Kaveh Akbar drops a searingly emotional piece for The Nation in reaction to the abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk:

This is, more than anything, a plea for principled leftists to rise en masse and not just decry but disrupt a nation helmed by gleeful genocideers. I’m writing frantically, aware my prose is ugly, overearnest, unvetted against worst-faith readers. It’s graceless, unlovely. So am I.

Tonight I want to be understood, not appreciated.

I could quote the piece at length, but to do so would be a disservice to both Akbar and to you.

It’s critical that I share this plea, however:

I want to tell you powerlessness is an alibi. Hopelessness too. I want to ask, what specifically are you going to do? Tomorrow, the next day? What’s your “I am Spartacus” move to protect the more vulnerable, the targeted, the invisibled, the next-on-the-list?

I want to say, it’s your turn now, help. This is us asking you while we still can.

I’ve taken one tiny step: I added the phone number for the San Francisco Immigrant Rapid Response Hotline (415-200-1548) to my contacts, so I’m prepared to act if I see someone being confronted by ICE.

Find the equivalent service in your area and add the number to your phone.

“Parenting In the Age of Trump,” from the irreplaceable Elie Mystal in The Nation, is a brilliant examination of the mechanisms of resistance his kids (and we) need to employ. I’m tempted to quote the piece at length, but it’s best if you just read the whole thing.

But allow me these two:

I already know that my kids will encounter a civil rights environment more like the one faced by my grandparents in the segregated South in the 1920s, than the one I faced in 1980s Queens. My skills of fighting the white man through argument and lawsuits seem completely irrelevant to the lives MAGA will force them to live. I’m a classically trained effete liberal columnist trying to prepare children to live in a Hobbesian state of perpetual white violence against us. What the hell do I know about what they must learn to do? We are well past the point where “pulling your pants up” and engaging in respectability politics designed to appease “reasonable” white folks is of any use.

And:

People can entirely miss me with “But golly gee, Elie. If we use the tactics of our enemy we are no better than them.” That way of thinking is obsolete. That way of thinking is how you get whatever the hell the “Democratic Party” is doing right now. Everybody wants to raise Barack Obama. I’ve got to start trying to raise Harriet Tubman. In a worst case scenario, I have to be raising Oskar Schindler. I need my kids to be able to chloroform a baby they’re hiding in their attic when ICE comes around, then walk downstairs and pay Musk’s troops in Bitcoin to make them go away.

Seriously, just go read it.

(Via @echoz@kopiti.am.)