Donald Trump’s most profound break with American democracy, evident in his words and actions alike, is his view that the state’s relationship with its citizens is defined not by ideals or rules but rather by expressions of power, at the personal direction of the president. That has been clear enough for years, but I had not truly seen what it looked like in person until I arrived in Minneapolis, my hometown, to witness what Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called Operation Metro Surge.
On Jan. 14, at 7:44 p.m., eight hours after I got to town, the City of Minneapolis’s official X account announced that there were “reports of a shooting involving federal law enforcement in North Minneapolis.” “Federal law enforcement,” as everyone by then knew, meant one of the 3,000 immigration agents fanned out across the metropolitan area, which Minneapolitans invariably called “ICE”: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the vanguard of the surge.
They had been there since December, ostensibly in relation to a fraud investigation that fell well out of their departmental purview and settled instead for what appeared outwardly as a more indiscriminate pursuit of potential immigration violations. The Minneapolis metro area is not big: Hennepin and Ramsey Counties — home to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, respectively, and many of their suburbs — are together less than one-fifth the size of Los Angeles County, the target of the administration’s first such immigration crackdown last year.
It is also home to a population of urban progressives who had thrown themselves into the task of tracking federal agents. The city had become a giant eyeball, every exercised citizen’s smartphone a sort of retinal photoreceptor for the optic nerve of neighborhood channels on the encrypted messaging app Signal, scanning public spaces for signs of ICE.
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hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
How is the momentum to reverse authoritarianism going to coalesce in a country where even something as organized as a city can’t get it together to stop using the literal Nazi pedophile social media site to make official statements?
nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 1 week ago
It took me a few iterations to parse, but finally I groked the cut of your jib and noticed the reference to Musk’s X/Twitter
First – Dude, how many European or Canadian governmental entities still post on an official X account? Quite a few. We’re all working against Metcalfe’s Law here.
Second – FWIW this niche issue is one I do push on IRL. Locally there are often bills that would require our government to do things like use open source software, use open document standards, ensure all government internet services can be accessed via standards-compliant web pages (not apps that require iOS or Android), yadda. I do what I can to support those. It’s a long uphill process, but also kind of a hobby.
hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
The difference is that Europe and Canada don’t have ICE shooting people in the streets. Obviously they should get away from Twitter too, and some of them have. The US, however, is in the middle of a struggle to maintain some semblance of democracy in the face of a government in which all three branches are at the moment dominated by an administration that cares about nothing at all but ego and power. Official policy is at this point open malice with no meaningful pretense of civility or justification. We have gestapo on the street harassing and disappearing American citizens on the basis of their skin color and accents, and people are being killed by these same people for non-violent resistance.
This is not a situation in which our official mouthpieces for those parts of the government that haven’t yet been dominated to post official communications to a Nazi bar that’s directly connected to that same administration. Even a shift to something as simple as posting this kind of stuff on official government websites would be an improvement, and would be an actual form of meaningful praxis in breaking away from the big platforms that led us down this road in the first place.
Even if they cross-posted their announcements to social media, it would reclaim some small degree of autonomy for legitimate representation. It isn’t the most dire requirement for the times we’re in, but it shows that these institutions and the people leading them are more than happy to sit on their hands and accept the status quo until they’re physically forced to stop doing so. It’s just one more bit of practice maintaining the extremely dangerous habit of helpless complacency even in the approach to matters that are at the end of the day not difficult to enact.
It’s a dead canary with a note pinned to it about how some day we might have to worry about carbon monoxide poisoning.