Heather Ann Thompson

Down will become up.

And that also felt very, very familiar to where we are today.

You know, just as I do, digging, digging, digging, finding pieces of paper, reading articles, seeing where it might have been reported the first time.

One of the extraordinary pieces of paper that I first saw and then began digging for more was the hate mail that poured into the teens that was sort of the mirror image of the celebratory, congratulatory messages that Goetz was receiving.

And both sets of sentiments were passionate messages.

And scary, frankly, really scary.

And it made me also realize that the moment we are in, just to keep kind of connecting that dot, is less new than we think.

So the question is, what is it that just kind of unleashed it in that moment and has been, I think, unleashing it since?

Race.

I mean, there is an inescapable race.

story here about the way in which this case and subsequent cases like it were fueled and animated and legitimated by the sense that the people who had been killed or harmed or damaged had deserved exactly what they got.

And all of that is framed in such a way that it is just inescapably racialized.

So to me, that is the through line.

And of course, once you normalize public violence to that extent, it will have spillover, right?

It will also be directed at people that we disagree with politically or that we see as a threat in other ways.

But the violence we have unleashed, the lawlessness—

the disregard for a rule of law and the absolute eradication of truth as something that matters, facts as something that matters, when that happens, nobody is safe.

It doesn't matter if you live in Minneapolis.

It doesn't matter if you live in Denmark.

It doesn't matter where you live.