“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 education for all, why not Medicare for All? And to Andrew’s pushback — doesn’t Abolish ICE alienate the persuadable middle? — her answer is the polling: majorities already oppose the raids, because Trump overreached.
• What State Terror Looks Like. The subtitle’s claim, cashed out: downtown Los Angeles under curfew, freeways shut, armed National Guardsmen at the federal buildings — and the refrain she heard nationwide: who will save us from these masked thugs? The realization that the police belong to the same structure taught the lesson in her credo: only the people can save the people. The terror is bureaucratic as much as theatrical — green-card applicants seized at airports en route to see friends, families ripped apart, and 20,000 immigrant children stripped of legal representation in defiance of a law George W. Bush signed (“who we thought at the time was the fascist authoritarian and is now, you know, like a Democrat”). Against it, the book’s nineteen voices — from Maine to Georgia to LA — deploy whistles, bullhorns, patrols, documentation, and, in a civil-rights echo, holding hands and singing to bring the temperature down. With Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kendi, Kelley, and a foreword by Roberto Lovato supplying the long view.
• Detention Centers & Data Centers. The conversation’s bridge to this show’s long Luddite summer: Kolhatkar sees the fight against immigrant detention centers and the fight against AI data centers as one struggle, since both, she argues, distract from and serve the same billionaire fleecing — “if we are busy blaming the day laborer at the street corner for stealing our job, we’re not gonna look at what Elon Musk has done.” Even MAGA voters, she notes, don’t want to live next to either. On movements that wither, her revision: Black Lives Matter didn’t fizzle, it was muzzled — Musk bought Black Twitter, its biggest bullhorn — and its abolitionist platform reads as current as ever: take the first four letters away from police, and you’re left with ICE. Her ask of journalism itself: solutions journalism — start with how people are fighting back, not one more story of how they’re being crushed.
About the Guest
Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist and the founder, host, and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, the long-running television and radio show airing on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. A senior editor at YES! Magazine and writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, she is co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission and serves on the board of the Justice Action Center. Her books include Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, Talking About Abolition, and Bleeding Afghanistan (as co-author). Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories Press) gathers nineteen of her conversations from the front lines, with a foreword by Roberto Lovato.
References:
• Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism by Sonali Kolhatkar (Seven Stories Press, 2026).
• Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice — the book behind her first Keen On appearance, three years ago.
• Among the book’s nineteen voices: Viet Thanh Nguyen, past Keen On guest Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D. G....
