Rachel Cohen first made headlines last year when she left her job at the high-powered law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, after organizing more than 600 of her fellow lawyers to sign an open letter condemning Donald Trump’s threats to the legal profession. Since then, she’s continued to call out the administration’s actions both on the ground and online. From her account @cohen.489, Cohen posts about her work community organizing and protesting ICE in Chicago, as well as the news. She recently went viral for a video where she confronted Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino at a convenience store.

Cohen joined Current Affairs News Briefing writer Emily Carmichael to discuss protest movements, our moral obligations to confront injustice, and the censorship that’s made it so hard to discuss political resistance online.

 

 

emily carmichael

So, let’s start with Chicago. Your first public foray into organizing was your departure from Skadden, but were you already tapped into the scene in Chicago, organizing in Chicago, before that?

 

RACHEL COHEN

I was aware of organizing in Chicago. One of the reasons that I moved to Chicago in the first place is because of its history of organizing led by Black Chicagoans against state violence and police violence, but I was not particularly plugged in as an individual because of the hours that I was working. And also because [you’re] not necessarily the most reliable ally as a corporate attorney who is popping in, who recently moved to the city, a white person doing finance law with unreliable hours and schedule, right? And so I was mostly aware of the mutual aid groups that existed, that I had friends that worked with, or similar. And after I left my firm, it was really important to me to start to plug into those networks, because prior to law school, when I lived in Rhode Island, I was much more involved in organizing and volunteering. Really the way that I got involved as an individual with in-person organizing in the city of Chicago was because my best friend and I were sending various volunteering and mutual aid opportunities to each other a lot on Instagram, and decided to hold ourselves accountable to going to those and making little influencer-style videos. Like “come with me to this new restaurant in Chicago,” but it’s for mutual aid, right, to make that feel a little bit more accessible for people who, similarly, were not sure where to plug in.

Because the violence that we’re seeing in this moment is a more public and broader violence that has its roots in really all of American history, and there are plenty of people who have been subject to this state violence as long as, or longer, than our country has existed. And so I think that the place to start plugging in is by showing up to learn from the people that are directly impacted, that have been doing this work, or other people who have been supporting people who are directly impacted.

 

carmichael

Is there anyone that was particularly pivotal for you, that you met and learned from? Or an organization?

 

COHEN

In terms of an entry point, there’s an organizer named Mariame Kaba who has a couple of books out, one co-authored with Kelly Hayes, who is Chicago-based, and who also just released an essay collection. And I think their community focus and their emphasis on movement building as a very long-term project has been extremely important to me and informed a lot of my organizing. And one of the most full-circle moments was at a protest that I worked with a number of other people to help organize back in September or October, and Kelly being present at that protest, because she was one of the first people that I followed who really got me thinking about abolition as a lens, and one to take really seriously.

Beyond that, I’ve met so many people who have really inspired me. There’s a number of freelance journalists that I’ve met that I think are doing incredible work. People with Block Club and Unraveled out of Chicago have done such important work. There’s a freelancer that I partner with a lot and amplify a lot, named Wali Khan, who is the only immigrant I know who’s doing such front-lines reporting on ICE violence. And I think our friendship has been very impactful to me. And then a number of the other organizers in Chicago, David Black, and people who have no appetite for, or safety in, being particularly public-facing, but who have just shown up for their neighbors over and over again, and have been doing it longer than I have. I have found immense, maybe joy, certainly community, in these organizing spaces, and I think that’s important for people to know and understand, because I think we feel very isolated and helpless right now. And I think that plugging in, even if you’re not sure where to start, is a powerful counter to those feelings.

 

carmichael

Sometimes I say that a radical act of protest in this day and age is just feeling awkward in a group of people that are doing something that you agree with.

 

COHEN

Yep. Showing up anyway.

 

 

carmichael

So, something you’ve talked a lot about is fear, and who really should be afraid right now and who should be out in the streets. Tell me a little bit more about how you think about that.

