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On January 7, Renee Nicole Good was murdered by ICE thug Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ross shot Good multiple times at close range, and then cursed her. “Fucking bitch” he said as he walked away from a woman still dying.
In response, people poured into the streets. The outrage and courageous struggle of the people in Minneapolis has, over the past 12 days, actually escalated in the face of both ever more violent repression and sub-zero weather. The fascist MAGA movement has intensified its violations of the rule of law and the norms of this system. This has taken sharpest form in Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would enable him to deploy federal troops to crush the people resisting in Minneapolis. He seemed to momentarily back off of this, only to mobilize 1,500 federal troops on standby in Alaska on the weekend. Trump has not only continued to attack and threaten the Democratic governor and mayor, he is said to have launched a federal investigation of them for conspiracy to impede ICE agents. He has poured 3,000 ICE agents into Minneapolis, outnumbering local police by a 5 to 1 ratio. He unleashed his Department of Justice to investigate Renee Good’s widow, Becca—provoking six federal prosecutors to immediately resign. And meanwhile, Trump’s minions in the media and Congress began invoking the specter of civil war.
If last week marked “a giant leap into full-out fascism,” it is hard to know what to say about this week—only that as part of that leap, the forms and norms of what had been regular imperialist rule continued to shake and shatter. This is rapidly becoming a situation in which, to quote the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, “those who have ruled over us, for so long, can no longer do so in the ‘normal’ way that people have been conditioned to accept.”
A State of Siege Enforced by Violent Thugs
The whole population of Minneapolis is under siege, with thuggish agents everywhere. This is especially true for immigrants who fear going to work, buying food, picking up prescriptions or walking their kids to school. (An important part of the resistance there has been people teaming up to make sure immigrants get food and medications and are as safe as possible.)
But it's not just immigrants. ICE is openly targeting people because they are not white or have an accent—and in complete violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, ICE is demanding people show them proof of citizenship. ICE is rampaging through the city, harassing and often violently abducting immigrants—and violently attacking anyone, including citizens—who stands up to them courageously in peaceful protest and defense of immigrants.
Five days after killing Renee Good, heavily armed ICE agents without a valid warrant smashed down the door of a Liberian man’s home, while his wife and small child were inside. He was seized and thrown into detention at an Army base in El Paso, Texas.
On January 14, ICE agents chased a man into his home and then shot their guns through the door, with no concern as to the fact that children were inside. The wounded man, who is Venezuelan, was taken to the hospital, and two people who had come to his aid were arrested. Meanwhile, hundreds of neighbors gathered in the street, demanding that the Minneapolis police arrest the ICE agent, and demanding that ICE leave the area and the city. ICE responded by firing flash bang grenades and pepper gas at the crowd.
Other incidents, captured on video, show gangs of ICE thugs violently pulling people out of their cars and beating them mercilessly as bystanders are filming or screaming at them to stop. And it has now also become quite “normal” for ICE agents to demand that randomly selected non-white people “show me your papers” and submit to questioning to “prove” they have a right to be here.
This wave of lawless violence is being unleashed by top fascist leaders. For example: less than a week after the murder of Renee Good, senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller posted this message to federal agents: “You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.” Translation: “You are above the law; kill, beat or maim anyone that gets in your way.”
ICE thugs are running with the message. Repeatedly, ICE agents are referencing Good’s murder as a direct threat to protesters. Minneapolis resident Phil Maddox posted a video to reddit of ICE agents, one with his gun drawn, boxing his car in and telling him “you won't like the outcome" if he follows the agents. "You did not learn from what just happened?’” Patty O'Keefe and a friend, both U.S. citizens were legally observing ICE from their car when they were violently arrested and detained by ICE. ICE sprayed pepper spray into their windshield vent to fill the car, broke the windshield and pulled them from their car. On the way to the detention center, an ICE agent threatened Patty, "you guys got to stop obstructing us, that's why that lesbian bitch is dead." The "lesbian bitch" is a vicious woman-hating reference to Renee Good.
Defeating Fascism and Raising Your Sights Beyond the Confines of This System Which Has Given Rise to This Fascism
As we wrote last week:
Whatever you thought “normal” was (under fascism!) died on a snowy Minnesota street with Renee Nicole Good.… People must be brought to see and to really “take on board” the implications of this basic fact. We cannot pin our hopes on or wait for elections that may well never happen. We must act now, together and determined, uniting all who can be united, in sustained, nonviolent protest demanding: Trump Must Go NOW!
