What 74 days of federal operations looked like in Minnesota, frame by frame:
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2026/01/us/ice-presence-minneapolis-st-paul-vis/
I am a recovering fundamentalist Christian, a lapsed Quaker, a secular Buddhist, a spiritual Humanist, a proud agnostic with a master's in Religion, and the author of Presence and Process. When I'm not theologizing and thinking deep thoughts, I'm a songwriter and musician.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2026/01/us/ice-presence-minneapolis-st-paul-vis/
"MAGA is, I think people are realizing, it was all a lie. It was a big lie for the people. What MAGA is really serving is in this administration who they're serving is their big donors; the big, big donors that donated all the money and continue to donate to the president's PACs and donate to the anniversary or donating to the big ballroom. And if they're donating to all these things. Those are the people that get the special favors, they get the government contracts, they get the pardons, or somebody they love or one of their friends gets a pardon. And it's the foreign countries that are are running the show here. It's the major big corporations and what is best for the world. That's really what MAGA is."
-- Marjorie Taylor Greene, 01/28/2026
"Young ladies, young ladies,
I like 'em underage, see
Some say that's statutory,
But I say it's mandatory."
--Kid Rock (Robert Ritchie) / Cool, Daddy Cool
Kid Rock is the headlining performer at the Trump-endorsed Turning Point USA's “All-American Halftime Show.”
Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan and the rest keep telling us that ICE is going after "the worst of the worst." Are these children abducted in Minnesota by ICE and flown to a detention center in Texas really "the worst of the worst"?
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/06/us/minnesota-children-detained-immigration
"I knew they would come here. If you’re a president hell-bent on retreading 2020 and retaliating against your enemies, the midwestern state that started the George Floyd protests, with a generous social safety net and diverse population, governed by a vice-presidential candidate you vehemently hate, is a certain target. But I don’t think most people thought it would look quite this bad, quite this fast, for quite this many people. I don’t think we could have fathomed what 3,000 agents would look like in a smaller city – the relentlessness of their presence – or the level of violence they intended to bring."
Source: I knew Trump would target Minnesota. I didn’t expect this level of violence, Rachel Leingang in Minneapolis, The Guardian
"Immediately after a US border patrol agent shot two people in Oregon last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the targets were 'vicious' gang members connected to a prior shooting and alleged they had 'attempted to run over' officers with their vehicle. In the weeks since, key parts of the federal government’s narrative have fallen apart."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/02/portland-venezuelans-shot-border-patrol-court
“They want to go about their lives and to enjoy life without being recognized as kidnappers and abusers in their community. We identify ICE and DHS agents for the same reasons we identify any violent, dangerous people intent on doing harm. They have chosen to prey on the community.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/30/antifa-unmasking-ice
"I was just following orders." - Adolf Eichmann, Nuremberg Trials
"Everything I've done, I've done at the direction of the president and Stephen [Miller]." - Kristi Noem, 01/28/2026
"What is the point of pinning someone to the ground before pouring pepper spray in his face? What is the point of all of this, except to anger the public, and then to respond to that anger with even more force?"
It Doesn't Matter If Alex Pretti Had A Gun, Sarah Jeong, The Verge
Two of the founding members of Trump's "Board of Peace" could not be at the inaugural signing in Switzerland, as they would have been arrested for war crimes.
Here are photos of ICE in Minnesota protecting America from "the worst of the worst" as they detain 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos.
The full story: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/21/ice-detains-5year-old-minnesota-boy-lawyer-says-agents-used-him-as-bait
Last night Donald Trump shared the photo below to social media. It is a photo that was taken in August of 2025 when several European leaders sat with Trump in the Oval Office for a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The photo has been altered however. In the August 2025 meeting there was a map of Ukraine on an easel. In the photo Trump shared last night the map of Ukraine has been replaced with a map showing the United States, Canada, Greenland and Venezuela under the American flag.
