1. I mean, sure, this is all anecdotal. But it's also all true.

2. I have worked in many restaurants. It may be different now, but back in the day almost everyone white who worked in the kitchen was a lunatic. Almost everyone else tended to be Hispanic, and often illegal. Every single one of those restaurants would have collapsed into a pile of cocaine and ennui while the angry white waitresses who were really dancers, and the angry white cooks who were really documentary filmmakers, and the angry sous chefs who were really illustrators, and the angry bartenders who were really actors were busy letting the world know through the language of poor service exactly how unfairly it was treating them. The Hispanics just pulled their shifts, and mostly kept the place afloat.

3. I worked for a construction company for a year, nominally as a carpenter's apprentice, but really as a tall dude who carried things. Most of my fellow laborers were Hispanic, and often illegal. While I was learning almost everything on the fly, many of the other laborers were as skilled as the carpenters, but they did the shit work for shit pay anyhow. When you have no choice, what's your choice? Also, I was salaried and they were not, which likely was just a coincidence.

4. I worked in a hotel for many years, first as a clerk and eventually as general manager. During that time, I probably hired (and sometimes fired) between 100-200 people. You learn a lot about life from trying to staff and run a business that never closes. At first I mostly hired cute girls for front desk jobs. Most of those girls were young and white, because most of the young girls who applied were white. That policy got tossed out the window pretty quickly.

5. In the end, I needed people I could depend on. If you've ever been woken at 3am because the sewage pipe burst in the basement of a six-story building with 80 rooms in downtown San Francisco, you know, as you run half-dressed to your 1978 Celica GT to punch it through traffic, that you have to have someone who can handle chaos in the interim.

6. Culturally embedded entitlement, unearned self-regard, and a general parental pampering are not resume attributes that inspire confidence. Fair or not, generalization or not, brown people in America need it more. Require less. Are not obsessed with recognition. Believe in the concept of actual pay for actual labor. Many of those brown people are immigrants. Some are illegal. I’ll take them on my team all day, any day.

7. Fair point, at this juncture, to mention that I was a self-involved asshole in my twenties as well, racial classification notwithstanding. But I was, and still am, a hard worker. Give me a hard worker over a hip guy I can break down noir cinema with, or a girl who looks like arty Winona Ryder all day long.

8. Also worth pointing out that this is not about how all Hispanics/immigrants/illegals are saints, or even cool. Lazy Mexicans do exist, which I know because I've both hired and fired them. But they are unusual. Actually, I disliked a healthy number of brown people I worked with over the years, but I disliked them because of their personalities.

9. It's interesting that in this current discussion of the border/immigration/deportation, almost no one makes the distinction between Mexico and South America. Further, they ignore the profound differences between the people/countries of Central America. A Honduran and a Guatemalan, are, unsurprisingly, as different as a Manhattanite and a rural Texan. But we lump them all together because it’s easy, and because we’re generally lazy and stupid.

10. In terms of my personal hiring experience, give me a Salvadoran anytime. Amazing people, incredibly hard workers, hilarious and fun and awesome. I mean, yeah, not all of them. But, like, 88%. It got to the point that if a Salvadoran applied, I'd just hire them on the spot. Never once regretted it.

11. Probably because the statute of limitations has elapsed, I will admit that I hired illegals regularly and willfully. At least if their ID was fake enough that I could plausibly claim I'd been duped. I rarely regretted that either. What could be harder than trying to find work, and make way for your family, and to wake up with desperation instead of Jimmy Dean link sausages in your stomach, in a new country with a second language? It mystifies me why America is not knocking itself out to help these people. Big ups to Haitians and Somalis! How is it possible to live in a society led by a man who calls them "garbage" while the toothless gleefully cheer?

12. We’re the wealthiest, most fortunate, most powerful country in the history of humanity, and it’s not even close. A country of that description, I would think, would also be the exemplar of justice, humanity, hope, and service to the rest of the world. Can someone explain to me why we’re not again?

13. Hey, did you know that remaining in the US without status while applying for a visa/citizenship is a civil violation, not a federal crime? So what’s with all the guns and tear gas and federal troops tackling people in the streets?

14. Hey gun fetishist prepper! Remember when you had to have an open-carry auto-kit machine gun with bump stock and silencer and military scope and Eagle Talon ammo to help protect against encroaching government tyranny? Well, it's HERE! So why aren't you in Minneapolis right now pointing your gun/penis at people?

