Cemetery Ridge, Minnesota

DHS came, Minneapolis saw, they conquored

I want to follow up on Digby’s Monday comments on Radley Balko’s post noting “the stunning similarities between the Boston Massacre and Minneapolis.” For all the faux reverence Trumpish and Trump-leaning conservatives pay toward America’s founders, they look today like the royal puppets American colonists fought a revolution send back to England. They’ve grown “downright farcical,” Balko writes, in their attempts to justify oppressive policies directly contrary to the Constitution. Balko is too kind. They barely even try:

This gaping chasm between what they claim to believe and how they govern is best exemplified by the copy of the Declaration of Independence Donald Trump has put on display in the same Oval Office gilded with gold flourishes and garish gifts from foreign leaders and business titans seeking favors.

Given the way Trump has been governing like a mad king, it’s almost as if he displayed the document not in tribute to the founding, but to treat the famous list of colonial grievances as his to-do list. (This would require him to have actually read it.)

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.

Balko observes, “You really can’t overstate how much the Founders worried about . . . exactly what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.” The abuses listed in the Declaration are exactly what the Trump’ administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is perpetrating in American cities. Those abuses are largely “why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and why the Constitution splits control of the military between the president and Congress.”

JV Last on Monday saw another historical parallel to events in Minneapolis in American history, except some four score and seven years after the signing of the Declaration: Gettysburg. The battle was not supposed to happen. It wasn’t planned. It began with a skirmish.

Two brigades of Confederates pushed into Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. They unexpectedly encountered Union cavalry from Gen. George Meade’s Union army. Unknown to the Confederates, Last begins, Meade had been shadowing Gen. Robert E. Lee’s troops at a distance. What happened over the next days unfolded with a momentum of its own. Last writes, noting:

It’s important to understand that no one understood the stakes at Gettysburg.

• Neither army intended to have a major showdown at that time or in that place.
• Once begun, the conflict escalated by its own logic until neither side had any choice but to go all-in.
• Even after the battle was finished, neither side understood that it had just fought the defining engagement of the war.

It is unclear exactly why Trump dispatched a brigade of DHS dragoons to Minnesota. Was it his hatred of 2024 vice presidential opponent Gov. Tim Walz? His hatred of Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee? His hatred of Minnesota, a blue state that voted against him three times? His hatred of the state’s large Somali immigrant community? It’s certainly not the career fraud’s hatred of welfare fraud allegedly committed by some of them; that was pretext. But the operative word here is hatred.

But when the regime’s forces occupied the city they were surprised by the resistance they encountered. Not from Democratic politicians, or institutions, or the legal establishment. From ordinary people. The people of Minneapolis organized to protect their neighbors and provide oversight of the regime’s forces that the local government either could not, or would not, perform.

Like the first skirmish at Gettysburg, Last suggests, the murder of Renee Good brought out local reinforcements and organized, neighborhood-by-neighborhood resistance. Walz urged Minnesotans to video everything federal agents did. “Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity but to bank evidence for future prosecution,” Walz said. 

Trump’s field commanders did not see it coming. Once begun, the engagements in Minneapolis escalated organically into a general strike on Friday. Then came Alex Pretti’s murder by CBP/ICE in full view of multiple cameras on Saturday. The national backlash to Pretti’s murder brushed aside Trump administration propaganda about Pretti the way Union cannon and rifle fire stopped General George Pickett’s disastrous attack on Cemetery Ridge.

What does it mean? “Maybe Minneapolis will prove to be a hinge point in the battle against American fascism,” Last writes. “You can never tell from inside the crucible.”

But DHS is in retreat. U.S. Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino has been relieved. He’s been sent packing back to resume his duties as sector chief in El Centro, Calif. “Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her close adviser Corey Lewandowski, who were Bovino’s biggest backers at DHS, are also at risk of losing their jobs,” two people told Nick Miroff of The Atlantic. Trump is sending border czar Tom Homan to oversee ICE operations in Minnesota, whatever those look like going forward.

What’s needed now is for House Democrats to get their butts to Minneapolis, Last believes. Ordinary citizens started this parade. It’s now time for leading Democrats to get in front of it, in the streets, “cameras out and recording, observing and putting their bodies on the line.”

Minneapolis is not a fight that anyone wanted. But it is here and it has become a major engagement. The people of Minneapolis understand this truth. You and I understand it. The Democratic party must be made to understand it, too.

“If You See Something, Say Something®” is a national campaign by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) encouraging the public to report suspicious, terrorism-related activities. (AI feed)

Citizens of Minneapolis saw DHS. They said something.

Update: Yeah, I misspelled the headline. Fixed it.