On January 7, 2026, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed our comrade Renee Good in cold blood. The following is an account of the events that immediately followed her murder from the perspective of an anarchist in Minneapolis. These words are dedicated to her memory.

Renee Good was murdered a mere six blocks from where George Floyd was murdered in May 2020. This feels significant in two ways. First, South Minneapolis has a history and memory of resistance. Thousands of people here still remember fighting the police in 2020. Secondly, a similar dynamic could play out today, just as in the fiery summer of 2020, when the unrest in Minneapolis acted as the spark that ignited a national uprising.

For 38 days now, the Department of Homeland Security has been occupying the Twin Cities to terrorize our immigrant neighbors. This Monday, they deployed 2000 more ICE agents to dramatically increase the number of abductions. This is an unprecedented escalation. No other city has yet experienced an ICE occupation at this scale.

This escalation is a reaction to the groundswell of resistance against ICE that our communities have carried out over the past several weeks. More than 4000 people have participated in at least 81 rapid response groups—patrolling, tailing, and boxing in ICE vehicles, warning our neighbors, protesting at hotels hosting ICE agents, and confronting them as they attempt to go about their evil business. The current surge in ICE attacks has not driven us to despair; we believe that it indicates that ICE is like a wild animal backed into a corner. Its erratic and violent behavior is beginning to suggest desperation. It is an agency in crisis, an agency that can be defeated.

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Yesterday, on January 7, I went to the Bishop Henry Whipple building at 8 am with a friend. The Whipple building is the ICE headquarters for the entire Upper Midwest; it is where they stage before carrying out their raids. I took pictures of their license plates for about an hour. A third friend planned to join us. Then she texted me that she couldn’t make it because ICE had shot someone.

My friend and I left Whipple and sped towards Portland and 34th, where the shooting had just taken place. When we arrived, Signal stopped working for both of us, as if our phones were being jammed. There was yellow crime scene tape up and dozens of MPD officers were protecting ICE officers in full tactical gear. The cops had a Bearcat with an LRAD on top. Greg Bovino himself, the “commander at large” of Border Patrol, was standing there in tactical gear. A crowd was forming—not just recognizable activists, but also ordinary neighbors who lived on that block coming out to cuss at them. We started a chant: “Cops! Pigs! Murderers!”

Things heated up when an agent tackled a protester about a block away. He grabbed them by their clothing and tried to force their hands behind their back in a snowbank. Somebody else body-checked the agent, knocking him down. A few people from the crowd ran over to see what was happening. A middle-aged local demanded to know why they were arresting the person.

“She was slashing tires,” the ICE agent answered.

The man yelled back, “I’m gonna do that too, motherfucker!”

There was a standoff for a couple minutes until the agent let the person go and retreated to the larger group of ICE agents.

The crowd started to gain confidence, getting in the faces of the ICE agents and chanting more aggressively. MPD cleared an exit for ICE to leave by heading south on Portland Avenue; they began to drive their vehicles out. Some people started shouting for people to get into the street to block them. The crowd hesitated at first, but a few people got into the street and blocked an ICE vehicle. Seeing this, more people began to get into the street. MPD officers shoved them out of the way. People kicked the ICE vehicles as they sped off. One person almost got hit.

As more of the crowd blocked Portland Avenue, the cops tried to clear a different exit for them, aiming to enable them to head west on 34th. People started chanting “Fists up, feds down, get the fuck out of town!” ICE guys with less-lethal launchers and shotguns were guarding an SUV as it tried to leave. People started throwing snowballs. The crowd surged forward and I came face to face with an ICE agent sticking the barrel of his launcher in my face.

“What are you gonna do,” I demanded, “shoot me too?”

He shot the launcher at my face at point-blank range. My first thought was “I just lost an eye.” That’s how it felt. Street medics pulled me back and started flushing my eyes. Off to my right, I could see people chasing some ICE agents into an alley behind some houses. I saw the same middle-aged man who had intervened on behalf of the other protester also take a pepper ball to the face at very close range. The agents shot tear gas and tackled somebody else.

