Commentary: The heroes of the resistance are stepping up

“I’m a veteran and you don’t give a f— about me! … You don’t get to take away our rights. You don’t get to do this to us!” These were the words of disabled veteran Jay Carey before sheriffs hauled him out of a Republican town hall in Asheville, North Carolina.

At a town hall in Kootenai County, Idaho, Teresa Borrenpohl spoke up as three men in black, who refused to identify themselves, violently dragged her out. Others, including Sheriff Robert Norris, looked on.

Scenes like this began to unfold at such an alarming rate that Republican Party leaders sent word to members to stop having face-to-face meetings with constituents.

In my hometown of Huntington Beach, former NFL punter Chris Kluwe was forced out for a nonviolent protest against the all-MAGA city council, a group obsessed with politicizing our libraries. He said: “MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is.” He was later fired from his role as the freshman football coach at a local high school.

A close friend who grew up reading a lot of literature about the Holocaust mused on this moment, wondering where the heroes were. As a kid, she would marvel at the heroes of the resistance and imagined she, too, would have stood up in the face of evil, regardless of the cost. “Didn’t other people read those books and say to themselves, ‘I’d go down fighting if I had to’?”

Day after day, these heroes are emerging across the nation as the Trump administration plays a losing game of whack-a-mole trying to silence the growing chorus of critics. Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten, along with six fellow prosecutors, resigned last month after brazen pressure from the Trump Justice Department to dismiss the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. His resignation stated: “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

People are resisting, refusing to roll over, unlike the spaghetti-spined cowards and fools who help silence dissent and empower a man who likens himself to a king and quotes Napoleon. Every day Americans are standing up to Bone Spurs Bonaparte in his attempted conquest of our basic rights, his designs to destroy our schools and obliterate our healthcare, our retirement security, the press, the judiciary, all the while further enriching himself and his billionaire cronies.

Compare these heroes to the feckless majority of Democrats, seen in all their glory at Trump’s joint address to Congress. When 77-year-old Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, stood and shook his cane and voiced his opposition to the lies from the lectern, uniformed officers pushed him out of the chamber. Fellow Democrats sat primly on their hands. Their polite opposition to tyranny was symbolized only by the tiny paddles they occasionally waved, like bidders at a Sotheby’s auction.

Closer to home, Gov. Gavin Newsom is busy on his new podcast flirting with the far-right likes of Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk, while doing an about-face to betray trans athletes. A line from the movie “The Contender” applies to this capitulating coward: “Principles only mean something when you stick by them when it’s inconvenient.”

The daily deluge of fresh outrages is a deliberate tactic to make us feel disempowered, disengaged and disconnected, but our need to resist has never been more critical. The richest man in the world says the Social Security checks that keep seniors alive are a “Ponzi scheme,” and the program is headed for the chopping block.

Billionaires pad their retirements while disappearing ours. They find a way to educate their kids while dismantling public education, a means to stay healthy while destroying public health, sources of clean water and clean air and safe cars and planes as they gut regulations and protections for the rest of us. We are the ones who must stand up for ourselves.

In response to the groundswell of protest targeting Tesla, the White House morphed into a Tesla showroom with Trump as the brand ambassador. The company’s stock has plummeted, a clear indicator that the protests are working.

If protests had no effect, the Trump administration wouldn’t have dragged the pro-Palestinian student activist and legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil away from his home. This administration is bent on making an example of him, the obvious goal to silence dissent. But we don’t have to accept becoming one of those knock-on-the-door-in-the-middle-of-the-night countries, where individuals deemed enemies of the state fall off balconies and die in mysterious plane crashes.

This is America. You should be able to call a Nazi salute a Nazi salute, and a genocide a genocide.

The Trump administration set out to scare us into submission; the effect has been to rally us into resistance.

Sarah Inama, hero sixth-grade teacher in Idaho, has refused to take down her classroom banner that says “Everyone is welcome here,” though her job is on the line. A Chicago elementary school shielded students from agents who showed up to the building. In Haddon Township, New Jersey, neighbors stood up for the beloved longtime owners of the neighborhood kebab shop, Celal and Emine Emanet, swept up in an immigration raid.

What a contrast from cowardly politicians like Chuck Schumer, invertebrate law firms like Paul Weiss and craven wealthy universities like Columbia. Often, the ones who have the least are the ones who summon the courage to do the most.

At a Boston show, the lead singer of the Dropkick Murphys, Ken Casey, lambasted Nazis and the MAGA movement. He later said in an interview: “This is a class war, not a political war. We are being tricked to fight amongst each other so that the ultra-wealthy can milk us of everything we have.”

The band prepared us for this moment with their 2011 song “Take ’Em Down”:

When the boss comes callin’ will you stand and fight?

When the boss comes callin’ we must unite

When the boss comes callin’ we can’t let them win

Let them know

We gotta take the bastards down

Let them know

We gotta smash ’em to the ground

Let them know

We gotta take the bastards down.

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Dipti S. Barot is a primary care doctor and educator in the San Francisco Bay Area.@diptisbarot.bsky.social