 

COHEN

There are so many people with privilege that are hiding behind this subjective fear of a hypothetical reality that might come for them that looks very similar to the actual reality that many people are living in this moment. Particularly when I was in big law, right, there are so many people that are worried about career implications and finances. There are so many people in this country who are afraid to leave their houses, even to go to work right now, because they might just be disappeared off the streets[…] White people are worried about safety if they show up to a protest, when there are five-year-olds that are getting taken off the streets because they are Latino.

And so it’s kind of this hypothetical fear that’s really, really crucial to ideas of empire, and to pressuring privileged people to accept a kind of twofold humanity, right? The idea that state violence is normal for some people and is both abnormal—extremely abnormal, and an okay reason to be so afraid as to opt out—for other groups of people. And those things can’t coexist. Like it can’t both be so abnormal when a police officer murders a white woman that it is in the consciousness of over 80 percent of the electorate—that can’t be true, and also that it’s not safe for white people to be out in the streets. Those things simply don’t coexist. They are inherently in conflict with each other. It is crucial that people with more privilege show up in this moment, because the risks to them are so much lower. And even the lower-risk harm that can happen, like being handcuffed or being pepper sprayed or similar—and the comparatively very rare extreme harm that we’ve seen twice now, where white people are murdered by the state—those things drive so much attention and outrage, whereas 32 people died in ICE detention last year, at least five have died in ICE detention already this year, and it does not generate the same kind of attention and outrage. And so all of that is to say, and maybe this is the lede, and I buried it: People who the system is supposed to work for are the ones who need to be out protesting the way that the system is working. Because they are more protected and because they are amplified.

 

carmichael

One of the things I heard you say, sometimes it can feel existential for people with privilege to be handcuffed. It can feel like an existential threat to be pepper-sprayed, and that’s a misunderstanding of the situation. It is not existential. There’s a much greater existential harm to other people.

 

COHEN

Yeah, I think a lot of white people need to grow the fuck up. Like, frankly, I think that we need to be serious. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’d say, “You know what, I’m not willing to bear the risk that I get pepper-sprayed as my neighbors are being disappeared to work camps.” Then say that. But don’t say “this is now comparatively unsafe for me.” Don’t hide behind the tragic but incredibly infrequent instances where the state murders white people when they murder non-white people constantly and that’s just accepted as normal.

 

carmichael

And one of the things you talked about in your video was opting into fear. And I thought that was a really interesting phrase. I’m curious, do you ever get scared?

 

COHEN

Oh, yeah, but my fear is subjective. It’s rooted in this kind of nebulous fear of, “Oh my gosh, I am out in a place where harm could befall me.” I get scared when I fly sometimes too, right? That doesn’t mean it’s reasonable.

 

carmichael

What do you do, when you do feel afraid? Do you just tell yourself that it’s unreasonable, or is there something else, like, is there a tactic that you have in the moment to help calm yourself down?

 

COHEN

I tend to get frightened beforehand, much more than I get frightened when I’m in it. And I suspect that is true for most people. I think that the fear is much greater when we are deciding whether or not to show up than it is once we actually get there. And so in the before, when I feel myself getting afraid, the tactic that I use is to remove myself from the reality of the situation, to treat it as a hypothetical, and say, if “I was presented with this as a hypothetical, given how I think about myself, given who I think I am, and the kind of person that I think I am, how would I predict that I would respond?” When I was in school learning about the Civil Rights Movement, what did I think of myself? Where did I think that I would be, as someone with privilege? And if I think about myself that way, what do I have to do in order to be honest with myself, right? What do I have to do for my self-conception to be correct?

I was arrested for civil disobedience back in August, and it was such a low-stakes, low-risk activity, again, because I am white and very, very insulated, very privileged. And the night before, I was so nervous about doing it, and that was how I calm myself down, is I ran through it and said, “Okay, if I present myself with this hypothetical, I have the chance to draw a lot of attention to a place where people are being detained without access to food and beds and hygiene products, and so many people in Chicago don’t even know that it’s happening, not because activists are not trying to tell them, but because white people with big megaphones are not putting themselves on the line, right?” Of course, I would say to myself that I would do that. So I have to do it, even if I feel nervous about it now or scared or whatever else like that— Fear is not an escape hatch to let you maintain your self-conception as a good person. Because we don’t think of ourselves as [saying] “I would do the right thing, so long as it wasn’t scary at all,” right?

