the attitude with arnie arnesen the Wed edition Jan 28

[Arnie Arnesen]

The Attitude with Arnie Arnesen

opening thoughts:  a cop speaks out...a story from MPLS 

producers: Dave Scott and Stephanie Collins

Chloé LaCasse (the best of the attitude)

streaming live at wnhnfm.org noon EST on the dial-94.7FM Concord NH

podcasts available at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/attitude-with-arnie-arnesen/id1634055179

opening thoughts: 

This is message from a former police officer friend that I admire and respect, Jim Shepard. He is speaking truth.

He writes:

These aren’t my words but they capture my feelings on the Renee Goode situation pretty well

“I wore a badge long enough to know the difference between a dangerous situation and a manufactured one.

What happened in Minneapolis wasn’t split-second chaos. It wasn’t a tragic accident. And it sure as hell wasn’t “necessary force.”

It was escalation. Illegal, reckless escalation—and any law enforcement official who tells you otherwise is lying, or hasn’t done the job.

From what we’ve seen so far, the encounter didn’t begin with a threat that justified lethal force.

There was no imminent danger to officers or the public that required bullets. There was time. There were options. There were off-ramps.

And they weren’t taken.

One of the first things you’re taught as a police officer is that force is not a punishment. It’s not a tool to assert dominance. It’s not something you use because someone doesn’t comply fast enough or says the wrong thing.

Force is a last resort governed by law. Period.

The standard is simple: Is there an immediate threat of serious bodily harm or death? If the answer is no, deadly force is unlawful. Full stop.

What we’re being fed now—by Trump officials, right-wing media, and the same law-and-order grifters who never hesitate to excuse police violence—is a familiar script.

They cherry-pick moments. They speculate about “what could have happened.” They inflate fear after the fact to justify an outcome that was already decided before any real threat existed.

That’s not analysis. That’s propaganda.

I’ve watched this play out too many times. A civilian is killed. The facts are inconvenient. So the story gets rewritten—fast. Suddenly the victim is on trial. Suddenly we’re told the officer “felt threatened.” Suddenly every rule of policing bends to accommodate the result.

But feelings don’t determine legality. The Constitution does.

If a cop “feels” scared but the objective facts don’t support deadly force, the shooting is still illegal.

Law enforcement isn’t vibes-based. It’s rule-based. Or at least it’s supposed to be.

The Trump administration knows this. They also know that if they repeat the lie often enough—if they shout “violent suspect” and “split-second decision” and “officer safety” into every camera—they can muddy the water long enough for accountability to disappear.

That’s the real pattern here. Not law enforcement. Not justice.

Covering your ass cause you just did something morally abhorrent and don’t want to admit it.

As someone who has been in violent confrontations, who has had to make real decisions under real pressure, I’m telling you this plainly: restraint is part of the job. De-escalation is part of the job. Walking away alive with everyone still breathing is the job.

When officers abandon that responsibility—and when the federal government rushes to excuse it—we don’t get safety. We get impunity.

And when the state lies to protect unlawful killing, it doesn’t just dishonor the person who died. It poisons the legitimacy of every officer who still believes the badge means something.

This wasn’t a tragedy without cause. It was a choice.

And no amount of propaganda can change that.”

Welcome to the American Winter In the frozen streets of Minneapolis, something profound is happening. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/minneapolis-uprising/685755/

please read the whole article...we need to prepare and their stories will soon be ours but here is just one vignette:

"One of those latecomers was a 46-year-old documentary filmmaker named Chad Knutson. On the morning after Good was killed, he was at home with his two hound dogs, watching a live feed from the Whipple Building, where ICE is based, a five-minute drive from his house. A protester had laid a rose on a makeshift memorial to Good. As Knutson watched, an ICE agent took the rose, put it in his lapel, and then mockingly gave it to a female ICE agent. They both laughed.

Knutson told me he had never been a protester. It seemed pointless, or just a way for people to expiate their sense of guilt. But when he saw those ICE agents laughing, something broke inside him.

“I grab my keys, I grab a coat, and drive over,” Knutson told me. “I barely park my car and I’m running out screaming and crying, ‘You stole a fucking flower from a dead woman. Like, are any of you human anymore?’”

His voice was so thick with emotion that it felt almost as if he were telling a story of religious conversion. It reminded me again of the Tahrir Square protests in 2011, when so many people seemed to have reached a moral and political turning point.

Knutson now goes to the Whipple Building almost daily, bringing thermoses of hot coffee for the people who hold up signs and bellow at the ICE agents and convoys as they drive in and out. He has been tear-gassed so many times, he said, his voice has gone hoarse. When I met him at his house in St. Paul, a row of megaphones was on the counter. He hands them out along with the coffee. He once brought an ice-fishing clam, a portable shelter, to the Whipple to help the protesters withstand the subzero temperatures.

Knutson mentioned in passing that his neighbor had “an adopted brown kid down there; they hid her in the basement yesterday.” This kind of thing no longer sounds weird in Minneapolis. Many people are hiding indoors—so many that, in a city with a substantial minority population, I hardly saw any Black or Latino faces on the street.

part one

aside:The Afghan minister of education confirms that access to schools for women in the country is permanently banned (heartbreak)

Kathryn Joyce is an investigative editor at In These Times, a freelance investigative reporter and the author of two books: The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption and Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.She is formerly the editor of Political Research Associates’ quarterly magazine The Public Eye, and teaches as an adjunct lecturer in Brooklyn College’s political science department. 

‘Clever as serpents’: How a legal group’s anti-LGBTQ policies took root in school districts across a state

In Pennsylvania, parents are challenging Independence Law Center policies while trying to avoid a legal case that could go to the conservative Supreme Court.    https://hechingerreport.org/clever-as-serpents-how-a-legal-groups-anti-lgbtq-policies-took-root-in-school-districts-across-a-state/

part two: 

Evan Mandery is a contributing writer at POLITICO Magazine and a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he researches and writes about inequality and higher education. He is the author of Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us.

They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted. Inside the civil war at the anti-woke university backed by Bari Weiss.

--https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/01/16/civil-war-university-of-austin-bari-weiss-00729688

part two: 

Kathryn Joyce is an investigative editor at In These Times, a freelance investigative reporter and the author of two books: The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption and Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.She is formerly the editor of Political Research Associates’ quarterly magazine The Public Eye, and teaches as an adjunct lecturer in Brooklyn College’s political science department. 

‘Clever as serpents’: How a legal group’s anti-LGBTQ policies took root in school districts across a state

In Pennsylvania, parents are challenging Independence Law Center policies while trying to avoid a legal case that could go to the conservative Supreme Court.    https://hechingerreport.org/clever-as-serpents-how-a-legal-groups-anti-lgbtq-policies-took-root-in-school-districts-across-a-state/

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KEEPING THE POT STIRRED SO SCUM DOESN'T RISE TO THE TOP -  Anonymous 

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[Arnie Arnesen]