I continue to worry profoundly about this country I live in, as the feds have now responded to their own murder of Renee Good by upping the level of brutality and lawlessness in Minneapolis even further. The corporate media seems to struggle to look straight at this story, to describe what’s actually happening, and even just to keep it on the front page. So once again I find the best coverage coming from outlets where you might least expect it. I was especially gripped by the firsthand reportage by Ryan Broderick in “We’re all just content for ICE: Four days on the ground in Minneapolis.”
The most gutting part of a gutting piece is this sequence of pictures:
Broderick explains,
But the most egregious example I saw of how tightly connected these two worlds are happened on Saturday morning. As a convoy of vehicles driven by ICE agents arrived at the federal building, a woman punched the window of one of the cars. Close to two dozen agents jumped out of the convoy and tackled her and her friend to the ground. Immediately following them, coming out of the same car as the agents, was Fox News national correspondent Matt Finn, who filmed the whole altercation with a massive shit-eating grin on his face. When I started filming him and asked who he was with and what he was using that video for, he turned his back towards me and tried to hide his face. “Intense video,” Finn would later caption his post on X.
When I saw this, I remembered something that happened in June of last year. One of California’s U.S. Senators, Alex Padilla, tried to interrupt a press conference being held here in L.A. by DHS secretary Kristi Noem, only to be muscled out of the room, wrestled to the ground, and handcuffed. The morning that it happened, I watched a video recording of the encounter, shocked by how security seemed to deliberately assault this man’s dignity. Over the next few days, I kept flashing back to a few frames of the video: the moment when a smirk flashed across the face of the security guard as he overpowered Padilla. I became so obsessed that I went through the video frame-by-frame and screenshotted the moment.
Seeing the Fox News reporter’s smirk, I felt I understood the first smirk better. These twisted smiles capture so much. There is a wicked, fragile pleasure in overpowering someone weaker than yourself. Men smile like this as they beat their wives and children. I assume they smile like this as they commit sexual violence against civilians during war. It’s the smile of the torturer. The smile of someone whose psychological state has taken them far away from the capacity to take care, to be gentle, and to remember the humanity of the person in front of them. They are full with gleeful bloodlust.
There must be a way to break these men out of this level of hell.