Two comrades who were helping to give me medical treatment assisted me in moving to a house two blocks away to get cleaned up. I showered and put gauze on the wound on my face. When I got out of the shower, I saw more commotion down on the sidewalk. It was hard to tell whether ICE was chasing people or people were chasing them.

Some people erected a barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered. The barricade remains there today, with protesters camping out there—including some familiar faces who held down the George Floyd Square autonomous zone half a mile away for over a year.

I went home to nurse my wounds and wash the pepper spray out of my clothes. A couple hours later, I heard reports that ICE was raiding Roosevelt high school and had rammed an observer’s car with one of their cars, weaponizing their vehicle as we’ve frequently seen them do. A fight broke out outside the main entrance. They arrested a protester, but they failed to catch the student they were trying to kidnap. This should remind everyone that they aren’t invincible: when we commit ourselves to our actions, we can beat them.

At about 4:30 pm, a group of 30 or 40 protesters breached the doors of the Federal Courthouse downtown. As security guards pushed back against the revolving doors to keep them out, someone smashed out a window. No one was arrested there. The spontaneity of the moment and the sheer number of little protests flaring up around the Twin Cities made it impossible for the authorities to react to all of them.

That night, there was a mass vigil to mourn Renee’s death. Some ten thousand people came out, crowding around burn barrels as they flooded Portland Avenue as far as the eye could see. It felt like everyone on the Southside was there.

Since the beginning of the invasion of the Twin Cities, messy contradictions have abounded in the network of rapid response groups that has sprung up. In the early days, there were major clashes with ICE at the Bro-Tex paper factory and on the eastside of St Paul. Some weeks later, there was a clash at 29th and Pillsbury, where they tackled a pregnant woman. Following these, there was a lot of peace policing and debating about nonviolence. Liberal elements have gained ground, and things that we could take for granted in 2020 are no longer established.

A lot of the people in the rapid response groups come out of 50501 and the No Kings protests and are very green and inexperienced. This can be a blessing and a curse. There is a huge wellspring of creative energy; various neighborhoods are trying all sorts of different strategies for alert systems and mutual aid. At times, the liberals running dispatch have been doing de facto counter-insurgency by telling people not to go to the scene of an abduction. Well-attended patrol trainings have instructed people to stay at least 30 feet away from ICE at all times. There is a culture of referring to ourselves as “observers,” an insidious brainworm for those of us who want to do everything we can to disrupt and interfere with ICE operations. There is a heavy emphasis on collecting ICE license plates, which has proven less and less useful as agents switch out their plates and 2000 new vehicles infest our streets. We have found foot patrols around hotspots like Lake and Bloomington to be increasingly effective since the surge began on Monday. It doesn’t take long to find an ICE agent skulking around.

In my opinion, we will have to fight on two levels to defeat the ICE invasion. We have to become more agile and more courageous at stopping abductions promptly and forcefully, and we also have to defeat them on a political level by popularizing the idea that ICE represents an attack on society as a whole. The conditions for another uprising like 2020 are bubbling just below the surface. It is a subterranean fire and the feds cannot put it out.

We owe it to our fallen sister Renee Good to push on these tensions until we break through to the other side.

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Sound Transit clearly learned nothing from the University St. vs. UW debacle. by Anonymous

Dear Sound Transit,

Congrats on extending Link Light Rail service to Federal Way. It's great that we're adding more transit infrastructure, even though the pace of construction is absolutely glacial.

That said, what dumb fuck committee named the stations and decided on the signage?! Now, when a tourist flies into Sea-Tac, the platform signs give them the options of "Federal Way Downtown" or "Lynwood City Center." Which one of those gets you to Seattle? Probably the one that says DOWNTOWN, right? The station probably exits onto a street called Federal Way next to the Space Needle or Pike Place, RIGHT?!

