Amanda: This gives me Barbie animated movie vibes.
Sarah: His head is so big, and his neck is so long, and I’m also confused by the size of her head and the length of her arms.
This is giving me the uncanny valley vibes of that one Julie Anne Long Cover – not the smirking git one, the giant head lady one.
This one:
Sarah: “Head too big, arms too short” will be the name of my podcast about disturbing cover art.
Elyse: That’s similar to my favorite kitten/puppy stage “ears too big, legs too long”
Sarah: His neck is long, right? It’s not just me?
Elyse: I think it’s not long, it’s broken.
Sarah: “How.” ” How what?” ” How did you know that my father was Gumby?” ” Everyone knows your father is Gumby, my lord.”
Elyse: LMAO
Sarah: “I thought we had hidden it.”
“You thought you had hidden your lineage and connection to Lord Gumbert Rubberthwaite, Earl of Stretetshingtonshoreley?” … “Which is pronounced ‘Stretchley?’ Really, you thought that was a secret?”
Elyse: I would read that book.
From Kelly B: One-the title is Behind the Net but they are clearly in front of the net. And two-the physics required to sit on a hockey net like that.
Sarah: This is just awful on so many gravitational and proportional levels.
Amanda: Girl has got to be engaging her core like crazy.
(snip-go read it-it’s hilarious! And post your own comments below!)
ICE white supremacist gang thugs getting even more agressive attacking people. They no longer care about skin color. The gang has reverted to gang tactics of intimidation. They think might makes them right. The ones with the guns are in charge is what they have been taught. And the administration is OK with this as it helps their cause to have a frightened public unwilling to stand up to them. They are covering their faces because they understand they are breaking the laws and that if a police officer tried this they would be in prison. They know that Stephen Miller will not always be there to protect them. And tRump can not pardon people found guilty of state crimes. In this clip a woman rushes into another woman’s home. The police dispatch incorrectly tells her she must hand the woman over and she almost does, but then gains courage as ICE thugs draw closer on her property. Her neighbors come out and give her strength and support. Hugs
The government take over of thoughts and what material people can read is happening with the assistance of the tech community. The limiting what people can see or read started with the idea of restricting any media that positively presented the LGBTQ+ community so to protect the children they claimed. See how quickly it has progressed in less than a year to simply the government telling / demanding the right to tell people what they can read or view so that the government is never disfavored or contradicted. Totally as China and Russia work. How do you like living in such a society. Remember the people who had these books on their device had paid for them and Amazon did not return their money, they just reached in and deleted the material they did not want you to read. Once the precedent is set it will be used by any new government who wish to control the population and how they feel about the society they live in. Hugs
A commuter using an Amazon Kindle while riding the subway in New York.Credit…Lucas Jackson/Reuters
In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”
On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole by Amazon.com.
In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.
An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.
Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned.
Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices and apparently to make them vanish.
An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.”
People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. “Of all the books to recall,” said Charles Slater, an executive with a sheet-music retailer in Philadelphia, who bought the digital edition of “1984” for 99 cents last month. “I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased.”
Antoine Bruguier, an engineer in Silicon Valley, said he had noticed that his digital copy of “1984” appeared to be a scan of a paper edition of the book. “If this Kindle breaks, I won’t buy a new one, that’s for sure,” he said.
Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues.
Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”
Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.
“It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from Amazon,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. “As a Kindle owner, I’m frustrated. I can’t lend people books and I can’t sell books that I’ve already read, and now it turns out that I can’t even count on still having my books tomorrow.”
Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.
On the Internet, of course, there is no such thing as a memory hole. While the copyright on “1984” will not expire until 2044 in the United States, it has already expired in other countries, including Canada, Australia and Russia. Web sites in those countries offer digital copies of the book free to all comers.
The sad fact is the actions of the military has dragged the US again into war crimes territory. It is Kegseth’s responsibility to guild and give direction to the military as its civilian leadership. He is the one that gave the illegal orders. Hugs
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Friday, November 28, 2025 at 5:02:31p EST
Photo from Donald Trump via Truth Social
Shocking as this moment is, none of us should pretend we weren’t warned. When Donald Trump installed Pete Hegseth — a television provocateur whose public record is soaked in belligerence, booze, and culture-war performance — as America’s Defense Secretary, the world could see exactly where it was headed.
Still, nothing prepared us for today’s Washington Post’s revelation that Hegseth personally ordered U.S. forces to “kill everybody” on a small wooden boat off the coast of Trinidad on September 2.
You’d expect rogue militias or failed–state paramilitaries to speak that way. You don’t expect it from the man running the Pentagon.
