Wizard's Weekly Wrap-Up: Shots Fired, Hearts Broken, A Line Crossed in the Snow
State Violence, Moral Rupture, Political Cracks & the Moment the World Flinched: The Week That Was January 4-10, 2026
This week was loud but illuminating, chaotic but clarifying, as power crossed a line, the world flinched, and something long suppressed finally registered. In a searing moment of human tragedy and callous violence, the world’s heart came online, like beacon, like a signal; a sign of the times and of things yet to come.
What a year this week has been.
It began with the Trump administration blowing past the congressional deadline to submit a written justification for why the vast majority of Epstein files remain redacted or withheld - a deadline they shrugged off as if transparency were optional. But what can you expect from an administration run by a man who, according to newly released congressional testimony from former special counsel Jack Smith, knowingly tried to overturn the 2020 election and would almost certainly be behind bars if he weren’t - infuriatingly and inexplicably - the current sitting president.
To draw attention away from the bad news leaking out everywhere, Trump invaded Venezuela, kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, extradited him to the U.S., and slapped him with a stack of barely-there charges that were less about law and more about oil and ego. Maduro had not suitably cow-towed to Trump, instead mocking him openly, so Trump staged a military blitz seemingly as an act of revenge, nabbing a few billion barrels of oil for himself while he was at it.
At the press conference following the assault, Trump looked half-asleep while members of the administration tried to explain what on earth “Operation Absolute Resolve” actually was. Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted it was a law enforcement mission - an arrest, not a war - but then Trump woke up just long enough to blow that excuse to pieces, bragging that it was a full-blown regime change to seize control of Venezuela’s oil fields. The operation, it turns out, was launched without congressional approval and appears to violate international law. So, you know, just another day in Donald Trump’s America.
Slurring his words and drifting off-script, Trump declared it “an assault like people have not seen since World War II” and announced that the United States would now run Venezuela - a plan nobody in the administration seemed to know anything about until he blurted it out in front of reporters, but that they would spend the rest of the week trying to figure out and explain to the public on the fly.
Trump eventually confirmed that Maduro’s Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez, had been sworn in as president and was prepared to work with the United States, evaporating any remaining pretense that the invasion had been about regime change. When asked why Maria Corina Machado - Venezuela’s opposition leader and widely recognized rightful winner of last year’s election - had not been installed, Trump dismissed her as lacking the support to govern but, according to reports, his disinterest was due to the fact that Machado had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, an award Trump openly covets.
“I can’t think of anybody in history that should get the Nobel Prize more than me,” he told reporters this week, while a White House source noted, “If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today.”
Within days, Machado announced she would like to give Trump the award and Trump said he plans to meet her when she visits Washington next week - seemingly to claim his stolen prize - prompting the Nobel committee to issue a rare clarification that once awarded, the prize cannot be revoked, transferred, or shared. Better luck next time, Don.
Asked about his past opposition to regime change and nation-building, Trump shrugged: “This is Venezuela. It’s in our area. The Don-roe Doctrine.” He then outlined a plan to send in United States oil companies to rebuild Venezuela’s crumbling infrastructure and “start making money for the country.” He’d already briefed the oil execs - before Congress, of course - but it turns out they’re not exactly onboard. With the government in limbo and the political situation wildly unstable, nobody wants to invest billions in a chaos pit. One executive told the Financial Times, “No one wants to go in there when a random f**king tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.”
Cue Marco Rubio, dispatched to the Sunday shows with a mop and a thesaurus. When asked under what legal authority the U.S. planned to run Venezuela, he spun a word salad about economic leverage and seized tankers to pressure the country to conform to America’s will, despite Trump having implied Rubio himself would be in charge of the nation Trump professed he’d just overthrown. Rubio snapped that people were “fixating on that,” prompting historian Kevin Kruse to quip: “Yeah, people are fixating on a Cabinet Secretary being handed a sovereign country to run, after the president waged an illegal war and kidnapped the head of state. Weird that they’d get hung up on that.”
Pressed again on why Congress wasn’t consulted about the Venezuela invasion, Rubio reiterated that it wasn’t an invasion - just a “law enforcement operation” to arrest Maduro. Apparently, cross-border military invasions are now fine, so long as you call them arrests. By that logic, any foreign government could indict Trump and send in a special ops team to grab him from the White House. As much as some Americans might fantasize about that, that’s not how international law works.
Dropping the pretence entirely that his attacks on Venezuela had anything to do with drug trafficking, as the administration has been posturing for months now, Trump tweeted: “Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America. This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!”
The plunder began immediately as U.S. forces continued their hot pursuit of a sanctioned Venezuelan oil tanker that had been dodging their blockade for over two weeks. Russia deployed a submarine and naval escorts to protect it once it reflagged under Moscow’s banner, but it was eventually seized and boarded by U.S. officials, underscoring just how fast this oil-grab is escalating into a full-blown geopolitical standoff.
Seemingly high on his Venezuelan escapades and newfound taste for high-seas piracy, Trump turned his attention to the rest of the Western Hemisphere, threatening moves against Cuba, warning Mexico to “get their act together,” and telling Iran that if it started “killing people like they have in the past,” the U.S. would hit back “very hard.” All this less than a week after announcing his New Year’s resolution was “Peace on Earth.”
Trump also threatened to invade Greenland, telling reporters, “We do need Greenland, absolutely, we need it for defense.” Never mind that Greenland is already part of NATO and thus already part of U.S. defense, so no one had any idea what he was talking about.
Enter Stephen Miller, screeching through a CNN interview that “We’re a superpower… we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.” When asked why his wife had posted an image of Greenland wrapped in an American flag, Miller snapped, “Greenland should be part of the U.S. By what right does Denmark assert control? Nobody is gonna fight the U.S. militarily over the future of Greenland.”
Senator Mark Warner wasn’t having it: “Nothing would lead to the absolute destruction of NATO faster than U.S. aggression toward a longtime ally like Denmark.” Senator Tom Tillis exploded on the Senate floor, saying “This nonsense with Greenland is a distraction from the good work [Trump’s] doing. The amateurs who pitched it should lose their jobs.”
