that started to take place around the turn of the millennium. They are, to use a pandemic phrase, essential workers in the truest sense. Without their contribution, the American economy could sputter. The signs are already there, at least here in Chicago. When I checked in at my hotel, a makeshift notice had been pasted up in the lobby: “Due to a staffing shortage, Housekeeping service will be limited,” that sign partly said. Enjoy your stay.

There are signs everywhere, and not just pasted angrily on the streets. Some restaurants have started posting notices on their doors prohibiting immigration officers from entering without a judicial warrant. Meanwhile, inside federal buildings, there are signs addressed to “illegal aliens” printed in both English and Spanish advising them to self-deport. “Self-deportation is safe,” these say. “Leave on your own terms by picking your departure flight.” If you leave it up to Trump, is the unspoken implication, you might end up in Uganda.

***

On a miserable afternoon, in a windowless room with a blue wire carpet, I witness Chicago’s administrative machine in action. A young judge named Craig Defoe is here at the courthouse to hear 19 immigration cases. There are three rows of hard wooden benches. A baby cries, grows silent, then cries again.

While the cinematic scenes of ICE encounters shared on social media make it seem like deportations are happening all the time, in the courthouse, deferral remains the order of the day. The cases I hear center on the question of whether a person, or people, deserves to stay in the United States, after having entered the country without doing all of the paperwork and waiting their turn.

These people had crossed jungles and deserts. They had forded rivers and sat in locked vans like cargo, not knowing where they were headed. This was brave, but it was also illegal, because other people had filled out their paperwork and waited. My family, for example, waited for a decade, though on the whole, emigrating from the Soviet Union was a lot easier than emigrating from Latin America.

Now a judge in his 30s would decide their fate. Defoe seems bored and morose, but he frequently surprises me with his shows of empathy. The third case that afternoon is of a Cuban woman who had entered illegally from Mexico. She was apprehended, sent back to Mexico, then crossed back again. Defoe and her attorney spar through a complicated exchange full of acronyms that no ordinary human being could be expected to understand. The upshot seems to be that there were several things the Cuban woman could have done to make her status here more secure, only she had failed to take those steps and was now at risk of deportation.

“That was not smart,” Defoe says. I imagine that he is going to let this woman really have it, ordering her sent back to Cuba at once. Instead, he simply schedules another hearing.

It is more or less the same with a Nicaraguan couple who had been delinquent with their paperwork. Their lawyer tries to explain that they could not file the necessary papers because the husband had been in prison. “The excuses don’t sound very compelling to me,” Defoe says. He grants the couple a month to file whatever had not been filed before.

The sixth case is an East Asian couple and it involves a protracted debate about whether they need a Korean or a Mandarin translator. Finally, Defoe sets a new hearing date for the couple: 27 June, 2028.

By then, we will be in the midst of electing a new president. Perhaps, by that time, artificial intelligence will have divined an answer to our immigration morass. But it seems more likely that things will remain as they are.

I certainly see little enthusiasm for Trump’s heavy-handed approach here. The afternoon is, to the people who actually work in the tangled guts of the immigration system, just one more performance in a country that has come to treat politics as entertainment. After it was done, there would be a new show — and another after that.

***

When I emerge from the courthouse, the rain has stopped but the weather is still raw. I go to Wicker Park, home to the Chicago Bath House, one of the last true Eastern European steam rooms in Chicago. Once, every city in the Northeast and Midwest had many steam rooms, because that is where Russians and Poles and Hungarians and Jews bathed and socialized. But then the Russians and Poles became Americans, and the steam rooms closed. The Eastern Europeans moved to the suburbs, where they bought houses with lawns and voted for Republicans.

Inside, I slip easily back into my native language of Russian with both patrons and staff. Everyone else here is speaking Russian, too, or another Slavic language. This would earn no dirty looks, no questions about legal status. Nobody here is worried about having to sit in Defoe’s courtroom anytime soon, or having to sit in a communal cell in the Broadview processing facility. Ensconced in an underground steam room, we are safe. No tear gas here, just purifying steam, salty snacks and beer.

By the time I leave, day has gone and darkness has fallen over Chicago. What fresh provocations and foul surprises will tomorrow bring? America is exhausted, and its exhaustion is especially evident in this city. Last year, Democrats asked voters to save democracy and the oceans and Obamacare. They may have simply misjudged our collective stamina, the reach of our moral imagination. People mostly just want to save themselves. In the zero-sum contest that is American life, you can’t fault them for that.

Southsea is where England peters out into a languid seaside boredom. A place once built for convalescing naval officers and Victorian holidaymakers is now home to a churn characteristic of provincial England in the 2020s: pensioners, bored teenagers, the unemployed, and the largely male migrants who have arrived, both legally and illegally, since 2022.

In July, a man staying at the Royal Beach Hotel was charged with attempted rape and voyeurism in the Portsmouth town center. Since then, a weekly protest has become a regular Friday night fixture. Yet whether or not Courtney’s pursuer really was staying in the hotel is ultimately beside the point, mum and daughter both insist. In fact, the protests weren’t just about the attempted rape, or Courtney’s stalker, or even the resented owner who had “sold his soul” in a deal with Serco and the Home Office to cash in on Britain’s small boats crisis.

Instead, the protest was about the direction of the town itself. Since the hotel had converted in 2022 to house asylum seekers, something very strange has been happening across Portsmouth. In fact, something very strange has been happening across England.

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At the start of the summer, Westminster feared a repeat of last year’s violence, as the small boats kept coming and Keir Starmer seemed helpless in their wake. What has happened instead is one of the odder turns in the country’s decade-long populist experiment. As the days got warmer, anti-migrant protests involving tens of thousands, at over 70 sites, formalized grassroots and localized opposition into a national movement that, in the words of one Labour MP, transformed Britain’s asylum system into “moral and political matter”.

The sense of forever protest has been further been normalized by “flagging”, the unofficial regalia of Britain’s rising provincial malaise. This has since manifested itself in other ways, from vigilante patrols in parks to community litter picking. To quote the “Weoley Warriors”, the group that kickstarted the flagging trend in Birmingham, the idea is “to show… local communities that all isn’t lost and they are not alone”. It’s a sentimentality so amorphous that it could be courted by everyone from the Prime Minister to social media influencer Tom Skinner.

Britain’s political establishment, unable to assert any sense of control or direction in this emerging new England, has reacted with a mixture of opportunity and panic. In Epping, for instance, the council leant on the Town and Country Planning Act to close the now-infamous Bell Hotel. That could yet embroil the Home Office in legal disputes with dozens of other councils, notwithstanding yesterday’s judgment that, for the moment, the Epping migrants can stay.

With the Government’s policy now to move Britain’s tens of thousands of small boat migrants into private accommodation the only viable alternative — and one which has inspired this summer’s most successful protest in Waterlooville — a once-unthinkable precedent for localized extra-parliamentary action has therefore been established. “These protests are not interested in conventional party politics,” says 43-year-old Barry of the Portsmouth Patriots, the protestors’ unofficial compère and looking rather like a teacher who’s lost control of a rowdy school trip. “It’s gathering momentum on its own. It’s doing it all by itself.”

Yet it’s also clear that the grassroots howls on the English streets, and the spontaneous wave of flagging, has nervously upended Westminster’s old means for understanding the forces of populism. Nigel Farage’s inner circle, which once bulked at Rupert Lowe’s fondness for “mass deportations”, has now borrowed the phrase in an attempt to ride the new mood. Just this week, it unveiled a new policy of detain and deport, complete with a mocked-up airport departures board featuring Eritrea, Afghanistan and Somalia.

Even the Labour party, rhetorically at least, has conceded to this new reality, pivoting from the outrage of last summer and opting for the model of Starmer’s now-forgotten party 2024 conference speech, one which decried the violence before moving onto a Blue Labour pastoral about the sense of insecurity stalking small-town Britain.

Such language has come to quietly set the Government’s tone. Stephen Morgan, for instance, the Labour MP for Portsmouth, has tried to hedge: acknowledging that his constituents had joined “out of frustration” — before decrying their exploitation at the hands of the far Right. Birmingham Mayor Richard Parker, asked to wade into the war between the flaggers of a long forgotten Birmingham suburb and the local council, glibly described the bunting as “uplifting”.

This uneasy dance between rising provincial populism on the one hand, and Britain’s anemic political establishment on the other, comes with a sense of unpredictability: both for a Reform Party eager to harness the anger, and a waning establishment keen to both appease and soothe its outpouring. In a country increasingly lacking any common hearth for political mediation — either through its media or culture — the spectacle of protest and flag has unveiled a fearful and increasingly ambiguous new front.

In their 2021 book Technopopulism, Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Accetti argue that our populist era has created a new political logic, one which mixes the rhetoric of populism with technocratic fixes to ensure, amid the illusion of anti-establishment upheaval, ample opportunities for existing elites, and indeed even challengers, to preserve their authority while maintaining the basic contours of the status quo.

At the forefront of this new political logic is a cynical appeal to both technocratic competence and the idea of the “popular will” — an empty sop for political parties marooned between the chasm that now exists between politics and society. The outcome, Bickerton and Accetti argue, is a kind of confidence trick, a “permanent campaign” that, if dealing with particular policy problems, ultimately obscures the more existential issues that underpin them.

Certainly, this framing takes us closer to the unspoken dilemma at the heart of British politics as politicians vie to control the public mood: can Britain’s malaise be solved solely through tackling illegal migration via technocratic wheezes? From reforming the ECHR to reviving the Rwanda plan, it’s an approach increasingly embraced across Westminster. Yet as the protests and flags suggest, and Courtney and her mum do too, fights over hotels have morphed into something more existential: the anxious, fragmenting drift of life in 21st century England after two decades of a failed economic consensus driven by a policy of mass migration.

Portsmouth is the epitome of this new politics. A city transformed over the last two decades, its port and industry have been replaced by a Blairite emphasis on higher education, creativity and public service. All the while, a cadre of property developers have turned the city into a kind of halfway house, converting its dwindling housing stock of Victorian villas and former social housing into HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation). All told, Portsmouth today has roughly double the national average of such properties.

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This transformation of the city has turned the fading Blairite vision into an ironic receptacle for new residents, an increasingly insecure realm filled by downwardly mobile laborers, lower-middle class private sector workers; unemployed migrants; and now, via the hand of Whitehall, asylum seekers.

“The hotel has become a symbol of discontent with the government, over the level of migration and general unhappiness with how things are going,” says George Madgwick, Reform’s leader on Portsmouth Council. His response has been to ruthlessly exploit the city’s summer discontent, leaking a series of stories to the press over the council’s alleged attempts to “cover up” the identity of Royal Beach Hotel rapist.

“100% these protests will mark a seachange in driving out Labour,” Madgwick emphasizes. “I’m saying that because of what I see on the ground. I’ve never seen anything like this.” When I asked the council’s Labour leader if she agreed, she didn’t respond. Either way, Madgwick’s strategy feels especially fitting in Portsmouth. After all, the city is also at the forefront of moving asylum seekers into private accommodation, with the council describing it as a “sanctuary city” as far back as October last year.

And, sure enough, the most recent weekly protests moved on from the Royal Beach Hotel to the council offices. On the eve of this new demonstration, I again speak to Barry of the Portsmouth Patriots. “We don’t just want them to close hotels, we want them to stop using HMOs to house migrants,” he tells me. “The city has completely changed, it started a decade ago but since the pandemic it’s completely exploded.”

How will the group’s tactics change to reflect this new focus? “We have discussed protesting housing,” Barry says, “but we don’t want to do it down residential streets. But I am worried that if things don’t change soonish, people’s patience will start to run thin.” Other observers are also skeptical about Reform’s ability to control the discontent. “I can see a situation where individual houses start being protested against and it could turn nasty,” says Mark Zimmer, a former Reform candidate and now a member of Ben Habib’s Advance UK. “Reform and the other actors jumping on it don’t understand the fire they’re playing with.”

To prove his point, Zimmer takes me to a quiet residential road of terraced houses, where an HMO has upended this erstwhile suburban retreat. The sight of visitors investigating a rumored “illegal HMOs” draws out an interested group of neighbors. “This used to be a nice road,” says Diane. But, now she continues, no one has any idea who lives there, with the house in question occupied by Deliveroo drivers and other itinerant workers.

One night, Gary, who has lived in the street since 2019, was threatened by a man from the house who thought he was spying on him. The residents are supportive of the ongoing protests in Portsmouth, but now have their eye on a bigger prize. On 13 September, they say, they will travel to London to join a Tommy Robinson rally for the first time.

That South Coast suburbanites are openly aligning themselves with someone like Robinson is telling. As Bickerton and Accetti warn, in time technopopulism only heightens the conflict between the popular will and mainstream politicians: until both are hollowed out of all meaning. It seems clear, anyway, that the flags and protests will test the logic of Westminster’s political confidence trick. Even for Reform, courting the unrest may only serve to accelerate the system’s unraveling.

The day after this latest protest, I ask Courtney’s mom Sarah what she hoped to achieve from the ongoing protest in her city — now set to continue amid the Government’s use of HMOs to house migrants. “It’s not about victory,” she tells me, “it’s about having no faith in politics or government to keep girls on the street safe. Everyone needs to actually vote Reform to see if [Farage] is going to do what [he says].” When I ask what would happen if Reform failed to restore the Portsmouth she once knew, Sarah paused. “I don’t think I’m ready to answer that.”

Serbia’s protests began back in November 2024, after the concrete canopy of the Novi Sad train station collapsed, killing 16 people. The people were quick to blame the disaster on government corruption and incompetence. The station’s canopy, after all, had recently been renovated by Chinese engineers. And though the authorities insist the project was “up to European standards”, no one believes that, especially when the relevant documents remain classified. 

Yet if Novi Sad was the trigger, the longevity of Serbia’s protests imply a deeper and broader malaise. Over the last nine months, they’ve morphed from anger over a single issue to a general movement for change, one encompassing the country’s very civic identity. At the center of it all is President Aleksandar Vučić, who over the last decade has morphed from a far-Right nationalist to a supposedly pragmatic pro-EU figure. Along the way, he has come to epitomize two things: both the long-standing ambiguity of Serbia’s geopolitical position, and a broader continent-wide slide towards populist autocracy. 

In a sense, Vučić’s very person is ambiguous. A man of relentless will and fertile intelligence, he is also famed for his oddly feminine lips (one of his nicknames is “pussy lips”). He has been in power for 12 years, circumventing the constitutional term limit by “doing a Putin” and switching between being president and prime minister. Those on the streets have had enough — and many blame Vučić personally. “He’s been in power for so long now, that for many of the protestors that is like a half of their lives,” says Marija, a young professional who has attended several protests. 

