The Wild Reed

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

“Our Country Right Now Is At a Crossroads”

Mike Figueredo begins his latest Humanist Report segment with a compilation of both fascist and liberal talking heads losing their shit over the exact same thing: the rise in popularity and electoral wins of candidates who identify as democratic socialists.

It’s a compilation, says Figueredo, that “showcases the [Blue-Brown] class solidarity between wealthy liberals [the ‘vote (corporatist) Blue no matter who’ crowd] and wealthy fascists [the ‘Brown’ in the Blue-Brown coalition, a reference to the Brownshirts of Nazi Germany] who both feel threatened by the rise of socialism.”

Contines Figueredo:

If it feels like they’re more hysterical than ever before, that’s because they are. They’re trying to whip people into a frenzy before Tuesday’s primaries where multiple socialists and socialist adjacent candidates are going to face-off against their establishment opponents.

. . . Our country right now is at a crossroads. Our political establishment has thoroughly failed us. And they’ve failed so badly that the only viable form of politics right now is populism. . . . The question is: Given the choice between psuedo populism in the form of fascist demagoguery and left-wing economic populism in the form of class warfare and socialism, which side are we going to choose?

Figueredo’s timely and insightful 25-minute video commentary can be viewed in its entirety below.

Related Off-site Links:
David Pakman Leads Rich Cringe Dem Revolt Against DSA – Due Dissidence (July 28, 2025).
Corporate Media Losing Its Mind Over Dem Socialist Surge – Status Coup News (July 29, 2025).
Centrists in Shambles As Socialist Francesca Hong Surges to Wisconsin Governor Lead – Breaking Points (July 28, 2026).
The Atlantic Magazine Is Terrified of Democratic Socialism – Jacobin (July 27, 2026).
Kshama Sawant: My Independent Socialist Campaign Will Defeat Adam Smith – Breaking Points (July 27, 2026).
Centrists Are Not More “Electable” – Nathan J. Robinson (Current Affairs, July 27, 2026).
James Carville’s War on the Democratic Left Is Funded by Centrist Billionaires – David Moore (Sludge, July 25, 2026).
Here Comes the Inevitable Backlash to DSA’s Rise – Ross Barkan (The Nation, July 24, 2026).
Our Favorite Progressive Candidate in 2026 – Brendan Trachsel, Green Party Candidate for Arizona House of Representatives District 6 – JeJune Magazine (July 23, 2026).
Kshama Sawant on Confronting Bad Politicians in Both Parties – Nathan J. Robinson (Current Affairs, July 17, 2026).
Revolutionary Optimism Takes Practice – Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin’s Newsletter, July 20, 2026).
Why the Democratic Party Is Not Going to Save Us From Fascism – The Humanist Report (March 6, 2025).
Dems Reportedly Angry That Progressives Are Pushing Them to Act Like an Opposition Party – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, February 12, 2025).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:

SOCIALISM
• Jeff Waldorf: Quote of the Day – July 3, 2026
• Marx and Class Struggle – Then and Now
• A Socialist Agenda for 2026
• Memes of the Times – November 23, 2025
• Matthew Cooke on the Fallacy That Socialism “Doesn't Work”
• No, Hitler and the Nazis Weren’t Socialists
• Socialist Equality Party: Quote of the Day – October 19, 2025
• “Hopeful and Grounded”: Omar Fateh’s Vision of Democratic Socialism
• Mark Harris: Quote of the Day – August 10, 2023
• Heather Cox Richardson on the Origin of the American Obsession with “Socialism”
• Martin Luther King, Jr. and Democratic Socialism
• “We Must Challenge the Entire System”
• The Biblical Roots of “From Each According to Ability; To Each According to Need”

THE FAILURES OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
• Tony Pentimalli on the Fallacy of the “Safe Political Center”
• Kshama Sawant on the Democrats’ Shutdown Cave
• David Norton: “The Democratic Party Serves Capital, Not You”
• Robert Reich on the “Big Ugly Cave” by Senate Democrats
• Mike Figueredo on the “Political Malpractice” of the Democratic Party
• Ted Rall: Democrats Are Not “the Left”
• Exposing the Dark Money Network Secretly Funding Establishment Democratic Influencers
• Why the Democratic Party Is Not Going to Save Us From Fascism
• Howie Hawkins: “The Democrats Are Not the Answer to the Trump/Fascism Problem”
• The Longstanding Fault Lines Within the Democratic Party Have Surfaced Again in Minnesota
• Jeff Cohen on How Obama’s “Corporate Liberalism” Led to the Rise of Trump
• Progressive Perspectives on Bernie Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” Tour
• Eric Fernández: Quote of the Day – May 14, 2025
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – July 26, 2025
• Democrat Talk on the Eve of Trump’s Return
• When Democrats Undermine Democracy
• Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

