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Melting ICE
As protesters demonstrated in Los Angeles and across the country on June 14, holding signs for “No Kings” day to oppose the Trump administration and its immigration crackdown, Mady Castigan wanted to try something different. Heading toward a federal building in the city’s Westwood neighborhood where U.S. Marines were patrolling on the orders of the president, the 29-year-old independent journalist was armed with little more than a loudspeaker and a video camera. Then, she clicked play. “G.I., why are you here? You should be at home with your honey, eating hamburgers and drinking milkshakes,” blared a woman speaking in a Vietnamese accent. “Defect, G.I. It is a very good idea to leave a sinking ship. Your people do not like you.”
If Castigan’s stunt sounded like an act of psychological warfare, that’s because it was drawn from one. The recording, lifted from the 2004 video game Battlefield Vietnam, featured the words of Trinh Thi Ngo, better known to American forces fighting in the Vietnam War as Hanoi Hannah, the announcer who read Communist government radio propaganda designed to sink U.S. morale. Footage Castigan filmed of her action that went viral on TikTok showed a group of uniformed service members listening to the recording. One of them can briefly be seen smiling, but as the sounds continue, they seem to be doing their best to try to tune it out.
“I started blaring this propaganda that a lot of people would find very distasteful from the Vietnam War, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it because it’s a fully legal act of First Amendment protest,” Castigan told me. “It definitely was designed to generate a viral and large impact. I do think it’s a good idea for people to get creative.”
As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detain people across the country in an aggressive attempt to meet President Donald Trump’s goal of carrying out the largest deportation in U.S. history, activists like Castigan are trying to think outside the box. As they seek to shame the authorities or disrupt ICE’s work, many are employing forms of nonviolent resistance that are more creative than just marching. Some are digital activists working to track the authorities, identify them, and publicize their raids on social media; others are camping outside hotels and making noise in order to disrupt agents’ sleep. Whatever the method, their actions are part of a long tradition of what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as “creative protest” when speaking about the 1960 sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. “You have taken the undying and passionate yearning for freedom,” King told the first students to stage a sit-in there, “and filtered it in your own soul and fashioned it into a creative protest that is destined to be one of the glowing epics of our time.”
If Castigan’s stunt sounded like an act of psychological warfare, that’s because it was drawn from one. The recording, lifted from the 2004 video game Battlefield Vietnam, featured the words of Trinh Thi Ngo, better known to American forces fighting in the Vietnam War as Hanoi Hannah, the announcer who read Communist government radio propaganda designed to sink U.S. morale. Footage Castigan filmed of her action that went viral on TikTok showed a group of uniformed service members listening to the recording. One of them can briefly be seen smiling, but as the sounds continue, they seem to be doing their best to try to tune it out.
“I started blaring this propaganda that a lot of people would find very distasteful from the Vietnam War, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it because it’s a fully legal act of First Amendment protest,” Castigan told me. “It definitely was designed to generate a viral and large impact. I do think it’s a good idea for people to get creative.”
As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detain people across the country in an aggressive attempt to meet President Donald Trump’s goal of carrying out the largest deportation in U.S. history, activists like Castigan are trying to think outside the box. As they seek to shame the authorities or disrupt ICE’s work, many are employing forms of nonviolent resistance that are more creative than just marching. Some are digital activists working to track the authorities, identify them, and publicize their raids on social media; others are camping outside hotels and making noise in order to disrupt agents’ sleep. Whatever the method, their actions are part of a long tradition of what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as “creative protest” when speaking about the 1960 sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. “You have taken the undying and passionate yearning for freedom,” King told the first students to stage a sit-in there, “and filtered it in your own soul and fashioned it into a creative protest that is destined to be one of the glowing epics of our time.”
https://archive.is/hxfHq#selection-1053.0-1189.326