Minneapolis saw even greater escalations of ICE violence Wednesday night, and there seems no scenario in which it gets better anytime soon. Federal agents shot a person in the leg on Wednesday—and fair warning, that article repeats DHS claims as if DHS has not provably lied about their actions in every single previous shooting. We still don't know what the federal rules of engagement are here, except "shoot at anyone you want, Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem will cover for you." So furious city residents again came out in force to peacefully protest another day's thuggery.
Which, because ICE and Border Patrol agents will wither away and die if they're not constantly shooting at people, led to federal agents shooting tear gas and multiple flashbang grenades at a baby.
Piecing together multiple videos and witness statements, what appears to have happened was this: A father of six children wanted to evacuate them from a major ICE presence and counterprotest outside his house, so he asked an agent for permission to drive them out of the neighborhood. The agent gave that permission.
At that point, he began to drive away—at which point other agents fired tear gas and at least three flashbang grenades at the car, deploying all the airbags and filling the car with smoke.
The youngest of his children, a 6 month old infant, stopped breathing.
EMTs were called, and all six of his children were subsequently hospitalized.
So it appears that Stephen Miller's goon squad came very close to murdering a 6 month old baby outright last night, and they did it in usual goon squad fashion: Incompetent, violent fuckuppery. Here was a father who was obeying one agent's orders, only to have the rest of the goon squad apparently flip out and attack the car because none of these halfwit dime-store Proud Boys rejects can coordinate anything more complicated than "see something, shoot something."
I've yet to see the Noem and Bondi defense of why federal agents had to flashbang the baby three times, but I'm sure we'll be getting the talking points soon. I'm sure they'll be investigating the baby for ties to "paid protesters" or some other Nazi-inspired shit.
Minnesota residents have absolutely had it, and while Gov. Tim Walz is weakly calling for calm despite all the violence being directed at protestors, rather than coming from protesters, the prevailing sentiment is rage. Pure rage.
At last night's new shooting and protests, federal agents were forced to abandon several vehicles that apparently couldn't handle the Minneapolis snow. Inspections of those vehicles turned up caches of license plates, an assortment of (apparently removed?) federal agency patches, and documents showing the names of federal agents, the hotels they were staying at, and other operational details.
Area schools and their students appear to be major targets of the Trump thugs, leading to closed schools, a switch to online learning, and a new generation of traumatized American children.
As for Donald Trump himself, he is again declaring a perhaps imminent need to invoke the Insurrection Act—a favored move by his most fascist advisers, and one that would allow the deployment of the U.S. military to augment this Stephen Miller-led Kristallnacht. Trump is also now singling out specific Somali-owned businesses in the city, implying with no evidence that they are hubs of "FRAUD," in an apparent bid for his supporters to attack those businesses.
And as for the debate over whether or not Trump's administration wants to appear openly allied with Naziism, there is no debate. The debate is over.
Sen. Chuck Schumer has to go
As all of this unfolds, Democratic leadership continues to have no particular strategy to respond to the murder of an American mother, or the flashbang attacks on a 6 month old infant, or the now thousands of incidents of DHS-led assaults on American citizens just trying to get from one place to another.
At the very minimum, Democratic senators need to justify keeping the government open while that same government is giddily ignoring the Constitution to conduct literal ethnic cleansing. That seems, morally, a difficult sell. If the government thinks that its campaign of street thuggery is worth flashbanging infants over, then any true American ought to be willing to step up to help block them from doing it.
But current Democratic leadership in the House and Senate not only does not show such a drive, they have battled at every turn to distance themselves from anyone who might. And this goes to the heart of the leadership problem: It does not lead. It does not believe in things. It pays for focus groups, it pays consultants to come up with bumper sticker phrases, but it appears to consider outrage in the face of fascist terror too much. It is constantly groveling for the votes of conservative Americans who might be convinced to give up a little of their racism in exchange for a little more economic security—and it does absolutely nothing to rally the great swath of Americans who do not vote at all because they do not think either party gives a damn about whether rich people can break every law or whether federal agents can flashbang their children.
I think I can diagnose Schumer's problem, in specific. Schumer is a creature of Democratic consultancies, and believes politics to be a game of competing focus groups rather than competing beliefs. And that might even work, except that Democratic leadership appears to pay for only one focus group every 6 months or so. Every last damn thing that comes out of Chuck Schumer's mouth is carefully tailored to meet the moment—if "the moment" was six months ago.
I have no doubt that Chuck Schumer will come up with a focus-grouped phrase to convey the American outrage over flashbanging a baby into unconsciousness and near-death—and that we'll be hearing about it six months from now, long after the situation has escalated into violence that is much, much worse.
That's not good enough. There needs to be a juggling of Democratic leadership, one that brings in new leaders willing to act as a true opposition party and willing to recognize that no, actually, none of this rampant criminality counts as mere "politics."
What you can do
In response to the questions about what any of us can do about any of this, the answer for most people is very simple.
Publicize it. Show it to people. Make sure your own social circles know that the Department of Homeland Security is making neo-Nazi videos and is flashbanging infants when their fathers try to evacuate from yet another of their police riots.
Call your representatives, and make certain they know that you do not give a particular shit about the price of milk compared to how much you care about roving racist goon squads leaping out of SUVs to tackle Americans, beat them, and then dump them several blocks away after they realize that they've abducted a citizen after all.
It really is that simple. If your Republican acquaintances want to own all of this, then make them own it. Make them say so. Make them humiliated to say so, if possible. Or simply ignore them, and focus on making sure all of those people you know who don't watch the news watch all of this.
Because most Americans still don't know it's going on. It hasn't hit their own city. They don't watch the news. They'll find out only when it affects them, unless someone who cares presses them to care too.
I'll tell you what I think is going to happen. There's no way Donald Trump, addled and fuming and suddenly willing to go to war with Denmark in order to capture Greenland and rename it Trumpland, is going to let this year go by without military occupations of cities. His thuggish, openly fascist inner circle won't rest until they've gotten it.
And there is going to be no way for you or I to convince every last American that they should avoid violence, when they see Trump-loyal squads flashbang children in their own neighborhoods. We can bicker about that all we like, but we don't control it. Nobody does. I wish it were different, but that is what collapsing democracies look like.
Republicans in Congress could, of course, stop all of this any hour of any day. It would be easy. It would be trivial, in fact.
But I sincerely doubt they will try — because they are cowards, foremost, and because they are violent racists themselves, second. And also because House Republicans have certainly proven beyond a doubt, at this point, that they would rather flashbang babies than govern, or restrain Trump, or oppose transparent bribery and corruption, or stop insanely premised new wars, or investigate which of their wealthy allied plutocrats participated in an elite pedophilia ring run by one of Donald Trump's closest personal friends.
Trump's thugs flashbanged a car full of children, just for the crime of being there. That's what we're dealing with, and what Trump's voters and party are now putting themselves behind.
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Written by Hunter Lazarro. Cross-posted from the Journal of Uncharted Blue Places.
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