We must love one another or die

Luke O'Neil

20 Jan 2026 • 13 min read

A Hell World reader in Minneapolis sent me the drawing above.

"Here's a drawing by an unknown artist at my kid's school. Among many other sweet gestures going in all directions, kids at the school have been making thank-you cards to the parents who have been carpooling other kids to school so their parents don't have to wait by the bus stops with them which right now can be life-threatening depending on the color of your skin. Anyways I've taped the card to my office door at work and it's one of my favorite things of these weeks."

On the inside:

Viva los bros!

I believe prints and/or t-shirts of the drawing are going to be made to raise funds for groups on the ground there so I'll update you once it happens.

In the meantime if you're looking for others ways to support people in Minnesota bravely and collectively standing up against the assault on their cities by the fascist federal government this site Stand With Minnesota is a great resource.

"Across Minnesota, ICE continues to stop, harass, and detain people regardless of their citizenship status. Normal life in Minnesota has been interrupted, as schools have been forced to close or go virtual, as people live in fear of leaving their homes or going to work. Minnesotans are organized and activated to respond to this violence. But they need our help," they write.

On the page you'll find places to donate for mutual aid and materials purchasing, rent relief funds, funds for students and schools, union member support and a long list of groups doing legal aid and other local support on the ground.

There's a list of local news outlets doing good work as well, including Racket, who I recommend, and who I interviewed about their launch in here a couple of years ago.

And there's also a page of testimonials about what it's been like living through this onslaught.

Here's one:

Our Children Are Being Trained To Deal With ICE

On the way home from school today, my daughter told me something that stopped me cold. When I asked about her day, she said that instead of playing with her friends at recess, they had to practice what to do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) came to their school.

Let that sink in. Children were not pretending to be astronauts or playing tag. They were rehearsing what to do if armed agents of the federal government arrived at their place of learning.

This is Minneapolis in 2026. And it is not normal. This is what state violence looks like when it filters down into daily life — not always with sirens and batons, but with drills, whispers, and parents quietly wondering whether today will be the day their family is torn apart. Immigrant families across Minneapolis are being pushed into hiding.

People are afraid to go to work.
Afraid to walk their kids to school.
Afraid to answer the door.
Afraid to exist in public at all.

Children are being trained for ICE the same way past generations were trained for fires or tornadoes. We are telling kids that their government might come for them — or for their classmates’ families — and that they need to be ready.

The cruelty of this moment is not abstract. It shows up on playgrounds. It shows up in the quiet of kids who are too anxious to run and laugh. It shows up in families weighing whether survival means disappearing.

What’s happening in Minneapolis is part of a broader national unraveling. The federal government is using immigration enforcement as a tool of fear, and children are collateral damage. People far from here need to understand this reality — the lived truth: six-year-olds practicing what to do if agents come to their school. This should alarm everyone, regardless of politics. A country that forces children to rehearse for state violence has already crossed a moral line. And we will all live with the consequences of that choice.

ICE, please go home.

When guys like this are being radicalized you know something is really wrong.

Clearly there's no shortage of horrors to choose from of late but for some reason this one in particular has really chilled me to the fucking bone. Last week a group of pigs had lunch at a Mexican restaurant called El Tapatio in Willmar, Minnesota. "Staff at the restaurant were frightened," an eye witness told the Star Tribune. You can surely imagine that they were. You can picture exactly how it must have felt in there. Four fucking Nazis with their shit-eating grins squeezing their fat asses into a booth at a family-owned Mexican place poisoning the entire room with their smug impunity. Desecrating a place of community. There's one like it where you live too. In almost every town in the country. We love Mexican food here so much.

They forced these people to prepare their food and to serve them all the while knowing that they were going to ruin their lives after. With full bellies. The threat hanging in the air. Of course they did ruin them. They arrested a dishwasher and the two owners a few hours later after the restaurant closed.

Can you imagine being made to wash the dishes used to feed the men who are waiting to kidnap you or worse? Cooking and plating their meals? I wonder if they put the same care they usually do into it or if their shaking hands made the work suffer?

Needless to say there have been countless cultural mores and myths about this very thing throughout human history.

"This is the kind of shit that would make you completely outside the bounds of any ancient society, the gods bestow generational curses for violating hospitality," the historian Patrick Wyman posted.

May they reap someday what they sow.

Just another one of the increasingly many days I wish that the gods were real. The vengeful ones anyway.

While I'm on the subject does everyone still think it’s anathema to treat these people poorly in restaurants by the way? If you remember my whole deal about that with Kirstjen Nielsen and all them back during the family separation days of the first Trump administration. The good old days. Are we still doing that shocked routine? How dare he? etc.

O’Neil said he wrote the article in his usual “tongue-in-cheek style” with the intention of arguing that people could “moderately inconvenience” the lives of those who “carry out policies of ethnic cleansing and family separation and stealing babies and putting babies in cages and losing children across the country.”“That apparently was beyond the pale,” he said. ...

