Freedom is a constant struggle
Or thoughts from Angela Davis on what is legal against violent oppression.
First, an update on this blog:
I’ve thought a lot about my inability to write about or think about anything other than what’s going on in this current political climate. I started this blog as a fun hobby to write about the things that mattered to me at the time: my life in West Hollywood, gay romance, discovering myself, and growing from my mistakes. It was an outlet to talk about gay sex, the boys I was in love with, and how pop culture intersected with my life.
But time’s have changed. In the 2 years since I started this, a genocide was waged on the Palestinian people by a US-backed Zionist force. Trump was reelected, in spite of everything I had been told about the majority of American people being on our side and that good people wouldn’t let him become President again. Not long after, he enacted what can now be called a military incursion on liberal cities under the guise of “immigration enforcement,” a current occupation that I am witnessing with my own eyes having now moved to Minneapolis. While not the first city to be invaded by ICE, it certainly has seen escalated violence as a result of this paramilitary group whose sole aim is to intimidate political opponents of Donald Trump. This culminated in the murder of Renee Good, which I wrote about last week.
For this reason, I had to change my aim with this blog. There’s a quote from Toni Morrison in her essay, “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” that goes:
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language.” - Toni Morrison
So, if I can’t write about what used to trouble me because it feels insignificant in the scheme of the world, I will write about what troubles me now. And that is simply, the fact that I am brown. The fact that I, as a second-class citizen (meaning, nonwhite and nonrich), am continually threatened by the politics, voting, and silence now being experienced in this country. It is not the first time that brown bodies have been targeted. It is not the first time that innocent civilians standing up for their neighbors have been shot. But it’s certainly my first time experiencing any of these things, and I think that’s worth writing about. If my little corner of the internet, all 100 of my subscribers, can learn just a little more about how much of a struggle it is for me to focus on normal life day-to-day, then at least I will have done something while feeling utterly powerless everywhere else.
All this to say (dramatically) that I’ve changed my blog for the time being. I apologize if what you want is a reprieve from the political turmoil you’re watching every day on the news, if you originally subscribed to enjoy bouts of gay sex and pining for the “perfect” relationship. There may still be some of that, as a gay still needs to find love amidst a military incursion. But for the most part, I’m going to talk a lot about what I see, what I hear, and what I feel in Trump’s America. Thanks for continuing to read and subscribe.
Freedom is a constant struggle
I’ve been reading Angela Davis to clarify my mind around political violence.
I’m appalled that average, everyday Americans are on the front lines defending communities from ICE while the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), its mayor, and its governor do nothing concrete to protect them. It’s not a coincidence that Renee Good, a mother and civilian, was killed in her car while Jacob Frey, Tim Walz, and other politicians were nowhere near the area and were safe at home in their beds. It’s also not a coincidence that they’re urging Minneapolis citizens to document and observe peacefully while their neighbors are brutalized and kidnapped in the street.
While imprisoned in 1971—accused for the death of California Superior Court Judge Harold Haley with a gun registered in Davis’ name (she would eventually be acquitted)—Davis wrote an essay titled, “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” as part of a collection of works that would be a foundation for her lifelong work towards abolishing the prison-industrial complex. You can read the full version of it here. In it, she describes her own thinking around what is considered “criminal” when resisting against oppression, and how America is one place where conveniently the term “political prisoner” is never used, at least not by any operatives of the State (including media). It reminds me a lot of this present moment.
She remarks:
“In the heat of our pursuit of fundamental human rights, black people have continually been cautioned to be patient. We are advised that as long as we remain faithful to the existing democratic order, the glorious moment will eventually arrive when we will come into our own as full-fledged human beings.”
- Angela Davis
Is that not what our political leaders are asking of us today? The Big Beautiful Bill, which afforded billions of dollars to ICE, was passed in Congress. It wasn’t even passed by force. There were no mass protests by Democrats or Republicans, no sit-ins, no violent expressions of any kind. It was passed, and now Renee Good is dead. Why is that? If our system is designed to protect our rights, to allow for public expression and voted outcomes by a reasonable public, then why does it seem as though we’ve been steamrolled into letting go of essential human rights since 2016?
Walz implored us to document so that we could build a case. A case that I’m told has already been submitted by our attorney general against the federal government. But what is the purpose of this case? I suppose it will go to a local court, then a state court, then a federal court. And along the way, there will be finger wagging and (here’s hoping) a judgment that ICE must remove themselves from our city and stop their unlawful transgressions on US citizens. But what then? They’ll go to another city. After all, a similar case was heard by the Supreme Court for Los Angeles, where ICE was conducting similar raids just months before. The more likely outcome of that case is that it will wind its way to the Supreme Court. A Supreme Court whose majority has now been hand-picked by Republican conservatives and has already allowed for ICE to continue unabated in a ruling where Justice Kavanaugh confirmed that “reasonable suspicion” enabled ICE agents to racially profile and detain people simply for being brown and speaking Spanish.
