As Trumpism and technology erode our shared understanding of the world, ordinary people in Minneapolis put their lives on their line to record the truth.
is a features editor who publishes award-winning stories about law, tech, and internet subcultures. A journalist trained as a lawyer, she has been writing about tech for 10 years.
The first video I saw of the Minneapolis shooting was bad enough. Shortly after I saw it, I had the terrible realization that there were multiple people in the clip holding their phones up — another angle was bound to surface. Within minutes, a second video was all over social media, and it was even more horrifying. In another recording, seemingly made by a neighbor, a man approaches to render aid. As armed agents rush toward him with guns, he shouts, “I’m a physician!” You can also hear someone sobbing just outside the frame: “That’s my wife!”
Much of America has now seen the first few seconds of this video obtained by the Minnesota Reformer. ICE agents lean over a vehicle that is slowly pulling out of the street of what appears to be a residential neighborhood. Three shots ring out. The car accelerates and crashes into a line of parked cars. (You don’t need a Bellingcat top-down reconstruction of the event to see that the ICE agents were nowhere in the pathway of the vehicle, but they’ve made one anyway.)
The full video is over four minutes long, and it’s the other portions that have burned themselves into my brain.
Throughout those four minutes, almost every civilian — dressed in puffy coats and plaid flannel and fluffy knits — eventually takes their phone out to record. They are filming the cars, ICE agents, each other. One woman is walking her dog on the sidewalk at the start. She appears again to ask, “What’s happening?” to the filmer; later, she shows up in the periphery, this time with her phone out.
All of these people know someone has been shot by armed, masked thugs who have been authorized to act with total impunity. The deployed airbag of the crashed car is splattered with red. There is blood on the ice. But the civilians still refuse to leave. They are putting their lives on the line because they believe witnessing reality is important.
The deceased victim — 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good — has been identified as a legal observer. The cacophony of whistles at the start of one video suggests that several activists and legal observers had descended on the scene of an ICE raid, the former to alert the neighborhood and the latter to record what they were doing.
The immediate response of the Trump administration was to call the victim a domestic terrorist, even before her name was known. Inside the propagandized filter bubbles of Truth Social and X, a single, grainy 13-second clip is being promoted by President Donald Trump as the canonical record of the killing; the countless other videos and eyewitness testimonies are being dismissed. But even this Trump-endorsed clip is, at best, ambiguous. The Trump administration, Mia Sato writes, “is asking the public to disbelieve their own eyes, despite mounting contradictory evidence. Who needs AI manipulations when your preferred angle will do the job well enough?”
Trump’s contempt for reality is well documented. We have written about it time and time again: his Orwellian war on anti-fascism; the internet hallucinations that sent the National Guard to American cities; the unhinged spectacle of the bombing of Venezuela. And his disregard for the truth is being wildly accelerated by the careless and untrammeled insertion of generative AI into everything, a technological revolution that is shattering our social consensus around the veracity of images. There are no brakes to pump: As Trump wooed and cowed Silicon Valley’s billionaires, American internet platforms actively dismantled what protections they built against disinformation. Now, being a fact-checker can get you denied a US visa.
But reality refuses to go quietly into the night. Instead of silencing dissent, the shooting has left Minnesota-nice in tatters. On television, the mayor says: “To ICE: Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” When reporters ask Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) why she thinks the Trump administration is targeting Minnesota, she tells them, “I wish I knew. I mean, I wish they would just leave us the fuck alone.”
Just as the shots ring out, a person filming screams, “Shame! Shame! Oh my fucking God! What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck did you just do?” In all of the extended videos of the shooting, you can hear the furious howls of residents as their boots crunch through the snow. “Don’t let the murderer get away!” they shout. Another cry in the distance: “Murderer!” (The ICE agent, who is masked, then gets into a car and does in fact get away.) But the entire neighborhood keeps screaming: “Murderer! Murderer!” and “Pussy motherfuckers, man!” and “You’re killing my neighbors, you’re stealing my neighbors, what the fuck, man!”
Renee Good and other legal observers came to record what they genuinely believe to be an atrocity: the violent snatching of their immigrant neighbors by masked ICE agents. The whistles, the car honks, the hurriedly captured smartphone videos: These are acts of faith in shared reality, in community, and in due process. They believe that these things — eroded as they are — are worth fighting for.
It’s doubtful that the shooting will deter anti-ICE resistance. The observers, I fear, will now go out in twos and threes, ready to record not just the ICE kidnappings, but also, potentially, each other’s deaths.
The tech CEOs, venture capitalists, social media platforms, AI features being rammed into software and hardware alike are all abetting the president of the United States in his war on reality. But the acts of ordinary people — using their phones, their cameras, their social media accounts — are the acts of people who still think reality matters. And as long as that’s the case, Trump has not won his war.