Murder in Minnesota
Trump and DHS are trying to make us distrust the evidence of our own senses
Yesterday’s events in Minnesota were not the first time federal agents under this administration have shot or killed people for protesting its deportation policies.
But it may be the first time they did it in broad daylight—in front of this many witnesses—with this many cameras rolling.
Back in October, a DHS agent shot another driver in Chicago, Marimar Martinez. She lived to share her side of the story.
But DHS had its own narrative ready to go: they said she was armed at the time, that she had tried to “ram” federal agents with her vehicle, etc.
This is apparently the standard government line now. It must be hard trying to make civilians appear a bigger threat than heavily-armed, body-armored, mask-wearing jackbooted federal thugs. The only material DHS has to work with is the vehicles people are driving—so they keep pointing to that.
And so, in the killing yesterday of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, DHS defaulted to that same script.
Good was a “rioter,” they claimed, who had “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them — an act of domestic terrorism.”
Except that this time, the whole world could see video evidence of what happened—and it does not at all line up with DHS’s description.
We see instead a federal agent walk up to a stopped vehicle, swearing profanities.
We see him try to pry open the driver’s side door.
We see the vehicle briefly reverse, then start to pull forward into a turn.
We see another federal agent almost instantly fire multiple shots through the windshield at point-blank range.
The driver was pronounced dead shortly thereafter. She was the mother of a six-year-old child.
What strikes us then about the DHS statement is that it is not only a lie, but a kind of perfect inversion of the truth.
The “terrorism” seems all on the side of a federal government that sends in armed thugs to intimidate a community and ends up shooting a mother in the face.
But go ahead, DHS. Lie to our faces. Tell us the opposite of what we can all see with our own eyes.
Slander the murdered, libel the dead,
burden your guilt on the innocent dead, [...]
call them ‘barbarians,’ you who have murdered —as the poet Harry Alan Potamkin once wrote of Chicago’s Haymarket massacre.
There will inevitably be further investigation of this incident. It’s possible even one or two officers directly involved will take the fall.
But the real guilt for the killing obviously lies with the leadership of this White House and this DHS.
For months, they have deliberately mobilized federal troops and agents to American cities in order to create spectacles of cruelty and violence.
They have slandered whole nationalities and ethnic groups—most recently, Somalis in Minnesota, but Haitians and Venezuelans before them, and countless others—in order to justify organized campaigns of abduction and terror.
And all for—what? For clicks on social media? To placate the administration’s Neo-Nazi Groyper fanboys who will otherwise accuse them of chickening out from going all the way on their white nationalist agenda?
The plain and evident purpose of these high-profile ICE mobilizations all along has been to stir up violence and chaos. Now, behold the results.
Masters of provocation, as Potamkin called the architects of the Haymarket killings.
More than 200 years ago, the British government sent in troops to quell working-class protests in Manchester. The cavalry ended up killing eighteen people and wounding hundreds more.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley learned of these events from Italy. And he did not waste his time examining the record of individual troops involved.
He knew exactly where the real blame for these events lay. He knew who had set the preconditions for inevitable violence and slaughter: the leading members of the British government who had sent in the troops in the first place.
As he wrote in the “Masque of Anarchy,” name-checking each member of the administration in turn:
I met Murder on the way –
He had a mask like Castlereagh –
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
[…]
Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.
[…]
Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.
[…]
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw –
‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’