They say a picture paints a thousand words, and this altered image tells us at least two things:
1. That the Trump administration has zero compunction about "editing" the truth to suit their purposes. This falls squarely in line with tactics used by authoritarians from Stalin to Kim Jong Un.
2. By posting this edited photo Trump is sending a very clear message of what his intentions are: to invade and rule Greenland and Canada, in addition to Venezuela.
The message Trump is sending is clear. The global danger is real.
Photo shared by Trump to social media:
Federal immigration agents forced open a door and detained a US citizen [with no criminal record] in his Minnesota home at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him out on to the streets in his underwear in subfreezing conditions.
Full story: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/20/citizen-ice-minnesota-thao
Full video:
Having spent 12 years as a Quaker (including earning a Master's degree from a Quaker seminary and studying Quaker history in depth) this is something that warms the cockles of my heart, because it's very much like something that the early Quakers used to do: confront hypocrisy in the Church (and in the justice system, and in the government), in a non-violent but disruptive manner... - DC
"Protesters disrupted church service at [fundamentalist evangelical] Cities Church in Saint Paul this morning where one of the pastors, David Easterwood, is the acting director of the St. Paul Field Office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Their demands were clear, justice for Renee Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, and for the pastor to use his authority to get ICE out of Minnesota.
Protesters said the objective of disrupting service was to inform the congregation of what they described as their pastor’s double-mindedness when it comes to the word of God and not loving thy neighbor with his work as a field director for ICE. The Pastor in the pulpit is Jonathan Parnell. David Easterwood was either absent or left when the protest started."
There have been several books that have dramatically altered my outlook on life. One of them is Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning. The book is a masterpiece of historical research that focuses on a relatively small contingent of German soldiers. But in doing so it reveals some very disturbing universal truths. Recent events with ICE agents brutally attacking U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike in Minneapolis have caused me to ponder once again the profound lessons I learn from reading "Ordinary Men."
Reserve Police Battalion 101 was comprised of middle-aged working-class men who were drafted into service in the latter part of WWII. Their job was to go through Poland, village-by-village, round up the Jewish residents, and execute them as part of Hitler's "Final Solution." The men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 were not rabid Nazis or even particularly antisemitic. They were just "ordinary men"--one might even say "mediocre men"--following orders and doing their job. They killed tens of thousands of Jews.
There is a quote, falsely attributed to filmmaker Werner Herzog, that goes like this: "Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches." Although the origins of the statement are murky, the statement itself rings with clarity. As the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated, a lot of people will go along with evil and injustice if it is mandated by "the authorities." And there can always we found a cadre of mediocre, ordinary men (and women) who will actively commit atrocity and utterly misuse civic power that is placed in their hands, if told to do so. In times of authoritarian crisis, only a minority, it seems, possess a strong enough internal moral compass to enable them to refuse to participate.
U.S. history is filled with atrocity, if one chooses to not gloss over it. More often than not it has been against non-white people. The perpetrators of atrocity usually do their best to keep their actions out of the general public view. Germans who lived in the lovely village of Dachau claimed that they had no idea of the depravity that was occurring at the concentration camp on the outskirts of town.
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries we average Americans have generally remained ignorant or apathetic about the atrocities in Central and South America, the Middle-East, Africa, Asia and elsewhere, committed with our government's backing, but now we are witnessing a new expression of atrocity within our own borders, and it is in plain sight. The Trump administration is intent on terrorizing immigrants and silencing citizens throughout the U.S. The level of atrocity does not compare with what was perpetrated by Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland, but the underlying psychology is very much the same. The men and women of ICE and the Border Patrol would, and will, commit greater atrocities if ordered to do so.
