A few months ago one of my MAGA relatives defended ICE agents as law enforcement who had to wear masks because Antifa threatened to kill their loved ones. We don't know if that's true, or if a comment was taken out of context, or if MAGA propagandists manufactured and promoted this lie as truth. What we do know is that 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 and 3 people have been murdered by ICE in Minnesota not even a full 30 days into the new year. I'm ranting now. I'm angry. I'm not interested in making literature, I simply want to yell at people.
Now ICE roam our streets like hyenas, eating the weakest and least dangerous among us, brown people taken from behind the counter at the deli where they work, out of the truck they drive on delivery routes, out of laundromats, and yes, even out of the courthouses where they are waiting to finalize their precious, hard-fought, expensive legal right to be here. No, ICE haven’t whipped criminals out of dens of iniquity, driven drug dealers out of our country, or stopped the wholesale trafficking of vulnerable women, minors, and immigrants into the sex or slave trade. But they have kidnapped innocent people. They have murdered innocent people. Last year 32 people died in ICE custody. But the last time an ICE agent was killed in duty was in 2021–by an accidental discharge. One of my MAGA relatives told me ICE agents wear masks to protect their families from Antifa, but the truth is they wear masks because, like the president they work for, they are criminals. They are insurrectionists pardoned by an irredeemable man and enlisted into his army of street thugs. They protect a criminal in the White House, a convicted felon, rapist, pedophile, extortionist, traitorous president who should be in prison for the rest of his life. Because of him, because of his enablers, thanks to both the spineless and the simply evil legislators in Washington DC, pregnant women are bleeding to death in emergency rooms and pre-teen girls who can’t even legally consent to sex are expected to have their rapist's baby. Veterans have been among the administration’s biggest losers, with Republican legislators voting no on everything from housing to adequate staffing at VA hospitals. After accounting for ‘acts of god’ or biological causes, more pregnant women are killed by homicide than hypertensive disorders, hemorrhage, or sepsis. It's their partners killing them. 1 in 6 pregnant women are victims of domestic abuse. Abused women are 37% more likely to experience obstetric complications (like hypertension) that put their and their baby’s life at risk. One study found that a woman’s odds of experiencing intimate partner violence goes up 10% with each pregnancy. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children in the United States–over 17,000 children have been killed with guns since 2013. But Trump’s supporters wear AR-15 lapel pins on the Senate floor. MAGA tells us we didn’t show the proper respect after Charlie Kirk was murdered but only ever offered thoughts and prayers after every mass shooting. The Christian Nationalist Speaker of the House, like everyone in that swamp, including a regrettable number of Democrats, protects one of the biggest criminals in the country from the justice he’s got coming to him and that we so rightly deserve.
Any person, whether Democrat, Republican, or Independent, with the ability to connect to the full range of human experience, should be able to see that we are in the middle of a crisis. And so seeing, should be willing to put themselves between the hyenas and their vulnerable prey. I find myself wondering where is the MAGA's conscience, where is their integrity? Did MAGA ever have either, and if so, where were they lost? I insist that MAGA should never be forgiven for the intentional, willful, uncritical support given to the president and his nearly decade long stranglehold on our national corpus, but I also insist that MAGA can change its mind. You don’t even have to say you were wrong. You can simply stand up against his (and your own) vileness and at least try to redeem yourself and restore our embattled democracy. You can say, “I didn’t understand,” or, “I feel like I was lied to.” You can. You’re a human adult with your own will and ability to reason–you can change your mind. You can learn and change your mind.
I am tired of Republicans wrecking my future, as they have done since Reagan. How many beautiful human beings making music, art, literature, legislation, and families, did we lose to AIDS and Republican prejudice? But worse still I am tired of Republicans--The Tea Party, Q-Anon, Proud Boys, the Christian Right, and MAGA–wrecking my children’s future. I will live out the rest of my life battered by the blunt force of your hatred for anyone not like you as I held my gay, Middle-Eastern, transgender, and disabled loved ones close to me. Every time we think we're making progress, even a little bit, a Republican administration comes along and dismantles everything. And people suffer. I’ll be damned if my children will live in a world battered by your bigotry and discrimination, terrified of ICE agents crashing into their classrooms to snatch out their brown friends or classmates, or despairing at the funerals of their transgender loved ones who would rather die than live in a world that hates them simply for existing.
It’s almost intolerable for me to believe that men I grew up admiring, men who I loved, can support an administration that targets the most vulnerable, the least likely to fight back, the already wounded; that celebrates murdering innocent people in the street; that celebrates kidnapping and detaining innocent people for being brown, for merely looking like they ‘aren’t American.’ I'm sickened to my deepest core to see women who nurtured us throughout our childhoods bare their teeth and fight for this administration. It makes my soul sick to think they can’t see what’s happening, and instead of saying, “This has gone too far,” they double down. You’re not serious people. You want us to think you have religion, you go to church and believe in God. How dare you. How dare you claim to follow Christ while supporting Donald Trump. How dare you say you love God with the same mouth you use to belittle and bully the people who don’t agree with you? What I’m trying to say is, imagine people cheering on people in power who are actively targeting and harming hungry families, children in poverty, the poor, the sick, the elderly, veterans, disabled people, people with chronic illness, and still somehow expecting people to believe you follow Jesus. You follow fuck-all.
I understand what you are, and it’s what you’ve always been--bullies. I think back to all the conversations I’ve overheard or been a part of. How many times have I heard one of you say, “I don’t want my money going to pay for [insert social support policy here.]" How many times have I heard you use pejorative words for black and brown people, for women, for people like me, who you’ve called a ‘college educated liberal asshole.’ Never mind that I don’t hear you complain about your tax dollars being used to build nuclear weapons, to bomb villages, to arm warlords, destabilize foreign governments, traffic children and women for sex and cheap labor. You don’t want your money to provide vocational services for returning citizens or lunches for poor kids. I don’t want my money blowing up hospitals in Gaza. We are not the same.
You can say you can’t support this administration any more. Even if you did, even if you support it until right this very minute, you can still say this has gone too far. I hope you can before it’s too late for us, before there are no mid-term elections, before we’re in full scale war with former allies, before more innocent people are rounded up. But there’s one thing you can never take back. You showed us who you really are. You showed us that the Constitution doesn’t matter to you. You showed us that pedophilia and sexual assault aren’t deal breakers. You showed us your homophobia, your racism, your bigotry, and misogyny in full, capitalized, red MAGA letters. You can recant your support of an administration that is slowly destabilizing our democracy, but you will never be able to hide your true colors from us again. Can you understand that we always at least thought you were better than this, that we suspended belief because we love you? But now we can't suspend belief anymore. We aren't going to lie to ourselves or appease you for the rest of your lives. Can you live with that? Can you live with us knowing you?
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