Among other things, Marija accuses Vučić of hollowing out state institutions, instead framing national life around his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Just as bad, she adds, is the fallout of the Novi Sad disaster. Apart from those still-unclassified files, she notes that only Serbs have yet been charged for the collapse. “It’s final proof for many not just of the cost of corruption but also the protection of foreign investors.” Other young demonstrators have similar complaints. “We want early elections, the reintroduction of democratic norms, an end of mass corruption,” says Stefan, an IT consultant. “We just want the chance to improve our lives.” Fair enough: with inflation around 5%, the cost of food and utilities rising, life here is getting tougher. 

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All this helps explain why, close to a year on, the protests are still going strong. As I walked through central Belgrade over the weekend, it was impossible to avoid the anti-government chatter after yet another demonstration. If, however, the anti-Vučić crowds are resolute, tensions have been rising. For eight months, things remained largely peaceful. But then, in June, police arrested hundreds of demonstrators, spurring their comrades to blockade roads. That, in turn, prompted the government to flood the streets with counter-demonstrators. Now, both sides are doubling down. Last week, anti-government protesters set the offices of the SNS on fire during a fifth consecutive night of protests.

The police responded with now-customary brutality in Belgrade and Novi Sad. In the city of Valjevo, they used stun grenades and tear gas on protestors. Dozens have since been injured in clashes, with hundreds more detained. According to one young activist named Milos, by now a veteran protester and talking to UnHerd using a pseudonym, the police are “brutal”, adding that they protect gangs of paid thugs to attack demonstrators. For his part, Vučić has said, with the type of prophylactic language beloved by dictators, that the government will not “remain unresponsive”.

It is, though, under pressure. SNS support has steadily eroded. According to a July poll, 54.8% now support the “student list” — an anti-government coalition, as the name suggests partly composed of the middle classes — compared to the 42.1% sticking to Vučić. But in the rural areas, and among the elderly, government support remains huge. The country, then, is polarized, even as some retired people are now coming out in support of the students, joined by less-educated Serbs tired of seeing their living standards drop. The President’s term ends in 2027, and he’s promised to step down then, hoping to mollify the public. But no one buys this; he’s said it too many times before.

All the while, the protests have brought out an increasingly autocratic strain in the President — and not just on the streets. The government now regularly accuses NGOs of plotting to destabilize the country with foreign funding. Serbian media is also less than free. Several pro-Vučić advertising agencies flood TV networks with overwhelmingly pro-government narratives. A 2022 study found Vučić received 44 hours of airtime over three months, 87% of it positive; the opposition got a mere three hours, and most of that was negative.

What has irked many young people I speak to here is that Serbia has been a candidate for EU accession since 2014. From then until 2020, the country received €1.1 billion a year from Brussels. In 2023 alone, it was responsible for 59.7% of Serbia’s total trade in goods. The EU, then, clearly has leverage over Serbia. But despite the protesters’ demands for security service reforms aligning closely with EU values, Brussels has said little about the upheaval, and almost nothing about the government crackdown.

No wonder many anti-government activists I met in Belgrade feel let down. There were noticeably few EU flags at the protests I attended. And while EU accession is not an official anti-government demand, it’s clear that people here were hoping for more from Brussels. “The EU betrayed those who believed in its values,” says Milos. “I believe government violence will increase. If so, we expect even greater resistance from citizens and more concrete support from other countries, and the European Union.”

I fear he will be disappointed. As Balkans analyst Tim Judah observes, the EU sees Serbia as one of Europe’s “stabilitocracies”, regimes that supposedly secure stability, pretend to espouse EU integration, but then engage in various insalubrious practices that undermine democracy and the rule of law. Vučić acts in increasingly authoritarian ways with limited pushback because he has so many avenues of leverage against the EU and the broader West.

As Judah explains, that begins with history. Though the wars of the Nineties feel distant now, Eurocrats still fear that latent ethnic tensions across the region could resurface. Certainly, memories are very much alive here in Belgrade. “The only genocide in the Balkans was against the Serbs” bawls white spray paint wrapped around a corner building in the city center, a reference to Croatian atrocities during the Second World War. Nearby, a former government building remains a deliberate ruin. It was bombed by Nato in 1999, and now stands as a monument to Western iniquity —though there have been attempts to turn it into a Trump Tower.

Vučić is also well-placed to play regional spoiler if he wants. An ally of ethnic Serbian leaders in Bosnia and Kosovo, he can easily encourage secessionist demands beyond his borders. As Serbia’s domestic crisis deepens, a Vučić who decides to stoke conflict across the Balkans to divert his people’s attention from internal problems could easily spark a toxic geopolitical conflagration.

Vučić’s leverage lies not just with the EU, but the West more broadly. Most immediately, and with the encouragement of both Brussels and DC, Serbia has been a huge arms exporter to Ukraine. From February 2022 to June 2024 alone, it exported $800 million worth of ammunition to Kyiv (which uses the same Soviet caliber stock), albeit via third parties. This is shadowed by other arms shipments, including artillery rockets and tank rounds. The US was also happy to see Belgrade to supply arms to Israel: it exported €42 million worth of arms to the Jewish state in 2024, a 30-fold jump from 2023.

Meanwhile, Rio Tinto, a British-Australian firm, is currently building a massive lithium mine in Serbia’s Jadar Valley. Set to be Europe’s largest, once completed it will fulfill 90% of Europe’s lithium needs, securing urgently needed supply chains for electric vehicles. Given the knife fight with China for rare earths, Brussels sees the project as having enormous strategic value. No less important, it needs Vučić to shepherd the scheme through in the face of huge domestic opposition: thanks to environmental concerns and the mine’s disruption to farmland. So if its policy toward the protests is unarticulated, it is clear: lie back and think of the lithium.

Vučić happily accepts Europe’s riches and frames EU accession as a goal, while he also makes friends elsewhere. China, so central to the Novi Sad station debacle, is a case in point. In November 2023, Belgrade signed a free trade deal with Beijing, the first of its kind in the region. Though Vučić claims the deal will lapse upon EU accession, if and when that happens, it almost certainly won’t. After all, China has also invested $10 billion in Serbia through the Belt and Road Initiative, mainly in infrastructure, and sent PPE and medical experts during the Covid crisis. “European solidarity does not exist,” Vučić declared at the time. “Serbia now turns its eyes to China.”

And if that again explains Vučić’s marked reluctance to investigate China’s role in the Novi Sad saga, Russia, too, enjoys a special role in Serbia. Belgrade imports its energy from there, while it also exports ammunition to Putin’s war machine via third parties, the mirror of its support for Ukraine. Vučić celebrates Victory Day in Moscow while the Kremlin says anti-government protests are Western-backed attempts at a color revolution — even as Serbia’s subtle diplomatic dance continues. The EU, after all, remains its leading investment partner, with Serbs enjoying visa-free travel to the bloc. 

Vučić’s strategy of leveraging East and West to maximize benefits for Serbia is, Judah argues, “embedded in the political DNA of Serbs.” It’s most fully exemplified in the figure of former Yugoslav leader Marshall Josip Broz Tito, who rooted his nation’s foreign policy in non-alignment, taking what he could get from all sides. When Tito took power in Yugoslavia, in 1945, he modeled much of his state on Soviet lines. The USSR supplied huge amounts of economic and military aid to its fellow socialist country, while Tito sent his officers to train in Moscow. At the same time, though, he was happy to receive arms from the US, which opened the door to military and economic aid from the West. In 1953, Tito even joined a military pact with soon-to-be Nato members Greece and Turkey, giving Yugoslavia effective access to the bloc without actually joining. 

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Serbia remains as non-aligned now as it was then, with Serbian officials boasting that their nation is ‘“the east of the West” and the “west of the East”. Given that modern-day Serbia lacks the size and resources of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Vučić must be even more adept at embracing the role and grabbing what he can. And with Brussels fatigued by enlargement negotiations with 10 countries, to say nothing of its epic problems from migration to energy, Vučić can be confident he won’t face much pushback. 

This, in the end, is the problem with the EU: it’s a supranational organization that speaks of its devotion to “universal” values, while its mandate is to quasi-govern a series of interlocking states with their own ethnic, political and historical narratives. Brussels must always balance a multiplicity of competing national interests if the train is to keep moving. And if this is clear enough in Belgrade, something similar is playing out elsewhere in Europe.

In December 2024, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico met with Putin in Moscow; Hungary’s Viktor Orbán made a similar visit in July. Both countries have curtailed free speech and clamped down on political opposition. Fico is now working to dismantle judicial independence and undermine anti-corruption efforts. The result, like in Serbia, is internal unrest. From January to March 2024, Slovakia saw over 150 protests, including one in February when 110,000 people took to the streets. This then provokes more autocratic behavior, which the EU must duly ignore. And, like in Serbia, Brussels knows it cannot allow these countries to choose an anti-Western path.

As for Serbia itself, the protests continue, and the country’s future remains unclear. Should the protestors’ demands be met, Serbia will face snap elections and significant government reforms, accompanied by an acceleration of EU integration. This scenario is, however, plausible only if the students manage to appease the varied factions that support them. Fail and the country will enter a period of political instability: an inevitable consequence of a fragmented opposition, ongoing economic disruptions, and a potential backlash from pro-government forces. Should this happen, Vučić would likely return to power, especially as he probably remains the only Serbian politician capable of navigating the country through its current turmoil. 

All the while, the unrest continues. One recent afternoon, as I walk through Belgrade surveying the mess from yet another protest, I notice a rubbish bin in which someone has dumped a sign. “Revolucija”, it says simply, defiance amid the detritus.

One sign announces that Charlburians are “NOT TOO POSH TO PROTEST”. That isn’t true: the demonstration is specifically not a protest, but a “Vance Not Welcome party”: that’s why its organizers, the Stop Trump Coalition (STC), brought the cake. Immaculate dogs saunter obediently on leads as their owners chat. (I overhear one person suggesting that this caucus should be called “Labradors Against Vance”.) A passing Volvo estate car toots its horn.

This is an omnicause demonstration: some fly Palestine flags, while others attend on behalf of the climate, “courtesy”, migrants and Ukraine. All these myopic single-issue angers converge in the figure of Vance. “This is a man whose regime is authoritarian,” says Jake Atkinson, a speaker from the STC. “They are abducting people off the streets in the US and deporting them without any due process. They are funding and arming a genocide in Gaza and they are rolling back support for a free Ukraine.”

But it’s not just Vance’s politics that have angered locals. Last Sunday, his 19-car motorcade thundered into Dean — a sleepy, 12-house hamlet where the former British prime minister David Cameron lives — after having spent the previous weekend with David Lammy at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s grace and favor country house. He rented Dean Manor from lightbulb millionaire Johnny Hornby and his wife Pippa (who apologized “for the circus” on a local WhatsApp group seen by the Telegraph). George Osborne arranged the rental for him. There, Vance duly set up an itinerant court, to which he summoned the likes of Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage, and Thomas Skinner — the ex-Apprentice star, acclaimed for eating sloppily patriotic breakfasts and saying “Bosh”.

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“People have not been able to use footpaths, have been stopped, asked for their contact details and social media — that’s a real intrusion,” complains Juliette Crisp, who moved to the area in the Eighties. The entire hamlet was “secured” last weekend, as checkpoints were hastily erected at both road entrances, while sweaty police officers rushed to block all nearby tracks and footpaths. A British policeman, whose job it was to move traffic cones back and forth by the south checkpoint, told me that he was averaging 12,000 steps a day within the same small patch of road. A few Americans, presumably Secret Service agents, perambulated in civvies and wiry sunglasses.

One local farmer posted on Charlbury Forum to say that 14 sheep grazing near Dean had disappeared. Soon, Charlbury was rife with speculation: a gate left open, or something darker? The sheep seem to have been found. Elsewhere, Clarkson’s Farm star Kaleb Cooper’s tractor was stuck behind the vice presidential convoy in Chipping Norton as it started to rain. “[If] he just drove around in a VW Polo,” he wrote on Instagram, “nobody would know who he was.”

Charlburians are used to this level of attention. In the last three weeks alone, they’ve hosted the former vice president Kamala Harris — who stayed at The Bull pub for Eve (daughter of Steve) Jobs’s wedding — and the Wilderness Festival. If there’s any truth to the oft-used moniker “sleepy”, it’s that Charlburians have spent the last few decades with their eyes wedged open by cocktail sticks, teased with small plates and matcha lattes and desperate for a rest.

This being the land of black labs and Ukraine flags, some kind of demonstration against Vance was inevitable. Here, Vance’s treatment of President Zelensky is deemed unforgivable. In Spelsbury, one woman told me that she hoped to “give Vance the kind of welcome he gave Zelensky”. But when I asked one of the demonstrators whether that’s what she hoped to do, she said: “No. We’re far too middle class for that.” His comments about the UK also wound up the demonstrators. Since becoming Vice President, he has called the UK “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” and “the first truly Islamist country” with nuclear weapons. Georgia, 23, accuses him of “hypocrisy”: to go around “slagging us off, and now he’s on holiday here”.

Many of the demonstrators belong to what is called the Pastoral Bourgeoisie — a class of comfortably middle-class, cottage-dwelling, Coalition-nostalgics, who work locally or from home, or are in semi-retirement. They are cakeists, unwilling to countenance lower migration despite being proprietorial over their own neighborhood. Theirs is a retrograde liberalism that’s left them trapped in a sort-of glitching VR headset jammed in a Sunday Times Property Supplement in the Summer of 2022. That was their heyday: they’d seen off the pandemic in leafy good cheer, and the nation still considered their values (honesty, integrity, courtesy) important enough to vanquish Boris Johnson. Next up, JD Vance. “I am just incandescent at the thought of Vance dumping himself on my countryside,” says Jude, a 60-year-old man. “People [here] might look old and crusty and wrinkly, but they value courtesy, morals.” Jake Atkinson tells me that Vance is guilty of “egregious abuses of power that don’t agree with British values”.

It’s unsurprising, then, that so many wealthy Democrats have moved here since Trump’s re-election last November. Charlbury sits in what estate agents call “The Golden Triangle”, the bit of countryside between Burford and Chipping Norton, where the proliferation of country clubs, good restaurants, and passable coffee means it’s been dubbed “The English Hamptons”. Plum Fenton, director of Savills’ country house team in the Cotswolds, told me that there had been an increase in dollar-based transactions since then, while David Henderson, who works in their residential department, said that many of these buyers have been coming from Democratic strongholds — though as yet they don’t have data on this.

