Dear Dad,

You probably don’t remember this, but when I was 11 years old you gave me a book, Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl. It was 1992 and Sarajevo was all over the news. Forty-five pages of Zlata Filipović’s diary had just been published and I was asking a lot of questions about war and Saddam (referred to as SoDumb in my diary) Hussein, likely trying to gauge how afraid I should be, because when you’re eleven, your world is very small and everything’s about you. Like Anne, I was an avid documentarian of my own life. Maybe you thought she could give me the answers I was seeking.

I read it cover to cover, twice. I was just a little younger than Anne at the time, so relating to her childhood joys and wonders and anxieties wasn’t a reach, even though she was hiding in Holland in fear of discovery by Nazis, and I was safe at home in my bed in the United States. Because despite facing death daily in isolation, she still paints a vivid picture of what’s it’s like to be a 13 year old girl. I liked how she called her diary Kitty. I liked how she described ordinary things. I liked how witty she was, she made me laugh. She became my friend. She found a way to make the Secret Annexe feel more like Monica and Rachel’s apartment in Friends, rather than the trap it was. An adventure of sorts. I found myself excited about things to come in my own life, the crushes on boys, how your body changes, how your mind grows.

Anne Frank gave me a blueprint of what to expect. 

I remember going to bed at night, talking silently to the sky, beaming up my gratitude, for I lived in a country without Saddam Husseins, without Adolf Hitlers. Without Nazis. Without living in isolation, in fear of being discovered, knowing discovery meant death. I went to bed safe, fully aware of my fortune. 

On January 7, I returned to my hotel room after a long workday in Little Rock, Arkansas. The rest of the team went bowling, but after two full days of being around people for all my waking hours, I needed to recharge. Two minutes later I saw the first video of the murder of Renée Nicole Good. My entire body seized up, went cold. I threw my phone on the bed as if it had just sunk its venomous teeth into my hand, crawled into the fetal position, no comforts of home. Other than uncontrollably shaking, I couldn’t move. 

No, Tosha. You do not get sit this one out. Get.Up. 

I watched the video again and again and again. I am unable to comprehend how anyone with control over their own mind could see it any different. Any way you look at it. From any angle. It took me exactly one time to understand the horror of the situation from the sound alone. I listened several times with my eyes closed. Anguished anticipation of what comes after getoutofthefuckingcar! Intense guttural pain with each pop that follows, gunshots + screams + crash, clashing in discord. It took two viewings to internalize my life will never be the same.

We all know what we saw. Still the journalist in me demands investigation. Check your sources. Check them again. And again. One more time. Please don’t let this be true. Please don’t let this be true. This can’t be true. I know you like to call real journalism Fake News, but I wonder if you ever realized it was also a direct attack on my education, intelligence and integrity. I was always relieved I never became a journalist, because no doubt our relationship would have ended years ago, the moment you started poo-pooing reliable, factual media sources, assuming that because you have no moral code of ethics, no one does. All news is Fake News except your news, of course. You have the answers. You always do, right? This time I could hear Mom whispering in the background she doesn’t know the whole story. Sigh. But you do, Mom, right? Attention everyone! Stop investigating, no need to get the bottom of it, my mom has the whole story! And she never even had to leave her house in small town Wisconsin. Very efficient.

You know who else made media the enemy? Hitler. Josef Goebbels, the propaganda chief, taught Germans to hate free journalism. Discrediting news outlets as “fake” or “traitorous,” making objective information untrustworthy, so only the regime’s propaganda remains…sound familiar? You can learn a lot from history. Well, until they rewrite it, then you learn what they want you to learn. Filed under: January 6, 2021. The government is referring to the political violence at the Capitol as a peaceful protest, a day of love. People died. Seriously check out whitehouse.gov’s interpretation of that day, it’s total bullshit. Insurrectionists were recast as patriots, not attackers of democracy. 1600 were pardoned. Probably all got cushy jobs working for ICE, where they can legally wreak havoc on communities under absolute immunity granted by the same government who pardoned them. Come to think of it…notice how we don’t hear anything about those Proud Boys anymore? That’s cause the they gave them all mismatched uniforms and guns. So I guess we are still hearing about them, they just call themselves ICE now.

As I watched Kristi Noem vomit lie after lie, straight-faced, (though I’m pretty sure they intentionally botox’d her face to the point it could never betray her) lies that no one believes, unless you’re consuming government propaganda, lies that can be visually proven to be factually false by multiple videos from various eye witnesses, I knew. As I watched Fox News refer to a woman who had just been shot in the face three times by a government agent as a “self-proclaimed” poet (I mean, she won the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize and Old Dominion University’s Undergraduate Poetry Award in 2020 for her poem On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs, you should read it, it’s incredible) with pronouns in her bio and leaving behind her lesbian wife, and a child from a previous marriage, I knew.

As I watched the ICE agent who feared so much for his life that he was able to switch his phone from his right hand to his left, in preparation of pulling his gun to murder a woman who DARE defy him, shoot her three times, twice through the open driver side window all while filming, and call her a fucking bitch as her car crashed, I knew. When I watched him walk totally unscathed with his own two legs to briefly check his work, quickly looking away as Renée’s wife held her, screaming for help she knew she would never get, then scurry back to his car and flee the scene like a coward, I knew. As I heard a neighbor beg to provide medical assistance I’m a doctor! and the ICE agent shout back I DON’T CARE, I knew. As I watched J.D Vance casually defend the murder, deny the truth, and feed lie after lie into the eager mouths of his base, I knew. 

Anne Frank gave me a blueprint.

In 8th grade, in lieu of regular class, my AP History course let us to do a project for National History Day. Our group selected the Holocaust. We made a short film packed with so many photographs found on microfiche, forever burned into my memory, set to John Lennon’s Imagine (very original). In whatever life grade you’re in at 33, I intentionally traveled to Germany and Auschwitz and Sarajevo, all names I heavily associated with fear as a child. I didn’t want to be afraid anymore. And knowledge is power. (Side note: why do you think our current administration totally obliterated the education department. They want us to be stupid. Puppets are easier to control.)

At the Topographie des Terrors exhibit and Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin, the air was thick with the pain and shame of the German people, for allowing their country to slide into a fascist regime right under their noses. A constant public reminder, it happened. Way harder to secretly destroy massive public memorials than erase words from the internet, replacing them with false narratives, don’t you think? (You might remember reading about my experience here.)

At Auschwitz, death was felt in every breath within 10 miles of the concentration camp. It choked me in front of Block 24a, the one that served as a camp library and brothel. A brothel. At a concentration camp. It hung on my body like a lead vest throughout the maze of rooms and museum displays within the barracks. It looked me right in the eyes through the Kowalski I came face-to-face with on the wall. Mom even commented this one was beautifully written.

I’m glad I saved Sarajevo, the place where it all started, for last. Such a devastatingly beautiful city tucked in the most enchanting mountains, equal parts tragedy, destruction and magic. Elegant tall white marble obelisks marking the Bosniak Muslim dead, leftover rubble from the war I wrote about in my diary when I was 11, and filled with the most hospitable and generous people who immediately accepted me as one of their own. I felt safe.

I didn’t want to know, but I had to know. So I texted you. Well. You were right. I need a gun to protect myself from the government. Like click bait to make sure you didn’t ignore me this time. I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve too, Dad. You wanted to record the conversation. Oooo boy, I gave you some juicy sound bites, maybe some day you can use them against me. 

Did you know C.B.P wouldn’t let an Australian journalist into the country last February because of a piece he wrote on the protests at Columbia while he was on campus? What happened to freedom of the speech, freedom of the press, guaranteeing the right of the media to publish information and opinions without government interference? Isn’t that part of our most valued amendment? Is that not why we made it FIRST?

Along with the right to petition, freedom of religion (we’re getting like a D- on this one fo sho’), and freedom of assembly protecting the right of people to gather peacefully. Trumpers really hate that we exercise that one, always so confused on why anyone would choose to dedicate their personal time seeking human justice, we must be getting paid. Out of state pro-ICE agitators are showing up to peaceful protests in attempts to incite violence, like that jackass Nazi with a megaphone and that flag-burner good Minnesotans sniffed out immediately. Evil emanates from their aura, they stick out like sore thumb in all that Minnesota Nice.

Do you realize I’ve been publicly denouncing Trump since before you voted him into office the first time, and that I’m now shouting ICE is a domestic terrorist organization from every rooftop? Freedom of speech is no longer a guaranteed right of the American people.

The very idea I could be rounded up for even writing this post is not a wild one. When you asked me what I was so afraid of, you scoffed when I answered uhhh, that we’re living under a fascist regime where the new law is obey or die? I could hear the patronizing tone in your response. I will always be a child to you. Not your child. A child. I’m used to it, it doesn’t affect me anymore.

If we’ve learned anything from history it’s that it repeats itself and yet people still don’t learn from it, we used to talk about that all the time.

