We are the consequences
We, collectively, are the condition that makes their defeat inevitable.
Erik Hane joins us again from Minneapolis now that the feds have supposedly ended their operations there. ;) They have not of course. He wrote this outstanding piece a few months back which you will surely remember.
Luke O’Neil
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The condition that makes their defeat inevitable
by Erik Hane
A moment like this was always coming, though knowing that didn’t make it taste less like chewing glass. “This surge operation and our work here... have yielded the successful results we came here for. We are leaving Minnesota safer.”
So went the declaration of victory from “Border Czar” Tom Homan a few weeks ago, in announcing the supposed end to the federal government’s ground invasion of one of its own major cities. This after the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the kidnapping of five-year-old Liam Ramos, the weeks and weeks of chaos and destruction that ICE agents wreaked on Minneapolis, the fracturing of lives we’ll never know about amidst the thousands we do.
It was painful to hear that man stand up there and gloat about the good job he felt his secret police force did in our city. From the moment they arrived until the moment they leave—and they have not left yet, is the thing, because they’re liars just as much as they’re sadists—Minneapolis stood against them in whatever ways we could. I have written already that every single day, ordinary people chose to get a little bit braver and raise their risk tolerance a little bit higher, in the name of protecting their neighbors. It was an effort that deserved a moment of unambiguous victory that will never come. The working people who suddenly found themselves coordinating supply logistics or patrol locations, those who stood outside schools and daycares with plastic whistles in the face of guns the government had shown they were willing to use—they deserved to see a true, humiliating retreat for their efforts. They won’t get one. That, right now, has been a hard truth to swallow.
There’s a frankly libidinal contemporary style of posting that amounts to fantasizing about consequences for the people perpetuating these horrors. At least on my timeline, Nuremberg is the favorite image for this—trials, verdicts, sentencing for the fascists. That’s one of the tamer visions. People in the Twin Cities are immensely proud of their efforts, and there is no question that even amidst the damage we’ll now spend a generation repairing, we prevented much more from occurring. We want that codified somehow. We want them to say, “You stopped us,” or “Your city’s character was not what we thought.” When they of course say the opposite, we’d like to say something ourselves—but it’s hard to declare victory from a defensive position. Deaths, losses, and displacements are easier to count than lives preserved, or kids kept on track in their schools, families successfully shielded from harm. And after all, people did die. People were detained and put on planes. Life here was, for a time, fully shattered. Think about these things for too long and the idea of “victory” starts feeling a lot more pyrrhic. When Homan greedily took the concept for himself and his thugs, it stopped feeling like a victory at all.
I have to be honest with you. I get angry more than anything else. There is grief, sure, given what we’ve seen and will now begin to process, but mainly when I think about what’s happened here these last few months it comes back to anger. The cruelest people this country has on offer banded together to make life unlivable here for months. They delight in that misery, feed off it, trade jokes, revel in their confidence that no one is in position to make them atone for any of it. This doesn’t make Minneapolis special, of course—that pattern of unanswered cruelty is about the most exceptionally American thing there is. Our collective responsibility will be to push for consequences and reparation, to use any tool available to us to give people justice, including holding the perpetrators of this violence accountable. I’ll leave you to imagine whatever consequences you’d like. Right now, they’re all too far away.
Well. Not all of them. Because I have come to believe something else too: we are the consequences. We, collectively, are the condition that makes their defeat inevitable.
Fascists thrive when a populace feels isolated from each other, when the show of guns, boots, and state-backed force presents as invincible. But we are not isolated—true solidarity existed here well before they arrived, and it has only blossomed in response to their cruelty. It’s proven so durable that the fascists can hardly believe it’s real and not paid for. In fact, they systemically can’t believe that it’s real, because if it is, they know they are destined to fail.
