Radley Balko has a great piece today discussing the stunning similarities between the Boston Massacre and Minneapolis which a number of people have noted. That this is happening on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence makes it all the more pointed. He discusses the right’s wing paeans to the founding, originalism etc and notes:
The Republicans’ veneration of the Founders is particularly rich at the moment because, of all the abuses England heaped on the colonies, nothing angered them more than the Crown’s deployment of soldiers on city streets — and the streets of Boston in particular. Anger, resentment, and violence simmered in Boston for years before the Boston Massacre in 1770. The Declaration of Independence Trump hangs in his office came six years later, followed by the American Revolution, then the birth of the United States.
The rage from those pre-revolution clashes in Boston continued to linger for years into the Constitutional Convention, and then the debate over the Bill of Rights. The Founders were also students of history, and saw how the domestic use of the military led to the fall of the Roman Republic. This, in large part, is why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and why the Constitution splits control of the military between the president and Congress. You really can’t overstate how much the Founders worried about . . . exactly what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.
When I was researching my first book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, I found a remarkable archive of colonial-era newspaper articles published as a collection in 1936 by a historian named Oliver Morton Dickerson. The articles are from A Journal of the Times, a pro-patriot, anti-monarchy paper published in colonial Boston. Dickerson’s published archive, which runs from 1767 to 1769, documents the rising tension as English troops patrolled the streets of Boston.
The accounts are clearly biased in favor of the angry colonists, but they’re also consistent with other contemporaneous accounts of the occupation. They read like a social media feed — if social media had existed at the time. They also depict scenes remarkably similar to what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.
We’re now at two dead in Minneapolis, and at least four people killed by immigration officers overall. We’re at 41 dead since Trump was inaugurated last year if you count the soaring number of deaths in ICE custody, many of which appear to be from either neglect or abuse.
Even as I was working on this post, there were two alarming new developments: First, the A.P. reported that the administration has been keeping a secret memo authorizing immigration to enter homes without a warrant to arrest people who have final removal orders (the memo itself suggests even a final removal order may not be necessary). This is remarkably similar to the general warrants or “writs of assistance” the British crown issued permitting soldiers to forcibly enter any home they suspected of harboring untaxed imports.
I’ll just state the obvious: If the Fourth Amendment permits the government to tear down your door with nothing more than an administrative warrant, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t exist. (The argument that this only affects undocumented immigrants is both legally dubious and utter garbage — they’ve already used this policy to terrorize an American citizen.)
The second alarming new incident was the murder of Alex Pretti. And within hours of Pretti’s death, the administration promptly did what they’ve done after the previous shootings: they slandered the victim, brazenly lied about what happened, and prevented local law enforcement from conducting their own investigation. They’ve also refused to release the names of the officers who killed Pretti, publicly praised those officers, and then quickly announced that those officers have been returned to the field.
He goes on to show some of the obvious parallels between the two events, 260 years apart. It’s pretty amazing. Click over to the link. It’s free.
We are going to see a revolting display of phony patriotism this summer as Trump cheapens the anniversary with UFC fights on the White House lawn and cheesy ceremonies designed more to celebrate him than the founding ideals of the country, of which he has zero understanding. But what he is actually doing would have the founding generation rolling over in their graves.