The horrors persist, but there’s so much great writing about how we beat them back, or just making sure they don’t go unnoticed, that here is your second round up of things I’ve read THIS fucking week.

One thing that’s clear is we must continue, we cannot give up. And do that end, we have to ensure that we actually meet the moment that has been thrust upon us. There’s no room for half measures or minor reforms. If you’re calling for tearing Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center or demolishing the Ball Room but you’re not calling to Abolish the Nazi Secret Police Terror Squads you need to look within yourself to figure out why.

Voters will destroy candidates and incumbents who even vaguely support roving terror squads in our neighborhoods, but we must go further. One of the reactions to this occupation highlights how much of this abuse and violence existed previously, perpetrated by national, state, and local armed state actors. It just wasn’t targeted at white people, and wasn’t livestreamed nor in the national news.

So what do we do with that information? Do we abolish the horrors and build our communities? Or do we invest in training and body cams for the horrors, so that we’ll ensure they’re ethnically cleansing and occupying the right way, as Ezra Klein intended?

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Listening

Since a ton of songs on my weekly track releases were about these themes too, I’m including them and a podcast interview this week.

Blood on the Wheel by Everlast, WLPWR

Streets of Minneapolis by Bruce Springsteen

City of Heros by Billy Brag

Minnesota Nazis by NOFX

Scooby by corook

Would You Die To Stop ICE? - Interview

Reading

Reply to the email or let me know in the comments what you’re reading or what you think of these pieces.

I grew up with Alex Pretti by Kristen Radtke

There is something destabilizing about having known someone only as a child and then hearing they were gunned down in the street. The person you see in your mind lying in that street is still a child. I’m sure his mother feels that way, too, or she sees him at every age all at once, including those he did not live to see.

https://www.theverge.com/policy/868567/alex-pretti-minneapolis-childhood-friend

Grok creates fake, sexualised images without consent and government is OK with that? by Hazel Chu

This is not accidental. It is a continuation of gender-based violence, repackaged as “technological innovation”. Digital abuse doesn’t just stay on screens, online attacks   quickly spill into real life, escalating in severity. It is not surprising that the recent violations by Grok show the deep-seated threat of misogyny and violence against women already reported across social media,   especially on X. We need to stop treating these issues as niche policy issues and face them for what they are: an ongoing concern of public safety.

Hazel Chu: Grok creates fake, sexualised images without consent and government is OK with that?

The Green Party councillor says the government’s decision to turn a blind eye to AI generation of sexual imagery without consent is not innovation, it’s negligence.

Crackdown by Marisa Kabas

Non-citizens caught in DHS’s web of terror don’t get the hero treatment because we don’t know most of their names. They’ve been forced to live in the shadows since Trump declared open season on their lives. While Good and Pretti may inspire us to keep going and to use any privilege we have to stand between the hunters and the hunted, the unnamed and unseen are the ones we’re visibly fighting for. It is because we believe they belong here, that they have legal and human rights, that they deserve to be here just as much as we do that we have this fight at all. And on the rare occasions we do know their names—Wael. Maher.   Liam.—we have to shout   their stories   so loud that it’s impossible for the enemy not to hear.   

The Means-Testing Industrial Complex by Luke Farrell

Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people.

…

We are currently heading further into crisis on each of these fronts; the federal government is abandoning enforcement efforts against dominant contractors, shutting down and privatizing successful public options, and adding complex eligibility rules for contractors to profit from. We must advance the opposite agenda at both the state and federal level by holding anti-competitive contractors accountable, building public options in-house, and simplifying eligibility rules to better serve people, not corporate profits.

States of Denial by Felipe De La Hoz

Trump is the ailing figurehead of a movement to impose rule by junta on the United States, and this plan is simultaneously advancing briskly and on weak footing. Only a clear-eyed acceptance of the former can drive us—by which I mean all of us, from community organizers to journalists to local and state and federal officials to civil society groups to judges, unwieldy as such a coalition might be—to effectively use the latter to destabilize it.

…

What I hope local leaders might soon grasp is that there are conceivable—even likely—scenarios where the main choices they are going to have are the ways and degree to which their constituents will be harmed, not whether they will be.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/states-of-denial-de-la-hoz

We need your Rage by J. P. Hill

Cry today, if you need to. Scream, vent, feel your rage. Then, brainstorm. Think about what you can do. Talk with people about mounting a general strike. Talk about ICE patrols, about where ICE agents in your area park their cars, what hotels they stay at, about   what corporations partner with ICE. Talk with friends and people you organize with about how you can escalate, how you can prepare for ICE invading your town the way they’ve invaded the Twin Cities. This time our anger can’t be limited to social media, and it can’t be limited to cathartic protest. The rage you feel right now must be translated into working toward the total abolition of ICE and the squashing of fascism.

https://www.jphilll.com/p/we-need-your-rage

Another Killing on ICE by Kate Starbird

What I found over on X was surprising, and the implications might suggest a changing information environment. I expected to see the right wing propaganda machine in action, spinning a story that blamed the victim, the community, the left, and anybody other than ICE agents or the Trump administration for the killing. And yes, those efforts were clearly there. But the frames they were pushing were not prevailing. The right was having trouble controlling the narrative, even on their home turf on X.

https://katestarbird.substack.com/p/another-murder-on-ice

Just add a little friction by Akshat Rathi

Much of writing is about asking questions. Too often, thanks to AI and superfast internet, I’m tempted to try to find those answers by searching right at the instant the question appears in my mind. I can’t do that on pen and paper, so I have a notes section where I jot down questions for later and I persist with the writing.

Just add a little friction – Akshat Rathi

One thing about modern life that’s a given is that we try to make things as efficient as possible. We are all busy and we all want to do as much as we can in the limited time we have.It&#8217…