I need you to hold me
I need you to care
I need you to listen
They won’t understand
Don’t let them tell ya
Don’t let them tell ya
Don’t let them tell ya
Don’t let them tell you it’s fair
I see you look out the window
I know you’re close to the brink
A younger version of me
I lie awake and I think
So when you look in the mirror
Tell me what do you see
Starstruck, you gotta make your own luck
And I’m making a woman out of me
Well I know they think I’m funny
They’ve got all their money
Look what I’ve become
And just stop talking to me
They’re looking down upon me
A metaphorical illusion of a mezzanine scene
But don’t you quit that thing
He’s just a rich cat, subtract the judgement from him
And remember my name, remember my face
Remember the place where I came
And I’ll be out of your way
You’ve made it this far
I’ll make you a star
Hold onto my arms
And let out all the grief in your heart
Well I know they think I’m funny
They’ve got all their money
Look what I’ve become
And just stop talking to me
Well I know they think I’m funny
They’ve got all their money
Look what I’ve become
Honey I’ve never felt this free
Well I know they think I’m funny
They’ve got all their money
Look what I’ve become
And just stop talking
They think I’m funny
Got all their money
But I don’t care
Don’t let them tell you it’s fair
SOURCE: The Belair Lip Bombs (YouTube), 4 September 2025
Russia has officially withdrawn from the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture. It is a logical step. It was abnormal that a fascist state which had trampled on all norms of law and morality formally continued to be among the signatories of this Convention.
Everything has now fallen into place. A state that employs torture on a scale comparable to that of Nazi Germany or the Stalinist USSR has finally brought its de jure status into alignment with its de facto reality.
I would remind you that Putin’s Russian Federation has murdered 200,000 to 300,000 people in Chechnya, 133,000 in Syria, and approximately 200,000 in Ukraine, including tens of thousands of women, children, and old people.
Pictured above are two of the latest Russian victims of Putin’s Gulag.
On the left is Alexander Kondratov, production designer for the miniseries Liquidation and winner of the TEFI and Golden Eagle awards.
Kondratov was originally from Moscow, but moved to Kyiv in 2012.
In May 2026, he flew to Russia to get a new travel passport (what the hell for, one wonders). He was arrested immediately upon arrival at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport and charged with “high treason.”
There is little need to explain what “high treason” means in the parlance of Putin’s fascists. In Kondratov’s case, it consisted of “at least six posts” on the internet.
On 26 October 2026, Alexander Kondratov died in a prison hospital at the age of fifty-two.
Pictured on the right is political analyst Alexander Kynev.
When they arrested him, the Russian Gestapo broke his shinbone in two places and planted a kilogram of narcotics on him. He is currently being held in a cell designed for thirty-four inmates, which now houses thirty-five inmates.
The cell has a hole in the floor instead of a toilet. Kynev, who is on crutches, cannot use this hole and so has gone on a hunger strike.
The plight of these two men serves as a simple reminder: you must not be naive when dealing with a fascist state.
Fascism kills.
SOURCE: Alexander Zhelenin (Facebook), 2 November 2026. Translated by the Russian Reader
So here we are at last. After two years of Donald Trump’s Washington—the idiocy, the cruelty, the malice, the bullying, the bigotry, the hubris, the state violence, the monomania, the cowardice—it’s finally time for the president to make the first payment on the bill. Barring a catastrophic polling error (and when has that ever happened?), Americans seem set to deliver a colossal rebuke to Trump, who stormed into office last year ready to crack heads and is now doddering out the last days of his trifecta ranking asses.
The big political killer was Iran. Trump’s disastrous Middle East war fractured his coalition and doomed the country to a year (or more!) of terrible economic vibes. A week into the war, Trump’s approval rating was sitting north of 42 percent; it’s been slumping lower ever since. Nothing makes price-conscious Americans reach for their pitchforks like spiking energy prices.
But I think that the turning point in Trump 2.0 actually came a little earlier. The thing that convinced Trump he needed to beat a retreat on a core part of his domestic agenda was his fiasco in Minneapolis.
It’s only been a year, but it’s already easy to forget just how big a part large-scale state violence against Democratic protesters played in Trump’s plans in 2025. Over and over, the White House launched remarkable provocations against blue cities and states, from Los Angeles to Portland to Washington, D.C. These actions weren’t just intended to cow Democratic leaders. They were intended to stoke deliberate conflict between militarized agents of the state and people on the ground—conflict that Trump and MAGA could then repackage as content for their base.
Amid Trump’s many simultaneous assaults on the norms and laws that restrain the presidency, this content served a specific rhetorical purpose. In videos of riots and clashes with protesters, Trump’s government represented the forces of order, while those who opposed him were the forces of chaos. The law, Trump’s violence argued, wasn’t some bunch of buzzkill rules dorks and eggheads used to rein in great men like him. The law was pepper spray in an angry protester’s face.
As I wrote last October:
Trump goes out of his way to start conflicts. He wildly exaggerates the horrors of daily life in blue cities. He sends the National Guard in a shock-and-awe show of force into those same places. In the protests and clashes that result, he tells them the only way they can err is by pulling their punches. You’ve got to teach these criminals, he says, the only way they understand. They spit, you hit. And “criminals” are whoever Trump says they are.
When he ordered ICE into Minneapolis, Trump was just following the natural progression of this plan. But the plan quickly met disaster. ICE’s clownishly brutal occupation of the city spurred ever-increasing organized resistance from locals, who tracked ICE vehicles and made their job consistently irritating and difficult—blowing their cover by following them with blaring horns and shrieking blowing whistles, organizing deliveries of groceries and other materials to terrified immigrants wouldn’t have to risk leaving their homes, and so on. And videos of irritated agents lashing out at annoying but law-abiding and peaceful protesters started to turn public sentiment against the occupiers—even before things went catastrophically wrong.
And then came the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. More than anything else, these two instances of shocking police violence against peaceful protesters turned the tide. Trump and Co. wanted a constant feed of videos of police administering street justice to hooligans; instead, Americans’ social platforms were suddenly full of videos of deadly violence dealt against—in Pretti’s case—a man who had literally tried to peacefully place his body between an agent of the state and the woman he was roughing up.
MAGA’s propaganda machine tried feverishly to smear these two dead Americans as domestic terrorists and would-be cop killers. But no one was buying it, and soon even they had to admit it. Not long after, the White House announced an about-face: They were heading out of Minneapolis. From now on, federal immigration enforcement would focus on the red cities and states that would cooperate with less fuss. The blue-city occupation strategy was at an end.
I don’t mean to oversell this. It isn’t as though Trump et al. have gotten significantly more careful about the violence the state wields: Others have died at the hands of DHS agents this year, including Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine this summer. And, as our Adrian Carrasquillo reported last week, Good and Pretti’s families have never gotten accountability from the officers who killed them.
But Minneapolis’s resistance still achieved something extraordinary: At a time when Trump seemed at his strongest and they seemed at their weakest, they managed to throw him off his violent agenda simply by standing up nobly as individuals and as a community against his designs. Maybe—probably?—voters will put Democrats back in power today, and Trump will never again achieve the level of unilateral state authority that he enjoyed last year. But even if they don’t—even if Republicans beat the odds and give Trump back more or less united control of Washington—Minneapolis still gives us the model: You resist with whatever you’ve got.
SOURCE: Andrew Egger, “Trump’s Downfall Started in Minneapolis,” The Bulwark, 3 November 2026. As a proud paid subscriber of the Bulwark, I’m happy to share this essay with my own readers. |||||trr
