Fellow Cassandras, political junkies, community activists and independent journalists will not be surprised by this post. In fact, they may even be bored by it.

But I feel compelled to write it because we have some newcomers to the antifascist movement and some of them may need this message before the primaries on August 4, definitely before November 2026 and most definitely before November 2028.

Since January 2025, these United States have faced some of the gravest assaults on what was left or ever existed of this so-called “Democratic Republic,” and we have collectively witnessed some of the most vile attacks on universal human rights and the Constitution.

People kidnapped by masked thugs without badges in broad daylight and sent to camps; American citizens murdered in the streets; journalist intimidated, bullied, forced out of their jobs; media and law companies, academic institutions sued; state governments being held hostage or blackmailed for refusing to share private information of voters, SNAP users, Medicaid/Medicare clients.

We have been collectively abused and gaslit for some 20 months straight on the daily, with authoritarianism and fascism creeping in not-so-subtly and very, very deliberately, making the oppressive governments of the world very, very jealous.

And suddenly, this summer, the Democratic Establishment got very, very agitated. Was it because of fascism? Was it over the human rights’ violations? The attacks on the Fourth Estate?

NAH.

The Democratic Establishment lost its collective shit over the electoral victories and the popularity in polls of the candidates who hail from the progressive wing of the party.

That’s right, you know who the problem children are, obviously: those pesky Pinko Commies who wanna tax billionaires and stand against genocide and actually provide services that are the pinnacles of civilizations, you know, healthcare, education, housing and equal rights and stuff to all. How Dare They?

Hakeem Jeffries is mad as hell and cannot take it anymore. James Carville is pissed. Rahm Emanuel can't stand it.

What Are These Pesky Democratic Socialists doing to these beautiful United States, really?

I dunno, man. From where I sit, it looks to me like they are running candidates who resonate with The Public and Winning.

I thought that was the whole point of elections, winning, you know?

Haley Stevens in Michigan claims that Is Real comes to her in her dreams, what? Amy Klobuchar, Ms. Throws-Binders-at-Staff and Eats-Salads-on-Airplanes-with-a-Comb, Xitted that Lady G was a “friend,” really?

And I lost one of my oldest, dearest friends in the ugliest way possible when they had the audacity and gall to ask if I ever faced discrimination in these United States because I’m white-passing and speak such good English, implying I couldn’t possibly understand the discrimination that their Jewish spouse feels in many parts of the world, even, gasp, some places here at home.

Love me, I’m a liberal, indeed.

It’s cool to bomb brown people back to the stone age and level children’s schools, but don’t you dare speak ill of the warmonger dead.

Oh, America, I am losing my mind.

You are giving me the worst existential crisis.

But, I gather my resolve one last time to be the one who puts it on the official record that this fight is rigged and crooked, like it’s always been, but worse.

These twatwaffles who have been telling us, “Vote Blue, No Matter Who,” “Blue Tsunami,” blah, blah, blah, now having the audacity to double-down on the gaslighting and telling us to swallow “Fash Lite” and like it… no, thank you.

Listen, I KNOW this is not new. I’ve been here long enough to see what they did to Ralph Nader, Howard Dean and Bernard Sanders.

I stopped watching MSThen back in 2016 & broke up with Rachel Maddow for good. I think the National Petroleum Report (NPR) and the New York Times are too right wing for my taste.

I just keep breaking up & cutting folks and organizations outta my life. No, it’s serious, I’m doing it for what’s left of my sanity and my analog brilliance.

No one gives medals out for surviving this shitshow on the daily.

But, here’s the point? Is there a point? Yes, absolutely.

My fellow Americans, please go to the polls on Aug. 4, and tell these dinosaurs to go extinct already.

Vote for every candidate that is endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, the Workers’ Party, for every person that the DNC is “concerned about.” Because, fuck them, that’s why.

If this is, indeed, a simulated reality show, I at least expect the packaging of the opposition to look like they are at least faking IT.

LET’S MAKE James Carville, Hakeem Jeffries, Rahm Emanuel cry on Tuesday.

I believe in US.

A friend of mine dropped dead from a heart attack yesterday.

It was the hard slap in the face I needed. Really. I’ve been sitting in my bungalow, feeling sorry for myself for goddess knows how long. I have 1,500 unread emails, hundreds of Messenger and Instagram messages. At some point this year, I fully committed to quiet-quitting from this mess. I just scroll through the dozens of Substack notifications on the daily. Leave everything unread. That’s when I realized that I was spiraling HARD.

If I, a former journalist, news junkie and overall glutton-for-punishment, have stopped reading, then who could I fathom is still not checked out?

I decided the hell with Substack, the hell with this American nightmare, the hell with all of it. I thought maybe I should compile some of my old poetry, because we still read poems when we are sad.

I was going to do that during my two-week stunt as an overnight dog sitter later this month. Then my client called and said her dog died. Which nearly broke me. Sad for the dog, sad for my client, sad for myself.

I went into an epic nervous breakdown. Classic, old-fashioned existential crisis stuff. I went all in with a box of discounted rosé. It felt really good to sit with my sadness. I made a few phone calls and sent a bunch of texts to former lovers, friends. Called my mom. Jesus, I called my mom. If y’all had any idea how bad things have to get for me to call my mother? It was a shitshow of epic proportions.

I cried myself to sleep, eventually.

When I awoke, while having my first cup of coffee and cigarette of the morning after We Almost Died, I found a text from one of my best friends telling me his girlfriend had died. Randomly, while mowing her grass. Just dropped dead at 48 in her front lawn.

If there was a faster recovery from a hangover in the history of the world, I am not aware of it. His text jumped out of my phone and gave me a strong punch to the left chin.

Besides shaking one’s hangover loose in a split second, the other thing that an early death of a friend does is to shake any inkling of romanticism you may or may not have had about the early death of your own.

I cannot emphasize this enough.

Once you see young people die young for no good reason at all, you just get committed to being an old, spiteful crone who is a pain in everyone’s side. You just do. Those are the rules. I didn’t make them, I just observe.

So, my friend died at 48, from a sudden heart attack, which is why I am compelled to write the blog post I resisted writing for 18 months.

The infamous, “What can we do?” post.

In Allison’s memory, I have to say that the number one thing you have to do right now is build community. Get to know your neighbors. Get to know the charities and activists who are dedicated to serving community.

In the last year and a half, I was resentful of folks who turned to community gardening, only because I ran a community gardening program for three years and couldn’t find volunteers to save my gardens. I am now letting go of that bitterness, too. You wanna grow some food? Great! I’ll send you the 11 locations in our hometown. I’d be happy research for gardens that are in other parts of the world, too. Just message me. I promise I’ll respond.

Oh my goddess, dahlinks, kittens, comrades… please, for the love of fairies in the garden, please do something… We have this one timeline. We gotta try to save it.

Also, don’t hoard resources. Sharing is caring & that’s how we create the world we want to see.

That’s it. Love harder, practice real mutual aid and solidarity (not charity) and we may just make it. Maybe.

Up until his death on June 21, 2012, my father sent me a May Day greeting every year. Usually, it included a version of “The Internationale,” by Pete Seeger or Billy Bragg or both. That last May when he was on his death bed at age 66, he sent me a rare recording of Pete Seeger at Bowdoin College.

How ironic it is that, finally, 14 years after my baba’s untimely death, May Day is becoming a thing in the place it originated–look up the Haymarket Riots, the whole world has been in solidarity with American workers for more than a century, but it took a particular blend of Christo-techno-fascists to take over for all of you to give a damn. Up until 2025, y’all were happy to sleepwalk through May Day and enjoy your uneventful three-day weekend in September for “Labor Day.”

I don’t mean to sound bitter. I haven’t written in a very long while and it would not be prudent of me to come back with a particular brand of finger-wagging after a long absence. However, this April, well, actually all of 2026, has been an especially soul-crushing time for thinking, feeling individuals and there’s a Scorpio Full Moon waxing in the sky and as the kids say these days, I’m deep in my feels.

I recognize that these days, it is considered a privilege for me to have grown up in an activist household. Not many folks grew up with that, with parents who celebrated the international solidarity of workers, gushed about unions and stood against uniformed fascists of all kinds.

But that privilege also came with a lot of heartache, primarily for my parents who endured great punishment for their efforts to make our country, Turkey, a better place. They were 26 and 24 when they were arrested for the crime of publishing an underground student newspaper in my grandparents’ attic and charged with “attempt to overthrow the government,” and sentenced to what I thought was only a couple of decades until my mother corrected me recently and said they were life sentences, indeed. Miraculously, they received amnesty along with hundreds of other Turkish student activists and were released in 1974. Which is why I exist, at all. Had they remained incarcerated, I would not have materialized in this timeline. But here I am and there you are.

For the last year and a half, I’ve been raising my tiny fist against the heavens and screaming from the rooftop of these tiny platform roofs. I used to rant on other platforms before this one, too. People were often sad about my rants and many good friends told me more than once that they would scroll past them if they contained a lot of words. One friend tried to give constructive advice–that I should use paragraph breaks.

Fast-forward to 2026 and our whole existence online is so corrupted by AI that there are writers on Substack who just outright stopped even fixing typos, just so we know it was composed by a human. What a time to be alive, indeed.

Only a couple of very close friends have noted my giant lapse between posts on this platform. I used to tell friends on the Zuckerworld platform that they should never be concerned about my wellbeing as long as I was ranting. That they should only worry when I stop. Well, apparently two people took that to heart and have been sending me wellness checks messages, for which I am grateful.

How am I? Sometimes I wake up and start crying immediately. Sometimes, I wake up and don’t cry. But everyday, I get up and go do my many side hustles. I got out of the 9-5 world a week after the election in 2024 and never looked back. Some people will say that is a privilege, too. Maybe. If you think privilege is taking a middle-aged, out-of-shape person into manual work everyday. And the only reason I was able to do that in the first place is that I’m not neck deep in credit debt. One of my proudest accomplishments is not having a “credit score” at all. When you run my credit report, it comes back literally “N/A.” Not applicable. Doesn’t exist.

When I do small projects for people and they ask me if they can pay me through the cash apps that most of you have come to love and accept, I tell them I don’t break bread with the techno-fascists that materialized J Divans out of thin air. Look up Peter Thiel, PayPal, Venmo and Palantir.

