Last night an old friend and colleague from the west coast texted, expressing gratitude for writing about the evil flooding Minneapolis streets right now. I hope your voice makes a difference. I live in silent fear providing for my immigrant Mom and boys by myself, feeling pretty sure that besides voting, I have no voice and no power as a naturalized citizen. I really long for voices like yours to make a difference. 

In normal times, I write once per month. In authoritarian times, my fingers can’t keep up with my head. In November of 2016, I pushed out eight essays with titles like:

No Experience Necessary
An Open Letter To Everyone Who Can Read
For Whom The Bell Tolls
I Will Aways Speak Out
Here’s Why You Need to Stop Telling Me to Get Over It
Hate And Rage Are Not The Same
Affirmation Is Not Information 

Can you guess what they were about? I apparently also picked a fight with my mom, dad, brother, sister-in-law, distant aunts, high-school friends, random Facebook “friends” extremely insulted by my words. Thanksgiving did not go well that year. Or any year after.

Though time has since turned him into an even bigger monster (research Sascha Riley, RELEASE THE EPSTElN FlLES) I didn’t have it in me to do it all over in 2024. It was affecting my mental health, my words were falling on deaf ears, family relationships weren’t great, but they existed, and that’s nice…right? Watching Jonathan Ross intentionally murder Renee Nicole Good unleashed something so deep and raw inside my soul, I thought surely this was it. Surely they would see now. 

No more censoring myself to not upset the family apple cart. The apples are rotten.

Jonathan Ross did not fear for his life. He murdered Renee Nicole Good because she was a woman unafraid. I do not hate the military. My ex-boyfriend is a Marine Corp veteran, two tours in Iraq. I bravely made & wore a shirt with the words Badgers Vote Bush on football Saturday in Madison, Wisconsin. I voted for McCain. I might have even voted for Romney, honestly can’t remember. That’s how much I care(d) about politics, much to the disappointment of many of my friends. BUT THIS AIN’T ABOUT POLITICS. 

I respect law enforcement, when they are enforcing the law. I give them security footage from my porch when they’ve requested, cuz I too, want to keep my neighborhood safe. How many police officers, do you think, make it through every single day without shooting anyone in the face, while put in way more dangerous situations than a mom in a Honda Pilot with stuffies in the glovebox and a good dog in the backseat, attempting to get away from angry masked men with guns? I’m going to go out on a limb and say, nearly all of them. I really cannot understand this blind loyalty to one person who does not represent all of law enforcement.

But like, ICE is not real law enforcement.

How many other federal agencies hire on the spot? No background check. No paperwork. A 50k bonus. Journalist (also deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82^nd Airborne Division, US Army) Laura Jedeed investigated what it took to apply to be an agent, and accidentally got herself hired (read it yourself here). ICE hired a lefty journalist with a very google-able name with Antifa all over her profile. Her background check was listed as three days from the day she was looking at her hiring confirmation, which means they have no idea who they are hiring. _{^{But like, don’t they?}} How many ICE agents out there running around with real guns have committed sexual assault, sex crimes, crimes against children, and now are in charge of detention centers where people won’t be missed or believed. If I were real LEO, I’d be insulted to be lumped in with this joke. They’re probably making more money too.

No matter what you tell yourself to sleep at night, she was not trying to run him over, she does not have a criminal record, she did not beat her kids, she is not a terrorist. I’ve seen so many doctored criminal records that can’t even bother to get her age right. Because it doesn’t matter. They know their base doesn’t check facts anyway. I mean, Trump himself literally said, “smart people don’t like me” and I have never heard anything ring more true. And the people just laughed politely, feeding his ego while he called them stupid. And now right-winged news sources and the US government are saying they want to investigate the widow. I won’t even dignify that with a response. It’s pure evil at play.

Have you not learned your lesson? And You guys gotta stop obstructing us, that’s why we killed that lesbian bitch. Just another day of ICE agents trying to intimidate women filming, making sure they don’t do it again, cuz y’all, if they’re shooting people in broad daylight with a dozen eye witnesses, imagine what they do when no one is around. They’ve denied House Reps access to the detention centers to examine the conditions under which detainees are held; ICE detention center says it’s not responsible for staff’s sexual abuse of detainees. WHO IS THEN? Oh right, the victim. Cool country. 