15. Oh, wait, because "tyranny" is a euphemism for "not white", and what you're actually protecting against is "empathy."

16. Race is an entirely cultural construction with no scientific basis, purpose, or meaning. There are certainly geographical groupings that share common evolutionary phenotypes related to DNA pools drawn upon, as well as environmental considerations such as proximity to the sun, or the need for more or less facial hair. There is no "White". There is no "Black." There are only variations of DNA combinations. The truth is that every single individual who has ever lived was so mathematically and chemically specific that they were always their own race of one.

17. There isn't a single white person in the bible. There isn't a single Christian in the bible. Really! Origin-wise, we're all South African. Back when Pangea was Pangea, there weren't continents, let alone countries. Back when the Bible was still an amalgam of mis-translated scrolls and oral histories, Jesus and his posse and his stigmata-dealers were brown Romans or brown Jews. Even the Romans were only partly Italian! They were Moors and Picts and Vandals and Visigoths and Ostrogoths and Goths and Franks and Egyptians and Greeks and Turks and Persians!

18. I am huge fan of South African music, primarily the genre known as Cape Jazz. For that reason alone, I'd be perfectly fine to have a South African passport and identify as such, which, down to the molecule, would not alter who I am, what I believe, what I stand for, or what my relative value is in relation to anyone else on Earth.

19. The Himalayas are the youngest mountain range on the planet. Nineteen major rivers/delta systems originate from them. The Valeriepieris Circle is an imaginary circle drawn on a map centered on the Himalayas that comprises 15% of the world's land mass and more than 50% of its population.

20. Which means, Stephen Miller, A MAJORITY of the world's population is neither Christian, American, exceptionalist, imbued with Judeo-Christian values, Miller-esque, Proud Boys, or white.

21. Not to get all Marx here, but the only true differences between any grouping of homo sapiens anywhere on the planet is economic status.

22. Hey, so time is static. Or at least it's non-linear. Which is to say, the past and the future are as real as this sentence. All three of them are happening, right now, as you read it. Gravity is the one force that connects all things in the universe. Because of this, time is influenced by movement. That’s not a clever bumper sticker, if you sent a windup alarm clock on a bedside table into space to orbit the earth, because of the increased distance from our gravitational center, the clock in space would record time faster than the one by your bed. It's true.

23. The earth is moving through space at 67,000 mph. So if an alien ship at the edge of our galaxy were moving at the same speed on a parallel line, January 17th, 2026, or our current conception of NOW, would be the same as theirs. But our brains aren’t really equipped to process or visualize in more than three dimensions. Which is to say, everything we see in the night sky that we presume is either static, or at least moving in concert, is not.

24. So if the alien ship were moving at exactly our speed but directionally closer or further away, that dimensional movement would change the NOW that they observe us experiencing, while our NOW would remain the same. In other words, if the ship moved toward us at 65,000 mph, the Earth they observed would be different than the one we think we're in. Say for argument 100 years in the future. If they went away from us, they’d see 16th century France.

25. Which is to say that everything in the universe is always happening all the time, the only factor that gives us the perception of a linear unfolding is observation relative to speed x distance.

26. Which is to say, Trump was a monster, is a monster, and always will be a monster. ICE is the gestapo, was the gestapo, will always be the gestapo.

27. Since a future already simultaneously exists and will soon unfold in which America comes to its senses and realizes what a FUCKING TRAVESTY this authoritarian swing into madness is, what exactly are you rooting for? IT’S ALREADY WRONG IN THE FUTURE!

28. Fuck ICE. Fuck simplistic thinking and the cowards who perpetuate it. Fuck tribalism. Fuck deliberate stupidity. Fuck white pride. Fuck greed. Fuck the current incarnation of America harder than Glen Rice fucked Sarah Palin.

29. ICE spending is currently at the level of the 13th largest military in the world — more than Canada, Italy, Poland, and Australia. Their new funding push includes 14 billion a year on detention alone. Ice is not about immigration, or fairness, or the law, or the border. It’s where the Police State meets the Industrial Prison System. It’s where people too fat for law enforcement and too dumb for the military hit the streets for a very specific brand of fascist cosplay. ICE is a private army whose real job is to trigger a justification for the invocation of the Insurrection Act, just in time for the midterms.