MIKE FIGUEREDO
• “Trump Is Scared Shitless”
• Mike Figueredo on Why Trump Might Be Pushing the U.S. to the Brink of Collapse
• Mike Figueredo: “Elected Democrats Have No Real Interest in Doing What the Base Wants”
• Mike Figueredo on the “Political Malpractice” of the Democratic Party
• How Democrats Can Start Winning Again
• Why the Democratic Party Is Not Going to Save Us From Fascism
• Progressive Perspectives on Marianne Williamson’s 2024 Presidential Run: “There’s No Downside to Her Doing This”

SIGNS OF HOPE
• “The Answer, Actually, Is Hope”
• Eddie Glaude: A “Radical Refusal” Is Happening
• Butch Ware on “Red & Blue vs Green Politics”
• Progressive Perspectives on Zohran Mamdani’s Win in New York City
• “No Kings”? Absolutely. But Also “No Oligarchy”
• Chris Smalls: We Need to Escape the “Two-Party Plantation”
• Kshama Sawant: Independent Working-class Campaigns Can Succeed
• The Rational National’s Take on Zohran Mamdani
• Omar Fateh: “We Need to Meet the Needs of Working People”
• Something to Think About – July 25, 2025
• In His Efforts to “Build a City That Works for All,” Omar Fateh Secures a Key Endorsement
• Butch Ware on His Run for California Governor and the Wider Goal of Disrupting the Duopoly
• Marianne Williamson on the Need for “Radical Love” in Responding to Trump’s Dismantling of Democracy
• “Protesting Is What Patriotism Looks Like in Public”

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

Scotty T. Reid on James Clyburn as a “Defender of the Political Establishment and Its Policies of Oppression”

Rep. James Clyburn [right] says Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election because not enough Black voters turned out. I disagree. I believe he’s intentionally asking the wrong question.

The real question is Why did turnout decline? The real question is Why did so many lifelong Democratic voters became disillusioned with the party in the first place?

For months before the election, voters warned Democratic leaders that U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza had become a moral issue. Thousands of Black clergy, students, human rights advocates, and millions of ordinary people repeatedly called for an end to U.S. military support. Those warnings weren’t whispered behind closed doors. They were public. They were persistent. They were impossible to ignore.

Yet when Clyburn explains the election in a recent interview, he doesn’t acknowledge what I believe became the defining moral issue dividing the Democratic coalition and now the Republican MAGA coalition. The American Israeli genocide still being perpetrated against Gaza residents.

Instead, James blames Black voters.

As a student of Black history, I find that remarkable. Black political thought has a long tradition of standing with oppressed people, not simply because they are Black, but because oppression anywhere demands moral scrutiny everywhere. Malcolm X condemned Zionism as a form of colonialism. James Baldwin challenged the dispossession of Palestinians. The Black Panther Party expressed solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. That tradition didn’t end in the 1970s.

It resurfaced during the Democratic primaries.

In Michigan, one of the clearest dividing lines between establishment Democrats and progressive challengers wasn’t just healthcare, wages, or affordability. It was Gaza. Voters – including Black voters – said so themselves. Video after video showed Democratic voters explaining that they could no longer support candidates who continued backing U.S. military assistance to Israel. That wasn’t Republican messaging. That came from Democratic voters. Today there is a growing bipartisan coalition in Congress to end economic and military support of Israel.

James Clyburn’s analysis ignores that reality because he stands with those who stand on the wrong side of the moral line of this time.

Instead of asking why many voters felt morally betrayed, he ignorantly asks why they didn’t vote.

In my Proxy Racism framework, every elected official serves as a proxy. The only question is: a proxy for whom? Some serve primarily as proxies for their communities. Others become proxies for party leadership, wealthy donors, corporate interests, or foreign governments.

When I hear James Clyburn blame Black voters while refusing to seriously confront the moral concerns many of them expressed over Gaza, I don’t hear the activist who emerged from the civil rights movement. I hear a defender of the political establishment and its policies of oppression revealing extreme moral depravity.

The Democratic Party cannot rebuild trust by blaming the very people who warned it, months in advance, that it was losing them on this issue alone.

If anything, Black voters deserve credit for doing what Black voters have often done throughout history: refusing to sacrifice their moral convictions for political expediency.

If Democrats truly want to understand what happened, they should spend less time blaming Black voters and more time listening to what a significant number of Black voters have been saying all along. Stop supporting genocide.