Leaving aside the fact that it's stupid to name a city after a street, what the fuck happened in the station naming process? Did they take a suggestion from a local Federal Way official who proudly considers that sprawl of big box stores and parking lots a "downtown" because it has a McDonald's and a Red Robin? Go take a walk around that station's neighborhood in Street View and see if you can figure out where the "downtown" is. I couldn't.

Even if whatever moron is in charge insists on keeping the station name "Federal Way Downtown," why couldn't you be bothered to add something on the platform signs that indicates which way Seattle is? Not even an indication of which way is north or south? You can bet that when Seattle hosts World Cup games this year, they'll put up big, obvious signage, so why not get a head start on it and afford the same respect to all tourists and transit riders?

Sound Transit clearly learned nothing from the University St. vs. UW debacle.

Do better.

enki2:

It was also her birthday. And because Ann Davison is gone, it's kind of your birthday. by Micah Yip

Every seat was taken at City Attorney Erika Evans’ swearing-in ceremony at City Hall Monday afternoon, and dozens stood at the back and sides of the room. Microphone in hand, Evans commanded the front of the room as her family and elected officials, including Mayor Katie Wilson and several city councilmembers, looked on. Coincidentally, it was also her birthday.

“I am committed to a Seattle where we can all feel safe and where we all thrive,” Evans said. “A city where dignity is non-negotiable. A city where we always fight back with urgency and with courage to protect our rights and values here in Seattle.”

Evans, Seattle’s first Black city attorney, said she’s in the process of creating a “new, reimagined” community court to connect people with services after their release so they don’t reoffend, fulfilling a campaign promise. Seattle had community court until former City Attorney Ann Davison shut it down in 2023. 

Evans also said she’d be “laser-focused” on domestic violence and DUI cases—ones that her predecessor, Davison, was badly behind on. And Evans plans to put a dedicated prosecutor on bias crimes “to make clear that hate and discrimination will have no place here in our city.”

Before Evans took the oath of office, several people close to Evans spoke to her character and work ethic, including retired Washington Supreme Court Justice Mary I. Yu, campaign intern and University of Washington student Towa Nakano-Harris, U.S. District Court Judge Richard A. Jones, and Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown, who’d known her for a decade and endorsed her candidacy. 

“I knew she had the skill set and the character to do something bold and visionary that would have an impact on more people,” Brown said.

Evans spoke of her grandfather, Lee Evans, a double-gold medal-winning Olympic sprinter and prominent leader in the Black power movement who famously raised his fist on the podium at the 1968 Summer Olympics.

“It is that same legacy that I carry forward, and why I am standing here today,” Evans said. And under the Trump administration, “when we were seeing clear rollbacks in civil rights, I knew I needed to make a decision just like my grandfather did to stand up and fight back what was happening. That is the vision I’m bringing towards this office.”

Democratic lawmakers are hammering President Donald Trump's regime-change operation in Venezuela, which he seems to have done to enrich the wealthy oil and gas tycoons who supported his candidacy.

Multiple Democratic lawmakers pointed to Trump's admission aboard Air Force One that he had briefed oil companies ahead of the U.S.’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—and before he notified members of Congress. Clearly, this has nothing to do with illicit drugs and everything to do with Trump wanting to line the pockets of his oil and gas donors. Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves in the world.

Most concerning of all, Trump and his administration appear to have no plan for what comes after Maduro’s capture. That risks further destabilizing the country, echoing the United State’s boondoggle in Iraq, where the U.S.’s regime-change operation lasted nearly two decades, led thousands of American troops to die, and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. 

"Trump risked American lives to kidnap Maduro just to have him replaced by one of Maduro's authoritarian cronies. This has nothing to do with drugs or ousting an authoritarian leader. It's a clown car of incompetence in an effort to enrich oil companies," Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, wrote in a post on X.

Other Democratic lawmakers echoed those sentiments.

"History shows that America's post-WW2 regime change enthusiasts are almost always wrong. And in Venezuela, it appears Trump has spent billions on a mission that has left the same people in charge. Just maybe with more favorable deals for Trump's oil buddies," Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut wrote in a post on X.