30. The great thing about life is that we mostly get to choose who we want to be.

Nine FACTS, One LIE
Issue #35
​
1. The woman's name is Renee Nicole Good. The woman is dead. And that is where factuality ends and religion begins.

2. Sounds like she'd been following ICE around all day, filming, yelling things with her partner as a sort of Citizen's Protest against both the actions and overall legitimacy of ICE. There are many reasons to question the legitimacy of ICE, and many ways to protest their actions, none of which are particularly effective, and most of which involve social media.

3. The wisdom inherent in both ICE as a political tool, and verbally confronting ICE as a political response, is equally dubious. Since deportation numbers under Obama and Biden are about the same as those under Donald J. Trump, ICE is really a performative tool of control pretending to be a legal method of enforcement.

4. As a species, we respond to images, not math. It SEEMS like something has changed through the deployment of ICE, but it's more that giddily depicted brutalism has entered, and been widely embraced, by a percentage of culture that gets high on fear experienced by people in a position they will almost certainly never themselves be.

5. Hey, you can open-field tackle an endless row of laborers in endless Home Depot parking lots, but we will still have the same understaffed courts, non-existent immigration policies, broken and feckless congress, transpiration of political courage, and a convenient racial toolbox with which to ignore the same set of problems and the same lack of solutions.

6. The Brutal Truth: America will never deport its way back to a perceived National Whiteness that will make poorly educated and perpetually angry whites more comfortable.

7. Although pretending to do so will make them vote.

8. But at some point the emotional and fiscal costs will overwhelm the fake benefits, and even those votes will shift to a better quality brand of hamburger.

9. Which is to say, Mr. JD Vance in 2028.

10. By the way, is there a more disingenuous, calculating, insufferable prick on the face of the planet than JD Vance? If so, please forward this mythical person's specs.

11. ICE just is, and almost certainly will be, until Donald J. Trump just isn't. But barring an emergency McNugget angioplasty, ICE will continue to behave as such, or worse, unless something happens that is so awful/embarrassing to the administration that it is forced to quietly back away.

12. Turns out in 2026 that incorrectly sending people to supermax in El Salvador and Uganda to be raped and tortured for crossing the border, branding them all Tren de Aragua cornerboys, and denying them Due Process, the ONE THING that we ALL have to be patriotic about, has yet to have that effect.

13. Spend five minutes online, and it's clear that shooting an obviously harmless woman in the face as payback for making your crap job a little crappier, and then calling her a "domestic terrorist" is totally cool with a percentage of Americans who are prepared to concede absolutely nothing, ever.

14. ICE is not moral or judicial or effectual. They are not police or military. They are a private army, and probably illegal themselves, but we won't know for sure until another decade of endless lawsuits scrape to an end. "FAFO" and "Why was she there in the first place?" and "If you obeyed the lawful commands of an officer, this wouldn't have happened" are party-line arguments that contrive to engage in rational discussion and event impartiality, but are really expressions of a transcendent personal anger to which facts, or even crisp video footage, does not apply.

15. Yes, Renee Nicole Good was probably being annoying as fuck, and other more subdued protesters, who watched her earlier behavior and even though sided with her politically wished she'd just shut up and go home already, did not think it a wise idea to plant their SUV between tired and illegally armed ICE goons on a freezing Minneapolis afternoon confident that shit would remain in control simply because they happen to live in White America.

16. All of that can be true, and all things can be stripped of politics, and Kristy Noem can be head of Homeland Security while also the most surgically altered aging stripper to ever be forcibly removed from the golden pole, and Donald J. Trump can be a sociopath and Baron Trump could have sold 150 million dollars worth of World Liberty Financial memecoins in the last year alone, even though his father is both President of the United States and owns World Liberty Financial, not to mention pardoned the guy from Binance who in exchange agreed to feature WLF tokens on his exchange, which, even for a world glutted with useless tech, is about as slick as method of gorging on bribes ever devised, and NONE of that changes the one elemental truth:

17. Renee Nicole Good was murdered. Your particular politics, religion, or political religion does not factor into that sentence.

18. America, in the end, is just another burgundy SUV half up on a bank of dirty snow, surrounded by police tape, inside of which evidence will be collected and bagged and stored and juries marshaled to be RIttenhoused, and names will be forgotten and lawyers paid extravagantly, but citizens of both parties will still know that their ride needs to be topped off, eventually, with fresh Venezuelan gas.