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Opinion
The Trump-Vance-Noem-Bovino Message to Americans: Obey or Die
Good and Pretti weren’t accidents, and they weren’t about immigration: these murders were unambiguous messages as clear as could be: “Get in our way and we will kill you, and nobody will do anything about it."
Jan 26, 2026
Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, Greg Bovino, and even whiskey Pete Hegseth are all out there trying to tell us that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist who came to a protest with the intention to “massacre” ICE agents.
But that’s not their real message.
Back in 1980, I went into Uganda during the Civil War against Idi Amin to take over a refugee camp up in the Karamoja region. When I was leaving the country, going through the Entebbe airport (which had only intermittent electricity and considerable damage from the war), I was confronted by three armed men, two of them Tanzanian soldiers (who’d just successfully occupied the country as Amin fled to Saudi Arabia) and one a local Ugandan policeman.
One of the soldiers had an AK-47 over his shoulder and he grabbed the clip and rotated the gun down so the barrel was pointed right at my nose from a distance of about 6 inches.
“I could kill you right here, right now,” he said with a smile, “and nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever punish me. Now, give us half of your money.”
His message was essentially the same message that the Trump regime is trying to communicate to all of us today:
“We have all the power. You have none. We can get away with murder, repeatedly, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
In other words: “Obey or die!”
It certainly worked for those three; I split the little money I had with them and they let me get on my plane.
These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.
This “we have all the power and you have none” is the classic, eternal message of fascism, wherever and whenever it appears in the world.
Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino aren’t trying to convince anybody (other than the pathetic, brainwashed suckers who watch Fox “News”) that both Alex Pretti and Nicole Good were “domestic terrorists.” They know that both were merely well-intentioned citizens protesting the occupation of their city by masked federal goons.
Their real message — and Trump’s, Miller’s, and Vance’s real message — to Democrats and to America is:
“Challenge us and we will kill you. And we will get away with it. That’s how powerful we are, so you shouldn’t even try to resist.”
And it appears, indeed, that they will get away with it. They’ve already shut down the investigation of Renee Good’s murder, and have now seized the evidence from Alex Pretti’s murder. And suffered no consequences whatsoever for this naked obstruction of justice.
Hakeem Jeffries is hiding someplace in Washington DC, perhaps under the same table as Chuck Schumer. Both should be in Minneapolis right now holding ad hoc hearings and engaging the nation in nonstop media the way Noem and Bovino are: you don’t fight corrupt power by cowering. You have to show up.
Meanwhile, the generally useless and certainly feckless Republicans in Congress are anxiously counting their campaign contributions, particularly the ones to their leadership PACs that they can take with them when they leave office.
Billionaires are buying fancy homes around DC so they can continue to purchase Republican politicians, while rightwing media struggles to convince people that what they’re seeing with their own lying eyes isn’t true.
And the message under it all is:
“We’re in charge here. You may not resist us. We are in control, not you. Obey or die.”
Studies show that conservative men, and law enforcement officers particularly, are generally submissive men who need a “strict father” figure to tell them what to do and who crave regular reinforcement — often achieved by using violence — for their fragile sense of masculinity.
— When a young woman tried to make her peaceful protest known, these cucks felt threatened so they violently threw her down onto the ice and sprayed her in the face with liquid pepper and other chemicals.
Their message: “Obey or die!”
— When Alex Pretti tried to put himself between the CPB/ICE thugs and the young woman they were beating up, he enraged them by claiming some power for himself. Thus, he also had to be punished, so first they knocked him to the ground and sprayed liquid pepper into his face, too, to blind and disorient him.
Their message: “Obey or die!”
— When he staggered back up from that, again asserting his personal power, it was apparently the final straw: to preserve their masculinity, this man — like the woman who’d laughed at impotent officer Jonathan Ross two weeks earlier — had to be taken down.
Their message: “Obey or die.”
— Finding his gun — a symbol of male power they were offended he dared legally carry — was pure gold for them. They eliminated any threat his gun might have represented by removing it and then — like the cowards they are — put as many as ten bullets into his back.
He didn’t obey, so he had to die.
These craven weaklings, desperate to prove their manhood and reassert their power, murdered Alex Pretti for having dared to challenge them, and then applauded themselves as one said of Pretti’s death, “Boo hoo.” Just like Putin does when average people challenge him in Russia, Orbán does in Hungary, the Ayatollah does in Iran, Erdoğon does in Turkey, and El Sisi does in Egypt, among others.
This is how fascist men roll and have throughout history; it’s an entirely predictable playbook as Ruth Ben Ghiat, Mary Trump, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and Miles Taylor can tell you: “Obey or die.”
