The Authoritarianism Will Be Televised

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️ In the 48 hours since ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, the Trump administration has concocted a few justifications: she was trying to run the agents over, she’s a “domestic terrorist,” part of a “ lunatic fringe ,” that the poor, innocent agents were simply trying to free their car from the snow. Their attempt to villainize Good for her own murder gained little traction as contemporaneous video of the killing rocketed around social media, disproving the spin. The footage appears to show Good’s maroon Honda Pilot SUV attempting to exit the scene, and that Ross shot Good while she was turning her car away from him. In a new video from Ross’ point of view - published Friday by a right-wing website - Good can be heard saying “I’m not mad at you” seconds before Ross kills her. Without the videos, we’d be entirely reliant on an administration that habitually lies about ICE’s use of unjustified force - a situation more akin to that in Portland, where Customs and Border Protection officers shot two people Thursday night. The administration claims that the passenger in the car was “a Venezuelan illegal alien affiliated with the transnational Tren de Aragua prostitution ring” (unclear what that is even supposed to mean), that the shooter, as usual, was fearful for his life. In the hours after the shooting, no footage was released. This, from the same administration that claimed that Silverio González (the man ICE agents killed in Chicago last September) was shot after trying to run over agents and dragging one to the point of “severe injuries.” In surveillance footage released later, González can be seen backing up to drive away while agents stood on either side of the car, and one agent can be heard describing his injuries as “nothing major.” The Department of Homeland Security also claimed that officers in Chicago had no choice but to shoot Marimar Martinez several times in October after, DHS claimed, she rammed their cars and threatened them with a semiautomatic weapon. Her lawyer said in court that he had footage of an agent ramming into Martinez’s car, that she had a permitted handgun in her purse that she never removed. In an extremely rare move, the Justice Department asked the judge to dismiss the indictment against her. Living in the panopticon presents myriad threats of its own, and AI might make this kind of video proof harder to trust in the future. But over the past year, these recordings have been indispensable in fighting the furious torrent of lies and propaganda the administration spews every time its ill-trained agents hurt and kill people. - Kate Riga Trump Breaks Protocol, Shares BLS Jobs Numbers Early In a flippant violation of clearly defined policy, President Donald Trump posted data from the unreleased Bureau of Labor Statistics December jobs report on social media the night before the report was published. Trump posted...

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