 

carmichael

And it sounds like what you’re doing is running through a personal trolley problem, and then appealing to who you are.

 

COHEN

Yeah, I think a lot about accurate self-conception. I think that we let ourselves off the hook. One of my least popular takes, I think, is that a lot of particularly white people, a lot of people with privilege, wealthy people, I think we could stand to be quite a bit harder on ourselves, to expect a lot more from ourselves. And I think that is a very unpopular take in this moment. There’s all of this, “we need to be gentle with ourselves.” And we do need to be gentle with ourselves and with other people. But that’s not the same thing as letting yourself off the hook.

 

carmichael

The Greg Bovino video was probably psychically satisfying for a lot of people to see. Something I think about, and not only is this dissent in the streets, but this is a content war. ICE has a mandate to record videos. Ryan Broderick wrote about how he was in Minneapolis and he saw an ICE agent holding a gun and a phone at the same time. And your Greg Bovino yelling thing did go viral. And I’m curious, what does dissent look like online, when this is a content war, and also the algorithms are owned by these oligarchs? It’s a lot to parse through.

 

COHEN

It is, and it’s a great question. It’s where I think a lot of us should be focusing. I think, to be totally honest, one of the things that makes the content war so difficult—It’s not just the algorithmic constraints. It’s that we are rapidly approaching, and perhaps even in already, a moment where the most effective kind of nonviolent activism is being branded as illegal, up to and including being called domestic terrorism or criminal conspiracy by the government. And so there are a lot of people that are not going to feel comfortable going online and saying, slow down ICE operations in whatever non-violent way you can, right?

And property damage is not violence. But if you go on the internet and say that, you’re putting yourself at risk, beyond just the algorithmic constraints. And I would argue that that’s worth it, and I have been trying very hard to use my platform, not to encourage people to go out and use any particular strategy or tactic in their resistance, but to name for people over and over again, that it is not violence to put your body in between an ICE officer and someone that they are trying to disappear. That is actually quite admirable, and the violence is the disappearance. It is not violence to block a car. It is not even violence, frankly, to pop a tire. That’s an object. This is a person that’s being disappeared. And so having those kinds of conversations—even from just a theoretical discourse, like what is the appropriate or moral way to respond, not calling anyone to do anything specific—we can’t have those on the internet. And so I think that plays a big role in considerations about the content war.

I think that the Bovino video is a good example, because it’s such a pressure release for people. And I don’t think that there’s anything inherently wrong about posting pressure releases and making very clear for white people, especially after ICE murdering two white people, that we should recognize that we still are cloaked in very deep protection at all times. But where that becomes an issue is when the kinds of pressure releases that many content creators make are viewed as activism because they are not. And so figuring out where to straddle the line, especially as legitimate activism gets ever closer to being criminalized by the government.

I think the algorithms, and the corporate capture of social media and news broadly in the United States right now, play a major role in how we think about getting information out. But I think that an under-acknowledged facet or consideration is that the government is rapidly moving to criminalize discussion about resistance and to pressure private employers to fire people who talk about resistance in any way. There was this Fox News article that argued that Renee Good’s filming of the ICE officer was more confrontational and violent than an act of civil disobedience in the civil rights movement. That this was not a situation where someone was there, you know, willingly getting arrested and putting their body on the line, but that they were instead impeding federal operations. There’s no room to talk about what resistance actually looks like right now, because we’re just in a media ecosystem where people are straight-up lying, and consumers believe it because they have to, in order to fit the narrative that they have about the United States and about themselves. And so I think that one of the reasons why things aren’t breaking through is partly because people are afraid to say the things that are true online.

 

carmichael

When you were describing the things that the government is talking about as violent, like slashing a tire—that’s just what some people do in a breakup. And you said, what was it exactly? That we can’t talk about what resistance looks like because everyone is lying.