It’s particularly ironic that right now, as a the USS Abraham Lincoln and a small armada of accompanying warships are scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran by the end of this week, that Iranian state TV is running clips of ICE gassing and killing Minnesotans on a loop.
They’re openly saying that Trump is doing the same as they did a few weeks ago, therefore justifying executing their own “domestic terrorists.”
And now, in a pathetic joke, Trump says he’s going to punish Iran’s mullahs for killing their own people on the streets of Tehran at the same time he brags about and justifies gunning down Americans on the streets of Minneapolis.
The brutal, cold-blooded murders of Good and Pretti also show clearly that ICE’s and CBP’s presence in Minnesota has little to do with immigration; there are only an estimated 130,000 undocumented people in the entire state, although Texas and Florida each have millions.
Minnesota, however, is a swing state that Trump lost three times and Republicans are looking at an electoral disaster this fall: something had to be done to set an example there that might cow other Democratic-led states.
When Pam Bondi sent her letter to Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz saying that if he’d just turn his voting rolls over to her (presumably so she could “clean” aka “purge” the list to rig this November’s election), she’d pull ICE and CPB out of the state.
That’s how Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğon, et al remain in power, by intimidating the population at the same time they rig their elections. It’s the model Trump has in mind for 2026 America, and tried to execute in 2020 with his phony electors scheme, a conspiracy with over 140 Republicans who voted not to confirm Biden, and, when those didn’t work, finally the attack on January 6th.
Trump’s message on January 6th was the same: “Obey or die.” Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi barely escaped being killed by Trump’s murderous mob, and four police officers lost their lives at the hands of the GOP’s shock troops.
We’re nuts if we think Trump and the people around him wouldn’t try it again, particularly when they’re all looking at the possibility of prison time if an impeachment effort is successful because so many Republicans could lose their seats this fall.
Trump himself has already been convicted of fraud multiple times, as well as stealing money from a children’s cancer charity and raping E. Jean Carroll, and his lickspittles have to know that John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, and 40 other senior officials (including a Cabinet member) went to prison in the 1970s.
Trump is a weak, psychologically damaged man, as were Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and most of the world’s other historic strongmen. Their weakness and emotional damage are what drive them to their “Obey or die” proclamations.
Such people not only draw others with a similar malady into their circles, but they also typically inflict generationally-destructive damage on their own countries when people push back against them.
These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.
History is unambiguous about what happens when bullies aren’t confronted early and publicly: their violence escalates, their lies morph into history and law, and intimidation against anybody who dares speak up becomes the new normal.
Soon, everybody is silent.
Good and Pretti weren’t accidents, and they weren’t about immigration: these intentional killings, these murders, were unambiguous messages as clear as the one I got in Uganda that fall afternoon: “Get in our way and we will kill you, and nobody will do anything about it. Obey or die.”
And unless Democratic leadership takes a cue from the good people of Minnesota and steps up and fights back hard, the next message will be even broader and bloodier, because authoritarians always interpret silence as permission.
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Cruella de Vance: Trump's Dog-Kicker
There are just too many examples of Vance’s delight in kicking to ignore.
Jan 26, 2026
There’s a fable about how Bear Bryant, the legendary coach of the University of Alabama, found the toughest players. He would, supposedly, drive through dusty Alabama towns with a dead dog tied behind his car. He’d then stop his car where the high school boys hung out and wait. The kid who came over and kicked that dead dog would get a scholarship.
JD Vance aspires to be the captain of the MAGA team when Trump moves on. The way to get there, he seems to believe, is to kick the dog, whichever one is most helpless (and not being eaten by Haitians), and show that he’s even meaner than Trump. His rhetorical style is all about the strong beating up on the weak, something Vance seems to relish. There are just too many examples of Vance’s delight in kicking to ignore.
Dog Eaters
The one that made these attacks Vance’s signature concerned the unsubstantiated story that his Haitian constituents in Ohio were eating their pets, which Trump and then Vance not only said, but then repeated despite denial from local authorities that it was happening. But Vance didn’t care. He went even further by admitting it was a false story, but one that he still proudly put forth:
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
The hell with the Haitians he supposedly represented in the Senate. And to hell with the truth.
Zelensky Muggers
When Volodymryr Zelensky visited the Oval Office on March 25, 2025, to secure American support against the Russians invaders, Vance took the lead role in a carefully orchestrated effort to humiliate the Ukrainian leader. Vance accused Zelensky of campaigning for the Democrats and for not thanking Trump profusely for all of the US support.
Vance said to Zelensky, “I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.”
