We don’t focus on these details in order to justify the federal agents’ actions, which are plainly brutal and unjustifiable; we do it to force the world to make sense, and to calm our nerves. If we don’t talk back, if we alter our routes to avoid protests, if we are lucky enough to be white, straight, natural-born Americans — or, if we are not, but we lie low, stay quiet — we will be safe. Conversely, we can choose to speak up, to go to protests, to take a risk. Either way, we tell ourselves, if we can predict the consequences, we have agency.
But that’s not how state terror works.
M. Gessen compares current, seemingly random brutality deployed by federal agents in Minneapolis and St.Paul with repression and terror of regimes in history. Soviet KGB terror, for example, was fundamentally random. “A regime based on terror … deploys violence precisely to reinforce the message that anyone can be subjected to it.” That is where President Trump has taken the United States.