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REVOLUTION NOW
There is a man you should know. His name is Russell Ellis. He grew up in the mountains of North Carolina inside a home where racism was not a flaw to be corrected but a foundation to be built upon. He was raised, as he puts it plainly, not merely around racists, but by them. He served his country in uniform as an Army combat veteran. He came home, looked at what he had been taught, looked at what he had seen, and made a decision that most people never make: he chose to be honest about it.
Under the name Jolly Good Ginger, he built an audience of millions not through performance or gimmick but through the rarest of currencies in the current age — plain truth delivered without apology. He is white, Southern, a veteran, a self-described redneck, and one of the most morally serious voices in American public life. When a man with his biography stands up and says it is time for revolution, you do not scroll past it. You stop. You listen. Because men like Russell Ellis do not say that word lightly.
Visit Jolly on Instagram He said it last week. He said it because of Delaney Hall.
In Newark, New Jersey, there is a private detention facility operated by the GEO Group on behalf of the federal government. It holds approximately nine hundred human beings. Detainees inside launched a hunger strike over conditions that attorneys, Democratic members of Congress, and the detainees themselves describe as inedible food, denied medical care, and quarters unfit for animals. The Trump administration’s response was to call these people “the worst of the worst” and to deny everything.
When New Jersey’s Democratic Governor, Mikie Sherrill, attempted to enter the facility and see for herself, she was turned away at the gate. Federal officers refused entry to the elected executive of the state in which the facility sits. She was not permitted to inspect a facility holding nine hundred people on her own soil.
Protesters gathered. They came in the hundreds, then the thousands. They came peacefully. The New Jersey Attorney General herself would later acknowledge the crowds were “overwhelmingly peaceful.” And what did they receive in return for their lawful assembly? ICE agents in full combat gear deployed pepper spray, pepper balls, and tear gas. Senator Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed. Protesters were thrown to the ground. One was shoved into oncoming traffic.
Governor Sherrill then sent in the state police. Not to open the facility. Not to demand accountability. To clear the streets. A mandatory curfew was imposed within a half-mile of the facility. And when the curfew took effect, riot police and mounted officers moved against crowds gathered outside the exclusion zone — people who were already beyond the boundary, already complying, already standing exactly where they were told to stand. Thirteen minutes after the warning was issued, the horses came. The Department of Homeland Security celebrated this on its official account, proudly posting footage of protesters kettled by law enforcement on all sides, as if the systematic containment of peaceful Americans was a trophy to be displayed.
This is not a border crisis. This is not a crime wave. This is the government of the United States deploying military force against its own citizens for the act of witnessing.
Now let us speak plainly about the party that calls itself the opposition.
Mikie Sherrill is a Democrat. She sent in the state police. She imposed the curfew. She stood at a podium and told the “overwhelmingly peaceful protesters” to lower the temperature, as though the temperature were their fault.
Abigail Spanberger is the Democratic Governor of Virginia. She has issued executive orders restricting ICE on state property that her own Democratic lawmakers call meaningless — orders with no enforcement mechanism, no remedy, no teeth. She vetoed legislation that would have given those protections actual force, citing legal inconvenience. Before she was governor, when she was a congresswoman, she voted to fund ICE and issued a press release praising it, calling herself a border security hawk and saying the American people were “right to expect a secure border.” The same Abigail Spanberger. The same woman. Different office. Different audience. Same calculation.
This is the point Russell Ellis is making when he says this is not a MAGA versus Democrat problem. He is right. The Democratic Party is not your rescue. It is the other management team of the same enterprise. It offers you a softer voice and the same result. It promises to protect your rights while voting to fund the agencies stripping them. It condemns the violence outside Delaney Hall while ordering the horses that caused it.
And if you are waiting for the midterms to change this, consider: even if the Democrats sweep every contested seat in November, you will be, as Ellis says, right back here within a year or two. The machine does not stop because one party gains a committee chairmanship. The detention facilities do not empty because of a press release. The men who threw Senator Kim to the pavement are not disciplined because a different party controls the House. Power does not restrain itself because you voted correctly.