Hannah Arendt, who reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, coined the term "the banality of evil." Eichmann, and others like him, she observed, tended to not be sadistic arch-villains but rather "terrifyingly normal" bland bureaucrats who managed to disassociate themselves from the reality of the evil they were responsible for. Eichmann, Arendt observed, was actually a rather shallow person, a joiner, a follower rather than a leader, an unimaginative and somewhat ignorant person more concerned with job security than with ideology. This description also applies to the men of Police Battalion 101 and, I suspect, to many of the men and women in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol and their parent bureaucracy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
When this present dark time has passed, and Trump is gone, and the United States is once more in sane hands, there will need to be a reckoning of Nuremburg-style trials. J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Gregory Bovino, Karoline Leavitt, and the rest of Trump's minions will need to be investigated and held accountable. ICE and BPS agents (and any other law enforcement agents) accused of committing illegal acts will need to be investigated, tried and, if found guilty, punished to the full extent of the law. And these agencies, such as ICE, Border Patrol and Homeland Security, that have been so utterly corrupted by the Trump administration, will need to be torn down and replaced with something that serves the American people (and those aspiring to become American) rather than terrorizes them.
Published in The Nation magazine, 02/28/2014...
Excerpt: "Border Patrol agents have intentionally and unnecessarily stepped in front of moving cars to justify using deadly force against vehicle occupants."
Renee Good Is Dead
My heart has been broken
At what the news just said
ICE in Minneapolis
And Renee Good is dead
Jonathan Ross, a Christian man
(at least that's what's been said)
Chose a uniform and a mask and a gun
And now Renee Good is dead
"Thou shall not murder"
"Show mercy instead"
But Jonathan Ross chose violence
And now Renee Good is dead
Three shots from his handgun
Three shots aimed at her head
As she sat in her Honda
And now Renee Good is dead
"I'm not mad at you"
Are the last words that she said
"Fucking bitch" he muttered
After Renee Good was dead
Renee, she followed Jesus
"Care for the least" He said
So that's just what she did
And now Renee Good is dead
The President and his lackeys
Called her a terrorist instead
And told all kinds of hateful lies
About why Renee Good is dead
But we watched it with our own eyes
And we won't be misled
It was murder in Minneapolis
And Renee Good is dead
And tonight there are three children
Laying in their beds
Who will never see their Mom again
Now that Renee Good is dead
And now I have this fury
Now I have this dread
ICE in Minneapolis
And Renee Good is dead.
by Danny Coleman, 01/09/2026
Chris Tomlin’s Worshipwashing of Charlie Kirk
https://publicwitness.wordandway.org/p/chris-tomlins-worshipwashing-of-charlie
"The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
--H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26th, 1920
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven."
--Jesus (Gospel of Matthew, 5:43-48)
“I forgive him [the murderer of her husband] because it was what Christ did and it is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love.”
--Erika Kirk, 9/21/2025, at Charlie Kirk memorial event
"This is just the way I am. I hate my opponent. I hate my opponents…. Hillary, Joe, Kamala. It doesn't matter. I just hate them."
--Donald Trump, 8/21/2024
"I hate my opponent, and I don't want the best for them. I'm sorry. I am sorry Erika. But now Erika can talk to me and the whole group and maybe they can convince me that that's not right, but I can't stand my opponent."
--Donald Trump, 9/21/2025, at Charlie Kirk memorial event
Note: Donald Trump was voted for by 80% of white evangelical Christians in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
One of my guilty pleasures is documentaries about musicians/bands. The new documentary about the Lilith Fair is one of the best I've seen.
"We must recognize that violent instability is baked into any system where one side has power and rights and the other has none."
Noam Sheizaf, How to Burst the Israeli Bubble
Seeing two-dimensionally in a three-dimensional world
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
- Hamlet, William Shakespeare
On September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk--a prominent right-wing political activist--was shot and killed by 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. The murder of Kirk happened during a public event at Utah Valley University, and graphic video of Kirk's death spread rapidly across the Internet.
On that same day, 16-year-old Desmond Holly launched an attack on Evergreen High School in Colorado, critically wounding two students. Holly then killed himself.