What the Post reports is almost too grotesque to absorb.
After the first U.S. missile ripped the boat apart and set it burning, commanders watched on a live drone feed as two survivors clung desperately to the charred wreckage.
They were unarmed. They were wounded. They were no threat to anyone. They were simply alive; inconveniently alive for a man who had allegedly already given the order that there be no survivors.
And so, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the strike, the Special Operations commander overseeing the operation ordered a second missile. It hit the water and blew those two men apart.
History tells us to watch out for nations that lose their moral compass in real time.
It starts when the powerful stop seeing human beings as human. It accelerates when the government itself denies any obligation to justify its killings.
And when leaders begin lying to Congress and the public to cover what they’ve done, you’re no longer looking at isolated abuses. You’re staring straight into the machinery of authoritarianism.
Instead of telling Congress that the second strike was designed to finish off wounded survivors, Pentagon officials claimed it was to “remove a navigation hazard.”
That isn’t just spin: it’s an attempt to rewrite reality.
The Post quotes Todd Huntley, a former Special Operations military lawyer now at Georgetown Law, saying exactly what any first-year law student would immediately recognize: because the United States is not legally “at war” with drug traffickers, killing the people on that boat “amounts to murder.”
Even if a war did exist, Huntley notes, the order to kill wounded, unarmed survivors “would in essence be an order to show no quarter,” which is defined under the Geneva Conventions as a war crime.
This isn’t an obscure legal debate. This is basic civilization. Armed states do not execute helpless people in the water.
And yet this is now U.S. policy. The boat strike on September 2 was not a one–off. It was the beginning of a campaign.
The Post reports that since that first attack, Trump and Hegseth have ordered more than 20 similar missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 80 people.
The administration insists the victims were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But in classified briefings to Congress, Pentagon officials have not provided even one single verified name of a trafficker or gang leader they’ve killed. Lawmakers from both parties say they’ve been shown nothing beyond grainy videos of small boats being destroyed from the air.
If these men had truly been high–value cartel operatives, Trump would be parading names and photos across every rally stage in America. The silence tells its own story.
Experts warn that many of the dead may not have been traffickers at all. They may have been border–crossing migrants, subsistence fishermen, or small–scale smugglers whose crimes did not remotely justify summary execution.
International human rights groups are already calling these killings extrajudicial and illegal. Some foreign governments are asking whether the United States has effectively created a free-fire zone over parts of the Caribbean, and several have limited intelligence sharing with us for fear of being complicit in prosecutable war crimes and crimes against humanity.
This, too, has been part of the authoritarian playbook since ancient times.
Pick a foreign or criminal “other,” paint them as subhuman monsters, and then declare that the normal laws of war, morality, and basic decency no longer apply.
For years, right-wing media has been hyping Tren de Aragua as a kind of supercharged successor to MS-13, just as Trump once used MS-13 as a bludgeon to justify abuses at home.
The fact that the administration has produced no evidence for its claims isn’t a bug: it’s the point. When the government fabricates an omnipresent threat, it gives itself permission to kill whoever it wants.
This may also explain the ferocity with which Hegseth and Trump went after Democratic lawmakers last week when they reminded U.S. service members that they are duty-bound to disobey illegal orders.
Those officers weren’t being dramatic: they were issuing a warning grounded in fresh blood. And Hegseth’s and Trump’s panicked rage — calling for the death penalty for six members of Congress, including a decorated war hero and a CIA officer — now makes perfect sense: he knows perfectly well what he’s already ordered.
The strike on September 2 is not just a policy failure; it’s a moral collapse. If the Post’s reporting is accurate — and multiple congressional offices say it is consistent with what whistleblowers have told them — then the United States has engaged in the deliberate killing of wounded, unarmed men floating in the sea.
That is the kind of conduct that topples governments, triggers war-crimes investigations, and leaves scars on nations for generations.
Nobody elected Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth to serve as judge, jury, and executioner for impoverished people in wooden boats. Nobody gave them the authority to murder suspects without trial. And nobody gave them the right to lie to Congress about it.
Congress must not let this pass. These allegations demand immediate public hearings, subpoena power, and full investigative authority.
If Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody,” he must be removed and prosecuted.
If U.S. commanders falsified reports to mislead Congress and the public, they must be held accountable.
And if Donald Trump approved or encouraged these actions, then impeachment and criminal referral are not optional: they’re required to defend the rule of law.
America doesn’t have many chances left to prove to the world, and to ourselves, that we still believe in the value of human life and the restraints of democratic power. This is one of them.
