Democrats Should Go To Jail
the ICE-Bucket Challenge
During the 2024 campaign, Democrats promised me that if Trump won, he would rule as a dictator and begin jailing his political opponents. He would unveil his fascist program, “Project 2025,” and destroy democracy as we know it.
Then Trump won, and the response from Democrats was basically,
When Trump lost in 2020, he got his supporters to hold the largest right-wing rally in American history. It was so big that it doesn’t even fit on the Wikipedia page for “List of protests and demonstrations in the United States by size.” If you try to edit the page to include the largest right-wing demonstration in history, your edit will be deleted, with Wikipedia editors claiming,
Dawg, it’s too big to even fit. What are you trying to do? Our website isn’t large enough to contain such things. Do you want to crash our website?
Love him or hate him, when Trump claimed that the election was stolen, he backed up this statement with a real substantial demonstration of belief. If I believed that the election was stolen, I would also be scaling walls like Spiderman, zip-ties in my pocket, pulling a devious lick on the speaker’s podium, and live-streaming from Nancy Pelosi’s office. Anything less would demonstrate that I did not sincerely believe my own claims of election theft — it was all just hyperbolic rhetoric.
Because Trump convinced voters that he was genuine and not just full of hot air, he won. He now openly flirts with the idea of suspending habeas corpus,1 molests German immigrants, and claims that legal permanent residents have no rights. So, Democrats, when is enough enough?
I agree with Nicholas Decker that it would not be appropriate for random Democrats to commit random acts of violence. This would be ineffectual, and would grant sympathy to Trump. Instead, I think Democrats should go to jail.
I don’t want Democrats to go to jail because of Hillary’s emails, Benghazi, the lockdowns, vaccines, mass immigration, funding Ukraine, Epstein’s island, or aborting millions of babies. I don’t want them to go to jail because Hunter Biden smoked crack off a hooker’s ass2 while flying first class on a Burisma jet.
I want Democrats to go to jail because I think it would be a very good PR stunt.
As Trump has proven, Americans love mugshots. Democrats should strive to produce as many mugshots as possible. Not as a matter of justice, but as a matter of winning elections.
All Democratic mayors and governors should refuse to cooperate with Trump’s deportations of students and actively resist ICE. Spending time in jail will help Democratic PR, because nothing shows you have a spine like standing up for what you believe in.
Defeat “Woke” by Going to Jail
Wokism is the belief that you should dedicate all your time and effort to things which don’t win elections. Saving shrimp is woke. Providing sign-language interpretation for televised speeches in an age of closed-captioning is woke. Ensuring the rights of trans-women to abort babies and supporting trans-surgeries for undocumented minors is woke.
But opposing mass deportations, the abuse and mistreatment of legal residents, and the deportation of PhD students isn’t woke.
Democrats have a problem:
They have spent the last 10 years defending obscure, alienating positions with the moral fervor of a witch-burning Puritan
But when push comes to shove, they are spineless and refuse to vigorously oppose Trump, despite all their empty rhetoric about how he is Hitler
Going to jail solves both of these problems at once.
Wokism won’t be defeated if Democrats roll over, die, and surrender to Republicans. This is a gross misunderstanding of what wokism is. In fact, the more Democrats act like pussies, always conceding and making excuses for why Trump can’t be stopped, the more woke activists are likely to gain attention and traction.
Morality abhors a vacuum.
Wokism is, first and foremost, an emotional need proceeding from religious psychology. Pragmatic politics is about fulfilling that need in a way which aligns with popular sentiment, rather than continuously alienating the public.
At the deepest level of the brain stem, there is very little difference between a “woke” activist protesting in defense of Gaza, and a “based” activist protesting an abortion clinic. Both believe that they are standing up for those who cannot defend themselves. Even if you erased Christianity from the face of the Earth, the need to defend the underdog and protect the weak and the innocent would still persist in a secular form, because the underlying mythological mechanisms are baked into our culture far deeper than mere rituals and exoteric dogmas.
Star Wars, Harry Potter, Star Trek: what do they all have in common? They are all about strong people defending weak people from other strong people. This isn’t something invented by Christianity, but comes from the basic parental instinct, which is the momma bear defending her baby cubs from the wolf. When we project this parental instinct onto non-kin relations with the magic of Christianity, and then secularize this abstraction, we get liberalism.
The problem isn’t that Democrats want to defend weak and defenseless people from bullies. The problem is that Democrats have been going about this in a “woke” (irrelevant, obscure, alienating) way. The way to defeat woke isn’t by becoming Nietzscheans — the way we defeat woke is by redirecting liberalism from obscure and unpopular crusades toward mainstream and popular ones.
Usha Vance’s parents are Lakshmi and Radhakrishna Chilukuri. They are immigrants who became college professors in America. If you really think it is a good idea to deport immigrant students without due process, then you think that the Vice President should be an incel.
I nominate Gavin Newsom for the ICE Bucket Challenge
I want the mugshots of Democrats resisting Trump to be handsome, photogenic, and sexy. I want Gavin Newsom to stop creeping people out with his plastic, photoshopped, Mr. Perfect persona. What better way to solve both of these problems at the same time than by sending Gavin Newsom to jail? He will gain grit and street cred, and maybe grow a bit of stubble.
