Isaac Stanley-Becker

Or do you think a real transformation in the way the country and the Congress handle this really vexed issue?

I think there's something surreal about this whole moment, and some of our colleagues have chronicled this really well.

But just before we went in for the interview, I was on the phone with a pastor and a mother of four children who was describing her own work and trying to document ICE and kind of interrupt these operations.

And she was saying, like, I'm driving my...

child to school and I'm getting these messages about ICE operations in my community and I'm thinking you know should I go and do this but you know no I don't want to get killed and have my son be motherless so these monumental decisions that are being made by just ordinary people who are who are not familiar with these kind of stakes I think is it there is something surreal about the whole experience.

Fort Sumter, it's a profound comparison, but...

He brought up these moments, he brought up these analogies, including John Brown, as a way of suggesting that people in Minnesota were making different decisions.

They were not

resorting to that kind of violence.

So that's what I took him to be saying.

But I also took him to be saying that we don't know how these moments are going to unfold and the kind of dire consequences they might have.

So we need to be careful, especially in a hair trigger environment.

And

in an environment where we just frankly are seeing things that are unprecedented, that we don't know the kind of violence or damage could be done.

So there's certainly a risk of hyperbole, but I think that there is also a risk of understatement and not fully coming to grips with the possible consequences of what we're seeing.

Thank you so much.