THERE'S A WARNING SIGN ON THE ROAD AHEAD

the moral imperative to keep on rockin'

JUNE 8, 2025

I am proud as of this week to have been the first person in Boston history to speak at the WBUR Festival and play a prime spot with my band at the Jimmy Fund’s Scooper Bowl just a few days apart. In context, these were both deeply surreal experiences: my immigration panel was slotted in just ahead of Anthony Fauci’s (!) appearance, and the Scooper Bowl was (as it has been for many years) just feet from Boston’s immigration court in the JFK Federal Building in Government Center where I have been appearing on behalf of clients in deportation proceedings almost weekly for 18 years.

The WBUR Festival appearance meant a lot to me and I really appreciated the invite, but here’s all you need to know about how much fun we had at the nation’s largest all-you-can-eat ice cream party: we played straight through our 5:30-8:00 PM set without a break and I completely forgot to eat any ice cream.

We played everything we had ready—and, for better or worse, a few tunes beyond that—but as might be expected for a crowd of Gen Xers, Xienniels, and geriatric millennials who showed up to spend $23 to consume headache-inducing amounts of ice cream in the heart of Boston the biggest crowd response throughout our set was to a cranky Canadian’s 36-year-old critique of the George H.W. Bush administration.

Neil Young told his biographer Jimmy McDonough that “you’re gonna look like a fuckin’ idiot” if you try to play “Rockin’ in the Free World” without taking at least “an hour and twenty five minutes” to get yourself and the crowd warmed up, and after waiting the appropriate amount of time in our set to play it I can now tell you from experience that this is very good advice. We added “Rockin’” to our summer rotation recently in anticipation of a Fourth of July parade we’ll be playing (on a float!) next month, but it certainly didn’t not work at an ice cream festival in the heart of one of our ailing nation’s bluest cities. If nothing else it got every aging white man in a T-shirt within earshot—a population which included me and everyone else on stage with me—banging their heads and pumping their fists, and I have been thinking about what that means every day since.

I mean, really: what does it mean to bang your head and pump your fist to “Rockin’ in the Free World” in June of 2025? In one sense, this is a purely autonomic response. Even before your brain processes the lyrics, your rock muscles are twitching from the first growl of the opening riff; by the time the full band kicks in your body is fully and involuntarily engaged with the rockin’-ist rocker in the Neil Young songbook.

But it is so much more complicated than that.

“Rockin’ in the Free World” is of course an intentionally subversive choice for an ice cream festival, let alone a Fourth of July parade. It is a “patriotic” song in the same way that Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” (as made ironically famous by Ronald Reagan) is, or a “happy” song in the same way that Dave Mason’s “Feelin’ Alright” (as made actually famous by Joe Cocker and ironically famous by far too many drug and truck commercials) is—which is to say, not at all. It’s a dark, biting, and uniquely Canadian take on American neglect at home (“we got a thousand points of light / for the homeless man”) and American imperialism abroad (“we got a kinder gentler machine gun hand”). But it is above all about the cognitive dissonance of enjoying the many privileges of American citizenship while also remaining at least distantly cognizant of the sins of our empire—and the typically American response to this knowledge of “trying to forget it any way I can.”

And in a very meta kind of way, the fist-pumping major-key chorus to “Rockin’ in the Free World”—which has to be running through your head by now as you read this—immediately expunges the droning minor-key nihilism of the verses from your mind as soon as you hear it. (It is no coincidence that “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Feelin’ Alright” do exactly the same thing.) Which is totally understandable, because the chorus fucking rules and also the whole thing is very possibly the hardest that a mainstream rocker has ever rocked in E minor.¹

Young bookended his mostly-acoustic 1989 (!) album Freedom with two very different versions of “Rockin’,” and it was burned eternally into the Gen X / elder millennial canon when he rocked the everloving shit out of it with Pearl Jam at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards. The lyrical quotes from George H.W. Bush, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Jesse Jackson have dated—well fine, mostly I guess, but they have dated and I could go for a post-9/11 update.²

“Rockin’ in the Free World” was last out in the zeitgeist in the 2016 Presidential campaign cycle, when it was the only song to be used by both Bernie Sanders (who Young supported) and Donald Trump (to whom Young sent the first of many cease-and-desist letters that he would receive from musicians that year).