Europe didn’t stay quiet either. Thirty-seven Members of the European Parliament co-signed a letter to EU President Ursula von der Leyen demanding the EU formally condemn the U.S. operation in Venezuela. Meanwhile, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the UK all issued a joint statement backing Denmark, Greenland, and NATO while Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen summed it up plainly, saying “Greenland is part of NATO. We are not for sale. And I strongly urge the United States to stop threatening close allies and sovereign nations who have made that very clear.”
While Trump did his best to knee-cap NATO, European leaders gathered in Paris to deepen their own defense pact - a newly formalized “Coalition of the Willing” pledging security guarantees, ceasefire oversight, and future troop support for Ukraine as the war enters its fourth winter and peace talks remain fragile. French President Emmanuel Macron declared, “It’s time for new partnerships,” calling for international reforms in the face of U.S. political instability. Without naming names, he made it clear that the age of American dominance is ending. Europe is on its own now.
In response, Trump threw a tantrum dressed as policy and ordered the U.S. to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - the backbone treaty that underpins the Paris Agreement - along with 66 other international organizations and agreements, gutting America’s participation in global frameworks for climate, development, gender equity, migration, and more. When asked by New York Times reporters if there were any limits to his power, Trump looked them in the eye and said: “…one thing: my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Dear God help us all.
As January 6 rolled around, America marked five years since a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, trying to overturn the election Joe Biden won by over seven million votes. While the world remembered the chaos, the White House tried to rewrite it, publishing a statement that referred to the rioters who assaulted 140 officers and smeared feces on Capitol walls as “peaceful patriotic protesters.” The real villains, it claimed in bold type, were “the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election.”
But while Trump clung to lies, Democrats held a candlelit vigil on Capitol Hill. Among the speakers was Pamela Hemphill, a former insurrectionist who pleaded guilty, served her sentence, turned down a pardon and told the truth anyway: “Once I got away from the MAGA cult and started educating myself about January the 6th, I knew what I did was wrong... I am guilty, and I own that guilt... I had fallen for the president’s lies.”
Continuing its campaign of federal retribution against anyone standing in its way, the Trump administration froze billions in social services funding to five blue states, while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went after Senator Mark Kelly - slashing his military pension, threatening demotion, and even floating criminal prosecution for reminding soldiers to obey their oath and reject unlawful orders.
Meanwhile, Trump directed the government to purchase $200 billion in mortgage bonds - a move he claimed would reduce interest rates, though critics noted it looked more like a bailout for distressed markets than any coherent policy.
And then, at a House GOP meeting, Trump confirmed every concern about his own cognitive decline by veering wildly from topic to topic, dancing without explanation, performing a series of crude imitations, and joking about canceling the 2026 election - just hilarious. Hours later, he tweeted (once again) that pregnant women should avoid Tylenol, then dispensed vaccine advice like he was starring in WebMD: The Musical. God help anyone taking medical advice from the man with the swollen cankles, bruised hands, and a McDonald’s-based blood type.
Later, at a White House roundtable with senior oil and gas executives that was meant to project control and competence, Trump abruptly stood up and wandered off to check on the progress of his adult coloring book ballroom he’s building where the East Wing once was, leaving baffled CEOs sitting in silence while he peered out the window. Moments later, Marco Rubio passed him a handwritten note meant to quietly steer the discussion back on track, which Trump promptly read aloud to the room. Neurologists will tell you that when the brain’s braking system fails, impulse takes the wheel and decorum evaporates, but of course, that’s not what’s happening here. No, no. Of course not.
Elsewhere in politics, far from the Trump clown show, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz withdrew from the 2026 governor’s race. With his state engulfed in a sprawling fraud scandal involving childcare and welfare programs, Walz said he couldn’t campaign while Minnesotans needed protection from “criminals and division.” The contrast wasn’t lost on anyone: a sitting governor stepping back amid unproven allegations, while the man in the White House sits atop 34 felony fraud convictions without even blinking.
In Paris, ten people were convicted of cyberbullying for spreading false claims that First Lady Brigitte Macron was secretly a man.
In Colombia, the government banned all new oil and mining exploration in the Amazon, protecting an area the size of Sweden and triggering global praise for what may be the most significant climate policy of the year.
In Australia, climate collapse made itself felt in real time as temperatures soared past 50°C (122°F) and fires ripped through towns across southern states. Powerlines fell, homes burned, and thick smoke choked the air as a state of disaster was declared. Meanwhile in Sydney, the post-Bondi crackdown continued with police extending a protest ban for another 14 days, gutting the right to public assembly in the name of “safety.” Under pressure, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese finally announced a federal royal commission into the Bondi attack, antisemitism, and “social cohesion” but critics say the resources directed at unpacking antisemitism haven’t been matched for other forms of racism, raising questions about whose rights and safety get a royal commission and whose don’t.
In Iran, the regime shut down internet and phone access nationwide in a desperate attempt to crush swelling anti-government protests. Instead of calming the streets, the blackout backfired, fueling even larger demonstrations, violent crackdowns, and urgent human rights alarms as massive crowds marched against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In the UK, a showdown erupted between Elon Musk and the Starmer government after it was revealed that Grok - X’s AI chatbot - had generated sexually explicit images of real people, including minors. Outrage erupted across the political spectrum, pushing the government to consider banning X under the new Online Safety Act, and now Australia and Canada are echoing the calls. Musk may believe he’s untouchable, but the Brits, the Aussies and the Canadians sent a clear message this week to clean up Grok, or get out.
In Wyoming, the state’s Supreme Court permanently blocked abortion bans, preserving legal access despite national trends in the opposite direction. And in Washington, cracks began to widen around the Epstein network as Congressman Robert Garcia secured subpoenas for Les Wexner - Epstein’s long-time benefactor - along with the Epstein estate’s executors Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn. In other words, more revelations are coming.
