Choosing Each Other in a Time of Terror

Listen to this article

0:00

/881.862517

1×

Greetings friends,

This newsletter is going to live up to its name this week, as I think out loud about the mess we’re in. January is almost over, and I still feel like I am taking my first unsteady steps into 2026. Assessing the terrain can feel like a fool’s errand when world events are shaped and reshaped by the whims and rantings of a bigoted old man, whose cruelty and bizarre fixations are indulged with astonishing passivity. Even the so-called opposition party is too afraid of seeming “weak on immigration” to call for an appropriate response to Trump’s paramilitary tyranny.

I have been heartened by the popular pushback against Democratic proposals to provide “better training” for ICE agents. Trump is waging war on our communities, and we don’t need “better training” for our attackers.

As was ever the case, a strategy for our liberation will have to come from us. I have some thoughts about what that might look like, or at least where I see it beginning this year. I also have a podcast recommendation and some must-reads to share with you. As always, thanks for reading — and for being in the struggle with me.

Competing Narratives

There’s a brutal cold front sweeping across the Midwest and Great Lakes, spreading into the eastern half of the country. Even amid these dangerous temperatures, the people of Minneapolis are protesting and resisting the federal occupation of their city, and solidarity actions are planned across Chicago and elsewhere on Friday. This is an alarming moment, as thousands of federal agents racially profile and attack Black and brown people in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and surrounding areas. DHS also launched a major operation in Maine this week, dubbing its attacks on Black refugee communities in the state “Operation Catch of the Day.”

Maine does not have a high density of undocumented residents, but efficiency is not the point of these monstrous operations. As we saw in Chicago, terrorization and content creation, showcasing the aesthetics of fascist paramilitary action, are among the federal government’s primary objectives. Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller appears to be enacting his longtime fantasies of waging a race war against Black and brown people. As I have previously discussed, Miller is a huge fan of the book The Camp of the Saints, a tale of white genocide popular among avowed racists and white nationalists. In the novel, Western governments are ridiculed for their unwillingness to perform acts of genocide to stem the flow of immigration.

In 2015 and 2016, Miller encouraged a Breitbart reporter to read The Camp of the Saints, suggesting that parallels be drawn between the book’s narrative and U.S. immigration policy. The novel depicts the destruction of Western Civilization, as unchecked immigration leads to the overwhelm and sublimation of white culture, ultimately resulting in white genocide. 

After the death of Renee Nicole Good, I recalled a passage from the book involving a refugee-supporting hippie being chastised by a professor about the consequences of mass immigration. “Don’t you ever ask yourself what something like this would mean? The mixture of races, and cultures, and lifestyles?” the professor asks. “The different levels of ability, different standards of education. Why, it would mean the end of France as we know it, the end of the French as a nation.” After making this pronouncement, the professor shoots the hippie.

The murder of Renee Nicole Good was not an unwanted byproduct of an assault on Black and brown communities. It was not a mistake. It was the realization of a fantasy — a white nationalist vision in which people deemed complicit in multiculturalism are punished for their crimes. This logic runs throughout The Camp of the Saints, a story in which the refusal to commit genocidal violence against refugees is portrayed as suicidal for Western nation states. The attacks being waged in Minnesota, Maine, and elsewhere are not simply attacks on immigrants, but attacks on entire communities viewed as complicit in what racist white men imagine as the contamination and collapse of their culture.

Those who would shelter or defend immigrants are cast as enemies in right-wing storytelling, no less dangerous than the Black and brown people white racists fear will overrun and destroy them. What we are witnessing is the conjuring of war by people whose imaginations have been corroded by race-war fantasies and myths about white-genocide. In this worldview, the death of the “complicit” is not a tragedy, but a warning — an attempt to discipline others into submission.

Good’s queerness is inseparable from how this violence has been narrated and justified. Fascism thrives on moral panics about deviation from rigid hierarchies. Trans people, queer people, and women who refuse submission to a misogynist white nationalist order have been cast as villains, and those deemed morally corrupt or deviant are denied victimhood altogether. In The Camp of the Saints, for example, a character named Lydie is raped to death by immigrants. Her fate is not mourned, but narrated with contempt. She embraced immigrants. She was impure. She was complicit. She was unmournable.

That same logic has been applied to Renee Nicole Good. One right-wing social media user posted a photo of Good and commented, “I feel like I’ve been condescended to by a woman who looks like this a thousand times.”

Donald Trump echoed this framing, describing Good’s supposed disobedience. “The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement,” he said. “Law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff.”

Again and again, we have seen efforts to justify Good’s death by focusing on her alleged obstruction of ICE agents or her disrespect for authority, as though these supposed transgressions warrant a death sentence. Journalist Katelyn Burns has described this process with great clarity as “the unpersoning of a political enemy.”

But the people of Minneapolis, along with people of conscience around the country, have refused to allow Renee Nicole Good to be unpersoned. They have rallied in her name, taken to the streets in greater numbers, and deepened their commitments to community defense. A GoFundMe benefiting Good’s widow and family has raised nearly $150,000. Rather than being disbanded or intimidated by Good’s murder, the people of Minneapolis have been galvanized, escalating their resistance and refusing to retreat from the work of protecting one another.

While the Army’s 11th Airborne Division and an Army military police brigade stand ready after receiving prepare-to-deploy orders, the people of Minneapolis are staging a general strike today. Hundreds of businesses have closed. Many residents are refusing to work or shop. Thousands are in the streets in subzero temperatures. Communities that have already been engaged in mutual aid and defense are now practicing collective refusal, demonstrating a willingness to disrupt business as usual rather than submit to terror. In the United States, general strikes are often treated as distant abstractions or online fantasies. In Minneapolis, under siege and in extreme cold, the tactic is being practiced as a living response to state violence.

