ICE killing pushes America toward Orwellian nightmare

Orwellian” is a word that gets chucked around far too much, but there is surely something quite sinister in the official response to the shooting of a civilian, Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. Obviously, in such circumstances, there’s always some room for argument about what happened and why, but not about the more obvious facts, backed up by videos and eyewitness accounts.

The ultimate boss of ICE, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, declared that Good was involved in an act of “domestic terrorism,” as if she were an Isis operative — and with zero evidence to back up that extreme claim, and little sign that Good was deliberately using her vehicle as a weapon. Donald Trump, who is responsible for militarising Democrat‑run cities for his own reasons, even claimed — having viewed a video — that she had “viciously run over” the ICE agent, even though the agent in question can apparently be seen walking away from the incident towards an ICE vehicle and has since been released from hospital.

The president likes to put his spin on a story as quickly as possible; soon enough, the ICE-Noem-Trump version of events formed the basis for Maga “talking points” on social and mainstream media. Meanwhile, none of the local authorities in Minnesota, so far as can be seen, agree with the “federal” view. Points of law — such as the degree of force permitted in these circumstances — are disputed. Fortunately, ubiquitous video coverage now allows us to see and judge for ourselves, and as we pore over the facts, it’s fair to say that they do not unequivocally support the account given by Trump and Noem.

Good’s car, for example, does not appear to be driving at great speed directly towards the ICE agent; rather, it seems to be pulling away and steering clear of the officers. Three shots were fired, seemingly deliberately, and with fatal consequences. There will be official investigations and extensive media analysis — and, of course, the usual crop of conspiracy theories. But, given the video and the wider political climate in Trump’s America, one is inevitably reminded of one of Orwell’s more famous lines from Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

There has also been a “Ministry of Truth” element to President Trump’s rewriting of history over the past few weeks. Not content with throwing random, misleading remarks into the ether during his increasingly aimless “weaves”, he has ordered official versions of past presidencies and of the insurrection on 6 January 2021. They are such ludicrous, self‑glorifying inversions of the truth that it is hard to believe anyone would take them seriously — but, as someone (not Orwell, though he’d agree) once said, “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”

The White House timeline of 6 January portrays the president promoting peace; Mike Pence — who was almost murdered — as a villain; the rioters as patriots; and the brave police as killers. Trump’s potted biographies of his predecessors in the “walk of fame” are entirely unreliable and designed solely to flatter his ego. He is such an insecure man, behind the bluster, that he must be sustained by fantasies such as the “stolen” election of 2020; it is possible that, schizophrenically, he sometimes believes truth and falsehood simultaneously, depending on which is most useful to him — consistency, except in his fixation on Joe Biden, is unnecessary.

To use another fashionable term, this is “gaslighting” on a grand scale — everything from falling egg prices to who started the war in Ukraine to who pays for tariffs is up for revision. The world is used to it, and many of us are clear‑sighted enough to find it almost comical. Yet there are sufficient allies of the president across media and the tech giants, and bogus “journalists” now given spurious respectability in Washington, for lies to be propagated and facts suppressed, making rational political debate and genuine choice harder than ever.