After months of sustained pressure, the backlash against ICE finally began to take material form as Spotify confirmed it had dropped all ICE recruitment ads, Avelo Airlines announced the cancellation of its contract with the agency, having spent months flying detainees across borders in shackles, and in Minneapolis, a Hilton hotel refused a bulk reservation made by DHS, saying it would not accommodate ICE agents. The Department of Homeland Security retaliated online, and Hilton retaliated in turn, expelling the property from its brand, sparking a nationwide boycott of the hotel chain. But none of it could prepare the world for what came next.
On a quiet, snow-covered street in Minneapolis, Renee Nicole Good - a mother of three, a poet, a singer, a churchgoing Christian - was shot dead by a masked ICE agent as she sat in her SUV after a morning school drop-off. The moment was brief, but monumental. A pivot point. A red line crossed in real time, marking the before and after of a world that finally flinched.
That single act - so public, and so brutal, and so clearly unjustified - cracked something open, and what’s followed since her death deserves unpacking in full, because it doesn’t just reveal what happened - it reveals what’s coming.
We’re barely a week into the new year, and already the seams are tearing. Decades of brittle global order have been tossed aside by a delusional madman and his hypnotized followers, as the architecture of democracy groans under the weight of its own complicity. But even in this dark hour, something is stirring beneath the rubble, because the unravelling of empire is also the loosening of the soil. Something older is waiting to bloom.
The world is loud right now - and it’s only going to get louder - because what we’re hearing is not strength, but collapse. This is the death rattle of the unsustainable. The roar of systems built on force flickering to extinction. And the louder they scream, the easier it is to miss what’s quietly rising beneath them.
So if you're asking what’s really moving beneath the noise - what this moment means, what it’s asking of us, and how to walk through it without losing your mind or your moral compass - then keep reading.
Fair warning: This week’s wrap-up is longer than usual. I tried to rein it in, but the words kept coming. I encourage you to read to the end, because that’s where I turn toward what this moment is actually asking of us. Many are feeling lost right now - unsure how to respond, what matters, or how to stay effective as things unravel. Most of all, there’s the question of how we live alongside those who keep their hearts closed even in the face of such cruelty and injustice. I offer some grounded guidance on that at the end, which you may find useful. I hope you’ll stick with it and read to the end.
Let’s make meaning of the madness,
Trace the architecture beneath the chaos,
And walk forward with eyes open,
Tuned to the clarity blooming beneath collapse.
**The cosmic insights shared here are mapped to the real movements of the heavens during the past week. If you want to know more about planetary pattern recognition, read about it here**
A Bridge Too Far
In January 2016, in a packed gymnasium in Iowa - deep in the pressure cooker of the Republican primary, just days before the Iowa caucuses - Donald Trump was under fire for mocking a reporter with a disability. While his campaign braced for backlash in an era where scandals still had consequences, Trump did the opposite of what any other candidate would have done and instead of apologising, he paused mid-speech and made what sounded like a grotesque joke.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” he said, grinning, “and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
The crowd laughed. Then they cheered. At the time it was shocking, but as time has passed, it’s become clear this was one of the key moments where the United States veered off onto a dark path towards the moment we’re in now. It was Trump (and the rest of us) discovering, in real time, that outrage no longer constrained power, that loyalty could detach itself from morality, and that consequences could be made optional if you were loud enough, cruel enough, and rewarded often enough.
That moment was a stress test the nation failed. It showed Trump he could flirt openly with violence and still be applauded. Everything that followed flows from that realisation. For nearly a decade, that morbid boast has played out not as a warning, but as a blueprint. Trump never had to pull a trigger on Fifth Avenue - instead, he helped create and normalise conditions in which lawlessness wasn’t merely tolerated but celebrated, and in time, everyday Americans were left to enact the violence he had normalised, so he didn’t have to.
When a violent intruder nearly murdered the Speaker’s husband, Paul Pelosi, Trump’s allies searched for excuses rather than accountability, turning an act of political violence into fodder for conspiracy and mockery.
When Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence was set on fire in a politically motivated arson attack while his family slept inside, the response from the right was muted, even as prosecutors described the act as terrorism.
When a federal judge’s home burned in a high-profile fire last year, following sustained threats against members of the judiciary, it barely registered among Trump’s supporters as an assault on the rule of law.
When Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed in what authorities described as a targeted political attack, Trump responded not with reflection or restraint, but by redirecting blame and escalating rhetoric about his opponents.
And of course there was January 6 - an outright domestic attack on the Capitol, carried out in his name. Hundreds of participants were later prosecuted and imprisoned, but after returning to the presidency, Trump issued pardons and clemency to many of those involved, while recasting the violence as a misunderstanding and portraying the police who defended the Capitol as the real aggressors.
Time and again, Trump has stoked the very kind of violence he once boasted he could get away with. And time and again, those around him waved him through, refusing to draw a line as he trampled norms, institutions, and principles the country once claimed to hold sacred.
But as we entered this new year, something shifted.
When U.S. forces carried out a large-scale military operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture and removal of President Nicolas Maduro - an action widely condemned by international legal experts as a violation of sovereignty and the UN Charter - the reaction was no longer reflexive applause. As Venezuelan officials reported that dozens were killed in the operation, and global outrage followed, many long-time supporters balked.
Commentators who had defended Trump for years publicly broke ranks, calling the action reckless, illegal, and destabilising. While Fox News, unsurprisingly, went straight into singing Trump’s praises, Megyn Kelly - hardly a habitual critic of Trump - likened the breathless cheerleading to Russian state propaganda. That break mattered. It signalled that something fundamental had snapped.
Trump’s foreign adventurism didn’t consolidate his base - it fractured it. Abroad, it repelled allies and alarmed governments already uneasy with an America that appeared willing to act as a rogue state.
And then came the shot heard far beyond U.S. borders this week, when a federal ICE agent shot and killed a civilian in Minneapolis during an enforcement operation. Trump may have once thought he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, but it turned out that bullets fired on the streets of Minneapolis were a bridge too far entirely.
ICE Cold Murder in Minneapolis
In the quiet chill of January 7, 37‑year‑old Renee Nicole Good had just dropped her six‑year‑old off at school when the ordinary morning broke open. Federal ICE agents, part of a broad enforcement operation most of Minneapolis didn’t yet know was underway, rolled through her neighborhood in force - masked, sudden, and like an occupying presence on residential streets.
Renee wasn’t their target. She wasn’t named in a warrant. She was simply a mother of three heading home with her wife, Rebecca, and their dog. A poet, a singer, a churchgoing Christian, Renee pulled her maroon Honda Pilot into the street and stopped, partially blocking a lane. According to Rebecca, she was there “to support her neighbors.”
A silver SUV pulled up on the passenger side, and its masked driver - a federal ICE agent - got out and began filming Renee with his phone. Rebecca had stepped out of the car and was also filming while residents up and down the block were doing the same, capturing the scene from multiple angles as the agent circled Renee’s car.
As he passed her open driver’s side window, Renee addressed him calmly. “That’s fine, dude,” she said, smiling. “I’m not mad at you.”
Behind the car, Rebecca’s tone was sharper. “Hey, show your face, big boy,” she called out. As the agent continued filming the vehicle’s rear license plate, she added, “We don’t change our plates every morning, just so you know. It’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us later.”
As she turned to get back into the passenger seat of Good’s car, Rebecca confirmed she was a U.S. citizen and then said, “You want to come at us? Go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Go ahead.”
That’s when a second SUV arrived - this one on the driver’s side - and two more masked agents stepped out and approached Renee’s window shouting, “Get out of the car! Get out of the f*cking car!”
As the first agent moved in front of her vehicle, still filming with his phone, one of the new agents - wearing a full black balaclava - reached through Renee’s open window and yanked at the door. There was no explanation, just the hand of a masked man invading her space.
Renee did what anyone might do when strangers shout and reach into your car: she tried to leave. She put the car in reverse, straightened out, and began turning away from the officers. As she slowly pulled forward to the right, the first agent raised his weapon and fired, while still filming with the phone in his hand.
He wasn’t in her path. He wasn’t trapped. The wheels of Renee’s car were turned away from him. But still, he shot three times. One bullet punched through the windshield. Two more ripped through the driver’s side window. “F*cking bitch,” he muttered after shooting her in the face, as Renee’s car drifted up the street, struck a parked vehicle, and came to rest against a utility pole.
Rebecca ran down the street after the car, but no agents rushed to Renee’s aid or checked to see if she was alive. The man who fired the shots simply walked away, visibly unhurt, while Renee sat slumped over the steering wheel.
Videos filmed by neighbors captured what followed: Rebecca collapsed in the snow, cradling their dog, weeping and rocking as she cried out that it was her fault - she had told Renee to turn the car around.
A man identifying himself as a doctor tried to approach the vehicle to render aid but was blocked by ICE agents. “I’m a doctor,” he said. “I don’t care,” one agent responded.
Bystanders began shouting, “Where are the medics?!” to which agents replied, “We have our own medics.” But witnesses say first responders were delayed for almost six minutes because ICE vehicles blocked access to the scene while Renee remained motionless and Rebecca wept openly in the snow-covered street.
Eventually, unable to bring a stretcher to the vehicle, ICE agents opened the driver’s side door and lifted Renee’s body by her arms and legs, her limbs hanging slack as they carried her down the street and laid her on the pavement at a nearby corner. Only then did CPR begin, but it was far too late.
Renee Good was dead - shot and killed on an ordinary street, in the aftermath of a routine school drop-off, by men who were sworn to protect and serve.
Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes and Ears
Within minutes of the killing, videos of the incident went viral on social media, offering the world clear visual evidence of exactly what happened. But almost as quickly as the footage spread, Trump and his acolytes rushed to every available microphone to tell their supporters not to believe their lying eyes, framing Renee as a dangerous leftist agitator who had tried to ram police with her car.
"The officer was hit by the vehicle,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said. “She hit him. He went to the hospital. A doctor did treat him. He has been released, but he's going to spend some time with his family."
Video of the incident suggests the officer was not hit by the vehicle, nor did he sustain injuries worthy of a hospital visit, but, never one to let the truth get in the way of a good story, Trump piled on, issuing his own tweet filled with lies.
“I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota,” he wrote online. “The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital….the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis.”
But none of that was true either. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara contradicted Trump, saying that Renee Good was the only person injured during the incident, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz made it clear, “We do not need any further help from the federal government. To Donald Trump and Kristi Noem, you’ve done enough. I’ve issued a warning order to prepare the Minnesota National Guard….Minnesota will not allow our community to be used as a prop in a national political fight.”
Representative Robin Kelly went a step further, moving to impeach Kristi Noem altogether. “I am impeaching Secretary Kristi Noem, who is an incompetent leader and a disgrace to our democracy,” Kelly wrote online. “She wreaked havoc in the Chicagoland area and has brought her reign of terror to Minneapolis. One of her rogue ICE agents shot and killed an innocent woman today. It must come to an end.”
Sensing the narrative slipping, Team Trump escalated. J.D. Vance was dispatched to bludgeon the press, insisting the shooting was justified, repeating the disputed claim that Renee tried to strike an agent with her car. He called her death “a tragedy of her own making,” casting her not as a civilian but as a radical enemy of law and order.
The ICE agent who killed Good was identified as Jonathan E Ross, a 10-year veteran of the special response team of ICE’s enforcement and removal operation who in June last year had been dragged by a vehicle while participating in the arrest of an undocumented immigrant and a prior criminal conviction. Vance accused journalists and critics of “gaslighting” the public for failing to empathize with the ICE officer’s fear of cars. “That very officer nearly had his life ended six months ago - 33 stitches in his leg,” Vance ranted. “So maybe he’s a little sensitive about being rammed with an automobile?”
