Alex Pretti is the second American citizen to be shot dead in the street in front of a crowd by ICE agents in Minneapolis so far this month, following Renee Good's killing. Both people were well known and beloved by their community. Both were legal observers documenting the unconstitutional activities of federal agents. Pretti was an ICU nurse with the Minneapolis VA whose final act in life was to protect another legal observer from an attacking federal agent. Renee Good's last words, spoken to an ICE agent, were, "That's fine, dude. I’m not mad at you."
Watching national news and social media pick up the story about these killings and the circumstances surrounding them, I've been tracking the spin machine as it divides public discourse into two mutually exclusive narratives, split along predictable partisan lines. The official story about the situation from DHS is so far from reality that it just sounds silly. At the same time, some of the stories activists are telling in the streets about what's happening sound just as silly.
I don't support either political party and I have friends from across the political spectrum. Since I'm not in either party and have different assumptions about the world than party members, I've been having conversations with my friends to try and shed some light on just what all of these people may be thinking.
Red, Blue, and Minneapolis
From what I understand, the red perspective is that democrats systematically break immigration laws so the immigrants will vote illegally for democrats, giving them an advantage in elections. The reds consider immigration an existential threat, sufficient to justify any use of force, and they have a very high tolerance for collateral damage. They don't consider themselves racists. They do believe that their opponents want to stop enforcing all immigration laws and that ICE is in Minnesota to stop fraud.
The blue perspective nationally seems fixated on Trump as public enemy number one. Mainstream blues support immigration enforcement as long as it's carried out in a legal and humane manner. They're outraged by the abuses of power we're seeing, but may also see these abuses as opportunities to convince more people to join their cause. If they're chasing votes, they're doing it by casting themselves as the resistance against an evil tyrant, not by importing illegal voters from foreign lands.
The Minneapolis perspective is that ICE ceased to be a legitimate law enforcement agency when it began systematically violating constitutional rights. Lie after lie about what's happening here from the federal government have not served to legitimize the occupation in the eyes of city residents. The fraud that ICE was sent here to fight was already being investigated and prosecuted when ICE arrived and fallout from the killing of Renee Good materially derailed this case. Votes don't figure into this perspective at all. The prevailing sentiment is that the city has literally been invaded by a terrorist group.
Think it Through
At this point, there's a mountain of evidence documenting thousands of constitutional rights violations and human rights abuses by federal agents in Minneapolis and around Minnesota. The level of outrage people are feeling here is impossible to convey. It's orders of magnitude greater than the outrage that boiled over into civil unrest in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd.
The outrage is greater, but it's much more organized. No one is looting or vandalizing storefronts. People aren't attacking each other. They're working together to fend off an attack that's coming from the outside. And every new offense committed by occupation soldiers adds weight to the argument that's dominating the streets, which is that our federal government has been taken over by fascists, led by a tyrannical dictator who was incidentally friends with Jeffrey Epstein.
If this situation isn't deescalated, ICE agents and more innocent people will probably end up dead. Some agents will be unmasked. The lives of some activists will be be destroyed. There may even be conflict between state and federal authorities if state authorities try to hold federal agents legally accountable for their crimes in the state.
I've studied human rights abuses during moments of political upheaval extensively. I know how fascism took root in Germany, how the Cultural Revolution dehumanized people in China, and how the Ukranian government used neo Nazi soldiers to violently repress the country's Donbas region following the US-backed Maidan Revolution in 2014. What's going on in Minnesota is very different from any of these things.
The Minnesota Department of Corrections recently had to launch a website to combat the "ongoing misinformation" coming from the Department of Homeland Security. The White House published an image of an activist that had been altered by AI to make her appear to be crying when she was not. Citizen efforts to meticulously document all ICE activities are underway, fully supported by local and state government. This isn't a war zone. It definitely isn't Nazi Germany. What's happening here is something much weirder, and much more high tech.
We are simultaneously seeing the first moves of a new unaccountable domestic military force and the emergence of a decentralized citizen's surveillance network watching and recording everything the secretive military force does. Both developments are concerning, especially in light of how divided our country had already become before this. Where this is all heading isn't clear, but the first signal that civil conflict is on the horizon is the expulsion of moderates from positions of power.
The next signal to look out for are mainstream ideologues who vilify their opponents to such an extent that they grossly underestimate them. In my opinion, this is where Minnesota is at right now. The federal government grossly underestimates the local population and the local population grossly underestimates the federal government.
The next clear signal that civil conflict is imminent would be a reprisal killing, which would almost certainly be immediately followed by a collective punishment action, which could start an actual civil war. No matter what people might say in the heat of the moment, no one with any sense wants that war or anything close to it. We've already had quite enough of masked men gunning people down in the streets.
It's true that events have spiraled out of control. An escalation of the conflict may be likely, but it's not inevitable. People may effectively be living in different realities because their sources of truth are different, but our humanity itself unites us all regardless. And we can keep choosing peace, day after day, no matter what side we think we're on.
Read more about the situation in Minneapolis.