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Ellen DeGeneres is certainly the most famous of these newly landed “Yanks on the Wold”, and she decided to move here the day after Trump was re-elected. She bought Kitesbridge Farm at the end of 2024 for £15 million, made considerable renovations, and then sold it to move elsewhere since she “needed a home that had a horse facility and pastures for them”. Once again, though, she’s escaped MAGA-dom after reportedly taking an urgent holiday whilst Vance is in the area.

In his 1971 book The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner writes that “America, here [in the Old World] had imaginative advantages, being unencumbered by the worldliness with which Europe had learned to inhabit the European world”. In looking at the UK, they have a radical idealism — oft-misguided — which cuts through the lumbering, skeptical fatalism of worldly Europe. Thus wealthy Democrats, liberated from their homeland’s tyranny, ignore the UK’s present disorder and see a liberal idyll where a center-left government came to power on the back of a landslide. So too can Vance believe that within the caricatured “Yookay” of the online Right — a lawless world of failed multiculturalism — there’s still something worth salvaging.

“It’s what they imagine England looks like,” says Charlbury’s vicar Fergus Butler-Gallie — a land of yellow oolitic sandstone and Hobbitish Cotswolds vernacular. As far back as 1929, American industrialist Henry Ford imagined such a Cotswolds: he imported a cottage from Chedworth which he rebuilt at Greenfield Village in Michigan, a museum that sought to preserve the old world as it was swept away by Ford’s innovations. But his buying agent knew the cottage wasn’t what Ford wanted, and so he made several modifications to make it look how Ford had imagined it would. The Times observed how the villagers “viewed the whole proceeding with disfavor, not unmixed with indignation. In common with most rural parishes, Chedworth suffers from a scarcity of houses, new ones are so costly to build as to put them beyond the reach of the ordinary man.”

Today, rich Americans are similarly shielded from local issues. The outskirts Charlbury are more This Country than Country Life. Hidden beneath a veneer of wealth, some 30 families attend the local food bank, and Butler-Gallie tells me that the church helps pay for their school uniforms and heating bills. Charlbury once had a prosperous gloving industry, and was the center of a booming agricultural region. (I drove past more signs reading “STOP THE FAMILY FARM TAX” than telling Vance to leave). Now it has tourism and the silly rich. “Americans? I love them,” says Peter Cowley, an 85-year-old parking attendant at Diddly Squat farm shop. “They’re generous. They spend. They tip well.” They are necessary. In Henry James’s novel Portrait of a Lady, a chronicle of Americans in Europe, Ralph Touchett tells Isabel Archer that “there is no romance here but what you may have brought with you”. But in the Cotswolds there is: for it’s the romance that sells.

Having accepted a council house where few others were willing to move, the newlyweds discovered a friendly working-class community living on estates built following the Second World War. When Margaret Thatcher kickstarted the peninsula’s redevelopment in 1988, Bob found work as a builder. Standing at the base of a 39-story tower on Wednesday afternoon, he points to the roads and drains which mark out his contribution to the global financial center now stretching out around his home.

Then, the area began to decline. “It used to be lovely,” says Nina. “It’s been going downhill for 10 years. The police never come. If we owned our house, we’d move. There is no community here anymore.”

Instead, at night, they see young men inhaling nitrous oxide balloons behind the wheels of their cars. A local gang recently attacked the house next door to them, smashing in its windows and setting fire to a vehicle outside. The police took an hour to arrive. If they were quoted in the press, they tell me, they would face “reprisals”. Bob and Nina are not their real names.

On Wednesday, however, the police did come to the Isle of Dogs. They lined up on either side of the street outside the Britannia Hotel. The Home Office were requisitioning the building to house asylum seekers, and the previous day a group of protesters had gathered. Many believed the immigrants would be moved in from Epping, where the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl by a man at the Bell Hotel has sparked weeks of protest.

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For Bob and Nina, this marked a final betrayal. Their son had been forced to move away from the Island, as locals still refer to it, by soaring property prices. If he were to request a council house as his parents once had, there would be 1,500 people ahead of him in the queue. For now, he lives in a one-bedroom flat in Bow with six-month-old twins and a five-year-old. “They’re unvetted,” says Bob, “…and they get houses straight away.”

While the Government’s use of three-star hotels to house asylum seekers has proved controversial for years, recent protests in Epping, whipped up by various actors, have galvanized a wider movement. In Diss, Norfolk, a demonstration was held outside the Park Hotel following news this week that it would no longer house families but single men. Further rallies are planned there, as well as at the Brook Hotel in Bowthorpe, near Norwich, and in Waterlooville, Hampshire, where asylum seekers will be housed in a vacant high street shop.

Peter Golds, a Conservative councillor who represents the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, fears the requisitioning of the Britannia Hotel will spark community tensions. He maintains the Island is diverse and happy — he lives there himself — but worries about the increasingly feverish anger of locals. He shows me messages on his phone from constituents which display a raw fury.

“It’s a government catastrophe,” Golds claims. “Would the French put them in a hotel with a sauna, chandeliers and a swimming pool? Would Meloni put them in central Rome? We’re mad.” On the nearby Barkentine Estate, he says, homes are desperately overcrowded; teens are sharing bunkbeds and “suddenly they’re seeing people getting off a boat and going into a hotel”.

Others are angrier still. Alf, a young man in an England shirt with a patchy beard, butts in to tell us that small boat migrants should be shot on sight. You would end up with small children drowning in the Channel if you did that, pleads the councillor. He can see his happy community slipping away in front of him.

For Alf, only a government led by Nigel Farage can fix Britain now. He lives just a few streets away from the Britannia, and can remember when the area was alive with dozens of pubs and local businesses. A perfume salesman by training, he used to work in Harrods until he squeezed a female colleague’s bicep (at, he insists, her instigation) and was fired for sexual harassment. For the past 15 years he tells me he has been warning his friends about Muslims, who he insists are taught to rape and kill Christians and Jews. “I’m not Tommy Robinson,” he says. “I’m quite a shy person. I don’t like trouble, but when I see something not right I have to stand up.”

Like him, most of the protesters are locals. “The Isle of Dogs is a tight-knit community,” says Mary, as she hands out homemade signs that read, “Stop calling us far right. Protect our women and children.” Over the school summer holidays, kids will be out playing in the streets, says a man standing next to her. He believes they will not be safe if asylum seekers are moved into the hotel.

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While many here are working class, others come from a very different world. One Polish man gestures to the flat he plans to buy in Wardian London, an ultra-luxury development next door to the hotel where 70% of the properties are priced at over $1.5 million. If asylum seekers are moved in, he says, he will have to reconsider.

There’s a Bangladeshi community too. They moved to the Island after the Second World War to work on its docks and fill its cheap housing. A group loiters nearby. Rocky, who grew up here, remembers the Eighties as a dangerous time. “This area used to be a no-go zone for us, we got chased out of here,” he says. When he was around seven, he wandered into the wrong neighborhood and a group of white men in their 20s stabbed his football with a knife before holding its blade to his face.

Now, he says, different communities get along. He worries that the arrival of asylum seekers might change that. “It can cause a division and more racism.” The younger men in his group agree. “Thousands of them are arriving every day,” Rocky says of the small boat migrants. “They’re not educated, they don’t know the law. If you’re going to stick them here, it will cause an uproar. You’ll have single men harassing young girls. I can foresee migrants hanging around outside causing no good.” All of the British-born Muslims in his neighborhood are opposed to the hotel being requisitioned, he claims. “We may be bilingual but we’re British in here,” he adds, pointing at his temple.

It was the third night of protests in a single week. Epping is a quiet market town where Greater London shades into Essex. It is not normally a tinder box. But it is now the most visible site of discontent with Britain’s asylum system, which has deposited thousands of unvetted migrants into smalltown Britain.

The protests began last Sunday, after Hadush Kebatu, an asylum seeker from Ethiopia, was charged with trying to kiss a schoolgirl on the town’s high street. He had been in Britain for just eight days. Housed inside the Bell Hotel until his arrest, Kebatu had been living alongside an unknown number of other asylum seekers.

Then, on Thursday, the protests increased in pitch. Hundreds gathered outside the Bell Hotel. The protest was initially peaceful, but took a violent turn. Police officers were assaulted and their vehicles damaged. Three people have now been arrested and politicians have condemned the violence.

This means that the country’s eyes remain on Epping. With hundreds of asylum hotels in operation across Britain, can we expect more protests like these? If so — how best to understand the people who attend them?

By the time night fell on Thursday, protesters had charged the anti-racist counter-demonstrators, kicked in a police van and thrown themselves at a wall of riot shields until the front teeth of a man had been smashed from his mouth. Then what? There was nothing left to do but loiter and argue about who was to blame. Their faces glowed with the light from their phones as they streamed their debates for thousands to watch live online.

Rubber-neckers gathered around Ed Matthews, a TikTok star with a wideboy Essex persona. Young men began pushing towards his camera and shouting over each other. “This country is a pressure cooker and you know what happens to pressure cookers — they explode,” one track-suited teenager shouted. “2025, watch out. It’s going to be a civil war.”

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For years, the hotel had proved a bone of contention for local residents. Initially requisitioned by the Home Office during the pandemic, it was used to house asylum-seeking families amid a shortage of temporary accommodation. Julian Leppert, then a local councillor representing For Britain, a now-defunct party with BNP links, told The Observer, “We don’t want a Tower Hamlets out in Essex.” Locals insisted petty crime had increased; Essex Police said it had not.

The Government stopped using the site, and then, with no consultation with local authorities, started again earlier this year. This time the inhabitants were entirely male. “The Home Office told us when it reopened. It was like, ‘This is happening’,” said Holly Whitbread, the ward councillor. “Local residents are very frustrated. The vast, vast majority don’t want it.” In March, the Phoenix Hotel, which is located on the other side of Epping and also houses asylum seekers, was burnt down. A week later, the Bell was set on fire. Rawand Abdulrih, 36, a resident, was charged with arson with intent to endanger life.

Holly’s father, Chris Whitbread, the leader of Epping Forest District Council, has since launched a petition calling for both hotels to be closed immediately. “Our community feels ignored and let down,” it claims. “Epping Forest has been forced to carry an unfair burden in the ongoing illegal immigration crisis.”

Massing outside the Bell on Thursday, furious locals echoed his demands. “Protect our women. Protect our children,” read one sign held aloft. “Stop housing illegal un-checked immigrants. Stop the boats, deport sexual predators. Close the borders.” In keeping with the town’s demographics, the crowd was very white, though a few black protesters were present throughout the day. Anger was directed primarily at the asylum hotel in their town, then illegal migrants more broadly, and, when probed, sometimes also Muslims, “lefties”, and immigrants in general.

A former teacher, there with her teenage grandson, told me she was concerned because the hotel was just 10 minutes’ walk from a school. “I’m mainly worried because they’re Islamic. Islam says you have to conquer,” she said. “This is the UN army. Look up Agenda 30. It’s what the 1% elite want to do.” When a man in a passing car lent from his window to shout “burn it down” her grandson displayed his braces in a toothy grin.

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One mile away, a counter-demonstration organized by Stand Up To Racism was gathering at Epping train station. A small group from the Left-wing campaign had been outside the hotel on Sunday, when a scuffle had broken out and one of their number received a cut above his eye. Following a national call out, they planned to return in greater numbers.

“I’m here because of racism,” one young black woman with a walking stick and a sunflower lanyard, which indicates a hidden disability, told me as she waited on a bench for her comrades to arrive. “No matter what town or city it happens in, it affects me. All people are welcome in this country.” Others had come in from east London, they said. There were pensioners and young communists brandishing copies of Socialist Appeal. They were wholly unprepared for the serious violence to follow.

By the time they began marching through Epping, a large and volatile crowd had assembled outside the Bell. When the anti-racists came within a few hundred meters, protesters surged forward to confront them. The gathering outside the hotel had been diverse, with many local women and older people among it, but the mob running forward now was made up overwhelmingly of young men. “Paedo protectors,” they shouted. The police, taken aback by the speed of their advance, retreated, before discharging canisters of pepper spray and halting the charge.

Forced back into Epping proper, the counter-protesters found themselves penned into a semi-circle between the police and a brick wall. A strangely English game ensued. Locals hurled eggs at the Left-wingers, who smiled as they batted them out of the air with “Refugees Welcome” signs. “I don’t understand why they’ve come,” a woman standing beside me said. She did not condone the violence, but was glad to see a real protest against the asylum seekers. Her elderly mother had been flashed by one recently, she claimed, and was now too scared to walk the dog.

Among those living closest to the Bell, opinion is more conflicted. For Jane Harvey, their presence has left her fearful, anxious and angry. She led me through her grey hallway, past her mother smoking silently by the backdoor, and out onto a patio from which the hotel could be seen just one garden over.

“I probably would not be feeling this way if they were genuine asylum seekers,” she said. “Real asylum seekers are families and women. I would hope the nation would help.” Harvey is not, she was keen to emphasize, a racist. She grew up in inner-city London. She made sure to send her children to a multicultural school, not one in leafy Epping. But at night she now sees strange groups of men and cars loitering outside, she claims. Her son has been pelted with stones while training for a marathon. Standing in her garden, Harvey said that despite the warm weather she will not leave her back door open while home alone anymore.

An elderly couple in a neat yellow house, by contrast, said they had no complaints about their asylum-seeking neighbors. “Up until now there have been no problems,” the husband said. “Me, I let them get on with it. I don’t want to get involved.” When the hotel was still a hotel, he added, drunken guests would stumble out onto the grass at 4am and make a ruckus. The asylum seekers have never done that.

As the day dragged on, with the Left-wing protesters penned in and unable to put up a fight, anger among the crowd began to switch to the police. Men started ramming into their lines and then barracking them furiously once pushed away. “I’m 57 years old,” shouted one at a young and rather timid looking officer. “This used to be a nice country; the police used to be good.”

When several vanloads of reinforcements arrived, the anger went up another gear. Demonstrators surged forward and kicked out at them wildly. As the law retreated, notepads and equipment lay strewn on the ground. A boy wearing a ski mask put on a policeman’s helmet.

