New York — A goddamn bitter 18°F with snow piling up like white grief, the kind of cold that bites through your bones and makes you question every life choice. Dress like you mean it or stay the hell home.

Kansas City — 12°F and the wind's a cruel bastard today, slicing through downtown like it's got a personal vendetta. The sky's a pale, unforgiving sheet of nothing.

Atlanta — A frigid damn 28°F, which for y'all means the city's basically shut down. Ice forming on magnolias like frozen tears on southern cheeks.

San Francisco — 52°F and drizzling that maddening mist that soaks through everything slowly. At least you can still feel your fucking face.

Detroit — 8°F. Eight. Single digits of pure Midwest suffering. The kind of cold that makes car engines whimper and souls question existence itself.

Sunday, January 25, 2026

Minneapolis burns with righteous fury as 3,000 federal agents occupy her frozen streets and a second citizen falls to their bullets. The climate screams louder while Trump's administration rips us from international treaties like a toddler tearing pages from books he'll never read. And a Texas judge decides drag queens are basically blackface—yes, really—while Democrats quietly strip anti-trans poison from funding bills. It's a lot. Breathe. We're here together.

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Editor's Note: The coldest day of the year hit Minneapolis yesterday; they showed up anyway—50,000 strong in subzero temperatures. That's not protest. That's love.

The smell of tear gas still hangs in the air on Nicollet Avenue, mixing with the acrid bite of arctic wind that hasn't let up for weeks. Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37 years old, an ICU nurse who spent his days keeping veterans alive at the Minneapolis VA hospital, is dead—shot multiple times by Border Patrol agents Saturday morning while witnesses say he was helping a woman who'd been pushed to the ground. His blood stained the snow less than two miles from where Renee Nicole Good was killed by ICE agents just seventeen days earlier. This is Trump's America now: a military-style occupation of an American city, 3,000 heavily armed federal agents terrorizing neighborhoods, using tear gas on families, detaining a five-year-old boy and his father, deploying flash-bangs against people whose only crime was standing outside their own homes. The Department of Homeland Security claims Pretti "violently resisted" and approached agents with a handgun. Multiple videos verified by major news outlets show something entirely different—a man holding a phone, his empty left hand raised, trying to protect someone who'd been shoved down. His parents, Michael and Susan Pretti, didn't mince words: "Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump's murdering and cowardly ICE thugs." NBC News Governor Tim Walz called it "a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government." Attorney General Keith Ellison promises to be in court Monday to end what he calls an "illegal and unconstitutional occupation." Senate Democrats have vowed to block DHS funding, and a partial government shutdown looms larger by the hour. Meanwhile, a massive winter storm sweeps toward the capital, shortening the legislative window to nothing. The Minneapolis Park Board closed every facility. The streets are empty except for mourners leaving candles at a growing memorial, their breath freezing in the negative-twenty air as they whisper Alex's name.

Feel that wrongness in the air? That unseasonal warmth that crept into December, the way January keeps swinging between brutal cold and eerily mild? The numbers are in, and they're ugly as hell: 2025 was the third-hottest year ever recorded, a mere 0.01°C cooler than 2023 and 0.13°C cooler than 2024's all-time record. The three-year running average for global surface temperature anomaly now sits at 1.52°C above pre-industrial baseline—likely the hottest three-year stretch in over 120,000 goddamn years. And what does the Trump administration do with this screaming emergency? It announced plans to withdraw the United States from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change entirely, pulling out of 65 international organizations because they "no longer serve American interests." Fuck the planet, apparently. Meanwhile, the new food pyramid unveiled by Health Secretary RFK Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins shoves meat and dairy products to the top, completely ignoring that livestock supply chains account for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The Arctic had its lowest December sea ice extent on record. Greenland saw nights that didn't drop below freezing—in January. Finland recorded its second-warmest year ever. And the richest 1% of humans generate enough emissions in a single year to cause 1.3 million heat-related deaths by century's end. This isn't climate change anymore. This is climate catastrophe, accelerating while the most powerful government on Earth actively makes it worse. Trump isn't just fiddling while Rome burns—he's pouring gasoline on the flames and calling it economic policy.

The texture of this victory feels strange in your hands—rough with compromise, smooth with relief. Democrats successfully stripped every anti-trans rider from the final appropriations bills this week, removing provisions that would have banned hospitals from providing gender-affirming care to trans youth, threatened funding for schools supporting trans students, and mandated exclusion of trans athletes from sports including chess and esports. Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly trans person in Congress, worked relentlessly alongside Democratic leaders to excise the poison from legislation funding Education, Health and Human Services, Labor, Homeland Security, Defense, and Transportation. The bills are "strikingly clean." Trans people can breathe—for now. But then there's U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, Trump's favorite judicial attack dog, who ruled that West Texas A&M's drag show ban doesn't violate the First Amendment because—and I wish I was making this up—drag is basically like blackface. The ruling claims student organizers "failed to convey a specific message" and that because past performances "simulated sexual acts," restricting them was justified. Transgender journalist Erin Reed called the comparison "particularly egregious," noting that "blackface was created by white performers to dehumanize a marginalized group," while "drag emerged from marginalized communities themselves as a form of self-expression, community building, and survival." Kacsmaryk has built his career on rulings targeting LGBTQ people and abortion rights. This one just says the quiet part loud: they think our existence is inherently offensive.

Life Survival: Lorde's words cut through the frozen Minneapolis air like a blade of truth. The neighbors delivering food to immigrant families too terrified to leave their homes understand this. The clergy kneeling on airport tarmac to pray for the detained understand this. The 50,000 souls who marched in subzero temperatures understand this. Fear exists either way. Silence doesn't make you safe—it just makes you alone with your terror. Speak. Show up. The only thing more dangerous than raising your voice is swallowing it forever.

When "allyship" turns out to be clout-chasing bullshit — The hockey podcast Empty Netters became darlings of the LGBTQIA+ community for their enthusiastic coverage of the gay romance series "Heated Rivalry," with the hosts gushing over romantic scenes and becoming faces of "positive masculinity in sports culture." Their YouTube views exploded 50-fold. Awful They sold merch. They interviewed cast members. Then text messages emerged showing host Dan Powers privately calling the show "trash" made by "losers" and "cowards" that "panders" and "checks inclusivity boxes." The backlash has been swift and brutal, with fans calling it "peak hypocrisy" and accusing the brothers of "grifting" off queer content they secretly despised.

Thousands of Minnesotans prove neighbors still means something — Beyond the massive Friday protests, something quieter and more radical has been happening across Minnesota: a grassroots network of community resistance that puts federal agents to shame. Neighbors are delivering groceries to families too scared to leave their homes. Parents and community members stand guard outside schools, daycares, and immigrant-owned businesses. Hundreds of everyday people have joined Signal chats tracking ICE movements, showing up to document arrests with phones and whistles and their physical presence. "There are people who are scared to go outside," said St. Paul resident Guy Hammink. "I feel like there's an obligation for those people to stand up for those who are being targeted."