As for the guns, the boots, the force? You’ve seen what I’ve seen. A woman doing her part watching over her neighborhood, whose murder brought everyone out instead of pushing them into hiding. A man whose final words were Are you okay, who ran toward the danger instead of away from it, and a city full of people that saw his bravery and what it meant for his life and knew that nonetheless they would do the same. Those people and their example became the consequence that will doom the perpetrators, sooner or later. In committing the unspeakable crimes they’ve had to commit in order to believe they’ve succeeded here, they will soon realize that their “victory” is just as pyrrhic as ours.
The violence is not over. It’s not even over here, in Minnesota. Do not let them tell you they have left us alone, because they have not. But when Homan made his announcement in February, once the feelings in our private chats subsided, the prevailing attitude was clear. We keep going. We keep patrolling neighborhoods, running supplies, offering rides, stocking pantries, gathering with each other, showing each other that every moment of fear or anger or grief can come with others ready to feel those things too. They have no answer for these things. This truth is what softens my anger when it becomes otherwise unbearable.
We are the consequences. That’s another way of saying that the work begins now. People here will need to grieve, process, heal, rebuild. These are difficult things, but we have built out the means of doing them together, on our terms, without needing to wait for someone else’s judgment or an election result or trials. We lit a fire here and it cannot, must not go out. On some level I think that Trump, Homan, and the rest know what they’ve unwittingly started in coming here, and they are hoping that by trickling agents out of our state it will disappear. We’ll see. It’s obvious to anyone of conscience that we do not currently have the country we want. I have a feeling that, soon, the fascists are going to find out that they don’t either.
Erik Hane is a literary agent and writer in Minneapolis.
Please read the most recent Hell World by me if you missed it.
Luke O’Neil
Jumping into the water to save someone is brave. So too running into a burning home. We all know this. Pushing back against the takeover of your city by federal kidnappers armed with little more than whistles and solidarity is likewise brave. Existing as trans or another kind of marginalized person in this country when the entire force of the state is being used to erase your rights and crush your spirit is brave. Continuing to wake up every day in a place ravaged by these same missiles of ours such as in Gaza and elsewhere is brave. Refusing to die when so much money and weaponry and political will is laser focused on ensuring that your life is worthless is brave.
I cannot think of anything less like bravery than operating an attack drone from the safety of some fucking aircraft carrier or office in D.C. or Tel Aviv or Palm Beach as the case is today. Pressing a button on a missile that will land hundreds or thousands of miles away. The little bottle of water on your desk. Maybe a picture of your family taped up there. Marching around saying "Yes sir" and all that shit. Saluting each other.
Fucking losers. Fucking murderers. Fucking cowards.
And expecting us – with good reason based on history of course – to all thank them for their service. Fuck your service and fuck you.
Saving a life is brave. Being instructed to kill and saying no I will not do that is brave. But murder like this? It is the least human thing you can do.
And also this newly (or always rather) relevant old one from me about the kind of violence it is acceptable to call for and the kind of violence it is beyond the realm of decency to call for.
Luke O’Neil
No one at these institutions enforces anything like professionalism or decency when it comes to calling for and endorsing systemic violence against vast swaths of people but trivial shit is policed heavily to the point of losing your employment. Betraying your preference for a Democrat is considered a sin in journalism while expressing your desire to see people immiserated — foreigners or Americans — is considered so down the middle it barely even registers as having said anything at all.
This isn’t “cancel culture” by the way it’s the banality of standard issue American bloodlust and Puritanical punishment culture.
You can remain in good standing in media or politics while advocating for as much violence and pain as you want as long as you do so politely and aren't saying you'll directly deliver it personally. Writing a story called “Invade Iraq now!” — or Iran or wherever for that matter — will never get you fired but saying “I'm going to come kick your ass” to one specific person will. Saying “We need to reopen the economy” during a pandemic despite the massive loss of life that would result is fine while telling someone “I hope your parents die” is not.
In other words hoping for one death is an abomination while passively accepting or enabling the deaths of 100,000 is just astute politics to paraphrase the fella.
The whole thing is a stupid game like when kids annoy their siblings by saying “I'm not touching you” while poking them with a stick. The idea is that as long as there's a buffer between you and the violence you are calling for through systemic means then your soul and professional reputation can remain clean.