I don’t know what it is, but I’m feeling myself right now in a way I never have before in my life. Like really feeling myself, as if something finally clicked into place and shit is about to get a lot easier for me, after a good decade and a half of feeling like I’m swimming upstream, against the tide. I don’t know why. Could be the new year and having a clean slate. I always feel lighter and brighter at the beginning of a new year, full of hope and promise. Could be a change in mindset about myself that I’ve been adopting. Or it could be something metaphysical that I can’t perceive with my five senses. All I know is it’s here, and I’ve never felt this way before.
Good timing too, because holy shit, is my country REALLY spiraling right now. Spiraling bad. God damn. Where do I even start?
We invaded Venezuela, a sovereign country, and kidnapped its leader and his wife, who appeared in court with a big bruise on her left eye, and killed upwards of 80 people, including innocent civilians, just so we could…. what, exactly? Take its oil? Replace him with a leader just like him? Because that’s what’s there now. Nothing has changed in the leadership. It’s basically the same people, except they’re even more pissed off at the United States and its 21st Century imperialism, as well they should be. What was the point of invading and bombing Venezuela and abducting its president under the horseshit excuse of drug trafficking–and get this–GUN RUNNING. The United States of America, the most drug-addicted, gun-trafficking, gun-loving, imperialist country in the world, kidnapped Maduro because he supposedly trafficks drugs and runs guns “against the United States.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
No, no, no. This is all a lie, of course. None of that shit is true. It’s a fucking pretext. It’s really all about the oil. Getting the oil. Controlling the oil. Extracting the oil. Profiting from the oil. This has been the plan for years, and it’s even in Project 2025. Get Venezuela. Get its oil. After this latest egregious violation of international law by the United States, Trump didn’t brief a bipartisan group of congressional leaders like American Presidents normally do after a new imperialist adventure. No, but you know who he met with instead? American OIL COMPANY LEADERS. Sat them down to brief them on the invasion and discuss plans for extracting Venezuela’s oil. You cannot make this shit up, but at least that orange pig deserves credit for transparency on this particular issue. He’s publicly stated that it’s about the oil, and his meeting with oil executives afterwards is a little too on the nose.
In case you’re wondering what the true purpose of American foreign policy has been for the past 30-50 years, here’s a little handy chart to help you do the math:
Notice a pattern here?
But American leaders still need to justify their modern-day colonialism. You can’t just go in and say “I want what you have, and I’m going to take it by force because you have it, and I want it.” Even with no military draft, you’re never going to get Americans to support invasions and killing innocent people if you tell them the truth, that it’s all about stealing foreign natural resources to enhance the profits of oil companies and our military industrial complex. The Vietnam War shows you absolutely need public support if you want to succeed in your imperialism. It’s still true in the Year of Our Lord 2026. For all of its faults, real time social media information acquisition is outpacing false narratives, but you still need to create one, because enough people are still low information, government-trusting rubes who will believe anything you tell them.
So you make some shit up. You tell them you’re saving Iraqis from a dictator that a prior President was totally fine with, even when he gassed Iranians whom we hate, except when it comes to cutting deals to release American hostages after a presidential election so your adversary doesn’t benefit from said release, and then trading arms with them in violation of an embargo just so you can fund yet another secret imperialist adventure in Nicaragua, which will be fought by paid mercenaries and funded in part by…. CIA drug-trafficking.
Lies, lies, lies. In the latest version of this, the Trump Administration is lying about why we invaded Venezuela, pretending it was about Maduro and “bringing freedom” to the people of Venezuela. Sound familiar? I mean, it’s fucking comical. Beyond parody. History keeps repeating itself, and any American who continues to believe this transparently false nonsense from our government is an absolute moron. A literal fucking idiot. More likely than not, we just created a half dozen new guerrilla movements in that country and the rest of South America, apart from having most of those countries turn to Russia and China for protection and trade. And oil barons are now telling Trump that they’re not going to invest in Venezuela where American policy can change based on a tweet, and where Maduro’s people are still in power. Smooth move, Ex Lax!
And then we have the totally avoidable, utterly horrific murder of Renee Good in Minnesota, which happened just a couple of days ago. A mother of three who just dropped her 6 year-old off at school gets shot four times in the face by an ICE officer who was videotaping her with his cellphone and then, contrary to DOJ and DHS policy, decided to walk in front of her car, still videotaping. He shot her in the face four times, including three times from the driver’s side window, because she tried to drive away after ICE officers told her to stop, including a gestapo goon clad in a black balaclava who looked like he was about to parachute into Fallujah, who tried to grab her door handle. All of this apparently spooked her into trying to drive away.
