You know the old saying that if you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail. You also know about Kristi Noem and her bragging about shooting an exuberant puppy. In the face! Given that like Trump and Stephen Miller she relishes cruelty no one’s surprised that one of ICE Barbie’s THUGS has shot someone. In the face. (or at least head) Noem, along with her superiors have WANTED to kill a white, U.S. Citizen to escalate the terror they’ve been inflicting. They’ve shot their share of brown people/immigrants (usually in cars, hmmmm) but the protests against their cruelty includes tons of white people. Noem wanted, NEEDED for a white U.S. Citizen to get shot and killed to send a “Don’t dare stand up to us” point.
That’s how I see it. I don’t remember who but I saw someone on TV recounting how most ICE shootings since Trump got back in the WH have been of people in cars. As I said, it was only a matter of time where a gaggle of agents would have a chance to take a shot at a white person who was probably a citizen. In their car. And claim their victim had ‘weaponized’ their vehicle. Noem as we know (and I’ve written about it already) was within a couple of hours spouting her bullshit about Renee Nicole Good being a ‘Domestic Terrorist’ who was she (Noem) seemed to be saying was stalking ICE and lusting for a chance to run one or more of them over with a vehicle.
You will never, EVER convince me that a “suggestion’ didn’t make its way down the ranks from Noem that any agent who killed a white U.S. Citizen in a vehicle would meet with her approval. And protection. Hell, maybe a bonus. Hints that whomever did so would be doing the agency a “favor” by ramping up a “If you protest be prepared to die” message. I can easily envision her and Stephen Miller hatching a strategy of ensuring what happened to Ms. Good would happen and pitching it to Trump. Trump of course would say “How soon can you get it done?” as his way of greenlighting the whole thing.
This was always coming. More and more U.S. citizens have been detained and sometimes not let go in a few hours after ICE grudgingly accepted they were U.S. Citizens but sometimes spending weeks or months in jail. And white people have started becoming part of that. Shooting and even killing brown people only was getting white folks worked up enough to get out and increasingly protest and even block ICE efforts to whisk away “illegals.” More and more, Americans of all types are not just speaking out about ICE and its cruelty but getting out to where they are doing the awful things they do.
With signs, chants, bullhorns and sometimes organized action they are shaming ICE and even getting them to give up and leave a given area. And they don’t like it! Yes, they are afraid that people they know back home will see them committing their cruelties, and worse maybe their kids. In this age even grade schoolers have cell phones. Having an eight or ten year old kid seeing their face during one of their ‘enforcement actions’ and asking ‘Daddy, why did you and your friends beat on that person?’ is the last thing they want.
Worse, they have terrorized an awful lot of people but at the same time they’ve mobilized far more. Trump’s approval is getting as low as it’s ever been and that’s in part because he’s gone underwater on his signature issue – immigration. Even folks in MAGA country are growing increasingly uncomfortable with what they see ICE and other DHS agents doing. Some have been willing to say out loud they are Trump supporters and glad the border is now “secure” but THIS isn’t want they want to see happening. You can bet the farm plenty of others feel the same way but are afraid to speak up. Team Trump knows this and it’s got them scared.
They looked at their choices. Declare ‘victory’ and quietly wind down/scale back arresting people who show up for routine hearings, raiding workplaces etc. OR escalate. Any Las Vegas odds maker who bet big on the latter is now bankrupt. OF COURSE Team Trump doubled down. But they chose to try and intimidate the public into staying away from ICE agents by shooting them. Not that ICE agents wouldn’t gladly beat or even kill someone with a hammer but it’s a lot easier just to shoot them dead. But with resistance to them growing, even with good ole boy/gal white MAGAs they’ve decided they need to start shooting WHITE people. Including and especially if they are almost certainly U.S. citizens.
The ICE agents got a good look at Ms. Good and her partner who I learned just today was in the passenger seat. While the verbal action was brief it was clear there was no foreign accent, that these were white women, almost certainly U.S. Citizens and it was game-on. Escalate and shoot. To KILL. It won’t turn out to be the first time either. Although we don’t have details before I started writing I saw a breaking news banner at the top of my homepage. A couple, white people got shot earlier today in Portland. Another city that’s been a persistent target for Trump/Noem/ICE.
Details as I said are few but you can read them here. Both have apparently survived but the man who was shot called for help several miles away from where the shooting took place. Did he and his partner have to somehow effect an escape from from being murdered by ICE or other DHS agents? Well, here’s what we know so far:
Two people were shot by federal agents in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday, according to local police.
Portland police officers responding to a call for help shortly before 2:30 p.m. local time found a man and woman with “apparent gunshot wounds,” according to the police department.
“Officers confirmed that federal agents had been involved in a shooting,” the Portland Police Department said in a statement, adding, “Portland Police were not involved in the incident.”
The article goes on to note the agents involved are with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and not ICE. But they are still Noem’s people since CPB is part of Homeland Security. There’s too much not yet known both about the victims and what was taking place where they were shot. If you’ve followed the news you know Portland has for whatever reason been a bug up Trump’s fat ass and people there are sick and tired of feds stomping around and mount protests. Keep an eye on this however. Not only is ICE not withdrawing or reducing its presence in Minneapolis they are ramping it up!
