Multiple Minneapolis Murders

 

Outrage makes coherent writing a challenge. I’ll try.

Hell-bent on defending ICE when Renee Good was murdered, Trump and MAGA could claim her killer feared for his life because, for an instant, he was stupidly in front of her car. They could pretend that when he shot her to death, standing to the side, he was still endangered, because... I don’t know. Something.

But the latest Minneapolis murder, by Border Patrol agents (why are they there?) led by Nazi cosplayer Greg Bovino, affords no such rationale. The first shot into Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who cared for critically ill veterans, came from behind, after another attacker had removed his licensed and holstered gun, which, unlike the lies told by Trump, Miller, Vance, Noem, Bovino, and more, he had pointed at no one, nor even touched. As he was executed, Alex Pretti was held down by several so-called officers, subdued, blinded by pepper spray.

We know the videos. Alex Pretti was holding a camera, not a weapon. When a non-violent woman was pushed to the ground by Trump’s thugs, he went to help her, and was taken down by several what-to-call-thems. He threatened no one. The gunmen who pumped eleven bullets into him, the kind Trump hires, might be professional killers, but they’re the opposite of professional law enforcement. Many are actual criminals. Others are just horrible humans. 

It’s so egregious, one might wonder if the assassination was intentional, because Trump and his Svengali, Stephen Miller, wanted to incite violence, enough to rationalize Trump’s dream of mowing down people who dare oppose him. I’m no conspiracist, but this was so out of bounds that who knows? Admirably, Minnesotans have refused the bait.

Everything Trump and his mouthpieces have said, even as multiple videos showed the truth, have been outrageous lies, told by people who know they’re lying but do it anyway. The lies and smears came so fast it was as if a script was pre-prepared. He was there “to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” He was “a domestic terrorist and an assassin.” No one should believe a single word coming from any of them. Ever again.

Republicans defend the right of all Americans to be armed with all weapons at all times in all places under all circumstances. Wasn’t there a time when self-described patriots were buying up military-style weapons and so much ammo that there were nationwide shortages? Wasn’t it to protect themselves from a repressive government bent on rounding up and killing Americans? In fairness, that was when our president was a black man. But, unless memory fails, unlike Trump, President Barack Obama never called for the death of his political opponents or hired death squads. Now that America is living their fever dream, where are those brave men?

If Alex Pretti having a gun meant, ipso facto, as stated by Trump’s hench, that he intended mayhem, would I be a hero, encountering one of those compensatory microphallics in Walmart, slung with an AR-15 and bandoleers containing enough rounds to erase everyone in the store, if I killed him?

Like fiscal responsibility, law and order, and free speech, the right to bear arms turns out to be just another cynical Republican talking point. Bovino tried to legitimize the murder because Alex Pretti “possessed” a weapon. Possessed! He even showed a picture of it. Will independent investigators be allowed to check the registration?

The implication: anyone legally carrying is a deserving target. It’s a bit of a departure from Republican doctrine, but there’s nothing about Trumpism that conforms to long-gone conservatism. Trumpism has devolved into fascism. 

So committed was Trump to moral leadership that he spent the next days touting his monstrosity of a ballroom and hosting billionaire suck-ups for a private screening of a fawning movie about his third wife.

After the execution of Alex Pretti, not even the most Trumpofoxified can deny that Trump and his chosen atrocities lied about what we all saw. They consider their supporters submissive idiots and figure they can dilute votes from those who aren’t. In Trump’s America, citizens are murdered without cause or consequence. Constitutionally protected protest is domestic terrorism. Like the First, the Second Amendment is situational, applying only to his followers. Like Kyle Rittenhouse.

Until Trump is gone, voting for any Republican signifies approval of the brutality behind the murders in Minneapolis and of the mendacious people he hired to oversee it. No matter one’s political leanings, this cruel lawlessness must be stopped. No exaggeration: The times demand choosing between standing with or against America. Assuming it’ll still be allowed, only massive voting can end Trumpic tyranny. Despite a few words of “concern,” Congressional Republicans won’t.

The murders in Minneapolis should fill the hearts of every American with outrage, dialed to 11/3/2026. If so, Republicans would lose both Houses in a tsunami of repudiation.

Meanwhile, don’t leave home without a camera phone.

