The Atlantic’s Brooks: MN Residents Made Trump Admin. Choose Between Create ‘More Hostility or Lose Control of the Streets’

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” The Atlantic Staff Writer David Brooks said that the drawdown of immigration officers in Minnesota was partially because people in Minneapolis, “in a self-disciplined” way like the Civil Rights movement, “put the regime in an impossible situation: Either behave brutally and generate more hostility or lose control of the streets.”

Brooks said, “I think it’s partly because of the awfulness of those videos and the killings. But it’s partly because of citizen power. We’ve been talking a lot over the months about a civic movement. And the people of Minneapolis, in bitter cold weather, behaved in a self-disciplined, humane way that appealed to people across the political spectrum, and, in a disciplined way. And they turned up the heat and they put the regime in an impossible situation: Either behave brutally and generate more hostility or lose control of the streets. And that’s what a civic movement needs to do, put the pressure on the government that’s — and expose the moral distance between one side and the other.”

He continued, “And I was with a historian yesterday. And she said, learn from the Civil Rights movement. Everybody should be studying the Civil Rights movement. That’s what they did, and it worked in this case in Minneapolis, and even the Trump administration had to back down.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett