Red Scare all over again. We've been here before.

By now you've probably heard the story. MAGA is seeking its revenge against modern America by attacking cities and their inhabitants. Lawyer and activist Jay Kuo recounts the attack by Donald Trump's goon squad on a Chicago apartment building this week: 

... federal authorities, including agents from ICE, the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives), and the FBI sought to make good on Donald Trump’s recent threats against U.S. cities. 

In the dead of night, they swarmed a residential building in Chicago, even dropping in from Black Hawk helicopters like some sort of special commandos going after dangerous terrorists. They indiscriminately broke into people’s apartments and yanked them from their beds. Some residents were naked. They ransacked apartments and even zip tied small children. Some U.S. citizens were detained for hours. 

... The justification for this blatantly illegal and unconstitutional assault is a familiar one. The regime claims it was going after drug traffickers and gang members. But once again, it offered no proof. We just have to take their word for it. Authorities seized people first, without probable cause, treating merely living in the same complex as suspected undocumented migrants as a crime. 

Eboni Watson, neighbor

... “They just treated us like we were nothing,” [resident Pertissue] Fisher said.

She had come out to the hallway in her nightgown around 10 p.m. Monday, where armed ICE agents were shouting “police.”

“It was scary, because I had never had a gun in my face,” Fisher said. “They asked my name and my date of birth and asked me, did I have any warrants?”—apparently meaning outstanding warrants for her arrest. “And I told them, ‘No,’ I didn’t,” she responded.

Fisher relayed that she was handcuffed and only released some five hours later around 3 a.m. ....

It's no surprise that this sort of government terrorism, backed by panic among the ignorant, has been a recurrent feature of U.S. history. After World War I, the country was unsettled. An unpopular foreign war and oligarchic exploitation of the country's workers provoked protest from society's underclass and fright in the ruling class. Might there be Reds under the bed?  David R. Lurie describes what came next: 

Out of control federal agents invading the nation’s cities and kidnapping people en masse, a president and his cronies fomenting public anger and fear of immigrants, and dissent suddenly declared to be an illegal threat to national security.

All of that is happening now. But it also happened in 1919, at the height of what came to be called the first Red Scare, when a young J. Edgar Hoover and his new federal police force led a crackdown on dissent, focused on “radical” Americans born abroad.

Hoover and then-Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had plans to use another tool now favored by the Trump regime — mass deportation. But while Hoover and Palmer did succeed in silencing prominent dissenters, their deportation scheme largely came undone as the public became increasingly revulsed by the government’s performative cruelty and lawlessness.

... But as the weeks and months proceeded, something else began to happen. Members of the American public, who previously seemed to agree with the mob that jeered at [defiant anarchist Emma] Goldman, began to change their minds as evidence emerged of the brutality and lawlessness of the G-Men. And the deportation scheme ended up failing. Out of 6,396 cases Hoover brought, fewer than 600 ended in deportations.

The people can be misled to applaud injustices for a season; we can also repudiate injustices. A recent report found that attempts by MAGA TV drunk and Trump's U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to charge protesters as felons in occupied Washington, DC, were collapsing at an unheard of rate. Grand juries made up of fellow Washingtonians refuse to indict.

We don't like this cruel BS. We can turn the tide. We've done that before. No Kings on October 18!

• • •

I thought it might be interesting to share how the 1919 Palmer raids played out for someone I once knew who was caught up in them.

In that year, Dorothy Day was swooped up in the general lawless repression in Chicago. Today Dorothy is remembered as a founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and potential Roman Catholic saint.  Then she was a drifting, loosely leftist, young intellectual. Being a young woman, her experience of the Palmer raids was different from that of male workers and agitators. She recounts this in From Union Square to Rome, a 1938 autobiography.

On wandering back from an aimless year in Europe after the war, she discovered: 

... The Socialists were too dull. They had too little vitality as far as I was concerned, and my allegiance for the most part was with the I. W. W.’s whose ideas in regard to solidarity and direct action appealed greatly to my youth.

 It was about this time that I had my second jail experience. ... I was associated at that time with some I. W. W.’s who had their headquarters on West Madison Street, Chicago. Across the street from their printing office was an old rooming house where a great many of them stayed, and where in true Wobbly fashion they had an everlasting pot of Mulligan on the fire. Everyone who came in was supposed to contribute to the pot whether it were a bunch of carrots, a piece of meat or a few pounds of potatoes. It was kept going from week to week, and when the funds were low the boys used to beg from grocers in the neighborhood. Those who had funds took care of their companions who had none, and there was a good spirit of comradeship. Their slogan was “An injury to one is an injury to all” and their sense of solidarity went even into housekeeping details.

... One day I opened the paper to find [a female acquaintance in these circles] had taken bichloride of mercury and was in the city hospital. They managed to save her life but when she was released from the hospital she went straight to the I. W. W. lodging house where she knew she would be taken in. I went over to see her in the evening to bring her food and planned to stay for the night with her. She was still ill and very much depressed and not altogether happy that they had dragged her back from death.

We were undressed and getting into bed when a knock came at the door and four men burst in telling us that we were under arrest for being inmates of a disorderly house. ... we were alone. It made no difference that radical headquarters all over Chicago were being raided and wholesale arrests being made. We could not feel that we were a part of a movement that was suffering persecution. Perhaps we were not sufficiently indoctrinated.

It had not occurred to us that it was unconventional or unseemly to be staying in a lodging house on West Madison Street. ... The ugly fact remained that we were two young girls arrested by four plain-clothes men who refused to leave the room while we got up and dressed for fear we would try to get away by the fire-escape. These were the days of the Palmer red raids when no one was safe. Those were times of persecution for all radicals. ...

Dorothy found her subsequent jail experience both brutal and enlightening.

... It was just a case of our knowing that these things were occurring every day and yet not realizing that they could occur to us. We were booked on the charge of being inmates of a disorderly house. We were not allowed to use the telephone to get in touch with a lawyer or our friends, although according to law we should have had this privilege. ...

... Before I had merely read about prison life and had agreed with Tolstoi that such punishment of criminals was futile when we were guilty for permitting such a system as ours to exist and that we, too, should bear the penalty for the crimes committed by those unfortunate ones. We all formed part of one body, a social body, and how could any limb of that body commit a crime alone?

We were photographed and finger-printed and finally taken to the morals court. Before we were placed in the detention pen we were examined for venereal diseases. When men are arrested during a red raid the police can express their brutality with rubber hoses and blackjacks. They can show their scorn and contempt for those who are trying to “undermine” our present system by kicking and beating them until their victims are a degraded mass of quivering flesh. 

They show more gallantry in regard to the women. They have a more subtle way of affronting their sensibilities. They can charge them with being prostitutes, make them submit to degrading physical examinations, and throw them into the company of those whom they feel should degrade them. But I felt more horror of the police and that police matron during this experience than I did of the [street walking] women. The women did not disgust me, it was their profession that disgusted me. They themselves may have been superior, as human beings go, to their captors. There was no pride or hypocrisy among them. 

The prostitutes Dorothy was jailed alongside worked for pimps who quickly bailed them out. Dorothy and her friend were locked up for several further days before a reporter friend who had discovered their incarceration managed to get them out.

Her short jail time reinforced Dorothy's conviction about whose side she was on.