Death and videotape

Trust your eyes

Photograph by Charly Triballeau / AFP / Getty

Originally, this whole Substack project was supposed to be about visual media and its disorienting effects on the American mind, an increasingly rich vein of exploration given all we do is scroll and swipe through videos and photo carousels. Most of the time, watching something is communal exercise in witnessing. A bomb being dropped or someone being shot in the street is a detached recording of a historical event. You can disagree with the contextual evidence that surrounds such an event—the missiles were justified or not; the slaughter was a rational response to threat or an act of intentional cruelty—but when provided with the same source material, we can typically agree on “what” happened. To introduce doubt is to try and crack a shared reality and, basically, drive everyone a little insane.

Last week in Minneapolis, an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross shot and killed a 37-year old woman named Renée Good as she was making a three-point turn and attempting to drive away from other ICE agents who were attempting to open her door. (The entire video is analyzed in excruciating detail by the New York Times here.) Ross stepped in front of Good’s car in an attempt to stop her from fleeing, and he unholsters his service weapon as Good is turning her steering wheel hard to the right and starting to move forward. Ross fired four shots into the left side of the car, three through the driver’s side window and one through the windshield creating a perfect bullet-sized hole a few inches from the side of the car’s frame. Good was hit in the head, chest, and arm. Her car accelerates into a pair of parked vehicles before hitting a tree and stopping. She is dead.

It was inevitable that a shooting like this would be politicized rapidly¹, but what I’m most interested in is the attempt by the Trump Administration to tell people their eyes have deceived them. Stripping down Trump’s social media post of its subjective analysis of justification—which, like I said, is something we all do—you start to see an interest in warping reality. From Trump: Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer,” “it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.” And from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem: “attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle” while they were “attempting to push out their vehicle” from the snow. Neither of these things are true if you simply watch the video. Good’s car hit Ross’ foot; Good wasn’t surrounding any ICE officers; no ICE officers were trying to dislodge their car out of the snow. Groypers can say Good had it coming and that protestors who interfere with ICE all deserve to be dealt with violently; being bad faith idiot fascists is sort of their thing as it is with ~30% of Americans. These are the engines of the snuff film political economy to borrow from Sarah Thankam Mathews. But the recorded footage itself is not crude enough to raise questions about what happened. Everyone saw it for what it is.

To introduce fissures in our shared sense of reality is deeply worrying to me, though one that isn’t necessarily novel under authoritarian governments. But in this case, it signals an administration that is willing to give everyone a low-hum of psychosis in order to introduce an invincible rationale for further violence. And there will be more. Unlike in the recent past, ICE has been unrelenting in ratcheting up the intensity and brazenness of its operations after they killed someone in the street. They’re targeting Spanish immersion daycares, snatching activists off the streets even as they present proof of citizenship, going door to door to harass minorities. Everyone on the streets is also terrified, both for themselves and their neighbors. That there are millions of people who may agree with the government’s assessment of the situation against all evidence is an ominous signal, one that’s as clear as videotape.

1. I still think one of the most disturbing aftershocks here is that the Trump Admin attempted to sic the Justice department on Good’s spouse which is… I mean that’s dictionary-definition fascism, using the organs of government to punish you political enemies.