A STERNLY WORDED LETTER

"If you can't hear us, you can't lead us"

Knowing of his fondness for the medium, I sent the following sternly-worded letter to Sen. Charles Schumer yesterday, and would encourage you to do the same!

Senator Schumer -

I’m no longer a resident of New York, but considering your position as Senate Minority Leader, I feel I have a vested interest in the state of your leadership.

Senator, three generations back, my family fled Ukraine in the pogroms of the late 19th century, actions in which, as I’m sure you know, the Tsar sent cossacks to assault and evict shtetl-dwellers in a bloody purge that scattered my ancestors from their homeland.

I look at the on-the-ground reporting from Minneapolis and, you’ll have to pardon me if this seems histrionic, but I know a pogrom when I see one. Citizens bodily pulled from cars and detained. Protestors blinded with “less lethal” ordnance. ICE on door-to-door sweeps filling a quota that has nothing to do with their ostensible charter to police immigration abuse.

Your remarks earlier this week about ICE left me and any number of our fellow Americans appalled at your failure to grasp the severity of the moment. ICE is operating lawlessly and with total impunity (granted without legal pretext by the President and Vice President who will happily brand an American citizen a “domestic terrorist” to fit their authoritarian narrative), yet your response to this inflection point is that ICE needs better training.

You are shamefully failing your constituents if you think modern-day slave-catchers are just in need of better training, when the real issue is that this administration has declared open war on its constituents. This is before we get into the administration’s reckless, unchecked aggressions against Venezuela and Greenland, but for the moment, let’s focus on the domestic issue.

American citizens - your constituents, your public - are living in fear of not making it back from the grocery store. For being murdered for either failing to comply or, as was the case with Renee Nicole Good, even after complying. Even in the wake of this cold-blooded crime, ICE agents have treated Ms. Good’s summary execution as a warning to other civilians. You cannot reform an organization that operates like this. You can only abolish them.

If you can’t see this, Senator, I’m deeply concerned that you’re not up to the fight that’s in front of you. You must either square with the terrifying reality Americans are living under and use your authority to rally the Democratic Party into action that can save lives, or accept that you are not making full use of the power vested in you by the voters, and by extension are complicit in the administration’s lawlessness.

ICE must be abolished. Secretary Noem must be impeached. The President and Vice President must be curtailed, censured, and preferably impeached, convicted and prosecuted as accessories to the murders of Renee Good and Keith Porter.

Nothing short of this is acceptable. You are uniquely positioned to act with an amount of power and influence unimaginable to the average citizen, yet the average citizen is in the streets risking life and liberty, while you offer conciliation about improved training.

Meet the moment, Senator. Your public is begging you. The next step will be to primary you.

Because if you can’t hear us, you can’t lead us.

Thank you for your time and consideration. Please do the right thing.

Sincerely,
Alexander Gradet

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I’m not trying to participate in the Democratic party’s timeless ritual of eating our own, but this is the moment for action, not empty bluster or limpdick half-measures.

It’s time for the officials we elected to represent us and our interests to step up or step down.