Another Execution by Death Squad in Minneapolis

As I said nearly a year ago, it's clarifying when you decide that those who are doing harm are simply evil. You stop looking for explanations for their terrible violence or goals for their open criminality and you accept that sometimes people are just evil and should be treated like they're evil. We are one year into the second administration of Donald Trump, and we are reaping the whirlwind of the evil he and his monstrous enablers commit. It is killing this country in ways big and small, one of those cancers that metastasized so quickly that you realize it's gone from your skin to your bones before you ever even identified the disease. 

This weekend in Minneapolis, we saw the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end of the Trump administration's barbaric war against immigrants and anyone who opposes the war against immigrants. On Friday, the general strike that had been called in Minnesota as a response to the murder of Renee Good was a huge success, with thousands marching in the -20 temperatures and hundreds of businesses, schools, and offices closing in support. On Saturday, the morning murder of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents (who have no reason at all nor the legal authority to even be in Minneapolis, which isn't within 100 miles of a border) was such a brazen act of criminality that it shook even those not previously shaken by Good's killing (which was equally brazen but motherfuckers who have drunk the MAGA chowder deeply couldn't get their heads around it and decided that they couldn't see what all of us with eyes could). 

The videos of Pretti's killing, shot as many as ten times while on his knees and then on his back, left no room at all through which you could squeeze your ideological blinders. It was clear that the gun Pretti legally was carrying was taken from him before the shooting and that he had never had it in his hand to threaten the BP officers who had shoved a woman to the ground and pepper-sprayed her and Pretti. It doesn't help the disinformation campaign in full swing now that Pretti was an ICU nurse at a VA hospital, beloved by his co-workers and patients. Every single video analysis shows that he was filming ICE and BP actions as a legal observer (as all observers are), not interfering in any way, and the porcine chodes in their douche vests and punk ass masks decided to fuck with him and the woman near him. The chodes surround him and beat him as he tries to cover up from the blows and then one of the chodes pistol whips him after another chode takes his gun. Every single video analysis shows the gun being taken. Every single video shows he was not a threat. Every single video shows he was fucking executed like it was a mob hit, just like Renee Good. The Border Patrol and ICE are a bunch of gutless thugs who want to murder some libs and don't have the balls to try without a uniform on. 

And yet...the simpering, smarmy fuck stains from Homeland Security and right-wing media insist that Pretti was a "domestic terrorist" who was "assaulting" the murderous BP officers, who, as dick dribble of doom Greg Bovino said, are the real "victims" and that Pretti and Good were "suspects." Except they weren't. See, to be a "suspect," one has to have a crime to suspect them of committing prior to approaching them. We all know who the criminals were and they had taped over badges and hidden faces. Along with Bovino's bullshit, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti was there "to perpetuate violence" like he was a puppy that whined too much, and slithering vermin fucker Stephen Miller did his dance of disinformation like the Nazi spoogebucket he is. 

But it's not working this time. For one thing, the people of Minneapolis are goddamned warriors and they deserve every bit of support they can get. They haven't backed down, and, if anything, each assault against their city and their fellow Minnesotans has made them even more pissed off and engaged. The other thing is that the Trumpistas went too far in condemning Pretti for having a gun, which, again, he had a legal permit to carry. FBI Director and man who looks like he just sharted in front of Sydney Sweeney, Kash Patel, said on some Sunday gab show, "You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple. You don't have a right to break the law." 

Except Pretti wasn't breaking any laws, and you can, in fact, bring a firearm to a protest if you live in a state that allows open or concealed carry of firearms. And that's gotten the gun nuts all up in, well, arms.  And that's made them take another look at the videos of the execution of Pretti. And they don't like what they see. See, MAGA and Trump only succeed when people don't have any actual beliefs, but gun humpers are true believers in their perverse interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. Fuck with that and they will let you fucking know. These are the pricks who worshipped Kyle Rittenhouse bringing his assault weapon to murder a protester. They have one thing they are consistent on, so, hey, welcome to the party, assholes. Yeah, it is constitutional overreach. Now let's work together to stop it.

You need to remember, though, that we are dealing with evil motherfuckers in the Trump administration. And they are going to keep escalating until something, somehow stops them. I don't think we can last until January of next year, assuming that Democrats win back at least the House in the midterm elections. That's why I say it's the end of the beginning. If they can make it worse, they will. 