“If you want to say this woman’s death is a tragedy, that we should pray for her soul as Christians and Americans, then I agree with you,” Vance wrote later online. “But … does this law enforcement officer have a family? Yes. Did he get seriously injured by a vehicle just six months ago? Yes. Did he have a reason to fear for his life? Yes. Does he have every right to safety while he’s doing his job? Yes.”
The public performance and the posting only intensified the backlash, not just against the shooting itself, but against the decision to return a clearly traumatised “trigger-happy” officer to duty. The outpouring of grief and outrage was palpable across the globe. By nightfall, a large crowd of thousands of peaceful protesters gathered in the frigid cold streets of Minneapolis, holding a vigil for Renee and standing in defiance of ICE’s brutality. Protests soon spread to other major cities, as leaders from all sides condemned the killing as avoidable and unjustified. Locals drew stark parallels to past abuses of power - like the killing of George Flloyd, which ironically happened just streets away from where Renee Good was killed - and questioned why a poetry-loving mother became a casualty of a federal crackdown.
For the first time in a long time, Trump’s old Fifth Avenue bravado misfired. This wasn’t abstract rhetoric anymore - this was bullets in broad daylight, and America, and the world, flinched.
Changed for Good
Within hours of Renee Good’s death, something startling happened back in Washington: Republicans in Congress voted to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies that they spent months last year fighting against. Even as Trump publicly threatened retribution if they dared move forward on those very measures, 17 Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats to ensure Americans retained access to affordable healthcare for another three years. Just one day later, 5 Republicans crossed the floor of the Senate to join Democrats in passing a War Powers Resolution aimed at limiting Trump’s ability to launch further attacks on Venezuela without congressional approval - an extraordinary move in a Republican-controlled chamber.
It was as if the horror of the moment had broken something open - a crack in the concrete where conscience finally began to leak through. The lawlessness and cruelty of the year’s first week jolted even the most spineless lawmakers out of their stupor, and for a fleeting moment, they reclaimed the power they had long surrendered.
After shots were fired in Minneapolis, Trump bled support like never before. The myth of unconditional loyalty cracked, not because Democrats finally made a case, but because a country watching its government kill one of its own couldn’t pretend anymore that lawless power without consequence was normal. Like waking from a dream to find the bed on fire, something snapped, and in a rare alignment of politics and planets, the Republican shift mirrored the sky: as Neptune and Saturn transition from Pisces (the dream) to Aries (the fire), even the most deluded began to feel the burn.
As always, there was a slice of the population that swallowed the lies with gusto, who watched the footage of a mother gunned down in her SUV and responded with meme warfare and macho glee. Kyle Rittenhouse - best known for crossing state lines to shoot and kill two people with an AR-15–style rifle during the 2020 protests - seized the moment to reinsert himself into the theatre of violence that once made him famous by posting online, asking whether he should “travel across state lines to Minnesota.” A tragedy that cracked open millions was, for him, just another chance to audition for the role of hero in the psychodrama of American fascism.
Around him, the usual chorus followed: mockery, justifications, and the reflexive claim that empathy is weakness - a worldview pushed by men so afraid of the world that they armor themselves with bullets and call it strength - but something about this moment and this particular horror, followed by the coldness of the official response, cracked something deeper in the collective.
People from all over the world took to social media to send the message loud and clear that they saw the truth with their own eyes. From Ballarat in Australia to Reading in England, from East Sussex to the West Midlands, ordinary people posted nearly identical messages:
“We saw the videos. We know the truth. We know it was murder.”
Posts came in from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, London, Derbyshire, and the Isle of Lewis. Others spoke from Finland, Sweden, Germany, and Korea, all echoing the same words - variations of a single, undeniable verdict.
This wasn’t a coordinated campaign. It wasn’t bots or branding. It was something rawer: a decentralized, human uprising against gaslighting. Across multiple platforms, strangers in dozens of cities bore witness in real time, pushing back against the official lies with clarity, grief, and moral certainty. They didn’t shout - they stated. They didn’t argue - they testified. And their message traveled farther and faster than any press release: The world is watching. The world knows what it saw.
The world saw the truth, felt it deep within, and that truth cracked something open, allowing the grief inside. People across the globe posted that they spent the day crying. That they couldn’t stop. That the grief ran deeper than usual. We’ve witnessed atrocities before, but somehow, Renee Good’s murder hit different.
Maybe the clue was in her name: Renee, meaning reborn. Nicole, meaning victory of the people. The rebirth of the people’s victory, toward the common Good.
Maybe the clue was in the sky, with heavy planetary pressure on truth, power, and conscience, stripping away the stories we tell to avoid feeling, thinning the veils that let us look away, and pushing emotion out of abstraction and into the body. It was a sky that made denial more difficult, empathy harder to dodge, and moral consequence harder to outsource. A sky that forced a choice: armour or heart, fear or feeling, domination or humanity.
While some chose fear, many millions more chose feeling. They felt it fully and let it break them open, and in that breaking, something began. A quieter beckoning - a call to coherence. It was as if, after years of trying to mentally digest the indigestible, the mind gave in and finally called for backup.
Modern neuroscience tells us that the part of the brain we rely on most - the analytical, language-driven mind - was never designed to hold raw meaning or metabolize grief. Its role is to categorize and explain, not to feel or know. When reality becomes too alive, too morally charged, too human to be reduced to concepts, that system collapses under the weight. And when it does, something older steps forward - the part of us that apprehends truth not through argument, but through presence. Through feeling. Through recognition. That’s what happened for millions of us this week.
When they came for George Floyd, the mind clocked the injustice, but also found ways to compartmentalize it. When Putin invaded Ukraine, the mind gasped in horror, but managed to box it in, make it distant and manageable. When Gaza was blown off the map, the mind rightly raged, and then troops on the streets, then Bondi, then Brown University, after every other shooting on every other day in the land of the free and the home of the brave, and then Venezuela…..and then, Minneapolis.
