From Gaza to Minneapolis We Are Still Being Told to Disbelieve Our Eyes

Living outside of the United States, my social media feed from back home over the last three weeks has felt like it is primarily composed of highly analyzed snuff films.

These analyses have been necessary because, across the political spectrum, politicians are often telling the public that they should not trust the videos they are seeing—nor should they trust the recent history which they can easily read.

From Republican politicians, this is happening as President Trump and his goons try to slander not just the characters of Renée Good and Alex Pretti (with all the tricks of character assassination which have traditionally been used on Black people who have been killed by the police), but to outright lie about actions which can easily be disproven by watching ubiquitously looping video.

From Democratic politicians, this is happening as current members of congress who have voted for Trump’s cabinet nominees, who have continuously voted to increase ICE’s budget, and who (like former presidents Clinton and Obama) largely created America’s current immigration police state infrastructure want the public to believe they have no responsibility for what’s happening.

Over the last couple of years leaders across the political spectrum, in media, academia and government, have cultivated this rupture between verifiable reality and liberal governance in their split with the public about the genocide in Gaza.

The denial of verifiable reality is as dangerous as manufactured propaganda.

A lot of media observers have wrung their hands over the effects of AI-created fake images and videos which will dupe the public into believing things that never happened did, in fact, happen. I have never worried about this too much; Photoshop has been around for decades and has never created any significant problems deceiving the general public which weren’t rectified relatively quickly.

The far more dangerous problem has been western news outlets and governments pretending that horrors that actually did happen did not occur.

Journalists, more than 270 of them, gave their lives to show the world the genocide in Gaza. So did more than 300 United Nations workers and more than 1,500 healthcare workers. As did tens of thousands of Palestinians, many who pleaded with the world for help, human-to-human, mother-to-mother, child-to-child, using their phone cameras to prove to the world the depth of their desperation and persecution. There is little excuse for not knowing what happened in Gaza; everyday, it was as if the screams of 10,000 Ann Franks had been beamed right into the pockets of millions of Americans during World War II.

And the people of the world largely believed their fellow humans in Gaza, when they heard them scream and cry.

But the news media and the governments of the west pretended that what was happening was not, in fact, happening. They proved that the denial of verifiable reality is as dangerous as manufactured propaganda. They physically beat, expelled and even deported students who said the genocide was unacceptable. They fired journalists and blacklisted professors who reported what anyone could see, if they chose to. They cancelled the visas of artists who spoke the truth.

Even when the west’s own institutions, born of 20th-century colonialism, like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, investigated how Israel was committing genocide, the United States responded by sanctioning the judges and human rights workers who were blowing the whistle.

All of this denialism of reality has had a profound effect on the west and has created a significant break in the trust between the public and the west’s governments, universities, and news outlets.

The constant gaslighting about Gaza blew up even the fiction of the international rules-based order.

This has helped pave the road to the hell of a second Trump administration. This has made it much easier for Trump to also essentially say—much as Biden had when confronted with video evidence of the genocide he was funding—Now who are you going to believe: me, or your own lying eyes?

It made it easier for ICE agent Jonathan Ross to shoot Renee Good in the head, call her a “Fucking bitch,” and know that nothing would happen to him.

It made it easier for the agents who executed Alex Pretti to be reassigned to other duties knowing—as most US-backed Israeli soldiers—who brazenly committed war crimes they then uploaded on TikTok—that they likely would never be held to account under the so-called international rules-based order.

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Outside the United States, many political leaders are struggling to deal with an American government which asks each of them to deny their own sense of reality.

