Will Bunch writes:

In the waning days of the worst January any of us can remember, I desperately wanted to tell a good story about America, and then on Friday, I watched one unfold in frozen Minnesota with an abiding love and white-hot intensity that seemed to melt the subzero air.

The sight of as many as 50,000 people packing the downtown streets on a minus-9-degree day to demand that federal immigration raiders leave Minneapolis was a high watermark for a pro-democracy movement that refuses to obey the autocracy of Donald Trump.

I was especially moved by the images of a polyglot of clergy from all across the nation — priests, rabbis, imams — leading the protests as they blocked traffic at the Minneapolis airport before marching on the headquarters of the giant retailer Target, pleading for an end to any cooperation with ICE. The group included as many as a half-dozen rabbis, Unitarian minsters, and other faith leaders from the Philadelphia area.

Saturday morning, I reached out to one of them: Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, a professor emeritus at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote. We talked about how — in a moment when pollsters and pundits fret about the steep decline in religiosity in American life — members of the clergy are providing a moral leadership that so many crave.

Kreimer told me about the instant bond in Minneapolis between the many rabbis there — the ICE raids “had a magnetic quality to them because of the echoes of the Gestapo,” she said — and other faith leaders like Black clergy, who were reminded of 19th-century slave patrols, and white Protestant ministers ashamed over a rising tide of white Christian nationalism in the Republican Party.

“People see coming out of the government — from out of the president specifically — such cruelty, such contempt, such dehumanizing language and just crudeness and awful meanness,“ the rabbi said. ”But yes, actually people are looking for a different kind of culture of kindness. And yes, they can find it perhaps in a spiritual setting.”

While we were on the phone, one of the lowest and most immoral acts in America’s 250-year history was taking place on the same snow-covered Minneapolis streets that had just been overflowing Friday with a vast sea of righteousness.

At 9:05 a.m. Central Time, a 37-year-old community volunteer and nurse named Alex Pretti stepped between a half-dozen masked federal agents and a female volunteer they were attacking with pepper spray, documenting the moment on his phone. In a split second, the goon squad had thrown Pretti to the ground, punching and kicking him in a brutal scene that looked like a documentary about the rise of Nazi Germany, or maybe an outtake from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

Then, shockingly, a shot rang out. Then a volley of as many as 10 more. Pretti had been summarily executed in public by agents of the U.S. government, in a scene that was captured on multiple phone cameras from every angle and will haunt the American soul for generations to come. [Continue reading…]