Day: January 30, 2026

Tens of millions of Americans have now seen video of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. The activities organized in response have not been initiated by outside agitators or left-wing zealots, but, rather, by everyday Americans protesting the tactics of federal agents in that city.

These community members are communicating over encrypted messaging apps such as Signal and using their cellphones to record Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers. Some have been using apps such as ICEBlock to help monitor ICE activities. They are using 3D printers to mass-produce whistles for community members to blow to alert each other when federal agents are in the area.

While the technology in some of these instances is new, this pattern – grassroots activists using the latest technology literally at their fingertips – is older than the republic itself. As a legal scholar who has studied American social movements and their relationship to technology, I see that what regular Americans in Minneapolis are doing is part of a very American tradition: building on trusted interpersonal relationships by harnessing the most recent technology to supercharge their organizing.

From Colonial era to the Civil Rights Movement

As the first stirrings of the American revolutionary spirit emerged in the 1770s, leaders formed the committees of correspondence to coordinate among the Colonies and in 1774 formed the Continental Congress. They harnessed the power of the printing press to promote tracts such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. One of the first acts of the new Congress was to create what it called the Constitutional Post, a mail system from the Maine territories to Georgia that enabled the colonists to communicate safely, out of reach of loyalist postmasters.

And the date Americans will be celebrating in 2026 as the 250th anniversary of the United States, July 4, commemorates when the drafters of the Declaration of Independence sent the final document to John Dunlap, rebel printer. In other words, what we celebrate as the birth of our nation is when the founders pressed “send.”

In the 1830s, as the battle over slavery in the new nation began to emerge, a new type of printing press, one powered by steam, helped supercharge the abolitionist movement. It could print antislavery broadsides much more rapidly and cheaply than manual presses.

The introduction of the telegraph in 1848 helped launch the women’s rights movement, spreading word of its convention in Seneca Falls, New York, while similar meetings had not quite caught the public’s imagination.

Fast-forward over 100 years in U.S. history to the Civil Rights Movement. Leaders of that movement embraced and harnessed the power of a new technology – television – and worked to create opportunities for broadcast media to beam images of authorities attacking young people in Birmingham, Alabama, and marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, Alabama, into living rooms across the United States. The images galvanized support for legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Social movements today

Today, new technologies and capabilities such as the smartphone and social media are making it easier for activists – and even those who have never seen themselves as activists – to get involved and help their neighbors. But it’s important not to mistake the method of communication for a movement. Indeed, without people behind the smartphones or as members of a group chat, there is no movement.

And what is happening in Minneapolis and in places across the country is still people organizing. Mutual aid networks are sprouting up nearly everywhere that immigration enforcement agents are amassed to carry out the Trump administration’s deportation policies, helped but not supplanted by technology. These technologies are important tools to support and catalyze the on-the-ground work.

It’s also important for advocates and would-be advocates to know the limits of such technologies and the risks that they can pose. These tools can sap a movement of energy, such as when someone posts a meme or “likes” a message on a social media platform and thinks they have done their part to support a grassroots effort.

There are also risks with any of these digital technologies, something the founders realized when they created their independent postal system. That is, use of these tools can also facilitate surveillance, expose networks to disruption and make people vulnerable to doxing or worse: charges that they are aiding and abetting criminal behavior.

Technology and trust

Most importantly, while technological tools might facilitate communication, they are no substitute for trust, the type of trust that can be forged only in face-to-face encounters. And that’s another thing that activists across American history have known since before the nation’s founding.

Until the late 1960s, groups participating in the work of democracy have often formed themselves into what political scientist Theda Skocpol calls “translocal networks”: collectives organized into local chapters connected to state, regional and even national networks.

It was in those local chapters where Americans practiced what French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville described in his visit to the United States in the 1830s as uniquely American: the “infinite art” of association and organizing. Americans used this practice to solve all manner of local problems. The local manifestations of those groups would often then engage in larger campaigns, whether to promote women’s rights in the 19th century or civil rights in the 20th.

Today’s technologies are reigniting the kind of grassroots activism that is deeply rooted in trust and solidarity, one block, one text message, one video at a time. It is also a profoundly American method of protest, infused with and catalyzed – but not replaced – by the technology such movements embrace.

Ray Brescia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Minneapolis residents say they feel besieged under what some are calling a fascist occupation. Thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been swarming a city whose vast majority in 2024 did not vote for Donald Trump – or for a paramilitary roundup of its diverse population.

Tragically, two residents have been killed by federal agents. Consequently, social media is aflame with comparisons of Trump’s immigration enforcers to Hitler’s Gestapo.

While comparisons to Hitler’s fascist regime are becoming common, I’d argue that it may be even more fitting to compare the present moment to a less-remembered but longer-lasting fascist regime: that of Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain from 1936 until his death in 1975.

In 2016, critics warned that Trump’s campaign rhetoric was grounded in textbook fascism, exhibiting signs such as racism, sexism and misogyny, nationalism, propaganda and more. In return, critics were met with intense backlash, accused of being hysterical or overly dramatic.

Now, even normally sober voices are sounding the alarm that America may be falling to fascist rule.

As a scholar of Spanish culture, I, too, see troubling parallels between Franco’s Spain and Trump’s America.

Putting them side by side, I believe, provides insightful tools that are needed to understand the magnitude of what’s at risk today.