Are you so deep in the hole you can’t see what’s happening? Trump has essentially no checks left on his power. He verbally stated in a public interview, the only thing that can stop him is his moral compass, and from someone who has stated he could shoot a man on fifth avenue and get away with it, and was caught on tape saying I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything, the idea that’s the moral compass tied to the fate of our country is terrifying. He dreams in dollar signs and likely whatever’s all over the Epstein files he’s trying to make us forget about. Save your Bill Clinton comments. I don’t define evil by politics. Money is the root of all evil, power too.

Did you see the video of the ICE agent taking a woman with her hands bound into the porta potty? No of course you didn’t. Tell me, why does he need to watch her pee? What else does he have planned for her inside?

How about the clip of the ICE agent punching a Native American kid sitting in his car with his aunt, before forcibly dragging him out, taking him who knows where? My guess is no on this one too. I had to take a break from reality, so I don’t know even if his Mom has heard from him yet.

And earlier today in St Paul, an ICE vehicle collided with the car of a legal community observer, removed her, placed her under arrest with her screaming PLEASE PLEASE ILL SHOW YOU MY ID in agony as they pinned her body to the road. So many tough guys needed to take down another woman. Do you really think all of these videos and eye witness accounts are fake news? Have you even checked on your two daughters who live in Minneapolis? DO YOU EVEN CARE HOW THEY ARE DOING? How about your grandchildren? They’re pepper spraying kids outside schools, Dad. Still nothing? Cool.

Okay, if you’re fine with ICE destroying our cars because they simply cannot handle being followed, it makes them very angry but IMPEDES NOTHING, (ICE don’t own the roads, they’re in OUR streets, maybe we’re going where they’re going! We’re definitely going where they’re going, because can you imagine the horrors not captured on camera? My car is 19 years old, she’s not afraid to go out with a bang) and you’re cool with people getting shot in the face, justify why ICE agents killed a family dog inside a house in El Paso, Texas while the dude (you got it, another American Citizen) went to get his identification from his car, letting the dog bleed out in the living room. You can read about it here. But I know you won’t. Because it didn’t come from your super secret news source that you pay way too much money for to “know things other people don’t know yet.”

What about the minor (yes, still a citizen) they drug out of his Target job as he pleaded for someone to call his mom, roughed up real good, and dumped in the Walmart parking lot a few miles away?

Or the unhoused man (still a US citizen) living in his car they just assaulted, all caught on camera. Here’s what he looks like now:

Like seriously, ICE just pushed this guy in front of a moving bus. But whatever. Everything’s cool, right? Ya’ll gonna blow before we do. We’ve been sticking flowers in guns for as long as you’ve been pointing them at us. No one pays us to protest. It’s in our DNA. The amount of horror flooding my phone with real footage of the United States government terrorizing its citizens, and you acknowledge none of it, while my friends, my nieces and nephew, my sisters, your daughters and grandchildren are in a living nightmare. And this is why we can no longer be friends, Dad. Turns out, you’re not really there for us when we need ya. It’s okay, we got each other.

There are real, actual videos from boots on the ground citizens verifying each of these accounts and there are hundreds more stories. I could link them all, but that would be a waste of my time. It’s all out there for you to discover if you thought for one second, just maybe you don’t know everything.These are my people, Dad. I fight for my people. I live in a community where I look out for my neighbors and they look out for me. It’s wild, but we all got this strange ability to care for people other than ourselves. You should try it.

Hey, you’re a God-fearing man. Did you know they pointed a gun at a pastor when he came to the defense of a woman they were harassing, asking them to take him instead? Cuffed him and tossed him into the back of an SUV, kept checking to see if he was scared yet. Let him go because he’s no fun anyway. Imagine if they roughed up a pastor. You’d find a way to justify it, I’m sure. Or are we at the point you don’t believe in a man of the cloth if they say things that don’t fit your narrative? Man, you white men are really getting off easy (shocking). No wonder you’re not afraid.

Have you ever been raped, Dad? Do you know what it’s like to have a man call you a fucking bitch after you deny his advances? Do you know what it’s like to wake up with a strange man’s fingers up your vagina? My guess is no. If an unidentified, masked man with a gun starts running toward me demanding I open my car door, and I am well aware our government is disappearing and physically attacking its own citizens, you bet your ass I’m gonna to do everything in my power to make sure hands drenched in evil don’t touch me. You have no idea what I’ve been through, but I hope you’re pleased to know I’m tough as hell. If my options are OBEY OR DIE, I choose the latter. I will not comply. I will not obey.

