Breaking ICE: Sonali Kolhatkar Explains Why Only the People Can Save the American Republic

“It’s a dying gasp of white supremacy — and I say dying with a caveat, because that part depends on us.” — Sonali Kolhatkar

 

Yesterday, Wendy Lesser suggested that Americans can learn much from the anti-fascist history of Berlin in the 1930s. Today, Rising Up With Sonali host Sonali Kolhatkar is even more explicit. Yes, she argues in her new book, Breaking ICE, the 2020s are eerily similar to the 1930s, especially in what she calls “state terror” and “MAGA fascism.”

 

In 2023, Sonali Kolhatkar came on this show to talk about Rising Up, a book about the power of narrative. Three years later, her new book describes what she sees as the dying gasp of white supremacy. But to fully die, she argues, the community needs to rise up. So, like the perennial fascist threat, the ability to tell stories is a perpetual feature of politics. Thus Breaking ICE, Kolhatkar’s story of stories about community defense against MAGA fascism.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Narrative Is Everything. The crackdown, Kolhatkar argues, was built on stories: immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” — Hitlerian language, used repeatedly — recast a population of workers and families as criminals, justifying the funding, the raids, and the denial of due process. The counternarrative is her book’s project: the activists who retold the story of ICE agents as Gestapo-like masked thugs, and did it so successfully that public opinion has swung back. Trump, she argues, overplayed his hand — every day brings another story of a Trump voter whose spouse is deported at a routine check-in, protesting “this is not what we voted for.” The sequel to Rising Up thus practices what that book preached: narrative as the primary weapon of politics — a weapon, she notes via Springsteen and the protest singers, that artists have always wielded and the right has lately understood better than the left.

•       A Dying Gasp — With a Caveat. Asked flatly whether this is a repeat of the 1930s, Kolhatkar answers yes — and adds that the echo is deliberate, down to “homeland,” a favorite term of the Nazis that George W. Bush domesticated. But the deeper lineage is homegrown: her interviewees Ibram X. Kendi and Robin D. G. Kelley trace American fascism through Native dispossession and mass enslavement — authoritarian, anti-democratic, racist. ICE, on this reading, is simply race-based policing restored. Hence her verdict: “a dying gasp of white supremacy,” with the caveat that the dying depends on us. No magic bullets, no finish line: “democracy is an ongoing exercise. There is no resting when it comes to freedom.” Fittingly, the episode lands the day after Wendy Lesser’s Berlin hour — Kolhatkar making explicit what the cautionary mirror implied.

•       The Mamdani Lesson. The hour’s sharpest political analysis: flip the script on electoral politics. Politicians want elections as popularity contests — “this is who I am, who’s behind me?” — when voters should be saying “this is what we want, who will back our demands?” The not-Trump ad is the losing move: it was Hillary Clinton’s approach, Kamala Harris’s approach, and now Xavier Becerra’s in California. The winning move is Zohran Mamdani’s: voters could instantly name what he was for — free buses, city-run grocery stores, rent control, universal childcare, fixed potholes. Her model is the civil rights movement, which didn’t wait for a savior politician but marched and forced hands. And her defense against the radicalism charge: what the American left demands — healthcare for all — is centrist in Europe. If public schools are educ