The mood was febrile. Following last year’s race riots, this is the scenario that British elites have feared: a spark that could ignite mass ethnic violence. A Whitehall briefing note, revealed last week, shows that ministers feared that disorder might break out should the public discover the secret Afghan resettlement scheme. As the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, recently told The New Statesman, she believes that northern England is so tense it could “go up in flames” at any time.

The rage pulsating through the country remains amorphous, however. In Epping, as throughout the north during last year’s riots, there were no real leaders. The protesters were left to deliberate among themselves, unsure as to whether they should stay in town to hassle the Left-wingers or head back to the hotel and target the asylum seekers.

The radical Right in Britain is meanwhile in a post-organizational phase. There is clearly a social base for a more extreme anti-migrant politics, but no predominant leader or unifying party to build it. Within this void, political entrepreneurs moved throughout the protest trying to win support for their banner.

Jaymey McIvor, a local Reform councilor dressed nattily in pinstriped trousers, loafers and a turquoise “MAKE BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN” cap, said he was there to stand up for women. “This is happening across the country,” he said. “We need to stop the wholesale importation of Afghans. The only way to stop this from happening is to vote Reform.” As protesters attacked police lines after dark, others chanted the name of Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League. “Tommy was right,” bellowed one man over and over again.

Another leading chants of “Send them back” was Callum Barker, a clean-cut young local who has attempted to position himself at the front of the protests. “I’d say that there’s no particular kind of leader or anything like this,” he said. “I’m just a bloke who’s picked up a megaphone.”

Barker is also a member of the Homeland Party, which has extensive neo-Nazi ties. Until now, he told me, he has avoided mentioning his allegiance at the demonstrations. He insists he only wants to stand up for Epping residents. When I asked whether he accepted that six million Jews had died in the Holocaust, he refused to answer.

After a final, bruising attempt to rush the line of riot police guarding the Bell, the crowd began to quiet down. Locals insisted they would not give up in the coming weeks, though. “If this was Northern Ireland that hotel would be on fire by now,” shouted one.

Outside a pub on the high street a man with a skull and crossbones tattooed on the back of his head told a small crowd the Government would never listen to them. Instead, action like this would be repeated across the country. As Britain sinks into a long, hot summer, its leaders will be desperately hoping he is not correct.

That night and its aftermath, I now believe, were the biggest factor behind the backlash rippling through US culture today. That was when a Covid-era tension finally snapped; and many millions resolved that every claim issuing from reputable authorities must be a lie. The beneficiaries: YouTube crackpots, semi-literate weightlifting bros, amateur Holocaust revisionists, manosphere goons, spittle-flecked “X” racists commanding huge audiences.

The political consequences: allowing the Trumpian Right and its new tech allies to justify a raft of self-interested, pro-oligarchic measures by simply gesturing at the very real bogeys of that era: woke, DEI, debanking, censorship. This, even as many of these same moves will only deepen the power imbalances — between corporations and consumers, individuals and institutions — cast into stark relief in the plague-and-pandemic year 2020.

Watching the looting on Lex that night, I told myself they wouldn’t bother with our block, bereft of any cool shops. I was wrong. By the time I returned to our building’s lobby, I spotted those roving packs moving down the street. Over the next four hours or so, I joined our two doormen as they kept vigil, unarmed, while more and more looters came, some clearly pausing to size up our lobby. We were spared, but a restaurant and a salon downstairs were smashed.

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In the Bronx, a car deliberately slammed into a black NYPD sergeant, sending his body flying like a ragdoll. Another officer was run over by an SUV in the Village. I’d never felt so unsafe, and I’d filed datelines from northern Iraq during the ISIS takeover. In a place like Iraq, you know you’re dealing with war and terror, and as a reporter, you typically move with the security forces. This, by contrast, was our home, and the police were overwhelmed and seemingly ordered to stand down.

As unnerving as these events were, the mainstream-media coverage was somehow more so. By about 3am, when things seemed to calm down, one of the doormen tuned into a newscast on his iPhone: “Protests continue tonight throughout New York,” the anchor began. We both burst out laughing. Protests — mere protests — was how the local affiliate of a major network was describing what looked more like a scene of war.

But the coup de grâce came on 4 June, when public-health experts at the University of Washington published a letter encouraging mass gatherings in the name of BLM. “We do not condemn these gatherings as risky,” they wrote. “We support them as vital to the national public health.” Some 1,200 health experts and practitioners worldwide would sign the letter. The same authorities had pushed for restricting Catholic masses, Jewish funerals, kids playing in the park.

I remember feeling at the time: This one might fucking break my mind. Up to that point, I’d spent my entire career at mainstream publications (albeit on Right-of-center comment pages). Yet I could see why many Americans would come to react to any assertion by mainstream outlets, even the Right-coded ones, with a skulk: What kind of ideological bullshit are you trying to pull on me now?  

Strengthening this hermeneutic of permanent and total suspicion was the social-media censorship that accompanied dishonest coverage. The New York Post, where I served as the op-ed editor at the time, faced the business end of this censorship more than once. In February 2020, Facebook banned a Post opinion essay for raising the possibility that the novel coronavirus had leaked from a lab. The piece didn’t assert definitively that the virus had leaked, mind you. It merely noted that it might have, given that the epicenter, Wuhan, was home to a major Chinese virology lab.

Today, the CIA assesses that a lab leak was the “more likely” cause. By banning even the Post’s reasonable speculation about the possibility in 2020, and numerous other steps of the kind, Big Tech and its media allies helped stoke public mistrust. They thus lent a powerful mystique to opportunistic nutters offering a kind of gnostic progression: They banned lab leak. Justified looting. Called women “bodies with vaginas” in their medical journals. In which case why not: They lied about 9/11. Are you sure Hitler was the bad guy in the Second World War?

I don’t know how mainstream institutions — do they even deserve that label anymore? — can repair what broke over the past decade or so, and especially in the pandemic. What I do know is that our society is in desperate need of repair. Because there is still no substitute for the truth procedures of rigorous institutional journalism, reasonable public deliberation, and scientific inquiry free from progressive or RFK-style Lysenkoism.

As it is, the so-called Tech Right led by Elon Musk (and increasingly joined by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos) are weaponizing the — well-earned — public mistrust against the professional classes who were supposed to uphold these ideals. And they are doing so for their own profiteering and power-grabbing ends.

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Consider social-media censorship. After 2020’s banning spree — and especially in the wake of the Hunter Biden laptop censorship that also targeted the Post — the populist Right began to take up serious reforms aimed at altering the power balance between individual users and platforms wielding Tolstoy-length “Terms of Service” written entirely in their own favor.

There was talk of abolishing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a Clinton-era law that allows bulletin-board style platforms like X and Facebook to act like publishers — that is, to censor and editorialize — without carrying any of the libel liabilities of a traditional publisher. The Right also invoked the so-called common-carrier rule — the ancient Anglo doctrine according to which private operators of public services like toll roads may not unreasonably discriminate against customers. A social-media platform shouldn’t be able to boot you for your views, the argument goes, any more than your landline provider could remove you based on what you said on the phone.

Then came Musk with his purchase of Twitter (renamed X). Immediately, he began giving ideological succor to the embittered Right, including the very-hard Right, agreeing with a white-nationalist user who claimed that Jews are behind multiculturalism: “You have said the actual truth.” Talk of Big Tech reform all but dissipated on the Right. Nothing has changed in the fundamental power imbalance between user and platform, and the latter’s arbitrary ability to shape how billions of people perceive and think about the world.

Instead of offering a genuinely free and productive digital public square, the new X (and Facebook, too) algorithmically de-emphasize news links, meaning that if you embed a news story in your post, other users are less likely to see it, regardless of the ideological bent of the story or opinion in question.

The content that thrives, especially on X, is monetized slop: “What do you notice?” asks a post depicting a tourist site — say, Niagara Falls — visited by Asian tourists: Get it? Foreign tourists are overrunning our … tourist sites. These posts typically garner thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of reposts and “likes”. The platform and the slop-monger profit; the user is rewarded with irrational anger and dead brain cells.

Or consider the problem of debanking. Beginning in 2021, financial institutions began to arbitrarily remove customers based on their political views. Most of the early victims belonged to the populist Right. Yet in one of his last acts as the Biden administration’s outgoing director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra promulgated a rule that would have barred banks from engaging in such practices.

Upon taking power, however, Trump II all but collapsed the CFPB. The new administration put the agency under the acting directorship of a hard-core pro-business libertarian, accepted a GOP proposal renouncing federal oversight of online payment processors, withdrew the Chopra anti-debanking rule, and iced an agency lawsuit against the banking association over the very issue of debanking.

“RIP CFPB,” Musk gloated. The Tesla and SpaceX boss has made no secret of his desire to turn X into a money app, meaning that by attacking CFPB, he preemptively defanged a potential regulator. At the same time, the Trump administration continues to raise the specter of “debanking” — to justify loosening regulations against the scammy crypto industry.

Or consider campus free speech and inquiry. In 2021, I was asked to join the advisory board of the University of Austin, a new institution that was to champion the old-fashioned academic values abandoned by elite institutions in the name of woke. Yet more recently, UA parted ways with an administrator, she claims, after she made a mild post defending the idea of diversity — even as she criticized institutional DEI. Her post — “We can have criticism of DEI without wanting to tear down the whole concept of diversity” — enraged a Right-wing donor.

The university told advisers that this was a long-term programmatic decision. Yet in its on-record statement to the outlet that published her story, it only highlighted a ferocious opposition to diversity, thus seemingly confirming the ex-admin’s account: “UATX is unapologetically opposed to DEI.” Moreover, one of the university’s most powerful donors publicly rails about the need to root out “Communism” on campus — which, to his mind, seemingly means anything to the Left of Attila the Hun. (I resigned from the advisory board.)

There are many other examples. The point is this: there is a clear effort by a subset of the oligarchy to use the epistemic madness that peaked in 2020 and 2021 to bring about a regime that is even more corrosive to authentic freedom, sanity, and the common good; that doesn’t even pretend to keep to the guardrails that have guided the West for centuries, ensuring its success.

Can the institutions and the “responsible people” make a comeback? I’m really not sure. But any revival will have to involve a much deeper reckoning with the failures of that mad, mad year — 2020. Maybe start by calling riots and lawlessness what they were. Make peace with the biological reality of two sexes — man and woman. Retract the ahistorical claptrap of the 1619 Project, which still enjoys the imprimatur of The New York Times. When ideology corrodes public trust, there’s only one path to winning it back: intellectual humility.

As that last phrase implies, and a quick glance at the protest the Cancel Suffs website confirms, the protesters are ultimately unhappy about Suffs for one fundamental reason: the whiteness of its feminism. A self-declared group of “radical, anti-racist, queer” feminists, the group rejects the idea that “white women are always aligned with progressive causes” — even as they attack Suffs for underplaying the supposed racism of those early electoral reformers. Taken together, in fact, Suffs is nothing less than “a betrayal” of the next generation of feminists.

The chaos in July is far from unique. At least according to a certain kind of intersectional feminist — the sort of person who believes trans women are women and sex work is work — “white feminists” are now to blame for everything. Consider, to give one example, the wild popularity of the “Karen” slur, an implicit (or sometimes not-so-implicit) attack on white women standing up for themselves. Then there’s the explosion of books. The titles speak for themselves: White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color; The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women; Against White Feminism; The Problem With White Feminism.

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The latest to land is Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop by Serene Khader. An academic at the CUNY Graduate Center, Khader credits white feminists with propagating five key myths, devoting a chapter to each. Demolishing everything from the claim that feminism is about personal freedom, to the fantasy that it aims to free individual women, Khader clearly sets her sights high.

But as a feminist myself, albeit of the white variety, what Khader seems to constitute as feminism feels utterly unrecognisable. Every “myth” she dispels, after all, is nothing more than an invention of liberal “lean in” feminists. Quite aside from the infamous shallowness of such people, they’re anyway a group that includes both white and non-white women. The idea that Khader is somehow demolishing the racial monolith of white feminism therefore feels rather implausible. In any case her liberal targets — white, affluent, #girlbossy — don’t include robust, grassroots feminists like me and countless others around the world.

Not that Khader’s actual arguments are much better. Unlike their white counterparts, for instance, she claims women of colour have always had to work outside the home. Really? There is no such thing as wealthy black or brown households? Then there’s the facile cultural relativism. White women are accused of contributing to the destruction of traditional cultures, even as Khader argues on several occasions that prior to colonisation, indigenous Americans enjoyed pretty much total gender equality. For such a sweeping claim, you might have imagined Khader would have rallied a host of serious scholars to her cause. No such luck. Instead, she cites Kim TallBear, a Native American academic who claims that non-monogamous lifestyles are a “decolonizing project” that challenge “settler sexuality”. 

And though laughable, at least that idea can basically be understood. That’s not always true, for instance when the author claims that when looking at victims of gender-based violence, “people are being targeted to preserve the hypervaluation of masculinity, and victims are not only people who were assigned female at birth”. I have no idea what Khader means by this. Maybe my white feminist brain just isn’t up to such intersectional wisdom.

In a sense, it’s almost too easy to mock Faux Feminism, filled to bursting with all that pseudointellectual nonsense. Yet I think that Khader and the rest really matter. After all, every addition to the “white feminist” stable ultimately mischaracterises what mainstream feminism actually is. Rather than seriously engaging with a serious ideology, with a history and deep internal debates, it instead creates a strawman. Feminism, Khader and her colleagues disingenuously argue, is now about little more than lipstick and promotions at work. 

And if that’s bad enough for feminism generally — though the girlbosses should surely be criticised, there’s clearly more to us than that — books like Faux Feminism are equally poisonous from a racial perspective. Not once in over 40 years of activism have I witnessed an actual feminist advocate for white women exclusively. Indeed, I spent my early years in the women’s liberation movement, throughout the Eighties, discussing real intersectionality: how feminism had to represent and include all women or progress meant nothing. From abortion rights to tackling male violence, I have never been in a group that wasn’t racially and ethnically diverse. 

That’s equally true when it comes to specific struggles. Consider polygamy, which many of the black and Asian feminists I’ve worked with consider a form of patriarchal control. Yet Khader dismisses this view as “white imperialism” — handily ignoring the fact that many ex-Muslim women abhor Islamism and the culture it brings. If, then, the “white feminism” slur is sexist, it’s also racist. By refusing to give women of colour any agency in shaping their own feminism, it patronisingly assumes that they’re simply been duped by their nefarious white sisters. 