Though he said he’s received death threats over the column, O’Neil had a different response to critics.“I do not apologize for it personally whatsoever,” he said.

Meanwhile:

Please do not say "Abolish ICE" though. It's not a winning strategy they tell me.

Here's a cool bakery in Massachusetts.

When someone asked “Why would you as a business choose to piss off 1/2 of your potential customers? Just curious what sense that makes.” the bakery responded with “I don’t want those customers.”

Here's an interesting article I've been thinking a lot about lately.

To put it another way, the vast majority of men are only willing to engage in public violence if they feel like the people around them will approve of — and reward them for — that violence.

ICE Watch works because it surrounds men seeking approval with people loudly expressing their disapproval. And the noise has the added benefit of drawing large crowds of bystanders who can quickly outnumber the ICE agents, who then have to decide if they want to escalate a situation or perhaps abandon their activity altogether.

Something for men of a certain age to contemplate.

I think I'm too pissed off to write coherently today I'm sorry.

Three years ago this week Georgia police murdered Tortuguita a peaceful forest protector. “Manuel loved the forest,” their mother said. “It gave them peace. They meditated there. The forest connected them with God. I never thought that Manuel could die in a meditation position.”

This is all the same story as the one we're seeing now.

Fuck this cartoon by the way.

The guy on the left, and the liberals who invited him into polite society, were literally the blueprint to get to the guy on the right.

Left: Minorities and the poor should be socially murdered, slowly, and out of sight.
Right: Minorities and the poor should be physically murdered spectacularly.

There is not now nor has there ever been any such thing as a Good Conservative. No matter many how many times the Reasonable Liberal tries to reverse engineer him into being.

I was thinking about Mike Davis the other day and specifically this interview he gave which I wrote about a couple years ago. Here's a chunk of it.

Aware that he only had a few months left to live the great Mike Davis gave one of his final interviews back in August to the Guardian. "You’ve been organizing for social change your whole life. How do you deal with a future that feels so bleak?" Lois Beckett asked.

"For someone my age who was in the civil rights movement, and in other struggles of the 1960s, I’ve seen miracles happen," the revolutionary and historian responded.

"I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resisters, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless."

"I’ve always been influenced by the poems Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the second world war, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, well, it’s a new dark ages … how do people resist in the dark ages?"

"What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight."

I believe that as well. Not always but I do believe it. It can be very easy sometimes to accept the verdict. To say fuck it. But on the balance you have to believe a better world is worth fighting for right? Otherwise what is the point of all of this? Of anything?

Davis' quote there calls to mind this stanza from Auden's September 1, 1939:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

And I imagine this part from To those born later is one of the Brecht poems he was referencing:

III
You who will emerge from the flood
In which we have gone under
Bring to mind
When you speak of our failings
Bring to mind also the dark times
That you have escaped.

Changing countries more often than our shoes,
We went through the class wars, despairing
When there was only injustice, no outrage.

And yet we realized:
Hatred, even of meanness
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. O,
We who wanted to prepare the ground for friendship
Could not ourselves be friendly.

But you, when the time comes at last
When man is helper to man
Think of us
With forbearance.

Auden's line "We must love one another or die" reminds me of the great David Lynch later saying "Fix your hearts or die" of course.

We lost Lynch a year ago this week.

"It would hardly be out of place to claim Lynch was the great artist of the last half-century or more. I’d be pressed to name more than a handful of others about whom the same could plausibly be said," Corey Atad wrote.

Spencer is good as usual here quoting King.

You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being. I am sure that each of you would want to go beyond the superficial social analyst who looks merely at effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.

That also calls to mind for me this classic speech by Orson Welles.

The blind soldier fought for me in this war. The least I can do now is fight for him. I have eyes. He hasn’t. I have a voice on the radio, he hasn’t. I was born a white man. And until a colored man is a full citizen, like me, I haven’t the leisure to enjoy the freedom that colored man risked his life to maintain for me. I don’t own what I have until he owns an equal share of it. Until somebody beats me and blinds me, I am in his debt. And so I come to this microphone not as a radio dramatist, though it pays better, not as a commentator, although it’s safer to be simply that, I come in that boy’s name, and in the name of all who in this land of ours have no voice of their own. I come with a call for action. This is a time for it. I call for action against the cause of riot. I know that to some ears, even the word “action” has a revolutionary twang, and it won’t surprise me if I’m accused in some quarters of inciting to riot. Well, I’m very interested in riots. I’m very interested in avoiding them. And so I call for action against the cause of riots.

Alright I'm gonna shut the fuck up for now. Not like we deserve it but here are a couple of cool things that happened. Hope all the washed indie dads (90% of my readers) out there are sitting down.