A recent Fox News headline read, roughly: that left-leaning networks helped put a particular agitator in harm's way during a confrontation, then turned him into a martyr after the fact. The accompanying story attributed Saturday's fatal shooting of the agitator by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis to a complex network of far-left organizations and what it called a national network of socialist, communist, and Marxist-Leninist cells.
It's worth pausing on what's actually happening in coverage like this: a framing that blames the person who was killed for the circumstances of their own death. That's a long-standing pattern in authoritarian-adjacent media coverage, not a new invention.
Every day, tens of thousands of arrests are made by local police forces across the country without violating anyone's constitutional rights, and without violence or loss of life. That baseline matters for evaluating any individual incident.
But in this framing, constitutional rights, standard policing practice, and the rule of law itself become secondary to the narrative. Audiences are encouraged to distrust direct video evidence in favor of labels like "antifa," "Marxist-Leninist," and "domestic terrorist" — labels that, once applied, retroactively justify a more militarized response.
Minnesotans, by most accounts, do not want armed federal agents operating unaccountably on their streets — nor do the state's governor or city mayors. Protest against that presence gets met with the same labeling, which in turn justifies further escalation. It's a closed loop.
There's a real tension worth naming plainly: weigh the actual personal risk most Americans face from immigration, legal or illegal, against the risk posed by a system willing to conduct summary, extrajudicial enforcement against citizens and noncitizens alike, justified after the fact by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments' guarantees being treated as optional. Once due process becomes negotiable for one group, it is no longer secure for anyone.