– Scotty T. Reid
via social media
July 27, 2026

Saturday, July 25, 2026

A Precise Metaphysical Claim

Don’t look for me in the world;
look for me in your own heart.
For if I am not found there,
I am not found anywhere.

– Rumi

Every pilgrimage the seeker undertakes eventually leads back to the same starting point: the chest cavity they never left.

This is the central provocation of Sufi teaching, and it undermines almost every conventional approach to spiritual seeking. Pilgrims travel to distant shrines. Seekers search for masters in far countries. People spend decades looking for meaning in achievement, relationship, or recognition, external locations where they hope the sacred is waiting to be discovered. The Sufi masters insisted, repeatedly and without exception, that this entire structure of searching outward was built on a fundamental misunderstanding. What is sought was never elsewhere. The heart – the qalb – was always the location.

This is not a comforting platitude. It is a precise metaphysical claim. The qalb, in Sufi cosmology, is not the emotional heart of Western sentiment. It is the organ of spiritual perception, the seat where divine reality can be directly known, if it has been sufficiently polished of the veils that ordinary living accumulates over it: fear, ego, distraction, attachment to the temporary. The heart that has not been polished sees nothing when it looks inward, and so the seeker, mistaking their own unpolished condition for absence, keeps looking elsewhere.

This is why the entire discipline of the Sufi path – dhikr, remembrance, the systematic clearing of what obscures the heart – exists. Not to travel toward the divine, but to remove what prevents the divine already present from being recognized. The pilgrimage was never geographic. It was always a movement inward, toward what had never actually left.

What you have been seeking in the world was waiting in your chest before you ever started the search.

– Pyramid Consciousness
via social media
July 16, 2026

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Inayat Khan and the Sufi Message

My exploration of – and walking on – the mystical path known as the Sufi Way continues with my sharing this evening of an excerpt from the foreword of The Inner Life (1997), a collection of three essential writings by the great Sufi musician and teacher Inayat Khan (1882-1927). This foreword is attributed simply to “H.J.W.”

____________

What is the character of the Sufi message? The core of it, of course, is mysticism. As a realized mystic, looking at Western culture, what Inayat Khan was destined to do was to open a path to inner realization that so many in the West could not find anymore. He was inspired to invoke the mysteries and the beauty of that path in many ways. He described the successive steps the seeker for truth has to go through. And he created the inner school of the Sufi Movement, the Sufi Order, to give personal guidance to sincere seekers. To initiates in this inner school he offered the possibility to develop the discipleship that has always been so important on the mystical path, and a range of spiritual practices that can help to open the heart and the inner senses but are also suitable for Westerners who remain active in worldly life.

For an essential aspect of Inayat Khan’s teaching was balance. He did not advocate withdrawing from the world in order to focus only on the inner life: on prayer, contemplation, and meditation. He shows us a human way, living in the world, meeting our obligations to our fellow human beings with sympathy and understanding – and at the same time learning to turn within and to come in touch with the peace and inspiration of the divine light. Then we discover the fullness of life. We can reach a balance between the inner life, where we open our hearts in surrender to the divine spirit, and the outer life, where we have to work actively to achieve our ideals and meet our obligations. Then our actions can be guided by the inspiration and wisdom we receive in our inner attunement, which will more and more shine through our outer work.

This mystical vision illuminates the whole of life: religion, philosophy, and psychology. The mystical path is also the essence of religion. For the purpose of the inner life – as Inayat Khan puts it – is to make God a reality. Not a theory, a dogma, or an abstraction, but the deepest experience we can have. This vision then leads to understanding the fundamental unity of all the great religions. For these religions have all been brought to humanity by successive messengers in different ages to awaken the feeling and realization of the divine. Inayat Khan shows that the God ideal is a great help for this, but that we have to realize that it can only be a help, a stepping-stone: that the divine Reality is beyond our limited intelligence and can only be experienced in the depths of our being, our soul, which itself is a spark of the divine light. Then we can see all religions as converging ways to the same goal. To express this idea, Inayat Khan created the Universal Worship, in which all religions are brought together in a ritual that shows how they are all kindled from the same divine light.

The philosophical aspect of the Sufi message is also important. The tremendous development of science and technology in the present time has made it difficult for many people to find their way to religion and to the inner life. For traditional religious dogmas and representations are at odds with modern scientific insight. But Inayat Khan’s mystical philosophy is completely in line with the deepening understanding of modern science.