Two weeks prior to that, 23-year-old Robin Westman fired dozens of rounds into an all-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. In two minutes of shooting, Westman killed two children, and wounded eighteen children and three adults, then committed suicide.
These are just the latest three in a long series of mass shootings and acts of extreme violence in public places, typically--but not always--perpetrated by young men. Whenever they occur, politicians and pundits are quick to cast the blame. The rank and file then join in via social media, pointing the finger (often before anything is actually known about the shooter or their motivations). Robin Westman, the Annunciation School shooter, identified as transgender and had changed their name from Robert but had not received any kind of gender-affirming medical treatment or hormone therapy. As a result of that tidbit, right-wing pundits and politicians jumped to blame transgender people and "woke" ideology for the shooting. When the Charlie Kirk murder occurred two weeks later, those same right-wing pundits and politicians once more immediately blamed "the radical left" and transgenderism, even before a suspect had been identified. Meanwhile, some on the left postulated that the killer was perhaps a radical right-winger who felt that Kirk was not right-wing enough.
And so it goes, the left suspects the right, the right is certain it is the left. Both sides are operating in a binary us vs. them framework. When Tyler Robinson, the murderer of Charlie Kirk, was apprehended and identified, and it was learned that he was a white kid from a good Republican Morman home and was not transgender, the calls from the right to visit holy war upon Democrats became less strident (though at this point in time some are still holding out hope that Robinson's roommate is transgender so that scapegoat can still be used). And, so far, nothing has come to light to indicate that Robinson was indoctrinated into neo-Nazism or some other far-right ideology. Time will tell the fuller picture.
But in the meantime, there are very clear indications (for those who have eyes to see) that Robinson was radicalized by the same zeitgeist as Holly and Westman and a number of other mass shooters who preceded them (including 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, and killed firefighter Corey Comperatore, and critically injured two others, in Butler Pennsylvania on July 13th, 2024). But this dark and poison wellspring exists outside of the two-dimensional binary worldview of right vs. left, Democrat vs. Republican, MAGA vs. Woke, progressive vs. conservative, making it difficult to comprehend. It is an ideology of nihilism. So, in a sense, it is an ideology of no ideology. Robin Westman, the Annunciation Catholic School shooter, made the following journal entry: "This is not a church or religion attack, that is not the message. The message is there is no message.” As the character Alfred says of the Joker in the Batman film The Dark Knight, "Some men just want to watch the world burn."
According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (an excellent, peer-reviewed, resource), "Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy."
This particular nihilism that we see manifesting with alarming frequency lives and spreads in a world that is completely invisible and alien to most of us. It is a world situated in dark corners of the Internet, on Discord and Telegram servers, in computer gaming culture, in decentralized online groups with names like Order of Nine Angles, No Lives Matter, Atomwaffen, 764, the Terrorgram Collective, Tempel ov Blood, the True Crime Community, etc. Communication in this world is rife with symbols and memes that are inscrutable to the uninitiated (I'm reminded of an old Star Trek episode called 'Darmok' in which Captain Picard finds himself marooned on a planet with a starship captain from a previously unknown race called the Tamarians who's language is made up entirely of references to Tamarian culture, mythology and history. In order to survive, Picard must figure out what phrases like "Shaka, when the walls fell", "Temba, his arms wide" and "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" mean. This is what came to my mind as law enforcement and news reporters struggled to decipher the meaning of phrases and symbols etched into Tyler Robinson's bullet casings, and suggested interpretations that were eventually shown to be misguided).
The FBI has recently coined a term: Nihilistic Violent Extremism (NVE). They define it as “individuals who engage in criminal conduct within the United States and abroad, in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.” Former FBI director Christopher Wray characterized NVE as “more about the violence than the ideology." British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has warned that “Terrorism has changed” to incorporate “loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety, sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups, but fixated on that extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake.” As disaffected young people become immersed in this dark cyberworld they are exposed to a buffet of cynicism, nihilism, extremism, graphic gore, misanthropism, sadism, rage, abuse, and hopelessness. Human empathy becomes dulled.