Some would say, “But, Umut, you benefit from the generosity of all of these people who do exist in that world…” Yes, this is true, but I could also exist in a world where a lot more of us opted out.

Which brings us back to May Day. There’s a general strike and a student walkout tomorrow. Good. If you can, please participate.

But please remember that it is going to take a lot more than that to get rid of these parasites. We are going to have to prepare to withhold our participation from a great many conveniences and comforts for them (you know the ones) to feel the pressure.

And ultimately, it is on us to build the new worlds we want to see. No one is coming to save us. Not Governor Gavin, nor Mayor Pete. We have to show them where we want to go. That is not for the faint of heart. But we have to try.

And I think, ultimately, that is what my baba taught me. He fought for what was right when he was very young. Got jailed, got separated from his wife and his baby girl (my Sister Z), got tortured by the fascists, and died very young because the human body is not capable of withstanding that much trauma and not succumbing to it. But he did it anyway. Which is why I’m doing what I can now. He would say it is not enough. But I know that he knows that I am trying.

I hope that you will do more, too.

N.B. Here’s the absolute best version of Billy Bragg singing “The Internationale” on Pete Seeger’s 90th Birthday:

In the summer of 1993, when I was just 16 years old, I saw my dad cry for the second time in my life. The first was when we watched “Imagine,” the documentary about John Lennon’s life, a couple of years earlier.

In 1993, he cried when I decided to leave the “home country” for a year, or for good (he knew it was for good). He wasn’t a traditional “dad” doling advice, he looked at me and told me one thing, “Whatever you do in America, I don’t care, just don’t get arrested. If you do, know that I cannot help you from here.”

That has stayed with me for thirty-odd years now, “Whatever I do, don’t get arrested, because daddy said so.”

In 1998, when I was barely 21, I married a Kansas boy. He got admitted to a TEFL (Teaching English As a Second Language) school based out of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. We decided to drive from Kansas to Puerto Vallarta. Everyone in his family thought we were insane, except for his grandma Wilma Jean.

Grandma Jean had us over for coffee and a game of Yahtzee, and made us show her the driving route we planned on the old Rand McNally Road Atlas. Then she disappeared into her bedroom and returned with $300, pressed in her hand, and said, “I had a good night at the Sac & Fox, you kids stay safe and have a good time.”

Getting into Mexico proved difficult, as the car (a 1994 Ford Festiva) was registered to my ex-husband’s family, and I had the credit card to pay for the car tax. We got turned away at Nogales and had to have my-mother-in-law at the time fax our marriage certificate. We crossed the border the next day, into Chihuahua, the most mountainous state we’d ever seen as the little babies we were at the time.

By the time we popped out of Chihuahua into Sonora, we were wiped. Mind you, dear readers, this is all pre-Internet, so we drove to the first hotel in Hermosillo that Fodor’s Guidebook recommended.

My elementary Spanish got us into a hotel room. The next morning, we woke up to see the most menacing translucent scorpion in our bathroom sink. I went to the desk to complain about it, they sent a 10-year-old with a broken Coke bottle to kill it. He did.

Then, Esteban invited us for breakfast. Our first morning in Mexico. Esteban fed us warm tortillas with salt and asked us about the scorpion in our room. Then he pointed to the stacks of three-ring binders in his room. He said, “You see that? Those are my FBI files. I just got out of the Big House in New Mexico. So, scorpions are the last of your worries in Mexico, got that?”

We did.

Then, we drove south to Puerto Vallarta, and met our best-friends-forever, two of whom I kept (or they kept me) Danny & Joy.

And this is a classic example of a buried lede, my loves.

This is all coming back to me now, because I just came back from visiting Joy.

Joy knew I hit a wall late last winter, and just extended an open invitation, “Come, rest your bones here; I know you are tired.”

And she was right, but I like to be obnoxious, anyway, so I demanded to be in New England around Jack Kerouac’s birthday. Of course, she obliged.

All of this to say that yours truly traveled some 1,600 miles to the East Coast, hoping the road would cure them and it didn’t.

Back home in LFK now, with a healthy dose of ennui.

Someone asked me if I was going to No Kings today. No, I didn’t.

I’m sorry, lovies, I hit a wall.

Should I go back to where I come from?

What are we even doing?

I do have a very nice Mediterranean country with nice beaches, that is also very fascist.

I have options. For now.

February 29, 2008, was one of the greatest days of my life. Truly. I had been an immigrant in The United States since 1993, and finally I was going to become one of you.

I am walking a fine line as a journalist and activist and ally here, I know that. A journalist should never “be the story,” and an activist and an ally should never “make it about them.”

But the stories I’ve been writing on this platform only have one goal and that has been a desperate effort to get folks to understand and empathize and maybe to stand up for basic human rights and decency.

I’m only centering myself to tell a human story that I hope you will understand…

So, please humor me. Imagine a 16-year-old flinging herself across the globe, without any family, any connections–just a dream to build a better life, to get a better education and to do some good in this world.

A Turkish teenager, raised in one of the biggest and oldest cities of the world, thrown into the suburbs of Johnson County, Kan. Into an affluent school district that never had any experience with an international student who “wanted to graduate” for real.

From the moment I arrived here, I had to learn how to advocate for myself, and mind you, we did not have the Internets back then.

And when I wanted to pursue a college education at The University of Kansas, the administrators lied to me and told me that I would qualify for in-state tuition after a year, not true. But hilarious, nonetheless–I had so many proposals for marriage in my sophomore year at KU, that was charming.

And after converting from a J-1 visa to an F-1 visa, finally getting a work permit to work full-time in this country, that was something. But, unfortunately, things took a dark turn for me when I applied for a Green Card (permanent residency) through my American husband. Before USCIS, we had NIS and I spent many days crying at the Omaha, Neb., office, we all did. They didn’t treat us like human beings.

All the while, Republicans and centrist liberals telling me they are proud of me for “doing things the right way.” I knew all along what a racist dog whistle it was–”You look like us. You are pale. You speak English well.”

Hated it. Have hated it for three decades.

Here we are in 2026, my 18th anniversary of being a “naturalized” American. Last week, ICE came into my town and kidnapped five of my neighbors. Cars stranded in parking lots, restaurant equipment left outside because entire businesses had to shut down.

My phone dinging constantly with hotline emergency calls, messages to my volunteer organization for several days straight.

I couldn’t breathe anymore. I couldn’t feed myself. I couldn’t water my house plants. Someone put it best in a meme, “Now, you have fascism and dead plants.” Yup, that’s me. Crumbling under the weight of it all, the heartache, the betrayal, and dead houseplants.

Most of the people in my adopted hometown rose to the occasion and became better angels.

Not all, though. I know this should be a time for gratitude. And it is. Regular folks are becoming superheroes overnight, and that is very much appreciated.

But allow me to break protocol, again, and tell you the unhelpful things I’ve seen.

People calling the local hotline and questioning why a volunteer organization has to exist at all, when LFK is such a nice, liberal town…

People asking in all seriousness if they can call 911 to summon local LEOs in the midst of an emergency.

People telling volunteer organizations they are not doing enough.

People asking volunteer organizations if they allow people to attend community trainings more than once, because that is not fair to folks who have not attended.

People questioning whether not having a 287g agreement with the federal government should mean we are okay in our community.

Folks just want to win medals for “The Most Compliant” in the revolution, and that IS A PROBLEM.

I have not processed many of the things that occurred in my little, quaint village in the last week, but I have learned one thing: Those who truly want to help, get it. Those who keep asking uninformed questions are not here to help and will never help.

This is the great reckoning, a watershed moment.

I’m not going to hold the hands of allies anymore. Do not come at me with “Tell me what to do?” questions.

I am exhausted, my darlings.

Happy 18th anniversary of me becoming one of you, indeed.

“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.”

–Allen Ginsberg, “America.”

This has always been one of my favorites of Ginsberg’s poems and I’ve read it often during the last 12 months, when I needed a place of refuge, to try to remind myself that others suffered here before me, too.

Today, I turned to it, again, after yet another state-sanctioned bloody murder in broad daylight, to be streamed across all social media within minutes. I told myself a long time ago that I should approach my Substack with a little bit of responsibility, some sort of emotional regulation and try not to write when I’m not in my right mind.

Well, folks, the way things are going that may not be any time soon (even though hell has literally frozen over where I currently live in the Heartland), so you are going to have to bear with me as I just vomit all my unfiltered emotions into this.

The dozens of times I reread Ginsberg’s “America,” last year, I glossed over the date. Not today. He wrote this poem in Berkeley, Calif., 70, SEVENTY, years ago this week. Sit with that for a second.

The reason why that is important is twofold: First, because all of his criticisms were valid and true then. Second, because all of the people who keep saying, “This is not who we are,” are just plain wrong.

What we have been witnessing for the past 12 months is not just one demented octogenarian losing his mind and taking out his frustrations of being a sad, miserable excuse for a human being on the rest of us who have(d) any joy left within our souls.

This is the emperor and the entire empire being caught without any clothes on.

This is what us radical activists were talking about when we kept repeating, “The system is not broken. It is working precisely as designed,” for years and decades.

Twenty-one days ago, when the Regime sent troops to attack Venezuela, a sovereign nation, and kidnapped that sovereign nation’s leader and his spouse to bring him back to a detention facility in New York, it wasn’t doing anything new. It just did it more brazenly.

Days later, when the Regime sent masked thugs into Minneapolis and one of those goons murdered Renee Good, it wasn’t doing anything new. It just started getting brazen about who can be murdered in broad daylight, only to be labeled as a criminal afterwards. Ask any of your Black or Brown friends, they’ll tell you.

This week, when one of those masked thugs detained a five-year-old boy named Liam Ramos and sent him to a family detention center in Texas, it wasn’t doing anything new. The Guardian published an excellent piece on this today, detailing the number of minors this has happened to and how the detention center was built during the Obama administration. Yes, that very “Hope & Change,” guy–my First President, indeed.

And yet, last Sunday during a community training we had about our rights and how to protect ourselves and our neighbors, some brazen person HECKLED my friend when she mentioned that no one was coming to save us. When she said, “Democrats don’t care about us,” this woman yelled, “YES THEY DO!”

I wish I knew who that older woman was. But I’m sure someone who reads my writings and who was in attendance that day does. If so, I have a message for her that I would like for you to relay for me. I think she is the problem with America.

