the ghosts of palmer and the lessons we keep ignoring

from Dispatches from the Frontlines of America’s Third Red Scare by Wesley R. Bishop

By late morning on June 14, 2025, the streets of thousands of American cities and locales pulsed with the noise of feet and voices. What began as a coordinated protest against an ostentatious military parade in Washington, D.C.—a spectacle timed with both the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary and Donald Trump’s 79th birthday—grew into something broader, deeper, and more defiant.

The “No Kings in America” protests had no singular epicenter because the current crisis and its resistance had refused to centralize power. From suburban parks in Idaho to city plazas in Atlanta, from midwestern college campuses to the tightly packed streets of New York City, the message was unmistakable. There should be no parades for tyrants. No pageantry for billionaires who pillage the public trust. No indulgence of those who trample the language of democracy under boots gilded in gold.

The scale was unprecedented. Estimates of participation stretched into millions. Organized by a coalition of over two hundred labor, civil rights, immigrant justice, and anti-authoritarian groups, this was not simply a protest—it was an eruption. Teachers carried signs bearing the names of banned books. Immigrant families marched beside veterans carrying upside-down American flags. Teenagers in homemade shirts that read “NO KINGS” danced in sidewalks in both rural and urban America.

The protest’s timing was deliberate. The military parade, greenlit by an administration giddy at the prospect of power cloaked in martial discipline, was grotesque by any reasonable standard. The only thing that outdid the gaudiness was the parade’s utter failure. With pro-Trump crowd sizes much lower than what had been planned, and a deflated Trump sitting behind bullet proof glass (at one point dozing off for a nap), the would-be coronation was just the latest proverbial child pointing at the nudity of this naked emperor.

The protest, too, bore out across the country. Sister protests erupted in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Iceland. Banners reading No Kings in America were unfurled beside flags of solidarity. The American president had, in his effort to pretend at being a monarch, inspired the world the world to remember that America was never meant to be one.

In the weeks that led up to the June protests, the state's retaliation was continuous, swift, surgical, and shameless. New Jersey Congresswoman LaMonica McIver—beloved in her district for her defense of immigrant families and her vocal criticism of ICE detention centers—was indicted by a federal grand jury. The charge: allegedly forcibly impeding federal law enforcement. The reality: she was attempting to inspect and stand up for her constituents the Trump administration is hell bent on terrorizing.

McIver’s so-called crime occurred outside a privately contracted immigration detention facility. There, families had gathered in prayer. Children held paper hearts. And McIver did what a member of Congress should do—she showed up. She questioned. She resisted. And for that, she was met with cuffs and a criminal complaint.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a singular act of political theater, the kind of procedural aggression that makes headlines and fades. But it wasn’t singular. It wasn’t theater. And it is far from fading.

Senator Alex Padilla of California was physically removed from a Department of Homeland Security press conference in Los Angeles for doing what every senator has the right to do: hold the Executive Branch accountable, particularly when it mobilizes the US military to invade a U.S. city. He spoke as an elected official amid ongoing ICE raids and military deployments in his state. For this, he was manhandled. For this, the Executive attempted to make an example of him.

The stage? A DHS event featuring Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security and the administration’s high priestess of cruelty. Noem, who once proudly recounted murdering her own dog in her memoir, has since made a career of publicly performing callousness as strength. She sneered through prepared remarks about California’s “burdensome leadership,” barely hiding her contempt for those who govern with even a trace of empathy.

When Padilla stood, when he tried to name the cost of policies carried out in the shadows—children vanishing into detention, parents deported without hearing or charge—he was silenced not with argument, but with force. His voice was dragged out of the room. And so the nation saw, on camera, what it usually must guess at behind bars and border walls.

California’s governor had already been overruled by the president. National Guard units had been deployed without consent. Seven hundred Marines were stationed in the city as if it were a war zone. In the America of 2025, federalism is a corpse, and the Constitution is a stage prop.

And yet the true danger lies not only in what is done, but in what is now considered normal. The sight of a senator being hauled away mid-question drew gasps from Capitol Hill and indignation from across the aisle. But what of those who are not senators? What of those who are mothers, students, workers—people without title or platform? If this is what happens with cameras, what happens without?

The executive branch has made its message clear: protest is perilous, criticism is criminal, and public service is conditional on silence to cater to Trump’s whims.

There’s a sick rhythm to American history. And we are dancing to it once more.

Last century, under the guise of national security, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer unleashed a campaign of raids, arrests, and deportations. Thousands were seized without warrants. Immigrants were rounded up for little more than union membership or socialist leanings. Homes were broken into. Families separated. Deportation orders handed down like fast food receipts.

The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 should have been a permanent stain on the American conscience. They should have taught us something. Anything. Instead, they’ve become precedent.

The legal community saw it for what it was even then. Felix Frankfurter and other scholars denounced the raids as legally baseless and morally bankrupt. The American Civil Liberties Union was born out of that chaos, forged as a shield for those discarded by the law. Labor unions protested, understanding that their ranks were being targeted not for crimes, but for organizing. Figures like Jane Addams raised their voices to remind the nation that liberty, once eroded, does not regenerate overnight.

And yet the machine ground on. Emma Goldman, poet of rebellion and heart of the radical left, was deported alongside hundreds of others, many of whom had done nothing more than demand dignity.

Sound familiar?

Today, the deportations continue—not just of people, but of ideals. Rights long assumed are being detained and questioned. Due process is called a loophole. Constitutional protections are redacted in the name of security.

Then, it was anarchists and immigrants. Now, it is elected officials, protest organizers, journalists, and again, immigrants. The targets sometimes change. The method does not.

There is, of course, something hopeful in the fact that the streets still fill. That bodies still show up. That voices still rise in the dark, even when they risk being silenced. Protest is proof that the American people still believe in something worth saving. But belief alone will not protect us.

The danger is not simply that authoritarianism has gained ground; it is that it has been normalized. That silence is being recast as patriotism. That cruelty is being marketed as strength. That resistance, even when peaceful, is treated as sedition.

This is America’s Third Red Scare. And it will not be the last unless we find a way to permanently disempower these authoritarian reflexes—to excise the impulse toward repression from our institutions, our culture, and our courts—we are doomed to repeat this cycle again and again. The Palmer Raids were supposed to be the lesson. Instead, they were the rehearsal for us now.

The protests are a heartbeat. A vital one. But a heartbeat alone cannot stop the bleeding. We need a revolution infrastructure, law, and imagination. Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves marching the same streets a decade from now, again shouting, No Kings in America—and wondering why they keep coming back.