About 150 years ago, masked men terrorized Black citizens in the South. The masks back then were crude white hoods. Today, the white hoods have been traded for Kevlar helmets, body armor and full face masks—from the people who 5 years ago whined that you couldn’t breath in a mask.

These are the tools of Trump’s trade in asserting his grip on modern American Society. Of course he has now added another one, going to war, but we’ll get back to that.

Many comparisons have been made between the actions and demeanor of ICE agents and the Gestapo. The parallels are apt. Gestapo is actually a contraction of the full name of Geheime Staatspolizei which literally translates to “Secret State Police.” So you can see where the idea of no insignia and masked faces comes from.

Like our current crop of ICE operatives—who are definitely not the snappy dressers like their Nazi predecessors—Gestapo agents cared very little for the actual law part of “law and order.” You were supposed to be afraid of them, that’s what they liked and expected. The very idea of having your name given to the Gestapo was terrifying, much the same as it would have been in Russia—then and now—with whatever names their secret police ran under: Checka, NKVD, Sluzhba, KGB, FSB, etc. It is all about the fear.

Free people don’t much like being bullied. And Americans are used to pushing back against these kinds of tactics. A few million, as much as 2 percent of the population, turned out to display their ire on No Kings Day.

Again, the dictator’s agents don’t really care that they are picking up people who do not belong in their nets. They’ve got quotas to meet and much like the body counts of the Vietnam days, they are slaves to their numbers and will let the “system” sort it out. Except for the minor detail that since ignoring the law and thus ignoring due process—and those annoying niceties of warrants—there’s little to sort. So there’s nothing for ICE to do but arrest those who point out their crimes and call in National Guard support when too many people get outraged. There aren’t any concentration camps—yet—so the people being kidnapped are simply being shipped off to torture prisons (El Salvador) or countries that happen to be in the middle of genocidal wars (Sudan).

The Gestapo didn’t care, why should ICE and why should Trump?

There was no more lawless organization than the Gestapo. It was a machine that generated fear in society and fear was a primary tool that Hitler used. Trump is trying to do the same thing with his lumberjack-shirted ICE flunkies. So far it has not been working. By and large, individual Americans may be afraid for a bit, but mainly we get pissed off and have no allergy to saying so, loudly.

So Trump needs a bigger distraction. War.

Iran kind of makes sense as a target. Long-time state sponsors of international terrorism and fomenters of strife and violence in the Middle East, the Ayatollahs certainly do not have clean hands. The biggest international fear around that country has been their nuclear development program coupled with their support of jihadist terrorists. Of course, a deal had been worked out to restrain that program 10 years ago. But since that was under the Obama administration—and thus signed by a Black man—Trump tore it up in his first term. But in spite of the economic sanctions imposed on their country over the decades, as Lucian Truscott points out, their per capita GDP is higher than Russia’s. So don’t expect Iran, the most populous nation in the Middle East, to be a pushover.

One of the reasons Iran has excelled at the practice of fostering groups that employ suicide assassins may be that the practice was invented there, hundreds of years ago. About 200 km north of Tehran is the ruins of the fortress of Alamut from which drug-addled assassins were sent forth with the idea that if they died in the execution of their mission they would return to “paradise.” Sound familiar?

Now Trump has banded together with another wannabe dictator, Netanyahu—who has survived politically largely by fomenting conflict for decades. Thus we now have war and attack headlines that are supposed to generate some sort of patriotic fervor to shift attention from Trump’s racist domestic agenda and blatant criminal activities. Also not working. Americans are getting more pissed off.

We should expect—and participate in—nationwide demonstrations that will make the record turnouts of No Kings Day look tiny. Maybe we can even get Congress to come out of its collective coma to take action to impeach the guy who just bypassed them yet again.

No Kings also means No Dictators, No Divine Right, No American Führer. Just because Trump loathes America doesn’t mean we have to lay down for it.