Again, if you think I’m exaggerating, ask Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Go back and read his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which he articulated my current frustration much more articulately:

“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

If you have studied white supremacy and heteronormative patriarchy even a little bit, you know that some white women have always been quick to attach themselves to these power systems. Almost everyone can agree that puppy-killer fash Barbie and Miss. Lip-filler-scars press secretary are good examples of white women doing the work of white supremacist evil patriarchs today.

But for some reason, nice, moderate, white women have always gotten a pass.

In the aftermath of Good’s murder, when the Regime released the “unedited video” to prove how guilty she was and how she deserved to be judged, tried and murdered by one masked thug, in which we all heard him call her a “fucking bitch,” a lot of those nice, moderate, white women were rightfully enraged and for the first time could finally identify with the innocent victim of state-sanctioned murder. As they should.

They felt those two words in their bones, especially if they were survivors of intimate partner violence.

I also felt those two words in my bones, as I am also a DV survivor and had heard those two words in a near-death situation. As a matter of fact, being the journalist that I am, in my Protection from Abuse order request against my partner, I quoted him verbatim saying, “Get up and take your beating, you fucking bitch.”

But unfortunately, a lot of those nice, moderate, white women were not unlike the very nice, moderate, white women who excused my abuser with statements such as, “I don’t condone domestic violence, but… [insert insult against my character and victim-blaming statement of choice].”

I don’t share these intimate, dark details of my life to seek pity. I share these details as empirical evidence for how these systems of abuse and oppression are all connected. For it was the very same group of women just a few years prior to my DV experience becoming public knowledge, who took the very same partner aside at a local watering hole to whisper their concerns about me “palling around with terrorists,” due to my early and vocal support of the local Black Lives Matter movement.

That’s the crux of the matter. That’s why I’m being “cruel and mean” to a particular group of people this very minute. What has unfolded in front of the whole world in Minneapolis-St. Paul is a direct result of too many nice folks not wanting to upset the status quo for far too long.

After each murder of an innocent Black person at the hands of law enforcement, these are the same nice folks that wanted to “gather all the facts and hear all the details,” before making up their mind. These are the same folks who used to pick on me for criticizing a beloved basketball coach for actively sweeping sexual assault allegations against his star players. These are the same folks who tried to tar and feather me out of town when I wrote a diatribe criticizing a beloved microbrewery owner for not showing solidarity to folks who said, “Black Lives Matter.”

Last, but not the least, just this past fall, these were the same folks who thought I was being unfair to one local city commissioner candidate, who just happened to be a former Republican and who actively took donations and allowed door-to-door canvassing help from MAGAs.

And that’s who dared to heckle my friend during a training last Sunday because she said, “Democrats don’t care.”

Well, do they, though? What have they done to stop any of this in the last 12 months, let alone in the last several decades? Just this past week, they couldn’t even produce a unanimous “NO” vote on funding for the masked, murdering thugs.

In the last 12 months, not a week has gone by where I haven’t received some frantic request for, “What can I do? How can I help?”

The answer is, whatever you are doing, do more.

A lot of us warned you. They published a very thick book detailing exactly what they were going to do and they are doing it. To act like this is all a shocking surprise at this point is just intellectually dishonest.

Do whatever you can to stop this. National strike, boycotts, walkouts, traffic disruptions.

Most importantly, stop placating abusers, bullies and oppressors of all kinds. Next time you hear someone try to victim blame, stop them in their tracks. Shout them out, cut them out of your life. Make them feel as uncomfortable as those very nice ladies made me feel all those years ago. Go find that disrespectful older woman who heckled my friend and educate her about the failings of the so-called “opposition” party.

This is not the essay with which I wanted to start the new year. I wanted a moment to pause, to reflect, to catch our breath and say, “This is all terrible, but we got this. Everyone I know is working very hard on saving something. Let’s keep pushing, let’s keep saving.” Alas, it was not to be.

When my menopausal meatsuit woke me up with the usual discomforts around 04:00 on January 3, 2026, I saw my phone quietly lighting up with notifications and I made the mistake of looking to see what was going on. And once I looked, I could not unsee it. “Those bastards won’t even let us have the first weekend of the year in peace,” I murmured, shuffling to my bungalow kitchen to make some coffee. Which then resulted in one of the worst days of this timeline since March 20, 2003. For those of you who don’t remember, that was the day that the US started its “Shock and Awe” campaign in Iraq, the start of the Second Gulf War, as it is known.

In the seven years since I had banished the last television connected to cable out of my house, I can’t think of a day that I was more grateful to not have access to broadcast news. From the 50,000 to 100,000 words I consumed across print and online media, it was clear that it was FUBAR out there for 24 hours straight (and continues to be, I assume).

It is the year of somebody’s lord 2026 and imperialism is alive and well.

Except that, this generation is too lazy for “manufactured consent,” so they just went ahead shooting and blowing up things, kidnapping a country’s leader and taking away a people’s right to sovereignty. Cool, cool.

You know who would be proud and impressed by this? Every liberal’s favorite dead Republican, Dick Cheney.

But, overall, it was a great day of revelation and enlightenment. It was nice to see all those milquetoast “law and order” types posting their, “I won’t have an opinion on this until we have all the facts,” statements.

Yes, how very objective of you, indeed, to sit and wait for the justifications of clearly illegal acts, after they have happened.

“I’m not an expert on international law,” some said. Oh? I’m not, either, I just have a B.S. in Journalism. But I know how to read. From where I sit with my ESL skills, the United Nations Charter is pretty simple. Don’t mess with other countries’ business. That’s all it says. Why else did poor Colin Powell have to endure all that song and dance about making a presentation with grainy B&W photos of piles of “Weapons of Mass Destruction?”

I know, I know, the UN is a toothless dog of a bygone era, too. And the “War Powers Act,” is a joke, too.

Yes, everything is a joke.

What is not a joke to me, or anyone who was born in one of the 100 countries that either this country tried to colonize by itself, or with the help of its allies, is the sheer terror that it is to be told that you cannot self-govern.

Last year, I often wrote about the similarities between authoritarian regimes and abusers. They are all the same, it’s all about power and control, abuse and exploitation, taking away self-agency or self-governance. Nothing you do or say appeases a bloodthirsty, abusive bully. Except, drawing a line in the sand and saying, “Hell, nah; this is wrong and I shall not let you.”

So, I was swift in my denouncement of what happened yesterday. I posted three words: “Atrocious, shameful, illegal.” I stand by that.

Overnight, some law experts I really respect started highlighting the “legal” opinions of William Barr and William Rehnquist, from 1989 and 1971.

Oh, by the way, the irony was not lost on me that yesterday was the 36th anniversary of Noriega’s capture, too. It reminded me of the old Tom Waits quote, “The world is a hellish place and bad writing is ruining the quality of our suffering.” I’m also reminded of my late father’s favorite Turkish insult, “Kifayetsiz Muhterisler,” which roughly translates to, “Incompetent Adversaries.”

So lazy and incompetent, yet capable of so much damage.

And here’s the story that most everyone seems to be missing, from where I sit in my dilapidated bungalow: this is in many ways a repeat of imperialism that has always been part and parcel of this empire, but it also has a darker twist.

First of all, this is just the beginning of the end for almost every Venezuelan’s American Dream. They will come for all of you, even those of you in Doral, Fla., who celebrated and gave quotes about your merriment about the news of your country’s “liberation.” Then, they will come for the Cubans. Then, they will come for the Mexicans. They want to deport 100 million of us; how do you think they are going to get to that number otherwise?

There’s a reason why Stephen Miller was there in the “War Room,” yesterday, and there is a reason why his deranged Barbie wife Xitted a picture of Greenland in US flag colors with the word, “Soon.”

So, all of you good folk, who are arguing about international and federal law and what this all means. Go ahead, I’m in awe of your dedication to objectivity.

I’m not without bias, myself. My late father met my late uncle after a direct action on an American bank branch in the capital of Turkey, when the slogan, “Go home, Yankee,” was popular. Yes, please imagine all the interesting family reunions I had as a naturalized Yankee with those cats, indeed.

A few hours into the nightmare yesterday, I did what anyone does in a time of great distress and called my mother. She was coming home from a New Year’s vacation unaware of the news. I told her, “You know, you guys accused me of changing and selling out, but I never had.” She went, “Awww, Umut, we are so sorry.”

Yes, I’m sorry, too.

I’m sorry this is all ramblings still, even after I waited 36 hours to write about it. Turns out I’m still pretty upset.

As I was drifting to sleep on January 2, 2026, I was drafting the intro to the original essay I wanted to post. It was going to go something like this: “I hope you all gorged on as many carbs and sweets as your body could handle and got some rest this holiday season. We are going to need all that stored energy this year.”

As per usual, I didn’t even know what I was sensing as a Cassandra.

Buckle up, lovies. It’s going to be a wild ride. Also, special thanks to the 30 of you who are supporting me financially. Could you please send some more generous friends my way?

N.B. Please listen to the full album, “There but for Fortune,” by Phil Ochs, if you get a chance, it’s what got me through this awful weekend.

I’m just going to cry and type through this because this is the only way I know how. It was, after all, Anne Frank, who wrote, “Paper is Patience.”

Except, we don’t even have the dignity of paper and pen anymore in the 21st century. Although, most of these babblings I have posted on this platform in the last 11 months have always started on paper. I’m not kidding around when I self-identify as a “Luddite,” I’m still into pens and paper, y’all. If anyone remembers such things.

There was that one time, I was working as a ghostwriter for some business types, where I threatened to send my writings via pigeon carrier, I was only half kidding. A total commie-pinko, sitting in their broken-down bungalow, making North American insurers and their consultants look good. Some client I had made it into the WSJ and Bloomberg’s “Top 10 Blogs to Watch,” list, and that poor woman had to do interviews about self-driving cars. I remember that time well.

Thirteen months ago today, I walked into the HR department of my employer, and quit on the spot, without notice. I had just spent a week in the Sangre de Cristos a week prior; sitting with the awfulness that was to come our way and I knew instinctively that I had to get out right then and there.

It was a USDA DEI-grant job, I would’ve lost it in two months, anyway.

I spent a couple of months, hiding in my bungalow, thinking about what’s to come.

And my goddess, these assholes came prepared for the worst. I wasn’t watching the “Inauguration,” but a friend sent me Muskrat’s salute… then, off we went to the races.

I tried to hang in there. I tried to tell the stories the mainstream media was refusing to tell.

