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ICE is Executing Innocent Americans in the Streets…Now What?

25 Sunday Jan 2026

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It feels like we’re at a turning point now, with many MAGA sympathizers and even MAGA supporters finally realizing that Donald Trump is the straight up fascist his critics have always said he was.

I’m not going to recap the two recent ICE murders because they were captured on multiple videos from different angles which you’ve no doubt seen already. They’re straightforward snuff films, with government agents playing judge, jury and executioner for people who very, very clearly are 100% innocent.

What is there to say, exactly? Between Trump threatening the US’ historical allies, like Canada, Denmark and Greenland, and him launching lethal attacks against American citizens, not to mention the ongoing Epstein cover-up, people who have railed against things like “wokeness” have finally found their red line. Good! That should be welcomed.

In one sense, the ICE murders are a shocking escalation, but they resemble police murders we have been seeing footage of for years. In 2016, Minnesota police murdered Philando Castile, who like Alex Pretti, also had a license for the gun he had on him. During his interaction with the cops, Castile calmly made police aware of the licensed gun he had in his glovebox, and the cops murdered him right in front of his girlfriend and 4-year-old son. We know this because the whole sequence is also on video.

So what’s different about this, ten years later? Trump increased ICE’s budget exponentially last year, from the $10-billion range to about $75 billion. It’s true that Trump is recruiting new ICE members from MAGA gangs like the Proud Boys and other violently deranged anti-woke January-6 militia, but the two agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti were members of ICE for 10 and 8 years, respectively.

Obama increased ICE’s funding and Biden didn’t abolish ICE when he had the chance, so why is this different? Because judging from the way Trump and his sycophants have not just excused the murders but praised them, framing this as Ameican authorities valiantly defending the heartland against terrorism rather than murderous hooligans satiating their bloodlust, this is clearly what Trump wanted to happen. He has been stoking violence for years, from famously attempting a coup and orchestrating an attack on the Capital to praising dozens of his voters for violently attacking democrats and critics.

Minnesota is in a state of siege, with even everyday, non-political residents hunkered down in terror while Trump’s militia goes door to door looking for non-white people. “Ghost cars” are a thing now, empty vehicles on the roads, left stranded there after ICE kidnapped the drivers’ and took them to god knows where. Residents with citizenship are trying to help immigants, who are too scared to leave their home to buy food, by buying the food for them, but ICE are following their movements. ICE are also circling schools, locking up students and even children as young as five, using food as bait to lure hungry people they can then kidnap. Despite what ICE says they’re doing, they’re using facial-recognition Palantir technology, partially to create a database of activists and designate them all “terrorists,” and to hunt non-white people.

Minnesota has been on Trump’s radar for years because it’s a progressive city, whose senator is Democratic rival and 2024 vice president nominee Tim Walz. There’s a community of established anti-MAGA activists, but this is radicalizing people in real time.

ICE is disappearing and murdering people. White Americans. This is important, because while absolutely nobody should be treated this way, it’s very telling that MAGA goons think they can simply kill or kidnap any American they want to. They’re not even pretending to follow their stated beliefs. Trump has given them impunity, and they very clearly want to kill and kidnap people. They don’t show remorse after killing innocent people, they seem proud and threaten to do it again. They’re not following any laws whatsoever. Nobody is safe, and it’s beyond naive, just extremely stupid, to think that MAGA will limit their reign of terror to the people they say they’re pursuing. That’s already been proven false.

People are noting how hypocritical libertarian don’t-tread-on-me types seem right now; their entire persona was based around owning guns to defend themselves from government tyranny. Many are watching their president’s paramilitary hooligans kidnap and kill people and responding, “Comply!” “Be servile!” “Do what the government tells you!”

Whatever your stance on gun ownership is, Alex Pretty, like Philando Castile, broke no laws. Renee Good clearly was unarmed. And they were murdered all the same. That they were murdered by lavishly-paid government agents who say they oppose Big Government and government tyranny would be ironic, but only if you expected the murderers to be coherent and logically consistent. Murderers usually aren’t.

“This is what people voted for!” is one excuse some Republicans are making now. It’s moot and frankly silly: there’s no rule saying that something can’t be fascist if people voted for it! I don’t need to remind you who else was voted in.

And yes, this is Project 2025. This is precisely what Trump critics said was going to happen. Most people criticizing it now criticized it right from the start. Now it’s here and it’s terrifying. Minnesota looks like they’re going to simply respond to this by going on a general strike, with nobody showing up for work until this stops. Because this can’t continue. On Friday, tens of thousands of protesters already braved freezing temperatures to denounce ICE in the streets and this will likely only grow and get worse.