 

COHEN

Not everyone, but we can’t talk about what resistance looks like because the government has created this world—and I want to be very clear, we can talk about what resistance looks like. But a lot of people are scared to talk about what resistance looks like, because the government has created a world in which to be honest about what’s happening is easy to criminalize. And so they lie about what the Civil Rights movement looked like, and they don’t even have to lie that hard, because so many people are just unaware anyway. The statistics about Martin Luther King Jr’s popularity at his death, the statistics about how much people approved of tactics like sit-ins and the marches. We are living in this time, where people are lying about what resistance and protest looks like. The government’s fake website about January 6, just totally reinventing history. And so people are afraid to say, “Hey, that’s not true.” The Emperor wears no clothes. And also, it is moral to interrupt the government as they disappear your neighbors to work camps. The government wants to say it’s illegal. There are a lot of people that are too scared to talk about that online because they don’t want the digital footprint. And I think that, I honestly think that people that have much smaller digital footprints perhaps should not say that online, right? Like maybe the risk reward is not worth it to put yourself in a situation where you might get swept up in the random net of the government being mad about people saying things. But the large political content people like opting out of saying that, and I think that’s a bit ridiculous.

 

carmichael

 Like Pod Save America should say it.

 

 

COHEN

[laughter] I’ll hold my breath.

 

 

carmichael

One of the things, or the big debates that I’ve seen is what is and isn’t settled fact in this country, in terms of what Trump is able to do, how powerful he actually is, and how much space we actually have to push back. I’m curious your take on that, because you are talking about this increased criminalization. How far do you think we’ve gone, and how much room do you think we have to navigate and push back and change the facts of this country still?

 

COHEN

I think we are in a very bad place. I think it has happened much less rapidly than a lot of people care to admit, because there’s so much tribalism in the country that the people who see how bad things are are much more likely to be Democratic voters. And Democratic voters are much less likely to admit that the policies of Democratic presidents have directly contributed to where we are, as well to the build-out of the immigration system and the carceral nature of it, the extreme funding of ICE, the build-out of surveillance and focus on “law and order” that’s always been weaponized against particularly Black people in this country[...] but I do think that there is still tons of room for dislodging us from that path.

The general strike that we’re seeing in Minneapolis now is an example of the kinds of tactics that we have not really seen so far, but that are particularly effective. General strikes are so effective in resistance to a deeply unpopular government policy or system. They almost never happen in the United States. And so I think there’s so much more room for economic pressure. The people that are calling the shots are overwhelmingly these tech billionaires, who, if they start to actually lose money, will back off. There are all of these economic levers that can be pulled, but I think that getting people to pull them will require an honest understanding of where we are and what we’re seeing, and I don’t think that we’re there yet. Especially in the talking-head spaces, so I think that can make people feel more demoralized, because all the people that they see commenting on their various news channels are just denying reality at every turn.

 

carmichael

So if I’m hearing you correctly, one of the things that we can do is convince people how bad it is?

 

COHEN

Absolutely, and also do that in conjunction with asking ourselves, okay, if it is this bad, what am I supposed to be doing? What did I think I would be doing?

 

carmichael

And you answer that question by saying, I’m out there protesting all—I don’t want to put that word in your mouth, but in your videos, it seems like you’re protesting all the time.

 

COHEN

I certainly wouldn’t say all the time. And I think we need to be engaging in more disruptive protests. And that’s something that I’m trying to hold myself to in 2026 also. Because it feels sometimes a little bit like protesting outside of a resettlement office before the Trail of Tears. That’s certainly better than being like, “that’s good, and I do think that we should be stealing people’s land,” but given the immensity of the harm faced by other people, is that enough? I don’t know. I think that I do know, actually. No, it’s not.

 

carmichael

So the question is, and I feel like this was less tactical than honestly talking through some of the larger ecosystem around this, but what does dissent look like right now? And from what I’ve heard in this conversation, dissent looks like being very honest with yourself. Ask yourself who you think you are, what that person would do in that moment, find people to do it with, and do it.

 

COHEN

I think that’s a fantastic way to distill it down.