As Davis writes:
“The liberal articulates his sensitivity to certain of society’s intolerable details, but will almost never prescribe methods of resistance that exceed the limits of legality — redress through electoral channels is the liberal’s panacea.”
- Angela Davis
I know why they’re telling us not to fight back. Because they’re afraid of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act, something he threatened as of yesterday, Jan 16, 2026, on his “truth social.” But let’s not forget the last time this was invoked by a President. It was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, my hometown, which were in response to the acquittal of four white police officers who beat Rodney King to death. Brennan Center reports that the “violence in Los Angeles killed 63 people and resulted in one billion dollars’ worth of property damage.” It’s funny how race and class (re: property) have always been part of the use of this act by presidents. It’s been invoked 30 times throughout history:
In response to early rebellions in the states against federal authority
At the start of the Civil War
To crush the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s
To intervene in labor disputes, almost always on the side of employers
During the Civil Rights Movement to enforce federal court orders desegregating schools in the South
If you’re scared of the Insurrection Act, read more from Brennan on what this might actually mean for the modern day.
But let’s look at Frey and Walz’s fear of this. Frey has said he does not want “open warfare in the streets” between state police forces and federal ICE agents. Ok, neither do I, but how exactly would this change what current citizens are experiencing?
Here’s what I see. I see mothers, fathers, the elderly, children, and all kinds of bystanders repeatedly put in danger by ICE agents. They’re torn from cars, rammed into, shot, pepper sprayed, tear gassed, threatened with guns, pushed, kneed, and kidnapped. Most of them struggle, but do not fight back. They have no weapons, only whistles and their phones. Those phones are repeatedly slammed away. From what I can tell, unarmed civilians are being attacked by agents. Most would deem this “criminal,” but in our current climate, the idea of criminality is suspect.
I suppose it always has been, just look at what Davis says about what happened in her own time:
“In the Spring of 1970, Los Angeles Panthers took up arms to defend themselves from an assault initiated by the local police force on their office and on their persons. They were charged with criminal assault…In defending themselves from the attack waged by some 600 policemen (there were only eleven Panthers in the office) they were defending not only their lives, but even more important accomplishments in the black community surrounding them, and in the boarded thrust for black liberation.
Whenever blacks in struggle have recourse to self-defense, particular armed self-defense, it is twisted and distorted on official levels and ultimately rendered synonymous with criminal aggression. On the other hand, when policemen are clearly indulging in acts of criminal aggression, officially they are defending themselves through ‘justifiable assault’ or ‘justifiable homicide.’”
- Angela Davis
And so someone like Renee Good (albeit, an unarmed white woman) gets considered a “domestic terrorist” by the federal government, while Jonathan Ross is allowed to roam free. It’s the same with any police officer who has ever killed a black or brown person—they remain free, on leave, while the bodies of their victims lie in a morgue. It happened with George Floyd. In both cases, the Minnesota state chose to protect law enforcement, not its civilians. After all, where is the manhunt for Ross?
It angers me. It angers me to see video of protests against ICE at the Whipple building on the night of Jan 14, with MPD standing with their backs to the federal goons and their riot gear focused instead on the unarmed protestors. It angers me that the governor gave a press conference earlier that day insisting that civilians be responsible for documenting, when we have an entire police force that could be out there with their phones and bullet-proof vests and helmets doing just the same. It angers me to see the mayor give similar calls to “not take the bait” when the bait is brutalization and murder of human beings. Not take the bait means “wait.” Wait for what? For more bodies? All the while these white legislators are able to go home safely, not worry too much about being taken or even manhandled by an officer, because they’re not the ones on the front lines. Renee is. Becca is. In the time of a military incursion, they ask for patience.
It even angers me to see politicians going to inspect ICE facilities, being denied entry, giving a press conference, and then doing nothing. Shouldn’t they be going in there every day? Shouldn’t they try to provide oversight, and be denied, every day? I still see Instagram ads to join Ilhan Omar’s fight against tyranny. What fight? A fight within the confines of a legal and political system that has already been failing us. Today there is a Congressional hearing of Minnesota lawmakers to hear first-hand about what’s been going on with ICE. Have they not seen the news? Have they not watched from their phones? Are they not part of the rapid response networks we all joined when Renee was killed? What comes out of this? The same thing that came out of the articles of impeachment against Trump?
Yesterday, my friend—a staunch advocate for the 2nd amendment so that liberals can protect themselves, too—asked if I wanted to learn to shoot a gun. He’d asked me before, about 6 months ago. Honestly, it was the first time I’d ever been asked, and I attributed it to being in the Midwest where proximity to guns was far more than where I grew up in SoCal. 6 months ago, I said “absolutely not.” I had no interest in even getting close to a gun, let alone learning how to shoot it. It went against every pacifist bone in my body and reminded me of the guns my father coddled as a prior LAPD policeman.
Yesterday, I wavered. Did I want to learn? After all, I’d been seeing armed men in masks throughout my city every day for the past two weeks. They certainly didn’t shy away from violence. So why should I?
I said no, that it still made me uncomfortable. He told me it was a standing offer if I ever changed my mind.