On this bitterly cold day, I am thinking about the importance of stories — how my friends and I have often told people in political workshops, “Everything’s a story. People understand the world in stories.” Every protest is a story. Every struggle is a story. When people cannot make sense of the world, the stories they reach for shape their analysis, their aspirations, and their willingness (or unwillingness) to act. Many of the stories circulating right now are dark and bleak. We are ruled by charlatans and menaced by political cults, while masked agents hunt our neighbors in the streets. People are gassed for practicing human decency, or even gunned down for having a conscience. Precious lives — like Renee Good’s, and the life of Victor Manuel Diaz, who died in ICE custody on January 14 — are being cut short. The social fabric of fascism, always embedded in the anti-Blackness of carcerality and policing, the violence of borders, and the infrastructure of colonial domination, is now openly mingling with global fascist legacies and long-standing fantasies of race war. None of this can be wished away. It is being enforced through terrorization and paramilitary force, through spectacle and punishment meant to narrow what people believe is possible.

Yet, those pressures have not produced the compliance they were designed to secure. In Minneapolis, people are refusing the story terror would impose. They are refusing disappearance, refusing submission, refusing to allow their neighbors to be unpersoned. Their outrage at Trumpian violence has fused itself to legacies of resistance, including long traditions of multi-racial organizing and the networks and solidarity forged during the 2020 uprisings after the murder of George Floyd. In subzero temperatures, with wind chills plunging far below zero, Minnesotans are taking to the streets — choosing solidarity over isolation and collective action over despair. These are not comforting stories, but sustaining ones, rooted in risk, relationship, and refusal. In Minnesota, our siblings in struggle are lighting the way, and giving us a glimpse of what’s possible. They are creating a story we can live together, if we refuse the unpersoning of our neighbors and defend our collective humanity.

Must-Reads

Here are some of the most important articles I’ve read lately. 

• Into the Abyss by Andrea Pitzer. “You can’t reform a concentration camp regime. You have to dismantle it and replace it. We have a thousand ways to do it. And most U.S. citizens—particularly white ones—have the freedom to act, for now, with far less risk than the many people currently targeted.”
• From Minneapolis: I've Never Seen Unity Like This by Margaret Killjoy. “One thing that came up, that stuck with me, is that while [the organizers are] glad the media is reporting about all the terrible things ICE is doing, they want more people to know how beautiful the resistance is. I can’t paint a rosy picture of what’s happening here, because it’s not rosy. It’s not idyllic. But it’s inspiring.”
• Trump Has Made ICE the Largest Law Enforcement Agency in the Country by Silky Shah. “If ICE’s expansion plans are realized, the immigration detention system will triple in size — detaining 120,000-150,000 people at any given time, mirroring the scale of Japanese American internment during WWII.”
• Amid Trump’s War on Antifa, Activists Face Arrest for Zines and Group Chats by Brit “Red” Schulte. “Under a fascist political regime, all oppositional discourse, literature, art, and life is subject to attack. We must recommit to solidarity, and rise to the defense of those whose lives and actions become criminal by default.”
• Netanyahu Joins Trump’s “Board of Peace” as Gaza Babies Freeze to Death by Sharon Zhang. “Netanyahu’s participation is an indication of the board’s goals — not for “peace,” but rather for a continuation of Israel’s slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, now institutionalized by a multinational board of world leaders.”
• How Much Can a City Take? by Scott Meslow. “Wherever you are, get organized now. Figure out who your likeminded neighbors are. Set up your Signal chats. Get some whistles (I can spare a few if you need them).”
• US Citizen Says ICE Removed Him From His Minnesota Home in his Underwear After Warrantless Search by Jack Brook. “Federal immigration agents bashed open a door and detained a U.S. citizen in his Minnesota home at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him out onto the streets in his underwear in subfreezing conditions, according to his family and videos reviewed by The Associated Press.”
• We Ran High-Level US Civil War Simulations. Minnesota is Exactly How They Start by Claire Finkelstein. “Minnesota may be the first test of whether constitutional limits on domestic military force still hold – or whether the United States is about to cross a line from which it cannot easily return.”
• ICE Sent 600 Immigrant Kids to Detention in Federal Shelters This Year. It’s a New Record by Mica Rosenberg, Mario Ariza, McKenzie Funk, Jeff Ernsthausen and Gabriel Sandoval. “Family separations are back, only now they are happening all across the country.”

Podcast Recommendation

I highly recommend checking out the latest episode of How to Survive the End of the World. Autumn Brown provides crucial, firsthand insights into the situation on the ground in Minneapolis, and makes a moving appeal about the kind of analysis that should not be amplified right now.

A Personal Note

As is often the case, I am struggling a bit, health-wise. I’m hopeful that some upcoming medication adjustments will make life easier, but I’m still jumping through procedural hoops to get the care I need — and some days, it’s very hard to think. I want to extend love and gratitude to everyone who has supported me in getting rest when I need it, and to send solidarity to everyone grappling with chronic pain, perimenopause (let’s talk about it), depression, autoimmune issues, and a world that refuses to accommodate chronic illness or disability.

Please remember to make your appointments when you can, to care for yourselves, and to make space for collective care in your communities. Liberation is a project for collective survival, so let’s take care of each other.

Much love,

Kelly

Organizing My Thoughts is a reader-supported newsletter. If you appreciate my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber today. There are no paywalls for the essays, reports, interviews, and excerpts published here. However, I could not do this work without the support of readers like you, so if you are able to contribute financially, I would greatly appreciate your help.