Minnesota Goddam
On channeling rage into resistance
On the morning of September 15, 1963, at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, approximately 200 men, women, and children gathered at 10:00 a.m. for Sunday school—as they did every week—prior to the 11:00 a.m. church service.
At 10:22 a.m., a bomb planted under the front steps of the church detonated.
The concussive explosion tore through walls, sent debris flying both inside and outside the building, and filled the entire block with smoke. To state the obvious, the violence of this terrorist act reverberated far beyond the church’s decimated walls, shattered windows, and shaken foundation.
It was far from being the first racially-targeted terrorist bombing in Birmingham. In the aftermath, The New York Times reported (on page 26) that it was the 21st such atrocity to date. What set it apart was that it was the deadliest. In fact, the bombing was one of more than 50 terror attacks against the Black community to rock the city between 1947 and 1965, earning Birmingham the grim nickname “Bombingham.”
As a result of the explosion, dozens of parishioners suffered serious injuries. But in the basement women’s lounge, five young girls had gathered that morning to prepare for singing in the choir—Denise McNair, age eleven; Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins, all age fourteen; and Addie Mae’s ten-year-old sister, Sarah. The blast instantly killed the four oldest girls. Ten-year-old Sarah, though gravely wounded, was the only one who survived.
News of the bombing traveled nationwide with alarming speed.
That evening, renowned jazz vocalist and classically trained pianist Nina Simone sat in the living room of her home on Nuber Avenue in Mount Vernon, New York, watching the news report of the bombing in a state of stunned horror. Tears poured from her eyes. From the depths of her soul, a rage began to boil—one she would later describe as being so intense that she started looking for materials to build a gun, unable to think of anything else besides seeking revenge on the monsters responsible for the massacre. After a long stretch of consolation from her husband, Andy Stroud, Simone was persuaded to channel her fury into music rather than retaliation.
The church bombing was the catalyst for what would become a brilliant expression of previously repressed righteous anger that had been accruing for years—probably a lifetime—and was compounded by earlier brutalities that took place in neighboring Mississippi: the recent assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers earlier that summer and the barbaric murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till a few years earlier.
Within a single hour at the piano, Simone performed a kind of moral and emotional alchemy in doing what great artists sometimes do when life’s circumstances leave them no other outlet: she transmuted the apoplectic rage that threatened to consume her into a transcendent work of art. In what she would later describe as a “rush of fury, hatred, and determination,” she wrote—in one sitting—both the music and the words to what was her first unambiguous civil-rights song, “Mississippi Goddam.”
“Alabama’s gotten me so upset,
Tennessee made me lose my rest,
And everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam!”
[…]
“Lord, have mercy on this land of mine,
We all gonna get it in due time,
‘Cause I don’t belong here,
I don’t belong there,
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer…”
[…]
But my country is full of lies,
We all gonna die, and die like flies,
‘Cause I don’t trust nobody anymore,
Keep on saying, “Go slow”
But that’s just the trouble (too slow),
Desegregation (too slow),
Mass participation (too slow),
Unification (too slow),
Do things gradually (too slow),
But bring more tragedy (too slow),
Why don’t you see it?
Why don’t you feel it?
I just don’t know…
Sixty-two years later, in the same country that bombed those little girls in Birmingham, I find myself in a similar place to the one Nina described—watching reports of government-sanctioned murder, paralyzed by a rage so consuming it threatens to devour me whole.
This past Saturday, January 24, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Trump regime’s Nazi death squad—spuriously known as ICE—executed 37-year-old American citizen Alex Pretti on the street, in broad daylight, in cold blood, for no goddamned reason.
Alex was there as a peaceful observer, documenting what was happening with his phone, and when he was jumped and beaten senseless by multiple assailants, he was trying to help a woman one of the fucking pigs had pepper-sprayed and shoved to the ground like the domestic abusers these bastards are. At least seven of them piled on top of Alex, pistol-whipping his face until one drew a gun and fired, prompting two others to do the same. Alex was defenseless on the ground—immobile, incapacitated. One Nazi emptied his clip into Alex’s lifeless body.
Alex is now the second person murdered by regime-authorized subhuman scum in Minneapolis in two weeks’ time. The other, of course, was 37-year-old Renee Good—a wife and mother of three—shot in the head and killed by Nazi vermin Jonathan Ross.
Prior to Alex and Renee’s murders in Minnesota, on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles, another stormtrooper executed Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old devoted father of two daughters, aged 10 and 20. Keith was known by family and friends as a “performer” who loved lifting people’s spirits by making them laugh.
Over the past year—before these three most recent executions—multiple people have died at the hands of this degenerate gang of domestic terrorists, including many whose names have never been made public. Among those identified: Parady La, 46, a father; Heber Sanchaz Domínguez, 34, a father of two; Victor Manuel Diaz, 36; Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, 68, a father; Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, 42; and Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55. Each name, a life extinguished. Each death, a family shattered. Each murder, state-sanctioned terrorism committed with impunity.
These roving criminal gangs of impotent, inbred losers are murderous, opportunistic predators drunk on power, operating with complete disregard for human life and anything resembling the rule of law. Many are MAGA insurrectionists—members of the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Atomwaffen Division, Blood Tribe—bona fide, goat-raping, cousin-fucking Nazi terrorists granted explicit permission from the Trump regime to maim, injure, and murder us. Any of us. Any time. For any or no reason whatsoever. In exchange for total immunity and the assurance of a tyrannical state that will laud and lionize them for carrying out their mission.