Jonathan Ross did not murder Renee Good because she didn’t obey a LEO. Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good because she did not obey Jonathan Ross. And the government is justifying it. Yet Trump warns Iran not to kill their protestors or he’ll have to “intervene.” In his speech at the Detroit Economic Club on 1.13.26 he told Iranian patriots to keep protesting, take over your institutions if possible and save the names of the killers who are abusing you, one death is too much. Having a real hard time making that make sense, aren’t you? Wait…do you guys even watch these? You probably should.

In all the horror, the moment I can’t quite run away from is Becca Good slumped on the sidewalk holding their dog, pleading for someone, anyone, to get the leash from the backseat of the car.

Her wife had just been shot in the face by the regime.
Her dog is wagging its tail like a good dog.
No more silence.
I couldn’t keep it in
if I tried. 

I numbly walked through the Little Rock airport the next day, everyone just going about their day, business as usual. Were they not aware? Were they aware and just didn’t care? Or worse, aware and the ones hypocritically justifying it on social media? I needed to know.

To the TSA agent giving me a pat-down (I wear a lot of jewelry): Did you hear the government is just shooting Americans in the face now and justifying it? That wasn’t us ma’am. Oh I know, but WE SHOULD ALL BE CONCERNED, NO?

To the host at the airport restaurant after she told me to have a good day: You know, I keep trying to, but then I remember a masked coward can shoot me in the face and walk away protected by the US GOVERNMENT for not OBEYING HIS COMMAND, sooooo…having some troublllllle??

To the big white guy I ended up sitting next to on the airplane only because when I got to my seat I found a nice old Black lady sitting in mine, saying no one told her there were assigned seats. Yes ma’am, I’ll take hers. I caught her eye as I checked her ticket. She knew what she was doing: So how do YOU feel about the fact our government just shot a lady in the face and is basically saying she deserved it, like it’s OBEY or DIE now? I could feel his unease as he mumbled something about why would I think he wouldn’t think it was awful, to which I replied, Oh yeah, no, I’m not just asking ya cuz you’re a dude, I’m asking everyone, CUZ IT’S FUCKED UP.

I’ll be the first to admit. My directness is…intense. People aren’t used to it. But I am physically unable to have a conversation with anyone without addressing this first. Not every day. Just once per person or group. Each time after I wear it on my face. Or in my tiny remarks. Or if you live with me, my gigantic outbursts. I have to yell and scream and really ROAR in a safe place, otherwise, I’m fairly certain I would explode into tiny pieces…though that almost feels like relief.

I work remotely with people from all over the country. If someone makes the mistake of asking me how I am doing, I tell them exactly how I am doing. 

Not good, Jim, not good. People are being terrorized in Minneapolis. Kids are afraid to go to school. Restaurants are closed because people are afraid to go to work. They’re escalating tactics, going door to door, breaking them down, pepper spraying into vents of cars, shattering windows and dragging American citizens to the detention centers for obstruction, which they can define as pretty much anything they want, and people are labeling it fake news, or spinning it, or worse, celebrating it.

And then there’s the people treating it like its Gaza (still happening) or some far away conflict that doesn’t affect them. Friends from other counties are sending their headlines, and I guess I should take comfort that the rest of the world knows what’s actually going on, but it almost makes it worse. Because I am stuck inside a monster. There’s so much evil here, so I’m having a hard time going about my daily activities of living.  

If you want to do something but don’t know what, do this. Talk about it openly. Keep talking about it. Don’t act like this is normal. I’m fully aware many of you have been doing this for much longer than a week and I am just now realizing how exhausted you must be. I’d see the headlines in LA, Portland, even Chicago, only three hours away, but felt the same way as maybe you do now. I hate that it took landing on the literal doorsteps of my friends and family in a city I love, but there’s no time for shame, and it’s never too late to speak up. PUT ME IN COACH. This is who I am now. (And no one is paying me a dime, it’s really sad I have to say that.)

