What the history of U.S. protests illuminates about today

January 28, 2026·28 min·2 clips

Do you want to be a freedom freeloader? We have a lot of freedom freeloaders who reap the benefits of other people putting themselves on the line.

OK, Minnesota is the doorway. B.A. Parker starts with the tension in Minneapolis after ICE interactions with protesters came to a head, first around Renee Macklin Good and then around Alex Preddy. Preddy was thirty-seven, an ICU nurse protesting ICE when, according to the transcript, an immigration officer shot and killed him Saturday morning a little after 9. The present feels raw, and the episode does not soften it. Then the story moves to West Virginia coal country, where workers lived under companies that controlled almost everything around them. The guest links European serfdom to American labor systems, including sharecropping and company control in mining towns. Land mattered. So did who owned the homes, schools, churches, stores, and the paper workers were paid with instead of real money. That paper was scripts. A worker could spend it at the company store, see debts written down, and still walk away with almost nothing. Unions became one of the few ways workers could push back together. Yellow dog contracts tried to shut that down by blocking union membership and wage negotiation, with eviction waiting for workers who resisted. Then Mother Jones enters the story, not as a tidy textbook symbol, but as a little grandmother with white hair and a fierce presence. By the end, protest, labor, policing, and corporate control feel like parts of the same old fight over who gets heard.

As heard by us

A sharp look at protest as both present crisis and American pattern.

Code Switch ties the Minnesota protests to a longer American pattern of labor, exploitation, and collective resistance. It starts with the immediate anger around ICE, then broadens into company towns, scripts, unions, and Mother Jones, treating protest as a response to old power…

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Why you'd press play

If you want protest history that speaks to the news, start here.

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