Gavin Newsom should declare, tomorrow, that he will no longer cooperate with ICE until the Trump administration returns all immigrants who have been illegally deported. He should then take all measures necessary to obstruct ICE detentions of students without due process
insert legal disclaimer about how advocating for Gavin Newsom to obstruct ICE is not illegal because reasons and Trump please don't arrest me I am just a substacker nooo I can't go to jail nooo stopwhich will result in him getting arrested by Trump.
When is the last time that a sitting governor was arrested by a president for something other than corruption?
Newsom could make history!
But doesn’t immigration lose elections?
The counter-argument to this scheme is that Americans really hate immigrants, and dying on the hill of protecting immigrants will not help Democrats win elections.
Thankfully, we have polling on this.
Americans are clear about two things:
They want the southern border to be militarized by scary guys with guns.
They do not want legal immigrants to be treated like illegal immigrants.
I think this actually provides a great opportunity for Democrats to shed the worst of “wokeness,” while standing up to Trump.
I’d draft the following speech for Newsom:
My fellow Americans, I come before you today in defense of rule of law, order, and the Constitution. Students, legal residents, and law abiding immigrants are, at this very moment, being unlawfully detained in foreign prisons, being deported for their thoughts and ideas, and being punished for following the legal process. Universities, college kids, and free speech itself are all under attack, with key developments in scientific research, including life-saving care, being defunded by this lawless administration.
This sets a dangerous precedent, which, if unchecked, threatens every American citizen, our tradition of due process, and the very foundations of basic law and order.
If you want to change the law, you need Congress. If you want to change the budget, you need Congress. No executive order can change that. The separation of powers, laid down by our Founding Fathers, is a sacred covenant which cannot be violated if our Republic is to survive.
California is a border state, and it is the obligation of the government to ensure that migration across the border is secure and orderly, which includes the deployment of border patrol along a border wall. Americans do not want chaos at the border. They want immigrants who follow a clearly defined process and clearly defined rules.
Trump’s illegal actions threaten all of that. Under Trump, there are no rules. There is no process. Anyone can be deported for no reason at all. Trump’s reign of chaos is destabilizing our country. His lawless disregard erodes the trust of our allies, our international students, and our citizens. The whole world is watching while Trump’s lackeys stand by and allow our country to slide further into a third-world dictatorship. No longer.
Today, I am declaring a complete suspension of cooperation with any ICE operations against international students that violate habeas corpus or due process. These unlawful and unconstitutional orders must be rescinded, reversed, and removed. The United States is a country of laws — and no one can change that, not even a felon like Donald Trump.
To this end, I will be deploying state police to ensure the safety of all international students studying in the state of California. I am also putting forth an emergency bill to protect any scientific research of potentially life-saving care from Trump’s disastrous defunding of education. I encourage all other governors to do the same.
California will ensure three things: firstly, that our border is secure. Secondly, that life-saving research is protected. Thirdly, that those who come here legally, following the legal process and the rules, are safe from harm. Any agent acting on behalf of Trump who violates these rights is not welcome in the state of California.
Let me make this perfectly clear: Donald Trump, if you want to arrest our students, our neighbors, our family members, you’ll have to arrest me first.
The exact mechanism of the obstruction is a bit tricky. How should Newsom deploy state police to oppose ICE presence on college campuses? Does he have this authority? Would they obey such an order when faced with ICE agents? Should Newsom show up in person to protest ICE raids?
I’m not an expert on how any of this would play out, but the goal here is to get Newsom arrested by Trump. Whatever accomplishes that is good.3
Of course, if Trump doesn’t arrest Newsom for defying ICE, that is also a victory, and will embolden Democrats to take their acts of resistance even further. Win-win. I call that a total 360 win.
Polling on the arrest of Judge Dugan is mixed. She is a woman, and there was some kind of allegation of a romantic relationship between herself and the immigrant she was helping to flee. I don’t think this rumor is true, but when dealing with performative PR stunts, we have to consider the way in which rumors and gossip function.
In the case of Judge Dugan, the obstruction of ICE seemed spontaneous, haphazard, and last-minute. It is plausible that she was giving some kind of special preferential treatment to that individual for some kind of personal reason. If Newsom declares a blanket protection for college students, any appearance of favoritism will be out of the picture. By making a statement as a matter of principle, in a premeditated fashion, Newsom can avoid the implication of impropriety.
Americans would respect Judge Dugan much more if she had publicly read a statement denouncing ICE ahead of time, and her intention to not cooperate, than trying to sneakily sneak some slippery immigrant out the back door. Americans do not like sneaky slippery moves — they like bold, premeditated, public defiance.
They also like defiant men more than defiant women. And if Judge Dugan was really hot, I think the polling would look a bit different. Don’t shoot the messenger — I don’t make the rules.
Which I think should be spelled habeus, but this isn’t an article about English spelling reform.
This is doubly worse because crack is supposed to be snorted off the ass, not smoked. Smoking crack off someone’s ass would either burn their skin (crack is very warm when smoking), or very dirty (the other kind of crack).
Someone get this essay to Newsom’s team and let them brainstorm the details.
For the win
Brilliant. This strategy makes too much sense, which sadly means it won’t happen.