Reality still matters in Minneapolis

The first video I saw of the shooting in Minneapolis was bad enough. Shortly after watching the clip, I became horribly aware that there were several people in the clip holding their phones up, and there was another angle that was bound to come to the fore. Within minutes, a second video spread all over social media, and it was even more terrifying. In another recording, apparently made by a neighbour, a man approaches to offer assistance. As armed agents rushed at him with rifles, he shouted, “I’m a doctor!” You can also hear someone crying just offscreen: “That’s my wife!”

Much of America has now witnessed the first few seconds of This video He got it Reformers in Minnesota. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents lean into a vehicle slowly pulling out of what appears to be a residential neighborhood. Three shots ring out. The car accelerates and crashes into a row of parked cars. (You don’t need to Top-down event reconstruction from Bellingcat To find out that the ICE agents were nowhere in the car’s path, but they made one anyway.)

The full video is over four minutes long, and the other parts are what burned themselves into my mind.

Throughout those four minutes, nearly every civilian — dressed in puffy coats, plaid flannel, and delicate knits — whips out their phones to record. They photograph cars, ICE agents, and each other. A woman walks with her dog on the sidewalk at the beginning. She popped up again to ask, “What’s going on?” To the photographer; Later, she appeared in the ocean, this time with her phone out.

All these people know that someone has been shot by armed and masked thugs, who have been allowed to act with complete impunity. The crashed car’s airbag deployment is splattered in red. There’s blood on the ice. But civilians still refuse to leave. They put their lives on the line because they believe that seeing reality is important.

The deceased victim – 37-year-old Renee Nicole Goode – has been identified as Legal observer. The cacophony of whistles at the beginning of one video suggests that several activists and legal observers had descended on the scene of an ICE raid, the first to alert the neighborhood and the second to record what they were doing.

The Trump administration’s immediate response was to summon Victim A Internal terroristeven before he knew her name. Within the propaganda filter bubbles of Truth Social and X, a single grainy 13-second clip is being promoted by President Donald Trump as the legal record of the killing; Countless videos and eyewitness testimonies are dismissed. But even this passage endorsed by Trump is ambiguous at best. Trump administration, Miya Sato writes“, “is asking the audience not to believe their eyes, despite mounting contradictory evidence. Who needs to fiddle with AI when your favorite angle can do the job well enough?”

Trump’s disdain for reality is well documented. We’ve written about it time and once again: for him The Orwellian war on anti-fascism; Internet hallucinations it Send in the National Guard to American cities; the A turbulent scene from the bombing of Venezuela. His disregard for the truth is greatly accelerated by The neglectful and unfettered inclusion of generative AI into everythingIt is a technological revolution that is shattering our social consensus about the authenticity of images. There are no brakes to pump: like Trump He sympathized and raged Silicon Valley billionaires and American Internet platforms They have been actively dismantling the protections they have built against disinformation. Now, being a Fact checker You may be refused a visa to enter the United States.

But reality refuses to go quietly into the night. Instead of silencing dissent, the shooting left Minnesota in tatters. on tv, The mayor says: “To ICE: Get out of Minneapolis.” When reporters ask Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) why she thinks the Trump administration is targeting Minnesota, She tells them“I wish I knew. I mean, I wish they’d leave us alone.”

As the shots ring out, someone filming shouts: “Shame! Shame! Oh my God! What is this? What is this? What did I just do?” In all the extended videos of the shooting, you can hear angry residents howling as their boots hit the snow. “Don’t let the killer escape!” They scream. Another distant cry: “Murderer!” (ICE agent, Who is masked?(And then he actually gets in the car and runs away.) But the whole neighborhood keeps screaming: “Murderer! Murderer!” and “You fucking man!” And “You’re killing my neighbors, you’re robbing my neighbors, what’s this, man!“

Rene Goode and other legal observers came to record what they truly believed was an atrocity: the violent kidnapping of their immigrant neighbors by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The whistles, the car horns, the hastily captured smartphone videos: these are acts of faith in shared reality, in community, and in due process. They believe that these things – although corrosive – are worth fighting for.

It is doubtful that the shooting will deter anti-ICE resistance. I fear that observers will now go out in twos and threes, ready to record not only ICE kidnappings, but also each other’s deaths.

Tech CEOs, venture capitalists, social media platforms, and AI features being built into software and hardware alike are all pitting the President of the United States in his war on reality. But the actions of ordinary people — with their phones, their cameras, their social media accounts — are the actions of people who still believe that reality matters. As long as this is the case, Trump has not won his war.