I’m struggling today.

Yesterday and this morning have been very difficult for me; my spoons have clattered to the floor, and the idea of picking them up and beginning again isn’t there yet.

I’ve called this Election Connection because it is connected to our recent past elections and the two future ones in 2026 and 2028. It’s the people.

And it’s also more than the elections and the consequences of an illiterate and ignorant electorate.

It’s that the lack of fundamental thought processing is gone. Media literacy is gone. Impartiality on behalf of our journalists is gone.I’m not sure if we will ever get any of this back.

There are not always two (or more) sides to every issue. Sometimes there is the fact side and the anti-truth side. Good versus evil.

A woman and her spouse were driving home with their dog after dropping their six-year-old off at school. They never arrived home. That trauma will never go away.

I watched in real time as side-by-side, the video of the murder next to the government lying about it, and I was stunned. I truly was. I still am.

Anyone who’s watched the video saw what happened. A woman, trying to follow the direction of one ICE agent and leave was murdered by another ICE agent who then calmly walked to her car, turned around and walked away. Not limped. Not taken to the hospital. Not injured in any way. He walked away.

The federal agents on the scene refused to let a doctor attend to her. The federal agents on the scene refused to allow an ambulance to reach her.

The EMTs had to walk into the scene and them carry her limp, dead body back to the ambulance.

At the same time that her spouse was sitting on a snowy curb sobbing, the President of the United States, the Director of Homeland Security, and other federal officials claimed that the driver was a terrorist, that she attempted to harm the ICE agent. We know this is not true. It has been described in the media as the government gaslighting the rest of us.

I will say it more clearly:

The federal officials, the director of Homeland Security, the President and Vice President of the United States are lying to us. They are, in George Orwell’s words, asking us not to believe what we see, but to believe what they tell us. They are lying. Over an over again.

And this morning, we are being told that the FBI, led by a corrupt, unqualified director will be solely in charge of the investigation; that they are refusing to share any evidence found with the Minnesota State Police or the Minneapolis City Police. We cannot be expected to trust them. Not one iota when they’ve been lying to us as we watched the video of Renee Good’s murder.

We know her name because she was a white, middle class suburban woman, a mother of three.

I ask you to search the internet for the following two names:

Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez (Chicago).

Keith Porter (Los Angeles).

We know of others who’ve died in ICE custody, several not wanted on any charges, not undocumented immigrants. We don’t hear their stories because they are not white suburban women, but men of color, and we should be following their deaths and their stories equally as close.

The first man (Villegas-Gonzalez) was allegedly killed by the same ICE agent that killed Renee Good, at least that’s what Director Noem seemed to say in her press conferences.

CORRECTION: While the ICE agent who killed Renee Good was dragged by a car, it was not Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez who was driving. These were two separate incidents with two different ice agents.

The government went too far on January 21. It continues to push us to the brink of the end of democracy, the end of civil rights, the end of life in the United States as we know it.

CBS has capitulated. CNN has capitulated. AP News, the NY Times, the Washington Post have all capitulated. Who will be left to tell the true story? When will actual journalists stand up and remember their commitment to unbiased, truthful reporting, of speaking truth to power, of not showing two sides of a single truth?

I hope it’s soon, but I won’t be holding my breath.