“The political act is defined as criminal in order to discredit radical and revolutionary movements. A political event is reduced to a criminal event in order to affirm the absolute invulnerability of the existing order.” - Angela Davis
Davis was talking about armed resistance, but also any form of resistance that is deemed “criminal.” Here in Minnesota, they just arrested 2 people for stealing documents and weapons from ICE vehicles. A criminal act, sure, but also a form of political resistance. Impeding ICE from enforcing the law of immigration is currently deemed criminal, but so were fugitive slave laws. Davis details in her essay how during slavery, there were repeated acts of unlawful resistance by anti-slavery activists, including one in Boston where there was armed resistance to free a fugitive slave from a Boston courtroom. Her quote above rings true in my head now, because by labeling even the protestors who are arrested as “criminals” rather than “political prisoners,” the State effectively reduces their actions to crimes rather than forms of political resistance. After all, did the 2 people who allegedly stole items from ICE vehicles this week do it out of a penchant for thievery or to stop the coordinated apparatus currently attacking their neighbors? If the latter, then their arrest shouldn’t be labeled as the arrest of 2 criminals, but rather the arrest of 2 political prisoners since their crimes would not have been committed if the State had not committed crimes against them in the first place.
It begs the question of how to consider Luigi Mangione, the man currently on trial for the murder of the United Healthcare CEO. In evidence presented by the prosecution, they argue that Luigi all but confesses to his motivations for murder by writing in his journal about his anger towards private healthcare and the evils therein. But still, they call him a criminal, not a political prisoner. It’s akin to what Davis describes as the hypocrisy in her time of not allowing trials of Black Panthers to be considered political: “In a revealing contradiction, the court resisted the description of the New York Panther 21 trial as “political”, yet the prosecutor entered as evidence of criminal intent, literature which represented, so he purported, the political ideology of the Black Panther Party.”
The Minnesota Star Tribune released an article bringing into question this idea of criminality vs resistance. In it, they write:
A federal agent on the night of Wednesday, Jan. 15, shot a man during a struggle to apprehend him, prompting residents to pour from their homes and protesters to flock to the North Side neighborhood.
Some kept their distance, but other protesters thrust cellphones in the faces of agents and hurled profanities. Some launched fireworks and water bottles at federal, state and local police officers. Three vehicles used by federal agents were ransacked, with vandals taking documents, including agent ID badges, from them.
Authorities fired projectiles and chemicals into the crowd. Soon, thunderheads of noxious green gas billowed through the neighborhoods, and police Chief Brian O’Hara declared the gathering “unlawful” while Mayor Jacob Frey called such actions “not helpful.”
Frey, who has urged peaceful protest, said at an evening news conference, “We cannot counter Donald Trump’s chaos with our own brand of chaos.”
A leading anti-ICE group, the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, rejected that plea. “There is violence and there is resistance to violence,” a statement read. “They must not be equated.”
[A woman they spoke to remarked,] “I know the polite political discourse line is to be nonviolent and to not put yourself at risk, but at a certain point it’s just…how many more murders are we supposed to tolerate?”
I side with that woman. What are we supposed to do, document and standby?
And the wider question around all of this is: where do we go from here? If we do document, if we do standby, what is it that we’re allowing to happen in our communities and what will happen as a result later down the road?
In her essay, Davis also contends with what will be if we allow repression to continue without adequate resistance:
“No one should fail to take heed of Georgi Dimitrov’s warning: “Whoever does not fight the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory (Report to the VIIth Congress of the Communist International, 1935). The only effective guarantee against the victory of fascism is an indivisible mass movement which refuses to conduct business as usual as long as repression rages on.”
- Angela Davis
In reading this, I couldn’t help but wonder whether giving Trump a political forum to spout racist ideology, treating him with respect and dignity while he eviscerated human rights in his first term and now in his second, and siding with law enforcement throughout repeated human rights violations by his supporters is actually allowing the “growth of fascism at these preparatory stages.” If we only have what we see with our own eyes as evidence, we’ve certainly seen the country become more lawless and chaotic since he enacted his policies, and it shows no signs of slowing down. If we continue to simply document and standby, in five years, will there be no form of effective resistance left? Will it be too late?
That’s my fear in all of this. And my more immediate fear is that black and brown families will continue to be torn apart, beaten, and kidnapped into a system that will never let them go, all while being asked to wait for justice. That’s what we’re fighting for currently, to prevent that from happening, and right now the only people I see doing it with any gusto are my friends and neighbors. Not the police. Not our elected officials. Just regular people being told by their government it’s their responsibility to remain calm, measured, and peaceful.
As of right now, I’m not advocating for armed resistance. But I know it’s something the other side is preparing for. Why else are they recruiting tens of thousands of ICE agents, picked from the ranks of white supremacist groups? Why else would they spend so much money on the military, making it a force far greater than even their nation’s own peoples could counter?
Right now I’m content with protestors throwing bottles of piss inside ICE vehicles. Or dumping water to create ice outside of their facilities.