A cellphone video released to a right-wing media outlet yesterday by Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who killed Renee Good, shows him circling Good’s Honda Pilot just seconds before he killed her. It shows her smiling at him in a totally friendly and non-threatening way from her open driver’s window, saying “That’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you“. She was sincere too. Watch the video. She looked just like any other 37 year-old mother of three, like any one of the busy mothers at my daughter’s school.
Ross proceeds around her car, gets the make, model, and license plate, and then, inexplicably, crosses to the front of the car, which is a big no-no in law enforcement and contrary to DHS and DOJ guidelines. At this point, they have all the information they need to arrest her at any time. She’s on video and her car is on video. She is smiling and friendly, and not threatening them in any way. Given all the information they have about her already, she is eminently locatable if things go sideways. She is not Eric Rudolph. She is not Ted Kaczynski.
This is what she looked like talking to Ross, seconds before he killed her.
What happens next is both totally unbelievable and stunningly horrific.
Ross’s cellphone video shows him traversing the front of her car to the front left bumper. Someone out of sight yells at Good to stop and get out of her car. Another video shows that this was another ICE officer who was approaching her car, along with Black Balaclava Guy. (Before this, Good was told to get out of the way and leave. As in many of these deadly law enforcement shooting incidents, the victims were given conflicting instructions by the officers. Google Tyre Nichols and Daniel Shaver). As Black Balaclava Guy grabs her doorhandle, which is shown in a different video, Ross’s cellphone video appears to show Good panic, turn her wheel sharply to the right, and hit the accelerator as she tries to leave the scene. She may have been going 3 miles per hour at most.
In a three-second span, Ross, still located at the front left bumper of her car, says “Whoa, Whoa,” drops his cellphone, pulls his gun, moves to his right, out of the way of the Pilot, and shoots Good straight in the face four times, once through her left bottom windshield, and three times from three feet away through her open driver’s side window. His distance from her car and clear safety from any danger during those last three shots can be seen in a different video that was released the day of the shooting. What can also be seen in both videos is Good turning her wheels to the right, AWAY from Ross, as she tried to get away. Lastly, you can also see that right at the moment of the shooting, Good’s wife, who had been ripping Ross a new one and videotaping just before he pulled his gun, was about to get in the Pilot when Good tried to take off. She had her hand on the passenger door handle and was trying to get in the car. This too makes me think Good just panicked under duress. We’ll never know why she tried to leave, but she had at least three masked officers surrounding her car, one of whom had his entire face covered except his eyes and looked like a villain in a GI Joe movie.
After Ross emptied his gun into her body, Good slumped over the wheel with her foot still on the accelerator. Her dead body drove her Honda Pilot about five yards to the side of the road where it came to a stop.
Here is the horrific result of Ross’ split second decision to shoot Good in the face instead of letting her leave the scene and arresting her later:
The last two things you hear in Ross’s video are Good’s airbag going off, and Ross saying “Fucking bitch.” Ross, who is still masked, then does something with his cellphone while a bystander videotapes him walking away from this homicide like he just scraped some shit off of his shoes. He then leaves the scene, which is totally unheard of after a police shooting, and totally contrary to any law enforcement policy.
This is beyond horrific. The stuffies you see across from Good’s bloodied airbag in the photo above belong to her six year-old son, whom she had just dropped off at school before having the misfortune of crossing paths with a trigger-happy Jonathan Ross. Good’s son is now an orphan because his father died two years ago. Good also had two other children, a 12 year-old and a 15 year-old.
Draw your own conclusions from the video. Mine were captured perfectly by Tim Miller, a conservative from The Bulwark, who posted this video right after he viewed it:
In my humble opinion, this was cold-blooded murder. It’s not even a close call that what Ross did–took the life of an unarmed, middle-aged woman in a fucking Honda Pilot who just spoke to him in a friendly way just seconds before–was egregious and totally unjustified. It’s an intentional murder by an incompetent, trigger-happy, callous FUCK who was simply angry about almost being clipped by Good’s car, which was clearly turning AWAY from him, not AT him. It was not the trained reaction of someone who believed his life was under imminent threat. Three of his four shots came from the DRIVER’S SIDE WINDOW when he indisputably was out of harm’s way. No, I’m done with debating people about this on Facebook, some of whom only see what they want to see, and are so ready to lick the boots of fascist thugs, gestapo goons, that one wonders if they’ve ever actually read the U.S. Constitution.
