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.

I remember when all the radical lefties were complaining that the university curriculum was too packed with tired old white men, which was true–the Western Canon is overstuffed with old guys. But I always thought the idea was to open the door to more diversity, to recognize more worthy women and brown people, and let the curriculum breathe a little more. It was less about culling Greek philosophers and to introduce more Great thinkers of different backgrounds.

Well, leave it to the conservatives to carry the idea to an extreme. Texas A&M wants to ban Plato.

Texas A&M has decided that Plato is not to be taught, a determination that suggests the problem is not ancient philosophy but what happens when people read it.

As Daily Nous reports, the university has instructed a professor not to teach Plato’s work in a “Contemporary Moral Problems” course, an act that is both historically incoherent and politically revealing. Plato is not a contemporary provocateur. He is one of the foundational figures of Western philosophy, taught because his writing invites questioning, disagreement, and analysis. Treating Plato as expendable makes clear that the concern is not ideology, but cognition in the time of Trump.

Madness.

What else bothers me is that the Texas A&M administration is overstepping their bounds. Administrators do not typically have the background to dictate the curriculum in a university department; faculty must have the autonomy to determine the content of their courses.

For example, most of the courses I teach are established topics widely recognized by all universities. I teach cell biology and genetics using standard textbooks, and further, these were courses long approved on my campus, and I’m continuing a curriculum established by my predecessors. If an administrator tried to meddle in the content of those courses, not only would I be pissed off, my colleagues would join me in protesting.

We also have to be prepared to extend our teaching to include new material — does anyone think an administrator is more up to date on current advances in biology than I am? I’ve also introduced entirely new courses, like my eco-devo course, which wasn’t just a whim on my part. I had to show my sources, and document my teaching plan to my department. I had to get approval from my division. I had to write a proposal that was presented to all the faculty of my university. Administrators had to deliver the final stamp of approval, but that’s just a formality — course content is and should be entirely a product of qualified faculty and experts.

I hope Texas A&M faculty are ready to rise up in furious protest at administrators killing Plato in a philosophy course.

If you are anything like me, you are eagerly anticipating the day that either Trump drops dead (preferably slowly, and in agony), or that Congress grows a spine and asserts its constitutional authority to slap the old fart down. The former is probably much more likely. Unfortunately, just seeing Trump hog-tied or buried in a shallow grave on one of his golf courses does not solve our problems — JD Vance is waiting in the wings, and he might be even worse. While Trump is amoral and greedy, Vance has a terrifying ideology driving him. He’s an acolyte of Thiel, and Thiel is an acolyte of Curtis Yarvin.

Curtis Yarvin is almost incomprehensibly popular among rich Silicon Valley libertarian/authoritarians, but I would guess one source of their esteem is Yarvin’s constant sucking up to the wealthy. They should rule the world, he thinks; democracy is bad, and we should let tech parasites be our overlords. Only problem with his perspective is that he’s a moron. Daniel Drezner sums him up.

My considered reaction: at least with the likes of, say, Marc Andreessen, some effort is required to parse out his true-but-not-new points from his new-but-not-true points.1 With Yarvin, it’s much simpler: pretty much everything he says in this interview is wrong. There is no kernel of an interesting idea gone bad; there is just a bunch of half-baked analogies that fall apart if you have a decent liberal-arts education. It’s like listening to a stoned, first-year MBA student who read his father’s outdated history books when he was a teenager and half-remembers them.

I’ve read some of Yarvin’s online work, but not much. It’s self-serving drivel, and anyone with any intelligence will recognize that within a few paragraphs. I think Elizabeth Spiers recognizes the problem.

The most appropriate treatment of Yarvin is one that recognizes his influence on Silicon Valley billionaires who don’t recognize him as a shallow thinker bc they’ve never taken a single class on political philosophy or history or philosophy

So yeah, kids, get a liberal arts education or you might end up as stupidly blinkered as a Yarvin or Andreesen or Thiel or Musk. Maybe my university ought to consider that for a slogan (our current advertising mantra is “More Is Morris,” which is short but not very deep. Don’t worry, they’ll probably change it next year.)

