“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How can I help it?” he blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
On Jan. 7, I dropped a car off at my daughter’s high school. Not long after that, she took it to skiing practice. A few minutes later, then-Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino and at least 10 ICE agents stopped in front of the school and marched onto the property. According to people I know who were there, the agents were aggressive and belligerent. One woman blew a whistle, and an agent walked up to her and said, “You’re assaulting me.”
The grounds were filled with students and staff who’d come outside and who were recording the incident. In one video, as ICE swarmed the grounds, the school principal ran up to pull a student back from an agent, who then fired chemical irritants into both their faces. Another staff member can be heard telling students to back up.
“Guys,” she says, “I don’t want you to get hurt. They literally just killed someone.”
That someone was Renee Good, who had been killed earlier that day. The videos from outside our school showed how easily the number of people killed could have climbed.
But there were other reasons to be disturbed.
The next day, Bovino wrote on X that the students and staff were “organized protesters” who “showed up in minutes assaulting agents,” He said there were four arrests and that they “saw no students.”
It’s no secret that politicians, secret police and paramilitary squad leaders lie. But this was different: A brazen attempt to rewrite facts that we could all see with our own eyes.
To anyone who’s been paying attention, this feels familiar. Ever since his disappointing crowd size in 2016, Donald Trump has been trying to alter reality with his words.
A few examples stand out: The California wildfires that he said were caused by not raking the forests. Trump claiming to be named Michigan’s “Man Of the Year.” Trump’s statement in 2020 that COVID-19 was disappearing. His assertion that January 6th was “a day of love.” And his more recent claim that he won Minnesota three times.
If these all sound insane, it’s partly because they are. But it’s also partly because Trump has understood our dystopian moment better than the rest of us.
Lately I’ve seen this quote from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four making the rounds: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
When Orwell and others tried to imagine the worst iteration of government power, they pictured an all-powerful state that controlled an official narrative of events. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the government uses violence (or drugs in the case of Brave New World) to control our perception of reality. The fear was a paucity of possible narratives.
Today, the opposite is true: The number of narrative possibilities is infinite, so we can choose the one that “feels true,” regardless of its connection to reality. These stories don’t need to be fact-checked or verified. They just need to be shared by people you trust. The events in them matter less than the beliefs holding them together. And as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
Trump rose in this milieu. In our modern dystopia, orthodoxy has become self-selecting. Anyone who wants to belong more than they want to understand can parrot the party line. It doesn’t matter how true it is because, as Orwell also observed, “reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
Trump intuited this: He could say whatever he wanted to be true. This has been so effective among his supporters that it seems to have become official policy: Just say what you want to have been true, regardless of what was.
Two hours after Renee Good was killed, for example, Homeland Security issued a statement that called her a “violent rioter,” who had “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them — an act of domestic terrorism.”
But when the observer videos came out, we all saw this was not true.
Two weeks later, Alex Pretti was tackled and shot 10 times. Afterward, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told the cameras: “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and kill law enforcement.”
Again the observer videos showed the truth.
This happened over and over during Metro Surge. It was only thanks to the 30,000 trained observers in Minnesota that reality could not be so easily distorted: ICE was abusing our rights, kidnapping working people off the street and tearing families apart. They were targeting anyone with dark skin, along with whomever else they wanted to inflict violence and chaos on. It was a raw power trip, and no amount of words could cover it up.
But with observers present, the world could see what the Party told us not to see.
The surge wore on, the resistance continued and the mass-documentation started to have an effect. After ICE agents claimed they were attacked by a violent criminal with a snow shovel — who they claimed to have shot in self-defense — video evidence again contradicted the official story. DHS later admitted its narrative had collapsed, and that its agents were under investigation.
“The men and women of ICE are entrusted with upholding the rule of law and are held to the highest standards of professionalism, integrity, and ethical conduct” A DHS spokesperson said. “Violations of this sacred sworn oath will not be tolerated.”
This was a lie we didn’t need a video to disprove.
The larger point is this: Minnesota’s resistance to the ICE surge cracked the Trump reality bubble. The air started leaking out, and the truth in. Bovino was ousted, followed by Noem. This was because when they told us to reject the evidence in front of our eyes, we kept recording.
When all this is over, we will likely still be awash in a dystopic swirl of stories. But this may be the beginning of the end of Trump’s ability to assert whatever version of reality he wants. If so, it will be because we shone a light on the terrible truth. And in doing so, we gave everyone watching a rudder to help steer our ship out of these dangerous waters.
- Frank Bures is the editor of "Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology, author of Pushing the River: An Epic Battle, a Lost History, a Near Death, and Other True Canoeing Stories," and he writes and records for VoiceMap. He lives in Minneapolis and is one of the city’s constitutional observers. More at frankbures.com.
