A New "Us vs. Them": We, the People Oppose the Plunderers; Video with Resistance Expert Hardy Merriman
And a new essay on resistance coming this week
So many of you have written to me about the great conversation we had last Friday with Hardy Merriman, who is one of the foremost experts in the world on civil resistance and movement building to contest autocracies. In the interest of civic education, I am making the video available to everyone (it is at the bottom of the post).
During the second half, which was not recorded, Hardy spoke about the need for the Democratic party to rise to the level of the emergency we are living through. We also talked about how to effectively message the Trump administration’s creation of more wealth for the billionaire class while the population faces conditions of hardship.
The administration is escalating its domestic “forever war,” with the Twin Cities being a test case for a flood-the-zone occupation, just as Los Angeles was a test for state security forces coordination last June. “The ICE surge is turning vibrant shopping areas into ghost towns,” reports the local Fox News station in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Children are learning remotely, creating crises for working parents and suffering for local economies.
But no matter, Leader’s wealth is increasing, and he represents all of us!
State repression and kleptocracy go together.
This is the “us vs. them” we need to talk about.
Authoritarianism can’t be defined only in political or legalistic terms, as the expansion of executive power over the legislature and the judiciary. Authoritarianism is also a process of depriving the many of rights and well-being and giving the very few freedom to plunder the workforce, the earth, and treat human beings as assets to exploit. The “all for me, nothing for you” operations of regime cronies have an economic corollary.
The Trump administration and its technofascist partners such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (Vice President J.D. Vance is in office as their proxy) are treating the United States as a laboratory of a new phase of this old authoritarian goal. This is why I have focused so much on Musk. My December 2024 essay described him as a “new and sinister force in government,” and in February 2025 I described his DOGE operation as “a new kind of coup”: a parallel civic service, loyal to a private citizen, gaining access to the data and financial nerve centers of a superpower and locking out government employees.
Over the last year the playbook of traditional autocratic capture has been updated by billionaires having unprecedented influence over American domestic and foreign policy. Seizing Greenland, “one way or another,” is part of the project. So is plundering as many natural resources from foreign countries as possible.
That chainsaw Musk wielded at CPAC in February 2025 was not a symbol of making government more “efficient” for public benefit, but his glee at having been given the power to lay waste to our democracy. Today’s technofascists believe they deserve to dominate us, steal our data, impoverish us, and accelerate America’s transformation into a white Christian male supremacist utopia.
As we resist in the streets against ICE brutality and the attempts to shred our basic rights and deny our humanity, we must also proclaim that we, the people, will not be silent as Trump and the GOP collude with billionaires to re-engineer the government of the United States as their personal enrichment and power consolidation tools.
Those who live with the societal ravages brought by kleptocracy know the outcomes of such trajectories. That is why, as he sat in the Siberian gulag where Vladimir Putin had placed him to end his anti-corruption activities, Alexei Navalny wrote in his diary that “we must do what they fear – tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.”
Is there a way governors can use their national guards as oversight on ice? Shadow them and enforce the citizens civil rights that are being smashed?
Thank you, Dr. Ben-Ghiat, for sharing your wisdom and insights with us. We need you.