We need your Rage
Fight for Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Keith Porter, and everyone murdered by ICE
I have found, in the last 24 hours, that I am not above begging. I generally strive to write in a way that is measured, angry when the occasion calls for it, but calm and steady even when enraged. Yesterday that poise left me. When I saw the footage of Alex Pretti’s execution the floor fell out. Six men pinned this man, this nurse and neighbor, down, beat him savagely for no reason, and executed him point blank. After suddenly, involuntarily watching Alex’s murder on social media I felt viscerally ill, felt a deep pit where my stomach should be — and I was simultaneously filled with rage.
So now I beg you. I beg you to join the resistance to ICE and fascism, to find those taking meaningful action and join them, to become open to radical action to push the Gestapo out of our communities. I beg you to understand that war has been declared on us, and that we can either stand up and fight or lay down and see everything worthwhile in this country swept away. I beg you to understand that the time to fight is now.
We’re up against people who are willing to do anything, who are willing to kill, willing to burn down the “law and order” they claim to love, people who are knowingly engaged in a civil war against the majority of this country in order to establish a fascist regime. The Overton window, the window of acceptable ideas and action, has shifted dramatically inside the regime. Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the goons they employ are willing and eager to violate the law and kill anyone in their way. We cannot ignore that this is who and what we’re up against. If there’s one thing I beg you to understand today, it’s that our Overton window must also shift.
One day marches, even the beautiful one day general strike in Minnesota, won’t cut it. The brutal murder of Alex Pretti came not 24 hours after the general strike concluded. As powerful as that day was, as incredible as the massive crowds turning out in negative temps appeared, as heartening as it was to see one major union after another sign on to the general strike call, we need more. The fascist regime is giving us no choice, we need to escalate. We cannot let our neighbors be kidnapped, disappeared, and gunned down in the streets.
So today I beg you to expand your horizons of resistance. I know not everyone reading this will devote themselves to the radical edge of forcing ICE out of their communities, not everyone will be on the front lines, nor should everyone be on the front lines. But this struggle will require all of us in one form or another. The baseline, the bare minimum, is not condemning those who take radical action against ICE and the fascist regime. This is vital.
In the coming days and weeks you will see more and more people take drastic actions to resist. This is inevitable. Everyone who encounters ICE from this point on will fear for their lives in an immediate, visceral way. They will think of Renee Good, Keith Porter, and Alex Pretti. How could you not? And some will engage in self defense. Others will engage in community defense pro-actively. Already numerous people have turned out to do armed patrols in Minneapolis. And it is crucial that our window shifts, so that at the very minimum we do not condemn these people who defend themselves and their communities. We must be one united bloc fighting fascism, and that means accepting that some people will resist in ways we disagree with, some people will use tactics we wouldn’t use, and that’s okay. The regime is murdering people on camera in broad daylight in our streets, and it will take all of us doing everything we can to beat them back. It will take all of us working as one diverse, united front to win.
Cry today, if you need to. Scream, vent, feel your rage. Then, brainstorm. Think about what you can do. Talk with people about mounting a general strike. Talk about ICE patrols, about where ICE agents in your area park their cars, what hotels they stay at, about what corporations partner with ICE. Talk with friends and people you organize with about how you can escalate, how you can prepare for ICE invading your town the way they’ve invaded the Twin Cities. This time our anger can’t be limited to social media, and it can’t be limited to cathartic protest. The rage you feel right now must be translated into working toward the total abolition of ICE and the squashing of fascism.
The destruction of fascism will originate from the people, from masses of people getting organized like never before. We outnumber the Gestapo massively, and they know it. They’re scared of us, and we need to build the power they’re afraid we already have. We also need to build the power to force the Democratic Party to do what they should have done from the beginning. Seven Democrats in the House just voted to fund ICE, not 48 hours before Alex Pretti was executed. Now that bill is in the Senate, where Democrats could block it. We have to force them to stand up against the Gestapo. We have to make sure they’re scared of what we’ll do if they fail to act. This too is the organizing demanded of us right now. It shouldn’t be necessary, but history shows that it very much is.
It’s on us to fight back. I wish it wasn’t, but confronting this reality is one of the single most important steps we can take right now. I’m brought back to one of the first waves of protest I participated in — the 2014 Black Lives Matter movement after the police murder Mike Brown in St. Louis. I was in D.C., marching through the streets nightly with a group that steadily grew as the days went on. One of the common chants, at first, was “Hands up, don’t shoot!” in reference to Mike Brown being killed with his hands in the air.
One day an organizer stepped in, getting the attention of the crowd with a bullhorn as we began that particular chant. She said, essentially, “fuck that.” She told us that she wasn’t willing to die with her hands up. She wasn’t willing to rely on the benevolence of the state and the police who kept murdering Black people. She wasn’t going to just put her hands up and ask them not to shoot. So, that day, we changed our tune. The chant we used from that point on was: “Fist up, fight back!”
Today, I’m begging you to fight back. Every day someone new is radicalized, and some days masses of people are radicalized at once. Really radicalized. That doesn’t just mean being a kind person, or having good values, or simply not hating immigrants. It means your window shifts dramatically. It means you see both that our system is fundamentally flawed and that radical action is required of us to abolish the structures we have inherited and build something new, and different. It means you’re ready to fight for your belief in human freedom, for your belief in a new and egalitarian world — it doesn’t just mean holding those beliefs.
