A Truth From Iran to Minneapolis: Weak Governments Kill Protesters

“This is not who we are,” many well-meaning public officials said last week in various statements. ICE officials’ assassination of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti has been a shock to the American system, causing even sleepy Democrats to call for abolishing ICE and firing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

But this shocked response obscures a much more troubling truth: As horrifying as Pretti’s murder was, it was not an anomaly. The killing of mother-of-three Renee Good just seventeen days prior, also in the streets of Minneapolis, was not an anomaly. The problem is bigger than Minneapolis, bigger than ICE, and bigger than Trump. And it’s not just a matter of police brutality in general. Violence against protesters is on the rise in the U.S. and all over the world, reflecting a horrifying escalation of authoritarianism, and an elite disregard for basic democratic freedoms.

Amnesty International cites “misuse of force” by the state as one of many trends making harder, around the world, to “stay safe while making your voice heard.” In 2024, an international group of researchers—affiliations included University of California—Berkeley and the European University of Madrid—found a global rise in the use of dangerous weaponry used against protesters.

In Iran early this month, at least 5,200 people and possibly many more were killed by government forces during widespread protests. Raha Bahreini, an Iran expert for Amnesty International, has called it “a state-orchestrated massacre,” unprecedented even for this repressive regime. (As horrific as this situation is, it is rich for President Trump to threaten the Iranian regime with bombing for killing protesters, while his masked goons kill people on the streets of Minneapolis.)

It’s easy to recognize Iran’s government as a totalitarian one, and Trump’s disregard for democratic freedoms is also well-known. Trump seems proud of his disregard for such freedoms, threatening protesters with “very heavy force” and consistently labelling them, without evidence, as domestic terrorists. But violent crackdown on protest is not limited to these obvious bad actors.  More than 2000 climate and environmental protesters have been killed around the world since 2012, University of Bristol researchers found in 2024—including in Atlanta, Georgia, where Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as “Tortuguita,” was killed by state troopers in 2023, the first time an environmental protester had been killed in the United States. In 2024, although protests had reached their lowest point since 2020, the rate of police intervention in protests was higher than it had been in years, especially at protests related to Palestine.  

I asked Oscar Berglund, one of the Bristol researchers who co-authored the paper on the attacks on environmental protesters, why he thought this was happening. He attributes it to the fact that many of these protests—whether over racism, economic inequality, or climate change—have serious traction. Recent years been “an increase in protest and some of that protest has shifted public opinion quite dramatically,” he said. The violence is a sign of the protesters success—that ruling elites know that the protesters aren’t just a bunch of marginal kooks, but may be speaking for, and influencing, millions more.

Berglund also had another general observation that seems resonant, whether in Tehran or in Minneapolis. “Repression often increases when efforts to legitimize ‘things as they are’ have been less effective,” he said. “States with decreasing legitimacy will therefore resort to repression.”

Sarah McLauglin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression affirmed Berglund’s analysis: “From Tiananmen decades ago to Tehran today,” she said, “ governments have violently cracked down on public protest because they understand that protest has power—perhaps even enough power to unseat public officials.” She thinks protest is, if anything, growing more powerful as a social force because it is so easily disseminated on social media, “where information can travel faster than the state can respond. That’s exactly what happened after the killing of Alex Pretti, where the immediate narrative conveyed by U.S. officials fell apart” because people could see with their own eyes, on their phones, what had really happened.

In past eras—putting aside moments of great upheaval, like revolutions or wars—there has often been a sense that protest is futile, performative, a waste of time. Paradoxically, the recent killings and violence against protesters may suggest the opposite: that protest is, in fact, effective. Today, around the world, the threats to protesters are multiplying—but so is the support. Protesters’ concerns are not seen as niche or silly, but rather are broadly shared.

From protests to polls, the ruling class is increasingly confronted by the possibility that there is, in fact, a global consensus against injustice, for democracy, for climate action, and for basic humanity. These movements aren’t going away. That’s encouraging, suggesting that we can someday unseat these bad actors. It’s also terrifying, because as our governments continue to desperately spiral into illegitimacy, they may kill more and more of us. Yet as we’re seeing from Minneapolis to Tehran, an amazing number of people are confronting both these realities right now—and choosing hope.