The human way that the Sufi message shows means that through the experience and difficulties of the outer life we can make progress toward the inner goal. This is the psychological aspect of Inayat Kan’s teachings. Here he gives a remarkable insight into the workings of our mind. He shows the importance of the impressions which we receive constantly through the outer world, which will be registered in our memory and become living, influencing our feelings, thoughts, words, and actions. And he explains how we can learn to control our mind, allowing only the positive and desirable impressions to live and work within us. By controlling our mind we can then control our life. But as important as the impressions are in our life, they are still only reflections on the mirror of our soul, our inner consciousness. The soul itself remains always pure. Its nature is divine; and it is that divine nature that we have to discover in life.

In their moral aspect Inayay Khan’s teachings also describe a way of gradual progress, of evolution. He speaks about “moral culture” and “civilization of the heart.” We must learn to understand other people and their points of view, to develop consideration and sympathy for them. That widens our consciousness and helps to overcome the identification with our limited being, the great illusion which blocks our way to the knowledge of God.

– H.J.W.
From the Foreword to The Inner Life
Shambhala, 1997
pp. xi-xiv

In the following video Filip Holm of the Let’s Talk Religion podcast explores the life of Inayat Khan and the universal expression of Sufism he promulgated.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Inayat Khan
• Inayat Khan and the Heart of Sufism
• Inayat Khan on the Art of Selflessness
• Inayat Khan: “There Must Be Balance”
• Inayat Khan and the Fountain of Happiness Within
• Inayat Khan and the Alchemy of Happiness
• A Light That Will Always Shine
• A Living Light
• A Perpetual Fire Within
• One Wisdom
• Awakening and Turning
• Inayat Khan on Mysticism
• The Sufi Way
• Sufism: Way of Love, Tradition of Enlightenment, and Antidote to Fanaticism
• Sufism: A Call to Awaken
• Sufism: A Living Twenty-First Century Tradition
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Kabir Helminski
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything is Possible
• Clarity, Hope, and Courage
• “Joined at the Heart”: Robert Thompson on Christianity and Sufism
• The Mystic Jesus: “A Name for the Unalterable Love That All of Us Share”
• Doris Lessing on the Sufi Way
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Doris Lessing
• The Soul’s Beloved
• The Gorgeous One
• Resting in the Presence of the Beloved
• You Are My Goal, Beloved One
• Be In My Mind, Beloved One
• Finding Balance in the Presence of the Beloved
• Your Peace Is With Me, Beloved One
• I Need Do Nothing . . . I Am Open to the Living Light
• New Horizons
• Saaxiib Qurux Badan and the Winged Heart
• Held in the Presence of God
• The Act of Surrender
• The Journey Home

Monday, July 20, 2026

Chase T. M. Anderson: “‘Queer’ Has Become One of the Most Elegant and Powerful Words I Use to Describe Myself”

I appreciate the July 18 op-ed in The Advocate by Chase T. M. Anderson (right). Entitled “I’m Queer, Not Gay. It Matters,” Anderson’s piece is a direct response to Matthew Vines’ June 30 New York Times op-ed, “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.”

Vines’ piece elicited strong responses from many within the LGBTQI+ communities, especially from those who identify as “queer.” (See the previous Wild Reed post, “Queer Perspectives on an Anti-Queer Op-Ed.”)

Following are excerpts from Anderson’s op-ed.

_____________

The terms “gay” and “queer” are not synonymous. When someone says “gay” to me these days, I think of cisgender. What comes to mind are people who say they’re “woke” but are silent as transgender people across the country are attacked. I think of being locked into acting how the heterosexual society wants our community to act.

I think of palatable.

Queer is often associated with describing the LGBTQ+ spectrum, an umbrella term of sorts. The word “queer” for many has been reclaimed – from a derogatory slur to a word of empowerment. This reclamation began after the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, where our community fought against police raiding the Stonewall Inn, a place of gathering for queer people. Over time, the word has come to be a term of inclusion for many. It is a term that describes how many people live outside of the binary of male and female, and how sexual orientation and identity can be fluid over time. The word has transformed into a statement of empowerment, of “potential and a future, not something that is stagnant.”

Queerness is also an emphatic no to the cisgender, male-centric, ableist, White, inflexible way we've been taught that we “must” live from a young age.

. . . “Queer” has become one of the most elegant and powerful words I use to describe myself.

It has been a word I have reclaimed for myself.

Telling people I’m queer comes with a certain gravitas. A certain “do not come for me unless I send for you.” The word is a rose with thorns – one that combines a gentleness with the passion of someone who has had to fight to survive. When I say I am queer, it means I am here to battle for our community’s rights while wearing gold eye glitter as armor. To be queer in America means that I will also bring the softness of someone who years ago envisioned a world where we all were frolicking and got along.

