It was a whole thing for a while, liberals getting irate with liberals for throwing around the “Nazi” label too casually. I got emails from people telling me to cool down the rhetoric, and I did. I shouldn’t have.

The University of Pennsylvania has been asked to give the Trump administration a list of Jewish faculty.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.

Huh. What “terrifying history” would that be, I wonder. I also wonder who specifically is behind this initiative to construct lists of Jews. Stephen? Is that you?

You might be thinking that this is just one example, that the similarity to the Nazi agenda is coincidental, and that the intent of the list is entirely benign, to protect Jewish people. Sure. Keep telling yourselves that. Americans have been blind to this sort of thing for decades, it’s traditional.

But have you looked at @DHSgov on Twitter? I know most of you don’t bother with that far right propaganda site anymore, but right now it’s full of Nazi shit.

In this context, one might think the White House would be bending over backward to make the goals of its immigration policy appear as benign as possible: If you want to persuade voters to accept ICE’s radical methods, you’d presumably want to assure them that it has mainstream objectives.

Instead, the administration opted to associate its immigration agenda with a Nazi slogan.

Adolf Hitler’s regime famously advertised its rule with the tagline, “​​One People, One Realm, One Leader.” Three days after Renee Good’s killing, Trump’s Department of Labor tweeted, “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.”

This post is, on its face, evocative of white nationalism. The United States is a multiethnic society. To say that it has only “one heritage” is to suggest that only one of its ethnic groups is truly American.

But the remarks are even more sinister when the Nazi allusion is taken into account. And this echo is almost certainly not coincidental. Under Trump, the official accounts of federal agencies have repeatedly referenced white nationalist memes and works.

On January 9, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted, “We’ll have our home again,” a lyric from an anthem adopted by the neo-fascist group The Proud Boys and other white nationalist organizations. This was accompanied by a link where one could sign up to join ICE.

Last August, DHS shared an ICE recruitment poster beneath the phrase, “Which way, American man?” — an apparent reference to the white supremacist tract, “Which Way, Western Man?” which argues that “Race consciousness, and discrimination on the basis of race, are absolutely essential to any race’s survival. … That is why the Jews are so fiercely for it for themselves…and fiercely against it for us, because we are their intended victim.”

In October, the US Border Patrol posted a video on its Facebook page of agents loading guns and driving through the desert, as a 13-second clip of Michael Jackson’s song “They Don’t Care About Us” plays — specifically, the lines “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me, kick me, k*ke me.”

Other Trump administration posts have suggested that its immigration policy aims to return the United States to its condition in 1943 (it is hard to see what specifically this could reference beyond the nation’s racial composition at that time) and implored ICE recruits to “Defend your culture!”

Meanwhile, last fall, Vance refused to condemn a group of Republican activists who had praised Hitler and disparaged Black people as “monkeys” in their private group chat.

We have put Nazis in positions of power to run the whole goddamn country. They call themselves “MAGA”, but don’t be fooled. They’re Nazis. Nazis through and through. And what do we do with Nazis?

But other people do. Here’s a horrific example of a door dash gone incredibly wrong, wrapped up in some wry commentary by Reese Waters.

For those who’d rather not watch a video for 38 minutes (I don’t blame you, although I do find Waters entertaining), the short summary is that a family in Minneapolis ordered a food delivery through door dash, and ICE followed the delivery driver, and arrested one of the people in the car (his whereabouts is currently unknown, ICE tends to whisk people away without documenting their actions). The woman driver fled into the home of the family waiting for the food, and she was clearly distraught and crying and trying to communicate through the wails in Spanish.

The woman in the house is also greatly distressed. She’s in this house, most of her children are away at school, she’s got one child there who is less then two years old. She doesn’t know what to do. She is freaking out as ICE agents surround her home and start pounding on the door, and her first impulse is to get rid of this stranger who has made her family a target.

I can’t blame her. This creepy squad of armed vigilantes are wandering about in her yard, hands on their guns, demanding that she surrender the woman she is protecting. She is more concerned about her child, and starts to lead the weeping woman to the door. You can hear her resolve gradually steeling itself, though; she demands a signed warrant before she’ll let her go.

They don’t have one. Of course they don’t have one. They’re just cruising around looking for brown people to intimidate.

The neighbors are coming outside after hearing all the commotion. They are blowing whistles (the latest thing to sound the alarm about ICE thugs, rather like what prairie dogs do when predators are around. I should probably get a whistle, too). The woman is now yelling, threatening ICE with exposure. The cowards back down, and start retreating to their cars. Hooray for community action! Teach ICE to fear us.

