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Which random brown/yellow people are being treated with over-the-top cruelty and viciousness? The closest I've seen there was the arrest of the one Hmong guy, who refused to identify himself and who they thought was a different really bad Hmong guy they were trying to arrest. They arrested him in the cold when he had only boxer shorts and a robe on, I think -- this is cruel but it's not "over-the-top" cruelty, arrests that aren't pre-arranged surrenders are almost always "come as you are". He was released the same day, I believe.
Sorry, the way I stated that made it unclear what I meant. If I had broken it up into multiple sentences rather than one long one it could have been clearer.
When I wrote that, I was thinking specifically about the Mexican-American teenager who was working at Target when ICE or CBP tackled him and dragged him out of the store in cuffs. Evidently he was repeatedly shouting that he was an American citizen. They ignored that, threw him in a van and drove off. They quickly figured out that he was in fact a citizen, but not before they beat the shit out of him and dumped him bleeding and crying in a Walmart parking lot a mile from where they picked him up. Evidently the person who found him posted a video of the boy shivering and weeping in the parking lot. I did not see that video, but I did see a clip from the video where he was led from the store.
I don't know what is true and what is not true about this story. Yes, there's video evidence, but there could easily be other information that would make the federal agents' actions seem less extreme. In any case, when I read the news (which is a mix of mainstream left and right leaning outlets as well as lots of twitter threads for hot takes and substack posts for analysis), I come away with the impression that someone wants me to believe that the federal government is acting with cruelty and viciousness for no damn good reason in Minnesota, except that they want to piss people off.
Whether that's because it's true or because of a concerted propaganda campaign, or a mix of the two, is beside the point. If that's the way it's widely perceived, that's all that matters. If, that is, you buy into the idea that the administration's true goals are for spectacle, an idea that makes more and more sense to me as the term progresses.
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