The Boy in the Bunny Hat

We need to make him the symbol of resistance to our government's fascist horror

I have long been a fan of Elissa Slotkin, and one of the very few things I was happy about in November, 2024 was her winning Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat over Mike Rogers, despite Donald Trump winning the state.

But I was shocked and disgusted when she voted a year ago to confirm the appalling Kristi Noem, who Trump nominated to be Secretary of Homeland Security. I suspect she followed senior senator Gary Peters’ lead in doing this. There’s a custom whereby senators give new presidents the benefit of the doubt, and confirm their cabinet choices unless there is something openly wrong with them.

That’s generally not a bad custom, and I had no problem with Democratic senators confirming Marco Rubio as secretary of state. But there WAS something clearly very wrong with Noem. She wrote — actually, bragged — in one of her two autobiographies that she took a misbehaving puppy to a gravel pit and killed her with a shotgun.

Then she killed a billy goat there too, though it took two blasts to finish it off.

This is sick. Not just murdering poor Cricket and the goat, but reveling in it. Her publisher prudently advised her to leave the killings out of her book, but she insisted on putting it in, because it showed that she was willing to do any “difficult, messy and ugly jobs” that had to be done. I’m sure Reinhard Heydrich felt the same way.

Add to that streak of nasty aggressiveness and sadism the fact that Noem is at best a semi-educated hick from a state with no big cities, minimal diversity (outside of Native Americans on reservations) and less than a million people.

All of which meant appointing Noem to be in charge of an agency that largely deals with undocumented persons of color made slightly less sense than appointing a heroin addict to run the Food and Drug Administration.

Then think about the tendencies of her boss, the nasty racist Donald Trump. It’s not surprising that her ICE have been encouraged to behave like a sadistic SS-Gestapo immigration force. It is mildly surprising that in the last three weeks they murdered two 37-year-old white Minnesotans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a stay-at-home mom and a nurse, blowing them away on camera and brazenly lying about what happened.

They pumped ten shots into Pretti Saturday, most as he lay defenseless on the ground, holding nothing more dangerous than his smartphone. Noem and her bullyboys want you to know they can do these things and get away with it.

ICE is probably targeting Minneapolis not because it’s a hotbed of illegal immigration, but because it is a northern cosmopolitan city in a liberal state. Minnesota has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1972, the only state that has done so. It shares a border with Noem’s South Dakota, which has voted Republican in every election since 1964.

Liam Conejo Ramos, hostage

ICE’s brutality is not limited to just killing people. The photo above, and at the top of this column is that of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, also from Minnesota, as he was being seized with his father, a native of Ecuador. He is now in a federal detention jail in Texas with his dad, whose lawyer says they are both here legally, and were allowed into the country in 2024 to pursue an asylum claim.

They were being arrested outside their home. The little boy’s mother was inside the home and apparently not wanted by the authorities, but the agents don’t appear to have tried to give the little boy to his mom.

They claim they did, of course, and say the father tried to flee and abandon the child. But the scum who are ICE spokesman can have no credibility after their blatant lies about the two people they murdered.

Incidentally, Liam’s father has something in common with Minneapolis martyrs Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti. None of them had an criminal record.

I suggest we make little Liam the symbol of the movement to resist ICE and their fascist and racist deportations. The least skilled Guatemalan who sneaks over the border to try and improve his life or get some food for his family would be a thousand times more valuable to this country than Kristi Noem or Donald Trump.

Here’s to a world where both of them are cast out in disgrace, and the murderers of Pretti and Good are convicted and rotting in prison.