Minnesota Winter

A second murder, a second set of lies and an ominous letter

In the past several weeks, masked federal agents dressed as military officers have killed two Americans who were peacefully protesting their violent attacks on immigrants and U.S. citizens. Both times their actions were recorded on video cameras. Both times, government spokesmen made false statements, directly contradicting the video evidence. Both times, the same spokesmen smeared the victims as “domestic terrorists.”

This is a tactic that I recognize: blaming the victims for their own deaths has long been standard practice in dictatorships. The administration’s lack of interest in any kind of investigation is also notable: They are now openly seeking to appeal to a part of the electorate that welcomes and celebrates violence, and to frighten and intimidate everyone else. The best account of these tactics came from Lydia Polgreen, of The New York Times. She visited Minnesota after the death of Renee Good, who was murdered inside her car:

But when I landed in Minneapolis on Monday and saw the size, scope and lawlessness of the federal onslaught unfolding here, I understood that Good’s killing was emblematic of its true mission: to stage a spectacle of cruelty upon a city that stands in stark defiance against Trump’s dark vision of America.

Thousands of masked, heavily armed agents, some with minimal training, have been unleashed on the streets of an American state. They have been promised near-total legal immunity by the president, effectively unshackled from any constitutional constraints.

They have been given limitless license to abduct anyone, not just the undocumented immigrants but American citizens who happen to look foreign, whatever that might mean. Even Native Americans, whose ancestors lived here long before anyone else, have been detained on the absurd suspicion that they are undocumented immigrants. They have roughed up local lawmakers, detained and jailed legal observers without charges, tear-gassed high school students, smashed in car windows of bewildered drivers unlucky enough to cross their path. Anyone who gets in their way — by protesting, filming their actions or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time — is presumed to be a domestic terrorist.

What does the administration hope to achieve through this use of selective terror? In the first episode of the new season of my podcast series, Autocracy in America, I wondered whether the plan might be to use ICE and other federal agents to intimidate voters. But the response of the Department of Justice to the protests in Minnesota has been even more explicit than that. Immediately after the murder of Alex Pretti, the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, sent Minnesota Governor Tim Walz an extraordinary letter. According to Democracy Docket:

Bondi blamed state and local leaders for the unrest ignited by the Trump administration’s expansive immigration enforcement operations. She claimed that Walz could “restore the rule of law” by complying with a list of demands, including giving the Department of Justice (DOJ) the state’s voter registration records:

“Allow the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to access voter rolls to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960.”

She added a list of other demands, but her demand for voter information, which in the US system is the responsibility of states, is particularly sinister.

Bondi’s letter represents a major assault on Minnesota’s sovereignty, demanding that it forfeit its ability to make and enforce its own laws and maintain its voter rolls without oversight from the executive branch, which does not have authority over elections.

The federal government, in other words, is using a violent paramilitary to extort an American state, apparently with the intent of influencing the coming midterm elections. If nothing else, this is the moment when everyone across the country should begin focusing on those elections, and putting every effort into ensuring that they are fair.

Some are already doing so. My colleague Robert Worth has written an excellent article on the Minnesota resistance:

But behind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as “engineered chaos” produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting. The movement has grown much larger than the core of activists shown on TV newscasts, especially since the killing of Renee Good on January 7. And it lacks the sort of central direction that Vance and other administration officials seem to imagine.

Read it here. Clearly, the resistance to manipulated elections will have a Minnesota component.

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Defund Science, Distort Culture, Mock Education

Episode 3 of my Autocracy in America podcast addresses this same issue, but from another angle. I ask whether the administration’s attacks on science, medicine, culture, and education, a combination of verbal threats and funding cuts, might also have a deeper goal: to create distrust, and, ultimately, to reshape Americans’ perceptions of reality. This kind of behavior also has a precedent. I spent many years writing about authoritarian regimes, and almost all of them try to undermine admired institutions in order to radically alter the way people think.

On the podcast, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat puts it like this:

There’s been a concerted and very relentless attempt to change the way that Americans feel about authorities, to change the way that they feel about American institutions. And elections are the most important of those institutions because it is the way that we express our voice and have our agency in the world.

Nor is this something that might happen. It has already happened. Trump managed to delude tens of millions of people against a very easily verifiable fact, that he lost the election in 2020:

Instead, he convinced tens of millions that he was the rightful winner. And he kept up the distrust in elections all these years. The churches allied with him; the manosphere; all of his enablers and allies. They’ve done a beautiful job from the autocratic point of view of discrediting not only elections but the whole way you think about democracy.

As I argued in the podcast’s first season, the mentality of authoritarianism has already arrived in America: “The corruption of democracy begins with the corruption of thought—and with the deliberate undermining of reality.”

Listen to the new episode here. Or else on one of these sites:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

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Kleptocracy Tracker

Continuing to monitor conflicts of interest, ostentatious emoluments, outright corruption and policy changes that will facilitate outright corruption. (Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc and check out the SNF Agora Institute chart)

January 16

• Trump pardoned a woman convicted of fraud after he had previously pardoned her for a separate fraud conviction during his first term. He also pardoned a man whose daughter had donated millions to a Trump-backed super PAC, as well as a former governor of Puerto Rico and a former FBI agent—all of whom had pleaded guilty in a political corruption case.

January 17

• Trump invited countries to join his proposed Gaza “board of peace,” and required invitees to pay $1 billion for a permanent seat on the board—which the president would personally control. Vladimir Putin, who was also invited, said he would be willing to contribute the $1 billion if Russian assets held in the United States were unfrozen.

January 18

• Trump granted a pardon to the son of Republican Representative Steve Womack, who was serving an eight-year sentence for selling methamphetamine—despite the administration’s tough rhetoric on cracking down on drug traffickers.

January 19

• Elon Musk made a $10 million donation—the largest single contribution ever to a Senate campaign—to a pro-Trump candidate running in Kentucky, as he seeks to maintain influence within the GOP.

January 20

• The United States seized a Venezuela-linked tanker in the Caribbean, marking the seventh such seizure as the Trump administration stockpiles—and ultimately sells—Venezuelan oil.

• The founders and CEOs of Silicon Valley’s largest tech firms increased their wealth by billions of dollars in the first year of Trump’s second term, a period that included multiple White House visits and donations to administration-backed projects for many of them.

• An analysis by the New York Times editorial board found that Trump made at least $1.4 billion in the first year of his second term—a figure that could be a significant underestimation, given revenue streams that may remain hidden from public view.

January 21

• Trump’s and Melania Trump’s memecoins have lost 94 percent and 99 percent of their value, respectively, in the year since their launch—even as the couple netted approximately $427 million in sales and trading fees, while most investors lost the majority of their investments.

• The Qatari jet gifted to Trump is expected to be ready for his use as Air Force One by this summer.

January 22

• Donald Trump Jr. is convening finance and tech leaders, along with online influencers, for a cryptocurrency event at Mar-a-Lago.

• Howard Lutnick’s son—who runs Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment firm founded by his father—paid a small lobbying firm associated with Donald Trump Jr. $21 million last year for services that the firm’s founder emeritus could presumably have provided himself.

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Greenland kleptocracy annex

Donald Trump’s fixation on Greenland dates back to his first term, when his longtime friend and fellow billionaire Ron Lauder floated the idea that the United States should simply buy the island. Trump’s desire to do so has nothing to do with security, or the non-existent threat from Russia or China. The United States is already treaty-bound to defend Greenland through NATO’s Article 5, and longstanding bilateral agreements with Copenhagen effectively give Washington carte blanche to establish any military installations it deems necessary there. As I wrote after visiting Denmark last year, I think he wants to own Greenland because it looks large on the map. Trump himself has said that he “psychologically” needs Greenland, not for the country but for himself.

But, as a footnote to this week’s kleptocracy tracker, it’s worth noting that some people around Trump do have business ambitions there. Lauder, who originally planted the idea in Trump’s head, has since invested heavily in developing Greenland’s luxury market. He is also pursuing hydroelectric projects to power aluminum smelting on the island, alongside a consortium of investors. Some of Trump’s largest donors have also taken stakes in firms positioned to reap windfall profits, perhaps, from Greenland’s subsoil.

As Casey Michel argues in the New Republic, there might even be a deeper game afoot:

Buried within the kind of crony capitalist network that has propelled Trump’s imperialism is something far stranger, and far darker, than simply seizing Greenland’s resources for financial gain. It’s about the opening salvos in a world in which any restrictions on American oligarchy—any oversight, any democratic checks, any hurdles whatsoever—are removed, and a golden, pro-oligarchic age reigns, centered on, but by no means limited to, Greenland.

Reuters has also reported on the Silicon Valley tech investors who are “promoting the frozen island as a site for a so-called freedom city, a libertarian utopia with minimal corporate regulation”:

The freedom-city movement reflects a fascination with settling new American frontiers, rooted in nostalgia for the nation’s 1800s western expansion. Expanding to Greenland “can be the dawn of a new Manifest Destiny,” said tech investor Shervin Pishevar, referring to the 19th-century philosophy that America was an exceptional nation with a God-given mission to conquer territory.

It’s very hard to know how serious this project might be (and no one seems to have explained how the freedom-city residents would cope with perpetual snow and ice). But, for the record, some very large Trump donors do care about Greenland. Although the president at Davos pulled back from his threat to invade, they could eventually persuade him to get interested again.

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Snow and Ice in DC

It’s not Greenland, but Rock Creek Park. Sleds on the hillside, ice floes in the creek.