But, goddamn, this murder and the blatant, obvious lies and the reaction to those lies (including the New York Times saying flat out that the Trump administration is "lying") and the passion of the people in Minneapolis and other places under attack, makes me think it might be the beginning of the end. Hell, Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats have said they will not support DHS funding in this week's appropriations vote, which might end up partially shutting down the government. 

So maybe, just maybe, it's the beginning of the end. Surely, there will be more violence. Idiots with guns will always be idiots. And surely there will be more resistance. We are shaken but unbowed.

And it all comes back to Trump, too. If he decides the optics of execution by death squad aren't helpful to whatever the fuck he things he's doing, then he might fire Bovino or Noem as a sacrifice to save face. But, most likely, he'll figure out what the most dickish, evil thing he can do is, and just fucking do that.

Martin Luther King Would Still Fuck MAGA's Shit Up

It's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, or "That day when conservatives say that one line from King and pretend that's all he ever said." Or, really, considering how the entirety of the MAGA movement, pissy politicians and prickish pundits, are simply denying that civil rights laws are needed, maybe they'll just ignore King altogether. 

It might be best for the motherfuckers to not fake it because, see, they get so much wrong about the "content of character" line from MLK. Just as a reminder, he most famously said it in his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963 and this is the full line: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." 

The way that line is interpreted so often by the right is that non-white people will somehow magically earn the right not to be judged by skin color by white people. Except there's a flip side to that, and it's something King would expand on in later work in the last few years of his too-short life. See, it's not just non-white people who are judged by their skin color, but also whites by non-whites. White people were (and are) the fucking problem when it comes to race relations, and King was also implying that they needed to step up if they didn't want color to be the most defining characteristic.

In a keynote speech at the American Psychological Association's annual convention in September 1967, King spoke about the role of social scientists in the fight for civil rights, and he was pretty goddamn clear about who needed some character-building:

"White America needs to understand that it is poisoned to its soul by racism and the understanding needs to be carefully documented and consequently more difficult to reject. The present crisis arises because although it is historically imperative that our society take the next step to equality, we find ourselves psychologically and socially imprisoned. All too many white Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions-the Negro himself.

"White America is seeking to keep the walls of segregation substantially intact while the evolution of society and the Negro's desperation is causing them to crumble. The white majority, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change, is resisting and producing chaos while complaining that if there were no chaos orderly change would come."

Later in the speech, talking about rioting and discussing how the product of it was damage to property and not people despite the violence against the bodies of Black people, King quoted Victor Hugo: "If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."

And he explained, "The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man."

King would fuck MAGA's shit up because he would look at what's happening in Minneapolis and point out that the real criminals aren't the workers and parents and children trying to live meaningful, peaceful lives. No, you can figure out who the villains are by the violence they use to terrify and punish people for just existing. And I believe he would demand widespread civil disobedience, leading it himself. 

As I've said every MLK Day for over 20 years, King was a radical, and the effort to erase his radicalism is one of the successes of the conservative revision of American history. While our hateful leaders pretend that we moved beyond the need for laws protecting the rights of non-whites, as MAGA freaks irrationally scream about "diversity" like it means "holocaust," we have to remember that the job of a society is to lift people up, or it's not worth saving.

Random Thoughts on a Murder and the Motherfuckers Who Are Responsible

1. The murder of Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross should be one of those pivot points in our history, much like the murder of George Floyd less than a mile away in 2020. Like with Floyd, we shouldn't even be talking about whether or not the murder was "justified." While I get that law enforcement is rarely punished because we're just fucking perverse cop worshippers as a whole in the country, any rational view of the videos of the incident show, clearly, that Ross wasn't in danger, wasn't being threatened, and wasn't hit by Good's SUV while trying to leave the street where she and her wife, Rebecca Good, were observing and recording ICE doing its brutal and illegal work in the streets of their neighborhood. Hell, Renee Good peacefully told a raging Ross, "That's fine, dude. I'm not mad at you" just before the ICE cuntmites escalated the whole thing and Ross, ignoring every training that cops get, briefly walked near the front of the vehicle before moving to the driver's side window as Good started to drive away and shooting Good point blank at her face three times.

