Conspiracism, corruption, lawlessness, and raw force are signatures of an elected president shrugging off the duties and constraints of office. Violent occupation of American cities and the ruin of rudimentary moral order have driven residents onto the streets to witness rampant cruelty, humiliation, and terror. Popular resistance, a necessary and justifiable response to the disfigurement of public life, takes several forms, “bearing witness” among them.   

Witnessing is a compelling personal response to acts of cruelty impossible to bear: an act of conscience. The terrain of resistance is around home, and witnesses identify themselves as neighbors. They know that here, as in natural disasters and much else, neighbors hold our lives in their hands.

Witnessing today comes in response to the violence of heavily armed and masked agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency under orders to find, arrest, detain, imprison, and deport people they take to be unlawful immigrants. On the ground, witnesses alert neighbors to the presence of agents and advise them of their presumptive rights. They collect evidence of the brutality, recording as agents terrorize, assault, and kill with impunity (and immunity). They film as ICE pulls residents from cars, invades schools, stores and workplaces, and breaks into homes without warrants. They know what follows: children separated from parents, imprisonment in camps closed to oversight, deportation to countries to suffer torture, imprisonment, and death; and disappearance without adjudication or dependable official records.

Witnesses do not only record the violence, they give it meaning. The president makes staggering claims to own reality. A master of conspiracism, he casts undocumented immigration as a terrorist invasion and witnesses as insurrectionists. Witnesses broadcast the true intention behind brutality and terror: to acclimate people to domination.

The phrase “bearing witness” underscores personal agency and the weightiness of reporting from the zone of transgression. “Bearing” contrasts with the limited role assigned to witnesses in legal proceedings, for example: to answer counsels’ questions and nothing more – no interpretation of facts, no account of the meaning of events, no judgment.

Bearing witness can be distinguished from the animating dynamics and aims of more familiar forms of popular resistance. Marches and demonstrations are the work of people who identify themselves as citizens of a democracy calling out violations in terms of constitutionalism, lawful exercises of authority, and disregard for rudimentary public interests. These protests take aim at a president bent on delegitimating and destroying governing institutions, at willful “ungoverning.” Witnesses may also be protesters or activists, but as witnesses they do not cast themselves as good citizens defending democracy in the public interest. They are recorders. They recognize sheer brutality and expose it.

In all this the act of bearing witness diverges from the animating dynamics and aims of more familiar forms of popular resistance. Many self-organized protests target specific local sites to underscore specific, egregious acts by friends of those in power. They gather at Tesla dealerships to protest Elon Musk’s indiscriminate gutting of whole departments of government and mass layoffs of federal workers under cover of “efficiency.” They gather at airports, pressuring Avelo Airlines to stop transporting prisoners of the regime to torture sites abroad. The objective is to call out specific abuses of power.

Mass demonstrations planned and promoted by activist groups and organized nation-wide have a different objective. “No Kings” calls out people with a wide range of reasons for protesting – assaults on freedom of speech, sudden withholding of public benefits, violence against trans people – that taken together capture the extent of the damage done by this regime. The kaleidoscope of posters, costumes, chants, and speeches delivers the message of inclusiveness. All-embracing shows of resistance make the frightening destruction of people’s security of expectation everywhere and all the way down tangible. Scale and scope are critical because organizers’ aim is for demonstrators (and others heartened by the display of numbers): to travel from the street to the voting booth. Mass popular resistance is directed at restoring constitutional democracy through elections.

Every form of popular resistance takes courage, for every exhibition of resistance is met with some form of retribution. Every exhibition of popular resistance has value, which is why it is important to identify what animates each and what is the hoped-for result. Familiar demonstrations of popular resistance, large and small, look to shape the future by precipitating political and institutional recovery and reform. Witnessing, in contrast, looks to save neighbors in the moment. Those bearing witness do more, of course: by documenting these moments they speak to memory and to history. They enable others to reconstruct why and how a grotesque regime did its work. The hope is that the horror of a neighbor being dragged from a car and shot in the face will survive.

Witnesses today join the company of others – Japanese hibakusha, survivors of the Holocaust, and many more – who charged themselves with telling the story of what happened to their neighbors. Like them, those bearing witness in American cities today are animated by revulsion at what the word “alien” permits. Like them, witnesses demonstrate “humanity.”