Yeah, I guess the outrage got to me.

The Police State Comes To Minneapolis

              

            Made in the USSA - by Mr. Fish

The murder of Renee Good, that young mother in Minneapolis – and it WAS murder – ought to be the final awakening for even the most MAGAfied, the most propaganda-blinded Trump worshippers. Especially those who consider themselves patriots. Or Christian. Not just because of the horror of it, per se, or what is says about the thugs Trump – and it IS on Trump – is hiring to carry out his plan of intimidation and forced submission. As sad as it is to think of her young child now motherless, what’s even more portentous for the county Trump has made no longer great, are the government-sponsored lies that followed.

When Kristi Noem lied so brazenly about it, calling the woman a “domestic terrorist” who ran over the officer, which she clearly didn’t, even saying the murderous agent was hospitalized for injuries (Trump did, too), it doesn’t matter if she knew there was video of the assassination. If she did, she wouldn’t have cared. Like Trump, and Vance, and Bondi, and Patel, and Miller, and Bannon, and Fox “news,” and Newsmax, and Karoline Leavitt, and professional liars like Ted Cruz and most Congressional Republicans, she knows that decades of relentless indoctrination have, as intended, created millions of endumbed worshippers who permit getting away with whatever anti-democracy actions and lies they choose.

When reporters showed Trump the video that made a liar out of him, he retracted nothing. (tinyurl.com/sawtruth)

What American with even an ounce of decency could see what happened and not feel sick? Who could fail to acknowledge, finally, that what Trump and his rudderless political party are creating is a police state, modeled after every despotic government the world has seen. That’s NOT unwarranted hyperbole. It’s as clear as climate change and the Trump-enabled measles epidemic working its way through our county.

Trump just told the New York Times that the only thing restraining him is his “own morality,” not any law or body. This, from the most amoral man ever to occupy the White House.  

That submission to tyranny has characterized so much of human history is something to ponder and to fear. Why do so many of our species so readily submit to domination, happy to be released from responsibility? Whatever the explanation, it’s about to eliminate 250 years of democratic governance here.

There was a time when we could look at the rise of Hitler in Germany, for one example, and think we’re immune to it. That the greatness of America makes her better. That, unlike us, those Germans were uniquely prone to following dictatorial orders, willing to brutalize fellow humans, or, at least, to say nothing. If the Minnesota murder and our government’s response don’t put the lie to that myth and convince a majority of remaining Trump supporters of what’s happening, history’s repeat will become permanent.

The murder in Minnesota and brutalization by ICE and Trump’s weaponized National Guard in his hated Democrat-run cities everywhere, rounding up citizens and non-citizens alike, holding them in inhumane “detention” facilities or deporting them, in some cases to brutal gulags – these are only the most obvious examples of Trumpic totalitarianism. As is the acceptance of them by so-called conservatives.

Consider the takeover of news media by Trump’s billionaire pals, installing stooges to manage and control what we hear and read. Banning the teaching of history, censoring the words of history’s great thinkers. Even Plato. This is what governmental suppression looks like, the hallmarks of despotic autocracy, population control by thought police. Already enthralled, half the country doesn’t seem to care.

Like history’s worst dictators, Trump is creating and MAGA is rejoicing in a cult of personality. His visage hanging from the windows of government buildings, his name plastered above John F. Kennedy’s in the center for the arts about which Trump couldn’t care less. That awful, grandiose ballroomic paean to narcissism, the announced triumphal arch, which, if it gets built, will surely have his name on it, too.

Such self-created idolatry is typical of North Korea and Russia. In Italy, the architectural vestiges of Mussolini’s rule are everywhere, even including engraved years beginning at Day One of his takeover. I don’t wish il Duce’s fate on Trump, though. I want to see him live long enough to watch his self-adoring monuments torn down. If reason returns.

After Minneapolis, everyone can see we’re being lied to every day by Trump and the people he hired for their willingness to do it. Excuse my righteous indignation, but the death of that mother and the disgusting lies that have followed, the silence among so many Congressional Republicans, the acquiescence of MAGA, and the defense of it from what amounts to state media are too much to bear. If 2026 isn’t the year in which Trump’s and his collaborators’ attacks on American values are rejected by Republicans and MAGA, it’ll be beyond recovery.