The vibe of this made-for-TV reality show reminded me of how bullies operate: Trump pinning back Zelensky’s arms, while Vance landed the body blows.
Denmark Trashing
JD wants to be a point person in taking Greenland from the Greenlanders and Denmark. In a visit to the Pituffik Space base last March, he belittled the sacrifice made by Danes who lost more soldiers per capital than any other ally in Afghanistan. But, as he put it, that was
“years ago, just as, for example, the French honor the sacrifice of Americans in Normandy 80 years ago…. Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland…”
It must be such a rush for a leader of a country with 340 million people to threaten a county of 6 million. They can’t touch you. You’re invincible.
Killing "Domestic Terrorists"
Without waiting for an investigation of any sort, Vance jumped to defend the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, who killed Renee Nicole Goode in Minneapolis by firing three shots through her car window at close range:
“The reality is that his life was endangered and he fired in self-defense.”
No, the reality is that Vance wants to demonstrate to the MAGA world that he is a bad ass who owns the libs, over and over, and supports killing them, if necessary.
And stomping on reporters who dare question his unsubstantiated finding is blood sport:
“Everybody who’s been repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law enforcement officer shot at her: you should be ashamed of yourselves, every single one of you.”
Kicking the Five-Year Old
You’ve got to have a heart made of stone not to show sympathy and kindness for a five-year-old who had his father taken away during an ICE raid. But if you want to be a MAGA leader, you have to look past any maudlin sentimentality even when the facts are lined up against you. According to the family’s asylum lawyer,
“The family was not eluding ICE in any way. They were following all established protocols, pursuing their claim for asylum, showing up for their court hearings, and posed no safety, not flight risk and should never have been detailed.”
Vance could care less about the facts:
“When they went to arrest his illegal alien father, the father ran. So, the story is that ICE detained a 5-year-old. Well, what are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death?”
Although the boy’s school and relatives offered to take care of the child, he was shipped with his father to a detention center in Texas.
So what? Why should Vance care any more about this child and his father than about dog-eating Haitians? Even though asylum seekers in the judicial process are legally here, Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, ignores the facts because the only facts that matter are proving that he will back ICE no matter what; that he will support the deportation of immigrants, legal or otherwise; that he will be seen as tough enough and mean enough to become the MAGA crown prince.
Cruella de Vance.
P.S. As the world learns that Alex Pretti was brutally murdered by federal agents, Cruella has yet to stomp on his dead body. Instead, he has issued a wilting word salad about “the engineered chaos” that is “the direct consequence of far left agitators, working with local authorities.” You offer that kind of gibberish when you’re worried that a real investigation might make you look like a fool.
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Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and the Outright Lies of Trump, Noem, and Vance
After the state-sanctioned executions comes the state-sanctioned propaganda.
Jan 26, 2026
On January 24th, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old white US citizen, was murdered by a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis. This comes less than three weeks after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good.
Video footage shows Pretti, an ICU nurse, stepping in between a woman and a federal agent who was pepper-spraying her. That agent proceeds to pepper-spray Pretti who was filming the encounter with his phone in one hand and nothing in the other. Several agents approached and forced Pretti onto the ground. He was restrained.
Despite this, one agent unholstered his gun and fired one shot at close range. As that agent continued to fire, another grabbed his gun and fired additional shots. In total, at least 10 shots were fired within five seconds.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immediately began spreading their state-sanctioned propaganda. Via Twitter-X, DHS posted that federal agents were conducting a “targeted operation” when an armed individual approached. “The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. […] Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots.” Without offering a shred of evidence, DHS wildly speculates that “this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Like Good, the Trump administration immediately labelled Pretti a “domestic terrorist.”
Both Good and Pretti were victims of state-sanctioned executions conducted by federal agents illegally occupying the state of Minnesota against the will of its people and its elected officials.
Regardless of your thoughts on ICE’s presence in Minnesota specifically or the Trump administration in general, this is beyond debate: there was absolutely no reason for federal agents to fire a single shot—let alone ten. Pretti was not a threat to anyone—let alone several heavily armed federal agents. They chose to abuse the power and “absolute immunity” that the Trump administration granted them to publicly execute a US citizen at their own discretion.
We vote for representatives, not kings.
The Trump administration, in their utter disregard for the safety and well-being of Americans, has unleashed an army of poorly trained, heavily armed, masked agents without any guardrails or accountability. Several news outlets have reported that the federal investigation into Renee Good’s murder is more focused on any possible ties between her wife, Becca Good, and activist groups rather than Ross’ conduct. Thus far, six federal prosecutors in Minnesota have resigned over the Justice Department’s reluctance to investigate Ross.
