By Michael Woyton
“Are you a proud American Citizen or does ICE need to come and track you down?”
That is what the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist sent out as part of a fundraising email recently.
The email, confirmed by Snopes, goes on to taunt the recipient with doubts about them being a “top MAGA patriot” because they still haven’t responded to his Citizens Only Survey — and sent him some dinero.
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“Don’t tell me, you’re an illegal alien?!?,” the email said.
Any doubts that the Mar-a-Lago makeup man thinks of ICE as his own personal military force? [An aside: Why is ICE going to the Winter Olympics to provide security?]
Just today Greg Bovino’s replacement — border czar Tom Homan — was asked Thursday how many ICE and border patrol agents were in Minnesota.
As part of his answer, Homan said that the agents have “been in theater, some of the people have been in theater for eight months.”
Interesting choice of words for Homan to refer to the agents being “in theater,” which makes it sound as if there is a wartime operation going on in Minnesota.
By the way, I just found out that Homan is only 64 years old. Talk about being ridden hard and put away wet.
Television writer and producer David Simon, likely best known for “The Wire,” reminds us that “in theater” is used in the military to refer “to a wartime theater of operations.”
He goes on to write, “The enemy in this military operation are citizens of Minnesota and the United States.”
The president’s own military force, answerable only to him.
An article in “The Atlantic” by Adam Serwer put the spotlight on the massive amount of pushback against ICE and the border patrol.
Titled “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong,” which can be read free through this link, poses the question of what the federal government expected when it was decided to invade Minnesota.
“Perhaps the Trump-administration officials had hoped that a few rabble-rousers would get violent, justifying the kind of crackdown he seems to fantasize about,” Serwer wrote.
Instead, the feds found “a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent,” numbering tens of thousands of volunteers willing to risk their safety to help defend their neighbors and their freedom.
Serwer points out that the number of Minnesotans who were willing to resist federal occupation “is so large that relatively few could be characterized as career activists.”
Simply, they are ordinary Americans, he observed.
These ordinary Americans seem better equipped to nonviolently “fight back” than the masked and unidentified agents are equipped to do whatever their mission is.
One observer Serwer interviewed said that it was her experience that ICE prefers to make arrests quietly and are unsettled by the whistleblowing and obvious presence by observers.
She said, “when these volunteers draw attention, the agents will ‘leave rather than dig in.’ She added, ‘They are huge pussies, I will be honest.'”
There’s a lot more in this rich story of the people of Minnesota and the times they are experiencing.
The point that Serwer makes is this: “No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors — just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.”
We have a lot to learn from the people of Minnesota. Time will show they are the best of us.
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If you are wondering if there are ways you can help the people of Minnesota, check out Stand with Minnesota through this link.
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Lead art: Screen grab from CNN.
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