ICE Is What Happens When America Refuses to Learn from Black History

Summary

Less than four percent of people who listen to this episode financially support this work. You can move from consumer to investor. Become a paid subscriber today. ICE is what happens when Americans refuse to learn from Black history. In this episode, I respond to the killing of Renee Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three, shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Already, the president and his officials are weaponizing the narrative. They are labeling victims “terrorists,” doubling down on violence, and relying on law enforcement structures with a long history of racial control.I draw on the Black history, specifically the example of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.The BPP emerged to monitor and prevent police brutality. Because of their display of firearms, an California Assemblyman in 1967 proposed a bill to make open-carry policies illegal. If we read the Black Panther Party’s 10-Point Program, we see that three points are devoted to policing, incarceration and courts—in other words, law enforcement. Finally, I turn to Venezuela. I connect domestic repression to international aggression and argue that the same ideology animating ICE and CBP also fuels an imperial “crusader mentality” is visible in rhetoric about the Western Hemisphere and Venezuela and the theological justifications of power.And they told us this was the play in Project 2025. The human stakes: who Renee Good was—and how quickly propaganda rewrites a lifeThe hypocrisy of “Christian persecution” narratives under a regime that kills a “devoted Christian” at homeWhy Black communities have long warned that policing protects power, not peopleThe Black Panthers, the Mulford Bill, and what armed Black self-defense revealed about American “law and order”ICE as a “personal army”: law enforcement powers without meaningful restraintWhy learning only from Europe’s fascism archives narrows our survival toolkitVenezuela, Project 2025’s worldview, and the imperial logic of the “Western Hemisph...