One thing we all have to work on is how to get that community support, beyond just blowing whistles. During this event, the homeowner is on the phone, having called 911 to get help. The police dispatcher is worse than useless, advising her to simply surrender the woman — they’re not there to defend every citizen, just the white English-speaking ones, and that is contemptible. Our police need to learn a lesson from Philadelphia.

Philadelphia sheriff Rochelle Bilal recently made a declaration.

Yes! That’s what I want our police to do — just shut down this invasion of armed thugs who are harrassing, detaining, and killing the citizens they are supposed to serve and protect.

I don’t know what I’d do in a similar situation. I know for sure I’d be terrified — my house has a lot of windows, and seeing those men standing around, peering through windows in their tactical gear, reminds me of scenes from a horror movie. I think I’d make sure all the doors were locked and tell them to go away, but then, we all say we’d have defended Anne Frank from the Gestapo, but apparently lots of people didn’t. I might try calling the local sheriff’s office, but this is rural America, and I don’t know what the odds are that they would actually help rather than join the besiegers.

I didn’t learn what to do from this one example. I have learned that many of us are living in a state of fear and uncertainty, just the way MAGA wants us.

A whole bunch of sensitive information about some government employees has been released.

Sensitive details of around 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees—including almost 2,000 agents working in frontline enforcement—have allegedly been released by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower following last week’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good.

The Jan. 7 killing of the mother by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has sparked nationwide protests and worldwide outrage, including among some DHS employees.

The alleged leak to ICE List, a self-styled “accountability initiative,” is believed to be the largest ever breach of DHS staff data. It appears to include names, work emails, telephone numbers, roles, and some resumé data, including previous jobs of federal immigration staff.

ICE List founder, Dominick Skinner, told the Daily Beast: “It is a sign that people aren’t happy within the U.S. government, clearly. The shooting [of Good] was the last straw for many people.”

You think?

DHS is very concerned.

Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told the Daily Beast that its “law enforcement officers are on the frontlines arresting terrorists, gang members, murderers, pedophiles, and rapists,” but that “thanks to the malicious rhetoric of sanctuary politicians, they are under constant threat from violent agitators.”

Let’s not forget all the people they arrest, like “terrorists, gang members, murderers, pedophiles, and rapists” and agricultural workers and door dash delivery drivers and brown people and students and 37 year old soccer moms. It’s a long list!

Gosh, I sure hope none of those leaked ICE agents get shot three times in the face. That wouldn’t be just.

I believe this is a 100% accurate rendering of ICE training. It’s also the entirety of their training.

Never trust Facebook, but this account of what’s happening in Minneapolis aligns with what I’m seeing on the news and hearing from friends. We are being occupied; DHS has flooded the city with thousands of poorly trained masked thugs who outnumber the local police, and unfortunately the police union has declared their alliance with them. I’m not visiting Minneapolis/St Paul anytime in the near future, but let me emphasize: it’s not the citizens of my state that I’m afraid of, it’s Trump’s Gestapo that worry me.

Friends outside of MN please read. Im sharing a post written by a personal friend and medical doctor:

Friends outside MN, you need to know what is happening here. Everyone knows that ICE shot and killed a woman here on Wednesday. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on:

• ICE agents are cruising areas with immigrant-owned businesses, and kidnapping patrons and employees alike. Yesterday they abducted two US citizen employees at a suburban Target, one who was begging them to allow him to go get his passport to show them.
• ICE is going door to door in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, asking residents where their immigrant neighbors live. Read that again. If it sounds like something out of your high school history textbook, that’s because it is.



• ICE is targeting schools and school buses. They pepper sprayed teenagers and abducted two school staff members at the high school up the street from me on Weds. Police are literally escorting school buses to ensure children can get to school and home safely. The Minneapolis Public Schools have moved to virtual learning for the next 4 weeks because it’s unsafe for children or teachers to physically come to school.

They are targeting hospitals and clinics.

Patients are scared and are canceling their appointments or just not showing up. Kids are missing their checkups and vaccines, folks aren’t getting their cancer care, etc.

• They are smashing windows in cars and homes.
• ICE is increasingly picking up Native Americans-again, targeting folks based on skin color alone.
• They are arresting and beating legal observers.

A friend of a friend had her arm broken yesterday. Folks are showing up at local hospitals, brought in in ICE custody, with severe injuries that are absolutely inconsistent with mechanism of injury reported by ICE. (Think: patient appears to have been beaten unconscious, while ICE agent says he slipped and fell.)

I can’t emphasize enough that these ICE agents do not have warrants. There are 2,000+ agents here and they are simply hunting for anyone that’s not white. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or a green card holder, they will kidnap you first and ask questions later.

But the community is fighting back.

• Protests are happening every day.
• Community groups have been leading know-your-rights sessions for months, often to packed venues.
• Whistles are being distributed by the thousands, carried on keychains and worn on coat zippers, always at the ready to be blown in warning if ICE is spotted.