I still do not see the emergency need here as none is really stated. What is the security issue? I think the thing is tRump’s admin wants to erase anything that as any other administration’s branding on it. The object is to make DC tRump’s city bearing only his branding and everything named after him. He sees other tyrant authoritarian dictator has a city named after them, he wants DC to be his, the White House to be a palace like other royalty has so he must have, and his rule to be unquestioned. Hugs.
The Trump administration is extending its wrecking ball to yet more historic buildings in Washington as the president’s pet projects — including his golden ballroom and triumphal arch — press forward.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appears before the House Committee on Homeland Security on Capitol Hill on Dec. 11, 2025.Mark Schiefelbein / AP Photo
The Trump administration is looking to tear down more historic buildings in Washington as the president, nearly a year into his final term, looks for ways to leave his mark on the District of Columbia.
This includes the destruction of the East Wing of the White House to make way for the president’s grand ballroom, which he now says will cost some $400 million, as well as a massive so-called arc de Trump.
But a memo uncovered by The Washington Post on Tuesday shows the administration using a new justification (that is, other than Trump’s vanity) to explain its latest effort to raze a part of D.C.’s history: a so-called emergency.
The Post reports Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose agency has engaged in some rather lavish spending on her behalf this year, issued a memo earlier this month “seeking to fast-track the demolition of more than a dozen historic buildings at St. Elizabeths in Southeast Washington,” which officials have been converting into a sprawling headquarters for DHS over more than a decade in accordance with historic preservation of treasured landmarks.
Per The Post:
‘Demolition is the only permanent measure that resolves the emergency conditions,’ Noem wrote in the memo. A risk assessment report undertaken by her agency ‘supports immediate corrective action,’ she wrote. The assessment report, which Noem included with her memo, concludes the vacant buildings ‘may be accessed by unauthorized individuals seeking to cause harm to personnel.’ The structures ‘provide a tactical advantage for carrying out small arms or active shooter scenarios,’ the report states.
MS NOW has not independently confirmed the memo. A spokesperson for the General Services Administration, which is overseeing development of the St. Elizabeths campus, confirmed to The Post that the agency had been alerted by the DHS about “a present security risk to life and property” at the campus “that may require us to demolish buildings.”
The report notes the push is being opposed by multiple preservationist groups, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has also sought to thwart Trump’s ballroom project.
It’s yet to be seen whether there’s any true risk in need of being resolved by Trump’s demolition of yet more historic buildings. But if past is prologue, there’s certainly reason to doubt the administration’s “emergency” claims here: namely, the president’s obvious desire to remake the nation’s capital and his administration’s tendency to use claims of “emergencies” to impose a slew of radical policies.
Again we see the institutionalized casual racism in the US. This was the basis of the CRT higher education classes were about. All the media latched on to and went into great detail over a white woman’s shooting by ICE but only report vaguely and sporadically on the shooting of the black / brown people shot by ICE. But when you read the report below think on how racist ICE gang thugs are, the fact that they have broken other laws and assaulted other people with impunity as they are defended by the power of the US government. One last thing to think on. The ICE thug was clearly angry and he had his gun out, ready, and pointed in front of him allowing him to shoot the man without raising his gun. The reported statements from the government never mention him drawing his gun nor raising it, just that he fired his weapon defensively. If he felt threatened why openly approach the man with the long gun? Why no call for back up? Depending on the time was the ICE thug wakened up by the noise of gun fire? Hugs
Friends and family of the 43-year-old man who was fatally shot by a Department of Homeland Security agent in Northridge on New Year’s Eve gathered on Sunday to demand accountability and hold a candlelight vigil for their lost loved one.
They identified the victim as Keith Porter, who they say was a well-known and well-liked person in the community.
“If I could say anything to the ICE agent, it’s that you’re a murderer,” said Jasané Tyler, Porter’s cousin. “You stole my cousin from me. You stole their father from them. You stole Francine’s son from her.”
Porter’s loved ones are demanding justice after the father of two died on New Year’s Eve. He was shot by an off-duty U.S. Immigration and Customs agent at the apartments where they both lived.
Keith Porter, the 43-year-old man fatally shot by a DHS agent in Northridge on New Year’s Eve. Porter Family
His family contends that he was shooting a gun in the air to mark the new year. A statement from DHS on the incident contends that it was an “active shooter situation.”
“On December 31st, an off-duty ICE Officer bravely responded to an active shooter situation at his apartment complex,” the statement said. “In order to protect his life and that of others, he was forced to defensively use his weapon and exchanged gunfire with the shooter.”