Did you know I won a scholarship in college for writing an essay on my interpretation of the phrase “live free or die,” from the Revolutionary War General John Stark’s famous toast in 1809? Death is not the worst of evils. Living without liberty is worse than death. And yet our freedom has been quietly slipping away under this administration, like dirty water down a drain. They tell women what we can and cannot do with our bodies. That everyone must worship their gods. They think they can tell people who to love. Who they can’t love. Who they can be, who they can’t be, where they can pee. Now they’re actively denying us our rights explicitly stated in the United States Constitution right in front of your face. Psssh. Fake news, you say. That didn’t happen, this happened. I don’t know man, doesn’t feel like a very free country to me. 

If I’m disappeared or “justifiably murdered” by the government for choosing death over passive compliance, I hope you stick to your values. I hope that you believe them, when they tell you I “deserved” it. Hey man, if she had just listened to the masked man who could literally be any gang member off the street since ICE is too busy taking minors from their jobs at Target and pushing grannies into the snow and pepper spraying kids at school dismissals, she wouldn’t have gotten shot in the face. HER FAULT. ^{_{(fuckin’ bitch)}}

Know that your people will dig into every detail of my life to find anything they can to smear me. Know they will call me a baby killer, as if that justifies everything. Know that YOUR people will do anything they can to paint me into some kind of domestic terrorist. And by god you better be right up there with them, pumping your fist. Because it’s way too late to change your mind when it’s me. Part of me believes even that wouldn’t make you see. That should absolutely destroy me, but it doesn’t. You’ve shown me what you value time and again. Besides, can’t argue with stupid – your words, not mine.

When mom called me a paid protestor in 2016, I googled “do protestors actually get paid?” Money has never been much of a motivating factor for me. And I loathe living in a capitalistic society where core values and beliefs can be bought.

I learned about fascism when I was 11 years old from a book you gave me for my birthday. I’m not exactly sure how you expected me to turn out. Who I am today might be a bit your fault, but that’s something you should be proud of Dad. At a very young age, you taught me no matter how little we had, others had less. You took us to buy Christmas presents, toys we wanted, and give them to children we’d never meet. You demonstrated acceptance and celebration of other cultures, filling our house with tapestries illustrating the plight of the Hmong people. I have beautiful pieces of art all over my home from Zimbabwe, Uganda, South Africa, all from you.

I know you think I’ve been radicalized, and you’re right. But not by propaganda. Not by some far left agenda. But by the very real, every day atrocities of humanity. 

Wish you were here.

The End,
Child Number 3

P.S. By the way, Antifa? Your and the government’s self-proclaimed largest threat to our nation right now? You know that’s me right? You know that’s just a word for anti-fascist. Think about it. There is no leader. There is no base, no headquarters. There is no organization. It’s just a bunch of us weirdos from the lakes of Minnesota, to the hills of Tennessee, across the plains of Texas, from sea to shining sea, from Detroit down to Houston and New York to LA, who still love our country so much, we’re willing to die for it. Cuz the flag still stands for freedom, and Lee Greenwood told me they can’t take that away.

You are either anti-fascist, or you are a fascist. There’s no more time to be in between. 

P.P.S

10 lies Germans were told, 10 lies you are being told

1. Political violence is patriotic (Jan 6)
2. Aggression restores greatness (Venezuela)
3. Judges & opponents are enemies (duh)
4. Media is the enemy (see above)
5. We are victims of conspiracies (no shit)
6. Foreigners are a mortal threat (can’t come in unless you’re white)
7. State enforcers only preserve order (the SS, like ICE were introduced as protectors)
8. Loyalty outranks expertise (dismantled the gov’t replacing experts with his cronies)
9. Emergency powers are essential (freedom is suffocated in the name of safety)
10. Only we, the regime, tell the truth (Listen to Kristi Noem at the same time you watch the synced up un-doctored, non- AI generated footage and tell me one factual statement made. There is zero corroboration in anything out that that validates her statements. You’re eating a bowl of bullshit and licking the spoon.)

P.P.P.S And for good measure here’s how AI sums up a fascist:

A fascist is a supporter of fascism, an authoritarian political ideology emphasizing extreme nationalism, a strong centralized government, militarism, and the subordination of individual rights to the state, often led by a dictator who suppresses opposition through force, propaganda, and control, rooted in movements by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Fascism prioritizes the nation/race, opposes democracy and liberalism, and relies on myth, national unity (like a “bundle” or fascio), and a powerful leader. 

_{I am so, so tired.}