Sometime in November, I snapped for good. I can’t remember what did me in… Something about Pantone picking the color of the year, perhaps. They called it, “Cloud Dancer.” Then, Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke at some event sponsored by Miriam Adelson, in which she asserted that young kids were “misled” by TikTok. Listen, dahlink, I’m not a fan of TikTok, either, but, when every United Nations report tells me it’s a genocide, I’m gonna take the word of the experts on the ground, OK?

The problem with neo-liberalism is so obvious. You don’t even have to be well-read to clock it. If it is near a duck that quacks and it pretends to be a duck, you know it’s a duck. The Pretendians, as my North American Indigenous siblings call it.

I went back to my immigrant roots… I cleaned toilets; I cleaned out clutter from hoarder houses; tended to vegetable gardens and pollinator habitats; organized garages and basements; I did whatever dirty job an “American” was not supposed to do.

Through this ordeal, my Turkish mother had to witness it and not cry, “This is not what I sent you to America for.”

I had to re-memorize my Alien Registration number. I sent pictures of my passport and my “Naturalization Certificate,” to attorney friends.

When my mother said she wanted to travel to the US, I was terrified and blocked her on social media, just in case.

Y’all, I cannot even begin to tell what an absolute nightmare it has been.

I cannot overemphasize how badly I wanted to be here.

I cannot describe the betrayal…

I’m so tired of waking up in The United States of America and crying about it daily.

Please do not paint it white, my dahlinks.

Paint it rainbow. FFS, paint it black.

Anything but white.

The old daily newspaper reporter in me is always embarrassed when I fall behind on my Substack posts. But, sometimes with the frenetic pace of breaking news resembling an avalanche in the Caucasus Mountains, it does take a few days to formulate my thoughts on how to tackle the monster that is our current timeline.

Last week, when everybody was celebrating the giant Blue Wave of victories across the nation, I had a curious, sinking feeling.

At first, I thought I might just be projecting and over-mourning the results of the local city commission in my own tiny Blue Island, where a couple of “unaffiliated” newcomers beat the only two Democrats, with the considerable help of the local GOP chapter and major MAGA folks, but then it made more sense when I read Zohran Mamdani’s “Hope is Alive!” speech. Don’t get me wrong, I’m ecstatic that Zohran won after so many billionaires (27 total) and so many influential faith leaders spent so much money and effort on smearing him and try to pry the sure-victory that has been his since the night he defeated his opponents in the primary.

And the speech itself is fantastic—classic Obama rhetoric and delivery—audacious, brave, bold, and, yes, hopeful. Listen, if there were an International Fan Club of the “Hope & Change Campaigns,” I’d be its president. My name, “Umut,” means “Hope,” in Turkish and I became a citizen in 2008, making Barack Obama my First President. I’m as “hopey & changey,” as they get.

But after reading the transcript for the third time, I felt an undeniable melancholy about it. Sure, Zohran won and that is YUGE, as Bernie would say. But it takes a very special person to withstand all the lies, the smear campaigns, the racism and the Islamophobia that just simply went off the rails.

Obama would know. They did it to him first. Although, I would humbly argue that at least he had help standing up to the bullies. Young folks may not remember this, but when things got really, really, really ugly toward the end of the campaign in 2008, Barack caught a Hail Mary pass from the Lion of the Senate himself—none other than Ted Kennedy, who single-handedly brought more than half of the Kennedy Dynasty (and the entire East Coast Elite) with him. That’s when the DNC and their goons in the SO-CALLED “LIBERAL MEDIA” (sorry for yelling) backed off and swallowed the possibility of a First Black Family in The White House.

Therein lies the difference between Barack and Zohran. Zohran did not have any heavy-hitter Democrats coming to his aid, much less doing the bare minimum and endorsing him properly (I’m looking at your world salad, Hakeem Jeffries). Not even when Sen. Andy Ogles demanded that Mamdani be denaturalized and “put on the first flight to Uganda.”

Not a single Democratic leader condemned it. Not one. Welcome to 2025, when we are forced to mourn the death of racists or else, and when not a single Democrat knows where their spine resides when faced with blatant Islamophobia.

That’s what was causing my melancholy, knowing full well that there is no precious “Decorum” left in this polite society anymore; it’s shattered (and not in a fun, punk way).

Zohran won handily, but this is a hero’s journey he will fight alone.

Just like when Columbia University left Mahmoud Khalil out to the wolves.

Let’s be real, fighting fascism has never been the DNC’s fortè.

As I was just trying to articulate my thoughts about that, Snow White (from Maine) and The Seven Dwarfs (of Morality and Intellectual Honesty) said, “Hold my beer—let’s calm down with this Blue Wave thing,” and decided to throw millions of Americans’ health care under the bus in exchange for SNAP benefits. One cruel “cooling” move on the movement.

Hope just got kneed in the brass ovaries.

And I hate to be the one to say, “I told you so.” Because we knew this, we all did. Where have our “Democratic Leaders” been all year? Were they out in front of the frozen Capitols of their states in February, March? They didn’t even take the resistance seriously until the first No Kings event in June.

But, many, many years ago, it was also the same “Democratic Leadership,” that snuffed out our dreams for a true single-payer universal healthcare system. Hell, they made Barack go back on a campaign promise and attached a mandate to the Affordable Care Act. It was the same leadership that railroaded Bernie Sanders in 2016. These people don’t care about affordable healthcare, or feeding the poor or housing the houseless.

This is just one set of corporate sycophants, trying to appear a little less racist and fascist than the other set of bootlickers for the oligarchy.

I’ve been a registered Democrat since I became a citizen. After 17 years, I want out.

But, the good news is (is there good news?) we have already come this far without their help. We have, and I truly believe this, reduced harm to countless possible others, whether by keeping tabs on the masked Gestapo and making their jobs harder at every turn or impeding the construction of yet another for-profit internment camp. We did all of this without any form of meaningful leadership from the Beltway.

So, we have that at least. We have US.

Let them belittle our “Blue Wave.” Next time, we’ll bring a tsunami, although it will look a lot less blue on paper.

Cover Art: “Concise Illustrated Biography of Monk Nichiren: Calming the Stormy Sea at Tsunoda in Exile to Sado Island,” by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Public Domain.

I feel very strongly attached to my chosen hometown of Lawrence, Kan. One does not fling themselves 5,000 miles across the globe to land on a spot they hardly care about.

I originally didn’t have a choice in graduating from Blue Valley High School in Stilwell, Kan., but I most definitely had a say in studying at the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas. Later, I made a very adult decision to return to Lawrence, after what I affectionately refer to as my “Tour of Small Town Americana.” All in all, I have spent 27 of my 32 years in the USA here in the heart of LFK.

Lawrence’s origin story is not a myth nor hyperbole. It is the story of a dedicated group of activists who moved here from Massachusetts to start a very intentional community to stop slavery from expanding to the West.

I devoured Richard Cordley’s, “A History of Lawrence, Kansas: From the First Settlement to the Close of the Rebellion,” first published in 1895 by the Lawrence Journal Press. I encourage all residents of our fine town to take a look at it, because after you’ve read it, you cannot continue to claim that we “can just debate injustice in the marketplace of ideas.” You just can’t. The book is full of stories of ordinary folks, very WASP ones at that, literally going, “Wait, no, slavery is wrong and we will die to prove that.” The forefathers and foremothers of this here little village were very serious about antiracism, antibigotry, and yes, in 21st-century parlance, antifascism, or antifa, for short.

So, imagine my abject horror when I received this mailer, paid for by Lawrence Professional Firefighters PAC, and backed by IAFF Local 1596, in my mailbox over the weekend.

The front of the full-color mailer features a less-than-flattering picture of our incumbent Lawrence City Commissioner Bart Littlejohn in the bottom left, with the words, “We are LESS SAFE thanks to Bart Littlejohn,” with an image of a burning building in the top right corner.

The back of the mailer features the very-flattering, smiling faces of his three opponents, with the words, in all caps, “CANDIDATES WE TRUST TO SUPPORT PUBLIC SAFETY.”

This is not okay. This is not a valid form of expressing a public policy disagreement with a sitting City Commissioner. This isn’t just a dog-whistle, this is racism via megaphone.

All persons involved in the creation and delivery of this blatantly racist message should be ashamed of themselves and should be expelled from public society.

But wait, there’s more, in the last few days, the people behind this campaign also robo-texted a similar message to Lawrence voters. Then, the IAFF Local 1596 also sent sponsored Instagram messages to some of us. I was in the lucky group that was subjected to the trifecta.

Needless to say, I was less than happy. I made some quick social media posts and wrote one very angry Letter to the Editor (which was not published, though I don’t regret any of the words I used).

Then, luckily for me, Bart himself (who is a much calmer and collected individual than my hot-headed Mediterranean self) finally addressed the issue.

And though I am very proud of him for always taking the higher road, his comments also made me sad:

“Unfortunately, it looks like I’m gonna be the only one responsible enough to respond to this so I will. Funny thing is, it was all directed at me; so go figure.

You all might’ve been recipients of an ad campaign recently with some pretty stark, misleading, and disturbing copy lately from a PAC supporting my opponents. Frankly, I feel bad that you have to view stuff like that. It seems as though the tactics and vitriol of the national/state races have seeped down to Lawrence.

We’re better than that!

In the manner described above, this PAC is leaning hard into trying to convince you that I do not support and care about public safety: that is not true and they know it.

I have always supported ALL of our city staff including public safety: fire/medical and police. They are the true public servants of the city and I truly value the work that they do.

I have them and your safety in mind in every difficult decision. Every department in Lawrence was impacted in our work to balance their duties with the communities’ wallet but cuts were required everywhere. As a goal, I try to put them in the best position to do their job given circumstances.

I have shown that through last year by keeping four on a truck, this year by making sure that we kept fire/med and police employed during a budget crunch, and directed staff to explore options for funding an additional fire station. This as well as my personal investments with all staff that I cherish in celebrating their life events, accomplishments, or just checking in.

But you all know that, because you all know me. You know that I try my best to uphold the values of the office with integrity.

Lawrence, we have a choice to make. We can either succumb to the tactics of the national level or we can choose to be better. I have chosen to be better. I know that at the end of the day I have to be the best role model for not only my own but all the kids out there so hopefully they have the tools to make it better for the next generation.

