Transcribed from the 18 January 2026 episode of the CounterVortex podcast and printed with permission. Edited for space and readability. Listen to the whole monologue:
Bill Weinberg: Welcome to the CounterVortex with your ranter Bill Weinberg, ranting at you in the wee hours of 17 January 2026, as always from my apartment on Manhattan’s lower east side, now days away from one year into the rule of the illegitimate, de facto president Donald Trump, who is constitutionally barred from office under the insurrection clause of the fourteenth amendment to the US constitution.
I am once again having a hard time staying on top of the news cycle. Last week we discussed Venezuela, when the cycle had already moved on to Iran, and this week we’re discussing Iran when the cycle has already moved on to Greenland. We’ll have some things to say about Greenland next week, but meanwhile there is certainly a sense of cognitive dissonance to the juxtaposition of deadly repression by federal troops in Minneapolis and Trump threatening military action against Iran ostensibly in response to massive deadly repression by the security forces there.
In contradistinction to the neocons of a generation ago, Trump has actually displayed refreshing honesty in his contempt for democracy. But in Iran, in a throwback to the neocon era, he is framing his military threats in terms of protecting human rights and democracy—as blatantly Orwellian as it is at the same time that Trump is threatening to invoke the insurrection act to deploy military troops in Minnesota to put down protests over the massive deployment of ICE agents to the Twin Cities.
Trump has broached invoking the act before, and has since met with reversals in the courts over his efforts to mobilize National Guard troops under the executive’s ordinary constitutional authority to suppress rebellion, increasing the pressure on him to do so (to invoke the insurrection act), allowing him to go over the heads of state governors—which is what is at issue in the court decisions against his mobilizations in Illinois and California, with another such case now brought by Minnesota.
We have noted before how Trump’s inauguration day executive order, of almost exactly a year ago, declaring a state of emergency on the southern border, also set a deadline of 20 April 2025 for a joint Pentagon-Homeland Security recommendation on whether to invoke the insurrection act. The report, handed in two days early, failed to recommend invocation of the act at that time, as we discussed on our podcast of 16 April 2025 facetiously titled “MAGA Fascism and the Dark Side of 420.”
Days later, on 28 April [2025], Trump issued executive order 14287, “Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens [sic],” which stated that city and state sanctuary policies constitute “a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of federal law and the federal government’s obligation to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States [sic].” That was pretty clearly an attempt to lay the groundwork for invocation of the act—note use of the word “insurrection.”
Of course there is an obvious irony to a president who is, as I contend, constitutionally barred from office under the insurrection clause of the constitution, for having led an insurrection on 6 January 2021, invoking the insurrection act over peaceful and constitutionally-protected protest.
One week after an ICE officer killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis, federal agents shot a man in the leg during an immigration raid in the city this past Wednesday, 14 January—did you catch that? The ICE raids are very clearly ethnically targeted. This week, ICE officers detained dozens of Somali refugees, including children, who were legally residing in the US. The administration says it is targeting around 5,600 refugees in Minnesota who have not yet been granted permanent residency, and the Trump regime has essentially ended all humanitarian immigration pathways.
In a particularly hideous irony, four Oglala Lakota Native American men have been detained by ICE in Minneapolis, and the Oglala Sioux tribal government is demanding their release. Reports have emerged that they are being held at Fort Snelling, a requisitioned historical site that was used by the army to hold hundreds of Dakota captives during the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century.
A man and woman were shot and injured by federal agents in Portland, Oregon, last Thursday, 8 January, one day after Renée Good was killed in Minneapolis, and a man named Keith Porter was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve in the Northridge district of Los Angeles. There needs to be greater attention to these cases.
Meanwhile, at least four people died in ICE custody in just the first ten days of 2026 [and this number is now up to six as of 2 February 2026 —ed.], and both Trump and the protesters are turning up the heat in Minnesota. Unions and community groups in the Twin Cities called for a day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping”—essentially a general strike—on 23 January, this coming Friday, to oppose the ICE occupation of Minneapolis and St. Paul, which, by the way, at some three thousand troops, now outnumbers the local police forces.