2. Let's put a couple of things into perspective here. First off, it's pretty fucked that Ross put the entire community and other officers in danger with his hair trigger finger. He shot wildly, with one hand on his gun and one hand still on his phone, and he not only could have killed Rebecca Good, but he could have easily offed another ICE agent. And the other thing is that you don't fucking shoot someone driving a vehicle unless you have no other choice because a dead person behind the wheel can't fucking control the car, and the SUV went out of control and slammed into another car, but, Jesus, it could have jumped the curb and hit pedestrians. That shit gets to me: the reckless disregard for anyone in his actions. Ross is a violent prick who was upset that a "fucking bitch," as he called Good after the murder, talked back to him, wasn't afraid of him. His masculine privilege and power, artificially-enhanced by that ICE vest, were being questioned by a woman, and he was not gonna take it. 

3. And then there's Renee Good's justifiable fears in that moment. ICE and the Border Patrol are a bunch of fucking animals, using obviously excessive force to grab and disappear both immigrants and citizens. For Good, it had to go through her mind that if she exited the vehicle, the little-dicked demi-men surrounding her might slam her to the ground, beat her, haul her into the back of one of their SUVs, and take her to a detention center for days or weeks. Frankly, it's stunning that she was as calm as she was as she was leaving, trying to get out of Ross's way as he placed himself in front of the vehicle, filming her with one hand and reaching for his gun with the other (against any fucking training this long-time law enforcement goon had undergone). She didn't panic. She just tried to leave. 

4. The reaction by DHS, Trump, Vance, and the entire Tump cumgobbling right-wing media universe has been to demonstrate what abject savages these pigfuckers are. It would have been so easy for Kristi Noem or someone in the administration to say, "We're unsure what happened and we'll investigate." But that's not how the pigfuckers work. The pigfuckers circle their wagons around the ICE animals and the cumgobblers get busy not just defending the animals, but asserting that anyone who dares to accuse Ross of murder and ICE of being a bunch of dullard Nazis who just want to beat up some brown people and liberals without them being able to fight back are actually terrorists. The pigfuckers keep saying, in essence, that Good was asking for it, that she deserved to be killed, and that if anyone attempts to get in the way of ICE agents breaking the law repeatedly, they deserve to be killed, too.

From the sty in the White House, with Noem and Vance and Trump. to the giant shit pit on cable news and podcasts, with Jesse Watters and Megyn Kelly and the whole bunch of them, you can see them all fucking the pigs in the mud, high-fiving that they've demonized an innocent woman as a monster to the mongrel hordes who can't think for themselves. Meanwhile, on Twitter and Truth Social, anonymous incel dolts jack off to all the memes they've made of Good's corpse, put in a bikini or less by Elon Musk's rape machine, Grok. Repellent motherfuckers, all. 

(And if this is getting incoherent, that I’m mixing up my pigfuckers and my cumgobblers, it’s because writing about this nightmare makes my rage flame roar like it could burn empires to the ground.)

5. Minneapolis is resisting and ICE and the Trump administration don't know what to do. They were expecting everyone to fold. But, if anything, this is starting to look like some kind of tipping point, like a line was crossed here that is moving even those who supported this administration and supported this bullshit immigration crackdown. It's moving those who have only a glancing interest in politics. ICE is going door-to-door in Minneapolis, literally just breaking down doors and looking for anyone they can drag in. DHS is having its largest ever force go in there to punish the city for daring to fight back, for daring to not just knuckle under. 

But here's the thing: if you lie all the time, then you won't be believed. You gotta mix some truth in with the lies. But this administration and their media lie all the fucking time. So you're better off thinking they're full of shit. Chances are you're right. And with the Good murder, we all fucking saw it. We're all witnesses. We saw Ross call her a "fucking bitch" on his own video. We saw him leave the scene of the crime. We've seen his ICE criminal buddies empty his apartment of anything that might be evidence that he wanted to shoot some commies. We saw the shooting and we saw them try to tell us that we weren't seeing what we were clearly seeing. 

This might be the start of something. I feel like we're in a race between those who want to bring this madness to an end and the mad leaders who want to bring us all to heel as they completely gut the rule of law in this country. They want us to be afraid. They are going to do more and more to scare us. It's going to get harder and harder not to let the fear overwhelm us. 

We didn't ask to live in this moment. We didn't ask to be called to action. Yet here we are. But we have to figure out the best way to fight and soon. Or the pigfuckers win.

Zohran Mamdani's Radical Refocus of the Left Is What We've Needed

If you need a boost to start this new year right, even as we fall further into the Trump-fucked abyss, I encourage you to watch the entire inauguration ceremony for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It was lefty bliss, a balm for the battered soul and a jolt to the heart yearning for action. From people abused by the immigration system giving the oath to Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to Williams's emotional speech, from Gen Z fave Lucy Dacus singing the old labor movement song "Bread and Roses" to Bernie Sanders's rousing introduction for Mamdani. Serious liberalpalooza vibes all around, like some kind of fever dream of democracy actually coming through for once. 

