On Saturday, ICE officers in Chicago shot a motorist who is a US citizen. After her release from the hospital, they arrested her. I'd say, “That's just what those people do,” but they haven't done that much shooting of the public so far. However, I think they’re getting to that part right now. In this case, they claimed to be endangered, even as they brought armored vehicles, body armor, automatic weapons, and masks to an American city for “law enforcement.” Meanwhile, Trump has authorized a deployment of the National Guard to Chicago over the objections of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
The recent moves amount to a national declaration of martial law, insofar as the administration is sending troops here and there, and every American city is under direct threat of invasion by the US military. And it's not just me saying “martial law.” US District Court judge Karin Immergut, enjoining the administration from sending troops to Portland, said: “This country has a long-standing and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs. This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law.”
The de facto suspension of the Constitution and the imposition of martial law fundamentally changes every American's relations to both the military and to law enforcement. It ought to change the way Americans view their government, for it renders the government of the United States entirely illegitimate. It can’t be wrong to disobey that government now. The moral obligation to obey was suspended along with the Constitution.
No one is under a moral obligation to obey people in masks and body armor waving weapons around. They’ve very likely to obey, for prudential reasons. They don't want to be beaten, gassed, or shot, interned or deported. For this reason and for this reason alone, I’d do what these fuckheads tell you to do. But if you have a reasonable chance of getting away with disobedience, resistance, doxxing, etc., you have no obligation not to do it. This is no longer about a social contract of democratically-instituted laws. Now it’s a matter of sheer force against sheer force.
In the contest of sheer force between people and a government represented by military units, ICE and the National Guard have the advantage in firepower and in psychopathy. But the protesters have the advantage of being in a defensible moral position. They have the advantage of numbers. They have the advantage of having American as opposed to fascist values. And the fact that they’re attacked in an entirely illegitimate way releases them from any duty to obey. What they have a duty to do in this situation, in which Homeland Security is likely to gather a shitload of information on you quick and deploy it to repress you, is to be as uncooperative as possible while not getting shot.
To ICE agents and National Guardsman: you’ve been recruited into a movement to vitiate the Constitution in every respect for the sake of racial profiling. People have a duty to resist you and are well within their rights to snicker in your masked face and ignore the crap you're ordering them to do. My advice to you is to refuse to serve. I know that self-delusion and political demagoguery are powerful. But you’re being used in a project of ragingly unconstitutional and un-American repression. You've been turned by Kristi Noem into stormtroopers deployed against your own people. You know in your hearts that you’re oppressors who ought to be resisted.
Disobey the orders, which are obviously unlawful. You’re obliged by your own oath to disobey unlawful orders. You’re being deployed against your fellow Americans. What you’re doing is racist and incompatible with any version of democracy. An effective autocracy is trying to force you to do evil. I realize that a single conscientious objector will simply be dropped and replaced or even imprisoned, so I think whole units should start going AWOL. I think they should join the protesters.
The situation that Trump claims has led him to declare de facto martial law is just status quo America. Street crime is going up and down like it's been doing for all these decades. There are gangs here and there, but not like there were in the 1980s. There are drug problems, as per usual. There are immigrant communities, for the most part industrious and law-abiding, whether legal or not.
Nothing has happened to justify an imposition of martial law except that personalities like Noem, Trump, and Hegseth have ascended to power. They’d be doing this no matter what the situation. They just want arbitrary power over their own people, won by violence and intimidation.
I won’t tell any particular person what to do in resistance. I'm just going to remark that any form of resistance is justified by this sort of violence and repression. And that law enforcement agents and soldiers who are called upon to oppress their fellows, to silence and gas and shoot them in violation both of the US Constitution and any plausible moral or spiritual orientation, are morally obliged not to do so.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