Marc-Andre Argentino, an academic expert on NVE, states, "Practitioners articulate a visceral disdain for humanity, morality, and meaning; their writings celebrate extinction, entropy, and the erasure of narrative coherence. Violence is framed as existential art: an aesthetic of ruin whose highest achievement is the visible unravelling of norms. Their ultimate objective is a civilizational vacuum in which all normative constraints—legal, moral, religious, and even ideological—have been liquidated. Collateral suffering is not a means to an end; it is the end."
A common feature of Nihilistic Violent Extremism is "accelerationism", a term that Wikipedia defines as "attempts to worsen existing conditions for a favorable outcome. [For example] Right-wing extremists such as neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and white supremacists have used the term to refer to an acceleration of racial conflict through assassinations, murders and terrorist attacks as a means to violently achieve a white ethnostate." Those indoctrinated into Nihilistic Violent Extremism, though not seeking to further a political agenda, may choose to act out in ways that create public shock and chaos and lead to further destruction. The perpetrator will then be remembered for his/her audacious deeds, which gives them a sense of immortality and meaningfulness. Both Desmond Holly and Robin Westman idolized previous school shooters, studied their methods, wrote about them in their journals, and incorporated references to them into their own violent performative acts of terror.
It remains to be seen if this is also the case with Tyler Robinson, but I suspect it will be. It is likely that Robinson's plan to murder Charlie Kirk, a prominent national Republican figure, in such a public way, had more to do with getting himself into the lorebooks of his nihilistic online community, to join the pantheon of young people who have shocked the world with cruel violence going back to Columbine High School's Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Robinson not only caught the attention of the entire world with a single bullet, but his act also brought about a ripple effect of chaos and potential violence as the Right blamed the Left and the Left blamed the Right. The next shooter may very well engage in obsessive hero worship of Tyler Robinson as they plan their own outrageous performance of meaningless violence.
I'm no expert in that world, that invisible and nearly incomprehensible dimension (I highly recommend Marc-Andre Argentino, who is), I'm just a dilettante scratching the surface. The FBI and U.S. Department of Justice are well aware of that culture of Nihilistic Violent Extremism, and what its access points are, and what the danger signs are that a young person is being pulled into its dark orbit. But one wonders if highly politicized government bureaucracies, as the FBI and DOJ currently are, are going to convey this information to the public-at-large or instead mute this information so as not to interfere with the cynical (and politically useful) narratives of "us vs. them" put forth by the politicians and pundits. And the news media, alas, tends to be too beholden to what makes quick and punchy headlines rather then providing us with in-depth and nuanced three-dimensional analysis. The obvious lesson here is that the longer we retain our two-dimensional us vs. them worldview, the more likely we are to play into the hands of these nihilistic attempts to sow self-perpetuating violence and chaos.
"I am not going to sugarcoat it: I have nothing but contempt for Charlie Kirk’s politics. He made a career out of poisoning young minds with grievance, conspiracy, and hate. He profited off division. He defended the indefensible. He celebrated cruelty. I don’t grieve for his ideas, and I won’t sanitize what he represented.
But here’s the thing: violence has no place in American politics. None.
I know what it’s like to be on the business end of political violence.
I felt fists, flagpoles, and tasers on January 6th. I heard men scream that they were going to kill me in the name of Donald Trump.
That day taught me something too many of us are still trying to ignore: once political violence becomes acceptable—once you decide that your enemy isn’t just wrong but expendable—you don’t control where it leads.
If you cheered this shooting because you hated Kirk, you’re no better than the mob that chanted for Mike Pence’s hanging. If you shrug it off because it happened to the other side, you’re part of the same sickness that’s rotting this country."
(Michael Fanone was police officer in the