Franco’s rise and reign

The Falange party started off as a a small extremist party on the margins of Spanish society, a society deeply troubled with political and economic instability. The party primarily preached a radical nationalism, a highly exclusive way to be and act Spanish. Traditional gender roles, monolingualism and Catholicism rallied people by offering absolutist comfort during uncertain times. Quickly, the Falange grew in power and prevalence until, ultimately, it moved mainstream.

By 1936, the party had garnered enough support from the Catholic Church, the military, and wealthy landowners and businessmen that a sizable amount of the population accepted Gen. Francisco Franco’s coup d’etat: a military crusade of sorts that sought to stop the perceived anarchy of liberals living in godless cities. His slogan, “¡Una, Grande, Libre!,” or “one, great, free,” mobilized people who shared the Falange’s anxieties.

Like the Falange, MAGA, the wing of the U.S. Republican Party named after Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again,” repeatedly vilifies the left, who mostly live in cities, as godless anarchists who live like vermin.

Once in power, the Francoist regime commissioned a secret police force, the Political-Social Brigade – known as the BPS – to “clean up house.” The BPS was charged with suppressing or killing any political, social, cultural or linguistic dissidents.

Weakening resistance

Franco not only weaponized the military but also proverbially enlisted the Catholic Church. He colluded with the clergy to convince parishioners, especially women, of their divine duty to multiply, instill nationalist Catholic values in their children, and thus reproduce ideological replicas of both the state and the church. From the pulpit, homemakers were extolled as “ángeles del hogar” and “heroínas de la patria,” or “angels of the home” and “heroines of the homeland.”

Together, Franco and the church constructed consent for social restrictions, including outlawing or criminalizing abortion, contraception, divorce, work by women and other women’s rights, along with even tolerating uxoricide, or the killing of wives, for their perceived sexual transgressions.

Some scholars contend that the repealing of women’s reproductive rights is the first step away from a fully democratic society. For this reason and more, many are concerned about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The #tradwife social media trend involves far-right platforms echoing Francoist-style ideologies of submission, restriction, dependence and white male dominance. One of TikTok’s most popular tradwife influencers, for instance, posted that “there is no higher calling than being a wife and a mother for a woman.” She also questioned young women attending college and rebuked, on air, wives who deny their husbands sexual intimacy.

Weakening the economy

Economically, Franco implemented autarkic policies, a system of limited trade designed to isolate Spain and protect it from anti-Spanish influences. He utilized high tariffs, strict quotas, border controls and currency manipulation, effectively impoverishing the nation and vastly enriching himself and his cronies.

These policies flew under the motto “¡Arriba España!,” or “Up Spain.” They nearly immediately triggered more than a decade of suffering known as the “hunger years.” An estimated 200,000 Spaniards died from famine and disease.

Under the slogan “America First” – Trump’s mutable but aggressive tariff regime – the $1 billion or more in personal wealth he’s accumulated while in office, along with his repeated attempts to cut nutrition benefits in blue states and his administration’s anti-vaccine policies may appear to be disconnected. But together, they galvanize an autarkic strategy that threatens to debilitate the country’s health.

Weakening the mind

Franco’s dictatorship systematically purged, exiled and repressed the country’s intellectual class. Many were forced to emigrate. Those who stayed in the country, such as the artist Joan Miró, were forced to bury their messages deeply within symbols and metaphor to evade censorship.

Currently in the U.S., banned books, banned words and phrases, and the slashing of academic and research funding across disciplines are causing the U.S. to experience “brain drain,” an exodus of members of the nation’s highly educated and skilled classes.

Furthermore, Franco conjoined the church, the state and education into one. I am tracking analogous moves in the U.S. The conservative group Turning Point USA has an educational division whose goal is to ‘reclaim” K-12 curriculum with white Christian nationalism.

Ongoing legislation that mandates public classrooms to display the Ten Commandments similarly violates religious freedom guarantees ratified in the constitution.

Drawing comparisons

Trump has frequently expressed admiration for contemporary dictators and last week stated that “sometimes you need a dictator.”

It is true that his tactics do not perfectly mirror Francoism or any other past fascist regime. But the work of civil rights scholar Michelle Alexander reminds us that systems of control do not disappear. They morph, evolve and adapt to sneak into modern contexts in less detectable ways. I see fascism like this.

Consider some of the recent activities in Minneapolis, and ask how they would be described if they were taking place in any other country.

Unidentified masked individuals in unmarked cars are forcibly entering homes without judicial warrants. These agents are killing, shooting and roughing up people, sometimes while handcuffed. They are tear-gassing peaceful protesters, assaulting and killing legal observers, and throwing flash grenades at bystanders. They are disappearing people of color, including four Native Americans and a toddler as young as 2, shipping them off to detention centers where allegations of abuse, neglect, sexual assault and even homicide are now frequent.

Government officials have spun deceptive narratives, or worse, lied about the administration’s actions.

In the wake of the public and political backlash following the killing of Alex Pretti, Trump signaled he would reduce immigration enforcement operations] in Minneapolis, only to turn around and have Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorize the use of an old military base near St. Paul, suggesting potential escalation, not de-escalation. Saying one thing while doing the opposite is a classic fascist trick warned about in history and literature alike.

The world has seen these tactics before. History shows the precedent and then supplies the bad ending. Comparing past Francoism to present Trumpism connects the past to the present and warns us about what could come.

Rachelle Wilson Tollemar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation