We Told You This Was Going To Fucking Happen

They told us not to catastrophize. Now American soldiers have killed a 20-year-old American father on an American street, and another American child will grow up without a Dad.

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood in front of a room full of white abolitionists who had invited him to celebrate Independence Day, and he refused. He made them wait until the fifth. Then he asked them the question their holiday could not survive: What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

On July 5, 2026, one hundred and seventy-four years later, before the smoke from the semiquincentennial fireworks had even cleared, two Tennessee National Guard soldiers shot and killed a 20-year-old man named Tyrin Johnson in downtown Memphis.

Brett Carlsen/Getty Images

Say his name with me, because the wire story will drop it by fucking Wednesday: TYRIN JOHNSON. He was only twenty years old. The same age as my youngest child. My heart shatters for his mother. He lived in Nashville, working construction, and was taking university classes. His cousin told the AP he was “as good a boy as can be.” He became a father for the first time earlier this year. His baby isn’t even old enough to sit up yet, and now that child will grow up in the country that killed their daddy with their country’s own soldiers before dawn on the fifth of July.

America is disgraceful.

According to Memphis police, officers were responding to a shots-fired call around 4 a.m. when they saw a man with a handgun. He ran. Police and nearby Guard soldiers chased him on foot. Memphis police say he turned toward the soldiers with his weapon; the TBI’s preliminary release says he “reportedly fired shots in the area” and that the situation escalated “for reasons under investigation” — and notably, the TBI did not repeat the police department’s claim that he turned. That is the entire official record right now. It’s only hours old, unverified, and told by the people who did the shooting. Maybe it holds up. Maybe it doesn’t. Who fuckin knows. But, we’ve all lived long enough to know how often the first official story survives contact with the video. For now, we wait for the bodycam footage, if there is any at all.

However, it doesn’t fucking matter which way the investigation comes out, because SOLDIERS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN THERE.

Our military should NEVER be pointing weapons at American citizens. Not ever. Not for crime rates, not for protests, not for a president’s disgusting ego. It’s not like this is a policy preference either — it’s the line between a republic and an occupation, and this country wrote it into law in 1878. The Posse Comitatus Act makes it a federal CRIME to use the military to enforce civilian law. Soldiers are trained to close with and destroy an enemy. That is the job. That is the training. Put that training on a downtown street at 4 a.m., point it at a 20-year-old, and now the line’s been crossed.

And the courts have been screaming about this for a YEAR now. Last September a federal judge ruled the Los Angeles deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act, the first injunction in the law’s 147-year history, and found the administration did it WILLFULLY, as part of a top-down, systematic effort to use troops to enforce civilian law. In December the Supreme Court — THIS Supreme fucking Court, the one they built — blocked the Chicago deployment 6-3. By January, troops were out of Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles.

But not Memphis.

Memorial site for Tyre Nichols Image Credits: AFP

Memphis is the city where police beat Tyré Nichols to death after a traffic stop in 2023. Remember that? It was one of the most brutal beatings I’d ever watched. Police officers chased him down and gang beat him to death like a bunch of psychopath killers. Thank god they were too stupid to see the traffic camera that caught the entire thing. Otherwise, it was their word and they lied their fucking asses off in the official reports, like cops tend to do. The Department of Justice investigated and found a pattern. They found escalating low-level encounters, unjustified force, unconstitutional stops, unlawful arrests, and Black residents treated more harshly than white residents for the same conduct. You know what President War Crime’s DOJ did with that report? Withdrew it. Closed the investigation. Called scrutiny of civil rights violations a failed experiment. And then that same administration sent a task force into that same majority-Black city with orders for “hypervigilant policing.”

They read the autopsy of Tyré Nichols and prescribed MORE.

It gets worse. After Nichols died, Memphis’s own City Council banned pretextual traffic stops — the pull-you-over-for-a-taillight-and-go-fishing stops that got him killed. Tennessee’s Republican legislature passed a law OVERRIDING the city’s ordinance. And now, per MLK50 and ProPublica’s review of task force arrest affidavits, those exact stops are a major part of what the task force does all day. A grieving city built a guardrail out of its dead, and the state legislature tore it down so an occupation could drive through.

ProPublica already documented what this looks like on the ground. It’s armed men in body armor with NO identifying badges pouring out of unmarked SUVs. A Black artist made to empty his pockets on the sidewalk, thinking, in his own words, that he wasn’t going to make it home. A pastor pulled over by an unmarked Guard vehicle because she looked like she was “driving unsure” — whatever the fuck that means; the Guard wouldn’t say. And when four Memphis residents tried to FILM the task force, they say the state’s “Halo Law” — which criminalizes coming within 25 feet of law enforcement — was turned on them, and that afterward they were followed, and unmarked vehicles and men in tactical vests appeared outside their homes. They’re suing, represented by the ACLU. Pretty fuckin wild that in an American city, in 2026, people allege they were stalked by their own government for pointing a camera at it.

THIS ISN’T NORMAL PEOPLE. THIS IS FUCKED.

Jonah Neal

And the body count didn’t just start this morning. I didn’t know this until I went digging, but apparently in May, task force members responded to a man in a mental health crisis — Jonah Neal, 25, reportedly armed and threatening to harm HIMSELF. Instead of getting this man mental health crisis intervention, a Homeland Security Investigations agent fired her weapon. Neal died at the scene; as of the TBI’s statement, it wasn’t even clear whether the agent’s bullet killed him or his own wounds did. He left in a body bag either way. TBI data ties at least four officer-involved shootings to this “task force” since it began. Today appears to be the first time American SOLDIERS pulled the trigger — and when reporters asked the TBI and the Guard whether it was the first, neither would answer.

NONE of these beautiful souls had to die. They were just surrounded by incompetent, untrained and scared people with guns.

Memphis’s serious crime was at a 25-year low by the mayor’s own account. Murders fell from 249 to 184 — a decline that began BEFORE the troops arrived and matched cities nationwide. A study that came out last month found the Guard deployment in D.C. had no measurable effect on violent crime. NONE. The Congressional Budget Office projects these deployments will cost more than a BILLION dollars this year. A billion dollars for an occupation that doesn’t reduce crime, in a city that didn’t want it, that the city’s own elected officials cannot legally stop — because in April the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled they lack standing, and because Governor Bill Lee, a racist piece of shit slimeball Republican, held the door open while federal courts were tearing this project apart everywhere else in America. He volunteered his state’s second-largest city for a conman president’s theater, and now Tyrin Johnson’s baby has no father.

We called this. Before the 2024 election we said a second Drumpf term meant soldiers in American streets and Americans dead at their hands, and we were told not to be hysterical. That we were catastrophizing. Too online. Calm down, they said, institutions will hold. Well. Being right feels like absolutely nothing, because it wasn’t clever. We just listened to what the man SAID and used our discernment, which is more than 77 million voters could be bothered to fucking do.

Fuck everyone who voted for this man. And fuck every Republican and Democratic politician licking that deranged orange creep’s asshole and doing his bidding.

So no, I’m not addressing this to some polite abstraction. MAGA, Republicans, BLUE MAGA and every enabler with a flag in their bio, Tyrin’s blood is on your hands. This is yours. You put a deranged malignant narcissist back in office who told you to your face he’d turn the military on “the enemy within,” and you hateful racist morons cheered. An enemy he got to define. Tyrin wasn’t an enemy. He was a father, a son, a partner and friend and was working hard to give his family a happy life. You were warned by judges, by historians, by veterans, by mothers, by the plain text of a law written by people who had just watched what military occupation does to a country, and you called us all idiots. And hysterical, and accused us of fear-mongering. You don’t get to look away. I’ll make sure you cowards look. I’m throwing it in your faces every second of every day until you all make this right.

His name was Tyrin Johnson, and every one of you helped load the moment. We were right. We were always right. And we will continue to be right. Even when they turn their weapons on you next. Because it’s coming. Your white skin won’t save you forever. Trump doesn’t give a fuck about you, or anybody for that matter. He never has.

Douglass told that Rochester audience their celebration was a sham and that all the shouting about liberty was hollow as long as it coexisted with people in chains. He made them sit in the distance between the Fourth of July and the fifth. Between the country in the fireworks and the country on the ground.

Two hundred and fifty years in, we lit the fireworks right on schedule. And before dawn, in a city that already buried Tyré Nichols and Jonah Neal, American soldiers killed an American citizen.

Damn.

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