January 23 🪶 Day of Truth and Freedom

Pádraig Drummond ✊There’s a stink coming off the American empire, the kind you’d recognise from a damp bedsit after a long weekend of bad decisions and cheap whiskey.

Only this isn’t a hangover, it’s policy. The Trump administration, under the twitchy command of The Faux-Führer, has turned the machinery of the state into a roaming protection racket, and ICE are the lads sent out to collect.

What’s happening in Minnesota isn’t some administrative hiccup or “border enforcement gone wrong.” It’s occupation. Plain and simple. Masked men lifting people off the streets, battering workers at their jobs, dumping human beings like rubbish bags miles from home. That’s not law enforcement, that’s counter-insurgency, the same dirty playbook the Yanks perfected from Da Nang to Baghdad and now feel bold enough to run at home.

They murdered Renee Nicole Good and then did what empires always do: they shot her twice, once with bullets and again with lies. Before her body was cold, the Faux-Führer and his mouthpieces were already smearing her as a threat, because empire cannot admit innocence among the dead. If the state kills you, you must be guilty. That’s the rule. Truth gets bundled into the van with the victim.

ICE, bloated with cash and staffed up like a pub brawl with a federal budget, has been reshaped into a loyalist militia, faces covered, badges hidden, fists swinging. Anyone from a Republican estate in the occupied six counties knows this look. We’ve seen it before: uniforms without accountability, authority without consent, violence without consequence. Call it homeland security if it helps you sleep. We call it what it is, state terror.

And still, the most dangerous thing facing them isn’t a brick or a slogan, it’s refusal. That’s why the call for a general strike in Minnesota matters. When workers stay home, when buses don’t run, and tills don’t ring, the empire starts to sweat. Labour withheld is the one weapon they can’t drone-strike or spin away. Profits dry up, and suddenly the men in suits start talking about “stability” and “dialogue.” Funny how that works.

But make no mistake, this brutality on America's home soil is stitched directly to slaughter abroad. The same hands funding raids in Minnesota are signing cheques for mass graves in Gaza. Just days ago, the Faux-Führer quietly pushed through another multi-billion-dollar weapons package for Bibi the Butcher, ensuring that Israeli jets, bombs, and missiles keep raining down on a trapped population already starved, bombed, and displaced beyond recognition.

This isn’t aid, it’s a supply line to genocide. Billions funnelled through “foreign military financing,” delivered at speed, no questions asked, while Palestinians are punished for daring to exist politically. Assistance to Palestinian communities is choked off unless they meet impossible loyalty tests, keep quiet about torture, and promise never to seek justice at international courts. Even the act of asking the world to recognise Palestine as a state is treated as a crime worthy of collective punishment.

The hypocrisy would be funny if it weren’t soaked in blood. Israel receives guaranteed military grants year after year, locked into long-term deals that stretch decades into the future, while Gaza is flattened and the West Bank is strangled inch by inch. Tens of billions have already been spent arming Israel since October 2023 alone, missile systems, ammunition, replacement stockpiles, expanded arms production, enough firepower to erase a people several times over. And more deals are queued up behind it, like orders at a weapons drive-through.

This is how empire works. The colonised are placed under a microscope, demanded to prove their humanity, while the occupying power is handed bombs and legal cover. Resistance is labelled terrorism. Survival is labelled extremism. And any attempt to seek justice outside Washington’s approval is crushed with financial blackmail.

Irish people should recognise this script instantly. Criminalise resistance. Starve the population. Arm the occupier. Call it peace. We lived it, and Palestine is living it now.

The same empire that bankrolls genocide in Gaza and bombs Venezuela for its oil is the one kidnapping workers in Minnesota. There is no contradiction here, only consistency. Imperial violence abroad always comes home eventually. You can’t normalise mass killing overseas and expect civil liberties to survive in your own streets.

So when workers strike in Minnesota, when students walk out, when communities refuse to cooperate with ICE, they’re not just fighting for migrants or civil rights; they’re striking a blow against the entire imperial system. The same system that funds apartheid, sanctions starving nations, and treats the world like a balance sheet soaked in blood.

The question isn’t whether a new world is coming. It is. The only question is who builds it. The Faux-Führer and his butchered alliances want a world ruled by force, fear, and permanent war. We want one built by solidarity, refusal, and memory.

Empires look eternal right up until the moment they crack. And history has shown, time and again, that organised working people can bring even the biggest, loudest, most violent machines to a halt.

They’re terrified of that. They should be.

⏩Pádraig Drummond is an anti-racism activist.