She has swallowed lies whole—hook, line and sinker. The worst of the recent lies is the preposterous claim that the mom an ICE agent shot three times and killed was running him over with her Honda. Dolores swallowed that lie, finding it plausible that the Minneapolis mom engaged in “domestic terrorism” after dropping off her six-year-old son at school.

“It was self-defense,” Dolores insists.

You’ve seen the video, judge for yourself, but what I saw was an unnecessary and reckless use of a gun by a jumped-up federal agent who fired three or four times, making sure to kill an American citizen. She was trying to drive her car away from the scene, away from the swarm of ICE agents, one who was attempting to open the door of her car. (Why? I guess he thought he could drag the woman from the moving vehicle.) Dolores believes the fiction that the ICE agent shot the unarmed mom of three in self-defense, right after she told him, “I’m not mad at you!”

I have tried to reason with Dolores, to no avail. President Bump said that the officer who pulled the trigger was “viciously” run over and that it was “hard to believe he is still alive.” But what is hard for me to believe is that the officer was firing his weapon in self-defense while simultaneously being run over. None of the many videos we’ve seen shows the agent on the ground or under the Honda’s tires. What we have seen is a federal agent almost casually shooting with one hand while holding his cellphone in his other hand.

“If the officer was acting in self-defense,” I asked Dolores, “what did he hope to accomplish by firing his weapon? Did he think he could gun down an automobile? The mom was no threat. She was already steering away from him. If he truly feared for his safety, why didn’t he simply back off and get out of the way?”

Dolores had no answer for that, except to say that the ICE agents have a difficult job. I am sure it becomes more difficult when people start blowing whistles at them.

By hiding critical evidence and refusing to cooperate with local prosecutors in a full investigation, Homeland Security and the Department of Justice are setting the matter up for further distortions and fabrications.

In a broader frame, the Bump administration wants to see more violence by federal agents. I don’t believe it now has anything to do with border enforcement. It is evident by their behavior that the agents, who are being recruited with $50,000 bribes, are trained to intimidate, incite and transgress. They have been instructed, apparently, that the law doesn’t matter and that Constitutional rights are not relevant. They are taught to demand “papers” and then to ignore any papers that are produced. They are trained not to care.

Deportation of immigrants whether or not they are the worst of the worst is the wedge to provoke an angry response in the streets that can then be used to justify sending in more federal agents. The next step will be to claim an insurrection as a justification for deploying federal armed forces in America’s peaceful streets.

They will not wait for local and state governments to ask for help. They will not consult local and state governments. They will not even tell them when they are coming.

The fear that the Bump administration is causing in neighborhoods and workplaces is a tactic. The tactic has a corollary in the administration’s actions beyond our borders. The formula, both foreign and domestic, is to commit belligerent acts with the intent to force compliance with the president’s will: at home by brutal arrests and detentions, abroad by missile strikes on fishing boats, for example, or by threatening to take Greenland “the hard way.”

Maybe this is what some believe American greatness looks like. But to my mind, if it is any kind of greatness, it is an embarrassing greatness, a petty greatness, a greatness of which none of us can be proud.

Transgression of norms and decency in America’s streets and transgression of respect in the community of nations is the fear tactic. The goal, I have no doubt, is to make citizens afraid to speak and afraid to vote.

Hello reader. Thanks for dropping by.

Sign up to receive a notification in your inbox whenever I get around to writing something.

Views: 0

Share it:

Some other stuff for later,

  • Big Mistake
    59
    The desires and hopes of the country’s inhabitants, the voters and people who never voted, the politicians and promoters, the influencers and pretenders, and even people who, like Dolores, didn’t seem to care, combined to produce a momentum of sorts. It seemed now momentum was carrying us forward into a…
  • Regrets
    51
    In which I wonder whether Dolores regrets how she voted and worry about where we are headed.
  • Moment By Moment
    47
    Why do I remember some moments and not others? Some of the moments I remember seemed unrelated to each other as they occurred but now form a through line when I put them together from the perspective of age. And there have been moments that were not fully my own,…