Another statement from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin provided further details. She said that the agent was “in his apartment, when he heard what he suspected were multiple gunshots. The suspected gunfire grew progressively louder, indicating to the officer that whoever was firing a gun was approaching his apartment. The officer took his ICE-authorized firearm and left his apartment to investigate. He moved to the ground level and went outside, where he believed the suspected gunfire was coming from.”
McLaughlin’s statement says that the officer rounded the corner of the building, where he encountered Porter, who they said was allegedly armed with a long rifle.
“The ICE officer identified himself as law enforcement. In response, the individual pointed his weapon at the ICE officer. The officer ordered the subject to put the weapon down, McLaughlin said. “When the subject refused to comply, the officer fired defensively with his service weapon at the subject to disarm him. The subject fired at least three rounds at the officer.”
Porter’s friends and family don’t buy it, especially with members of law enforcement in their own family.
“Every one of them says this is not standard, this is not protocol,” Tyler said.
Black Lives Matter leaders, who hosted the Sunday night vigil, are outraged by what happened.
“Were this anyone else, there would’ve been an arrest,” said Dr. Melina Abdullah, with BLM. “You don’t get to just murder people because you don’t like what they’re doing or how they’re celebrating.”
Los Angeles Police Department officers tell CBS LA that their investigation into the shooting is still ongoing. They also told the LA Times on Sunday that they haven’t yet spoken with the ICE agent due to protocol on how deadly force investigations are conducted when they involve federal law enforcement officers.
The only reason tRump believes this and what makes it true is the republicans in charge of congress refuse to stand up against his illegal actions. They are either scared of tRump’s goons / gang thugs, or they are compromised with something tRump / Russia has over them, or they have been bought and paid for by Russia. No matter what they refuse to act against what tRump administration is doing and the democrats can’t because they are not in charge of congress right now. However if the democrats get at least the house then they can challenge tRump in court and force him to act with in the laws of the nation.
And all the things the republicans are quiet on now because it is trump doing them, watch how fast they get their voices back and how loud they screech when a democrat becomes president. If a Democratic Party president tried to with hold money, declare a way without congress approval, or demanded private companies, universities, or media enforce liberal polices watch the republicans suddenly wake up and lose their minds and shit their pants. Fox entertainment would be running a non-stop screaming host on every show about how horrible and evil it was. Hugs
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before boarding Air Force One on Nov. 16, 2025.
President Donald Trump has every reason to believe he’ll never be called to account for his actions.
He managed to skate on several impeachments and a host of felony convictions. He was allowed to return to office despite his part in an attempt to halt the peaceful transfer of power to his successor. The Supreme Court, a constitutionally enshrined backstop on his power, opted to give him blanket immunity for any number of crimes.
Still, it’s shocking to hear the president openly admit that no one in the government could stop him. And that’s exactly what he did in an interview with the New York Times that was shared on Thursday.
Pressed about the checks on his presidential power following a shocking raid on that ended in the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump said he’s constrained by nothing but his own sense of right and wrong.
“There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” he said.
Trump also said that he didn’t “need international law” because he’s “not looking to hurt people.”
The outlet asked Trump to consider the precedent he was setting via his arrest of Maduro. They wondered if China might see a justification to take similar actions against Taiwanese leadership.
“This was a real threat,” he said of Venezuela. “You didn’t have drugs pouring into China. You didn’t have all of the bad things that we’ve had. You didn’t have the jails of Taiwan opened up and the people pouring into China.”
A photo of Renee Macklin Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis earlier in the day on Wednesday, is taped to a light post near the site where she was killed at 34th Street and Portland Avenue.
Ben Hovland | MPR News
Renee Macklin Good’s wife, Becca Good, said that the 37-year-old poet and mother of three was made of sunshine.
“She literally sparkled,” Becca Good said in a statement. “I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time.”
But behind that light was a well of deep values that Macklin Good lived by, including a conviction that every person — regardless of “where you come from or what you look like” — deserves compassion and kindness.
“Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole,” Good said.
Those were the values that brought the Goods to stop during an ICE operation in south Minneapolis on Jan. 7. Though they were relatively new in town, Becca Good said they wanted to support their neighbors.
“We had whistles,” she said. “They had guns.”
An offering at the memorial for Renee Good in Minneapolis on Friday.
Ben Hovland | MPR News
Bystander videos show a federal agent grabbing the handle of Good’s car and demanding she open the door. As she begins to pull away, footage shows another officer — since identified as Jonathan Ross — pointing his gun at her and firing through the windshield of the car.
A video taken by Ross that began circulating Friday also shows Macklin Good saying to the agent, “That’s fine dude. I’m not mad at you.”
The Trump administration has cast Macklin Good as a “domestic terrorist” who tried to run over federal agents, though that is not supported by eyewitness accounts or footage from the scene.