To be queer, to me, is to hold onto that hope while dealing with the realities of now. At its core, being queer means being free to express myself however aligns most with my internal sense of self – and that is a power that many people fear and try to control.

By calling myself queer, I no longer let anyone dictate how I should label myself or try to have me “fit in” to a society not built for me.

After all, I’m queer, and not gay. It matters.

To read Chase T. M. Anderson’s op-ed in its entirety, click here.

Chase T. M. Anderson, MD (he/she/they), is an assistant professor in child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and Medical Director of The Muses Program for Minoritized Youth. You can follow them on Instagram, X, and BlueSky.

Related Off-site Links:
Queer Isn’t the Threat. Respectability Politics Is – Brandon Robertson (Brandon Robertson (June 30, 2026).
Actually, I’m Gay and I’m Queer. It Matters – Emma Cieslik (Washington Blade, July 2, 2026).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Queer Perspectives on an Anti-Queer Op-Ed
• Cassandra Snow on Reclaiming the Word “Queer”
• Dyllón Burnside: “For Me, the Term Queer Just Opens Up Space”
• Reclaiming and Re-Queering Pride
• The Queer Liberation March: Bringing Back the Spirit of Stonewall
• Michelangelo Signorile on the Rebellious Purpose of Queer Pride
• Queer Native Americans, Colonialism, and the Fourth of July
• North America: Perhaps Once the “Queerest Continent on the Planet”
• Afdhere Jama’s “Love Song to the Queer Somali”
• Thoughts on Queer Cinema
• Queer Black Panther
• The New Superman: Not Necessarily Gay, but Definitely Queer
• Adam Sandel on the Queer Appeal of Harry Potter
• Dusty Springfield: Queer Icon
• David Bowie: Queer Messiah
• In a Historic First, Country Music’s Latest Star Is a Queer Black Man
• Kuan Yin: “A Mirror of the Queer Experience”
• Barbara Anne Kozee on Knowing the Divine in “Queer Time”
• Three Radical (Religious) Ideas for Queer Liberation
• Recovering the Queer Artistic Heritage
• Sister Teresa Forcades on Queer Theology
• Our Lives as LGBTQI People: “Garments Grown in Love”
• Tian Richards’ Message to Queer Youth: “Every Part of Your Identity Is a Superpower”
• Mia Birdsong on the “Queering of Friendship”
• Kadeem
• “Queer Love Is My Divine Companion”

Sunday, July 19, 2026

The Serpent: Not the Enemy of Ascension But Its Guardian

No tree can grow to heaven
unless its roots reach down to hell.

– Carl Jung

The higher you rise, the deeper you must have gone first. There is no exception to this law.

Jung did not mean hell as a place of punishment. He meant it as the underworld of the psyche, everything rejected, buried, and denied. Every fear you have refused to name. Every wound you have covered instead of healing. Every part of yourself you decided was too ugly, too dangerous, or too shameful to claim as your own.

Most people try to grow upward while ignoring what lies beneath them. They chase enlightenment, success, or peace without ever descending into the parts of themselves they have spent a lifetime avoiding. And so they stay small, reaching toward the light with roots too shallow to hold real height.

The alchemists called this the nigredo, the blackening, the necessary descent into darkness before any true transformation can occur. You cannot skip this stage. You cannot bypass it with positivity or spiritual bypassing dressed as growth. The tree that reaches heaven does so precisely because its roots have gone where it is uncomfortable to look.

This is not a metaphor for the weak-hearted. It is a law of the psyche, as real as gravity. What you refuse to face controls you from below. What you finally face becomes the foundation that lets you rise.

The serpent wrapped around this tree is not the enemy of ascension. It is the guardian of it, the very thing that must be integrated, not defeated, before the branches can reach the sun.

Your shadow is not what is wrong with you. It is the root system waiting to hold your growth.

– Pyramid Consciousness
via social media
July 3, 2026

Saturday, July 18, 2026

Quote of the Day

Stephen Miller stood in front of representatives from more than 60 countries this week and called left-wing politics a “fatal cancer of civilization.” He said left-wing terrorism, “left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag.” Elsewhere, he’s vowed to “uproot and dismantle” what he calls left-wing terrorist networks, and says Trump’s NSPM-7 directive will mean debanking and defunding left-wing “political terrorists.”

Worth noting that the Trump regime has been sending people to gulags in El Salvador.

Now let’s check the data regarding terrorism: CSIS tracked 750 domestic terror attacks and plots from 1994–2020: right-wing extremists committed 57% of them. Left-wing extremists committed 25%. Since 2016, the far right has carried out 152 attacks to the left’s 41 – and right-wing violence has killed 112 people in the last decade. Left-wing violence killed 13.

(Yes, 2025 saw a brief anomaly where left-wing incidents edged ahead – but that’s because right-wing attacks cratered, not because the left surged. Researchers stress the numbers on both sides remain historically low.)

So the actual data says the right is the dominant terror threat in America. Miller’s solution: call the left “cancer” and “terrorists” who must be uprooted.

This playbook isn’t new. After the 1933 Reichstag fire, Hitler blamed Communists and declared: “we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”

Cancer. Pest. Terrorists. Root them out. We’ve read this script before, and we know how it ends.

What makes this even more preposterous: The Department of Justice (DOJ) quietly deleted a federal study – “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism” – that found right-wing extremism outpaces the left. It just vanished from the DOJ site. No announcement. Lawmakers demanded answers in November; DOJ still hasn’t republished it.

– Reich-Wing Watch
via social media
July 17, 2026

Thursday, July 16, 2026

Remembering the Romanovs

It’s the 108th anniversary of the murder of the Romanov family – Tsar Nicholas II, Tsaritsa Alexandra Feodovnora, Tsarevich Alexei, and Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia.

The seven members of Russia’s last Imperial Family were shot and bayoneted to death by their Bolshevik captors in the cellar of the “House of Special Purpose” in Ekaterinburg in the early hours of July 17, 1918.

Also murdered were four members of the Romanov household – lady-in-waiting Anna Demidova, footman Alexei Trupp, cook Ivan Kharitonov, and court physician, Eugene Botkin.

As I’ve noted previously, I’ve long been fascinated by the Romanovs and their tragic story. In marking this year’s anniversary of their deaths, I share an excerpt from Nicholas II, The Last Tsar by Michael Paterson.

_____________________

Accounts describe the executioners’ astonishment when bullets ricocheted off some of the women. Only afterward did the reason become clear – they had jewels sewn into their bodices that had deflected the shots. [Thus] not all were killed outright, despite the careful targeting. Anastasia seems to have fainted. She regained consciousness seconds after the fusillade and had to be finished off with a bayonet. The maid, Demidova, was unharmed enough by the first shots to run back and forth to defend herself with a cushion that had been in her hands. Otherwise it was mercifully swift.

Arguably this sudden end, horrific as it was, was preferable to further months – or years – of captivity and degradation. Time and again over that interminable, fourteen-month wait, they must have asked themselves: “How much longer can this go on? How can we endure?” The youngest member of the Family, during their last days in Tobolsk, told Alexandra: “I would like to die, Mama; I’m not afraid of death, but I’m afraid of what they may do to us here.”

It is unlikely that the Romanovs would have been released, and they could have lived on, prisoners in some Gulag, for decades. Alexandra and Alexis would not have survived. The girls could in theory have lived until the end of the twentieth century – and thus might have seen the demise of the Soviet state in 1991. Had the Bolsheviks put Nicholas on trial he would have been made a national scapegoat and condemned to death. There would have been the same type of tragic parting from his family that was seen with Charles I. Alexandra too might have been tried, for treason – the fact that no evidence existed would not have mattered – and could have suffered her own Calvary in the manner of Marie Antionette. How much better that this close-knit family was together and that it happened without warning. One wonders why the executioners did not simply shoot them in their beds as they slept. Perhaps Yakov Yurovsky was one of those who wanted to see the Tsar stand trail, hence his brief delivery of sentence [before being the first of the executioners to open fire in the cellar].

As the world knows, the bodies were taken to a clearing outside the town and rendered down by a crude process of dismemberment, acid and burning. They were then buried and the site of their grave was disguised. They would remain undisturbed for more than sixty years while, from the moment they disappeared, rumour and speculation and wishful thinking would keep them alive.

Had the Family been able to flee and find sanctuary abroad, they would never have known peace. The secret police of the new state were to prove extremely adept at carrying out executions of dissidents and other enemies no matter where in the world they settled, as witness the killing of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Though a great many Russian aristocrats, and a number of Romanovs, were to live unmolested in the West for the remainder of their lives, the immediate family might not have been so lucky. They could have been – and they would have felt – hunted for the rest of their lives.