It’s insane to me that ANY intelligent, objective person would view these videos and believe that what Ross did in this situation was remotely justified or reasonable in what should not have been a life and death situation. After listening to experienced law enforcement and former DHS officers discuss this, it’s even more clear to me that every single thing that asshole did here was wrong and contrary to DOJ and DHS policy. Every single thing. And after learning that Ross was dragged by another car in an incident not that long ago, it’s even more clear to me that he reacted out of anger and some type of PTSD-related trigger, not because he actually feared for his life. He transferred his unconscious rage from that prior incident and the rants from Good’s wife to Good, and he senselessly killed her by firing four bullets into her face mere seconds after she spoke to him in an unthreatening and friendly way.
Who in the holy fuck would do this? I’ve almost been clipped by cars in parking lots and in my own town in situations that were the same, if not worse, than this. This was a totally senseless and avoidable execution of a mother of three. To make matters worse, these gestapo pigs then prevented a doctor who witnessed the whole thing from rendering her aid in the aftermath. They threatened him and forced bystanders who wanted to help her to wait for an ambulance, which took 15 minutes to arrive.
How Israeli of them.
But no matter how the most moronic and bootlicking fascist enablers feel about this video, what’s beyond dispute by anyone is that within minutes of this homicide–before anyone knew who Good was or why she was there, the most powerful leaders in our country blatantly lied to the American public about this incident in a transparent effort to control the narrative about what happened and grease the skids for “justifying” more gestapo crimes like this in other parts of the country. While Good’s body was still warm, the President of the United States and Secretary of Homeland Security stunningly called Good a “domestic terrorist” and a “professional agitator” when they didn’t know who the fuck she was. They also accused her of “intentionally trying to run over an ICE officer” when the video clearly shows this didn’t happen.
Incredibly, the President then said that Ross was “recovering in the hospital” when he was totally fine and walked away from this incident like nothing happened! A day later, JD Vance, the most disingenuous, lying gasbag who ever graced the Vice-Presidency and whose political future needs to be stillborn once Trump is gone, soon followed suit, dragging Good’s reputation through the mud on a national stage in one of the most ghoulish and downright evil exhibitions I’ve ever witnessed.
Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies.
The United States government has always lied to its people and to the world. I wasn’t born yesterday, and my current politics were birthed in significant part by an acute understanding of this country’s lying history, and the fact that the United States is not and never has been what it professes to be. But this particular crew of pathological liars is making an Olympic sport of it, all to appease their mafia boss, who practically invented lying. They literally are telling us to ignore our eyes, ears, brains, and all common sense. Why? To manufacture consent and subservience to what they are doing and plan to do. It’s positively Orwellian and cut straight from every fascist playbook in history. Their “Lie Lie Lie” gambit is part of their strategy to manufacture a “national security threat” and declare martial law before the midterms, something I predicted would happen a year ago. We are absolutely headed there. After what just happened in Venezuela and Minneapolis, I’m more convinced of this than ever.
Have you asked yourself why these people are so focused on Minneapolis of all places? Why they are sending thousands of masked and heavily-armed ICE officers to a small city comprised of 430,000 people, to stoke anger among its citizens?
The answer is so simple and transparent that it’s almost silly.
Minneapolis is where George Floyd was murdered, only a few blocks away from where Good was killed. Minneapolis is where the George Floyd protests started a few years ago. Minneapolis was the first spark in nationwide protests over yet another senseless murder committed by a bad cop, which led to protests in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., where Trump openly inquired about the possibility of shooting unarmed George Floyd protesters near the White House.
Trump and his personal Heinrich Himmler, Stephen Miller, desperately want another George Floyd protest. They want a worse one. A more violent one. They want this country on fire like it was five years ago, and they are doing everything in their power to make it happen. To put a finer point on it, the Trump Administration is intentionally trying to create another nationwide George Floyd protest, and ideally a wave of property destruction and rioting, just so they can declare martial law and cancel, or at least fuck with, the midterms, and have a Republican rubber-stamp Congress remain in power for another two years. ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, and the immigration issue are simply their tools to accomplish this obvious goal. This is why they are targeting American citizens in addition to illegal immigrants, keeping their gestapo masked, and encouraging them to abduct people off the streets and be as aggressive as possible, while ignoring the Fourth Amendment and the rest of the Constitution. This is why they’re lying about the cold-blooded murder of a 37-year old mother of three, who just received a death sentence for blocking traffic and trying to leave the scene. This is why they are ramming cars and shooting people in Chicago, before lying about what happened and bragging to their colleagues how many “holes” they created when they unloaded their weapon.