There was no way to think this one away. No way to explain it. No way to categorize it as distant, expected, or abstract. Many pointed out that black people have been dealing with this kind of injustice for decades, and that only now that it was a white woman shot by a white cop were the general population outraged. There’s a truth in that observation that is both uncomfortable and prescient - white people make up the majority of Trump’s MAGA base, so the image of one of their own being shot by one of their own serves as a shocking wake-up call. They’re not just coming for the black and brown people now - they’re coming for us all.
What happened to Renee Good was too close, too raw and too real. The mind literally could not metabolise it. And when the intellect can’t make sense of what’s going on - it has two choices. Shut down entirely or reach for something deeper. Something wiser and more sacred.
In that wave of collective heartbreak, for millions across the world, the heart came online - not as sentiment, but as signal. As frequency. A current that’s been building beneath the surface for years, now finally breaking through.
The skies have been warning us that in 2026, after centuries of suppression, this would be the year that the frequency of the heart came roaring back online. What few expected was that such an awakening would be triggered by tragedy - the heart bursting back online not in a moment of collective joy but in a wave of sacred sorrow.
The Golden Threads of Light
There is no bright side to an innocent woman being shot in her car by masked men on a quiet suburban street. We are not meant to witness something like that and find a way to feel okay about it. We are not meant to reframe murder into metaphor, to turn state-sanctioned cruelty into a teachable moment. Not in Minneapolis. Not in Gaza. Not in Venezuela or in Ukraine. Some acts are not puzzles to solve or problems to fix - they are ruptures. They are mirrors. They are the sound of something breaking that was never supposed to hold in the first place.
For years now, we’ve been trying to think our way through collapse as systems fail and injustices surge, trying to process it all through the mind, as if with enough logic or data or sharp analysis, we might outmanoeuvre the mounting heartbreak. But the killing of Renee Good wasn’t a moment for the mind. It was a moment that bypassed intellect and broke straight into the heart.
That’s because the old world’s operating system is failing - the one that was built from the neck up. Ours is a civilization rooted in the mind, disconnected from the soul, and divorced from the heart, where we’ve lived like we’re just these bodies, just this brain, just this fear, and from that limited understanding, we built everything: our politics, our borders, our economies, our weapons, and our walls.
Because the mind fears what it cannot control, we built a world of control.
Because the mind fears death, we built systems to dominate.
Because the mind fears lack, we gathered and hoarded.
Because it fears pain, we armored up.
And because the mind cannot feel, we lost touch with each other entirely.
Somewhere along the line, we forgot we were souls - eternal sparks of consciousness having a life experience in a human vessel. We forgot the golden threads of light that connect us - heart to heart, being to being - and we became a species flying emotionally blind.
With fear in charge, the heart shut down, and the golden threads went dark, and for centuries, we’ve been stumbling around in that darkness, wondering why the world feels so lonely, brutal, and numb. But now, at last, the heart frequency is coming back online, as the stars herald the long-awaited return of a signal we’ve been without for thousands of years - a deeper coherence, a buried frequency, the forgotten hum of the human soul remembering itself.
Right on cue, at the dawn of this hinge year, that signal is leaking back into the field, just as the stars foretold.
A Return to Heart Coherence
Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist has spent decades documenting what happens when civilizations mistake analysis for wisdom, and what emerges when that spell finally breaks. In healthy cultures, he explains, the part of the mind that perceives living reality leads, and the part that categorizes and explains follows. In ours, that order was reversed long ago. We built a world run by abstraction, control, and certainty, while silencing the faculty that knows meaning, relationship, and moral weight. What broke open this week wasn’t sentimentality - it was a long-suppressed mode of heart-led knowing finally reasserting itself under pressure.
This is the deeper story of 2026, the year everything begins to turn back towards the heart - a hinge year, not just in history, but in frequency, as a rare convergence of planetary forces reshapes the very architecture of how we sense, feel, and orient, with Pluto razing dead systems in Aquarius, Saturn and Neptune colliding at the first degree of Aries (the Genesis Reset), Uranus cracking open cognition in Gemini, and Jupiter setting fire to self-expression in Leo.
I wrote about this in detail below, if you’d like to see the detailed map of the year ahead:
It’s not collapse for collapse’s sake, but collapse to clear the frequency. The old world - built by the mind, ruled by control, and kept alive through domination and detachment - is out of sync with what’s coming. And what’s coming is not a new ideology - it’s a new coherence. A return to the original intelligence of the heart.
This is the deeper context for what’s breaking right now. The mind doesn’t know how to metabolize grief like this - it wants to solve, reframe, or just quietly move on, but the universe isn’t having it. It’s forcing us deeper, down into our hearts, to the place that understands that moments like this are not just tragedy, they are thresholds. They are what happens when the frequency starts to shift, and the systems built to suppress feeling can no longer hold.
This is how the signal returns. Not through media or policy, but through grief and the unbearable recognition that what happened to Renee Good should never happen to anyone, and yet it could have been anyone. And that truth, when it lands, doesn’t just hurt - it recalibrates.
This is what it looks like when a civilization starts to feel again - when we see Renee Good’s body slumped over that wheel and something inside us aches, like it was our own. That’s the golden thread lighting up, open heart to open heart. When we can feel the grief of her partner, Rebecca, huddling in the snow clutching her dog, as if the loss were our own. That’s what happened this week in Minneapolis. Yes a crime, but also a collective coherence event, where the web of golden threads of light that bind us all together lit up in a brilliant display of love and deep recognition that goes far beyond the mind.
Renee Good’s death didn’t just spark outrage - it triggered remembrance. Millions didn’t just scroll past. They stopped, they cried, and they felt, not out of sentiment, but out of sacred recognition. Her killing pierced the veil that the mind has kept in place, and in that rupture, something ancient began to pour in.
For some, it was too much. They clung to the old worldview, the one that keeps the gun close and the heart sealed tight. They lashed out, mocked the grief, doubled down on cruelty, because to feel this moment fully would be to admit that everything they were taught to believe - about strength, about justice, about safety - was a lie.
But there were millions who let the grief in. They let it wreck them, and in that wrecking, something holy stirred.