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I don’t want to be unfair here. Khader certainly writes well, and parts of her book are meticulously researched. The chapter on the “individualism myth” — where she outlines the history of women’s unacknowledged labour — was especially enlightening. Yet between generalisation and cliche, she ultimately only succeeds in ignoring most of what feminists, white or not, have achieved over the last century or more. Say what you like about Susan B. Anthony, and even by the standards of her age, she was fairly progressive on matters of race, surely better that she prodded women towards the ballot box than simply stay at home? That isn’t to say, of course, that feminism begins or ends with Suffs. It’s just that the march of women’s liberation is a long one, and every step in the road deserves to be remembered. 

That’s especially true given plenty of women alive right now would surely love something as simple as the vote. As the Taliban steps up its torture of women and girls in Afghanistan, and  increasing numbers of females worldwide find themselves shackled by Sharia, those that dismiss “white feminism” equally dismiss the millions of non-white women who expect support from their sisters in the West. Then again, as an academic at CUNY, or anyway an activist with time to picket musicals, it’s presumably easy to set these questions aside. 

That such woes should afflict one of the richest cities in the country, with a median household income of over $100,000, cannot be blamed on economic decline. Yet much of Seattle’s core looks like a pockmarked ghost town. Businesses on both sides of Third Avenue, a major thoroughfare, are boarded up. Blocks from the Four Seasons hotel and the Fairmont Hotel, tents crowd the sidewalks, and drug users sit under awnings holding pieces of foil over lighter flames. Traffic enforcement is minimal to nonexistent. The year 2020 saw a 68% spike in homicides, the highest number in 26 years, and the year 2021 saw a 40% surge in 911 calls for shots fired and a 100% surge in drive-by shootings. Petty crime plagues every neighbourhood of the city, and downtown businesses have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund their own security.

What happened to Seattle? The answer, of course, depends on your politics. In the news section of the Seattle Times, for instance, a reader is unlikely to see any consideration of a link between policing and public safety. “No single cause for 2021’s surge in gunfire in Seattle,” declared a typical recent headline over an article that points only to possibilities such as the pandemic or an unlucky cycle of “retaliatory violence”. But the majority view in Seattle appears to have shifted toward an acknowledgement that the unrest and destruction that occurred after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 marked a turning point and that the city’s policies toward its police force, whose ranks are now depleted, are relevant to understanding the story. What follows, based on interviews with a number of past and present police officers — five of whom are on the record in this article — is an attempt to offer an obvious but unheeded perspective. It is a cop’s-eye view of Seattle’s undoing.

On Monday 25 May 2020, in Minneapolis, a man named George Floyd died after police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd face-down on the pavement with a knee to Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. Video footage of the incident circulated around the world in the days that followed. One of those to watch it was T.J. San Miguel, a canine handler who had moved from the Big Island of Hawaii to join the Seattle police in 2008. “I thought it was disgusting,” she says of Chauvin’s actions. “You don’t do that to somebody. That’s just basic fucking stuff that we knew and learned and had trained on for years and years. It became pretty apparent that there’s a big difference in training and tactics and procedures in the West Coast versus East Coast and other places.”

The knee to the neck also surprised J.D. Smith, a Marine veteran of the first Gulf War and a Seattle police officer since 1998. Smith had spent years pursuing drug dealers, killers, and pimps and had subdued a lot of people. “That’s not even a proper technique,” says Smith. “We put a knee in between the shoulder blades, and it never chokes anybody out.”

Matthew Kruse, a young patrol officer who had joined the force in 2018, was struck that a handcuffed man would fail to get immediate medical care. “Especially in Seattle, we really emphasise once they’re in handcuffs and they’re under control you turn to the medical attention,” he says. “It’s kind of ingrained, but it’s also just doing the right thing. Do you need something? Do you want to get checked out by medical? If I have water on me, do you want some water?”

But any potential differences between the police in Seattle and those in other places mattered little to the mood of the city in the late spring of 2020. Protests spread from Minneapolis across the country, and the first large-scale demonstrations took shape on Friday night, 29 May, in Seattle’s Chinatown district. Matthew Kruse was among the cops standing guard. “We go down there, and we’re in the riot gear, and people were pleasant,” he says. “For the first three hours, I was just having a conversation with people.” After 10 o’clock, though, the mood shifted. “People were throwing stuff,” Kruse says. “They were starting to shine flashlights in our face.”

On Saturday, the crowds grew destructive. Groups of protesters shattered windows up and down the retail corridors of downtown and emptied many of the stores of their merchandise. Some of those in the crowd torched police cruisers parked outside of the Nordstrom flagship store at Pine Street and 6th Avenue. Protesters also pulled firearms, including M4 rifles, out of the abandoned vehicles. Mike Magan, a robbery detective who had been on the force for over three decades, was home that evening, watching the mayhem on a screen. “I was beside myself,” he says. He recognised the abandoned van of a co-worker, whom he phoned. The colleague, a forensics video specialist, answered in a whisper and said that he and other colleagues were taking shelter in the Nordstrom’s and videotaping what they could of the violence outside.

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The following morning, Magan got called into the office to start investigations of 30 to 40 people who’d been arrested for crimes such as trespass, burglary and property destruction. Five or six hours in, he began to suspect they’d given the police false names. But there was no point looking into it further. “We found out they’d all been released from custody prior to even being questioned,” he says.

The bedlam in Seattle caused police leaders to institute a so-called “blue/gold” schedule, meaning that officers had to work 12-hour shifts up to seven days a week. Christopher Young, a detective in the investigative support unit (previously named the criminal intelligence unit), who has been on the force since 1994 and never experienced such a schedule, calls June 2020 “the most stressful month of my life”. Young found himself working 16-hour days for weeks straight. “Even our homicide detectives were sitting at their desks working their cases in battle dress uniforms with their helmets ready to run outside to protect their own office building,” he says, adding that an eight-hour day is already demanding in the world of policing, where split-second decisions are the norm. “There’s been plenty of criticism of how we handled it, but people don’t realise how stressful it was just from the sleep deprivation alone.”

Of the hundreds of businesses that reported being damaged or looted over the weekend, Nordstrom’s flagship store was the most prominent. There had been an attempt by someone to set it aflame. On 1 June, Mike Magan and a colleague from the Seattle bomb unit entered the site to look for possible video footage. The first floor, he says, was destroyed. “All the jewellery cases had been smashed,” he says. “All the cosmetics were gone. All the makeup was gone. Shoes were gone — bags. Everything.” As for tracking down the looters, that wasn’t on the agenda. “We were told: you will not investigate any of those things,” Magan says. “The city attorney wouldn’t file charges on them.”

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That night, Magan, who had been out of uniform for decades, had to don riot gear to guard the East Precinct on Capitol Hill. Demonstrations began peacefully but changed after dark. “We were getting pelted with bricks, rocks, frozen water bottles,” says Magan. “There were shots fired. Here I am, 33 or 34 years on the department and I’m like: why am I on the front line here?”

The 12-hour shifts exhausted everyone, including the younger officers. Matthew Kruse was working from 7pm to 7am, mostly on his feet, and if he was out on patrol he had to have riot gear with him in the car in case he was needed for crowd control. Once a week or fortnight, he’d get a day off and spend it all sleeping. “Some nights I slept at the police station,” he says. “And I remember at least a couple of times I just slept in my car, because I was like, if I try to drive home I’m going to kill myself or someone else.”

J.D. Smith, stationed at the West Precinct near the turmoil, was spared a direct confrontation with the violence. His job at the time was to process online crime reports, which were now rolling in faster than ever. But he could see the toll being taken on his coworkers when they returned to the station from the protest sites day after day. “The looks on their faces — it just reminded me of the Gulf War,” he says.

When the protests grew violent, police officers began to use various non-lethal weapons to control the crowd, including pepper spray and tear gas. This led to complaints, lawsuits, and stinging condemnation in the local press. On 5 June, Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, declared that officers “do not need to be using tear gas at protests as a crowd management tool” and banned the use of it for 30 days. Many officers felt they were being asked to maintain order in violent crowds while surrendering all of their crowd-control tools. “People were throwing bottles and rocks, and we had to split this thing up. God forbid after multiple, multiple, multiple warnings that we’re gonna throw gas, guys, you better disperse, we throw gas,” says J.D. Smith. “So then what? Oh, Seattle PD, look how heavy-handed they are.”

Seattle has never been as police-friendly as some other cities, but outright hostility to law enforcement had until 2020 been confined to a minority of residents. Lots of officers on the force had even been accustomed to positive public attention. T.J. San Miguel and her German Shepherd, Pele — named after the goddess of volcanoes in Hawaii, San Miguel’s native home — had been featured on “America’s Top Dog,” a series putting dogs through obstacle courses, and had cheery write-ups for her work. Mike Magan received regular cards from people he’d helped and, when Covid hit, even a crate of cleaning supplies from one grateful Vietnamese-American family whose jewellery store he had saved when he tracked down four robbers and got all of the stolen goods returned. J.D. Smith became a brief celebrity in 2016, when while off-duty he pulled over on a mountain pass on Interstate 90 to rescue an unconscious woman from a flaming car. All of the cops could point to times when they’d helped save a victim from a bad guy.

Prior to the summer of 2020 the department had been receiving encouraging communications from the mayor’s office, and city officials were planning to ask the federal government to lift a consent decree that had been imposed on the Seattle police in 2012. In 2016, Barack Obama had even invited the department’s then-chief, Kathleen O’Toole, to the State of the Union, and a federal judge had ruled in 2018 that the city was in “full and effective compliance” with the decree. T.J. San Miguel expected that city officials would take a moment to let the worst of the public anger pass and then speak up for their police force. “I’m like, okay, it was horrible and people absolutely need to say what they need to say,” she says. “So we’re going to give it a minute here in our department, but then our city is going to say: Hey, that was horrible. It was disgusting. It was bad. And guess what? You’ll never see that in the Seattle Police Department.”

That statement did not come. Mayor Jenny Durkan announced on 3 June that the city would no longer seek to lift the consent decree. Seattle city council member Teresa Mosqueda vowed to lead an “inquest” into the budget of the Seattle police and said she wanted to cut funding by half, a view echoed by fellow council members Tammy Morales and Kshama Sawant. City Council president Lorena Gonzáles blamed the police response to the protests for turning “our densest neighbourhoods” into a “complete war zone”.

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By Oliver Wiseman

“In May of 2020, our political leadership considered us a necessary evil,” says Chris Young. “In June of 2020, they started to think that we were an unnecessary evil. Every cultural institution in the city turned on the police.” That included educational institutions. In early June, Young, as a parent of children in Seattle Public Schools, was one of thousands of recipients of an email from school superintendent Denise Juneau announcing that cooperation with the police would be suspended in light of “the perpetuation of systemic racism, the murders of Black people by police officers across our country, [and] the violence displayed by some law enforcement officers here in Seattle”.

The perspective was palpable on the streets, too. T.J. San Miguel would hear jeers out of open windows on Capitol Hill. “You have people in an apartment several stories high just yelling and screaming at you as you’re out there walking down the block,” she says. In one case, a crime victim had called for police help, only to start showering the responding officers with anti-cop abuse when they arrived. “It was very shocking,” she says. “And it’s just like: Okay, bye, have a nice night.”

“We were hated,” says J.D. Smith. “We were literally hated overnight.”

On Sunday 8 June, Matthew Kruse and coworkers from the North Precinct got an order to go down and help back up his colleagues in the East Precinct on Capitol Hill. The plan, he says, was to let crowds march past the precinct unimpeded, unless there was criminal activity, and Kruse and his colleagues were stationed a couple of blocks away, watching the area on camera. No one was trying to break into the precinct, says Kruse, but people started to pitch tents near it. At that point, according to Kruse, a police captain went over to talk to the protesters. “He started talking to protesters and telling them, hey, you guys have got to move along, and they got in a verbal altercation,” says Kruse. “Then they [senior officers] came back to us and said we’re just going to let them stay there and do their thing.” The East Precinct, already boarded up, was now abandoned.

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Why anarchy has come to America

By Mary Harrington

News of the surrender of the East Precinct hit cops hard. “I just felt sick,” says Chris Young. “It was humiliating.”  Matthew Kruse found the about-face on holding the fort versus leaving it insulting. “At first they had said: no, we’re not going to let them take the precinct,” says Kruse. “The next day it’s being cleared out.” J.D. Smith remains incredulous. “I’m still embarrassed,” Smith says. “We gave away a precinct.”

What followed for the next few weeks was an impromptu test site for improvised maintenance of public order in what came to be called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. A few days into the CHAZ, the New York Times described it as “an experiment in life without the police — part street festival, part commune.” Donald Trump weighed in from the Oval Office to condemn it. “Domestic Terrorists have taken over Seattle,” he tweeted. Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, responded, “It’s not terrorism. It’s patriotism.” Asked by CNN’s Chris Cuomo how long the CHAZ would last, Durkan quipped, “I don’t know. We could have the summer of love.”

For police stationed out of the East Precinct, there was no base of operations anymore. “They couldn’t deploy from there,” says Matthew Kruse. “They had to deploy from the West Precinct or North or South or Southwest or any other precinct. So response times got slower, and that affects everyone from a shop owner to a person who lives there.”

Where some observers saw a harmless street fair others saw something more menacing. “All these businesses are failing and they’re asking for help,” recalls J.D. Smith. “There is nothing, and I mean zero, we can do because the mayor is saying summer of love.” Chris Young says that officers received an email instructing them not to enter the six-block zone of the CHAZ, although he made his way into the off-limits area after some unsuccessful arson attempts against the precinct building. “I was sent with a fancy camera to take pictures of the crime scene of where they tried to burn it down,” says Young. “You had to go by a checkpoint with guards, and God knows what they’d do with me if they found out I was a cop. I had to basically go undercover to sneak in and look at my own precinct.”

On Saturday 20 June, about 12 days after the East Precinct was vacated, T.J. San Miguel got called in to respond to a shooting of two men in the CHAZ, one of whom was now in a serious condition. “So everybody just goes rolls down there and then, you know, they have to come up with a plan,” she says. “Like, how are we going to get in there?”

By the time a group of officers made it into the CHAZ, they were told the most endangered victim was already being taken to the hospital by activists on the scene. Over the radio in her car outside the CHAZ, San Miguel heard that the victim was being driven in a plain white van toward the Harborview Medical Center, and she happened to look up. “There’s this van driving just crazy,” she says. “The back doors are open and swinging. There’s a bunch of people in the back of the van working, I guess, on this person that was just shot, and I’m just like, oh my god.” San Miguel decided to alert Harborview and escort the van there. “I just jumped ahead of it, lights and sirens,” she says, “and I blocked all the intersections as it went, so it safely got there and no other cars got in the way of it.” In the end, the victim, 19-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson, made it to Harborview but didn’t survive.