And I’m realizing even as I write this that we are within a week of the 10th anniversary of this non-consensually Neil Young-soundtracked one-way descent to a new low in US politics:

On June 16th, 2015—only two days after his 69th birthday—Trump made his triumphal escalator ride from the heights of the New York City landmark which bears his name to the depths of the grossest Presidential election cycle in modern US history with “Rockin’ in the Free World” blasting the whole way. He went straight from there into the most wantonly racist campaign kickoff speech in modern American history just seconds after the last notes of Neil Young’s guitar had faded. (This Politico oral history of that day is well worth the read.) Young would be the first of a list of musicians so long that it is has now earned its own lengthy Wikipedia entry to demand that Trump stop using his music at campaign events.³

Trump has a deeply weird relationship with music. Like Richard Nixon before him, he is is well-known to prefer Broadway showtunes—but unlike Nixon⁴ he doesn’t seem to enjoy music very much, even when he just shuts up and dances aimlessly on stage for uncomfortably long periods of time.

As it is, Donald Trump is an empty hungry ghost of a bully who doesn’t really enjoy anything. And yet, somehow, Neil Young—one of the most venerable lefty songwriters of the 20th century⁵—drew Trump to one of the few rock concerts which he is known to have not only attended but possibly even had a good time at. Multiple times! Trump told Rolling Stone in 2008 that he really liked Young’s “haunting” voice, which I guess kind of explains why he has so clearly never actually given a second thought to a single word that he has ever heard the man sing.

Anyway. I’m stalling. I don’t want to have to talk about this.

photo by Ringo Chiu (Getty Images)

In the past 48 hours Immigration and Customs Enforcement escalated its war on the free world in Los Angeles (and, with less attention, NYC) by using tear gas against non-violent protesters outside a detention facility.⁶ We have known since well before November 2024 that Trump was looking to use protests against his extreme immigration enforcement policies as an excuse to send in the military to impose martial law in blue cities, and barely four months in these incidents are looking to provide that pretext. Without directly invoking the Insurrection Act—which is no doubt the endgame here—Trump has ordered 2,000 National Guard troops into LA to “protect” federal personnel and property. This is the first time in 60 years that a US President has done so against the wishes of a state governor.

55 years ago last month, the National Guard provided the tragic inspiration for one of Neil Young’s other best-known songs when they shot and killed four students at Kent State who were protesting the U.S. bombing of Cambodia which had been revealed several days earlier. “We’re finally on our own,” Young sang in “Ohio”—but not hardly as it turned out, because the incident (and the song) galvanized the nation in a far more unified movement against the war in Vietnam and ultimately began the long road to turning the American public against it entirely. I truly hope it won’t take another Kent State to get us there with ICE, but so long as we keep telling and widely distributing the stories of our neighbors who now make up the majority of ICE’s detained population who have been doing nothing more than trying to keep their heads down and contribute as parents, workers, and taxpaying members of their communities I believe that we should be able to get there.

This—right now, in the coming days—is the last chance for the world to see who and what ICE really is. DHS is on the verge of receiving a stunning $150 billion Congressional appropriation for ICE alone which would more than double its deportation force and vastly increase its detention capacity. I don’t think even people who think they want this can possibly begin to understand what a different country we will be after that money has been spent, but for those of us who already know that we don’t want to find out now is the time to say so with everything that we have everywhere that we can.

I know that I say this as someone who has been trying to tell you about the evils of this unaccountable menace to all of our liberties for going on two decades, but unchecked ICE expansion will amount to the single greatest threat to civic life as we know it that this Presidency can—and, if permitted, will—inflict. I don’t even want to think about the fetid pools this already unaccountable, un-suable, unhinged federal police force will draw from in hiring so many more officers so quickly, but if you think this is only about immigration enforcement you haven’t been paying attention.

