White people did not start protesting because ICE murdered Good and Pretti.
ICE murdered Good and Pretti •because• white people were protesting — and fighting back.
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Re: disappearances
I guess a lot of us here are old enough to remember the 1980s, when US backed militias in Central America disappeared huge numbers of people
Which led to huge numbers of Central American refugees coming to the US
Which contributed to the development of a US economy that depends on these refugees
And a political party that gets elected by saying that the refugees are bad people and they will get rid of them, but is careful never to actually do that, because they are needed workers
And I don't know if it's happening yet, but people keep talking about how the so-called deportation camps are going to turn into work camps
It was the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti that punctured the bubble of the comfortable and launched Minneapolis to the top of international news. I understand why that is: the whiteness of the victims combined with unbelievable damning, stomach-churning video were something that a whole lot of people who’d been tuned out simply could not ignore. And those murders alone are so horrific that either one •should• be sufficient to pop the bubble of comfort — but they’re just the tip of an iceberg here.
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Just the tip of the iceberg was enough to sink the Titanic.
For many people who’d been inside that bubble of comfort, particularly at national news orgs, the story •started• with those two murders. They now seem to have a half-formed mental narrative that runs something like this:
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1. First the Trump administration started deporting a lot more people.
2. Then ICE murdered Good and Pretti.
3. Those two escalations caused widespread unrest in Minneapolis.
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That narrative is wrong.
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Just this afternoon, I was at lunch with a woman who announced fiercely, "Now they've killed TWO Americans!"
"Eight. ICE has killed EIGHT people this year. Not two. Eight."
It was like she couldn't even hear me. Sailed right over her head. Only the two are "American" enough to count, apparently.
Not counting the ones who've died in custody. That's absolutely reprehensible. Shame on you, lady who had lunch with Violet Madder!
CC: @inthehands@hachyderm.io
(This is also the same person who recently said, "Who would ever say anything bad about Nancy Pelosi?!" and meant it and then my buddy took a deep breath and started turning colors and yeah! 😝 Real bruncher type.)
"Who would ever say anything bad about Nancy Pelosi? Say, does anyone hear a rumbling sound?"
White people did not start protesting because ICE murdered Good and Pretti.
ICE murdered Good and Pretti •because• white people were protesting — and fighting back.
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People were jumping into action here in Minneapolis — droves of people, comfortable people, white people — not in mid-January, but in •early December•.
Community meetings overflowing. Signal groups exploding. Observer trainings filling day after day after day. Mutual aid networks popping up like mushrooms. On and on.
Why? Because we saw brown and Black neighbors being dragged from their cars, dragged from their homes, stalked, terrorized, •kidnapped• with barely the slimmest shadow of due process or legal oversight.
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Increased deportations would be bad enough. An increase in the kind of immigration nightmares you see in, say, “Mo” on Netflix would be awful already. But that’s not what we were seeing.
We were seeing anonymous masked thugs abducting people and disappearing them. We were seeing a secret police with blanket immunity. We were seeing a complete breakdown of the rule of law. We were seeing an authoritarian police state forming.
And we were expected not to care, because it was targeting dark-skinned people.
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That is the horror that spurred Minneapolis-St. Paul into action. That is the horror we’ve been fighting. That is the horror that Renee Good and Alex Pretti died fighting.
And it is the horror that is destroying countless lives of people whose names you do not know.
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@inthehands and the mobilization part started even earlier. we attended a training put on by monarca at the end of october right after noem's first "we're coming for you" press conference and they had to get a new venue bc the expected crowd swelled to hundreds. people were already getting activated then.