"As Americans realize how much harm is being done, we get angrier, maybe even angry enough to get up off the couch and do something."
Jane Collins
Democrats had been oddly quiet in the aftermath of the 2024 election. After the 2016 election, Democrats were angry that victory seemed to have been snatched from their hands. But after this election, Democrats were dealing with a discouraging realization, that a plurality of our fellow citizens preferred Trump to the Democratic nominee. There was more sadness and contemplation, less outrage.That has changed. Now, six weeks into Trump's second term, dismay has turned into anger. Democrats are seeing that Trump wasn't bluffing about seeking "retribution." He had an enemies list and he is expanding the power of the presidency to squash opposition and make an example of opponents. It sends a chilling message. If you said or did something Trump didn't like, he will blackball you or your employer, call for your impeachment, "primary" you if you are a squishy Republican, sue you for defamation, threaten you with tariffs, take away your federal funding, fire you, or round you up and deport you. Trump's action is sudden. Decisive. It comes directly from an executive order, not through legislation. It is a performance to elicit shock and awe. "My God! Look what Trump just did!"
Shock and awe aroused opposition. U.S. Senate Minority Leader and college classmate Chuck Schumer's response struck many Democrats as weak and accommodative, not smart and strategic. Schumer's strategy divides his party because it misses the mood of a great many Democrats. It isn't enough. It isn't angry and indignant and resolute. Many Democrats want to do something, something visible and in the streets. Show the world that we are in opposition.
Another college classmate, Jane Collins, is part of that group wanting more. She has a long history of political protest. She lives in the area of one of Trump's shock-and-awe operations, the arrest of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk. Collins joined a demonstration condemning that action. She wrote about it on own personal website, https://aliceT4.com.
Her guest post is a shortened version of her full post: https://alicet4.com/2025/03/28/the-people-speak/
Guest Post by Jane Collins
The People Speak
Ever since Trump and Musk began to take a chainsaw to the work of generations, I’ve been hearing, “Where is the outrage?” Go to a protest near you; you will find that outrage.
On Thursday, March 26, I went to Tufts for a rally against the abduction the day before of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at the school. She was snatched by masked federal agents as she walked toward a friend’s house, handcuffed, and driven away in an unmarked car. Before a judge could order that the government not take her out of Massachusetts, she had already been spirited away to an ICE detention center in Louisiana.
Ozturk was grabbed without any form of due process. She was in the United States legally on a student visa. She had done nothing wrong. About a year ago, she objected to Tufts’s refusal to divest from Israel in an opinion piece in the student paper. Trump & company have decided that anyone who uses their freedom of speech in a way they don’t like is a threat to national security, maybe even a terrorist.
Outspoken international students are low-hanging fruit. Trump means to pick them and throw them somewhere to rot. He doesn’t have to abduct all of them, just enough to shut the rest of them up.
But students are not shutting up. Ozturk’s abduction, added to the equally outrageous detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student, three weeks ago, and the rendition of more than 250 Venezuelans to the worst prison in El Salvador with no proof that any of them were criminals or gang members, has pushed many into activism.
The Tufts rally comprised about 2000 people, most with handmade signs. Never mind the speakers, whom I couldn’t hear anyway. This is what their signs said:
An injury to one is an injury to all.
Free Rumeysa!
Democracy -- NOT deportation -- protects Jewish students
We will not be silenced!
Silencing dissent is the REAL cancel culture
If not fascism, then why fascism-shaped?
Democracy > Deportation
Release all prisoners of the secret police
Democracy is under attack!
Speak out against injustice or you’re gonna be silenced next
I love inclusion, equality, diversity
Stop doing evil shit
Abolish ICE
ICE out of our communities! Free Palestine!
Jews Against Deportation
This Tufts alum affirms the equal dignity and humanity of all people
Nice Jewish Students for Democracy
Project 2025 indicates that it won’t be long before Trump uses the military against peaceful demonstrators. There will be tear gas, pepper spray, and water hoses, mass arrests, and eventually, rubber bullets or worse.
Meanwhile, Trump is damaging everything we love: our communities, education, alliances with other democracies, the environment, and most of all our rights. Democracy is clearly under attack. As Americans realize how much harm is being done, we get angrier, maybe even angry enough to get up off the couch and do something.
The protests are becoming more frequent, and the crowds keep getting bigger. If you’re not on the streets already, I hope you will join us soon. The homemade, passionate, outraged signs at every rally help me to believe that maybe we can save democracy. Not leaders or heroes, or the corporate-owned Democrats. We, the people.
11 comments:
The merits of the U.S. immigration actions against foreign-born Hamas sympathizers Ozturk and Khalil aside, does not "Abolish ICE" remind one of "Defund the Police"? The wider implications are parallel. Well-intended progressives like Ms. Collins are far from idiots, but they certainly are useful. Whether that includes to the Democratic Party remains to be seen.
Do guest foreign students have the same rights to influence the policies of the United States as citizens of the United States do? As far as I know, the answer is that they do not. Foreigners do not have an absolute right to be here, and the amount of due process they are entitled to is open to question.
Europe imported a significant amount of Islamic radicalism via the flood of refugees from the Middle East. The United States is under no obligation to make that same mistake.
Context is important. Bumper stickers and slogans are not the best vehicles to communicate a nuanced political thought. In the case of Palestinian rights in the US, slogans enflame and are easy to dismiss as supporters of antisemitism.
To paraphrase Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Muslims, and I did not speak out because I was not a Muslim. Then they came for the liberals, but I did not speak out because I was not a liberal. Then they came for the protesters, but I did not speak out because I was not a protester. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
A significant amount of the antisemitism in those protests is actual antisemitism and/or explicit support of terrorism. What else would you call tearing down and defacing posters of Jewish hostages?
To say nothing of doing it with their heads wrapped up in keffiyahs to conceal their identities and cosplay jihadist terrorists.
“Free Palestine”, where Hamas and its apologists are concerned, does not mean a two-state solution (which Israel has offered in various forms over decades now). It signifies, along with “From the river to the sea”, no more or less than the extirpation of Jewish Israel. The Columbia University protesters specifically called for another “flood”, which was the descriptive moniker Hamas itself gave to its revolting, sneak truce-breaking October 7 rape, kidnap, torture and mass-murder spree.
The Tufts student detained by ICE called up front for an end to what she—and Ms. Collins’ colleagues—term “Palestinian genocide”, a laughable description in view of the targeted Israeli response to the (unmentioned by Ozturk) October 7 atrocity, which was, incidentally, approved by the vast majority of Palestinians. It’s laughable even if we credit the casualty numbers claimed by the Hamas-controlled serial liars comprising those legacy media darlings, the “Gaza health authorities”.
It may be relevant: I know from earlier posts that Jane is Jewish, celebrates Jewish holidays, and took a year off during college to work on a kibbutz in Israel. She is not antisemitic. She does think Israel is oppressing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Opposition to Netanyahu’s atrocity of a war is no more antisemitic than opposition to Hamas is anti-Muslim. Nothing about this endless catastrophe has anything to do with religion, but everything to do with man’s inhumanity to man.
Obviously Ms. Collins is no anti-Semite. Ozturk and Khalil, the celebrants, on the other hand?
You cannot fight an enemy who hides behind human shields without harming those shields. Given the vicious depraved terrorist atrocity Hamas perpetrated on 10/7, there was no way Israel was going to let the human shield strategy succeed.
Yes, the terrorist atrocity Hamas perpetrated on 10/7 was vicious and depraved. So is the ongoing slaughter, displacement and starvation of Palestinians perpetrated by Israel.
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