Gov. Walz and Mayor Frey are urging people not to take the bait. To ensure protests are peaceful and don’t give Trump an excuse to go nuts with the Insurrection Act or sending in federal troops. Given court rulings the fireworks if he were to try and temporarily federalize the Minnesota National Guard would be epic. Like the Mayor I can see Walz standing at the podium and telling Trump to fuck off and get the fuck out of his state! However I think this just might be the place and time where Trump goes all out to create an incident that gives him what he thinks will be justification to declare Martial Law.
Personally I think it will backfire. I sure as hell hope so. In the meantime we see an all out push to demonize the VICTIM in yesterday’s deadly event. Team Trump is shouting louder and louder, spouting what we all figured from the start were lies. We can see the video for ourselves. When I was on active duty I was a grunt but found myself sent to the DC area because the SecNave wanted Marine Grunts in the OPNAV security office to protect his office suite and the Naval Command Center. That meant being attached to the Provost Marshall’s Office. I wore a badge both at the Pentagon and standing regular watch at our post, Henderson Hall in Arlington. And yes, I know the feeling of seeing a gun pointed at me because I was wearing that badge. Even having some drunk jarhead returning to the post and potentially hitting me with their car both by accident or intentionally. Or see it with others in my unit. Yet no one got shot. Arrests were made. But I can look at the video taken yesterday and see it with different eyes than many can.
Team Trump is trying hard to paint a false picture. I wrote earlier today about how the media has fallen short, and one of the ways is by not telling up a helluva lot more about the actual victim than we heard last night or for much of this day. Thankfully I found an article that does tell us more, even if talking heads still don’t seem to want to give it true discussion. I’m hoping Lawrence O’Donnell will step up in a few minutes to put lie to the claims of Team Trump. In case he doesn’t, take a look at the title pic, and then read this article from The Guardian.
It paints a very different picture. It describes a gentle soul who appears what her mother said about her in the limited information we got last night. In fact in another article I saw earlier (can’t seem to find it again) her partner says the fact they were at the scene in the first place is HER doing. After dropping Good’s 6-year-old son off at school she convinced Renee to head to the site where ICE agents were reported to be.
I called my Congresswoman’s office today with suggestions for things she needs to say in a floor speech. I’ll do so again tomorrow (or leave a message tonight urging her to read this article, and spread it to other Democrats so there’s real pushback on what Team Trump is saying about the actual VICTIM. I encourage you to do the same. Renee Nicole Good didn’t deserve to die yesterday and sure as hell doesn’t deserve to have an entire administration trashing her memory the way they are doing.
We the people aren’t nails or exuberant puppies and ICE (and other federal agents) shouldn’t be empowered federal ‘hammers’ using guns on us like we are nails. We need to keep showing up. As with the Civil Rights protests back in the 1950s and 60s yes, it will come at a cost to some. And yes, I’m willing to drag my disabled ass out to the Towne Greene or even Raleigh if a guy in my building (a fellow veteran who attends protests) is willing to take me along. There are tens of millions of us and only thousand of THEM.
Friends, I know everyone begs you for money. I promise, among all those asking for spare change, we are the smallest and the hardest working. We’re a group of old, disabled people, except for one writer in his mid-50s. The rest of us are in our sixties and seventies, and this is a labor of love. All we’re asking for is the chance to keep telling the truth about Trump and help ensure democracy survives. If you can help, please do. Thank you. Ursula
“Cogent” was invented to describe this fluent article which ought to be spread far and wide
Thank you. This morning, reflecting on my outburst I realize I omitted mention of the true architect of this and so much other related terror and tragedy – Stephen Miller. He’s got the same ‘flawed wiring’ and black heart of a serial killer. I have NO doubt that if he didn’t have the political influence he started attaining fairly quickly in his career which led to him winding up loaned to Trump’s first campaign dozens of people would have died horrible deaths in dark, dank places at his hand. His family is rightly ashamed of him. It’s a shame I understand because I will carry the shame of being the grandson of a badge wielding racist, sexist child predator until the day I die. My family line dies with me and as far as I’m concerned no more Elliotts of my lineage is a good thing.
The only thing that separates me from Miller’s family is scale. My grandfather caused plenty of damage but didn’t have the kind of political power Miller has attained. I shudder to think of what he would have done with it, and Miller is an ugly reminder of how much worse my grandad could have been. In the mid 1970s my grandfather died a quite undignified death, naked, strapped down to a rubber mattress in a tertiary care hospital in St. Louis inclined at a steep angle (to aid drainage) with tubes running from every orifice, and quite a few doctor made ones in his abdomen with nasty looking gunk draining out of him. Before he lost consciouness for the last time he knew true pain and indignity – being naked and exposed the way he was. For all his suffering I felt then and still do that it was a better than he deserved.
Stephen Miller deserves far worse.
Lady Karma will get the slimy Stephen Miller in the end but meantime he gets to inlict his hatred on innocent, decent people, because that’s what his twisted Nazi brain tells him he needs to do to feel like a real man. I suspect his mind grew warped because it never got a manly covering of hair atop his skull. Even his expensive follicle implants were rejected. Bald narcissists are a dangerous mutation amongst us.