Most importantly, in his inauguration address, Mamdani didn't just reaffirm his progressive agenda, saying that "I have been told that this is the occasion to reset expectations, that I should use this opportunity to encourage the people of New York to ask for little and expect even less. I will do no such thing. The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations." Yes, that was terrific, as was his restating of the goals of his campaign, making clear that he was going to push for big ideas and big efforts. He also demonstrated an understanding of the broad array of identities that he will be leading, talking about individuals as threads in a larger tapestry.

But what got me practically cheering on my couch was when Mamdani went directly at a couple of the shibboleths of contemporary politics, the kind of bullshit that Republicans have been slinging since at least the FDR era, ideas that have become so ingrained in American rhetoric that Democrats often find themselves saying much the same or having to react to them. Mamdani's approach was to take back a version of progressivism that hearkens to the early 20th century and through the time of the New Deal: a sense that we're all in this together and we better fucking act like we are and the clearest expression of that is the government that we elect and demand action from.

He said, "Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try. To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this: No longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives." And if you immediately think about Ronald Reagan when you read that line on big government, Mamdani is actually quoting Bill Clinton's 1996 inaugural address when he took the Democratic Party into Republican-lite territory. Clinton said it like it was a fact coming out of the Reagan/Bush years, and he leaned into it instead of cursing it or vowing to change it. Mamdani is throwing it back into the cesspool of shitty ideas with a call to move government back to its rightful place as democratic expression of what the broad populace needs and desires, not merely a tool used too often for oppression and neglect while favoring the wealthy few who know how to manipulate its complex machinery and its facile leaders.

Then, in something that has pissed off all the right people, Mamdani went right at the foundation of conservative ideology when he said, "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it." Now that's some socialism that walks the motherfucking walk right there. 

The great lie of America is that the only way to succeed is by placing the individual self above all else, looking out for #1 and all that bullshit. It's been the cement shoes on the workers' rights movements since the 1980s, when we moved from the collectivist dreams of the 1960s and 70s to the "Greed is good" era of amped-up capitalism. We thought we'd shift back during the Obama years, but that was beaten to death by the greedy fucks in the GOP and their complicit media. What was the Tea Party movement but a conglomeration of avarice and ignorance masked as freedom from the government? "The American dream" has long been a sucker's bet, a way to make one's own advancement the only the thing that matters, not the idea of living in a country, a state, or a city, even, where everyone's needs are the business of everyone else and that helping the least makes life better for all people. Mamdani did indeed campaign on how New York City is almost uniquely positioned to demonstrate how this can actually work.

It's extra important for young people especially to hear that. They have been inundated with the venality and treachery of the Trump administration, where government doesn't give a shit about you and fuck you if you think it should. I'd implore them (and everyone) to learn the goddamn difference between democratic socialism and communism because the motherfuckers are coming after Mamdani hard, invoking Soviet gulags and Chinese oppression. Mamdani isn't a communist. He doesn't believe that all people should be equal in property and wealth. He doesn't believe in the government owning all housing and controlling all industries so that it gives out homes and jobs. Thinking that the ultra-rich should pay higher taxes so that poor people can ride the buses for free does not equal enforced food rationing and the imprisonment of dissidents. In fact, those who keep bringing up that shit should be treated like the fucking morons or despicable liars that they are.

And it's also important that the Democratic Party watches how this all goes down and learns. Take this radical refocus, this return what used to motivate the left and the center-left and, hell, even the center politically, and use it. It's time to put Clintonism on a raft and set it on fire. It's time to assert that government can be a force for good. It's time to promise to do things on a national level that Mamdani is already doing, like shitcanning everything the corrupt and compromised former mayor, Eric Adams, did after he was indicted. Promise to reverse everything Trump has done and raze his golden ballroom. Talk about immigrants like they are welcome additions to the country, not invaders or criminals. Jesus, this shouldn't be hard.

I don't know how this will go or what Mamdani will be able to accomplish. But, goddamn, it's a good start. And as we reach new levels of fucked as a desperate Trump tries to cram in every terrible thing he wants to do before the midterms change the equation, I'll take whatever glimmers of light I can.