To My Fellow Americans: Keep Resisting ICE

Hi, there. I just need to say one thing: FUCK ICE.

Okay, I’ll say another thing: keep resisting and fighting against ICE.

How can you do that? There are many different ways:
– You can protest in person, of course.
– Avoid buying things from companies like Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Whole Foods, since they all work with ICE.
– Get involved with local organizations to help protect people and find protests to participate in. Your local branches of Indivisible and 50501 are good places to start.
– Call your representatives and put pressure on them to abolish ICE and invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump (and all his cronies) from office. You can find their phone numbers with a quick online search, and the staffers on the other end will write down your message.
– If you see a snitch hotline phone number being passed around on social media, call it and give the workers and/or answering machine extremely useless information. Sing songs, rattle off trivia, quote movies and TV shows, talk about who you think is in the Epstein files, or mention anything else that comes into your head. (I did this for a Texas snitch hotline that went up last summer, and the whole process was strangely cathartic.) This helps gum up the hotline and prevents real snitches from informing on innocent people.
– If you own a business and ICE agents try to use it, refuse them service. It’s your right to refuse them.

And here’s the most important bit of advice: DON’T. GIVE. UP. Keep resisting, protesting, and fighting back. Everyone is angry at ICE right now, and if we keep pushing back against them, they cannot win. There are 340 million of us, after all, and they can’t get rid of us.

I know that telling you to rebel against a U.S. government agency is a far cry from what I usually write about here, but I have to say something. And actually, many of the narratives I’ve covered in my posts are explicitly anti-fascist (hi, Star Wars, Captain Marvel, Wicked, and even Harry Potter), so this feels a bit like life imitating art.

Also, it scares me that both Renee Good and Alex Pretti (ICE’s most recent murder victims, who were innocent people) were just a year old than I am. Like, yikes, we’re the ones you’re going after? I guess I see the Millennial generation as people who are trying to figure our lives out, while ICE sees us as fully adult threats.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say for now.

Why and How We Should Protect U.S. National Parks

Most of the time, this is a pop culture blog. However, my country is turning into a fascist nightmare run by insane tech billionaires, and they’re tearing the U.S. government apart. One way they’re doing that is by illegally firing federal workers en masse. They’ve fired 3,400 new Forest Service hires (people who’ve been hired in the last years or so), along with 1,000 National Parks Service (NPS) recent hires. According to that article from The Guardian, that accounts for 10% of the Forest Service’s workforce and 5% of the NPS’s workforce. That’s important to know because Elon Musk and his Muskrats at DOGE (which is not a really or legal U.S. federal department) want the National Parks to shut down.

Why would a bunch of ultra-rich tech-bro asshats want to shut down the National Parks Service, which has been called “America’s Best Idea” in the past? So they can shut the NPS down, and then their billionaire buddies can develop housing and apartments on some of that land and drill on other parts of that land. I imagine Elon Musk also wants to build a mansion that overlooks Crater Lake National Parks or something like that.

But they’re not supposed to do that. That’s public land that’s set aside for everyone to enjoy, and in many cases, the NPS work with local Indigenous peoples in and around those parks to preserve their sacred spaces. And according to that Guardian article, the U.S. National Parks welcome 159 million visitors per year. 159 million people is the size of a large sovereign nation (for reference, the U.S. has around 330 million citizens, and it’s one of the top 5 most populous nations on Earth). The National Park Service guards so many wonderful things, and people clearly love visiting the sites it protects. That’s why we have to make sure that the NPS doesn’t go away.

That’s the reason why we need to protect the U.S. National Parks, but how can we do that?

We can do that by continuing to show up to the sites in the NPS’s system. We need to show that we care about these places and that we want to see and learn from them.

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How Fascists’ Beliefs are Fueled by Projection, Not Reality

So my country has been taken over by fascists. You may have heard about it. I hate them. I hate feeling powerless. So I’m going to do the only thing I feel I can do: write about it.

Now, I want to break down what drives them, and that’s projection. The things that these American Nazis claim to hate in marginalized groups is really a reflection of them and how they see and interact with the world around them. The groups they hate don’t do the things the fascists say they do, but those fascists do those things. They think that if LGBTQ+ folks, BIPOC people, and women of all races get their hands on power, those folks will think and act like fascists and ruling class capitalists do. The non-rich fascists also project their hopes and dreams onto billionaires, thinking, “One day, that will be me.”

(I don’t have any relevant fun images for this post, and I don’t want to give people like Elon Musk extra SEO for their images, so here’s Grogu/Baby Yoda.)

Here are some more concrete examples of what I’m talking about:

Continue reading “How Fascists’ Beliefs are Fueled by Projection, Not Reality”