Five-year-old Liam Ramos collared by a federal agent.
Having once told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” Trump has now effectively opened the way for extremist militias—with their signature assault rifles and tactical gear—to antagonize local populations, especially immigrants, as they had in Portland and elsewhere.
And indeed, groups of armed men have been roaming the streets intimidating immigrants, violently confronting protesters, and claiming an authority beyond the purview of state or local law enforcement. This time, though, the men belong to the Department of Homeland Security’s mass-deportation teams. Their tactics bear striking similarities to those of the Proud Boys and other militias that showed up in U.S. cities during Trump’s first term. Clad in the same tactical vests, cargo pants, sunglasses, and neck buffs pulled over their faces, some 3,000 federal agents deployed to the streets of Minneapolis with catastrophic results. — Ali Breland, “Meet the New Proud Boys”
It is dawning on an increasing number of Americans, including folks who don’t pay much attention to politics, that something is wrong with this picture. It’s neither normal, nor morally defensible.
Henry Farrell commented at Programmable Mutter on his recent conversation with Ezra Klein, which clarified for him “the connection between the limits to US power in the world, and the limits to the Trump administration’s power inside the borders of America.”
Trump’s signature move is to crush anyone standing in his way — internationally as well as at home — and many people are repulsed by the brutal depravity they observe.
In his conversation with Klein, Farrell observed:
One of the key moments in the fall of the Berlin Wall are these protests that happen in the East German city of Leipzig. These protests get bigger and bigger, and they begin to create a collective understanding that, in fact, the regime is wildly unpopular.
Susanne Lohmann, a political scientist, wrote this classic article on this. She argues that the Leipzig protesters seemed like normal people — good, decent people you would like to have as neighbors. The East German propaganda is that these are evil, weird freaks, that these are dissidents, they’re scruffy, they’re whatever. And it’s the fact that these look like normal, ordinary people that actually make this powerful.
So I think what we’re seeing in Minnesota is we’re seeing ordinary people. It’s very clear that the people who are organizing, the people who are pushing back are neighbors. They are people who seem like very straightforward, very ordinary Midwestern people, people who are part of the community.
People see that the protesters demonized by a coercive government are “normal people — good, decent people you would like to have as neighbors.” They are not “evil, weird freaks.”
In Minneapolis, the lies and slander spread by Trump’s loyalists in the federal government have collided with what people see with their own eyes.
Gal Beckerman also references what’s normal in his assessment of ICE’s militarized presence in Minnesota. His focus is on the expectation of being free to live an ordinary life. Beckerman refers to this expectation as pre-political, something we expect as a matter of course: the freedom to be ourselves, to live as we choose.
Referencing the protests in Minneapolis, he writes:
The movement that has arisen on the city’s frigid streets is about defending what any reasonable American would call “normal”—the expectation of a life without the threat of violence and coercion.
He elaborates:
The assault by federal agents was an attack on something pre-political, on parts of our communal existence that people, in normal times, take for granted. You should be able to assume that parents, immigrant or not, won’t be ripped away from children. You should assume that people don’t have to hide in their house because their skin is brown or black. You should assume that filming an interaction with the police won’t end in your death. These are all pre-political assumptions, and we hold them not as Democrats or Republicans, but as individuals who just want to live freely.
The Trump administration is aggressively, lawlessly pushing boundaries to deny us and our neighbors the opportunity to live freely.
The miliary occupation of Minneapolis, the brutality and deaths, the family separations and more, are too far from normal to overlook or to shrug off. The lies and smears of Americans pushing back against this federal assault only deepen the depravity.
We want our country back, our neighborhoods. We want to live freely.