No laws or restrictions exist to restrain these rabid dogs. They are free to wage their campaign of terror against the American people however they see fit—beating people including high school students, chasing and tackling 10-year-olds in the street as they try to make their way to school, tear gassing day cares and elementary schools, using children as young as five years old as bait, driving recklessly and fleeing the accidents they cause just as surely as they flee the scenes of their murders.
They do not care what they do, who they hurt, whose property they destroy.
They steal and wreck people’s vehicles. They illegally abduct people coming out of grocery stores and steal the food they just bought. They steal iPhones and Androids from teenagers, drop them in ecoATM machines, and pocket the cash. They eat lunch in Mexican restaurants, then arrest everyone working there. They photograph innocent citizens observing them, then taunt them with promises of being added to a government watchlist. They verbally threaten people, asking, “Did you not learn your lesson from what happened to that woman?”
They stalk, harass, and intimidate. They bully, rape, and kill.
These monsters are scum—hateful, racist, cruel, violent, and—thanks to this evil, white nationalist, Christo-fascist regime—empowered. They are, unquestionably, the worst of the worst of us.
Alex, Renee, and Keith were the exact opposite. They were the best of the best of us—loving parents, hard workers, intelligent and empathetic human beings. Alex was an ICU nurse who cared for critically ill soldiers at the local V.A. hospital. A colleague remembered him as someone whose “default expression was a smile.” Another nurse who worked alongside him recalled, “He wanted to be helpful, to help humanity and have a career that was a force of good in the world.” Alex’s next-door neighbor described him as “the sweetest, kindest, most unoffensive, most nonviolent person you’d ever want to meet.”
And what makes all of this even more unbearable—more enraging, more sickening—is the lies. The slander. The posthumous denigration of their character by this regime and its ghouls. How fucking dare they? How fucking dare these bitches and bastards have the unmitigated gall to insult innocent people they themselves have killed—and falsely characterize them as “domestic terrorists” to justify their own atrocities? It literally can’t get any lower than that. There is no deeper moral rot.
For Alex, Renee, Keith—and all whose names we may never know, whose lives were needlessly, senselessly taken—their legacies will live forever. And when the reckoning comes—and it will come—they will be honored and remembered as what they were: the very best of us.
Nina Simone channeled her fury into a song within an hour. I have struggled with this piece for days, and still I cannot adequately express the depth of my loathing, my disgust, my white-hot rage for ICE pigs and the regime that set them loose—nor can I fully articulate the devastation I feel for every person they have harmed or killed.
I can say that I want all of these fuckers to suffer. I want them to know what it feels like to be hunted, to be afraid, to have everything ripped away. I want their names synonymous with shame for generations. I want their children to change their surnames, disowning the genetic cesspool they’ve come from. I want to watch all of them hang, to pay for their crimes against humanity, and for the entire nation to celebrate their deaths by spitting on their graves.
Each one of these Nazi cucks has a name and an address and a family who will one day learn what kind of monster daddy (or mommy) was and what horrific things they did for a living. And when this evil regime falls, there won’t be a hole deep enough for these fucking rats to hide in—because in the same way they track us by taking our photos and adding us to their watchlists, we’re tracking them: documenting names, faces, identifying marks like their Nazi tattoos, vehicles and license plates, VIN numbers, as well as photo and video evidence of their myriad crimes.
They should be afraid. Not of me—but of all of us, and of the consequences of their own goddamned actions. Nobody made them become Nazis. They weren’t forced against their will to join Trump’s death squad. Their bigotry and hate drove them to this. They did it all to themselves. They made their beds, and now they can lie in them while they’re on fire. Fuck ‘em.
Nina’s song outlived every man who planted that bomb. It outlived every racist terrorist, every murderer, every segregationist who thought that through violence and terror they would win. They are nothing but dust. Forgotten. But the song endures.
Likewise, this report—and everything you and others document and save—will outlive Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Greg Bovino, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, Todd Lyons, and every other piece of Nazi trash who are currently terrorizing innocent Americans.
What we document can serve as evidence at their trials or as testimony at their graves.
Either works for me.
I stand with my fellow Americans, the true patriots of this country, like Alex and Renee and Keith; like Parady and Heber and Victor and Luis and Geraldo.
I stand with the millions of others in this country who believe that the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
Fuck ICE.
Abolish ICE.
Minnesota goddam.
A recurring subscription or one-time donation to Gonzo Report helps me continue this work, and I’d be honored and grateful to have your support.
🖤




Chris, reading this masterpiece of outraged resistance left me thrumming with rage. I’ve read dozens, if not hundreds, of essays, opinions and reports about the criminal and amoral conduct of ICE and CBP, but none has resonated with me quite like this. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing this with us. Every decent American citizen and person around the globe should bear witness to these atrocities and rise up against the monsters who are gleefully perpetrating them. I wish you peace and healing. ❤️🩹
What a powerful and well written piece, thank you. Watching from Australia I did not think I could be more disgusted and horrified by the Orange Menace and his cowardly enablers, but they have reached a low I did not think possible. Many here are questioning our alliance with the US and want a rethink on it, at least until this regime is overturned. I hope the good people of America funnel their rage and make a new America from the ashes, and it must include justice for every person who has been wronged. Peace and blessings to you.