When you think of Bart Littlejohn, I want you to think about:

The work that I’m doing to make sure we have affordable and available housing of all types.

That I’m working to bring in and encourage new commercial development as well as supporting our new and established homegrown businesses to bring us more jobs as well as revenue to relieve the tax paying burden on residents.

That I support public safety as well as infrastructure to make sure that our city is operating as efficiently and safe as possible.

If you want to learn more about the campaign, support me, or just to meet me; go to: https://www.vote4bart.org/

Thank you guys and let’s try to be the best Lawrence that we can be!”

Stellar statement, but how sad is it that he is the only one having to defend his own reputation, integrity of character and the fact that he’s not a “Black man that will make you less safe,” as the local Union and its shady PAC decided to depict him as…

I would’ve preferred to see a John McCain response from one of his three opponents or some prominent LFK leaders.

But nothing. We got crickets. Respectability politics at its best, let’s just ignore glaring racism thrown at one of the two Black commissioners we ever elected.

Well, this imported Jayhawk, all of those buried at Oak Hill Cemetery and John Brown himself are all judging you, yes, all of you.

Just like McCain in 2008, we aren’t asking for a pass because he is Black. We are asking you to not stoop to the lowest levels of personal and racist attacks. By all means, please do argue with him on policy and his past votes as commissioner. Goddess knows and Bart knows that I have done that personally, for years.

What a crying shame that in the birthplace of the Free State itself, where some entrepreneurs make some serious money selling the image (and the ales) of John Brown, there isn’t a single soul to stand up for the integrity and character of an Incumbent City Commissioner, who just happens to be a Black man.

The end of October is a divine time when the veil starts thinning between the dead and the living. And the ghost of John Brown will come for us all. I hope he haunts us into an awakening.

The last time I wrote, we were collectively being gaslit about not mourning the death of a bigot properly.

This week Politico broke the news that several prominent young Republicans regularly used racial slurs in group messages while gushing about their admiration for Hitler and gas chambers.

Among those in the leaked chats was a prominent young Kansas Republican and the Kansas GOP immediately started tripping all over itself trying to denounce the local group, eventually deactivating it altogether.

Many Kansas GOP County groups released a statement denouncing the atrocious culture evident among the Party’s young leaders.

Not Douglas County Republicans.

As of press time, their latest posts seem to be a devotion to CK (not Calvin Klein, you know who).

Here is a selection of their philosophical highlights:

That’s a huge problem for Kristine Polian, who is a candidate for becoming the next commissioner for Lawrence City Commission.

Why is that a problem for Polian, you ask.

Because she is secretly endorsed by the DG Co GOP, even though she’s been running a “nonpartisan” campaign.

She had the most devout Lawrence MAGAs canvassing for her and some people noticed.

When questioned privately, she admitted to being endorsed and supported by Lawrence MAGA.

But, somehow, miraculously, she never had to admit it in public (not miraculously, the local press was asleep at the wheel).

Well, Ms. Polian, the buck stops here.

You have an obligation to come clean now. Tell the Lawrence voters that the DG Co GOP endorsed you; that you took $1,000 from Randy Swain and you let Dan Cady to canvass for you.

Ask them to denounce the Kansas Young Republicans as vehemently as they mourned CK.

Because, otherwise, you just look like an opportunistic WASP lady trying to unseat a Black man (one of two ever elected in this fine, abolitionist town).

While we are at it, please explain again how “we are unable to control people taking advantage of the system.”

Namaste💜

Those of us who are survivors of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV/DV) or anyone who ever had an experience with a narcissistic abuser at any relationship level know exactly what this week was about.

It’s called, “gaslighting,” coined after the superb 1944 movie, “Gaslight,” in which an awful abuser Gregory tries to convince Paula that the gaslight lamps dimming are just a figment of her imagination and the proof that she is going insane.

This week, in Los Estados Unidos, we were collectively gaslit by The Regime and right-wing extremists on a larger and uglier than usual scale.

A right-wing extremist, who said “gun-violence deaths were an unfortunate reality to keep the Second Amendment intact,” and “Empathy is a made-up New Age term,” died a violent death in broad daylight.

And then, the flood gates opened. Somehow, this political violence became our fault. Somehow, those of us who pointed out exactly how this one dude has made a career out of inciting violence against Black people, immigrants, LGBT folks, trans folks, became the problem.

This should terrify you, it should shake you to your very core of your being.

What we are seeing play out in real life is indeed a litmus test, but also the last throes of an unpopular movement that is continuing to tank in public opinion polls.

Everyone who has lived experience with abusers knows that the most dangerous time for an abuser is when the mask starts slipping–in the IPV world, we call this the switch from “Entitlement Abuser,” to “Survival Abuser.”

They start with entitlement, because they believe fully that everyone is at their service. When the mask starts slipping and they start getting desperate; it is solely about survival at that point.

So, over the weekend, we witnessed the rise of doxxing incidents on social media and an actual dedicated Web site to snitching.

They are so desperate at this point. Trying to recreate the image of a bold bigot, misogynist, transphobe into a wholesome “follower of Christ.”

Anyone who posts evidence to the contrary gets branded a person who celebrates “Political Violence.” Right.

It wasn’t political violence when you posted AI images of yourself taunting the Windy City with the hammer of federal agents, gloating about the “smell of mass deportations in the morning.”

It wasn’t political violence when you posted images of shackled prisoners with the tagline, “ASMR.”

It wasn’t political violence when masked thugs grabbed college kids in broad daylight.

It wasn’t political violence when your religious leaders celebrated devastating natural disasters.

It wasn’t political violence when Brian advocated for “involuntary lethal injections” for houseless veterans.

Got it. Thank you.

When my partner of 10 years got violent with me and tried to murder me in my bungalow, there were so many folks who went down the rabbit hole of logic, “I don’t condone domestic violence, but she got what she deserved.”

“Oh, she’s so mouthy and opinionated. Especially when she drinks.”

People, who pretended to be a part of polite society, tried to justify the beatings I got.

Then, some folks felt all mighty and holier than thou, because I kept feeding the hand that beat me, literally.

So, I know a thing or two about literal abuse, Stockholm Syndrome, trauma bonding, etc., etc.

I recognize gaslighting when it happens. Every day under This Regime is gaslighting. But this week was particularly bad.

The only silver lining is that I know it is because they are scared. They know the whole world is watching and everybody hates them for their bigotry.

They can try to cling to Jesus. But the reality is, they know that people like me, an ethnic Muslim atheist who is genderless, is closer to Jesus than they will ever be.

Ask my ex-husband. He is a Catholic now. He knows how I embody Christ on the daily.

But, make no mistake–this is a trial run on how to change the legacy of a person after they are dead. Wait for the amazing eulogies of Our Dear Leader, who was so very Christlike himself.

Stay alert and awake, darlings. September is going to be a doozy. Be kind to each other. Stay alive in spite of all the people who want us dead.

References:

MSNBC fires analyst Matthew Dowd over Charlie Kirk shooting remarks | US news | The Guardian

Wonkette

Guess We Shouldn't Do What The Right Did When Minnesota Democrats Were Murdered, Huh?

Charlie Kirk is dead, and the Right is about to start a civil war with us…

Read more

a year ago · 409 likes · 1567 comments · Robyn Pennacchia

The Black Wall Street Times

Charlie Kirk Is Dead—But Black America Remembers His Racism

Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, founder of Turning Point USA, and close ally of President Donald Trump, was assassinated on Wednesday afternoon during a campus event at Utah Valley University. Police say a sniper opened fire from a nearby roof…

Read more

a year ago · 173 likes · 3 comments · The Black Wall Street Times, Nehemiah D. Frank, and Ezekiel J Walker

Several people fired after clampdown on speech over Charlie Kirk shooting | Charlie Kirk shooting | The Guardian

W. Kamau Bell asks, "Who's With Me?"

Charlie Kirk Said, “I Can’t Stand Empathy.”

This is the last conversation Charlie Kirk had before he died…

Read more

a year ago · 1758 likes · 60 comments · W. Kamau Bell

I landed at JFK airport on August 31, 1993. The Lufthansa plane that brought some 55 exchange students from Istanbul via Frankfurt parked on the tarmac, far from any gate. I was so thrilled to do a “Beatles” landing, where we all got to walk down the steps of the big bird, and yes, I absolutely knelt down and kissed the gross tarmac like a sixteen-year-old who was privy to too much free beer in economy seating on their first transatlantic flight would.

When I applied for my international student exchange program, I could’ve picked any number of countries to live in for the following year. My mother begged me to pick Italy, “Italian boys are so handsome and you’ll still be on the Mediterranean Coast,” she argued.

But, at 15, I had my eyes set on only one country—I was determined to come to the United States.

Even though I was a child of anti-imperialists, I was also influenced heavily by my father, who went to a private American boarding school in Istanbul. He started teaching me English when I was a wee bit. He was the one who introduced me to MAD magazine, classic American movies, Walt Whitman, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. He met James Baldwin through one of his teachers at his boarding school.

So, yes, I knew about the atrocities; I knew what Baldwin said about the pain of what it means to be a queer Black person in America. Still, I chose this over anywhere in the world. First, as a teen, then, over and over as an adult. I believed in a better United States of America—the one where freedom of speech and religion was coded into the Constitution. So few folks know what a rarity that it is among the constitutions of the republics of the world.

I was like a firefly, drawn to the light—one specific light source.

But in the three decades that I have been here, I have sadly watched my adopted country, as well as the country of my birth, slide dangerously to the deep-dark-rabbit hole of far-right extremism.

This year, in just seven months, I watched this Regime accomplish what took Erdoğan 20 years to accomplish in Turkey.

I screamed from the rooftop of my phone and laptop and raised my angry fist at the gods and goddesses.

This, of course, was the first step in my grief process—Denial.

Then, in the last couple of weeks, I moved into the sadness stage. It took me a while to identify it and call it by its name.

I realized the Dream is Over. It is no more. I realized that it was my mistake for thinking it was even salvageable in the first place. It is not.

Even if The Entire Regime gets sent to the Hague for crimes against humanity tomorrow, there is no turning back from this, not in this timeline. Sorry kids.

Mainly because there are still an awful lot of people who think they can somehow appease the tyrants—from the mayor of Washington DC to mainstream media publications to law firms and prominent universities. People, important people, are capitulating to lawlessness. Yes, the lower courts are on our side, mostly. But the Roberts Court will undo each and every decision when they have a chance, as they have done time and time, again, in these miserable seven months in the year of somebody’s Lord, 2025.

I imagine this post will not be one of my more popular posts. I watch my Substack stats like a hawk and my least popular one was titled, “Gavin Newsom is not a friend.”
That was back in Febuary. So, I’m doing well as a Cassandra.

A lot of folks are just looking for “How to Save American Democracy in 5 Steps” posts and there’s plenty of it out there.

A lot of people want to hear about hope. Ah, “Hope,” the bain of my existence—the literal translation of my name. The name my parents gave me after getting amnesty for their political activism landed them in jail for 15 and 23 years, respectively. The name that was the part of the campaign of my first American President—”a skinny kid with a funny name who has a place here, too.” Barack, The Blessed, the child of an African man and a Kansan mom.

So, now I have moved into acceptance. I have realized my days here are numbered. I could be kidnapped and sent to El Salvador or Uganda for just writing this very blog post and existing in these United States as a “foreign-born national,” an “Alien.”

It reminds me of the time that I accepted being abused by my partner who was dying.

Once again, I find myself relenting to taking care of my dying abuser.

Funny how life works out, innit?

“Life’s but a walking shadow/it’s a tale told by an idiot/full of sound and fury/signifying nothing.” Thank you, imaginary white man for distilling the knowledge of goddess knows whom…

Over the last few days, I’ve reached out to those closest to me with a simple message—”I’m the saddest I’ve ever been.”

I now have to admit I have been wrong for 32 years straight. I have to tell my mother she was right, I should’ve gone to Italy.

Daddy died in 2012, right before Obama’s reelection campaign. I was bitching to him about the Affordable Care Act, and he literally told me, “I don’t care what dissapoints you. Now is the time to form a unified front against fascism.” Daddy always knew best.

My sister, my only sibling, took a sharp turn in her mental health after the fake coup by Erdoğan in 2016 and died by suicide in 2017.

So, yeah, maybe this is just politics for some. Maybe they think they will weather this storm.

For me, it is deeply personal.

This is me choosing to die here. On this very hill.

I grieve for the death of something that I loved deeply, but will surely kill me also.

Go ahead, call me a snowflake. Who amongst you looked death in the face and said, “Bring it on, bitch.”

“Tread on everyone else, but not me, daddy,” is a terrible slogan, just saying.

Long before I even knew Substack existed, I used to write these long rants on the platform I will only refer to as ZuckerWorld, and very well-meaning friends would reach out with all sorts of well-meaning concerns about my mental health. Some thought that platform was only for pictures of our brunches and pets and humans we adore. Some thought I didn’t format my rants properly for reading on a phone. Some even went so far as to tell me that they would just scroll right along when they saw a long string of words, feeling sorry for me and being worried for my mental health. My answer was always the same, “As long as I am writing and ranting, know that I am doing OK. If I ever go quiet, that’s when you should worry about me.”

I have been on Substack since Jan. 1, and have tried to hold myself to a weekly deadline for seven months. This is the longest break I have taken between posts, because, well, dear readers, I hit a wall. I reached the inevitable burnout about two weeks ago.

What happened two weeks ago that caused this fallout? Well, it was something very close to me geographically and personally.

A Lenexa, Kan., City Council Member, Melanie Arroyo, was reported to the Kansas Bureau of Investigations (KBI) by a Johnson County Republican as a possible fraudster for being an American citizen.

That is when my brain broke.

Here is a naturalized citizen, a local City Council Member, a paid employee of the City of Lenexa. And just because one old bigot thinks she might be faking her whole legal existence, based on the color of her skin, her race, her name, the City of Lenexa, Kan., decided that it was fair grounds for a “police investigation.” I’m sorry, excuse my French, but what the fuck…

Let me break this down to y’all who don’t know how naturalization works in this country… Non-citizens do not have a right to vote. When we are legal immigrants, we are cautioned against this very sternly and very frequently.

I can report to you, based on my lived experience here in 32 years, that I have only met one non-citizen in the U.S. who boasted about voting and he was British. Colonizers are going to colonize. We, savages, know better. We know our place. Our whole existence in this country has been about knowing our place.

So, one pissed-off old bigoted dude places one call to the KBI and the KBI promptly refers that case to the Lenexa Police Department. And the Lenexa City Attorney, whose job should entail, first and foremost, protecting the City of Lenexa officials and employees from harassment goes, “We had no other choice, but to investigate.” What? Are you kidding me?

The Kansas City Star, the ghost of the legacy newspaper it used to be, where I worked briefly and wanted desperately to retire from, rightfully noted in its story that Arroyo is on the voting rolls in Johnson County, available on public record.

The Kansas Reflector, which I adore, did not go far enough in pushing the government propaganda. So much so, I found myself cornering one of its writers at a random bar in Lawrence, Kan., and pointing out, “Hey, dude, she’s a paid employee of the City of Lenexa. You know they had to verify her papers to pay her, right?”

That was about a week ago and they didn’t follow up on my tip.

So, now, I have to tell the story. Although I am very tired. So, I’m not going to provide the links to stories about her. You are either going to search on your own, or take my word for it. Oh, by the way, you should know that I don’t write posts based on memes. I’m an award-winning investigative journalist. So, stay with me.

Here’s how it goes for non-US-born people seeking employment: You have to either provide a copy of your U.S. passport, or, if you do not have one, a valid driver’s license and a social security card. Here’s the thing about Social Security Cards: There are two types. One will just have your name and Social Security Number. If you are Not a Citizen, it will have a stamp on it that says, “For Work Authorization Only.”

Now, I have not reached out to Ms. Arroyo personally, so I do not know what documents she had. But the fact that she is a legal voter in Johnson County and a Lenexa City Council Member tells me that at some point, someone put some eyeballs at her documents.

So, she was legal, full stop.

At best, this should have been an HR affair. City Attorney gets word that some MAGA is raising questions about the legality of her whole ass existence in this country… His response should have been, “Hey, Michelle, in HR, what kind of records do we have for this brown person?”

By the way, I know all of this, not on account of being an immigrant-turned-citizen or an investigative journalist, but also as a former public administrator, myself.

I not only had to verify my documents, but the documents of my interns that I hired in my three years at Douglas County.

In that short time, one thing I learned is that finance and HR folks in local governments do not fuck around. They dot their “i”s and cross their “t”s, if you know what I mean.

So, for the City Attorney of Lenexa to come out and say, “Our hands were tied, we had no option but to send the police to our City Council Member to be investigated,” is nothing but pure bullshit, again, excuse my French.

Yeah, so that’s why I’ve been broken and quiet for two weeks because I literally could Not Talk or Write About It.

Dorothy Parker, an old New Yorker writer, was summoned to the House of Un-American Activities Committee, and she said this, “For God’s sake, children. Fascism isn’t coming; it’s already here.”

On the upside, my pollinator habitat is doing stellar this year. Monarch butterflies are the only monarchs I support.

Do something. Anything. Resist, my dahlinks, as our lives depend on it, because they do.

A friend of mine, who is an academic, just returned from a conference about the rising threat of authoritarianism and reported that every single Latin American academic she talked to said the same thing, “What is going on in the U.S.? Why are media companies, universities, businesses, state and local governments already giving into the unconstitutional demands of the administration?”

Privilege, or at least assumed privilege, can be a powerful blinding veil to the very real threats that the vulnerable feel immediately.

For the somewhat privileged in the U.S., what has transpired in the last seven months may not be a big deal. People snatched off the streets by masked thugs claiming to be law enforcement agents? Sure, those people deserved it. Except that more and more people are being released out of the gulags both here and overseas. Even Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom The Regime claimed was one of the “worst of the worst,” is back in the U.S., and not one but two judges ruled in his favor, calling the government’s claims of his gang activity “fanciful.” You don’t hear judges using the adjective “fanciful,” very often and that’s very telling. I’m pretty sure it translates to “bullshit,” in colloquial vernacular.

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, case after case of supposed “violent attacks on federal agents” are also being dismissed, due to “false claims,” made by agents. Translation: They lied.

The Regime said that it would try to “shock and awe,” this nation and, “flood the zone with shit,” and it most certainly delivered.

Universities, one after the other, falling like dominoes—Columbia, UCLA (which just settled a lawsuit, handing $50K a piece to each student and faculty who were offended by the anti-war protests), and last but not the least, my own alma mater, The University of Kansas, which just directed all employees to delete their pronouns from their email signatures.

Not to mention, the complete and utter destruction of major U.S. agencies and departments, especially those helping the most vulnerable among us…

And on and on, the list of attacks on the soul of the Republic, the Constitution and basic tenets of democracy and human rights are too long for one little blog post.

Yet, we have failed to make the staunch supporters of this cruel Regime the new Nickelback. They still exist all around us, and somehow, miraculously, still being included in social and political discourse, as if any respect is owed to them. John Pavlovitz says, “No,” by the way.

“Sure, we disagree on national issues, but we agree on local ones,” is one argument I heard this week and it nearly made my head explode.

How can you possibly separate the national from the local right now? When the federal government sends directives to local municipalities to get rid of all DEI policies to continue receiving funding, as my hometown just went through in May?

How can you possibly sit and talk with people who are rejoicing the removal of those pesky pronouns from email signatures? Is it because you don’t personally know even one person who gets misgendered in public on the daily?

What is it going to take for you to understand what is at stake here? Do you need to get one of your family members sent to a concentration camp to finally get it? Or for your grandma to die? (Grams has a year and a half, by the way, since they didn’t dare roll out the Medicaid cuts until after the midterms.)

It is truly astonishing to all of us who were born in other countries who have seen this play out. It is truly astonishing to anyone who is not a WASP, what’s at play here.

But, the privileged, or the self-assumed privileged, still do not get it.

For the life of me, I will never understand how people think any of this is just a slight disruption in the political climate.

It is not. The Titanic has hit the iceberg. You can keep running from port to starboard, looking for a lifeboat, keeping your little comforts and privileges, but in the end most of us will drown.

I refuse to break bread with people who appease the fascists. I’m done with the “good people” looking for bipartisanship. In the words of Georgie, “You are either with us, or with the terrorists.”

I’m drawing my line in the sand.

I came to this country as a high-school exchange student, with plans to find a college to attend. When I was assigned a host family in Stilwell, Kan., my teenage self was a bit stunned.

Those of us in the Global South know approximately three locations in this vast country, before coming here–New York City, California and Chicago.

In the pre-Internet and Google years, that involved getting the old World Atlas out to locate this foreign place and looking in the Encyclopedia Britannica to see what this new place was all about. Far from water. Sad. Also, cold winters, eek!

But, I was a trooper about it, nonetheless. I was the first foreign exchange student at Blue Valley High School (the OG, at 151st & Nall) to receive a diploma. My host parents were both graduates from the University of Kansas. Even though my idealist self wanted to aim for Berkeley or Stanford, when they took me to Lawrence, it spoke to me, for whatever reason.

So, of course, I applied and they did admit me. Though they lied in admissions about me paying out-of-state tuition for one year, only. US citizens who establish residency in another state can do that, they did not inform me of this, which did ensue a hilarious string of marriage offers in my sophomore year.

The University of Kansas was a marvelous place to be in the mid-1990s. Western Civilization I & II were still required for all incoming freshmen, regardless of major. We all had to read the Bible, the Old and the New Testament, the Quran, St. Thomas, St. Aquinas and The Communist Manifesto.

Something like 16 books each semester. My little bookworm heart loved it and drank it up. Then, in my sophomore year, my lil rebel heart insisted we take Eastern Civ, too. I wanted to balance my education and that’s when I fell in love with Buddhism.

I had a philosophy professor who only held office hours in the back of Wescoe, so he could smoke. I had journalism professors who made me cry so hard that I was prepared for any newsroom I entered after graduation.

Back in those days, KU was ranked consistently in the Top 25 Public Universities in the nation, and always in the Top 3 for journalism. I graduated with a newspaper-editorial degree in 1998.

Yes, I can attest to this–The University of Kansas was simply fabulous.

Fast-forward about three decades. Wow. I mean, what the hell, my dear old alma mater?

The Kansas of Board Regents, overseeing all of our public universities, issued a verdict, so Dear Old KU complied.

Here’s the thing, it took Erdoğan Twenty Years to get a hold of the universities of Turkey.

Six months here in the US?

My loves, my dahlinks, my comrades, this is Not How It Works.

There is no capitulating, obeying in advance.

No keeping your head down for a bit, hoping for a Regime Change.

You have to resist now. It will not go away if you just bury your head in the sand. It will only get worse.

Today, a new friend I made this summer asked me a rather pointed question: “How much danger do you think you are in for speaking out, organizing and protesting?” I just started laughing and blurted out, “Oh, probably a lot.”

Then, I got absolutely serious and delivered the answer that I have been holding onto in my heart for a while: “Listen, one of the many reasons I moved here as a young adult is for First Amendment rights. I decided a while back that I have to be prepared to die on that hill.”

My friend followed up with, “Don’t you think it would be better for you to lay low for a while and do things, you know, quietly, in the background?”

For sure. It absolutely would be. Maybe, if I had held on to my local public administration job and my title of respectability and did not start an absolutely radical blog, maybe, just maybe, I could travel out of the country to see my family and return without trouble.

But those of us who grew up under authoritarian regimes and those who have studied them in depth know for a fact that some people have to stick their necks out at the first sign of threat and danger to all of us.

I’ve written a lot about doom and gloom in these last few months, so today, I would like to highlight the people who inspire me to keep pushing, keep saying the uncomfortable truths.

1. Zohran Mamdani

Zohran is a Democratic Socialist running for Mayor of New York. He surprised everyone by getting the most votes in NYC’s mayoral primary.

Let’s review some of the attacks against Zohran, shall we…

It started with a statement from Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee.

On June 30, Texas Republican Representative Brandon Gill told Mamdani to “go back to the Third World” in response to a video of him eating with his hands.

“Civilized people in America don't eat like this,” Gill Xitted (is that the right verb conjunction for the platform formerly known as Twitter?). “If you refuse to adopt Western customs, go back to the Third World.”

This one struck a chord with many of us from the Global South who happen to live in the United States. It’s kind of hilarious, when you take the sheer bigotry out of it, because the people of this country LOOOOVE to EAT with THEIR HANDS.

I was 16 years old in a wealthy suburb of Kansas City as an exchange student, when fellow teens asked me all sorts of silly questions such as, “Do your people eat on the floor with your hands?” I don’t know, Chad, do your people love to eat pizza, fried chicken, ribs with their hands, not even so much with a freaking a paper towel and just wipe their hands on their unwashed jeans?

I’m going to be sensitive and qualify this sentence with “not all Americans,” but I have never observed a majority of the population that is worse than Americans about table manners. Really. I’m so sorry to be the one to break this one to you–the fork is not a cutting device. That is what the knife is for.

You can gloat all you want about your chopstick game, but if you do not know how to use a fork and a knife properly, please kindly sit down and stop being a bigot.

Sorry, not sorry, for that tirade on table manners. Back to Zohran…

By July 1, as reported by The Guardian, it escalated to this: “The [administration] has raised the possibility of stripping Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic mayoral candidate for New York City, of his US citizenship as part of a crackdown against foreign-born citizens convicted of certain offences.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, appeared to pave the way for an investigation into Mamdani’s status after Andy Ogles, a rightwing Republican representative for Tennessee, called for his citizenship to be revoked on the grounds that he may have concealed his support for “terrorism” during the naturalization process.”

What was Zohran’s answer to all of this? Golden, of course.

“The President of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, put in a detention camp and deported. Not because I have broken any law but because I will refuse to let Ice terrorize our city,” he wrote.

He continued: “His statements don’t just represent an attack on our democracy but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows: if you speak up, they will come for you. We will not accept this intimidation.”

That is a Profile in Courage. Calling out the bullying and the intimidation tactics for what they are and promising not to back down.

2. Mahmoud Khalil

Khalil was the first one to be “disappeared” for exercising his First Amendment rights on the Columbia University campus. He spent more than 100 days in a Louisiana Gulag and missed the birth of his first child Deen.

On June 21, ordering Khalil’s immediate release, federal judge Michael Farbiarz of Newark, New Jersey, found that the government had failed to provide evidence that the graduate was a flight risk or danger to the public. “[He] is not a danger to the community,” Farbiarz ruled. “Period, full stop.”

The judge also ruled that punishing someone over a civil immigration matter by detaining them was unconstitutional.

And what did Khalil do when he came out of illegal detention? He went right back to Columbia to protest. Then he sued the government.

Khalil told the AP that the goal of his legal claim is to send a message that he will not be intimidated into silence.

“They are abusing their power because they think they are untouchable,” Khalil said. “Unless they feel there is some sort of accountability, it will continue to go unchecked.”

Khalil said he plans to share any settlement money with others targeted in Trump’s “failed” effort to suppress pro-Palestinian speech. In lieu of a settlement, he would also accept an official apology and changes to the administration’s deportation policies.

Golden, again.

3. Everyone who has been on the streets protesting since February 5.

This one goes out to all of you, the hundreds and thousands of you in Kansas, and the hundreds of thousands and millions of you, who have chosen against all odds to come out to the streets to say, “None of this is OK.”

May all the goddesses and the faeries in the gardens bless you. I know so many folks, who are not at all in one of the at-risk groups, who keep telling me over and over, “I don’t know, it seems like a trap… what if I go out to a protest and they arrest me or worse?” Well, Chad, I’m glad you are choosing your safety over everyone else’s. Hate to remind you of the old poem, “First they came for…” But you do you.

No Kings Day was an absolutely phenomenal event. I’m sorry if you missed it.

Here in the Sunflower State, there were at least 22 events. But, according to The Old Gray Lady, none.

This week is the week of “Good Trouble Lives On” commemorative events in honor of the late John Lewis. We had an amazing turnout for it in my sleepy little college town in the Heartland.

We are going to be at the Capitol in Topeka tomorrow.

Goodtroubleliveson.org

Resist like our lives depend on it. They do.

I promise to you that I have waited a good, long time to try to write this post. I didn’t want to write while I was angry, lest I be accused of being a hot-headed Mediterranean savage unable to control their emotions.

Guess what? I waited almost two weeks and I am unable to calm down.

My dear United States of America, I am not okay. I don’t know when I’ll be okay and if I wait until I am, then I may not write for a very long time and that seems counterproductive at this point. Somebody has to say something. And, maybe you are on Substack, too, following all of the greatest minds of our generation, spitting breaking news at you every day. But, maybe you are not, and you are just watching cable news of your choice and still reading the newspapers of record, in which case, I’m worried about you.

I’m not going to bury the lede, my dear readers–we are just over the five-month mark of this cruel Regime and let me be the first one to say that there are authoritarian leaders across the world who are looking at this scene with the greatest envy. No one has been able to destroy so much of the basic fabric of society in so little time. No one.

It was sometime after the November election and before Inauguration Day that I had a falling out with one of my oldest friends in North America because he refused to understand or even feign some sympathy for my worries about the possibility of being “denaturalized.” We had multiple text exchanges and phone calls, in which my friend tried to tell me what exactly my status in this country is–”You are a citizen,” he kept telling me, over and over. “They are only going to come after the ‘illegals,’ you are fine,” he kept saying. In one of our last phone conversations, I pleaded and begged him, “No human being is illegal, please stop saying that.” I think he called me a ‘Libtard,’ or a ‘Cuck for liberals,’ or some such Joe Rogan BS. I knew right then and there that I could not have this person in my life, no matter how much I loved him, for so long as a brother of mine.

Fast-forward to June 11, 2025, when the inevitable directive from the Office of the Attorney General of the U.S., finally was released on the 10 categories of ‘priorities for denaturalization cases.’

Number 10 is especially riveting:

“Any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”

And just that they were very clear about the vagueness of these powers, this little addendum at the end seals the deal: “These categories are intended to guide the Civil Division in prioritizing which cases to pursue; however, these categories do not limit the Civil division from pursuing any particular case…”

Oh, swell.

This little memo didn’t even see the light until after SCOTUS decided to kneecap the lower court judges, or deem “due process” a headache.

And immediately after that, we went straight into the Big Ugly Death Bill saga. Oh, the MSM was so sure that we were going to have some brave GOP souls to save the nation’s soul. Ha! That was a great 48 hours of aging I didn’t know I needed.

Of course, the bill passed. And it is terrible. And it is every bit of the “death panel” stuff they accused Obama’s Affordable Care Act back in 2009, but hey, this is the United States of America, who has long-term memory going that far back?