• Drivers are following ICE vehicles, blaring their horns in warning.



• Businesses are locking their doors even while open to keep employees and customers safe. As I type this, I’m standing guard at the locked door of our neighborhood burrito joint while I wait formy takeout order, so the employees can focus on their jobs. The place is packed with neighbors supporting this small business.



• Anti-ICE signs are posted everywhere. The community is making it crystal clear that ICE is not welcome here.



• Parents and neighbors are standing guard outside schools, organizing carpools, and escorting kids to and from school on foot.
• Parents of kids in Spanish-immersion daycare (there are a LOT of these daycares here!) are keeping their kids home so the teachers don’t have to take the risk of coming to work.
• Churches and community groups are holding fundraisers to buy and deliver groceries to families who don’t feel safe leaving home.



• Mutual aid money is going out to folks who can’t make rent because they can’t work or because a breadwinner was abducted, or who need a warm place to stay after their home’s windows were smashed.

THAT is what is happening here. This fight is ongoing and it’s horrifying to watch. But we are not backing down. To my friends in other cities and states, don’t think for a minute that this won’t happen in your town. It will. Be ready.

Learn from us, as we have learned from Portland and Chicago and New York. Fight back. Don’t let us get to the last line of Martin Niemoller’s poem.

Personally, I live three hours away from Minneapolis, so the turmoil isn’t affecting me directly yet. While I was standing in a protest line on Saturday, though, I heard that ICE agents have been spotted sniffing around the poultry farms and the immigrant workers employed there, so they’re creeping up on us.

One final note of irony: the man who murdered Renee Good, Jonathan Ross, has a legal defense fund on GoFundMe, and certain people are making a novel argument for supporting him.

I am big believer in our legal principal [sic] that one is innocent until proven guilty, wrote hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman on X after donating a reported $10,000 to Ross’s cause.

I can’t even…

It was a bad day for a protest: -10°C (what is that in F? about 15,16°), 40km/hr winds, blowing snow, near blizzard conditions, roads slick and icy, yet there they were, a dozen brave individuals standing out there in Cyrus, Minnesota, getting frostbit to protest the criminal regime of corrupt murderers and liars in this country.

Yikes, but it was cold.

We had a few assholes in pickup trucks drive by and make rude gestures, and a few people just stared stonily straight ahead to avoid acknowledging us, but the majority of the passers-by would wave or honk their horns for the cause.

And then I had to drive home and struggle to keep in my lane while the wind tried to push me into a ditch. Worth it, though.

The woman shot in Minneapolis was named Renee Nicole Good. She was a wife and mother, and was acting as a legal observer of ICE activities in her city. She was murdered by one of 2000 ICE thugs who had been intentionally deployed to Minneapolis to harass and kidnap people who didn’t look white enough, as part of a campaign by our president to punish the state for voting against him, under the pretext that some people committed fraud in 2020. That fraud case has been in the courts for years, and is being dealt with legally, with many convictions. Having masked, armed men roaming the city does not contribute in any way to the processing of the court case.

Since early December, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations – many of them masked and brandishing rifles – have grabbed people at hardware stores and gyms, or outside homes and schools around the cities. They have violently tackled undocumented immigrants as well as US citizens, including advocates and protestors.

By the time Good was shot on Wednesday – in broad daylight, as dozens of bystanders screamed in shock – local leaders and human rights advocates had been bracing for a catastrophe.

But there they are, shooting people.

Meanwhile, Kristi Noem, who was not there, is lying about the events of last night. She calls Renee Nicole Good a domestic terrorist.

An ICE vehicle had become stuck in the snow, Noem said, and officers were attempting to push it out “when a mob of agitators that were harassing them all day began blocking them in shouting at them and impeding law enforcement operations.”
…
ICE officers approached a woman in her vehicle, who Noem said “was blocking the officers in with her car.” She said the woman had been “stalking and impeding their work all throughout the day.”

ICE agents ordered her out of the car, telling her to stop obstructing law enforcement, Noem said. “But she refused to obey her commands.”

“She then proceeded to weaponize her vehicle, and she attempted to run a law enforcement officer over,” Noem said. “This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism.”

All lies. You’ve seen the video.

It’s going to get worse. ICE is exercising no restraint.

In Minneapolis, residents and organizers were bracing for more violence. Hours after Good’s death, about 3 miles (5km) from where she was shot on Wednesday, armed immigration officers descended on Minneapolis’s Roosevelt high school, tackled people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders, school officials told MPR.

Noem must be impeached, ICE must be disbanded, and Donald Trump…I don’t want to say what should be done with Trump, because what he deserves is not pretty.

Minneapolis is getting ready. This crisis is not over.