One tin soldier rides away
Minneapolis, with an auspicious and a dropping eye
I want neither to minimize the achievement nor discount the remaining dangers. It’s great that the fash creep Bovino has been removed from Minneapolis, and that the standing of his fellow fash creep Noem is falling. And the rising tide of Senate Democrats who say they’ll oppose DHS funding — even Fetterman! — is a very positive development.
But “Border Czar” Tom Homan, sent in Bovino’s stead, is as bad as he is. I mean, maybe today there’ll be a few 2,000-word essays in the classy magazines comparing these two schmucks point by point, telling us how one is more classic authoritarian than the other, or neo-totalitarian or Bosnia-Herzegovinan or whatever, but when all is said and done they’re just two different stuffed evil clown dolls interchangeably stuck on the grill of the same killdozer.
This is true of all of them including Noem, as I have dramatized. Trump is driving the killdozer.
And while I’m glad the penny dropped for Schumer and he’s whipping his troops on funding, the fact that this had to wait until the PR became intolerable suggests that, if it goes the other way — like if Tubby finds a bunch of guys who’ll pretend to be a Venezuelan Bad Hombre Gang and slaughter some pretty conservative influencer on camera so he can whip up an outrage and blame it on the Sick Democraps Who Hate America — they’ll run right back to their hidey-holes and start talking Price of Eggs again. Because for Schumer et alia, almost as little as for the Republicans, principle is a distant second to expediency.
(Chris Van Hollen and a few others get a pass.)
But!
The shift in momentum and public attitude is real. And if not many people are saying so in the Prestige Press, it is nonetheless obvious to anyone with eyes that the good people of Minneapolis are responsible. Not Schumer and his wind-testing apparatchiks. Not the moderates and Just The Tip Trumpers who have tried for weeks to bothsides it and whose buckling on the issue presaged the breach.
The Minnesotans staying in the streets and refusing to let the crimes of ICE and the Border Patrol goons go unrecorded was what kept those rampages in front of the public. That not only got many Americans to really look at how shamefully contrary these are to the values that they still believe this country is about — it also got Trump’s pimps and propagandists to twist themselves in ever more absurd knots to justify it, until finally they were just pretty much saying If you also oppose us, we will kill you, too.
It’s awful that two observers had to get killed on the street before the dam cracked. It’s awful that, for their deaths to break through, they had to be white, and especially that one of them had to be carrying a weapon, thus activating the final, fatal absurdism of Trump flacks denying the Second Amendment just to slur him as a terrorist (which if it didn’t turn many MAGA freaks at least confused and paralyzed them).
But this is how history works. People pledge to a cause and to make sacrifices and they can’t know how big their sacrifice will be; but if their cause is just and their hearts are stout, their sacrifices can turn the tide.
To the extent it has been turned, that’s their doing, their honor and their glory. Now they and we have to deal with comes next. Maybe it’s all just hammering at the weak spots till it breaks. Maybe it’s confronting a new and even worse backlash. Whatever it is, there’ll be more bodies on the line for it, because some brave souls showed it was possible. And that is definitely reason for hope.
Nothing but respect for the people of Minnesota.
People have repeatedly said the carnage in Minneapolis has broken through in a monumental way, and I'll add my own small anecdote. I follow some, I guess you could call them lifestyle influencers, on YouTube. Mostly they engage in craftsy activities that interest me. I have followed one woman for 8 years and never heard her utter a syllable about politics or ideology. She posted "Shame! Shame! ICE OUT, no more money, DEFUND!" in the last few days.
If the Democrats don't keep putting pressure on the fissures in the GOP and keep this issue (along with Epstein) in the forefront, I honestly don't know how they can call themselves politicians, or explain what they are there for -- maybe just trading stocks?
For me, a strong indicator of how things are different is the extent to which this has filtered in to normally non-political social media spaces. These are the subreddits and Instagram and TikTok accounts that normally talk about such politically charged topics like American Girl Dolls, skiing, knitting (don't rile up the knitters!), and cooking. When even those accounts have posted anti-ice messages, and done it enough that the freaking Washington Post sees it, you know something is different. The r/americangirl subreddit has been particularly active in posting cute photos of their dolls posed next to signs like "Fuck Ice" and "True American Girls Stand Against Ice!"
Many of the non-political types of Americans who try to not think too much about what's going on, are seeing and even saying things that they would normally never have seen or said. We'll see if we can turn this into action, but awareness is the first step.