Her presence made ‘folks feel good’
Macklin Good was born in Colorado Springs as Renee Nicole Ganger. She graduated from Old Dominion University in Virginia in her early 30s, with a degree in English. In 2020, she won a prize from the Academy of American Poets for a poem called “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.”
MPR newscaster and poet Emily Bright reads Renee Macklin Good’s poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.”
While at Old Dominion University, she took a fiction workshop with associate professor Kent Wascom. That class with Macklin Good was the first class he taught there.
He said he could still clearly remember how her warmth and positivity shaped the experience for everyone as they shared their own writing with the class.
“She was incredibly warm with her peers, generous with their work, and was just a bright and engaging presence that made folks feel good,” he said. “When the temptation to offer a biting critique might have fallen on another student, she was there with something kind to say, something positive to say about the work or something insightful that might be helpful.”
He said at the time that she was taking his class, she was pregnant with her son. It was the early days of the pandemic too, and despite all she was balancing, she stood out in how she continued to uplift others, even remotely.
News crews film near the memorial for Renee Good on Portland Avenue in Minneapolis on Friday.
Ben Hovland | MPR News
Along with her son, who is now six years old, she was also a mother to two other older children. Her wife described them as “extraordinary children” and said the youngest had already lost his father.
The Minnesota Star Tribune quoted Macklin Good’s mother Donna Ganger, who described her as “extremely compassionate.”
“She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate,” she said.
Macklin Good and Becca Good had moved recently to Minneapolis, in search of a new home.
When Macklin Good, her wife and their six-year-old son road-tripped to Minnesota for the chance to make a better life, the couple held hands the entire car ride, Becca Good said. Their son made drawings on the windows as the miles stretched on toward Minneapolis.
When they arrived, they found a vibrant and welcoming community and a “strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other.” Becca Good said she finally found peace and safe harbor.
But “that has been taken from me forever.”
A woman prays the rosary during a vigil for Renee Good, a woman who was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis earlier in the day on Wednesday.
Ben Hovland | MPR News
Each night since Macklin Good was killed, thousands of people have shown up to protest ICE and hold candles in support for Macklin Good and her family, locally and in other cities. Online, a GoFundMe that aimed to raise $50,000 in support of the family, has surpassed $1.5 million and has since closed.
The support has come in from out of state and out of the country.
“I’m sorry that you lost your life so senselessly simply because you were brave enough to stand up for your neighbors,” one donation read. “Please rest in peace knowing that we will take it from here. Tyranny will not stand, Good will prevail.”
“Renee, your death weighs heavily on my heart. You stood up for your neighbors and for immigrants like me, a Somali who knows how much that protection matters. I am heartbroken for your children, who must now live without you,” another read.
“I’m truly sorry for your loss, we all know the truth and I hope you get justice,” read another.
Becca Good expressed gratitude for the wave of support and called for honoring Macklin Good by living her values and coming together “to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love.”
“The kindness of strangers is the most fitting tribute because if you ever encountered my wife, Renee Nicole Macklin Good, you know that above all else, she was kind,” Becca Good said.
“In fact, kindness radiated out of her.”
Here’s the full statement from Becca Good:
First, I want to extend my gratitude to all the people who have reached out from across the country and around the world to support our family.
This kindness of strangers is the most fitting tribute because if you ever encountered my wife, Renee Nicole Macklin Good, you know that above all else, she was kind. In fact, kindness radiated out of her.
Renee sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time. You might think it was just my love talking but her family said the same thing. Renee was made of sunshine.
Renee lived by an overarching belief: there is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow. Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.
Like people have done across place and time, we moved to make a better life for ourselves. We chose Minnesota to make our home. Our whole extended road trip here, we held hands in the car while our son drew all over the windows to pass the time and the miles.
What we found when we got here was a vibrant and welcoming community, we made friends and spread joy. And while any place we were together was home, there was a strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other. Here, I had finally found peace and safe harbor. That has been taken from me forever.
We were raising our son to believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness. Renee lived this belief every day. She is pure love. She is pure joy. She is pure sunshine.
On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns.
Renee leaves behind three extraordinary children; the youngest is just six years old and already lost his father. I am now left to raise our son and to continue teaching him, as Renee believed, that there are people building a better world for him. That the people who did this had fear and anger in their hearts, and we need to show them a better way.
We thank you for the privacy you are granting our family as we grieve. We thank you for ensuring that Renee’s legacy is one of kindness and love. We honor her memory by living her values: rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love.
Photo from Donald Trump via Truth Social
Scottie's Playtime 