At the same time, people urgently need to be asking these questions, and digging deeply for answers:
What kind of a system puts the reins of power into the hands of these ugly fascist thugs waging illegitimate violence against righteous people standing up? What kind of system drives people from their homelands for the basic ability to survive, and then demonizes and mass-deports them in the most vicious way? What kind of system unleashes dark-ages misogyny against women who do not "know their place"?
It is this system of capitalism-imperialism which has given rise to this fascism, and is responsible for so many other atrocities.
Now ask yourself, what kind of a system do we need? What kind of system could give backing to the broad aspirations of so many to defend and support each other in the face of fascist violence? What kind of system could give backing to the desire for collective means of survival instead of cutthroat dog-eat-dog competition?
In this rare time, when revolution has become more possible, it is more and more urgent to raise your sights and think outside the confines of this system, to the need and possibility for a radically different system. The concrete framework and blueprint for this is spelled out in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian. And the vision for this is distilled in the Declaration from the revcoms, We Need and We Demand: A Whole New Way to Live, a Fundamentally Different System:
A whole different way of living is possible: a whole different way to organize society, with a radically different economic foundation and political system, emancipating relations among people and an uplifting culture—all of this oriented to meeting the basic needs and fulfilling the highest interests of the masses of people.
Broader, Deeper, More Determined—and Searching for Answers
This week will witness demonstrations across the country in deep opposition to the brutal murder of Renee Good and the escalating repression that this fascist regime has imposed on top of that horror. These demonstrations should be built very broadly. The undeniable fascism of this regime, now hurtling forward at such breakneck speed, must be called out for what it is and opposed. The indictment from RefuseFascism.org should be gotten out widely, and people who are ready to recognize and resist this threat must be brought forward and organized.
Revcoms should be spreading the word about Bob Avakian’s 2025 interviews, which deeply analyze the roots of this fascism within this capitalist-imperialist system, how a revolution could be made to uproot that system, and what that revolution would actually do toward the emancipation of humanity. They should also be widely passing out “WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM.”
For above all, does not the intensifying and pervasive persecution of immigrants and the murder of someone like Renee Nicole Good, along with poisonous hatred of women that has accompanied that crime, both make clear that this is humanity’s great and urgently pressing need?
Misogyny, White Supremacy and Outright Nazi-ism
Another aspect of the intensifying fascist assault now concentrated in Minnesota has been the open unleashing of Nazi-style propaganda, both officially from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and even more crudely among the various fascist news media, influencers, and other “unofficial” mouthpieces. (See Right-wing media are describing pro-immigrant Minnesota activists using the language of war from Media Matters for nearly 20 documented examples of this.) And typical of Naziism, and a key cornerstone and “recruiting pitch” for MAGA, has been the crude and hateful misogyny (hatred of women) that has flowed out of MAGA.
Let’s start with the Naziism. For some time, DHS has been recruiting for ICE using memes and slogans closely associated with white supremacist organizations, such as calling on potential recruits to “defend the homeland” from outsiders while featuring heroic images of white men. And just last week, the U.S. Labor department wrote on social media: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American,” which closely echoes the German Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”—“One People, One Nation, One Leader.” On Saturday, the fascist Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, who has been directly on the ground leading these violent operations, wore a coat that is a near replica of a German Nazi stormtrooper coat. The Daily Wire’s Matt Welsh demands the federal government “Wage war against the terrorists because as the Renee Good case demonstrates very clearly, they're already waging war against us.” (Emphasis added to highlight savage lunacy of these fascists.)
Sneering misogyny (hatred of women) has been a major feature of the fascist “commentary” since the killing of Renee Nicole Good. Stung and infuriated by the heroic role being played by thousands of women, and by the specter of white women rejecting the sick ideology and program of white supremacy and America First chauvinism, these fascists have branded heroes such as Good as “AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals).”
Radio host Erick Erickson tweeted, “An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her. Progressive whites are turning violent. ICE agents have the right to defend themselves.” And former liberal-turned fascist Naomi Wolf, posted: “Liberal men at this point (sorry) are disproportionately estrogenized, physically passive, submissive due to woke gender hectoring, or porn-addicted. White liberal women are disproportionately sexually frustrated. Policing others as in the pandemic was an outlet for them, but it was not nearly enough. The smiles you see on their faces now say it all: white women long for all out combat with ICE—who tend to be strong, physically confident, masculine men—because the conflict is a form of physical release for them.”