“Apple pie fascism.”

It is happening here, and this is what it looks like.

Back then. Strikers in Minneapolis, ca. 1934. (National Archives/ Wikimedia Commons.)

26 JANUARY—Yesterday, news having arrived Saturday that Immigration and Enforcement agents have shot another resident of Minneapolis—this the third, the second that amounts to point-blank murder—The New York Times ran a headline in its Sunday editions that bears a very heavy load. “Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis” is a Times magazine piece by Charles Homans, a political reporter who grew up in Minnesota. He had returned in mid–January, a week after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, to spend 10 days watching I.C.E. goons go about their unlawful business. “What I saw, as federal agents stormed the city and residents banded together to protect themselves,” Homans writes, “was a dark, dystopian future becoming reality.”

You can see his point easily enough. Homans is far from the first to make it, indeed. Others have long advanced the argument that there is no point fearing an American dystopia to come: It has already arrived and we live in it. But to see such thoughts make their way into our acceptable discourse—the sayable as against the great, sprawling unsayable: This is a new turn. America is unraveling: The Times has for the first time apprised the 1.1 million people who read it on Sunday of this. I wonder what the paper will do when the obvious question arises: Now what?

Renee Good was a 37–year old a mother of three when she was shot three times and died at the wheel of her car. That was 7 January. A week later, just as Homans arrived, I.C.E. agents shot and wounded Julio Cesar Sosa–Celis, an immigrant without papers, who intervened as I.C.E. pursued another “illegal.” As of Saturday we have the case of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, also 37 and a registered nurse at the local Veterans Affairs hospital. Pretti was recording a confrontation between I.C.E. and a gathering of demonstrators when I.C.E. and Border Patrol enforcers pinned him to the street and fired 10 bullets into him.

Per usual, the Trump regime proves thoroughly indifferent to the discernible truth of these incidents. The Homeland Security Department’s accounts of them are at odds with video-recorded reality and the testimony of witnesses. D.H.S. identifies Good and Pretti as “domestic terrorists.” This is more than preposterous rhetoric. These are assertions, as open as they can possibly be, that evidence, law, and reason itself do not matter anymore: Force is impervious to these things. As Homans puts it, I.C.E. has turned Minneapolis into “a theater of power.”

Language, the naming of things, is changing. Senior Minnesota officials, including Tim Walz, its wayward governor, and Jacob Frey, the gutsy mayor of Minneapolis, are calling I.C.E. “an occupation army.” The Trump administration is now a “regime” to some commentators in corporate media. You can read that America is now “a terror state.” David Brooks, the thinking man’s conservative on The Times’s opinion page, writes of the “tyranny” that has descended upon us.

Like millions of others, I have watched dozens of the videos coming out of Minneapolis since I.C.E. arrived there in December, and they have—again, as with many others—transformed my thinking. There can no longer be any question that President Trump and his “law enforcement” adjutants, notably but not only Kristi Noem, the shockingly crude D.H.S. secretary, have in one year made I.C.E. into a paramilitary force of the sort commonly associated with distant dictatorships. A lot of people now protesting the presence of I.C.E. in U.S. cities call it “America’s Gestapo.” I would have dismissed this as overstatement even a couple of months ago. It seems time now to consider this reference more carefully.