– Michael Paterson
Excerpted from Nicholas II, The Last Tsar
Robinson, 2017
pp. 221-222

Above: Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra pictured under house arrest in the garden of the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo in May of 1917. The Alexander Palace was the preferred residence of the last Tsar and his family, and it became the family’s initial place of imprisonment after the first of two Russian Revolutions in 1917 overthrew the House of Romanov in February. In August, the Provisional Government evacuated Nicholas and his family to the Siberian town of Tobolsk. After the October Revolution, the Bolshevik regime moved the family in the spring of 1918 to the Urals city of Ekaterinburg where they were executed in July of that year, together with several of their retainers.

After undergoing years of renovation, the Alexander Palace opened in the summer of 2021 as a state museum housing relics of the former Imperial dynasty.

The Governor’s Mansion in Tobolsk (right) in which the Romanovs were imprisoned, is now also known as Kuklin House. Located on 10 Mira Street, the mansion is protected by the Russian Federal government as a historical monument. Following the Revolution the house was renamed the “House of Freedom.” In 1937 a carpet from the Governor’s Mansion was sent to and preserved by a museum in San Francisco. Following a complete restoration of the building, which included demolition of an art deco portico and its replacement by one in the original design, it was reopened in 2018 to house The Museum of the Family of Emperor Nicholas II.

The Ipatiev House (the “House of Special Purpose”) in Ekaterinburg was demolished in 1977 by order of the Politburo to the local Soviet government, almost 59 years after the Romanov family’s murder and 14 years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

_________________

In closing, here is the “Nicholas and Alexandra Suite” from the soundtrack of the 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra. Composed by Richard Rodney Bennett, this work is one of the truly great film soundtracks – epic, haunting and, like the film itself, often underrated; so much so that it remains to this day unavailable on CD. The film's “Love Theme” (the second movement in the suite) is much beloved by my Mum, who can play it beautifully on the keyboard. It was turned into a rather torchy song, “Too Beautiful to Last,” and recorded by Engelbert Humperdinck in 1972.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Remembering the Romanovs (2012)
• Remembering Olga Nikolaevna and Her Sisters
• The Tragedy of the Romanovs, 100 Years On
• Yes, the Children Too
• Viva La Vida – The Romanovs

Related Off-site Links:
The Romanov Mystery Solved: How Archaeologists, Scientists and Historians Discovered What Really Happened in 1918 – Greg Heilman (Diario AS, June 5, 2026).
The Romanovs: Love, Tragedy, and Historical Legacy – MSN (July 16, 2026). Thousands of Intimate Photographs Reveal the Everyday Lives of the Romanovs, Russia’s Last Imperial Family – Meilan Solly (Smithsonian Magazine, July 16, 2026).
The Legacy of the Romanovs: How Is the Last Russian Royal Family Remembered in Russia? – Helen Rappaport (HistoryExtra.com, July 16, 2018).
DNA Analysis Confirms Authenticity of Romanovs’ Remains – Brigit Katz (Smithsonian Magazine, July 17, 2018).
Inside the Romanov Family's Final Days – Caroline Hallemann (Town and Country, July 1, 2018).
The Race to Save the Romanovs and How It Fell Apart – Bob Ruggiero (Houston Press, July 11, 2018).
How the Royal Houses of Europe Abandoned the Romanovs – Helen Rappaport (The Economist, June 28, 2018).

“Hazardous for Everyone”

If you woke up to your neighborhood smelling like campfire, you’re not alone.

Poor air quality is forecast for nearly all of Minnesota Thursday due to wildfires.

Air quality has reached the maroon category for much of eastern Minnesota, including the Twin Cities metro, meaning it is hazardous for everyone, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

The MPCA says anyone in the maroon or hazardous area should avoid any outdoor activity and stay inside.

Farther west in Minnesota, purple – very unhealthy – and red – unhealthy – alerts are in effect.

The MPCA says heavy smoke will remain across the state Thursday as existing smoke recirculates and mixes with new smoke from wildfires across northeastern Minnesota and southern Canada.

Heavy smoke remains possible beyond the alert expiration time across portions of northeast Minnesota, but the potential for rain Friday could greatly reduce smoke output and improve air quality, according to the MPCA. As for the rest of the state, a cold front is expected bring cleaner air on northwest winds through the day Friday.

– Anna Haecherl
“Hazardous Air Quality Forecast
for Much of Minnesota Thursday”
Minnesota Public Radio News
July 16, 2026

Monday, July 13, 2026

Mark Greene on How ICE Is a Weapon of the Epstein Class

ICE has killed yet another person – a 25-year-old Columbian man in Biddleford, Maine.

