With stunned disbelief, the world has looked at the stream of images coming to us from Minneapolis, which has quickly become the unlikely epicenter of the greatest threat to democracy in our lifetimes as militarized and violent federal agents abuse bodies, minds, spirits, and trust in their haphazard mission of terror and chaos — the consequence of the $75 billion appropriated and signed into law by President Donald Trump last year.
Our country’s leaders have wasted no time in blaming Renée Good and Alex Pretti, two of many people who have died at the hands of federal agents in recent weeks, for their own deaths at the hands of law enforcement on the ground there — deaths we would not know about but for the courageous citizens who stood in the bitter cold and hit “record.”
In particular, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, wasted no time in blaming Good and Pretti for engaging in domestic terrorism. Apologists and bots have trotted out their usual rote responses — accusations of “paid protestors” taking to the streets, gross mischaracterizations of community behavior, and absolute vilification of immigrants — all designed to derail any reasonable conversation, engage in any spirited debate, or find any common ground about these heartbreaking and needless deaths.
In lawsuits that are grinding their way through the courts, government attorneys dutifully describe the thousands of federal agents who have swarmed into Minneapolis as selfless public servants who are risking life and limb, constantly terrified of the lawless, violent, paid-by-George-Soros Antifa mob.
But something is shifting.
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We have passed the point where the Trump administration can swat away these lethal responses and blame “the radical Left.” Even the National Rifle Association — not exactly a bastion of progressive politics — is publicly warning the administration against “demonizing law-abiding citizens.”
That’s because the world can see this behavior for what it is.
For all the tactical military gear and video game cosplay, the people on the ground in the Twin Cities have something amazingly powerful: the phones in their pockets.
It’s never been easier for ordinary people to capture imagery and to document what is really happening on the ground in Minneapolis and the other cities that are the target of this administration’s attacks.
And the people on the ground are sharing what they film with legal teams, with advocacy organizations, with state authorities, with lawmakers, with broadcast and print journalists, with bloggers, with peers, with the world.
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The world watched what amounts to two documentary snuff films filmed by multiple people from multiple angles.
The world pressed play and heard Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Good in her car, call her a “fucking bitch.” The world watched the screen as an officer mockingly responded “Boo hoo” to distraught onlookers as Alex Pretti’s body, still warm, lay riddled with bullets.
The world saw these agents’ tragically disproportional response to conflict and deadly indifference to public safety, combined with our country’s leaders slandering the victims.
Alex Pretti was not Rambo. Neither was Renée Good. By all accounts from credible sources, Pretti was an extraordinarily kind man who did good in the world and by the world. Good, a mother and a poet, has been described as a woman of faith and compassion.
Our country owes a debt of gratitude to the people who are putting their bodies and their lives on the line for government accountability, who are filming and bringing to light behavior that — partisan politics completely aside — violates every value most of us hold as Americans and as principled, decent human beings who value the lives of others.
We are all journalists these days, and that on-the-ground citizen reporting might save our democracy.
This Voices Editorial was submitted to The Commons.
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