In a country already chock-full of state and federal law enforcement, the Trump Administration has unleashed a masked paramilitary of his own Brownshirts who are comprised of tens of thousands of undertrained, unvetted, unfit, undisciplined, and trigger-happy goons because he wants another George Floyd protest. A more angry and bloodthirsty one that he can use as a pretext to declare martial law or invoke the Insurrection Act before November. It’s all part of the plan, my brothers and sisters. He will keep pushing and pushing and pushing until someone stops him. It’s the way he operates. It’s the way Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor (go watch The Apprentice on Amazon Prime) operated, and this absolutely is the Roy Cohn Presidency.
So what to do about this fascist shitshow?
First, it’s important to recognize that we are now living under tyranny, which is defined as a “cruel and oppressive government or rule.” The first step is to recognize this sad truth and stop living like an ostrich with its head in the sand. The seeds were planted under Biden, when he sanctioned violations of the free speech rights of pro-Palestinian protesters on and off college campuses, and then spent a year and a half blatantly lying to the country about Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing. Trump simply grabbed Biden’s baton, thanked him for greasing the gaslight skids, and ran with it.
It’s also important to recognize that there have always been two Americas. The first is The America of Ideals, Freedom, Truth, and Pursuit of the Good and the Just. This is the America that I love. This is the America that I’ve always loved. This is the mythical America that I believe is still worth fighting for and saving. There are good people here. Millions of them. People who still believe in that first America, including me. People who recognize that no country is perfect, but we must always strive to be better and do better, so that we can live up to the incredible ideals upon which this country was founded. A big part of doing that is being honest and truthful about our history and our failings, both in the past and today, so we can be better, make the world a better place, and get as close as possible to those laudable ideals of our founding, even though that founding occurred during a time of slavery and genocide, and when women were second-class citizens and African-Americans–who had been rounded up, whipped, beaten, and abducted from their native countries and turned into nameless, powerless cogs of the American economy–were considered “savages,” and at most, 3/5ths of a person.
Sidenote: It is truly ironic that the ideals upon which this country was founded are far broader and more profound than the personal beliefs and behaviors of the deeply-flawed, property-owning, white male slave-owners who created them and announced them to the world.
The Second America, which has always existed too, is the America of Lies, Violence, Racism, and Imperialism. An America that uses its ideals in the most cynical and deceptive of ways, both domestically and internationally. An America that refuses to face its own scarred and violent history of genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, racism, nativism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, and imperialism. An America that lies to itself about its worst acts and impulses. An America that gets high on its own supply, despite all evidence to the contrary, and demands that the world do the same. An America that uses all of its available levers of power to perpetuate its hegemony and economic status. This is the America I despise and want to leave behind. Literally. When I talk about leaving this country, this is the America I’m referring to. Not the first one. I want to leave because I’m starting to see that the First America is more myth than reality, and the Second America appears to be the one that far too many people prefer, or at least are willing to accept through cognitive dissonance, bubble-dwelling, and delusion.
In the past two years, under the administrations of two presidents from both parties, I’ve come to understand that when you turn a blind eye to genocide and ethnic cleansing, to the callous murder of young children in the most gruesome of ways, whether it’s in Sandy Hook, Uvalde, or Gaza, you will turn a blind eye to anything. There is a straight line between millions of Americans’ willful disregard of these horrors, which are clear, obvious, and available for anyone to see, and the tyranny that we are experiencing today. So the first order of business right now is to recognize this and stop ignoring reality, no matter how awful it is, or how much we prefer not to face it.
The next step is to adopt and follow Timothy Snyder’s Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century in his book, On Tyranny. If you haven’t read it already, here’s a link to it, which is freely available here. Here are the ones I think are most important:
- Do not obey in advance.
- Defend institutions.
- Take responsibility for the face of the world.
- Be wary of paramilitaries.
- Stand out.
- Believe in truth.
- Investigate.
- Contribute to good causes.
- Listen for dangerous words.
- Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.
- Be a patriot.
- Be as courageous as you can.