These are not new observations. Thomas Paine made them in 1776 in plain language for plain people, because plain people were the ones being asked to bleed for a principle their rulers kept betraying. He did not write Common Sense to flatter his readers. He wrote it to wake them up. He understood that the moment a population decides to keep waiting for permission to be free, freedom is already lost.
We are at that moment.
So what is to be done? Not what you fear this essay is about to say. There will be no call here for arms or barricades or fire in the streets. That is not a moral scruple — it is a strategic one. The tyrant needs your violence. He has prepared for your violence. His entire apparatus — the riot gear, the kettling, the DHS social media account crowing about protesters surrounded on all sides — is designed to justify itself against your violence. Do not give him the proof he is manufacturing. Do not become the riot he needs you to be. The moment you throw a rock, nine hundred detainees’ stories disappear and yours begins. Do not hand him that exchange.
But understand this: patience is also a form of surrender. Politeness in the face of tyranny is collaboration. Waiting is a choice, and it is the choice the tyrant is counting on you to make.
So here is what revolution actually looks like.
Stop paying for it. Federal tax resistance is as American as the document that founded this nation. The colonists did not merely argue against taxation without representation — they refused it. That tradition is yours. Consult a tax attorney, understand the consequences, and decide what you are willing to risk. But know that a government funded by your compliance has no reason to stop.
Stop feeding it. Every dollar you spend with a corporation that lobbies for this administration, funds its political apparatus, or profits from its detention contracts is a dollar cast as a vote for what you are watching happen. GEO Group is a publicly traded company. Its shareholders are institutions managing your money. Ask them. Demand divestment. Move your accounts. Starve the machine of your participation wherever you can name the transaction.
Stop being polite about it. When your neighbor tells you the people at Delaney Hall deserve what they get, do not nod and change the subject for the sake of the dinner party. Tell them what you know. Tell them about the hunger strike. Tell them about the senator who was gassed. Tell them about the curfew imposed on people standing outside the curfew zone. Tell them that a country that does this to nine hundred people it has decided do not matter will eventually decide that you do not matter either. Silence in the presence of injustice is not neutrality. It is a vote.
Show up. Not on social media. In person, in public, at the offices of your elected representatives, at shareholder meetings, at school board sessions, at city council chambers. Democracy does not live in your phone. It lives in rooms where people can be seen and counted. Fill those rooms. Bring your neighbors. Bring your discomfort. Leave your politeness at the door.
Organize without waiting for leaders. The professional activist class will arrive with their agendas and their donor lists. You do not need them. You need your block, your congregation, your union hall, your bar, your bowling league. You need the ten people you actually know and trust, each of whom knows ten more. That is not a metaphor. That is how power has always been built from below.
Document everything. The government is counting on you not watching. Prove it wrong. Every incident at Delaney Hall that reached public consciousness did so because someone had a phone and the presence of mind to use it. You are the press. Act like it.
Protect the vulnerable directly. While the political class debates, there are people in your community who need attorneys, who need to know their rights, who need someone to stand between them and a van with federal markings. Find the legal aid organizations. Fund them. Volunteer with them. Be the body that stands there.
Russell Ellis is a man who was taught to hate and chose not to. A man who served a country that failed him and called it anyway. A man who stood at the gates of Delaney Hall with a bullhorn because he calculated that the cost of standing there was less than the cost of staying home. He calls this our 1776. He is not wrong.
In 1776, the men and women who built this country did not wait for a majority. They did not wait for the king to change his mind. They did not wait for the next election cycle. They decided that there was a line, and that the line had been crossed, and that crossing it without consequence was not something a free people could permit.
The line has been crossed. Elected governors are turned away from facilities holding nine hundred people on their own soil. Senators are gassed. Peaceful crowds are kettled and the footage is posted as propaganda. Democratic governors send in the horses. Democratic governors who once funded the agency now issue executive orders their own lawmakers call theater.
There is no cavalry coming. There is no election that fixes this by itself. There is no polite conversation that moves a government this far gone back toward decency.
There is only you. And what you decide to do next.
No Crowns. No Masters.