This is the heart frequency - not a feeling, but a force. It’s what comes online when the mind finally bows out. It’s what floods through the body when you realize you can’t intellectualize this pain away. It’s what wakes up when you remember that love is not sentimental - it’s elemental.
And it’s what will build the world that comes next, after the old world has fallen.
Grief That Grows Coherence
As we move deeper into 2026, the outer world will only grow more chaotic as it collapses, throwing up wave after wave of collective grief, each one designed to activate the heart. The heart frequency doesn’t return in a flurry of butterflies, kittens, and rainbows. It returns through feeling, through ache and through sorrow that breaks the heart space open.
This frequency calls us back to the place where we can feel one another’s feelings. Not just intellectually understand them, but actually feel them directly, as if they were our own.
Many right now are watching the new television show Pluribus, which (spoiler alert) imagines a society overtaken by a hive mind - a world where millions of people think each other’s thoughts, share one central intelligence, and move through life in a kind of soulless, collective autopilot. It’s a world that looks polite on the surface, but underneath, no one has agency or feeling, like a shared mind with no soul.
Thankfully, that is not what’s ahead for humanity.
The coherence now returning isn’t about shared thought - it’s about shared feeling. As the heart frequency rises, our thoughts remain our own but our feelings begin to harmonize. To help another feels like helping yourself, and to harm another becomes unthinkable, because to do so would feel like harming yourself.
When hearts are open, the golden threads of light that connect us - heart to heart, being to being - begin to illuminate, carrying feeling back and forth like a living nervous system. No words required - the heart just knows and it informs the mind.
We already understand this in our relationships with children and animals. Parents feel it with babies who can’t yet speak, but whose needs are somehow known - felt directly through the golden tether, translated from one open heart to another and passed to the mind. Pet owners feel it when they look into their dog’s eyes and just know they want to play, or sense when their cat wants to go outside. This is heart-level communication, and it’s only going to grow stronger as more hearts awaken in the months and years to come.
But the threads only light up when the hearts at both ends are open. In a world built for the mind, many hearts have long been closed. The tethers are still there, just dormant, and sleeping, waiting for grief, beauty, or love to light them up.
This week, many said they felt as if their hearts couldn’t contain the sorrow - that letting it in might actually break them. But that’s a misunderstanding of the heart’s capacity. No heart is at risk of breaking. The soul’s space is infinite and eternal - unlike your mind and your physical body, it cannot be harmed. The mind knows to protect itself, because it senses it’s own impermanence, and because that is all it knows, it seeks to protect the heart and soul too. It sends out the thought that says, “Don’t let that feeling in, it’s a threat, it could break your heart.” It’s trying to protect the one part of you that needs no protection.
When your mind tells you your heart is breaking, what it’s sensing isn’t damage - it’s release. What’s perceived as breaking is actually your heart expanding and cracking out of the cage the mind has long kept it in to keep it safe. It’s the heart center activating as your soul reclaims space in your own body.
So don’t numb it.
Don’t outrun it.
Don’t rationalize it.
Go toward it.
Anchor yourself in that breaking-open feeling. Your heart won’t shatter because your soul is not fragile. The deepest part of you is unbreakable. What’s happening is not collapse, but communication. Your heart is speaking. Listen.
We are not going to get through what comes next by living only in our minds, as we have for so long. Analysis alone won’t carry us. Arguments won’t either. What’s required now is heart-led clarity. This is quite literally the frequency of the new world coming online as the old one rages violently on its way out.
Let it.
You don’t have to feel good about anything right now.
Feel sorrow, because it’s sacred.
Feel rage, because there is truth there too.
But take it all to your heart, not away from it. Let the anger, the grief, the fury move through the center of your being so it can be refined into something that knows what to do next.
This is not a time for spiritual bypassing. Not a time for “everything happens for a reason” or forced optimism. This is a time to take the despair, the injustice, the heartbreak - all of it - straight into the core of your soul and let it move.
Your heart can take it.
Your soul can take it.
When these feelings are allowed to flow through the heart instead of being suppressed or displaced by the mind, that’s when the soul can begin to inform the mind. The heart informs the head, not the other way around.
This is how the new world begins to rise, not out there first, but within us. Through hearts that are awake, alive, and unafraid to feel what this moment actually asks of us.
Stay with your heart. It knows the next step, even if your mind doesn’t yet. This is not the breaking of the world; it is the remembering of the heart, and only a heart that feels deeply is fit to shape what comes next.
What of the Closed Heart?
But what of those who keep their hearts clamped shut in this moment?
What of figures like Kyle Rittenhouse, who appears to believe that standing up to a masked man with a gun warrants state-sanctioned murder? Or J.D. Vance and Kristi Noem, who rush to spin lies rather than join the rest of us in grief at the needless loss of innocent life? Or Jonathan Ross himself, who pulled the trigger while calling his target a “f**king bitch,” then walked away without offering aid as her life drained from her body? Or Donald Trump and Stephen Miller - architects of this cruelty - who see no reason to pause or reckon, even as blood soaks the ground beneath their policies?
What do we do with the closed-hearted? And how do we open hearts that are determined to stay closed?
This is the central conundrum of the age. Because if we are truly moving in the language of the heart, then we force nothing. Force is the language of fear - the antithesis of love. If we open our hearts to the death of Renee Good and allow that grief to light the golden threads that bind us, then trying to coerce others into feeling would only darken those threads again. We cannot midwife a heart-led world by returning to the frequency of fear.
From an open heart, we do not hurl abuse online. We do not dox murderous ICE agents to ensure they never knows peace again, no matter how good it might make us feel in the moment. From an open heart, we do not seek vengeance as a substitute for justice.
The urge to punish the closed-hearted does not arise from love, but from another closed heart. We do not rise into coherence by periodically shutting our hearts down so we can smite our perceived enemies. This is not an episode of Dexter, where cruelty and violence becomes permissible as long as it’s aimed in the “right” direction. That’s the thinking that led us here, and it will not lead us out.
