Mick Hartley

I have no idea what really happened in the Minneapolis shooting, but every American knows (well, with the exception of Jerry Coyne). It was cold-blooded murder, carried out by Trump’s fascist ICE thugs. No, it was self-defence: the woman was aiming her car straight at the man…..FAFO.

It’s like that old internet meme of the dress – do you see it as blue and black, or white and gold? Same input; different perceptions. The answer depends on whether you’re a Trump hater or a Trump supporter. And Minneapolis again – site of the George Floyd killing. It’s a key moment precisely because, although it’s there on video footage, people’s views are just about 100% correlated with their political ideology. A parable for our times.

Camilla Long:

To read anything about this appalling tragedy is to be dragged, with full force, back into the depths of America’s culture war. It is to be spat at, again, in the face. It is to be flooded with videos of these agents — a newly expanded praetorian force that’s now been told it can arrest anyone it suspects of being an illegal immigrant — screaming at people, pushing them to the floor, arresting them, bloodying them, marching them around, dragging pregnant women along the street, just because they think, sometimes on sight, they shouldn’t be in America.

But — how do I put this? — it is also to be brought, once again, face to face with the country’s screeching victimhood and paranoia.

“Get the f*** out of Minneapolis,” bellowed the city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, just after the killing on Wednesday — a strange, turkey-necked man last seen weeping at the coffin of George Floyd, who died less than a mile down the road. An excited Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor, most famous as Kamala Harris’s dundering VP pick, went one further: he’d issued a “warning order” to the state’s national guard.

“We’ve got about 7, 500 troops in training … across the state,” he boasted, mostly “teachers” and “business owners”, ready to repel Trump’s ICE agents. I do wonder how scared Trump will be of thousands of geography assistants. Doesn’t matter: pushing back, said Walz, is Minnesotans’ patriotic duty.

“It was Minnesota’s 1st that held that line for the nation on July 3, 1863,” he said, “and I think now we may be in that moment.” What moment? Good had barely been dead 24 hours — and now it’s civil war?

I don’t think civil war is out of the question, by the way. In fact, now, to many, war might come as a relief. Walz encouraged Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago — all in big Democrat states — to “stand with us”, while hoping (not at all hoping) they’d do it “safely”. Who will help them? Any number of disturbed people who still worship these failed Democrats: the shaking, weeping woman who dropped by the place where Good died, for example, and told a TV crew she thought it was “wrong” for her to cry because she was “privileged” as a white woman and “white tears are not helpful”, even though the victim herself was white.

Trump’s behaviour was not “normalcy”, suggested Walz. But neither is his.

How is it that the richest country in the world finds itself here: the democracy closest to self-annihilation? Is it the money? Do they conform to the Roman example: we’ll do it because we’re bored and we can? I think it is more because Trump, Walz, Clinton — well, they’re all of a piece: lucky, cushy middle-class people who, drunk on power, think nothing of winding people up, and then grab everything for themselves.

Walz is accused of indulging Somali fraudsters while they diverted more than $1 billion from the needy in Minnesota. The sums of money are vast: more than the state’s whole prison system spends in a year.

So it’s a bit strange to watch him nod along to Frey’s hokey, sentimental, let’s “build cities” and “love … citizens above any ideology” rhetoric, when you know that none of them — not Frey, nor Walz, nor Clinton — has any intention of “building” anything with Maga. They’re actively looking to erase Maga entirely, choking off their jobs, livelihoods and rights, while championing 20 million “undocumenteds”. It’s civil war already, really: that is why ICE was in Minnesota.

You could say this is what happens when you hollow out a democracy’s intellectual inner life and replace it with a whole load of seething, worthless political emotions and wants. Walz, for example, has in the space of a decade turned super-white, geeky Minnesota — famous for its water — into a flaming crucible of progressive madness, a “trans refuge” where Walz fought to make trans surgeries easier for children.

When a democracy gets to this point, when it feels comfortable enough to vote in Mr Reality TV twice, but to also prance around saying men are women, I think you have to accept that no one is any longer serious about it. All rational thinking is replaced by people moronically scrapping over micro-assets like cavemen, while elected politicians compete to be horrible.