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington tied Trump’s Venezuela attacks to the chaos and cruelty Trump has inflicted at home.

"While millions of Americans lose health care and prices are surging here at home, Trump doesn't care and has no solutions. Instead, he is threatening to bomb half the Western Hemisphere, occupy Venezuela, and annex Greenland," she wrote in a post on X.  "Is this America First?"

Others have pointed out that Trump’s argument that Maduro had to be arrested for drug trafficking makes little sense given that Trump recently pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking. 

“I have not seen a single Republican official or MAGA influencer offer a credible explanation of Trump's decision to pardon the drug trafficking ex-president of Honduras,” Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts wrote in a post on X. “You cannot credibly argue that trafficking sometimes gets a pardon and sometimes requires a war.”

Of course, there's one Democratic lawmaker who is marching to the beat of his very wrong drum: Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman.

“Why, as a Democrat, can’t we just acknowledge it was successful?” Fetterman said.

However, Fetterman is missing the point of Democrats' criticism. It’s not that Democrats think Maduro should be in power. On the contrary, they think he is indeed corrupt and evil.

Rather, Democrats have correctly said Congress should have been involved in authorizing this operation, and that the Trump administration needed to disclose its plans after Maduro's ouster to ensure this situation doesn't go south in the way that past regime-change operations have.

So far, it looks like Trump and his crew have no plan for what comes next, and that Americans will once again be left holding the bag.

"This is a moment for careful coordination with our allies and partners, and work with the opposition in Venezuela—not glib assertions about running the country and using oil revenues to pay for it. This is a moment for the focus to be on American families, not American oil executives who donated to Trump’s campaign," Sen. Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, wrote in a post on X. 

"We’ve got millions of American families wondering why their dollars are going to attacks in Venezuela instead of healthcare at home. You deserve answers, not premature victory celebrations,” he added.

Last week saw a spate of accusations of AI use in video games, ones where developer denials took strange turns when even the studios or individuals accused couldn’t say for sure they hadn’t used AI. The case of both Fortnite’s new sprays and a swiftly announced-then-cancelled Postal game are the latest signs of how the specter of AI is ruining all of our lives.

Last week, publisher Running With Scissors announced a new game in the Postal series, called Postal: Bullet Paradise. Viewers swiftly began lobbing accusations of AI at the game’s announcement trailer, which has since been pulled down, accusations that developer Goonswarm Games denied. People highlighted concern over the sprites’ mouths in the trailer and an apparently suspicious speedpaint Running With Scissors released, but none of it featured the telltale too-many-fingers or other undeniable signs. 

On December 5, Goonswarm announced that the whole thing had gotten so out of hand that they were closing the studio, writing on Twitter, “Our studio was mistakenly accused of using AI-generated art in our games, and every attempt to clarify our work only escalated the situation… It’s tough to pour so much energy into a game and end up caught in the middle of an AI war by accident. We’ve decided to shut down the studio and end all future activities.”

We’ve shut down the studio pic.twitter.com/tbW2f2VQxL

— Goonswarm Games (@goonswarmgames) December 5, 2025

I am a person who has zero interest in a Postal game, much less in 2025, but I found watching it all unfold concerning. If Goonswarm had used AI, it seemed unlikely to me that they would deny it so strenuously–what would be the point of lying like this, much less sticking to the lie so intently that you’d close the studio? I wondered if this wasn’t some new version of AI brainrot, where the bullshit technology has been forced down our throats so much that we can’t help but see it everywhere, just as its most strenuous boosters hope.