According to initial reports, this young man, who was authorized to work in the United States and was not the target of a warrant, was shot through the windshield of his car by ICE agents. These agents then dragged him out of his vehicle and handcuffed him as he lay dying on the road. There are also reports that this brutal and unwarranted killing took place in front of the young man’s wife and three-year-old daughter.

In response to this shooting, residents of Biddleford have spontaneously taken to the streets in protest (right and below).

This killing is the eleventh by ICE agents this year. To date, there has been absolutely no accountability demanded from those responsible for these execution-style deaths, and no justice for those killed or for their families.

ICE is out of control as it continues to act without impunity as the domestic terrorist organization that it is. The Trump regime is not going to stop this madness as it is of its making. ICE, by design, is Trump’s personal paramilitary group. Only a massive disruption to “business as usual” across the country will bring this travesty to a halt – localized general strikes, in other words. Those who are profiting from the fascist Trump regime and, in particular, the expansion of ICE and the building of for-profit detention centers have to be hit were it hurts most. We also have to organize locally to support workers and their families who will be most impacted by these strike actions.

We also need to be very clear about what ICE is really all about and who it is that benefits from its deadly actions in our communities. In understanding this, Mark Greene’s recent commentary is very helpful. Following is what he says about ICE as a weapon of the Eptsein class. Greene wrote his piece in the aftermath of the July 9 shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents in Houston, Texas.

_________________

We need to understand exactly what’s being created inside ICE, inside Homeland Security. The murder of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is one of hundreds of murders that have taken place either in detention centers or on the streets of our cities. Over 1,000 detainees disappeared from Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. Their records [have gone missing from ICE’s online database, with their families and attorneys unable to locate them].

It takes time for tens of thousands of men in an organization like ICE to slowly become desensitized to violence and torture. And it can only happen when these federal organizations, led by men like Donald Trump and Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, say explicitly to their officers that there are no limits on what they can do. It takes time for those men to believe it. It takes time for those men to try out little acts of violence fotst, to look around at the cameras pointed at them and say, I guess nobody’s gonna stop me. And slowly but surely, they grow their appetite for violence and cruelty.

The number of people that we do not know about, who have lost their lives in massive detention centers, people who are held in those centers not because they can’t be deported but because a private prison corporation is making massive profits every day that they hold those individuals.

It’s no accident that the men and women who run an operation designed to make profit off human torture and murder are also in the Epstein files. Over twenty people in the Trump administration are named in the Epstein files. This is the systemic and brutal torture being funded, operationalized, and profited off of by the Epstein class.

ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, and Homeland Security have become a massive for-profit murder and torture operation. And what comes next is they cease to make their mission immigrants and turn this huge infrastructure they’re building onto controlling and detaining American citizens.

We are at a grave and dangerous point in American history. This level of violence and torture being organized and implemented by our federal government isn’t going to end until the Republican Party loses its majorities in the Congress and eventually its grip on the White House.

But elections alone aren’t going to save us. And the only way this is going to end is if millions of Americans show up in the streets of our cities and demand that this ends. And it will not happen in a a single day. It may take months. We may be looking at an American Spring where we finally say this level of brutality, this level of savagery, this level of Epstein class violence must end.

– Mark Greene
via Remaking Manhood
July 10, 2026

UPDATE: The man killed by ICE in Maine today has been identified as Johan Sebastián Guerrero, a 25-year-old permitted worker from Colombia.

Wrote Qasim Rashid when he shared the above image on social media today:

This is Johan Sebastián Guerrero, the 25-year-old Colombian father and husband murdered by ICE fascists in broad daylight in front of his 3-year-old daughter.

He was NOT the target of the ICE warrant. He was documented. He did everything right. ICE murdered him anyway. And the Supreme Court of the United States has already ruled it legal for ICE to profile people based on skin color.

Saying it again – it was never about law and order. It was always about murdering anyone not white. This is fascism. Abolish and prosecute ICE.

The Wild Reed

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

“Our Country Right Now Is At a Crossroads”

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

Scotty T. Reid on James Clyburn as a “Defender of the Political Establishment and Its Policies of Oppression”

Saturday, July 25, 2026

A Precise Metaphysical Claim

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Inayat Khan and the Sufi Message

Monday, July 20, 2026

Chase T. M. Anderson: “‘Queer’ Has Become One of the Most Elegant and Powerful Words I Use to Describe Myself”

Sunday, July 19, 2026

The Serpent: Not the Enemy of Ascension But Its Guardian

Saturday, July 18, 2026

Quote of the Day

Thursday, July 16, 2026

Remembering the Romanovs

“Hazardous for Everyone”

Monday, July 13, 2026

Mark Greene on How ICE Is a Weapon of the Epstein Class

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