The department of justice, on Friday 16 January, issued subpoenas for Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, accusing them of interfering with federal operations in the city. The DOJ is not only not investigating Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot Renée Good, and instead is investigating the deceased Renée Good, but is also refusing to cooperate with the state and city investigations into the killing, effectively trying to shut them down.
This brings us closer to the rupture between state and local governments and federal power (which we have been discussing as an eventuality in our series of podcasts about the Zohran Mamdani phenomenon here in New York) which would heighten the contradictions in this country. If Trump invokes the insurrection act, this portends the very escalatory move of sending National Guard troops from red states—or even active duty military troops—into a blue state, with the potential for armed conflict between state and federal forces, a scenario we predicted in our podcast of 25 November 2024 entitled “Nullify the Election II.”
Ominously, the threat to invoke the insurrection act comes just as Trump has broached cancelling the upcoming midterm elections, telling Reuters this week: “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” He is obviously floating this to set a precedent for 2028 so he can be president for life. I have been warning of this since 2016—a full decade now. Boy, do I ever feel like Cassandra.
Finally, all of this comes—quite predictably, if you understand the pattern of consolidating fascism—amid his spasm of military adventures and threats, most alarmingly Venezuela and Greenland of course. But meanwhile, the “Global War on Terrorism” continues on an escalatory course: the US has bombed both Syria and Somalia so far this year, with hardly anyone even noticing.
This is also grim vindication, as I have been repudiating—since 2016—the notion that Trump is an “isolationist.” Just the opposite: he has embraced fascism since 2016, by even the most rigorous definition, and fascism always has a fetish for military aggression. It is part of the package.
This brings us, of course, to Iran. Protests broke out among Tehran bazaar merchants in response to the dire economic situation in the country on 28 December [2025]. The strike rapidly spread across the country. Shopkeepers closed their stalls in city after city and held protest gatherings, where they were joined by students who walked off university campuses. Protest slogans escalated beyond economic grievances, openly targeting clerical rule and “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Security forces responded with mass arrests, and then live fire. A photo of a lone protester blocking a column of police motorcycles on a Tehran freeway has gone viral, drawing comparisons to the iconic “Tank Man” photo from Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Human rights groups have reported security force raids on hospitals to arrest injured protesters and confiscate the bodies of those killed. The government has shut down the internet and even phone service—a far more complete shutdown than those during the November 2019 protests or the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising.
During both of those, security forces killed hundreds of protesters and bystanders under a near-total blackout. This time we can say it’s a total blackout. Estimates of the dead this time around—that is, just over the past two and a half weeks—run as high as twelve thousand. Although it is uncertain we will ever get an accurate figure, it is certainly in the thousands [subsequent reporting has indicated it could be more than twice this initial estimate. —ed.].
Trump responded with his usual inflammatory and bellicose rhetoric, saying on 2 January that the US was “locked and loaded” if Iran kills protesters, but he then failed to respond as the killing began over the following days and escalated horrifically.
Following the mass deadly repression, the protests in Iran appear to have abated for now, and Trump is saying that he has received assurances that the Islamic Republic won’t move ahead with apparently planned executions of hundreds of arrested protesters—although there has been no confirmation of this from Tehran. It should be noted that Iran carried out a record-breaking one thousand executions in 2025—that’s a minimum figure, with United Nations human rights investigators accusing the regime of “conducting executions at an industrial scale.”
There are a few things that need to be said about all this. First, Trump’s bogus show of support for the protesters actually harms them. It just plays into the calumny that they are “foreign-inspired.” I submit that it would be the tactically as well as ethically correct thing for the Iranian protesters to tell Trump to go to hell.
It is also imperative that we stateside protesters repudiate the calumny that the Iran protests are CIA or Mossad “astroturf,” and recognize them as a genuine, self-organized popular uprising. Protests of that scale cannot be CIA or Mossad astroturf. That is the worst kind of conspiracy theory thinking, and a betrayal of people facing bloody repression for standing up against an oppressive regime.
