A Five-Alarm Fire in Minnesota
The Trump administration experiments with dictatorship
My last post was a long, meandering conversation with myself about my outrage at the shooting death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE officer in Minneapolis and my accompanying fear of protesters providing Donald Trump with the pretext he needs to go much further in imposing militarized authoritarianism on the country.
Well, events on the ground over the past several days have now pushed me beyond my default state of ambivalence (not to say fatalism). Not only did the administration and its media cheerleaders respond to the Good shooting by lying about and demonizing the victim while valorizing the shooter. They also used the event as an occasion to intensify ICE’s actions in the Twin Cities. According to Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, there are currently 3,000 ICE officers swarming the city. That’s five times the total number of officers who work on the city’s entire police force. And they are behaving like what they are: Jackbooted storm troopers who know they can act with impunity in inflicting violence on anyone they wish—undocumented immigrants, permanent residents, and American citizens.
I remain deeply uncertain about what we can and should do about this dawning reality—and I’ll return to that question in the final section of this post—but there is value in simply documenting the reality in its appalling details. I think it is now undeniable that the Trump administration is experimenting with the imposition of outright fascism on the Twin Cities, almost certainly as a prelude to expanding it elsewhere as circumstances and resources permit. We need to have our eyes wide open about this as we prepare for more, and worse.
