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Last Sunday I was highly activated by the murder of Alex Pretti. A brutal street execution by Border Patrol agents caught in HD in four different angles is not something you can shake, and immediately after Minneapolis had carried out one of the most significant general strikes in American history. I heard from a friend that a rapid response training was happening and I dropped everything to be able to attend. I started making plans to help organize friends in my own neighborhood to be ready when ICE inevitably comes to our neighborhood. I also started texting organizers I know to set up a stop the bleed class for organizers on our side of town. I have a half dozen group chats to respond to and a lot of video calls to schedule in the next week, but hopefully by the end of it I’ll have a few dozen more people equipped to confront the deportation behemoth when Stephen Miller decides to unhinge his jaw and try to swallow us.

By Monday night my friends and I were discussing the nationwide general strike being called for by Friday by students in Minneapolis. I will admit I was highly skeptical that such a thing could spread across the country on such short notice. I knew labor unions wouldn’t participate in a meaningful way, I knew our fragmented algorithms meant that many people weren’t going to realize that such a sudden strike was being called. I was worried that this would be another instance of a small faction of people yelling: “I declare GENERAL STRIKE!!!” and no one listening. But as I talked to my most trusted organizing friends, I knew I had to suppress those doubts and believe that Friday was going to be something.

By Tuesday my friends and I were formulating a plan of how we could meaningfully contribute to the call for a strike. We elected to organize a protest at the Amazon Web Services office in Santa Monica. Amazon has a huge contract with ICE to provide the data infrastructure necessary to maintain their deportation machine, they are the cloud storage backbone, literally storing the biometric data that allows ICE to more easily target and detain immigrants. I shared this article by Eric Blanc with my friends to explain why they would be a good target for an action on a day of action when everyone’s attention would be on ICE. We thought it would be beneficial to capture people in a moment of heightened activation to draw the connection between ICE’s cruelty and the wider private business network that profits from it.

So we started planning the action. We’ve done our share of protests, we know who to email from the press and what groups to alert that such an action is taking place. We made flyers to let people know this was happening. I designed the poster pictured above and had it printed. It depicts the ice cream cart of Enrique Lozano, a vendor in Culver City who was kidnapped by ICE so suddenly that his cart was abandoned on the street, who was thankfully eventually returned to LA after the community rallied for him. This was a protest directed specifically at people in West LA, we trusted that most of them would know what this image means. We trusted that if we got our flyer circulating on social media, people would show up, and show up they did. About an hour into our protest, roughly two hundred high school students from the neighboring high schools streamed off the Expo line to join us. The pure, anarchic, chaotic joy we felt watching all these kids pile onto the sidewalks and medians around us cannot be put into words. All of us teared up. Our protest really did materialize into something real.

At the peak there were probably four hundred of us gathered there, all unified in our anger and despair at the killings this month, directly outside of the offices where tech capital is complicit in our death-making machinery. I have no idea if everyone who participated in this action fully understood why we were there. I can’t promise you that every single participant drew the connection between the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and our larger tech oligarchy. But I can tell you that people heard about it, and they heard the story of Keith Porter Jr, a man here in Los Angeles who was also unjustly executed by an off-duty ICE agent whose family has received a fraction of the money that Good and Pretti have. People got handed flyers with QR codes to join our rapid response network, and they got prompted to donate to the vendor buyout program my friends run to support migrant vendors who can’t work under threat of ICE raids. That vendor buyout program has raised over $20k in the last few days.

I went home and turned on the TV. My friend and mayoral candidate Rev. Rae Huang was set to appear on Hasan Piker’s stream that afternoon. They had originally been scheduled to ride transit and eat Taiwanese food around LA the week prior, but given the circumstances they had pivoted to participating in the anti-ICE protests downtown instead. Hasan had also been kicked off of Twitch the night before for comparing ICE supporters to “Zionist pigs”. So at the last second, he had had to figure out how to get set up on YouTube. This ended up being a blessing, he got significantly more viewers than he generally does on Twitch, which meant when he linked up with Rae downtown, he had about 100k people watching. They walked around downtown among the throngs of people, Rae trying valiantly to describe her platform amid the cacophony of chants, car horns, and random people mobbing Hasan. It was pure chaos, but I think it also demonstrated that Rae is truly of the people; she loves the streets, she loves talking to people unified in struggle. Hasan was in a bullet proof vest, a necessary measure given the regular death threats he receives. Rae was protected only by her stole.

At one point as they were walking, they ran into my buddy Helen who organizes with the feminist anti-war movement CodePink. She asked Hasan to join CodePink in protesting Bari Weiss when she comes to town soon. It felt like an amazing moment of serendipity, these disparate pieces of the social movements I’ve been connected to over the years all meeting in the streets on one blisteringly sunny afternoon.

As Friday wound down and images from protests across the country started to flood my Instagram, it was clear that this had been another significant day of action across the country. 100k people in the streets in San Francisco, people blocking ICE facilities in Baltimore, kids going toe to toe with DHS here in downtown LA. People across the country took time off work, skipped school, dropped their regular obligations to show up en masse. To show up in defiance of state violence. To refuse to accept the techno-feudal Christian nationalist future being shoved down our throats. I have no idea if these actions constituted a significant amount of economic damage. I cannot tell you what comes next. But I can tell you that Liam Ramos, the five year old abducted by this regime in Minneapolis and shipped to a concentration camp in Texas is back home now. If nothing else, our collective efforts, our mourning and our rage, may very well have saved this little boy’s life. In the grand scheme of the evil we’re up against, it’s not enough, but we have to recognize that there are ways we can win, day by day, week by week.

On Sunday I got up at the crack of dawn to make a mini-documentary for Rae’s campaign. We were shooting a series of interviews with people directly impacted by the ICE raids in LA, and conveying how the city’s lackluster response to the brutality has amplified the harms perpetuated. People were so eager to tell us their stories about what they’ve been through that multiple people flew out here or changed flights to be sure they could participate. We talked to a woman who was unlawfully held in ICE detention for months. We spoke to activists who’ve been tear gassed and arrested. All of their stories will be told by this campaign with as much fidelity and honesty as we can manage. As we were shooting, we steadily were getting alerts of more lefty content creators who wanted to collaborate with Rae after she had been on Hasan. Things are in motion for us.

That’s what I really want to convey to you, friends. Things are in motion. All around you are people who are outraged and ready to get in the streets with you. As Hasan talked about on the stream, nothing makes you realize your own power like feeling the interconnected strength of being in a crowd with others. I don’t normally enjoy diary style essays like this, and to be frank I worry that writing something like this makes it far too easy for the fascist apparatus to track and target me. But I also feel called to articulate how I’m spending my time resisting this government in the hopes that it might give you some perspective and ideas for how you can begin to organize with your neighbors to bring about the world we have to will into existence together.

Something is cracking- you can feel it, can’t you? A consensus that was solid a decade ago is shattered. A vulgar, wretched fascist snake is wrapping its way around our throats, but people are starting to instinctually understand that the time has come to start wriggling free. The putrid selfishness of the autocrats at the top, their obvious disdain for any sense of morality, their gleeful participation in Epstein’s pedophile cabal, becomes more apparent by the hour. People are open to hearing the gospel that we are all bound up in each other, people are willing to admit that our struggles are interconnected, that we must all love and support each other. I’ll see you in the streets, beloveds.

I’ll leave you with that old International Workers of the World hymn that still endures over a century later:

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,

Greater than the might of armies, multiplied a thousand-fold.

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old

For the union makes us strong.