At last Saturday’s WBUR panel, moderator Simon Rios gently pushed back against my previous public suggestions that it is not at all unfair to call ICE an “American Gestapo” given the full weight of torture and genocide which the name “Gestapo” now represents—which was fair comment, but I stood (and stand) by my point. The Gestapo was an ideologically-driven unaccountable secret police force which answered only to the Fuhrer, and it was able to do everything that it did during the Third Reich because Hitler allowed it to fully centralize its political policing power by fully subordinating state and local law enforcement in 1936. It would be six full years before the Wannsee Conference’s formal decision to proceed with the industrial-scale genocide known to its participants as the Final Solution, but which would come to more than earn its dismal place in history as the only mass extinction event to down as the capital-H Holocaust.⁷

The Trump administration’s war on “sanctuary” jurisdictions, widespread use of “287(g)” cooperation agreements, and brutal masked takedowns and forced disappearances of people who have committed no crimes is all entirely consistent with early Gestapo tactics, and once these agreements are fully in place I fear that the broad impact of these centralized force multipliers will represent an overwhelming threat to the rights and freedom of non-citizens and citizens alike.

Per historian Robert Paxton’s famous definition, the final stage of fascism is reached when the government “pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” I feel entirely justified in telling you that ICE—as supplemented by state, local, and adjacent federal authorities, and soon to be inevitably supported in the coming years by sympathetic militias—is exactly the kind of agency which has been historically required for the kind of “internal cleansing” which everyone who voted for Trump very much voted for.

I understand the argument that mass protest is exactly what Trump wants, but I also believe that this is the last possible moment in which we can realistically stop what is coming. We have an obligation to our neighbors, our communities, and ourselves to loudly but nonviolently⁸ show the world that we are taking a unified stand against American fascism where and while we still can. I’d like to spend the rest of my life knowing that I did something (anything) while I still could, and if you are the kind of person who has read this far into a diaristic Substack post written by an American deportation defense attorney as of June 2025 I think you would too.

As of now it’s still a free world—if we can keep it. Keep on rockin’.

1. Crazy Horse never had a keyboard player, so I just do what I do whenever we play guitar-forward ‘90s stuff and punch in a healthy dose of gritty Hammond organ over the best parts

2. I’ve also never been sure if he is trying to be ironically trite with his concerns about a crack baby who will “never be cool” or if that line really is as cringe as it sounds, but we’re not about to change the lyrics to a Neil Young song

3. My favorite of these was from the Rolling Stones in re: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” which Trump trollishly adopted as a kind of unofficial theme song to the point that it was his walk-off music after his 2016 RNC nomination

4. I didn’t have to live through Nixon and am generally aware that he was at least our fourth-worst President, but I have always had a soft spot for the man knowing that he was a remarkably accomplished amateur pianist who genuinely loved hanging out with musicians. Look at his absolute delight as he plays “Happy Birthday” for Duke Ellington at the White House on his 80th! Trump would never.

5. All of this reminds me of the episode which the venerable lefty podcast “Know Your Enemy” did on right-wing Grateful Dead fans, and even after listening to it twice now I am completely lost as to how some of the people with the least chill on Earth (Ann Coulter! Paul Ryan! Tucker fucking Carlson!) could not only appreciate the Dead but regularly attend events which still stand today as the apotheosis of American hippiedom. Surely there are plenty of other sources for Americana which aren’t thoroughly soaked in lysergic acid diethylamide, and I just can’t see these people getting into the usual impassioned fan arguments over which is the best “Dark Star.” Jerry Garcia didn’t live to see the rise of Tucker Carlson, but I can hardly imagine two mainstream American celebrities who would be less likely to have a friendly hang.

6. From what I have seen it was FBI agents detailed to ICE who actually did this, which is in itself a solid argument against having the FBI detailed to ICE

7. I’m not saying that ICE expansion will inevitably lead to death camps, although it is certainly foreseeable given the extremities of dehumanization we are already seeing in these early days. I am mostly just making the point that a lot can happen in six years.

8. N.B.: but nonviolently. This is not necessarily the same as “peacefully,” which has been badly overused to criticize some very effective tactics. Some of the most effective direct action against ICE has been nothing more than dozens of very brave people sitting down in inconvenient places until they are dragged away. Anyone doing that should be prepared to face federal charges, but of course so should anyone stupid enough to throw things at federal agents.