This is not just about Renee Good, but the entire attack on Minneapolis, the state of Minnesota, other blue cities, other blue states. The government is waging war on places that don’t agree with DJT and his cronies. If you wanna get really motivated, checkout whitehouse.gov. It’s ridiculous. Pure propaganda. From someone who is very likely also a very very very very very bad guy. Ya’ll can stand with your secret police in cosplay, I stand with Sascha Riley, retired US Army Sniper. A real American hero who went through the depths of hell at the hands of very powerful people. Because that is what this is about. POWER & MONEY. You can’t get to the tippy top with stepping on A LOT of people. They’ve waged a mass effort to make us turn against each other to keep our eyes off the top. WAKE UP.

My own head’s been recovering in the sand for too long, I’m still shaking out the dust. I mean, ears don’t grow back, do they? I’ve heard so many of your stories, how this has affected your relationship with your families. Heartbreak has a lot of colors. I want to be very clear that I did not cut ties with my parents because of what they believe. I watch Fox News. I spend way more time consuming conservative media sources than I care to admit. That’s how I know how they are spinning this. I know the garbage they are pumping out. If you want to know the truth, you seek information from multiple sources. You don’t just take the doctor’s word for it.

I cut ties because rather than reach out to their own two daughters, rather than use reliable sources at their finger tips, rather than think for one second that something so horrible could be happening even when I begged them to listen, they still chose to believe their own sources. But the real kicker, the last straw where any last bits of respect I was clinging onto evaporated? My dad made fun of me when I pointed that out. You know that weird baby voice Trump uses to insult his enemies? That’s the voice he used. OoOoo you got boots on the ground, boots on the ground. 

Come on y’all, when has an administration ever been 100% correct all of the time? Never. Yet they say things like “anything else you hear except for this, is false” That’s literally all Karloine Leavit says now in between aggressively berating journalists for being brainwashed for even questioning her authority of information. Everyone else is wrong. Every other country. Only we, the regime.

You know that pregnant woman they pinned to the ground, and like, drug away? Probably didn’t hear about that either. If she loses her baby, by your own definition of a fetus, wouldn’t that make ICE baby killers? Or are you just gonna blame the baby. Don’t be silly tosh, they’ll probably charge the mother. 

Last election I was chatting with my friend Willy about voting. She said something I’ve thought about almost every day since. I mean the government’s been fucking us over our entire lives, they’ve already done the worst things imaginable to our people, kinda hard to get motivated to play their games. Click. She lives way up on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where you’d think those buffoons would have the decency and respect not to roam, but nope. Agents are slithering around there too. And according to the Oglala Sioux Tribe, at least three Oglala Lakota men are still being detained at the Whipple at Fort Snelling.

Like what the actual fuck, I thought ICE was here for IMMIGRANTS. They are literally the farthest people possible from an “illegal” immigrant in this country. If you want a real history horror read up on the historical significance between the Oglala Sioux and Fort Snelling: the same site where, in 1862, U.S. forces imprisoned about 1,700 Indigenous men, women, children and elders following the U.S.-Dakota War; many died of torture, starvation and disease; survivors were exiled to reservations in what’s now South Dakota. You did not conquer this land, you stole it. This is about POWER & MONEY. And do I detect a tinge of revenge?

Lucky for us “leftist libtards”, you don’t have to be in the military to serve your country. And you don’t need guns to fight a war.

^{Same Fred, same.}

P.S.

My sister Tessa (moved to Minneapolis for Law School like 20 years ago) sent me a Marco Polo tonight that went something like this:

There was a guy outside who was trying to shut down Minnesota puppy mills in Minnesota, I mean…such an admirable cause, you know….and I told him, I would donate to you normally, but I just dropped off a rather large donation to sharing and caring hands for families who you know, can’t go outside or go to work, and so I’m like, I’m.. I’m… maxed out for the day. And he’s like I hear you, I appreciate what you did, I feel a little bad talking about animals right now when we should be talking about humans, and I said, NO! no. We can’t just stop caring about everything, right? This matters. It does matter. I just…I’m at my limit today.

Then she went on saying how much confidence she gained with each representative she called. I have never loved her so hard. We can’t do it all, but we can all do something.