Donald Trump, his nasty White House sycophants, and their stormtrooper thugs lie and lie and lie to the world while pouring gasoline on the fires they set in our cities. Trump and his gang of thugs must be impeached, removed from power, tried for murder and treason, and if found guilty imprisoned.
The United States has been in the throes of yet another round of violence and civil unrest. There have been frequent tho intermittent mass peaceful protests, assassinations and attempted assassinations, mass shooting in schools and houses of worship, nationwide No Kings Day demonstrations, political corruption and corporate intrusion into government especially at the Federal level, numerous violent abuses and war-like raids on first immigrants and then anyone else by ICE and CBP, the calling out of National Guard forces by President Trump over the objections of Democratic state governors and city mayors, the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro’s Residence, waves of White racism, transphobia, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, the rollback of LBTQI+ rights, the rollback of woke and DEI, the increased sexism and misogyny from the White House, and the erasure of much of history including downplaying slavery and genocide. That is one long sentence, and, even so, a very incomplete list. This nation is once again highly polarized, and the temperature keeps getting cranked back up.
Lately much of the turmoil has been centered in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Twin Cities in the heart of the American State of Minnesota. On Saturday the 14th of June 2025, an ultraconservative Fundamentalist Christian part-time pastor went on a rampage of assassination along the edges of the Twin Cities. He shot two Democrat state lawmakers and their spouses. All four were riddled with bullets. One couple died and the other two survived.
Then on Wednesday morning of 27 August 2025, a troubled young person shot up a Catholic School in Minneapolis. Two children were murdered, 14 more were wounded, and three adults were also wounded before the shooter shot themselves dead. In November and into December ICE and CBP agents surged into Minneapolis and St. Paul to attack and disappear, allegedly detain and deport, alleged immigrants. Such ICE raids triggered increasingly large protests and street clashes with local citizens including immigrants and long-time civilians. Even the local police criticized the highly aggressive tactics of Federal law enforcement. The Republicans in the Federal Government, however, in turned accused many Minnesotans especially the Somali community as engaging in multi-billion dollar fraud.
Renée Good, 37 years old, was shot in the head and killed by ICE agents on Wednesday 7 January 2026 as she turned her car to drive away from them during a peaceful protest. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Federals from the White House to local ICE agents claimed she was a terrorist who had weaponized her SUV to run over agents there to enforce the law. Ms. Good was shot four times.
On Wednesday the 14th of January 2026 a Venezuelan national attempting to help and protect another Venezuelan refugee fleeing from aggressive ICE agents was shot in the leg and both detained. Even more outrage broke out after ICE agents detained a scared, confused 5-year old boy in a blue bunny hat with floppy ears and made off with him in an unmarked vehicle. The little boy’s dad had fled the gang and cartel wars in Ecuador to seek asylum in the United States.
More and more ICE ands CBP agents were sent into Minnesota, President Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the Army, and Governor Walz threatened to mobilize his State National Guard. The state and local police were caught in the middle but seemed to come out against ICE due to the reckless and murderous aggressiveness of Federal agents.
Alex Pretti, an ICU-RN at the Veterans Hospital there, was then pepper sprayed and assaulted by a gang of ICE agents as he sought to help a defenseless woman who was also sprayed. Pretti had a holstered, legally-registered and permitted concealed pistol which was taken away from him while the agents beat and kicked him. Pretti was squirming vigorously in pain from the pepper spray in his eyes. His actions were labeled as “violently resisting arrest” by the Feds. Then two agents, after Pretti’s firearm was removed and he was squirming in pain, shot him 10 times including in his back. Minnesota erupted. The nation erupted.
We Americans have arrived at yet another major inflection point at the edge of yet another Rubicon. We came close to revolution and civil war during the height of violent unrest in the 1960s and 70s and again after Wisconsin, Occupy, Standing Rock, the Black Lives Matter revolts, right wing militia revolts, and Trump’s insurrection of 2011-2021. One can see similar surges of intermittent violence and civil conflict across every decade in American history since the end of the Second World War, and indeed every decade since the American Revolution. We are a violent nation that actually believes itself to be peaceful. Fortunately, we’ve only suffered a true, all-out civil war once, and was so bloody and murderous and destructive as to still invoke fear of another. The United States took many decades, more than a century, to recover from the Civil War of 1861-1865. Several issues still remain unresolved such as a number of civil rights, social justice, and systemic economic and political issues.
We’ve had a number of inflection points already including the reelection of Donald Trump, a convicted felon and possible traitor, in November 2024 with his inauguration as President in January 2024. Another is the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in September 2025. The two peaceful No Kings! Day protests in June and again in October of 2025 were the largest demonstrations in American history. Portland and Los Angeles and Chicago and Washington, DC were scenes of numerous raids, protests, and clashes. And now Minnesota has erupted. Fiery rhetoric, anger, fear, fury, terror, and outrage continues to stoke what seems to be a battleground. Meanwhile harsh winter weather abounds in the wake of massive Winter Storm Fern. So many Republicans now question what the Hell happened in Minneapolis-St. Paul that Trump backed down and the head of ICE forces on the ground, Greg Bovino, was pulled out. The outrage is nation-wide. Indeed, global. Our allies, already disgusted over Trump’s naked imperial ambitions, are further repulsed by this mafia-fascist shatterer of standards and norms. We the People of the United States of America must find ways to stay nonviolent even as we shout and holler. We cannot, must not be sucker punched into civil war. Such violence would destroy us all and spill out across our borders into all neighboring countries.
To be clear much must be changed, reformed, abolished. The Electoral College must be abolished. Immigration must be reformed, streamlined, and made affordable. Our deep issues are systemic and ossified. We must find ways to break free of the concrete and iron of today’s anachronisms still stuck in the past such as the endless arguments between capitalists and socialists with their centuries-old jargon. We’ve lots to do. Let’s bring peace and justice to Minnesota, corral in ICE and look at abolishing or defunding ICE or folding it into CBP to focus on the actual borders and ports and let local police deal with criminal behavior in their jurisdictions.
The corruption in the White House with all the financial wheelings and dealings, the influence of technocrat oligarchs, and their manipulation of both crypto and the marketplace must be addressed. Extrajudicial killings in international waters must be addressed. The treason of the Orange Man in his White House and his lackeys must be addressed. The evidence of GOP-led voter suppression and gerrymandering must be addressed. There’s more, much more, for the list of issues that “must be addressed” is long. We must start now.
Already some of Trump’s allies in his MAGA Mafia Cult seem to be withdrawing support. One Minnesota attorney, Will Stancil, declared Trump must be “pretty much unconditionally surrendering as support collapses.” Trump, however, is a sorcerer of deflection, deception, and misdirection. He will seek to maintain and expand his power in other ways as he has so cleverly done before now. Trump and his stooges will go make a mess somewhere else until we impeach and remove the wannabe-despot once and for all.
William Dudley Bass
Monday 26 January 2025
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Earth
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