Posthumous Guilt and Plausible Deniability

Calling them “Blackshirts” is not hyperbole. It is historical pattern recognition.

The original Blackshirts were not defined by uniforms or slogans. They were defined by function. Rapidly recruited. Politically indulged. Loosely trained. Told they were patriots restoring order while being quietly licensed to apply violence in the service of a narrative. Mussolini did not begin with dictatorship. He began with enforcement theatre and rhetorical permission.

Fast-forward and the parallels are uncomfortably familiar. A sudden expansion of a federal enforcement body. Recruitment accelerated by urgency rather than professionalism. Training compressed. Oversight softened. Political leaders framing enforcement actions as existential battles rather than lawful operations. And when a civilian is killed, the defence comes first, the facts later. That sequence matters. It always has.

What makes Minneapolis particularly revealing is the video. The footage shows a car attempting to manoeuvre out of a blocked space, wheels turned away, not a vehicle being used as a weapon. No clear acceleration. No direct line towards an officer. No impact. Shots are fired as the car is turning away. That matters too. In any serious use-of-force analysis, direction, speed and intent are not details. They are the entire case.

Yet before any of that is assessed, the President declares the narrative closed. He claims the officer was “run over” and hospitalised. Video says otherwise. Local officials say otherwise. The footage shows no collision at all. The more plausible explanation for hospital treatment, given the conditions visible on the ground, is not vehicular assault but a far more prosaic hazard: ice. The irony would be comic if the consequences were not fatal.

This is how violence is normalised. Not with jackboots, but with press statements. Not with decrees, but with applause. The dead are convicted posthumously. The living are canonised instantly. Evidence is invited to catch up, not to decide. Enforcement bodies learn very quickly what behaviour will be defended regardless of facts.

That is not law enforcement. It is political enforcement with plausible deniability.

History is blunt on this point. Once a state expands coercive power faster than accountability, the problem is no longer an isolated shooting. It is momentum. And momentum does not stop because someone later insists they only meant to restore order.

The Blackshirts did not think they were villains either. That is the final lesson.