MAGA’s prime directive–their stated support for rights relating to liberty, freedom, and gun ownership–has been shown to be a complete sham. It’s not that I personally think these beliefs were right or that these beliefs are wrong, it’s that all this time MAGA never believed in them. Even if it was extremely obvious that this is where things were heading, written out in Project 2025 and forecast for years by Trump’s words and actions, I hope his supporters can finally accept that he was lying and this can’t continue and they stop supporting him.

ICE needs to be abolished, yesterday, and all the people responsible for this should be held on trial. This is the moderate position.

I worry that, while typing safely on social media from my hometown of Toronto, I will encourage somebody to join the protests, and that person will be murdered by ICE. I want this violence to stop and I want people to stop it, but that’s the whole thing. If unarmed, innocent people can simply be murdered by the state in their own neighbourhoods, what are hopeful words going to achieve?

Identity politics VS politics

30 Friday Mar 2018

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The conservative idea of “identity politics” is sheltered and oblivious and needs consideration.

In one of the latest incidents in US police brutality Stephon Clark, a father of two, was in his grandmother’s backyard holding a cellphone when police shot him twenty times. Fatally. [Correction: eight bullets hit him, they fired 20 times.] Drawing attention to this, calling this outrageous and demanding it end is a no-brainer. It’s not a partisan cause or some niche side-interest to take up unless you think black people are only secondary members of society.

Maybe conservatives would care about it more if framed as an issue of government overreach, as in it’s wrong to spend tax dollars (often a huge salary) on government workers who don’t just fail to do their jobs, they literally kill sovereign citizens. 

In the age of video, white people need to be wilfully ignorant to still believe the innocent people killed posed a reasonable threat to police, that police were justified to feel their lives were at risk.

Stephon Clark was unarmed on his grandmother’s property and they shot him 20 times.

Philando Castile was calmly telling police he had a gun in his glove compartment before they shot him dead in front of his wife and child—it was licensed and they were in an open-carry  state and the entire interaction lasted about 40 seconds. The examples go on and on.

There are also multiple incidents of white people carrying machine guns brought in alive by police, even after they killed people or even after they pointed the guns at police.

The difference is instructive and extremely damning. The problem isn’t that these white people are brought in alive by cops—that’s a good thing. It’s that evidently police feel more threatened by an unarmed black man than a white man pointing a gun at them.

Police couldn’t be failing more to meet any standard of discretion, let alone the high one required before society should grant them the right to use lethal force on citizens.

Let’s do a thought experiment: if you didn’t know to what race you belonged and were told of two problems plaguing society, the first encouraging the use of trans-approved pronouns and the second state agents killing people with the court system’s permission, what would you say is a bigger problem?

Conservatives here are single-mindedly fixated on changing pronouns for two reasons: even the slightest accommodation they’re asked to make feels oppressive because people in power are used to demanding not accommodating, and conservatives are utterly sheltered from actual social problems.

Even if you thought that government control of language was only a prelude to gulags, the police are already killing people with the state’s permission. Why are those frothing mad about what they claim is potential fascism silent on what’s already happening?

Because conservatives only care about their identity politics.

Consider how natural it is for the conservative to see his identity mirrored in NFL pregame ceremonies, with Navy or Army veterans singing the anthem with a brass band, an American flag seen from space and fighter jets screaming over the field in formation.

They don’t even term this “identity politics” because it’s just the default way of doing things. But what else is it?

Conservatives feel under siege when their identity politics pre-game ritual is even slightly altered, so slightly nobody even saw Colin Kaepernick take a knee during the anthem for weeks until a reporter caught on and asked him about it. They were deaf to the fighter jets but the man silently kneeling pierces their ears. Think about that.

Conservatives often get offended when you tell them that actually the flag and fighter jets are blatantly identity politics, especially the kind of conservative who brags about how they cannot be offended.

In the way conservative’s invoke the supposedly sacrosanct right to own guns but defend police for killing a black person because they claim the black person was holding one, conservative fury at Kaepernick exposes their sham concern for free speech and the right to protest.

Identity politics is politics and the stakes are high. The FBI is surveilling Black Lives Matter activists, like they did Martin Luther King Jr, calling them “black identity extremists.” In other words, the feds are potentially criminalizing innocent black people joining a group that is peacefully responding to innocent black people being killed by police. Think about that circular logic.

Identity and politics are seldom separated. So for people to minimize what is literally a life and death issue marginalized communities face as mere “identity politics”? Anyone who does this must take a hard look at themselves and ask why.

Hopefully conservatives reading this won’t become defensive. I know political alignment is mostly determined by Clan Loyalty and it’s hard to break group ties and emotional bonds. Just, really consider what you actually believe and why.