In the immediate aftermath of the ICE killing of Renée Good in Minneapolis last week, the Trump administration smeared her as a “domestic terrorist,” claiming that she had weaponized her vehicle. They labeled Good a “violent rioter” and insisted every new video angle proved their version of the truth: Good was a menace and the ICE agent a potential victim. That’s despite video evidence to the contrary, showing Good, by all appearances, trying to leave the scene of the altercation, while ICE agents acted aggressively. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, spent Sunday doubling down, insisting that Good had supposedly been “breaking the law by impeding and obstructing a law enforcement operation.”
So, on Sunday, I joined the throng in Manhattan for one of many dozens of protests held around the country this past weekend. In the middle of Fifth Avenue, surrounded by raucous, defiant New Yorkers, I asked protesters the simple question: What did you see?
“I mean, it seems like the bottomless, self-radicalizing thing that the government is going through,” said Anne Perryman, 85, a former journalist. “Is there any point when they’re actually at the bottom, and they’re not going to get any worse? I don’t think so.”
“I think there’s a small minority of Americans who are buying that,” said Kobe Amos, a 29-year-old lawyer, describing reactions to the government’s gaslighting. “It’s obviously enough to do a lot of damage. But if you look around, people are angry.”
“I saw an agent that overreacted,” he added, “and did something that was what—I think it’s murder.”
But, as you said, they’re proud of being compared to Nazis. Calling them authoritarians would just give them a fuzzy, tickling feeling in their loins—because “authority” and machismo.
If the goal is to describe their own behavior to themselves in a way that they both understand and will blow a gasket over, calling them communists is pretty much a guaranteed way to do it. Most of them don’t actually understand what “communism” or “socialism” is beyond conflating them with Russia and China-flavored authoritarianism. Add on to that they grew up being indoctrinated into unquestionably believing that communism is the antithesis of America, democracy, personal freedoms, and all that is good in the world.
They see themselves as the good guys fighting evil. Calling them “commies” is, in their own minds and in a single word, outright saying they are the pure evil they hate. The cognitive dissonance of trying to reconcile that thought for even a moment would be agonizing.