Unfortunately, there are significant elements of the stateside left that are swallowing and propagating the calumny, in the sway of hybrid state propaganda platforms like Mint Press—which, very tellingly, is now making a big show of support for the protesters in Minneapolis while portraying the Iranian protesters as pawns of the West in a “regime change” conspiracy. We have discussed before Mint Press’s institutionalized service to the Iran regime, on our podcast of 1 June 2023 entitled “Tankies, False Flags, and the Grayzone.”
This point is also made by the British-Afghan activist and political commentator Shabnam Nasimi in a 14 January piece in the UK Independent entitled “Stop calling Iranian protesters ‘foreign-backed—they’re not puppets.'” She writes:
As Iranians, particularly the women, risk everything for freedom, too many in the West prefer conspiracy theories and skepticism to solidarity. Before the names of the dead are even known, before the detained have been counted, the conspiracy theories begin: ‘Zionist-backed.’ ‘US-backed.’ ‘A CIA operation.’ I am tired of it—the kind of tiredness that comes from watching people in the region fight for their own dignity only to have that struggle confiscated by Western progressives who treat our lives like footnotes to their ideological scripts.
If that sounds like you, dear listener, I strongly urge you to rethink things.
I must also caution the Iranian protesters, if any of you are listening, to reject the ambitions of the reactionary crown prince Reza Pahlavi to install himself as leader. Unfortunately, many of the rallies here in the US by the Iranian immigrant community in solidarity with the Iran protests have displayed support for this opportunist. I trust he does not have a significant following in Iran.
I happily note that video footage on social media reveals that on 14 January there was a very large march—a thousand strong—in Berlin in solidarity with the Iran protests, which seems to have been entirely progressive in its political content. More of this, please!
I’ll know that things are moving in the right direction in this world when the Iranian protesters repudiate Pahlavi and Trump, and declare their support for the protesters in Minnesota—and the protesters in Minneapolis and other US cities unequivocally declare their support for the protesters in Iran. For Tehran-Minneapolis solidarity! Down with all tyrants, whether robber-barons like Trump or omnipotent moral busybodies like Ayatollah Khamenei!
I am going to close by recalling once again the famous words of Rosa Luxemburg in the essay she wrote the night before she was assassinated by rightwing paramilitaries, on 15 January 1919, in the wake of the crushing of the Spartacist uprising, “Order Reigns in Berlin.” From the text:
‘Order reigns in Warsaw!’ ‘Order reigns in Paris!’ ‘Order reigns in Berlin!’—so run the reports of the guardians of ‘order’ every half-century, from one center of the world historical struggle to another. And the rejoicing victors do not notice that an ‘order’ which must be periodically maintained by bloody butchery is steadily approaching its historical destiny, its doom. You stupid lackeys! Your ‘order’ is built on sand.
The historical references there were to the Polish national uprising of 1831, brutally put down by Russian troops; the Paris Commune of 1871; and the crushing of the Spartacist uprising in Germany in 1919. We have just seen another such episode. Iran is thoroughly capitalist, and thoroughly integrated into the world capitalist system—despite the regime’s “anti-imperialist” rhetoric—and represents a Shiite clerical fascism. And with Trump consolidating his authoritarian state here in the US in league with Christian fascism, it should be inescapably clear that it is the same fight.
For the moment at least, it appears that “order reigns” in Tehran. I hope that order will not reign in Minneapolis in the days ahead. I will once again reiterate my call:
Resist consolidation of fascism in the United States of America and the fascist world order on the global stage!
All solidarity with the Iranian uprising when it inevitably rises again! Total repudiation of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and total repudiation of the Trump regime!
Total non-cooperation with Trump’s illegitimate rule, his bogus posturing in support of the Iran protesters as he unleashes deadly repression here at home, and his real paroxysm of warmongering!
Who is with me?
This has been Bill Weinberg with the CounterVortex. Check us out online, where everything we rant about on the podcast is assiduously blogged up, hyperlinked, and documented to credible sources. Please support us on Patreon. Join the CounterVortex, join the resistance, and rant on you next time.
Featured image source: Chad Davis via the CounterVortex
