How can you run when you know?

Gotta get down to it Soldiers are cutting us down Should have been done long ago What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground How can you run when you know? — Neil Young, Ohio

Earl Fowler

In case you’re not old enough to remember the Kent State shooting, or even if you’re a little rusty on the ever-expanding subject of American massacres, here’s a quick recap:

On May 4, 1970, four unarmed college students were fatally gunned down and nine injured when 28 gas-masked members of the Ohio National Guard fired 67 rounds during 13 seconds of reckless mayhem at an anti-war rally on the campus in Kent, Ohio. One of the injured students was left permanently paralyzed.

The protesters had been demonstrating against the draft, against their country’s unconscionable expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia — and against the presence of the militia on the campus, withal. The four dead students — a 19-year-old man, a 19-year-old woman, a 20-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman — were all white.

The Kent State shooting is recognized as a landmark moment in American history  — thanks in part to Neil Young’s irate chant/call-to-arms “Ohio,” an anti-war anthem the Canadian singer-songwriter knocked off in just 15 minutes after he and bandmate David Crosby had been left shaken by the May 15 issue of photo-heavy Life magazine’s 12-page coverage headlined “Tragedy at Kent.”

Another event that happened the day the magazine hit the stands has largely been forgotten. That one brought tragedy to two Black families and traumatized a predominantly Black student body. Coincidence?

It wasn’t what I was expecting, but I stumbled across this account in Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY and the Lost Story of 1970, David Browne’s terrific retrospective on that tumultuous year as seen through the lens of a Rolling Stone journalist:

Like many campuses around the country, Jackson State College — a primarily African American school in the southwest section of Jackson, Mississippi — was a jumble of panic, fear, and indignation after the massacre in Ohio. On Wednesday, May 13, students took over a construction site, setting a dump truck on fire. A fire truck dispatched to the scene was hit with rocks and bottles, resulting in the inevitable aftermath — police and National Guard called in to restore order on and around the campus.

What happened next depended on who told the story. According to police, a sniper on the fourth floor of Alexander Hall, the women’s dormitory, began firing at them. The students in and around the hall denied any such thing — if anything, they said, police had mistaken the sound of smashed bottles for gunfire.

No sniper was ever found. But this much is known: Shortly after midnight on May 15, police opened fire at the dorm:

Again, reports varied: Seven seconds of shots? Twenty-five? Nine students wounded? Eleven? Fifteen? Yet no one could argue with the number of bullet holes counted in the dorm — 250 — or the smell of blood on the first floor, or with the grimmest results of all: two black students dead from gunshots. Philip Lafayette Gibbs, a junior studying pre-law and father of a baby about to turn eleven months, was the first casualty. James Earl Green wasn’t even a student at Jackson State: A seventeen-year-old senior at the local high school, he was on his way home from a part-time job at the Rag-a-Bag grocery store, where he worked to help his widowed mother support her four children. Like those at Kent State, they were victims not of politics but of timing. Gibbs’s membership in the Committee of Social Concern at nearby Methodist Church was the closest either man came to activism.

The next day, according to newspapers from the time, President Richard Nixon issued a bland statement in a half-hearted bid to de-escalate tensions: “In the shadow of these troubled days, this tragedy makes it urgent that every American personally undertake greater efforts toward understanding, restraint, and compassion.”

The statement had none of the eloquence of a Robert F. Kennedy or a Martin Luther King Jr., who’d both been assassinated by then. But at least Nixon wasn’t vilifying the victims of either college incident as radical paid agitators or domestic terrorists. Yet he soon reverted to form.

Nixon’s reaction to the Kent State shootings and the subsequent national student protests was widely perceived as dismissive and politically calculating. His press secretary described the tragedy in terms that shifted blame onto demonstrators, warning that “when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.” Nixon himself referred to student protesters as “bums blowing up campuses” shortly after the shootings. 

This rhetorical framing served to distance the administration from the moral weight of the killings, to delegitimize protesters as unruly radicals and to appeal to the so-called “silent majority” of Americans who opposed campus upheavals. Nixon later attempted symbolic outreach — meeting students at the Lincoln Memorial — but this was widely seen as awkward and ineffective. 

Behind the scenes, of course, the true feelings of Nixon and the sorry cast around him were expressed more honestly and callously. Writes Browne:

On May 26, Vice President Spiro Agnew, never known for subtlety, nuance, or love of hippies, sent a memo to John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic affairs advisor, about the national outbreak of antiwar protests.

“We have had enough maudlin sympathy for lawbreakers emanating from other areas of government,” he wrote. “… In my judgment, nothing makes the average American angrier than to see the pained, self-righteous expressions of a(n Edwin) Muskie or a (Charles) Percy as they attach like leeches to the nearest Negro funeral procession. … The polls show that the people are with (Nixon) and not with the whiners in the Senate and in the liberal community.” Although he’d sounded a conciliatory note in his post-Jackson State comment, Nixon took a different stance in his office, away from prying eyes. After reading the memo, he jotted, “E — I agree.” It was time for some law and order, and even though his popularity was waning, he pinned his hopes on his fellow Americans agreeing with him.

The strategy paid off. Two years later, Nixon and Agnew were elected to a second term in a landslide over the shambolic Democratic ticket of Senator George McGovern and former ambassador Sargent Shriver. With 60.7 per cent of the popular vote, Nixon won the largest share the Republicans have ever enjoyed in any U.S. presidential election.

Fast-forward to today.

So now we have two 37-year-old American citizens dead in Minnesota (a woman shot in her car on Jan. 7, a male nurse holding a phone that was mistaken for a gun today) and a Trump administration employing much the same playbook as the Nixon bunch before them, only this one is unfolding against a highly partisan backdrop of state and municipal outrage and certainly without any appeals for “greater efforts toward understanding, restraint, and compassion.”

Trump and his administration’s rhetoric around anti-ICE protests has combined law-and-order framing with an aggressive defence of federal enforcement. The White House and Department of Homeland Security have characterized protests across the U.S. as threats to public safety and federal authority, and allied political leaders have pushed back forcefully against state or local officials they see as sympathetic to demonstrators. (These are the same Republican allies, of course, who were strident advocates of state rights and loudly remonstrated against what they decried as federal overreach during the Obama and Biden presidencies.)

Trump and his advisers are using the protests in Minnesota and elsewhere to reinforce political narratives — portraying critics as enabling criminality and obstruction of law enforcement — which, similar to Nixon’s strategy, is deepening partisan divides rather than attempting to bridge them. Internal GOP polling has reportedly shown declining support for hard-line immigration tactics, complicating the administration’s messaging. So Trump and his minions are doing what they always do when cornered: stick to their guns and lie, lie, lie.

If they can whip up enough violence, cause enough damage and death on all sides, it might just work like it did in 1972. My country, right or wrong.

Trump will finally get to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to suppress civil disorder, as he has been spoiling to do since George Floyd was murdered by a cop in 2000, barely a mile from where Renée Goode was fatally shot three weeks ago by ICE Agent Jonathan Ross. When he does, of course, he’ll claim that unleashing the military on American streets is the only way to preserve law and order and that he had little choice. His immediate response to Saturday’s shooting of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol officer was to blame Minnesota’s Democratic governor and the mayor of Minneapolis for “inciting Insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric.”

This is going to get a hell of a lot worse than four dead in Ohio and two in Mississippi. Might even serve as a convenient pretext for cancelling the midterm 2026 elections the Republicans seem certain to lose. But surely no one could be that pompous, dangerous and arrogant?