Decency is already dead
Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, J.D. Vance, Pam Bondi, et al. have a message for brown-skinned residents of this country: GET OUT!
“The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert picked up on the subtle metamessage that Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, J.D. Vance, Pam Bondi, et al. just sent the rest of us. In the wake of the deadly shooting of Renee Nicole Good, 37, in Minneapolis on Wednesday by an ICE agent, that message is, “OBEY OR DIE! And if you die, you clearly didn’t obey.”
Jimmy Kimmel’s Thursday evening monologue on the Minneapolis shooting, noted frantic efforts by the Trump administration to convince Americans that we did not see what we saw.
There once was a baseline of truth and decency in this country, Kimmel lamented. It doesn’t seem to exist anymore.
I was on the street with that same message about decency in mid-December.
Kimmel’s staff assembled multiple examples of authoritarian propaganda.
“If you get in the way of the government repelling a foreign invasion,” warned one talking head, you’ll end up just as dead as Renee Nicole Good.
Michelle Goldberg heard that “giddy sadism” 5 by 5. Homeland Security’s social media posts and recruitment videos telegraph “the creation of a far-reaching police state,” Goldberg writes:
In such a system, the relationship between every citizen and their government is transformed by the constant demand for submission. Since Good’s death, Republicans have been lining up to threaten those who don’t immediately comply with ICE’s orders. “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life,” Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas said on Newsmax.
All of us, citizens and immigrants alike, are being ruled by people who think life is a privilege bestowed by authority, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D) of Texas broke down in a committee hearing on Thursday over Good’s killing.
“A child has lost her mom!” Crockett sobbed before composing herself.
She later recalled that she first ran for Congress amidst protests in the wake of the George Floyd lynching (her word) by law enforcement in Minneapolis. She recalled the pro bono work she did with nonprofits then for protesters arrested in Dallas.
Unless there is some kind of justice for the “state-sanctioned execution that we all saw,” Crockett predicted, nonprofits that aid poor people unable to make bail will be kept busy again. Expect another wave of protests across the country.
Crockett at the time did not have the name of shooter. The Minneapolis Star Tribune identified him as Jonathan Ross. Perhaps Floyd’s murderer, Derek Chauvin, will send Ross greetings from the Federal Correctional Institution in Big Spring, Texas.
Under the Trump misadministration, I have little confidence that Ross will join him.