In 1826, Nicéphore Niépce produced the first known permanent photograph. The photograph was of an innocuous rooftop and the exposure of the light onto dark took hours to develop. 200 years later, the basic elements of that technology stand today as a primary weapon against fascism.
Authoritarians hate many things—dissent, accountability, Taylor Swift, Jon Stewart, and Bad Bunny—but nothing rattles them quite like a shaky video shot by someone with bad Wi-Fi and a full battery.
This week in Minnesota, an ICU nurse is dead. The official story arrived first, as it always does, wearing its best suit and using words like “altercation” and “unfortunate.” You can almost recite what right-leaning news programs would report. An ‘agitator’ hell-bent on ‘trouble’ assaulted law enforcement.
Then came that blurry cell phone footage. And then another one. And another angle. And another angle. And another angle. And now we’re having a different conversation entirely.
For most of human history, power controlled the story. Kings had scribes. Governments had press offices. Marble statue makers would make their subjects a little more, ahem, endowed, if you know what I mean. If something ugly happened, it could be denied, delayed, or buried under a fresh coat of language. “Isolated incident.” “Conflicting reports.” “We’re investigating ourselves and have found ourselves blameless pending further investigation by ourselves.”
Then came the video camera. It would be used to chronicle Vietnam, and Rodney King, and Arab Spring, and George Floyd. Suddenly the investigating was done before the press release could even warm up the printer.
In the past 25 years, every major government lie across the world has followed the same arc: an official statement is released, calm and authoritative, using fonts that suggest credibility. And then a video appears that makes the statement look like it was written in a different universe. Not a rebuttal. Not an opinion. Just footage. Gravity with pixels.
Police say it was a “medical incident.” The video shows a knee on the back of a head. Officials state it was a riot. Video evidence shows it was protestors dressed in chicken suits singing Taylor Swift songs. Fox News says protests were “mostly peaceful.” The video shows tear gas, rubber bullets, and a journalist being arrested for the crime of journalism. Leaders say an event was exaggerated. The crowd posts 30,000 angles of it, including one from a guy who was just trying to record his niece’s soccer game.
The camera doesn’t argue. It doesn’t editorialize. It doesn’t have a political affiliation or an agenda beyond “look at this thing that happened.” It simply asks the most dangerous question in politics: Is that what actually happened?
This is why modern authoritarianism spends so much energy attacking the act of filming itself. They don’t fear dissent—you can spin dissent, dismiss it as fringe thinking, call it unpatriotic. But they fear documentation. Documentation doesn’t care about your talking points. It’s why cameras get slapped out of hands. It’s why recording becomes a crime dressed up as “officer safety” or “security concerns.” It’s why officials suddenly care deeply about “context” the moment video appears.
Context is what you demand when the facts won’t cooperate.
What’s happening in Minneapolis right now follows the same script we’ve seen over and over: a version of events is offered up for public consumption, carefully plated and garnished. Then cell phone footage arrives and chews through it like a woodchipper. The anger people feel isn’t confusion—it’s clarity. People are furious because they can see.
In George Orwell’s 1984, there is this quote, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Open your eyes. Then believe them. In the meantime, keep pressing record.
