The woman shot in Minneapolis was named Renee Nicole Good. She was a wife and mother, and was acting as a legal observer of ICE activities in her city. She was murdered by one of 2000 ICE thugs who had been intentionally deployed to Minneapolis to harass and kidnap people who didn’t look white enough, as part of a campaign by our president to punish the state for voting against him, under the pretext that some people committed fraud in 2020. That fraud case has been in the courts for years, and is being dealt with legally, with many convictions. Having masked, armed men roaming the city does not contribute in any way to the processing of the court case.

Since early December, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations – many of them masked and brandishing rifles – have grabbed people at hardware stores and gyms, or outside homes and schools around the cities. They have violently tackled undocumented immigrants as well as US citizens, including advocates and protestors.

By the time Good was shot on Wednesday – in broad daylight, as dozens of bystanders screamed in shock – local leaders and human rights advocates had been bracing for a catastrophe.

But there they are, shooting people.

Meanwhile, Kristi Noem, who was not there, is lying about the events of last night. She calls Renee Nicole Good a domestic terrorist.

An ICE vehicle had become stuck in the snow, Noem said, and officers were attempting to push it out “when a mob of agitators that were harassing them all day began blocking them in shouting at them and impeding law enforcement operations.”
…
ICE officers approached a woman in her vehicle, who Noem said “was blocking the officers in with her car.” She said the woman had been “stalking and impeding their work all throughout the day.”

ICE agents ordered her out of the car, telling her to stop obstructing law enforcement, Noem said. “But she refused to obey her commands.”

“She then proceeded to weaponize her vehicle, and she attempted to run a law enforcement officer over,” Noem said. “This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism.”

All lies. You’ve seen the video.

It’s going to get worse. ICE is exercising no restraint.

In Minneapolis, residents and organizers were bracing for more violence. Hours after Good’s death, about 3 miles (5km) from where she was shot on Wednesday, armed immigration officers descended on Minneapolis’s Roosevelt high school, tackled people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders, school officials told MPR.

Noem must be impeached, ICE must be disbanded, and Donald Trump…I don’t want to say what should be done with Trump, because what he deserves is not pretty.

Minneapolis is getting ready. This crisis is not over.

I remember when all the radical lefties were complaining that the university curriculum was too packed with tired old white men, which was true–the Western Canon is overstuffed with old guys. But I always thought the idea was to open the door to more diversity, to recognize more worthy women and brown people, and let the curriculum breathe a little more. It was less about culling Greek philosophers and to introduce more Great thinkers of different backgrounds.

Well, leave it to the conservatives to carry the idea to an extreme. Texas A&M wants to ban Plato.

Texas A&M has decided that Plato is not to be taught, a determination that suggests the problem is not ancient philosophy but what happens when people read it.

As Daily Nous reports, the university has instructed a professor not to teach Plato’s work in a “Contemporary Moral Problems” course, an act that is both historically incoherent and politically revealing. Plato is not a contemporary provocateur. He is one of the foundational figures of Western philosophy, taught because his writing invites questioning, disagreement, and analysis. Treating Plato as expendable makes clear that the concern is not ideology, but cognition in the time of Trump.

Madness.

What else bothers me is that the Texas A&M administration is overstepping their bounds. Administrators do not typically have the background to dictate the curriculum in a university department; faculty must have the autonomy to determine the content of their courses.

For example, most of the courses I teach are established topics widely recognized by all universities. I teach cell biology and genetics using standard textbooks, and further, these were courses long approved on my campus, and I’m continuing a curriculum established by my predecessors. If an administrator tried to meddle in the content of those courses, not only would I be pissed off, my colleagues would join me in protesting.

We also have to be prepared to extend our teaching to include new material — does anyone think an administrator is more up to date on current advances in biology than I am? I’ve also introduced entirely new courses, like my eco-devo course, which wasn’t just a whim on my part. I had to show my sources, and document my teaching plan to my department. I had to get approval from my division. I had to write a proposal that was presented to all the faculty of my university. Administrators had to deliver the final stamp of approval, but that’s just a formality — course content is and should be entirely a product of qualified faculty and experts.

I hope Texas A&M faculty are ready to rise up in furious protest at administrators killing Plato in a philosophy course.