"After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no
longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to
govern this nation. It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant
fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment
be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our
new national reality. State terror has arrived.
"Please look at this list with me. Since early January, when
Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded its operation in
Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., federal officers have: killed Renee
Good, a white middle-class mother; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer
in her firm’s parking lot; detained numerous U.S. citizens, including
one who was dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed in the
windows of cars and detained their occupants, including a U.S. citizen
who was on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury
center; set off crowd-control grenades and a tear gas container next to a
car that contained six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an
airport, demanding to see people’s papers and arresting more than a
dozen people who were working there; detained a 5-year-old. And now they
have killed another U.S. citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse
with no criminal record. It seems he was white. The agents had him down
on the ground, subdued, before they apparently fired at least 10 shots
at point-blank range..." -- Masha Gessen, NYT, in her op/ed "State Terror Has Arrived." Russian- born Gessen, of course, is an expert in autocracies and has seen how democracies can slide into dictatorships.
There's not much more to add, except to say "a picture is worth a thousand words":
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