What if There Were No Cameras?
What else is happening?
“On January 23, 2016, Donald Trump notoriously declared, ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.’ That statement was understood at the time as a metaphorical expression of the depth of Republican voters’ commitment to him. Ten years and one day later, his administration’s agents shot a disarmed man on the street in full view of the public…. What was once seen as a joke has attained the status of a prophecy. — Jonathan Chait
We find ourselves in a genuinely extraordinary moment.
For years, the president has built a universe of falsehoods. Donald Trump lies with such facility that we no longer bother to keep count. Over the years, he has created a culture of lies and surrounded himself with lackeys eager to mangle truth in his service. So, we should hardly be shocked that lies suffuse everything that comes from the Administration.
This weekend, the Administration continues to lie with an absolute confidence that they can bend truth to their whim — even to the extent of telling Americans to ignore the clear evidence of their eyes. Writes the NYT’s Peter Baker:
Without waiting for facts, the Trump team has advanced one-sided narratives to justify each of the killings and demonize the victims. Renee Good, a mother of three, was engaged in “domestic terrorism” and “viciously ran over the ICE Officer,” they declared. Alex Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse at a veterans’ hospital, was an “assassin” aiming to “massacre law enforcement.”
But the problem is that “the Trump versions of reality have collided with bystander videos watched by millions who did not see what they were told. Ms. Good did not run over the ICE agent who killed her; a video analysis suggested she was trying to turn away from him and he continued to shoot her even as she passed him. Mr. Pretti approached officers with a phone in his hand, not a gun; he moved to help a woman who was pepper sprayed and he was under a pileup of agents when one suddenly shot him in the back.”
Let’s pause on this for a moment: Here is the full text of the Trump Administration’s version of the killing of Alex Pretti.
At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here.
The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming. Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene.
The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID—this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.
About 200 rioters arrived at the scene and began to obstruct and assault law enforcement on the scene, crowd control measures were deployed for the safety of the public and law enforcement. This situation is evolving, and more information is forthcoming.
Now that we have seen the actual videos — and all of the analysis — we know that almost every word is false. See:
The Wall Street Journal: “Videos of Fatal Shooting of Alex Pretti Contradict U.S. Account in Minneapolis”
Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis - The New York Times
Videos of deadly Minneapolis shooting contradict government statements - ABC News
Videos show agent secured gun from Pretti before fatal shooting in Minnesota - The Washington Post
Watch: Videos refute DHS account of fatal shooting in Minneapolis : NPR
The videos expose the DHS statement as an Orwellian parody. Indeed, Kristi Noem’s desperate spin was too much even for Bari Weiss’s Free Press, which denounced “Kristi Noem’s Reckless Lies.”
This has been a pattern for the Trump administration. After the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, Noem gave an account of the incident soon contradicted by video footage and called Good a “domestic terrorist,” despite zero evidence that she fit that description.
But as my colleague Matt Lewis and other have asked:
What if we did not have those videos? How many Americans would have believed this? Or given the Administration the benefit of the doubt?
This raises another — and rather urgent — question.
What else is happening that we are not seeing on camera? What else is going on at the hands of an organization that thrives on cruelty porn and is willing to execute American citizens in broad daylight? What are they doing when no one is watching?
What’s happening in the camps? What’s happening in the warehouses?
In Texas, an ICE inmate’s death has been ruled a homicide, but government agents claim it was a suicide. What’s the truth? And will anyone ever be held accountable?
Exit take: The optimist in me would like to believe that this is a breaking point, because the lies are too obvious, and the brutality too much for Americans’ latent sense of decency.
The much darker possibility is that Trump's prophecy will come true. And that he has vulgarized and brutalized our culture to the point where people either believe the lies or simply do not care.
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Jonathan Rauch uses the F-Word
Yes, It’s Fascism - The Atlantic
Over Trump’s past year, what originally looked like an effort to make the government his personal plaything has drifted distinctly toward doctrinal and operational fascism. Trump’s appetite for lebensraum, his claim of unlimited power, his support for the global far right, his politicization of the justice system, his deployment of performative brutality, his ostentatious violation of rights, his creation of a national paramilitary police—all of those developments bespeak something more purposeful and sinister than run-of-the-mill greed or gangsterism.
When the facts change, I change my mind. Recent events have brought Trump’s governing style into sharper focus. Fascist best describes it, and reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.
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ICYMI, I spoke with Rauch last week:
Monday dogs
Over at my wife’s splendid Substack newsletter, a birthday celebration of our baby Eli, who just turned six.
Six years ago:
We must witness, testify and resist. We must rally others. We must never be silent. We must never be complicit. We must stand.
Keep fighting back.
"But the problem is that 'the Trump versions of reality have collided with bystander videos watched by millions who did not see what they were told.'"
This is what happened with the killing of George Floyd - regardless of how the Black Lives Matter movement ended, it started with the video, and it brought out millions of people across the country, from every demographic you can think of, together in our outrage.
Keep filming the atrocities everyone! Keep uploading them. Let future generations see!