Ryan Williamson
In Minneapolis, ordinary people are standing outside schools in subzero temperatures watching for ICE vehicles so parents can pick up their kids safely. Coffee shops are handing out whistles so people can warn their neighbors. A public health nurse is standing bodily between immigrants and federal agents—not because she thinks she’ll fix the world, but because her neighbor needed a shield between them and the government. And it’s working.
Vice President Vance wants to “redefine the meaning of American citizenship” around Americans with “real roots”—people MAGA calls “Heritage Americans.” Mere days after ICE agents murdered a 37-year-old American mother in Minneapolis while her wife watched in horror, DHS posted recruitment ads set to music popularized in neo-Nazi spaces, shared content from an account whose bio reads “Wake Up White Man,” and Secretary Noem stood behind a podium bearing the slogan “One of Ours, All of Yours.” Of the roughly 3,000 people arrested in the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, 23 were Somali—the community it supposedly targeted. None had ties to the fraud cases under investigation. ICE is now the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the United States—enough to rank in the top fifteen military budgets on Earth—operating masked, in unmarked vehicles, without body cameras, and recruiting with neo-Nazi anthems.
Jonathan Rauch built his entire career on defending liberal institutions, avoiding inflammatory language, and making careful distinctions. Sam Harris is famous for being measured to a fault—sometimes maddeningly so. When both independently conclude the F-word is the only accurate descriptor for Trump’s governing style, it’s not hyperbole. It’s documentation. Rauch’s Atlantic piece “Yes, It’s Fascism” dropped last Sunday. Today Harris hosted him for a conversation with the same title. The first thirty minutes are free—and Harris asks the question I’ve been asking since Alex Pretti was killed: “Where the hell are the conservative gun owners on this?”
The Bill of Rights has ten amendments. In his first year back in office, Trump has violated eight of them—documented by federal courts, not partisan interpretation. First Amendment: targeting law firms, arresting journalists. Second Amendment: Pretti. Fourth: warrantless arrests and racial profiling. Fifth: a federal court ruling that executive orders violated “rights to equal protection and due process.” Sixth: same ruling, right to counsel. Eighth: sending people to a notorious Salvadoran prison for torture. Ninth and Tenth: stripping state authority and demanding voter rolls. The only amendments still standing are the Third and Seventh. At this rate, expect troops billeted in Democrats’ homes by March.
I wrote a farewell post about silence being more insidious than hostility, and a guy who was silent for the entirety of my presence on Twitter showed up to be hostile at the end. Of nearly 4,000 followers, less than half of one percent ever engaged positively on anything that really mattered—and I know each of them by name. The rest? Hate follows, lurkers, tourists, a meaningless vanity metric. When the only interactions on posts about federal agents shooting American citizens and government agencies posting Nazi slogans are hostile, that tells you everything you need to know about who your audience is and what to do about it.
I’m grieving. Going through the stages. This week was anger. The grief isn’t because “everyone I know is a Nazi.” They aren’t. That’s the problem. That’s what makes it worse. “I find this argument boring and lacking substance,” my friend says. “Trump’s a lot of things, but he’s not a tyrant.” My friend isn’t a Nazi. He’s a good guy. He’d help his immigrant neighbors. He’d give you the shirt off his back. And he’ll keep finding each individual argument boring and lacking substance, right up until the moment it’s undeniable, even to him, and the people he’d help are gone.
A Bush-appointed judge who clerked for Antonin Scalia found ICE violated 96 court orders in January 2026 alone. DHS called him “just another activist judge.” Two U.S. citizens are dead—one shot while her car appeared to be turning away, one shot ten times while holding his phone. Six federal prosecutors have resigned under pressure to stop investigating. The Pentagon has 1,500 paratroopers on standby. And the President posted “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING” on Truth Social. “Fascism” may not be the most technically precise term for what’s happening right now, but I can’t think of a better one.
I went looking for Republicans willing to say Alex Pretti’s shooting was wrong. I found two. Chris Madel dropped out of the Minnesota governor’s race and left the party. Marjorie Taylor Greene had already left. That’s it. 41% of Republicans say federal agents were justified in killing a disarmed man in his own neighborhood. 38% are “unsure.” One in five will admit it was wrong, but not one sitting Republican officeholder will back them up.
“We’re no longer having a political debate, we’re having a moral debate… This is not ‘we need to see both sides.’ This is not ‘we need to wait for this.’ This is basic human decency.” — Tim Walz
I posed Claude a thought experiment: “Federal agents extrajudicially killing a man for peacefully exercising his Second Amendment rights at a lawful gathering is the very definition of tyranny.” Claude agreed—by definition—but noted that real cases never arrive with clean stipulations. The contested ground is always whether it was *actually* peaceful, whether the gathering was *actually* lawful, whether there was *actually* an imminent threat. Then I told Claude to search for Alex Pretti.
