Is it a battle?
Minneapolis is my kind of town. The area where Renee Good was killed was middle class but just a few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed in a working class or less neighborhood. The governor of the state is an ex high school football coach. The two senators are Waspy women, one of them, Amy Klobechar, was an aide to Fritz Mondale. The councilman for the area is Hispanic. The Attorney General of the state is Black. The mayor is Jewish and the Police Chief is Irish. The local congresswoman is an articulate anti-semetic Somalian immigrant. Good herself was a lesbian with three children, which suggests a complex sexuality, though John Updike suggests all sex is complex. How much more diverse could you want?
What actually happened at what I decided was a murder because the ICE agent was standing beside the car when he shot into Good;s car while she was trying to leave, having had a friendly remark in his direction, all captured in video. But Kristi Noem insists Good was attacking the ICE agent with her car and so the scene can seem confusing. Moreover, there are such differing views of the situation as a whole that it is difficult to make particular facts critical, Noem says the Democratic political leaders are urging unrest which Mayor Frey says is not true because he has repeatedly insisted on calm and not taking the bait on ICE provocations. But what she may mean is that Frey wanting ICER to leave town is itself a provocation because what ICE is doping is legal, however munich it avoids the general principle that law enforcement in a democracy depends on the assent of the populace and that Minneapolisans regard the arrest of long law abiding neighbors as not worthy of arrest or that it is inappropriate for an American citizen to prove he is a citizen, an Hispanic visage or a Spanish accent not grounds for detention until the person is cleared. That is not American or legal. It is also illegal for ICE officers to assume the powers of police officers. They cannot arrest, much less kill, drivers of cars that have crowded a lane in a street. They have to ask the local police to do that and the Minneapolis police department is not cooperating with them which means ICE is overridden rather than empowered to assume police authority.
But rather than quibble about misleading angles in cellphone footage, or the niceties of who can enforce which laws, I have a simple way to get to the truth.about Minneapolis and much else that is going on. If I were a congressman at a committee hearing Kristyi Noem attended, I would ask her four straightforward questions. Were Haitians eating cars and dogs in Springfield, Ohio? Was Obama born in Kenya? Were hundred and fifty year olds receiving Social Security payments? Did Trump not ask Georgia officials to rig the 2020 election? If Noem supports the President's view or equivocates, then she is a liar and nothing she says about Minneapolis can be trusted. Which makes her nothing to discuss, which is different from those cooler heads who say we should sort out our differences through talk. The current situation is that the protests in Minneapolis to ICE incursions are the battle of Minneapolis.
Minneapolis is a battle even though it has so far had few casualties. That is because the sides are jockeying for advantage rather than relying on principle. California gerrymandered House seats in the response to gerrymandering seats in Texas because California decided to retaliate even though it had previously passed a law to apportion seats by a commission rather than through [political enactment. Prudence trumps principle. In similar fashion, though here under the color of principle, the Trump Justice Department indicted Governor Walz and Mayor Frey and others for obstructing ICE while in recent days a Federal judge instructed ICE not to interfere with peaceful protestors and Kristi Noem on Sunday said ICEwas not using chemicals to control crowds until her staff had to recant that. The Defense Department is said to have prepared two brigades in Alaska who specialize in operating in very cold weather to deploy to Minneapolis where the temperature is around zero fahrenheit.In the early years of the war, Germany and Great Britain didn’t bomb each other’s cities and then they did. Wars escalate, and so does Minneapolis. All devices come to do what will take advantage. Even though the protesters have been very careful to be peaceful, doing things like giving food to people reluctant to leave their homes lest they be deported, MLK's protests remain peaceful partly because his own cadres were used to keep their own people from getting out of hand. Protests or counter protests can get out of hand. Remember Kent State where troopers were given live rounds and had to see through their gasmasks and so panicked and killed some students.I am waiting for the first ICE casualty. So far, only skirmishing and the lack of animus on the side of protesters, though Noem seems pretty hateful;.
The past few days have not further unfolded perhaps because the media have been distracted by whether the farce of Greenland invasion is to be taken seriously. Is Minneapolis a distraction from Greenland or visa versa? Or as some commentators say, both are distractions from Jeffrey Epstein? It is perhaps more accurate to say all of them are part of Trump showmanship to keep multiple balls juggling so as to hide any of them falling to the floor. Remember that Trump is motivated by racial animus, greed and vanity, nothing worthy. He is asking for a billion dollars for entry into a Board of Peace not, I think, to bring peace and rebuilding for Gaza, but to enter into large contracts to spend and make money on Gaza real estate, just as Trump was offering oil companies the chance to build Venezuelan installations in the hope of long term profit, however unstable was the political situation there. Trump decides whether to get the attention of the American people in Minneapolis or somewhere else.
Who is going to win? Maybe the Trump side will relent in Minneapolis just as it did in L. A. and Chicago. Maybe it will persist until the population in Minneapolis is intimidated and stops taking to the streets, which is what happened in Nazi occupied Paris. Hard to say. Chuck Schumer thinks, and has thought al;l al;ongsince Trump was inaugurated, that everything was in preparation for the midterms and that would be decisive, the Democrats at least taking the House and therefore gaining subpoena powers so as to cross examine cabinet officials about the details of what they have done. But that would still rely on popular opinion turning against Trump because of the new revelations. Perhaps it is right in a democracy for public opinion rather than the law as the final arbiter.