Some are obvious, and you can read how Snyder extrapolates on each in his book, but there’s one that is particularly apt right now:
Language is a critical weapon for any fascist. When one person gets to decide what “extremist,” “radical,” or “terrorist” means, when one person self-servingly gets to define them as “anyone who opposes me and what I’m doing,” they’ve won half the tyranny battle. They’re halfway there because your average uninformed citizen will automatically believe it. Fear and human beings’ inherent predisposition to respect and follow authority are extremely powerful. Google “Milgram experiment.”
So whether it’s here, or in Gaza, or in Venezuela, or anywhere else, recognize that our Tyrants Du Jour have a clear agenda and are using language to institute it. They are calling each and every political enemy a “domestic terrorist,” whether the term actually applies or not. They just called a smiling, waving mother of three a “domestic terrorist” for God’s sake. They are calling anyone who protests any of their policies a “domestic terrorist.” This is intentional. They are trying to make their political enemies “others” to justify their targeting, prosecution, injury, or outright murder by their paramilitaries and armed supporters. This is not an exaggeration.
Accordingly, do not accept at face value the American government’s, or any complicit or incompetent media’s labeling of someone as a “terrorist,” “extremist,” or “radical.” Instead, follow Rule 11: Investigate for yourself, then decide.
Snyder’s rules are the best primer on how to handle where we’re headed. I hope I’m wrong, but George Orwell’s 1984 reality is now here, a few decades late. I think this is going to be an extremely difficult year in this country. A violent one. We have an insanely corrupt, mafioso tyrant in power, a government comprised of pathological liars and sycophants who are increasingly desperate because their approval rating is in the toilet, and they see the end of their impunity is near if Democrats take control of the House in November, which appears to be a virtual certainty at this point. It is manifestly obvious that they will do anything and everything to stay in power. To accomplish this, they either need to prevent the November midterms entirely, or obstruct them in enough blue cities (which I think is more likely) to ensure that enough cucked Republicans get re-elected to maintain control of the House and continue rubberstamping Trump’s illegal and corrupt acts for another two years.
This is a man, after all, who tried to steal an election five years ago. This piece of criminal dogshit is actively trying to start riots in this country by stoking violence with his private masked gestapo, who are trashing people’s constitutional rights and acting with impunity. That gestapo believes it has impunity because the Trump Administration–most notably, Trump, Noem, his personal lawyer, Pam Bondi, JD Vance, and Marco Rubio–are actively and affirmatively lying about things that all of us can see on video with our own fucking eyes. And again, the most recent version of this started under the Biden Administration, which lied to us in the same form about Israel and Gaza, and Weekend at Bernies’ rapidly-declining cognitive capacity.
But this is a New Year of No Fear. So we need to oppose this. Stand against this. Speak up. Debunk their lies publicly. Express our dissent to this abject trampling of our rights more loudly than ever, whenever and wherever we can. If we see something happen in front of us, we need to get our phones out and videotape these motherfuckers, because the worst thing that any oppressor, from NetanNazi to Putin to Mango Mussolini to Jonathan Ross to Derek Chauvin ever encountered in their life is a CELLPHONE CAMERA. We need to record their tyrannical actions and let them speak for themselves. We need to speak up for people who are being viciously oppressed by our government’s paramilitaries, whether you agree with those victims politically or not. We need to find allies wherever we can, even if we disagree with them on other issues. All of this is so critical right now. It’s never been more critical in my life. This is why I find myself agreeing with political adversaries like Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith of all people on so many things that are happening right now.
Most importantly, if and when a time comes that martial law is declared, whether it’s in your town or city or somewhere else–I hope it doesn’t, but I fear that it will–we need to be prepared to take to the streets in protest, as is our right. This country was FOUNDED on protest. Protest against a tyranny like the one we are experiencing now is as American as baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet. There are way more of us than there are of them, so be prepared to prove this to them if and when the time comes, just like so many people before us have done, both in this country and in Russia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Germany, China, Czechoslovakia, and so many other places. If Trump’s two terms have shown us anything, it’s that our civil rights and democracy are not a given, and we’ve taken both for granted for way too long. So be prepared to turn off Netflix, your NFL football, your TikTok doomscrolling. Be prepared to get off of your ass and take to the streets. Be prepared to encounter armed military, ICE gestapo, National Guard, and police officers and face them down. We must be prepared to defend our rights and our country because the alternative is subjugation, fascism, and a nihilistic, dystopian future that none of us want to live in.
Yes, it’s scary, but they’re counting on us being too fat, lazy, and disengaged to do this. They’re counting on us to be too afraid to do this. If and when the time comes, it will be up to us to prove them wrong.
Because this is a New Year of No Fear, motherfuckers.