Every day someone is martyred for their belief in a better world, and for taking action based on those beliefs. Many of those martyrs die behind prison walls, behind internment and concentration camp walls. Many of those martyrs have died in Gaza, many have died in refugee camps, many have died without news stories being written about them and without their names ringing out around the world. But, sometimes, one name breaks through. Sometimes one video, one story, one of the countless heroes fighting for a better world breaks from the confines of an anonymous death, and seizes us, grabs us by the shoulders, and shakes us. Sometimes a martyr breaks through and wakes us up, radicalizes us, calls on us to pick up their banner, and to fight.
The execution of Alex Pretti is one such moment. He has instantly become one of the martyrs who calls us to fight back, calls us to make sure his life was not taken in vain, calls us to pick up the mantle he died carrying. We must commit to a new level of organization and resistance. We must band together and expand the horizons of our fight. ICE has expanded the scope of their attack exponentially, and we have struggled to keep up. Heroic efforts everywhere have tried, and in some cases succeeded in keeping our people safe. But too often we fail, too often our neighbors are taken, or killed. So more of us are needed, more of us are called to join the struggle, more of us are called to fight back. Today I beg you to think bigger, act more radically, and join the struggle of our lifetimes. Solidarity - JP
P.S. Some more reads about resistance to ICE:
https://www.thecorsaironline.com/corsair/2026/1/23/of0waxsytsrtwrm2ce84g5ffytve9h
https://truthout.org/articles/heres-how-to-find-out-which-corporations-are-collaborating-with-ice/
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/ice-businesses-boycott-campaign/
https://lapublicpress.org/2025/08/community-school-ice-patrols/
Strategize, boycott, organize...whatever it takes. The USA is a police state.
Alas, rage is just what they want. What is occurring is divide and conquer 101, it is the oldest playbook that exists. It is a pathetic tactic of predators without imagination.
The 1% wants everyone,—ICE, police, protestors, left, right, center highly activated and at each others' throats - with the migrants in the middle - in order destroy America in a blaze of hated to achieve their 2030 goals of:
1) you will own nothing and be happy, AKA we will loot and plunder it all and you will like it or else
2) The USA will no longer be a super power AKA there will be nothing standing in our way of enslaving you.
Here is how they are doing this, we cannot allow it to continue:
Ten Ways the 1% Who Hate Us Are Manipulating Us Right Now
1) The first manipulation is the illusion of choice. You think you have two parties representing different visions for America but both parties are funded by the same billionaires, vote for the same surveillance bills, approve the same defense budgets, and serve the same corporate interests. The choice you are given is which color tie the puppet wears, not who controls the strings.
2) The second manipulation is emotional hijacking. The news does not inform you, it activates you. Every story is framed to trigger fear or anger or disgust because those emotions bypass your rational thinking and make you easier to control. You are not watching journalism. You are being subjected to psychological operations designed to keep you in a constant state of agitation.
3) The third manipulation is tribal sorting. The algorithm learns what makes you angry and feeds you more of it until your entire worldview is shaped by outrage at the other side. You are sorted into a tribe not because you chose it but because keeping you tribal keeps you predictable and profitable.
4) The fourth manipulation is false scarcity. You are told resources are limited and the other tribe is taking what belongs to you. Immigrants are stealing your jobs. Welfare recipients are draining your taxes. The other party is destroying your healthcare. Meanwhile the billionaire class has more wealth than any humans in history and could solve most of these problems tomorrow if they wanted to.
5) The fifth manipulation is memory holing. Stories that threaten powerful interests get buried or forgotten within days. Exposed crimes result in no consequences. Historical context that would help you understand the present is never taught. You are kept in a perpetual present with no past to learn from and no future to plan for.
6) The sixth manipulation is controlled opposition. The voices you think are fighting for you are often funded by the same interests they pretend to oppose. The outrage merchant on your side of the aisle is playing a character designed to keep you engaged and angry and tuned in while nothing ever actually changes.
7) The seventh manipulation is the Overton window. The range of acceptable opinion is artificially narrowed so that anything outside it seems extreme. Ideas that were mainstream fifty years ago are now treated as radical. Ideas that serve elite interests are treated as moderate common sense. You are not choosing your beliefs from the full range of human thought. You are choosing from a menu they wrote.
8) The eighth manipulation is learned helplessness. You are shown so many problems with no solutions that you eventually give up and accept that nothing can change. This is intentional. A population that believes resistance is futile does not resist. They scroll and complain and feel superior for understanding how bad things are while doing absolutely nothing about it.
9) The ninth manipulation is identity capture. Your political affiliation becomes your identity, and any attack on your party feels like an attack on you personally. This makes you defend politicians and policies that harm you because admitting they are wrong would mean admitting you were wrong, and your ego will not allow that.
10) The tenth manipulation is the most insidious of all: you are manipulated into believing you are too smart to be manipulated. Every person reading this thinks the manipulations I described apply to other people, the stupid people, the brainwashed people on the other side. That certainty is itself a manipulation. The moment you believe you are immune is the moment you become most vulnerable