When Joe Rogan compares your tactics to that of the Gestapo, your rock-solid coalition might be in trouble. In January, the popular podcaster, who famously interviewed Donald Trump in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election and endorsed him, expressed his disgust at the tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on American streets.

“Are we really going to be the Gestapo? ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?”

And Rogan is not alone.

Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton denounced “Gestapo-type stuff happening in the streets of America” after the killing of protester Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, joining other politicians, such as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who have made that connection.

But the critics who flinch at the scenes out of Minneapolis need not have traveled so far back or far away for a combustible example of a clash between the power of the state and the public.

In a time before cellphones but with photographers documenting the scenes, American law enforcement acted as an occupying force rather than protectors. The citizens they came after were simply asserting their rights — to live where they wanted, to access shops and hotels and jobs they were overqualified for, to vote.

Those citizens were joined by allies who may not have been the targets of a government intent on control and subjugation but who still recognized that attacks on some were attacks on the very idea of America itself.

Ironically, during the civil rights movement, it was the federal government that provided a........

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