The CHAZ lasted another ten days after that, until Wednesday 1 July, when officers reclaimed the precinct without a struggle. In the meantime, a 17-year-old had been shot in the arm on 21 June, a 30-year-old male shot and wounded on 23 June, and two black teenagers, 14 and 16, shot and wounded on 29 June as they drove into the CHAZ. The older of the two, Antonio Mays Jr., died of his wounds. Witnesses have stated that members of CHAZ security were the ones who opened fire on them, but police have never tracked down the responsible parties.

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By Oliver Wiseman

Despite the retaking of the East Precinct, the city continued to be racked by protest and strife throughout July, with further vandalism and looting by a subset of the protesters, few of whom ever faced charges. City officials continued to direct their ire toward the police department instead, and on 10 August the Seattle City council voted to cut the pay of senior police staff, including Chief Carmen Best, who enjoyed widespread respect from officers on the force, including all of those interviewed for this article. “It was demoralising,” says Chris Young. “She was a great chief and a very progressive leader who happens to be black. But she still got run out of town on a rail because she wouldn’t agree that her department needed to be abolished.”

Carmen Best immediately announced her resignation. At that time, T.J. San Miguel, who calls Best “excellent, just excellent,” was already deep into looking for an exit. A move like that, when she’d spent years to secure the job of her dreams, working in the K-9 unit, would have been unthinkable in the recent past. She considered herself one of the biggest cheerleaders of the department. But the hostility from the city in June and July changed her outlook. “I realised I could do everything completely right, and if the optics aren’t good, then they’re going to hang me out to dry,” she says. “Once I came to that realisation, it was like a bad breakup where you just shut somebody off.” San Miguel left the force when Best did.

A change in public safety began to be noticeable across the city, not just in protest zones. Seattle’s city attorney, Pete Holmes, and King County’s prosecuting attorney, Dan Satterberg, had always taken a lenient approach to so-called quality-of-life crimes, but after June 2020 they began to ease up across the board toward a range of other offences. Most of those who committed vandalism or looting during the protests escaped any punishment. Matthew Kruse said that storeowners would call the police about shoplifters, not realising that prosecutions of that offence had effectively ceased. On one occasion Kruse and his partner watched a man walk into a store, shoplift about $20 in goods, and walk out. “He was like, what are you guys going to do — arrest me?” says Kruse. “And we knew we weren’t going to arrest him, because with any misdemeanour stuff, we had to go through the prosecutor, and stuff like that wasn’t going to get prosecuted. You could I.D. the suspect and could get a full confession, and they were going be like, ‘We’re not gonna take it.’”

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By Katharine Birbalsingh

One case in which prosecutors did take action proved to be the last straw for Matthew Kruse’s partner. It involved a shooting that, according to Kruse, everyone involved in investigating believed to be obvious self-defence. A 40-something white Seattle male with no criminal record had shot a homeless Hispanic male who had attacked him in a parking lot at night. The directive from the prosecutors’ office was to jail the man in preparation for pressing murder charges, Kruse recalls, “because of the optics.” Kruse says the case went to trial and ended in swift acquittal, but Kruse’s partner, disgusted by what he viewed as politicised decision-making, quit his job.

With an incentive structure that made officers feel they had little to gain and much to lose from taking the initiative on crime prevention, cops began a dramatic — and some would say resentful — pullback in enforcement. Patrol officers no longer drove or walked about looking for suspicious behaviour like someone climbing a fence but stayed put and responded after the fact. Mike Magan said that one of his colleagues got investigated and punished for responding to a call of shots fired without logging into his computer first. “It was like we were biting our own necks, and you began to see that a lot of these officers would go park their cars at certain location and not go out and patrol,” he says. “You could track the cars and you could see that these officers were parking in parking garages.”

Kruse wanted to keep patrolling, even if it was in a more low-key way, but one day his supervisor advised him to avoid it. “I was told straight to my face: don’t leave the precinct unless you’re going to a call,” Kruse recalls. “He says: I’m looking out for you, still fresh in your career. I don’t want you to get in trouble for doing the right thing.” Kruse says a lot of his coworkers began to rely on an imaginary colleague they dubbed “Officer Time,” so named because most criminal behavior stops on its own after a while. “If it’s a shoplift, the building is going to close, or if it’s someone that’s just trespassing, they’re eventually going to leave,” says Kruse. “So just let them off and let Officer Time handle it.” Kruse quit in October of 2020. The following month, the city council voted to cut the budget of the department by 20%.

For Mike Magan, the pullback in enforcement spread even to his fellow detectives, causing him to hit breaking point. “One of the robbery squads just decided they weren’t going to work anymore,” he says. “They wouldn’t leave the office, they wouldn’t help you on search warrants, they wouldn’t come out and conduct interviews with you. They wouldn’t come out and track video. It was heartbreaking.” Magan couldn’t stand it and decided to retire early. He had banked eight months of sick leave that he intended to exhaust prior to his official departure date, but his ordinary work hours ended after February of 2021.

An exodus of officers led to a manpower shortage that prompted J.D. Smith to quit as well. As someone whose interactions with the public were mostly online at this point in his career, Smith was relatively cushioned from classic hazards of the job. The severe shortage of officers, however, made him certain that he’d be put back into uniform and on street patrol, which he believed spelled trouble for someone out of practice. “It’s tough even when you’re out there every day,” he says. “But you take somebody who has been off the streets for 10 years — they’re rusty.” Returning to the work of chasing down violent criminals in a time of hostile public scrutiny seemed untenable. Smith picked April Fool’s Day of 2021 as his date of retirement. “I had eight more years,” he says. “I needed to stay, financially, but I decided no, I’m going to quit.”

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The departing officers left a severely diminished department. Even before the unrest of 2020, the number of officers in the Seattle Police Department was low by the standard of other cities. With about 1,400 police officers in 2019, or 18.5 officers for every 10,000 residents, policing in Seattle could never be as comprehensive as in New York City, where the ratio is 43.6 officers for every 10,000 residents, or Washington, D.C. where it is 54 per 10,000. But with 186 separations from the department in 2020, nearly three times the historical annual average, and another 150 or so in 2021, Seattle started 2022 with well under 1,000 deployable officers department-wide.

Almost all of the officers spoken to for this article seemed to be in low-key mourning over their alienation from the city they served. “I loved going to work every day, and I had a fantastic career,” says Mike Magan. “It’s a beautiful city, but I watched it go from really good to really bad.”

“The mayor and the city council were telling us, basically, that we’re the bad guy,” says J.D. Smith. “The truth is 99% plus of us are amazing people that are only there for the reason that I was there: I don’t like people in fear, and I don’t like people in pain.”

“I’m actually a Left-wing guy on just about every issue,” says Chris Young. “I want the United States to be a Scandinavian-style welfare state. So I’m very sympathetic to people’s concerns.” Forming a complementary department of 100 people comprising community service officers, social workers and others who could do the sort of enforcement that doesn’t require a gun would have been a worthy experiment, Young feels. “But they didn’t do that,” he says. “They just demonised the police and chased good people out of town. It was, let’s slash budgets and hope something good happens.”

Today, T.J. San Miguel works for the police department of Marysville, a town about 30 miles north of Seattle. She had to take a $10-an-hour pay cut, she says, and abandon her work with Pele, starting over as a patrol officer once more. (She did get to keep living with Pele, who is now a full-time pet. “She’s fat and happy,” San Miguel reports.) But the first day of patrol among Marysville residents was a revelation. “People told me face-to-face: We love you. We support you. Thank you for doing your job,” she says. “People were waving. You couldn’t buy your own coffee.”

Matthew Kruse found a job in the police department of Lynnwood, a suburb about 15 miles north of Seattle. Like San Miguel, Kruse was astonished by the contrast between his new workplace and the one he left. In Lynnwood, he says, cops crack down on illegal drug paraphernalia. When someone gets a warrant to show up in court and fails to show, police will arrest the person for ignoring the warrant. When someone shoplifts, that person gets arrested and charged. “I ask people when I catch them shoplifting up here in Lynnwood, ‘What are you doing up here?’” he says.

J.D. Smith moved to Idaho, near Priest River, not far from the Washington border. “It’s affordable, and it got me out of the area,” he says. “I have a chance to start a new life and not be a police officer anymore. I’m hanging the badge up.”

Mike Magan moved to Bozeman, Montana, where he is building a house. In the months that followed his departure from the office, he continued to show up whenever he was needed to wrap up a serious case and make sure the perpetrators were prosecuted. But most of that work has wound down. “I look forward to the transition,” he says. “But I do miss it.”

Remaining on the force is Chris Young, who has seen repeated changes of role as more and more of his colleagues leave. “A few months ago I was just a detective. Now I’m a permanent acting sergeant,” he says. “Half the people in my unit are gone.” Any lull in enforcement that might have existed in the fall of 2020 has long since been replaced by a frantic rush from call to call, as ever fewer officers confront ever higher numbers of crimes.

Part of Young’s job now is to keep more people from leaving, even as the city steps up efforts to repopulate the force. Last October, as vaccine mandates caused even more officers to leave, the mayor put in place an emergency order offering $25,000 bonuses to new hires. But the mindset of the city seems to have mattered just as much to the officers in this story as financial considerations. “My young rockstar detectives are sniffing around these other departments where they’ll get treated like royalty,” Young says. “How do I compete with that?” The answer to that may depend on how much Seattle cares.

Dressed head to toe in black, her hair swept into a glorious silver-grey chignon, she told me she was “in mourning” for her former lover David, who had not died but left Claudia many years ago. Describing David as “a cross between George Best and Jesus Christ”, Claudia told me her life story.

Born male, Claudia grew up on a run-down estate in Glasgow, where she was mercilessly bullied for being gay. Then, in the early Eighties, Claudia met David, who soon announced he was “not gay” and that therefore Claudia “must be a woman”. She had genital surgery in 1986.

“I changed for all the wrong reasons,” Claudia told me. David walked out a year after the operation. Claudia and I became firm friends and remain so to this day. I later wrote about her for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, but the editors decided not to put the article online, so it was not widely read.

Not so my now-infamous column in the Guardian, entitled “Gender Benders, Beware”, in which I railed against a trans woman who had tried to have a rape crisis centre in Vancouver shut down by tying its staff up in years of litigation. The fall-out was immediate; the Reader’s Editor received more than 200 letters of complaint, many as a result of lobbying by trans activists. (He would later distance himself from the article, claiming “it abused an already abused minority”.)

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The hounding of Kathleen Stock

By Timandra Harkness

I began to receive death and rape threats by email, as well as messages that I was “being watched”. I was used to my feminist views being unpopular: those of us who name and blame men for violence towards women are often warned to keep quiet. But nothing could prepare me for the misogyny of extreme transgender activists.

Despite the hostility, I contacted a number of trans people to see if they were willing to talk. Over the years I had debated countless prominent activists at public events. It was always respectful, warm and, in some cases, truly enlightening for both sides. I kept in touch with some of my opponents and friendships were formed.

In 2007, I was asked by the BBC to take part in Hecklers, a live radio programme with an aggressive format. I was asked to put forward my view — that sex-change operations constitute unnecessary mutilation — before an audience of doctors and transgender people at the Royal Society of Medicine. Two trans people, a gender clinician and Peter Tatchell were put up to argue against me.

I was convinced I would mess up, and was too scared to invite my feminist allies to watch. But I survived, and afterwards stayed for a drink with several of the audience. Two individual trans men came up to me, lifted their T-shirts and showed me their double mastectomy scars. A trans woman told me that before transition and hormones she was being “poisoned by testosterone”. There was no animosity, except for the fact that Claudia, who had insisted on coming along to support me, was cruelly snubbed by her own community. Solidarity never extends to those who speak out against the transgender doctrine.

The following year, I was nominated for the Journalist of the Year award by Stonewall for my work on anti-lesbian violence. I had no interest in the nomination, which had come from the public as opposed to an internal vote by the charity. But when the gay media decided to go absolutely berserk about my nomination, I changed my mind: I had to go, despite the fact that I had long made public my view that Stonewall prioritised rich gay men over lesbians.

Soon social media was awash with petitions, open letters and plans for a demonstration at the event. There was talk of how to storm the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the event was being held. But Stonewall held firm.

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The crowd greeting me on arrival was loud and aggressive. My name was plastered over dozens of placards, and “Bindel the bigot” was being screamed through loudhailers. Once I had managed to enter the building, I was told by one of the judges that I was the clear winner, but the panel had received strict instructions that I was not to be given the award. So it was given to a heterosexual agony aunt.

The impact of that decision would extend far beyond the handing-out of a mundane prize. It galvanised the modern day trans-rights movement: the old guard — such as Press for Change founders Christine Burns and Stephen Whittle — started to be dismissed as irrelevant and too conciliatory, with the younger blue-fringe crew declaring themselves the new overlords.

From 2008 onwards, whenever I was invited to speak alongside a transgender activist or ally, the event would face threats of being shut down or disrupted. In 2010 I was invited to speak at “Queer Question Time” at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. I turned up to face a massive demonstration of well over 100 trans activists, shouting my name through loudhailers, jostling me as I tried to enter the building. Many of the protesters came inside for the event, and every time I opened my mouth, screamed over me.

The atmosphere became so toxic that one of my co-panellists, former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, was forced to say: “I’m sure that you do have people that put you in danger, but I can’t imagine Julie Bindel is one.” From the floor, an object was thrown across the room and hit me just below the eye. I was terrified, even though it turned out to be a lanyard, thrown by a trans woman.

But at least the event had been able to take place. From 2008, the UK National Union of Students (NUS) has included me on its “no-platform” list, alongside fascist groups and individuals. This meant that even when I was invited to speak at universities on male violence towards women and girls, the NUS would threaten to withdraw any financial support it had given to the organiser. Inevitably I would be dropped, publicly, to protect the event.

For many that still wasn’t enough. In 2011, upset that I was still invited to speak at the occasional university event, the NUS Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) conference voted to no-platform me once and for all. The motion summed up their spiteful worldview: “This conference believes that Julie Bindle [sic] is vile.”

And on it went. In Denmark, at a conference on how to end the harms caused to women by the global sex trade, I had to be escorted out of the venue by police officers after an angry mob started to bang loudly on the windows and scream through loudhailers. At another event, in Spain, where I was asked to deliver a keynote speech on rape, I was stopped from going on stage with minutes to spare. I later discovered that a major funder of the organising group had raised concerns about “transphobia, as reflected by the invitation to Julie Bindel to speak.”

