Murder in Minnesota
Minnesota Nice is being tested by the worst people in the world.
Today, Trump’s ICE goons murdered, in cold blood, another non-violent, non-threatening Minnesota protestor. Minnesota is often mistakenly considered a “liberal state,” but we’re only liberal in the urban areas. Like every other state in this failing empire (and maybe everywhere in the world?), the “outstate” (rural) areas of the state are largely “conservative.” (A word that, in every definition, means “cowardly.”) Trump’s ICE goons are the poster children for conservatives: violent, terrified of everything that moves, uneducated, unskilled and untrained, and unintelligent.
The first murder was earlier this month, January 8, 2026. As CNN reported, “Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old US citizen, was killed when an ICE agent shot into her vehicle during an encounter Wednesday morning.” Ms. Good was a mother of 3 and was trying to obey conflicting orders, while being illegally threatened, after driving into a traffic situation created by ICE agents’ incompetent driving “skills” on Minnesota ice (actual ice, not Nazi ICE).
Today, January 24, 2026, ICE agents, again, intentionally, irrationally, and predictably murdered another Minnesotan, Alex Pretti, 37, a registered nurse working in the intensive care unit at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System. Even more obviously than with Renee Nicole Good, this was a blatant execution. Ghoulish plastic-surgery disaster Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem and Trump made similar outlandish claims of self-defense and justified homicide, well before they knew any details of the event. Rural Minnesota’s Republican US Representatives, Brad Finstad, Tom Emmer, Pete Stauber, and Michelle Fischbach immediately joined in with outright lies and exaggerations. Of course, all of those American Fascist Party politicians knew nothing about either the victim of the actual events before pronouncing his guilt. Knowing nothing is pretty much their standard operating procedure,
In the “style” of L.A. police beating an unarmed, unresisting Rodney King, the ICE goons are beating and pistol-whipping Pretti unmercifully, as is their pattern, one of the goons walks off with a confiscated weapon (that looks nothing like the one the Trump minions are displaying), a legally registered Sig Sauer 9mm, and a few moments later three of the ICE “officers” (to abuse that term mercilessly) fire 9 shots into Pretti’s prone and immobile body.
A Guardian article went to the trouble to interview Pretti’s employer, the V.A. Hospital in Minneapolis, his co-workers, and friends and you can read those character descriptions here: “Man killed in Minneapolis by federal agents identified as VA nurse Alex Pretti: ‘He wanted to help people’.”
This was a mob-style execution and nothing you can say will change my opinion. Republicans have been selling 1984-style “don’t believe your lying eyes” bullshit since Nixon and, even before that, with Joe McCarthy’s grocery list of fabrications. As I’ve observed before in “When You Can Fool Enough of the People All of the Time,” the US has been breeding for stupid for 250 years as the rest of the world dumped their garbage people, right from the beginning, in the European invasion of North America. If support for Trump holds up at the very consistent 40+% level, it’s pretty obvious that the “American Century” is over and our empire is collapsing from self-destruction at a predictable, historic rate. Obviously, Putin’s “investment: in Trump and the Republican Party, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian interference in our elections, and billionaire contamination of our inequitable economic system have paid off exponentially. But, in the end, we did this to ourselves. We are getting the government we deserve.