Carpe Momentum: The Spectacle and the Witness

In Trump’s authoritarian theater, JD Vance cues the violence. In San Diego, unarmed clergy reveal the mask.

We are no longer governed. We are being produced into a reality show.

The collapse of American democratic norms has long ceased to be a backroom affair. It now operates fully in public view, feeding a constant cycle of spectacle designed for cameras, headlines, and social media loops. Governance has become theater, and the performance is accelerating.

This week offered another meticulously staged scene when Vice President JD Vance arrived in Los Angeles. Ostensibly, it was to assess federal immigration enforcement operations. In reality, it was pure theater. Vance’s visit lasted barely four and a half hours, with just over an hour inside the city itself. Local reporters were barred; only select MAGA-aligned national media were invited to the choreographed event. The true audience was never in the room.

Standing before the handpicked press pool, Vance delivered his monologue: California’s governor and mayor were to blame for making Los Angeles “open season” on federal law enforcement. He invoked violence, chaos, lawlessness, the necessary villains for the regime’s ongoing narrative of national disorder. Then, his most revealing slip came when Vance called California Senator Alex Padilla, his former Senate colleague recently detained in a highly public FBI raid, “Jose Padilla.” Jose Padilla was the name of a long-detained ‘enemy combatant’ from the Bush years, accused of terrorism. But more revealing was Vance’s casual use of “Jose” as a stand-in for any Hispanic name, a reflexive act of racial diminishment that laid bare his nativist instincts. In one stroke, Vance seamlessly fused elected officials, immigrants, and terrorism into a single category of threat, tapping into the oldest American habit of reducing brown-skinned people to interchangeable caricatures.

The Khalil case follows the same script. Immigration enforcement detained Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful U.S. resident and graduate student, for months. But his real crime was political: his pro-Palestinian activism made him inconvenient. His release, ordered by a federal judge, was immediately appealed by the Trump administration to preserve the regime’s preferred storyline: that dissent itself constitutes criminality.

The consequences of this narrative aren’t confined to press briefings. In Minnesota, State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were gunned down by a pro-Trump gunman now charged with murder. State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife were critically wounded in the same attack. The gunman left behind a hit list naming dozens of Democratic officials. Across the country, elected leaders face escalating death threats, attempted kidnappings, and assassination plots, each grim act another installment in the reality TV horror show of American collapse. This is the dark ecosystem of stochastic terrorism: the regime’s public figures deliver rhetorical cues designed to inflame unstable individuals, knowing full well that violence may follow. Vance’s inflammatory remarks aren’t merely offensive, they are part of a deliberate strategy of indirect incitement, where plausible deniability masks intentional provocation.

There is a second theater playing out. A theater not of power, but of witness. A counter-spectacle that cuts directly through the regime’s carnival of cruelty.

On World Refugee Day, in San Diego, one of the most heavily targeted ICE theaters of operation, a quiet act of human defiance broke the spell. At the direction of Pope Leo XIV, who has become increasingly outspoken in condemning the Trump regime’s brutal crackdown on migrants, Bishop Michael Pham, himself once a Vietnamese refugee, led a coalition of priests and clergy into the federal courthouse where ICE agents had routinely stalked migrants. These agents were notorious for hiding behind pillars and bathrooms, seizing people after court hearings, often in front of terrified families. But on that day, the clergy stood silently beside migrant families called to appear. There was no chanting, no slogans, no violence, just presence. The ICE agents, who had been lurking in corners and waiting outside bathrooms, retreated. No one was detained, no one was tackled. The boot prints on the walls remained, but the agents vanished. A priest described it like Moses parting the Red Sea. The sheer power of moral witness.

The Trump regime’s use of force depends on shadows. It relies on secrecy, masked agents, and spectacle unchallenged. Its power thrives when it controls the frame. But when unarmed clergy walk into the shot, the mask slips. The entire apparatus, designed to project overwhelming power, reveals itself as fragile, dependent on intimidation and concealment.

Every authoritarian system understands it must control not only action but narrative. For this reason, Trump dispatches Vance to Los Angeles with handpicked cameras. That is why ICE agents wear masks while pummeling migrants in parking lots. That is why the regime depends on a constant supply of images portraying blue cities as war zones requiring federal occupation.

But moral witness is a different kind of theater, one that does not rely on coercion. The clergy’s silent presence dismantled the ICE spectacle without a single confrontation. Their refusal to participate in the regime’s production turned the scene into something else entirely: an exposure.

The question now is whether more Americans will become witnesses. Not merely spectators. Witnesses.

Authoritarianism is always, ultimately, theater. Its greatest weakness is the presence of those who refuse to play their assigned roles. Who stand, quietly, unarmed, in the middle of the stage and refuse to flinch.

The collapse proceeds. The scripts grow more grotesque. But the possibility of resistance remains, not in louder shouting, but in refusing to exit the frame. In standing beside the vulnerable. In breaking the illusion that power is inevitable.

Carpe Momentum.