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By Debbie Hayton

I am, of course, not the only activist to be harassed. Over the years, I have made friends with a number of trans people who have also been harassed and de-platformed when attempting to have discussions with feminists such as myself. I’ve interviewed dozens of de-transitioners who have been cast asunder after expressing regret about transitioning. I also know many trans people who are perfectly happy with their decision — but none of them believe it is reasonable to demand that they encroach women-only spaces such as domestic violence refuges, rape crisis services, prisons or hospital wards.

The problem, after all, is not trans people. It is extreme trans activism — a men’s rights movement which has grown out of the backlash against feminism, in particular the type of feminism that seeks to eradicate male violence towards women and girls.

For me, the costs of being targeted in this way have been enormous — and not just in relation to my unpaid activism. The mob follows me around, preventing me from speaking on how to end male violence under the guise of “protecting trans-rights”. Whenever I speak about prostitution, an expertise of mine, I am told that I “clearly hate trans sex workers”, as though everything comes back to that.

Faced with such vitriol, my mental health took a hammering. I began to feel ashamed of the trouble I was causing for those who invited me to speak. I would find myself apologising to them, which they would graciously accept as though they had done something commendable by having me there, despite my decades of active feminism and public profile.

I started to wonder if perhaps I was a monster — and I was ridiculously grateful to those who did not hide or apologise for the fact that they had any public connection to me. My self-confidence fell to rock bottom, as I doubted my abilities, skills and knowledge. On hearing of the latest cancellation, I would end up highly distressed and in floods of tears, knowing that mud often sticks. I was offered a newspaper column only to have it withdrawn after several staff members announced they would publicly argue against my appointment.

I spent years trying to warn my fellow feminists that if they stood by and let them scapegoat me, eventually they would come after every dissenter. First on the list would be the lesbians, because we are a thorn in the side of misogynistic gay men. Yet when I appealed to academics to stand with me and not cancel an event I was speaking at, most turned the other cheek and decided a quiet life was better.

And so now, here we are. The witches are being drowned and the bitches burned at the stake. Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix, Selina Todd and many other women whose names you will never know are being put through hell.

But another, largely hidden cost of this war is the lost opportunity for solidarity. As a young lesbian, trans people were my friends and allies. That is how it should be. Those of us who live on the margins of society, and who are discriminated against, should have each other’s backs. We are all victims of this bloody battle.

Like countless other precocious teenagers before me, I waited until university to rebel against “the system”. Then, for about two years, I dedicated every Saturday and dozens of other evenings to sitting, cross-legged, in a circle in the centre of Cambridge, discussing the end of the world. Climate change, after all, was the issue of our time. Forget the petty squabbles and internecine conflicts of the Left — the revolution would be green, not red.

While I jumped from one political identity to the next — Social Democrat, Corbyn loyalist, Anarcho-Syndicalist, Bookchinite Social Ecologist, Trotskyist — there was a single constant: to defeat the forces of capital, Leftism needed to be centred around sustainability. Climate change was one crisis capitalism couldn’t overcome: it had an extinction date.

It is difficult for me to separate how much of my political certainty was a product of the Left-wing populism that electrified campus politics, and how much was born from youthful arrogance. Either way, I was convinced we were the only ones left to protect the working classes against the forces of reaction. So it stung to have them reject us for what we were: jumped-up students looking out for our own interests.

Still, I enjoyed being a “radical”. I would walk around campus brandishing my own Little Green Book. Entitled Make Rojava Great Again, it was a hilariously delusional manifesto influenced by Murray Bookchin, and attempted to explain how a small, anarchist-in-name-only Kurdish commune was the future for global Leftism. The irony that Rojava was only able to exist thanks to the imperialist interventionism of the Global American Empire in Syria was, of course, lost on me and my comrades.

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It was amid this revolutionary fervour that I was introduced to Extinction Rebellion (XR). They were, at the time, a relatively unknown collection of old-school conservationists, ageing animal rights campaigners and credentialed academics who seemed utterly clueless in comparison with our own more militant group, Zero Carbon. Before one meeting between our two respective groups — we had planned to discuss the importance of racial justice — several XR members started shouting at us for failing to have brought chairs. They were, it quickly transpired, simply too old to sit crossed-legged in a circle like us students.

My comrades and I used to chuckle over photos from their rallies, full of middle-aged, middle-class hippies who looked as if they had wandered off from a People’s Vote protest. That this raggedy group would go on to become the most influential face of environmental activism was inconceivable three years ago.

As for their ideas and strategies, they were even easier to mock. How exactly did they expect to build a popular front against “extractivist” climate-plundering while simultaneously irritating ordinary people with their thoughtless disruption? Where was their consideration of class? How dare they cloak themselves in the language of revolution despite clearly posing no actual threat to the regime.

Yet there remained a tacit understanding that we were on the same side. We shared meeting rooms, supported their direct actions and invited them along to our own. Our memberships became increasingly blurred, with the next intake of freshers often touting loyalty to both Zero Carbon and XR.

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I became friends with XR true believers, kindly old activists who would cook me vegan chilli and explain how I could safely chain myself to a fence or gate. Their provincialism was charming; while we enlightened radicals understood the need to destroy bourgeois capitalism, they simply wanted Cambridgeshire local council to declare a “climate emergency”.

But then, during a Zero Carbon protest at the 2019 Oxford-Cambridge boat race, also my 19^th birthday, it all unravelled. Our plan had been to protest the universities’ decision not to divest from fossil fuels. We were, though, quickly caught by a pair of very patient police officers, who humoured our Bolshevik playacting for a while. But then, I watched in dismay as my comrades started complaining about police brutality, crowding around the officers and shoving phone cameras in their face.

The sight of their ridiculously exaggerated outrage quelled my revolutionary zeal. There we were, wearing straw boaters, planning to drop a banner over Hammersmith Bridge and set off a few flares for… what? Was this what we were all along: pantomime activists? We were no better than the XR hippies singing outside the Cambridgeshire County Council office; worse, actually, because we weren’t even having fun.

Samuel Biagetti has described the dynamic inherent within modern Leftist politics as that of a parent and child, with liberal elders viewing young activists as juvenile and subordinate. I saw then what he meant. My comrades and I thought we could radicalise our XR mentors; in reality, they had merely been indulging our silly fantasies. They knew that, eventually, we would learn to give up the pretence of Marxist revolution and accept the inevitability of reform.

So I left eco-activism for good. Better to be reviled as a reactionary traitor than have to live with the humiliating realisation that I essentially held the same politics of my parents. And there is nothing rebellious about XR. Just look at Roger Hallam, who co-founded the movement after studying for a PhD in civil disobedience at King’s College London. His thesis was that mass outbreaks of civil unrest — like those seen in the last few weeks in central London — are the best way to force governments to act. “Extinction Rebellion” is therefore a misnomer: the group doesn’t want to overthrow the system, but to petition it.

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By Ian Birrell

Liberal democracy isn’t going to solve the climate crisis. The same conditions that triggered the climate collapse will persist, and no amount of performative anti-capitalism will remedy that. XR’s rallies over the past week have seemed little more than narcissistic spectacle, a way for well-meaning people to gather and feel righteous and alive for a few hours.

Just as my comrades and I lacked any substance beneath our vague faith in the power of “revolution”, there is nothing hiding beneath their costumes. They have achieved the platonic ideal of liberal protest — all style, no substance.

It would, of course, be all too easy to laugh at them, were it not for the gnawing realisation that their warnings contain an element of truth. It is too late. This really is the last gasp of the old regime. And there they are: dancing as the world burns.

Gorbachev and Reagan both had important roles to play, for sure — including in their surprising friendship. But not everything in history is about political leaders and superpowers.

Above all, the astonishing events that transformed Poland through an upsurge of popular resistance in autumn 1980 paved the way for everything that unfolded throughout the region in the years to come. The ripples of those events continue, including in neighbouring Belarus today.

The strikes 40 years ago in the shipyards of Gdańsk and then across the country led to the creation of Solidarity, an independent trade union with 10 million members which achieved legal status within the still-strong Soviet bloc. The Gdańsk Agreement was signed at the end of August 1980, and Solidarity as a national movement was formed on 17 September. This was an opposition movement, by any other name — in ways that had until then seemed unthinkable.

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By Daniel Kalder

These were dangerous times. Leonid Brezhnev, then Soviet leader, had given his name to what was described as “the Brezhnev doctrine”: if faced with a problem, send in the tanks. The Russians had invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, to stop the Prague Spring. Just eight months before Solidarity, they sent tanks into Afghanistan. The Western consensus was that the Polish strikers were foolhardy, because the authorities “clearly” could not agree to their demands. The Times took comfort from the fact that “the romantic and volatile Pole of tradition” was now “less in evidence”, and that therefore they would only demand what the authorities were ready to give.

It didn’t work out that way.

Poles, like Belarusians today, understood the risks better than any outside observers could do. A decade earlier, protests in Gdansk had been violently crushed, and dozens were killed. But, as I witnessed when living in Poland through these extraordinary days, Poles were energised by the astonishing possibilities of change. Despite all the power at the government’s disposal, non-violent mass action forced an unyielding police state to back down. That legacy would never be entirely erased.

In the months that followed, Poland was transformed. Unpublishable books were published. Unseen films were shown. Public meetings, traditionally dull affairs, became engaged and extraordinary. There were still self-imposed boundaries; most speakers tiptoed around the ever-present threat of Soviet intervention. But Poles could echo Wordsworth, on the French Revolution: bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

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It didn’t last. After 16 months, the tanks did go on the streets. Solidarity was banned. Many were arrested and jailed. Dozens were killed. The sceptics and pessimists felt justified in saying: you see, we were right all along. Those pesky Poles had just been too bold, with their demands. The status quo had been restored.

Except that it never was restored, despite all the propaganda, the tear gas, the arrests. The dissident Adam Michnik was briefly released from jail under a political amnesty in 1984. Back behind bars the following year, he wrote of what he had seen while out on the streets, describing it as the “barren twilight” of the totalitarian world. His experience “exceeded not just my expectations but even my dreams”. Sooner or later, he wrote, “but I think sooner, we shall leave the prisons and come out of the underground on to the bright square of freedom”.

Many would have described Michnik as a naïve dreamer for those words, and understandably so. Within a few years, however, he was proved right. Solidarity was re-legalised. In August 1989, as East Europe Editor of the Independent, I was able to sit in the gallery of the Polish parliament and watch a Solidarity prime minister being appointed. Three months later, the Berlin Wall came down. Two years after that, the Soviet Union itself was history.

I was reminded of those words of Michnik recently, when reading the reflections of Svetlana Sugako of the (brilliant) semi-underground Belarus Free Theatre, who was held for several days with a colleague in an overcrowded cell in the Okrestina prison in Minsk, notorious for its violence and torture. Sugako said: “We went into jail in one country, and came out into another… I just burst into tears, it was so unbelievable.”

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Renewed official violence in Belarus is still an obvious possibility, as we are reminded by the sight of President Alexander Lukashenko strutting around with an assault rifle, and by the continued arrests and deaths. Lukashenko praises his violent OMON riot police, even as the non-violent protesters — with women often playing a key role — use creative methods to trump the violence. But, as with Poland in 1980 and 1981, each day that goes by makes it more difficult for Lukashenko (and his uneasy backers in Moscow) to return to the repressive status quo ante, whatever violence he or they may choose to use.

Arguably, Lukashenko has already overplayed his hand: if he had not claimed an offensively absurd “80%” electoral victory over his presidential challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the protests against the stolen election might not have been so vigorous or sustained. Authoritarian leaders sometimes persuade themselves that they can do anything — as this week’s abduction of opposition leader Maria Kolesnikova by unidentified masked men made clear. But officials lawlessness and violence should not be seen as the last word.

As with Poland in 1980-81, this remains a fragile time. It is unsurprising that the most vocal support for the people of Belarus comes not from powerful Western governments but from the small neighbouring Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, who were also told by Western leaders that they were “unrealistic” in their aspirations to regain independence from Moscow, which they had lost when Stalin annexed all three countries under the secret terms of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939.

The stance of Moscow will remain important. Clearly, Vladimir Putin has every reason to be nervous about the prospective fall of Lukashenko, however little respect he may have for Lukashenko himself. The ripples of protest in Belarus could still spread into Russia itself — just as happened 30 years ago, when Russian slogans in solidarity with the Baltic states proclaimed: “For your and our freedom.”

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In 1989, I asked a pro-independence leader in Estonia if he was not frightened of the prospect of violence from Moscow, to stop this defiance of Kremlin rule.

No, he said: “You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.” To prove his point, he added: “Look what just happened in Poland”, where the appointment of a Solidarity prime minister had just been announced. Another activist calmly explained that any Soviet violence would simply be “the last dying flick of the dragon’s tail”. She and others were proved right. Eighteen months later, when Soviet tanks went into the Baltic states in January 1991, the violence backfired.

The end of the story in Belarus is not yet written. But if we see increased official violence and mass arrests and a part-Russian takeover tomorrow, that won’t mark the end of the story, any more than it did in Poland or the Baltic states. A Soviet hardline coup in August 1991 was supposed to stop reforms and restore Soviet strength. The coup collapsed because of popular protests after just three days. The Soviet Union itself ended four months later.

For Lukashenko and Putin alike, those lessons from history are impossible to ignore.

It makes for a bizarre dynamic, as Democratic Party pundits and politicians routinely describe avowed insurrectionists as nothing more than benign “peaceful protesters”. And since the protests came to be arrayed against the federal forces dispatched to Portland by Donald Trump, more conventional elements of the Left/liberal “Resistance” have made common cause with these revolutionary anarchists who regard the very essence of the US political system — not just Trump — as innately fascist and “white supremacist”. On a recent evening, for instance, an older white couple in a pair of matching “Resistance”-branded T-shirts could be spotted in attendance among the radical activists, as well as a man sporting the slogan “Ridin’ with Biden”.

To characterise what’s gone on in Portland as a traditional “protest” is a misnomer, however. Pay a visit to the area around the Federal Courthouse in Downtown after midnight and you are greeted by brigades of black-clad “Antifa” foot soldiers — geared up in full body armour, complete with industrial-grade gas masks, shields and even customised radio systems. Being overwhelmingly white, they are strategic about public presentation: the speakers appointed to address the nightly “rallies” are almost exclusively black, as “amplifying black voices” to whom whites must dutifully “listen” is a central tenet of the Summer 2020 protest ethos.