There’s a longer article on Yarvin in the New Yorker, but he’s hardly worth the extensive coverage — my feeling reading anything about him is that anyone pays attention to him. Here’s a short summary of his agenda.

In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”

It wouldn’t be of much concern if Yarvin was just a crank with a blog, but he has become a crank with influence on some very powerful people.

A decade on, with the Trumpian right embracing strongman rule, Yarvin’s links to élites in Silicon Valley and Washington are no longer a secret. In a 2021 appearance on a far-right podcast, Vice-President J. D. Vance, a former employee of one of Thiel’s venture-capital firms, cited Yarvin when suggesting that a future Trump Administration “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” and ignore the courts if they objected. Marc Andreessen, one of the heads of Andreessen Horowitz and an informal adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has started quoting his “good friend” Yarvin about the need for a founder-like figure to take charge of our “out of control” bureaucracy. Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at the government’s Office of Personnel Management, has said that replacing civil servants with loyalists could help Trump defeat “the Cathedral.”

If Trump were to die, Stephen Miller’s influence might diminish somewhat (a good thing), but he’d be replaced by Curtis Yarvin as advisor, with every Silicon Valley venture capitalist breathing over his shoulder, urging him on to empower mega-capitalism. Yarvin is a scary extremist dude.

As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow. When I spoke to him recently, he quoted the words of Louis de Saint-Just, the French philosopher who championed the Reign of Terror: “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

How does this bozo get the attention of media and influence so many of the assholes in power? I’ve been doing it wrong. If I want to be rich and popular, I really need to start praising the rich and popular, telling them that they deserve to rule the world.

I’ll try that right now.

…

Any minute now.

…

Urk…

…

…

Sorry, I just can’t bring myself to be that stupid and craven. Sorry. I’d rather just fade away into obscurity.

I am horrified by this incompetent man who is running the country.

We should not allow our country to be run by “STUPID” or INCOMPETENT PEOPLE!, which is why Trump should be impeached and his entire administration dismissed, ultimately to be arrested and tried. He is providing the evidence himself: you do not ask people to take a cognitive test unless you suspect there may be a cognitive problem, and asking them to take the test three times suggests that there is a deep problem here.

He is in cognitive decline. He’s also in poor health, to the point that he is tweaking his medication against all medical advice. He’s taking 4 times the recommended daily dose of aspirin.

They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don’t want thick blood pouring through my heart. I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?

I know a little bit about this, with my history of cardiac problems. Initially they had me taking baby aspirin, low dose aspirin, but then the doctors decided, on the basis of evidence, that this wouldn’t help. So guess what I did? I stopped taking it. I didn’t quadruple the dose.

He’s a stupid, ignorant old man.

Yet somehow this man holds unfettered power; he can, basically on a whim, without congressional approval, invade a foreign country and snatch up the elected leader of that country. Venezuela sets an ugly precedent. I guess we couldn’t complain if the EU swept in and scooped up our president (please do, we’ll welcome you with flags and parades).

Worse, he’s declaring that this sudden snatch-and-grab means we’re now in charge, that we “run” Venezuela, and he has admitted that the motive was simple greed, to steal their oil. We tried this in Iraq, at the cost of a million lives and trillions of dollars. Are we supposed to believe that this will work this time?

I need a stronger word than “worse,” because now Stephen Miller is talking about taking over Greenland.

One of President Donald Trump’s closest aides, Stephen Miller, questioned Denmark’s claim on Greenland and suggested the U.S. could seize it without pushback, stoking concern among European allies.

Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper, Miller sidestepped questions of whether the U.S. will use military force to take Greenland, a territory of Denmark, and said the president has been “clear for months” that the U.S. should have it.

“Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Miller said in the Jan. 5 interview.

We are so fucked. The whole world is fucked.