Amidst NATO leaders, this is manifesting in an increasing unease about the Trump administration’s intentions regarding Greenland (and, with a less obvious sense of public panic, regarding Ukraine). Admitting “that the rules-based order is fading” and that “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must,” Canadian Prime Minister Jay Carney admitted that it was the “end of a nice story” which was known to be a “useful” fiction:

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim… This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

It is refreshing to see a national leader so nakedly admit they played along with something they knew was false and engaged in hypocrisy for their nation’s selfish benefit at the expense of others. But though Carney had strong words for Trump while telling him to leave the 55,000 people of Greenland alone—who have not yet been attacked—he had no such sympathetic words demanding Trump leave the 30 million people of Venezuela alone. Indeed, after the US killed at least 100 Venezuelans while kidnapping president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Carney wrote that the “Canadian government therefore welcomes the opportunity for freedom, democracy, peace, and prosperity for the Venezuelan people.”

The constant gaslighting about Gaza blew up even the fiction of the international rules-based order.

Furthermore, the Canadian government has armed Israel throughout its genocide in Palestine and brutally suppressed criticism of Israel and Zionism.

If Carney, or any NATO leaders, want to really understand how the international rules-based order fell apart, they can’t look merely to the Trump administration’s threats against Greenland (a colonial territory whose governance should be determined by Inuit Greenlanders and to which Denmark itself should be making no claims). They have to admit that the constant gaslighting about Gaza blew up even the fiction of the international rules-based order. This happened at scales from the micro to the macro—from European countries gaslighting their citizens that their eyes could not accurately perceive what they were seeing, to punishing their citizens for protesting, to banning truthtellers at their borders, to cancelling public talks by witnesses, to destroying the careers of those who merely reported what was happening.

The west’s assault on a shared reality even included largely ignoring the findings of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court that there was a plausible case of case of genocide against Israel, and that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested for war crimes. They ignored and attacked the arbiters of their own rules-based order.

If politicians in Canada or any other NATO states had treated these, the most serious of matters proven in the most significant ways, with the gravitas they deserve, then there may not have been such a rupture between fact-based reality, western news media, and liberal governance.

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The videos proving what ICE is doing are a tool in countering the obvious lies of the Trump administration.

But, like the videos which galvanized not just the Palestine protests of the last two years but the Black Lives Matter movement of the past decade, they do not guarantee a quick resolution.

The ubiquity of cell phone cameras has made it so that there have been routine video recordings of police killings for more than a decade now, stretching back at least to the choking death of Eric Garner in 2014. (The only person arrested and who served time in that lynching was the videographer who filmed it, Ramsey Orta.)

Over the same period, there has also been comprehensive data collected for the first time by the Mapping Violence Project and others about how many people the police kill each year in the United States. Yet despite this data, and despite repeated videos showing the lynching of Black men by local police, from Walter Scott to Laquan McDonald to George Floyd, bipartisan funding for police has pretty consistently increased year over year.

And so, depressingly, has the number of people killed by police which, according to the Mapping Violence Project, included 1,028 souls in 2014, 1,381 in 2024, and some 1,314 in 2025.

The past doesn’t determine the future, but it does inform its challenges. Despite Senate Democrats’ tepid demands for weak ICE reforms, there are still strong, bipartisan forces which seek to increase ICE’s funding—despite ICE killing people on video as brazenly as local police have. ICE abolitionists will therefore face the same forces which police abolitionists have faced for some time.

We need not repeat that path. But, as the poet Saul Williams pointed out last week,

We asked everyone to pay close attention to every Palestinian nurse, doctor, mom, child, poet… being labeled a terrorist & killed with total impunity. Both parties offered no choice but genocide. If you are finally willing to withhold your labor be sure to connect the dots.

Connecting the dots means admitting that as ruthless as Trump and the Republicans are, they are but one side of the equation. It means admitting that Biden, Obama and Clinton—as well as Carney and Justin Trudeau before him, and Keir Starmer in the UK—have also led brutal, dehumanizing immigration crackdowns, even if they were not so crude in crowing about it as Trump. It means studying how elected leaders, legislatures, and corporate media work in collusion to gaslight the public into not believing what it can clearly see.

For if we do not connect the dots, we will be condemned to a reality where the easily-viewable violence of everyday life in Minneapolis or in Gaza City will increasingly become the norm in cities all across the west.