An FBI agent who was working with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) also resigned. Shortly after opening a civil rights investigation into Good’s death, she was ordered to reclassify it as an investigation into an assault on the ICE agent. The FBI also blocked the BCA from participating in the investigation.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has already announced that DHS will be leading the investigation of the Border Patrol agent that murdered Pretti. To emphasize, the department that, before the investigation even began, fabricated a series of lies meant to publicly exonerate Border Patrol agents will be investigating their conduct.
Given this precedent, why exactly would federal agents show restraint? Why deescalate when excessive violence is unconditionally excused? Even if they murder someone, President Trump will only go as far as acknowledging “that mistakes sometimes happen” and “that 99% of our ICE officers are doing the right thing.” Following Pretti’s murder, Trump wasted no time defending Border Patrol. He claimed that federal agents “had to protect themselves” against “the gunman.”
While Trump highlights Pretti’s gun as some kind of excuse, whether he was armed changes nothing. This is America – a country with over 80 million gun owners whose right to bear arms is inscribed in the Second Amendment. A fact that President Trump and his allies are usually so eager to point out. Pretti had a permit to carry a concealed handgun. Not only was he completely within his rights to carry, no video shows him even holding it.
Even Noem refused to directly answer whether Pretti brandished his weapon. Instead, she insisted that “I don’t know of any peaceful protestor that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” Yet, of course, she does. The J6 protestors were armed, attacked law enforcement and yet Noem supported Trump pardoning them. Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to another state, went to a peaceful protest armed, shot three people and received widespread praise from the Trump administration.
DHS is so blatantly lying that even staunch Trump supporters like Tim Pool are questioning the official state narrative.
The Trump administration’s careless indifference towards the truth means that, regardless of what they say, we must continue to record and share videos of federal agents. We simply cannot trust the words of an administration whose first impulse is to justify the death of US citizens.
But, there is a deeper worry. It may be tempting to see these lies as an attempt by the administration to justify the violence. An attempt to use the state’s massive propaganda machine—which includes media outlets like Fox News, the New York Post, Bari Weiss’s CBS and Elon Musk’s X—to convince the American public that federal agents are trying to faithfully execute their jobs.
By his own admission, Trump is only limited by his “own morality.” Even if his own supporters disagree with him, Trump remains steadfast–as he puts it, “MAGA is me.” Driven by narcissism, greed, and a litany of grievances, Trump shows little regard for the Constitution, Congress, court rulings, and the “international rules-based order.”
I would add to this list: the people. To think that Trump cares about convincing the public is to believe that Trump still cares about their opinion. Trump does not. He has ‘joked’ about cancelling the midterm elections. In August 2025, his administration quietly removed an online tool from Regulations.gov that allowed advocacy groups to collect and submit public comments to federal agencies. Doing so makes it much harder for individuals to weigh in on agency regulatory proposals. He also pursues a series of unpopular policies including seizing Greenland, occupying Venezuela and renaming the Kennedy Center.
Most Americans think ICE is making cities less safe, but Trump doesn’t care. Hours after Pretti’s murder, Attorney General Pamela Bondi sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) making three demands:
1.Walz’s office must share state records on Medicaid, and Food and Nutrition Service programs with the federal government
2.Repeal sanctuary city policies, force all state correctional facilities to fully cooperate with ICE, honor immigration detainers, and permit ICE to interview detainees to determine immigration status
3.Grant the Department of Justice complete access to the state’s voter rolls to confirm that its registration policies comply with federal law
These demands are a direct assault on the sovereignty of Minnesota. A day after a major statewide economic blackout and protest, the Trump administration is ordering Walz to betray the will of his own constituents. And to be clear, these are demands. As Bondi emphasized on Fox News, Walz “better support President Trump. He better support the men and women in law enforcement because if he doesn’t, we are.”
For the Trump administration, Minnesota is not about immigration enforcement or fraud. It is a trial run for his administration’s fascist apparatus. He is testing whether there are any limits to his power beyond his own judgment. After all, thus far Congress and the Supreme Court have utterly failed to keep him in check—not that either has really tried.
Walz cannot capitulate to the Trump administration. But we also cannot depend on elected officials to solve this problem. Now is the time for collective action—not just in Minnesota but across the entire country. After all, there is one thing that Trump definitely cares about: the economy. A nationwide economic blackout and protest would hit him where it hurts.
No matter which state you live in, you are not safe from Trump. Do not be fooled by victim-blaming narratives that fault Good and Pretti for being ‘where they were not supposed to be.’ The notion that we, as Americans, cannot protest unlawful law enforcement is a repulsive austerity policy masquerading as genuine critique. It is to surrender ourselves unconditionally to the whims of the state.