But then, on December 6, Goonswarm returned to Twitter with an update. It turns out that after “conducting an internal review, we agree with your criticism. The promo art does appear to include or be influenced by AI-generated material.” Goonswarm wrote that “We collaborated with external artists for years and never saw any sign of this” and that the files they received from these external artists “always looked legitimate within our internal pipeline, which is why our initial reaction was to protect our team and defend our innocence. We understand now that your concerns were valid. And we take responsibility for not catching this earlier.” The studio wrote that this possible AI use only extended to the game’s promo art, and that it will “replace all disputed promo art across our projects with pieces created entirely by human artists.” The studio concluded by writing, “We never intended to mislead anyone, and our earlier statements reflected what we honestly believed at the moment.”

pic.twitter.com/UR5g4rxJxz

— Goonswarm Games (@goonswarmgames) December 6, 2025

Running With Scissors followed up on December 10 to say that while it had “needed to cut ties with Goonswarm Games on Friday and state the reason for doing so, our broken trust, we still wanted to give Goonswarm the time and space to be transparent about what had occurred… We wish them all the best as we both move forward our separate ways.”

The idea that an outside artist used AI and didn’t disclose it to the studio is more plausible than Goonswarm riding a lie into the ground, and highlights the insidious nature of AI’s forced ubiquity–how can you ever trust it isn’t being used? The situation bears some similarities to another AI dustup earlier last week, involving accusations of AI use in some new Fortnite sprays. Fans were already on edge about AI in Epic games over comments Tim Sweeney made that “AI will be involved in nearly all future [games] production,” and the sprays in question definitely have the signs, including the telltale too many toes. Other accusations centered on some in-game music. 

The freelance artist of one of the sprays responded to the accusations on Instagram, but rather than clearing things up, they made the situation even more confusing. They wrote that “I think the culprit is a clock in the background. I grabbed some clocks off image search, collaged them, and halftoned them. The numbers are bad, entirely possible I grabbed an AI clock and wasn’t paying attention.” Epic has yet to comment on the situation.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sean Dove (@andthankyou)

Putting aside the idea that a whole cadre of professionals might not notice an AI clock, a ubiquitous and straightforward object that is designed to be easy to gauge the accuracy of, this response highlights a deeper problem with AI. Even if an individual isn’t actively using it, it’s increasingly easy for it to slip in under our noses if we’re not constantly on alert. As AI becomes more convincing, and as it’s forced into more and more places, even if we aren’t trying to engage with AI, we can’t be sure we haven’t.  

It’s no wonder that widespread paranoia over all this has taken hold. If even the people making things can’t be sure they aren’t using AI (or at least claim they aren’t sure), how can their audience be confident? And while vigilance is healthy and warranted, what does it mean–especially these days–when we feel like we can’t trust anything we see? False accusations of AI use can harm a person’s academic or artistic career, and it’s also just bad for all of our souls and brains to be constantly on high alert. It makes us prone to distrust and dismissiveness, leaving us less open to other people’s creative works and making it harder for them to share it, especially if they’re still developing their skills. AI is already eroding trust, and our heightened suspicion can make us hostile not just to the work, but to each other. It’s not good for creators or their audiences to live like this, and it’s certainly not a good environment for anyone to try to make things in.

But! “Let’s all show each other some grace, huh?” is not a lesson I can impart to you in the situations above, both of which prove that suspicion was warranted and that the accusations might have been correct. If anything, they suggest that even more suspicion is called for, when the people denying AI use themselves might not even know if they can truthfully deny it. So now how are you supposed to live, pinned between the slow spiritual death of thinking everyone around you is full of shit and the world-eating encroachment of the full-of-shit machine? 

Honestly, I don’t know. As we wait for the AI bubble to gloriously burst and all of this to go the way of NFTs and the metaverse, I think the best we can do is remember who our common enemy is: the AI companies and the people who stand to get rich off the tech, who need us to believe all of this is inevitable. We can double down on our commitment to proving them wrong, refuting their bullshit claims and making our displeasure known when AI products get forced into our tools without our consent. No one wants to take the extra time to make sure some reference art or a freelance pitch isn’t AI (ask me how I know!), but maybe we can motivate ourselves by seeing it as one more way to tell the Sam Altmans of the world to get fucked. It wouldn’t prevent the situations above, and it doesn’t help us navigate a world increasingly full of AI slop, but it can at least be a small act of resistance against their shit.