Over the weekend, I watched M, Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic in which Peter Lorre plays Hans Beckert, a child killer terrorizing Berlin, until he is captured by organized crime. They take him to an abandoned brewery for a mock trial. In the trial before the mob, Beckert pleads hysterically for his life, saying that yes, he’s a murderer, but he can’t help himself — that he is tormented by his evil compulsions. The mob is so enraged by him that it prepares to rush forward to tear him to bits with its bare hands, and is only stopped by the sudden appearance of the police. It is an extremely powerful scene: the child killer deserves to die for his crimes, but hearing his pitiful sobbing over these compulsions he can’t control, you understand that yes, there is a such thing as being criminally insane. Beckert should be punished for his crimes, but the law must handle this, not the mob. Besides — and this, I think, is Lang’s point — the mob too is gripped by a spirit of murder that it cannot control. The deranged killer and the mob are mirror images of each other.

The shooting of Daunte Wright was a travesty. The cop reached for her taser, grabbed her pistol by mistake, and killed him. Now, though, the mob is at work — and the Mayor and City Council of Brooklyn Center are doing its bidding:

Brooklyn Center City Manager Curt Boganey was fired on Monday evening, hours after he publicly disagreed with Mayor Mike Elliott’s assertion that the police officer who fatally shot a Black man in the Minneapolis suburb should be immediately fired in response to the incident.

“Effective immediately our city manager has been relieved of his duties, and the deputy city manager will be assuming his duties moving forward,” Elliott wrote on Twitter. “I will continue to work my hardest to ensure good leadership at all levels of our city government.”

More:

The Brooklyn Center City Council voted to fire Boganey, a longtime city employee, during an emergency meeting, the Star Tribune reported. At the same meeting, the council voted to give the mayor command authority over the city’s police department.

During a virtual workshop after the meeting, Council Member Kris Lawrence-Anderson said she voted to fire Boganey out of fear of potential reprisals from protestors if she did not, according to the newspaper.

“He was doing a great job. I respect him dearly,” Lawrence-Anderson said. “I didn’t want repercussions at a personal level.”

They fired this city manager simply for calling for the basic constitutional right of due process for the accused police officer! The cop, like every other accused criminal, deserves a fair trial — and nobody should be punished for saying so! And this one council member openly admitted that she voted that way out of fear.

Meanwhile, justice-seekers are burning down a dollar store in town:

Smoke is billowing out of the Dollar Tree. Bystanders are yelling “Is there anybody in there? Get out of there.” This is going to engulf in minutes. @StarTribune pic.twitter.com/6cCist4dtI

— Liz Sawyer (@ByLizSawyer) April 13, 2021

And a Michigan Congresswoman calls for lawlessness:

Brooklyn Center sounds like a perfectly sane place to live. How pleasurable it must be to pay tax money to support racist indoctrination centers:

Brooklyn Center, MN schools policy:

“We honor that because of the permanence of racism, a district free of oppression is not attainable.”

“Everything we do must be directly shaped by these beliefs, anything less is inherently oppressive.” pic.twitter.com/03ot2RCcMs

— Steven Welliever (@StevenWelliever) April 12, 2021

Here’s where that passage comes from.

The media is there to frame the Narrative:

The new propaganda and lies of critical race theory: Don’t let the facts get in the way of a narrative. pic.twitter.com/yPp81sYsif

— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) April 13, 2021

Mob rule is always and everywhere bad. It’s even bad when a careless police officer shoots and kills a man. So many forces are now in play to encourage mob behavior. If we don’t have the law, what do we have? We have a precursor to the kind of nation that Fritz Lang had to flee in 1933.