An armed hostile power threatens to invade us. What will we do if it happens?
The Justice Department just sued Boston for relying on our city ordinance, the Boston 2014 Trust Act, to defend our police forces from outside control. The physical invasion, Patriot 2.0, has already begun. So far its few actions have been defended by Thomas Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, as targeting only “the worst of the worst”.
But aren’t we their “worst”? Our community beliefs about race, gender, poverty, cultural freedoms, and human rights have been attacked as un-American by the increasingly centralized power of the White House. As the primary motivation of the first American attacks on the power of the British Red Coats, we Bostonians place democracy on the highest pedestal.
We are now in the cross-hairs of Trump’s police apparatus. Homan called our overwhelmingly popular leader “the mayor of Boston, Marxist Michelle Wu Moonbat Michelle” in February. Now Wu’s overwhelming victory against the scion of the rich white Boston establishment makes us all suspect. We are Trump’s “vermin”. Homan said, “We are coming to Boston.”
No invasion, or any other threat of the Trump government, is certain until it happens. But our city’s people were once successful in leading the resistance to the world’s most powerful hostile power. Bostonians have patted ourselves on the back since then. We must not be caught unprepared.
Every organization in Boston is threatened. In my Roslindale precinct, where Wu won nearly 90% of the votes, there are ethnic social clubs, independent businesses, environmental improvement activists, neighborhood internet groups, and countless other forms of community solidarity. Local churches proclaim Black Lives Matter. Alone or in groups of affiliation, we must prepare for organized military attack.
I am not a likely protest leader. We don’t necessarily need leaders, an idea of mine left over from understanding anarchism for the first time as a graduate student in the 1970s. Revolutions succeed when they are collective expressions of resistance. We don’t need someone to tell us what we should do, we need to plan among ourselves what we would do.
Maybe our judiciary will stop an invasion. Maybe our national political leadership will prevent an invasion. That seems unlikely. More likely is that this particular expression of the larger Trump threat to our lives will waffle, because Trump is Waffler-in-Chief.
He thinks keeping everyone guessing is his superpower, deciding, then changing his mind. We in Boston, and in America, don’t know how he will express his hatred for at least half of Americans, who happen to be concentrated in this wonderful city. Hoping no invasion happens and then reacting spontaneously when it does are the conditions for a weak, confused, and unimpressive Boston response. Trump has selected us for demonstrating dictatorship. We might have to demonstrate popular resistance to tyranny for other Americans, and the world.
Let’s get ready now.
Steve Hochstadt
September 11, 2025