It gets better–the “Kill Your Grandma” provisions of the bill will not go into effect until 2027, conveniently, after the midterms, if we have them (I hear Carville is worried about whether we will have elections at all, isn’t that darling of that Gumbo Boi from Louisiana? I just ADORE how relevant his opinion is these days).

But you know what will go into effect immediately? The tax breaks for the billionaires and the massive budget for ICE. The money they have appropriated for ICE is off the charts. It’s ridiculous. It will make ICE the greatest paramilitary organization, better-funded than save like 15 military forces of the world. Breathe with me, and for sure, fact-check me on Snopes or something and come back to tell me how I am wrong.

I’m a big fan of the quote, “When people show me who they are the first time, I believe them.” I think Maya Angelou said that.

My very first Substack post was titled, “Where will you be when they come for me?” and I quoted from a law professor explaining how these goons really didn’t want to stop at “immigrants,” but they would come for people such as myself, who did everything “the right way.”

And now they are. They are saying that they are. Who are the people not believing what they say, is my question.

Sometime in the last two weeks, I was streaming some bad television on a free app, and I almost fainted when I came across a commercial for jobs at CoreCivic, a for-profit company that is trying to build a Gulag right here in my backyard in Kansas.

When that is greenlighted for operations, I will be a fine candidate for detention, among many others in this part of The Heartland.

If you are a U.S. born person with the tiniest bit of empathy, I’m sure you are very sad about what I have written so far. And I’m sure you are waiting for instructions on what to do next. I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t. Your relatives weren’t so concerned about Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk or Mohsen Mahdawi… Every one of those activists, when given the chance at due process, were exonerated by the judges, who wagged their finger at The Regime’s lawyers.

And what of those ‘criminals’ that got shipped off to CECOT in El Salvador? Well, pretty much every media outlet has confirmed that only about eight percent of them had criminal backgrounds. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is back in the U.S., and his lawyers were so worried about his safety, that they asked the court to keep him in jail, so that ICE wouldn’t get him, again.

I don’t know what to tell you. What I can tell you is this: Your country is in danger. Whatever you are doing now is Not Enough. Do More. Time is of the essence. You, we, don’t have much time.

The speed with which news breaks and swiftly gets swept under the rug by mainstream media in these United States under the current Regime is challenging even for the most-seasoned watchdog reporters of yore.

In the last week alone, I wanted to write about the release of Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil from the Louisiana ICE gulag he had been in for more than 100 days; how the Supreme Court of the United States no longer cares about due process or lifesaving medical care for kiddos; and finally, the earth-shattering victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral race.

But today, I am going to put all of those stories on hold to share a bit of good news, not necessarily life-changing for all, yet still very worthy of this tiny little platform I have, for the very tiny audience I have built in the last five and a half months I’ve been on Substack.

Just two days ago, I received word that my friend B., a former Buddhist monk from Laos, was going to finally become an American citizen at the naturalization ceremony held at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, Kan., today at 9:30 a.m.

I met B. shortly after Inauguration Day this year, through a volunteer tutoring organization led by longtime friends from Lawrence, Kan.

I was told that he had passed the civics part of his citizenship test, but failed the English proficiency test before, and he just needed a tutor to call him twice a week to practice the questions.

I called him every Monday and Tuesday to go over the same 15-20 questions. These are very basic questions, things such as, “What is your name,” “What is your birthday,” “What is your marital status?”

At first, they were very difficult for him. Especially the one about his marital status. His wife had passed away and he refused to say he was single, so we practiced the word, “widower,” over and over. In just a few weeks, he improved so much that one day blurted out in perfect pronunciation: “Thank you for helping me!”

As someone who had gone through the naturalization process myself, but with a lot more advantage–near-perfect fluency and the ability to fill out my paperwork without any legal assistance–I felt an immediate empathy for and kinship with B.

For more than three decades in this country, I’ve been trying to advocate for those who are less privileged than me and to explain to “the good centrists,” and “the good conservatives,” that “doing it the right way,” is a road filled with pain and suffering.

I was extremely grateful for the opportunity to finally be able to help someone directly in his second chance at the elusive American citizenship journey. In a lot of ways, it was the only thing that helped me get out of bed and face another day under this cruel Regime.

Then, in early April, my friend B. was diagnosed with cancer and we had to suspend the tutoring sessions because he was in so much pain. I was devastated. I was already hanging by a thread, facing the daily deluge of bad news coming from Washington D.C., and the only good thing in my life came to a screeching halt. My friends at the volunteer tutoring organization asked me if I’d be willing to take on another student. I couldn’t. My empath heart that was already very low on spoons dreaded the possibility of getting attached to another fellow human, lest something terrible happened to them, too.

In the last two months, I kept getting updates on B.’s health and how he was getting treatment and finally getting some relief from the pain. In the meanwhile, the volunteer organization worked diligently to try to get him a medical exemption from the English proficiency test. The bad news was that his exemption claim was denied, but the most amazing news was that on June 16, he passed his English proficiency test. I was over the moon.

What happened next was even more amazing. Usually, after the final testing and interviews, it takes about two months to be scheduled for a naturalization ceremony. But my friend B. was notified earlier this week that he would be naturalized today, just 10 days after passing the final test. Miraculous.

It just so happened that my car was in the shop for repairs and I had to scramble to find a ride to no avail. Finally, my volunteer coordinator informed me that my friend B. and his nephew would be happy to pick me up on their way to Topeka and bring me back.

The naturalization ceremony was just perfect. There were only 35 new citizen candidates from 19 countries (usually it’s a much larger group than that) and they each got to stand up and introduce themselves and say the name of their country of origin.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Rachel Schwartz and Keynote Speaker Dr. Beryl New made excellent remarks acknowledging the sacred and historic ground we were on–the very school that was the subject of the Brown v. BOE case. Needless to say, I cried and cried, joyful tears, bittersweet tears, tears of hope against hope.

What this means for my friend B. is hard to put into words. He had left Buddhist monkhood sometime ago and started working at a manufacturing plant in Johnson County to support his children back home. His Lao passport expired. He had no way of traveling home to see his family. Now, he will get to apply for an American passport (the ultimate Blue Book of status); get to see his kids for the first time in years; and maybe even petition to have them moved here. That is nothing short of a life-changing watershed moment for him.

With all the vitriol coming out of The Regime about “the criminals and animals” that walk among us, I hope that you will think of people like my Buddhist monk friend B. He is a kind man, a spiritually enlightened man, who gave up religious life to help his family. He works hard and he pays taxes. He just wants to be able to travel freely to see them and maybe have them come over to visit.

I’m sure that was also the case for the 34 other folks who were naturalized today.

The American Dream means something to them. The American Dream still means something to me.

Please do not let them take our humanity away from us. I beg of you–say it with me, “No human being is illegal (especially on Stolen Land).

On Father’s Day every year, people around the world fill their social media feeds with tributes to their fathers.

Until this year, I was one of those people, since my father and I were very close and he died in 2012. But this year, I decided that another father desperately needs the spotlight and I’m certain that my baba would agree.

After all, they share many things in common: political incarceration, religion and being separated from their young child. My baba was incarcerated in Ankara, Turkey, from 1972 to 1974, while my older sister was going through her very crucial early childhood years, from age 3 to 5.

On this Father’s Day, Mahmoud Khalil is still in a detention center in Louisiana, where he has been since early March, unable to enjoy his very first holiday as a father of a newborn. His wife, Noor Abdalla, a U.S. citizen, gave birth to their first child, Deen on April 21.

On June 11, U.S. District Judge Michael Fabiarz ruled that the administration could no longer detain Khalil on the claim that he is a threat to U.S. foreign policy, but stopped short of ordering his release. Instead, he gave the government lawyers until Friday to appeal his order, which they did not.

But when Khalil’s lawyers asked for his immediate release, the administration then argued it was authorized to continue detaining him, based on its allegations that he lied on his Green-Card application.

As someone who has been through both the Green-Card and Naturalization applications, I can imagine how easily someone could nitpick through all the dozens of pages of information the candidates have to provide and accuse anyone of intentionally leaving something out and committing fraud (that in itself is a terrifying possibility for millions of lawful immigrants living here).

Unfortunately for Khalil, Judge Fabiarz said that his lawyers did not present enough evidence on his detention being solely based on the Green Card claims was unlawful, and punted the case back to the immigration judge in Louisiana.

On Mother’s Day, The Guardian had published Khalil’s letter to his son Deen in full, here some excerpts that are particularly gut-wrenching to me:

“In the early hours of 21 April, I waited on the other end of a phone as your mother labored to bring you into this world. I listened to her pained breaths and tried to speak comforting words into her ear over the crackling line. During your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept my voice low so that the 70 other men sleeping in this concrete room would not see my cloudy eyes or hear my voice catch. I feel suffocated by my rage and the cruelty of a system that deprived your mother and me of sharing this experience. Why do faceless politicians have the power to strip human beings of their divine moments?”

“Deen, my heart aches that I could not hold you in my arms and hear your first cry, that I could not unfurl your clenched fists or change your first diaper.”

“Deen, as a Palestinian refugee, I inherited a kind of exile that followed me to every border, every airport, every form. Borders mean something to me that they may not mean to you. Each crossing required me to prove my docility, my identity and my very right to exist. You were born an American citizen. You may never feel that weight. You may never have to translate your humanity through paperwork, countless visa applications and interview appointments. I hope you use this not to separate yourself from others, but to uplift those who live under the same circumstances that once constrained me. But I won’t pretend this citizenship protects you. Not completely. Not when you have my name. Not when those in power still see our people as threats.”

“Deen, my love for you is deeper than anything I have ever known. Loving you is not separate from the struggle for liberation. It is liberation itself. I fight for you, and for every Palestinian child whose life deserves safety, tenderness and freedom. I hope one day you will stand tall knowing your father was not absent out of apathy, but out of conviction. And I will spend my life making up for the moments we lost–starting with this one, writing to you with all the love in my heart.”

The ACLU has also released a powerful video of celebrity dads Mark Ruffalo, Mahershala Ali, Dallas Goldtooth, Arian Moayed, Mo Amer, Alex Winter, Kamau Bell and Tom Morello reading excerpts directly to a camera. Please give it a watch and if you are inclined to do so, go to aclu.org/khalil to sign a petition demanding his release.

Happy Father’s Day!