We vote for representatives, not kings. If ever our elected officials fail to reflect our will, then they must be made to submit—not the other way around. Trump has forgotten how things work; we would all do well to remind him.
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Trump's Administration of Comic Book Villains Is Making War on the World Order
The 47th US president wants to get rid of the United Nations, reverse the decolonization process, and return the world to a time when only power determines the course of events.
Jan 26, 2026
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, wanted to change his agency’s dietary recommendations, he did something very simple. He took the food pyramid and turned it upside down. After years of promoting healthy grains, pulses, and vegetables, the agency was now favoring meat and dairy.
It seemed like a joke. It wasn’t.
Kennedy called his upside-down pyramid, with meat at the top and whole grains at the bottom, “Eat Real Food.” A better name would be “Support Cattle Farmers and Have a Heart Attack.”
The Trump administration’s topsy-turvy approach applies to every aspect of American policy.
The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when the world that it is trying to turn upside down unites against it.
The United States needs undocumented immigrants to maintain the economy by filling jobs in agriculture, the construction industry, and the service sector. So, the Trump administration is deporting them.
The United States is the only major industrialized country without universal healthcare. So, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for people to access medical insurance.
The United States, before 2024, was the largest oil and gas producing nation on the planet, but needed government support to make the transition to clean energy. So, the Trump administration eliminated those clean energy subsidies and invested even more into expanding the fossil fuel sector.
In other words, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to harm people and the planet. They are like comic book villains, and they don’t even realize it
The upside-down nature of Trump’s approach to policy can perhaps best be seen in the foreign policy realm.
Donald Trump has talked over and over again about the importance of peace. He has lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize. When asked about his New Year’s wish this year, he said, “Peace on Earth.”
But all he has done recently is promote war. His administration bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. The United States invaded Venezuela right after the New Year in order to kidnap the president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
The administration is now preparing to attack Iran. Trump has insisted that the United States must seize Greenland, by force if necessary. And the US president expects that the government in Cuba will fall as well, and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will one day be that country’s leader.
The Trump administration has emphasized the critical importance of US sovereignty. It doesn’t want any other country or any international institutions interfering with US policies.
However, the Trump administration doesn’t care about the sovereignty of any other country. Trump believes he can intervene anywhere. Even close allies are not off limits. He has suggested absorbing Canada. And he seems willing to fight a fellow NATO member, Denmark, in order to control Greenland.
Respect for sovereignty is a bedrock principle of the United Nations. All states rely on this principle to safeguard their borders and protect against the interventions of other countries. Trump’s challenges to sovereignty in Venezuela and elsewhere threaten to unravel the world order.
This contempt for international treaties and institutions led the administration early on to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate as well as the UN Human Rights Council. This year, he has ordered the withdrawal from 66 international organizations, half of them connected to the United Nations. These include the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body responsible for the yearly Conference of Parties (COP), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
From 2005 to 2024, carbon emissions in the United States dropped 20%, a rare bit of good news from a country with the second-highest rate of emissions in the world. Last year, under Trump, US emissions made a dramatic U-turn, rising by 2.4%.
Trump has nothing but contempt for international law. He has done more than just denounce legal bodies like the International Criminal Court. He has actively sought to destroy the ICC with sanctions. And he has threatened even more sanctions if the ICC doesn’t rewrite its founding document to ensure that Trump and his cronies are never prosecuted for the war crimes that they have most definitely committed.
The violations of sovereignty, the withdrawal from international institutions, and the contempt for international law: These all form a different kind of war. The Trump administration has launched an offensive against the very edifice of the world order. He wants to get rid of the United Nations, reverse the decolonization process, and return the world to a time when only power determines the course of events.
This is the world of Stephen Miller, Trump’s hard-right adviser. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller recently told CNN. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
This is, of course, nonsense. Power, as even authoritarian leaders learn, has its limits. Autocrats can’t change their societies by force alone. They are overthrown by peaceful protests. They are tried in court and sent to jail.
History is littered with the wreckage of empires that attempted to rule by force alone. That is the iron law since the beginning of time.
And it is just a matter of time before the Trump administration discovers that it too faces limits. The European Union is banding together to fend off any attempt on Greenland. The US courts are laying down limits on what the Trump administration can and cannot do, with even the conservative Supreme Court ruling recently that the administration cannot send the National Guard to Chicago against the wishes of the mayor and the governor.
And popular protests continue throughout the United States, most recently to protest the killing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of a young mother in Minneapolis.
The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when the world that it is trying to turn upside down unites against it. An upside-down pyramid is not stable. Eventually, it will collapse.
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