The New Yorker:

The killing of Alex Pretti has ignited a public outcry, and, perhaps, an awakening of national conscience.

By Michael Luo

“Stand up for America,” Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, implored on Saturday, after federal agents shot to death another one of his constituents. “Recognize that your children will ask you what side you were on. Your grandchildren will ask you what you did to act to prevent this from happening again—to make sure that the foundational elements of our democracy were rock solid. What did you do to protect your city? What did you do to protect your nation?”

During the Trump era, many Democratic politicians have delivered soaring orations, exhorting the American people to be vigilant about safeguarding democracy. The entreaties have often fallen flat; the Klaxon can only be sounded so many times before it’s ignored, and, for most people, more prosaic issues govern their daily existence. This time, as Frey delivered his remarks with barely contained outrage, it felt different. Masked men were terrorizing an entire city, operating with impunity. Local authorities were outnumbered and beleaguered. Innocent people were dying.

In 2025, I made a project of reading the Third Reich trilogy, by Richard J. Evans, a definitive history of Nazi Germany. Evans details the police state established by Adolf Hitler, noting that Nazi terror was not “levelled exclusively against small and despised minorities” but that the “threat of arrest, prosecution and incarceration in increasingly brutal and violent conditions loomed over everyone.” He explains how the Nazi regime “intimidated Germans into acquiescence” and how “fear and terror were integral parts of the Nazis’ armoury of political weapons from the very beginning.”

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