Open their eyes

It sucks, but I do believe Minneapolis is where their lies run out of gas

I hardly want to think about it because I’m so goddamn angry. Maybe writing about it will calm me down a bit.

By now it’s clear to anyone who saw the video that Renee Nicole Good was murdered by a masked “police” “officer” while attempting to drive away from him and his fellow goons in Minneapolis on Wednesday. The people you would expect to pretend otherwise — that is, every Republican from Trump and Noem on down — have done and are doing so.

Erick Erickson, one of the worst of the lot, showed his fans an edited clip of the incident while instructing them what to believe they were looking at: “a white female progressive activist attempted to block ICE agents with her vehicle… The progressive activist tried to run [the shooter] over after first using her car to block the agents...”

Others just hurried their lies into print and pixels without audio-visual accompaniment, confident that anyone who thought them worth listening to would never bother to check. And in the deepest fissures of Satan’s ass, they did shit like this:

The alleged victim can be seen in videos walking away from the scene of his crime. (I don’t know who the fuckface on the right is, but the other guy is Todd Starnes, whose always loathsome appearance seems to have metastasized into something like a giant brick of impacted flesh; I imagine if you were to tear his suit off it would look like one of those great wads of pork shoved into clear plastic bags at Costco.)

The Prestige Press is playing it as namby-pamby as expected (“Minnesota Officials Dispute Federal Account of Fatal ICE Shooting” lol QUESTIONS REMAIN). At this moment it looks as if, between the stonewalling of the feds and the stenosis of the press, your average not-too-involved voter is being forcibly handed a security blanket and a bum steer.

This is all as dark as it seems. I will say a little, however, about what makes it more bearable for me.

First of all I assume you know that ICE and the Border Patrol have been killing people all along. According to The Intercept, last year they shot 14 people, “at least four” fatally — presumably that number is vague because ICE dragged those victims into the black hole to which they’ve cosigned so many and who knows what happened to them. And let’s not forget that the tens of thousands of renditions the New Model ICE has performed in the past year are just another type of violence; at best they lead to misery; at worst, torture and death.

I should also mention, since the ICE goons claim that Good was trying to hit her assailant with her car, that rightwingers and other rage-poisoned freaks have been mowing down protesters with their vehicles since Charlottesville. In fact in some red states it’s overtly legally protected. It combines two things these guys love: Violence against their enemies and driving like an asshole. And I assume projecting their own vice onto their victim adds a perverse frisson to their enjoyment of this killing.

Now, these thoughts all came together for me in a rush as I was contemplating Wednesday’s outrage. In a way it was intensely frustrating and enraging. But it also made me think about how, once you put all these things together — or rather, once they’re all put together for you — it’s pretty easy to see how fucked up it is. I mean, you don’t even have to be particularly liberal — you just have to be able to see.

That’s why the goons rushed to lie, and lied so egregiously. They can lie at leisure about foreigners, the Somalis, the Venezuelans; hell, they lied to a federal court about a gang that Maduro allegedly ran but, they later had to admit, they actually had entirely made up.

But their story that the nice white lady they murdered was actually a cold-blooded political assassin? That’s extremely hard for even your average honky to believe. That’s why Fox News factora are using the “pronouns in her bio” shit to try and dehumanize her. This kind of high-level lying is more likely to work when the people you’re trying to bamboozle don’t know whether or not to trust you. But everyone — everyone — knows these guys can’t be trusted.

Truth has some advantages here. For one thing, the local officials, like Mayor Frey and Congresswoman Omar, have been extremely forthright about what a con this is. Governor Walz especially seems to have been freed up by dropping out of his reelection campaign to speak the truth.

I know the hardcore dismiss this out of hand, but the non-MAGA people — and, never forget, they far outnumber the MAGAs — notice when normally overcautious public officials suddenly stand up on their hind legs and call bullshit.

The Prestige Press will continue to suck — like, look at this bullshit — but already you can see little cracks in the facade. Like this from CBS News: “Kristi Noem characterized the driver’s actions as an ‘act of domestic terrorism’... However, videos posted to social media of the deadly encounter corroborate witness accounts.” You know Bari Weiss isn’t interested in the truth — but she is interested in covering her ass.

And you know Minneapolis won’t let it go, just like they didn’t let George Floyd go. This thing is going stay public, and when the threadbare lies blow away the outrage will persist. Yeah, I know Trump’s supposed to be a genius with distractions, but at this point he’s so chaotic that it’s left the realm of Hey Look At That and entered the realm of Dude What The Fuck among normies. Like I said earlier, he can’t sell the Maduro thing even with every Prestige Press ponce sucking his ass, not even with promises of cheap gas (largely because — and here’s another drawback of the Trump method over time — no one believes anything he says).

Sure, doubters, I guess it’s possible that he’ll declare Double Secret Martial Law and enough of the state apparatus will go along with it that democracy is over and we’re down to White Rose status. Oh well! Even then, I expect an EU Army of Liberation to eventually sort it out, though it’ll suck meantime. But at the moment, where we are right now, I think this will get through to a few more people, and keep the momentum of popular opinion going the right way. Keep hope alive!