When the verdict of the man who murdered George Floyd was being read, the Governor of Minnesota mobilized thousands of national guard troops and ordered them to occupy Minneapolis. There were thousands of armed soldiers, on foot and in armored vehicles, staged throughout the city. The implicit threat was that if Chauvin was acquitted and we tried to enact justice anyway we’d be machine gunned in the street for opposing a murderous white supremacist.

For those few days Minneapolis was the most heavily occupied city in the world.