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Stop pretending the BLM protests were peaceful

By Michael Tracey

If there is any foundational idea operative in Portland, it’s to keep a frenetic confrontation with the state going for as long as possible, so as to maximise the chances that an incendiary incident might occur and catalyse a larger insurrectionary uproar — similar to the killing of George Floyd in May, which sparked nationwide riots. One fateful tear gas canister fired into the temple of a “protester” could reverberate rapidly across the country; “Portland solidarity” actions have already sprouted up as far away as Richmond, Virginia. This is by design: a former occupant of the so-called “CHAZ,” the former anarchist commune that took over a portion of Seattle in June, told me a number of people who previously set up shop there had headed south to Portland.

As I milled around one night livestreaming on my phone, a “protester” wielding a heavy-duty shield emblazoned with the anarchist “A” symbol demanded that I cease recording. When I declined to obey this command, I was confronted by several additional “protesters” — all white, of course — one of whom snatched the phone out of my hands. It was only returned after I agreed to recite the phrase “Black Lives Matter” with sufficient vigour. This friendly fellow subsequently threatened to “fucking stomp me out,” and then ejected me from the protest zone — forcing me to run, not walk, away — as another associate hurled a projectile at me. Certainly not behaviour I’ve encountered at any other “protest”.

The pandemic is far from the minds of participants — in contrast with most working-class Americans. One night, I tried to put a question to Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, about the advisability of mass protest gatherings as Covid cases spike in the state of Oregon. Wheeler had ventured out in a show of support for the protesters, and was even permitted to address the rally, despite being widely loathed. “Fuck you, Ted Wheeler,” his detractors shouted, unimpressed by his pleading. Still determined to demonstrate his solidarity, however, he subjected himself to a choreographed tear-gassing from federal forces (a New York Times reporter was right next to him at the time, surely by sheer coincidence.)

“The most important thing right now is the Black Lives Matter movement,” Wheeler replied to me, at which protesters in the vicinity became enraged, accusing me of engaging in “white supremacy” and “silencing” blacks for posing a question they (the whites) deemed “inappropriate” to an elected official. “That is a premise that doesn’t concern this movement at all,” one protester said of the pandemic, as others demanded that I “get the fuck out of here”.

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Wheeler’s fallacy is imagining that any incrementalist policy reforms will satisfy the ideological core of these protesters, whose goal is abolition of the country’s entire criminal justice apparatus in addition to general insurrection. But as expected, even getting tear-gassed wasn’t enough to placate Wheeler’s critics. The following day, Jo Ann Hardesty, a Portland City Commissioner, dismissed Wheeler as “a privileged white man”. (Having received a sizable helping of tear-gas myself, I can confirm that it was highly unpleasant.)

The source of the animosity toward Wheeler is the conduct of the municipal Portland police, which a number of residents (and even officers) find genuinely baffling. “We are probably one of the most progressive law enforcement agencies I’ve ever had the opportunity to be around,” one veteran Portland Police Bureau officer told me as he monitored the protest action from afar one night, semi-hidden in an unmarked vehicle parked on a side street, with the massive booms of the “mortar”-style fireworks being fired at the Federal Courthouse crackling in the background. “And it’s just sad to me that we’re getting shoved back into this stigma of these jackbooted thugs again. All the outreach we’ve done — all the gang outreach we’ve been a part of — it’s all been taken away from us.”

Indeed, take a look at the official Portland Police Twitter account and you will find a banner image of an officer happily wearing a LGBT Pride Flag-coloured facemask. A left-wing political activist in Portland who asked to remain nameless for fear of retribution attested to having a friend in the Bureau who is a black lesbian woman with several children. “She’s one of the most thoughtful, intelligent people that I know,” the activist said, “who went into becoming a police officer because she wanted to see more people like her on the force in her community.”

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They added: “We have a lot of people running this protest who have never been outside of this Portland bubble. And the Portland bubble is very comfortable. They don’t understand what real suffering is like.”

That black lesbian woman would presumably be implicated in one of the chants that has become a staple of the protests: “A – C – A – B… ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS” — which is unlikely to be a notion dispelled by marginal policy changes of the kind politely suggested, for example, by Wheeler. Nor would the withdrawal of federal forces from the area satisfy their insurrectionist demands. When protesters chant “NO GOOD COPS IN A RACIST SYSTEM,” the “system” to which they are referring is the foundational system of governance of the United States — again, deemed inherently “fascist” and “white supremacist”, and therefore impossible to reform. As one sign wielded by a protester declared: “The Revolution will not come by asking or voting,” with the customary anarchist “A” symbol scrawled onto the cardboard. Other protest phrases visible around Portland include “Die Piggies” and “Dead Cops,” as well as calls for the assassination of Trump.

Outside the core of the Downtown protest zone, the same mass-produced “Black Lives Matter” posters which have become ubiquitous across so many other American metropolitan areas dot the front porches and storefront windows of Portland establishments. (It’s certainly more culturally fashionable than “Joe Biden 2020” insignia, although the electoral implications are roughly similar). But a trip around the city also reveals hand-made yard signs posing questions such as, “DEAR WHITE PEOPLE, WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO END WHITE SUPREMACY?”

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One potential answer to this question might be: “elect a black head of state,” as the overwhelmingly white Multnomah County, Oregon — home to Portland — did by a whopping 56-point margin in 2008 and 55-point in 2012. But a strange feature of this protest movement is that one would barely know Barack Obama, a black man elected president in a majority white nation, ever existed. Not that Obama’s mere election was supposed to have eradicated every last trace of racial inequities in the United States: of course it wasn’t. But you’d think it would at least inform popular conceptions of the role of race within the nation’s elite power structure. Instead, Obama seems to have been simply “erased” — the significance of his tenure not even worth mentioning. Are we to believe that a country so intractably defined by “white supremacy” — a totally uncontested truism among protesters and their media allies — nonetheless elected a black man not once, but twice? Apparently.

Like so many other cities across the US, much of Portland remains boarded up as a result of riots that initially broke out in early June after the George Floyd killing — compounded by decreased economic activity brought on by the pandemic. (Again, the virus is evidently not a “premise” of “concern” to protesters.) Even VooDoo Doughnut, a popular independent Portland shop featuring items like Vegan Maple Cream, was boarded up as of July 26, after one of its windows was smashed by “BLM protesters”, according to a security guard. “We had some threats,” he said. Overtly left-wing food carts — the mere existence of which is already something of a conundrum — also report being “damaged during the protests” and indefinitely closed.

While “The Feds” have reduced their visibility in recent days, that doesn’t mean the rancour will subside any time soon. Notwithstanding talk of a “peaceful transition,” one Department of Homeland Security agent told me: “There may be some unrealistic expectations. There’s never going to be a 100% withdrawal of federal officers from the federal building.” And one of the “voices” appointed to address a nightly rally last month explicitly likened Portland’s action to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the 1950s, which lasted for 381 days.

Apart from highlighting the elevated historical terms in which these protesters see themselves, it’s an indication that Feds or no Feds, the Portland anarchists have every incentive to keep the chaos going in perpetuity. And why wouldn’t they? Clearly, their strategy is paying off.

That is certainly plausible. In which case, it would presumably be important to document how ordinary Americans, especially those most directly affected, perceive the “movement” in question.

Scan almost any of the popular media coverage over the past six weeks and you’ll find that journalists have been steadfast in their depiction of “protesters” as unassailably “peaceful.” While the vast majority of those who attended a state-backed demonstration or some other event spurred by the ‘movement’ are unlikely to have committed any acts of physical destruction, the term “peaceful protest” doesn’t seem to quite capture the impact of a society-wide upheaval that included, as a key component, mass riots — the magnitude of which have not been seen in the U.S. since at least the 1960s.

From large metro areas like Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul, to small and mid-sized cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Green Bay, Wisconsin, the number of boarded up, damaged or destroyed buildings I have personally observed — commercial, civic, and residential — is staggering. Keeping exact count is impossible. One might think that a major media organisation such as the New York Times would use some of their galactic journalistic resources to tally up the wreckage for posterity. But roughly six weeks later, and such a tally is still nowhere to be found.

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A standard retort one often hears is that “the riots” must not be conflated with “the protests,” which is technically accurate in certain contexts. But the distinction is not as obvious as the media like to make out. In many locations, police and fire services were diverted to accommodate these massive protests, which in turn created a vacuum that enabled the outbreak of riotous activity. As one resident of Minneapolis explained to me, emergency services told him that they would simply be unavailable during the weekend of 29-31 May, while other locals recounted with amazement that police were totally absent as their neighbourhoods burned.

In Milwaukee, a man described being chased down by rioters after getting off the bus on his way home from work. He saw no difference between protesters and rioters; the flippant idea that these groups can be so neatly disentangled is wrong.

This view is just as likely to be espoused by black people and other minorities as anyone else (the Milwaukee man was black), which renders the media’s strident insistence to depict the ‘movement’ as entirely peaceful incongruous with the perceptions of working-class Americans (of all races). So many of them experienced what transpired more as a painful tragedy than any kind of wondrous harmony.

Indeed, the resulting destruction may have set their majority-minority neighbourhoods back economically for months or years, if not longer. Most had already been struggling due to the pandemic, with the riots interrupting fragile reopening plans. To exclude the perspectives of these people from popular media narratives amounts to a kind of purposefully obfuscatory, moralising snobbery. Talk about ‘erasure’.

So why, exactly, has the scope of these riots been so assiduously downplayed, and the opinions of those who experienced them first-hand been largely ignored? A number of potential explanations ring true. For one, media elites desperately do not want to undermine the moral legitimacy of a ‘movement’ that they have cast as presumptively righteous. And highlighting that urban minority populations are generally less enthusiastic about a movement whose mantra is “Black Lives Matter” would be embarrassing for obvious reasons.

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The white liberals and Leftists who claim to be so sensitively attuned to the feelings of minorities clearly spend very little time actually talking to working class non-white people — or at least those who happen to fall outside their activist cohort. If they did, they would be saddened to discover that, unlike them, working class non-whites frequently express “small-c” conservative cultural attitudes.

For instance, black Americans whom I’ve spoken to on the street across America in randomly-selected encounters were almost unanimous in their approval of the National Guard deployments to their neighborhood during the riots. If anything, their main criticism was that these deployments came too late to prevent the destruction.

This certainly makes the emotional meltdown of coddled 20 and 30-something journalists, who seriously claimed that they were “endangered” by a U.S. Senator’s NYT column advocating for a military presence to maintain order in cities, look especially disconnected and bizarre. So one could understand why the media would be reluctant to feature the “voices” of minorities who take an alternate view.

There’s also the barely-hidden fear that properly depicting the after-effects of these riots would somehow “help Trump” during an election year. Even if it could be established as true that reporting on a historically significant event would “help” the incumbent president, refraining from such reportage on that ground would obviously be wildly improper from a journalistic perspective.

But even from a raw political standpoint, it’s almost certainly not even true. Trump’s inability to convert this post-riot political environment into some kind of electoral advantage is an irony unto itself, given the theme of his inaugural address — which ominously (but not entirely unjustifiably) invoked the specter of “American carnage”. For all the non-stop hysteria painting Trump as some kind of maniacal fascist, it truly is a lousy fascist who fails to leverage widespread social unrest and instability to consolidate power.

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Needless to say, Trump is also currently presiding over a disastrous federal pandemic response, and rapidly shedding support among elderly voters. So if one insists on behaving purely as a partisan actor — which many contemporary journalists certainly are — any fatuous “would it help Trump?” calculation ought to be irrelevant.

Trump or no Trump, the lack of adequate coverage is the true affront. It should be more widely known that large swathes of a major American metropolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, still lies in rubble over a month after the riots. And the main perpetrators of this destruction — namely those who committed the most incendiary arson attacks — were, by many accounts relayed to me directly, white Left-wing activists. Refusing to seek out and accurately present this information reflects the mainstream media’s propensity to operate under predetermined, politicised assumptions that are antithetical to any rightly-understood conception of journalism.

Travelling around Minneapolis, one frequently sees the anarchist “A” symbol scrawled on charred and/or boarded-up buildings, as well as catchphrases like “Viva La Revolucion” — expressions typical of Left-wing activists. Indeed, it’s abundantly clear that there was a strong ideological component to these riots, one that’s also been under-emphasised by the media, again likely because of the belief that it could in some vague sense “help Trump.” I spoke to numerous residents who are convinced that white out-of-towners were the ones who instigated the most severe chaos, after which locals latched on opportunistically. Marianne Robinson, a black woman who has resided in Chicago’s South Side for decades, asked me if I was familiar with “antifa” and blamed them for the riots.

Flora Westbrooks of Minneapolis, whose hair salon was burned down, was likewise convinced that the perpetrators could not have possibly been familiar with the neighbourhood given her longstanding community ties there. The theory might be a tad over-simplistic, but it does seem at least partially accurate. A (white) rioter I interviewed, who was present when the Third Police Precinct building in Minneapolis burned, remarked to me that he found himself in jail alongside people who came from as far as Missouri, Florida, Colorado, California and other distant states. He said they ventured to Minnesota out of a mixture of thrill-seeking and inchoate political grievance.

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A police officer on foot patrol in Chicago’s heavily-black West Side remarked to me how perplexed she was by the lack of coverage of the damage in these neighbourhoods. Indeed, a simple drive around such parts of Chicago reveals a stunning number of boarded-up establishments, many of which appear like they will never return. The officer mused that she enjoyed the social-work aspects of the job — I watched her greeting various street-dwellers by name — and so, far from seeing the “Defund the Police” slogan and other expressions of animosity as an existential threat to the Chicago Police Department, regarded it as so detached from her everyday experience that she wasn’t even bothered. Over the course of my ten days in Minneapolis, I didn’t see a single officer on foot patrol, which is highly unusual for a major American city.

In Chicago, at the peak of the riots during the last weekend in May, there were a record-breaking 18 homicides in a single 24-hour period — the most since such data started being collected in 1961. I mention this not to make a knee-jerk “what about black-on-black crime” point, but simply to ask in general terms: why wasn’t this historic occurrence featured more prominently in the coverage of these protests?

Something extreme just happened in America. I could give dozens of additional examples of reportorial tidbits which don’t align with the prevailing media narrative that has flourished in the wake of this “movement”. And if you hadn’t seen it directly, would you ever know?