If we want a world led by the heart, then we must lead with ours - even here, in this moment. Especially here.
Those perpetrating or condoning violence right now are not possessed by demons, nor acting under the spell of some satanic force intent on turning Earth into a private hellscape. This isn’t Vecna in the Upside Down. There is no Pennywise lurking behind the curtain. Blaming bad behaviour on evil spirits is a convenient trick of the mind to avoid us facing the truth that what most people call “evil” is usually something far more ordinary and far more tragic: a human being who has allowed their inner light to go out.
A human operating entirely from the mind, cut off from the heart. A human who has lived in the dark so long that the light now feels like an assault. Like being woken from deep sleep by a flashlight in the eyes. The light burns not because it is cruel, but because it is unfamiliar.
These people are not our enemy, no matter how evil we think they are. All human beings are seperate expressions of the one consciousness, so there can be no “us versus them,” not when you really get down to it. This is not light versus dark, because darkness is not the enemy of the light - it is simply the absence of it. And the light does not fight the dark and nor does it argue with it. It simply illuminates.
Dealing With the Dark
In the face of Trump’s fascist capture of American power, millions across the world are crying out, “Do something!” as if there must be a dramatic action capable of stopping the most powerful and unhinged man on Earth from wielding the tools at his disposal. As if the darkness he inhabits could be chased away by us closing our hearts and joining him there to bludgeon him with our light.
That is not how this works. And it is not the way out.
Donald Trump is not possessed by some external evil. He’s a human who made a choice to repeatedly snuff out his own light and hold himself in the dark. The darkness is his preference - it’s where he thrives. But darkness cannot be sustained in the presence of light, which is why he keeps baiting us all to snuff ours out.
What eradicates darkness is light. So if you want to know what to do - what action to take in this moment - it is this:
Tend your inner light.
Tend to your heart, not just your head.
Go inward, not outward.
Seek the stillness - the place of the soul.
Let the larger part of you rise and illuminate your heart-space.
There will be those who say that shining brightly in a moment like this is a cop-out - that you can’t meet guns and bombs with peace and prayers - but that response itself arises from a closed heart locked in fear, offering directions that only lead deeper into the dark. The only response to darkness is light, just as the only response to fear is love.
That is how this darkness is addressed, with illumination.
And it is the only way the new world begins.
Learning the Language of the Soul
The truth is, most of us were never taught how to tend that inner light. We’ve been trained almost exclusively into the mind - into language, logic, and analysis - and left largely uninitiated into the ways of the soul. The soul does not speak in words. It speaks in feeling, resonance, and frequency, and we don’t access it by thinking harder or consuming more information. There is no spell to recite and no book that automatically opens the heart. The doorway only appears when the mind loosens its grip.
Because the soul speaks the language of frequency, sound and music are among the most direct paths inward. That’s why I’m so grateful to share the words from my Daily Lighthouse posts with The Resonance Room each day, where they are carefully set to music. The words engage the mind, the music reaches the heart, and when both are activated together, something begins to illuminate from within.
If you’re moving through this moment without any regular practice that tends to your heart and soul, the months and years ahead are likely to feel unnecessarily heavy. We’re being asked now to live from a deeper center - to move through the world anchored in the soul, not just the intellect - so that our presence itself becomes a source of light.
I invite you to listen to the short ten-minute sound activation from The Resonance Room below, and simply notice what happens as you listen. Pay attention to how your body responds. Notice what feelings arise, what images drift through your awareness, what softens or opens. This isn’t magic. It’s coherence - the natural result of bringing the full intelligence of the human being back online, heart and mind together.
If you resonate with the offering, each morning a new sound activation can land in your inbox - let that be how you start your day. Just ten minutes as you lie in bed, anchoring yourself in the frequency of the soul before you launch into the world. This is how we move forward with light and illumination. This is how we deal with the dark.
Let this be the moment we stopped bracing and started breaking open.
Not to collapse, but to feel.
Not to fall apart, but to remember that we were never meant to do any of this alone.
Some will run from this moment. Some will harden, double down, cling tighter to the old story. But many will begin to remember. Remember that this way of living is not normal. That it never was. That we are not minds encased in meat, clawing for safety in a hostile world. We are living, feeling, interconnected beings, and the world we build next will either be shaped by that knowing, or it will not survive.
2026 is not the end.
It is the ignition.
It is the moment a long-detuned instrument finally finds its true pitch, and everything that has learned to survive through distortion begins to strain. What cannot resonate with the real or survive in the light will start to crumble, not because we are doomed, but because false structures cannot hold once coherence returns.
And coherence is returning.
We were never meant to live through rupture after rupture, but if we must, let us use these moments of hardship, grief and despair not to harden, but to open. To break the heart wide enough that love has room to move through us again. To remind us that we are not here merely to endure, but to feel, and from that feeling, to rebuild.
Not the old world.
But the true one.
The one that hums in harmony.
The one the soul remembers.
The one where the heart leads.
See you next Sunday, friends. Until then, have COURAGE, and stay kind, stay fierce, and stay human.
I came to some realizations years ago that make all this really resonate with me. First, the opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s fear, and negative emotions like hate all flow from fear. In the same vein, all positive emotions like joy and happiness flow from love. Then it came to me that fear is really only an illusion that dissolves in the light of love. Of course, realizing all this and actually living it are two different things! Your words keep bringing me back to it, so thank you very much for helping me return to my heart. My equilibrium has been severely upset with both personal and global issues. Thank you for being a steadying force.❤️
I laughed; Rubio entering the defense with a mop and thesaurus.
I deeply felt; the litany of bizarre events in just the first week of 2026
I understood; the planetary movements and their energy you have been charting throughout the past year.
It’s not a pretty picture but I feel more grounded about what is happening and what is ahead when I read about the cosmic blueprint connection. Consciousness, heart energy and the threads of light connecting everything is a furthering focus. Fear can no longer be in charge of the radio stations while I’m driving through this era.
Sunday morning with Wiz. Whew. Thanks.