Tolerating human rights abuses set the stage for what we’re seeing today.
Alex Pretti was a 37 year old nurse who cared for critically ill veterans. He was executed by federal agents in Minneapolis after he helped a woman they were assaulting.
He was the second US citizen killed in as many weeks, the other being a young mother of three named Renee Good. She was observing abuses and vacating the area in her car. Agents shot her in the head in front of her wife.
Videos of both extrajudicial killings surfaced online within minutes, as did the character assassinations from regime spokespeople who labeled the victims “terrorists“.
The same week, agents shot flashbangs and tear gas grenades at a family driving home in a residential neighbourhood. Six children were in the car when the grenades detonated beneath them, resulting in CPR being administered to a baby. The Department of Homeland Security reflexively labelled the parents “radical agitators“.
All of this violence was instigated by the Trump regime to punish Minneapolis for voting Republican in insufficient numbers. In his wording, this was “retribution“. It followed similar deployments to Los Angeles and Chicago.
The official cover is immigration control, but this lie is transparent to anyone outside the Trump cult of personality. Still, the cruelty is largely targeted. The KKK-backed regime is rounding up people of colour, including native Americans, documented immigrants, and US citizens. They murder white people who stand up for their neighbours.
It’s a win-win for the Republicans who are open about making the US a whites-only nation and satisfying Trump’s narcissistic impulse to harm those perceived to have voted for the opposition party.
The political nature of this targeted repression makes federal agents, by definition, a secret police.
The abuses aren’t new, only the targets
None of what’s happening in the US is novel.
What is new is that the abuses are coming in as a flood and impacting white middle-class citizens, at least those in blue states.
Minorities in the US are intimately familiar with human rights violations and the lies made to excuse them. From racist murders of young black men, to Muslim bans, to purging society of trans people, to intentionally orphaning undocumented immigrant children, every violent act of the current moment has seeds in the past.
They came for them first, and society largely answered with silence.
Canada on the same path
Now they’re coming for everyone of the regime’s perceived detractors, and with a malignant narcissist and his sycophants in charge, the bar to be considered as such is in Hell.
Canada is creating the same permission structure at home that enabled the descent of the United-States into open fascism.
We ignore the repression of Muslim Québécois, giving air time to the province’s falsehoods that this is about laïcité. We ignore the state-led attacks on trans Albertans. We continue the genocide against indigenous people while speaking of reconciliation. We are silent about US sanctions on a Canadian judge for being a member of the International Criminal Court.
The majority in Canada has sacrificed justice for minorities for comfort. But in doing so, they are enshrining a permission structure that can only go after them next.
Who will be left to speak for them then?