On “Saturday Night Live” this week, recent Golden Globe winner Teyana Taylor played a news anchor in a sketch mocking the lack of awareness in some media coverage of the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement-related events in Minneapolis. In it, the white journalist characters appeared gobsmacked that law enforcement would target innocent people based on how they looked, while the Black journalists in the sketch seemed all too familiar with the scenario. The sketch wasn’t so much funny as it was painfully and uncomfortably on point. Turn on CNN’s “NewsNight,” and you’ll likely see the same thing. The message is clear: There’s a playbook for how most Americans perceive what’s happening in Minneapolis with the government’s overreach of power. But Black and brown communities have been here before. We’ve seen this exact script play out, and it’s beyond exhausting.The playbook is old, but its execution has remained devastatingly effective — find Black and brown communities, orchestrate a deceptive threat (usually through the media), and unleash the full force of the government on everyone.We’ve watched this story unfold time and time again.In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon launched the “War on Drugs,” which adviser later admitted was explicitly designed to criminalize Blackness and “disrupt those communities.” Under President Ronald Reagan, Congress allocated nearly $2 billion for new anti-drug funding in 1986. The 1033 program, established in 1997, has resulted in $7.6 billion worth of military equipment being sent to over 10,000 police departments. And another $34 billion was funneled to local law enforcement in the decade after 9/11.And in 2003, Colin Powell stood before the UN with a vial of what was supposedly anthrax, claiming Iraq had WMDs. UN inspectors debunked it. America invaded anyway, and hundreds of thousands of people died.The result was exploding incarceration rates, militarized police forces and the systematic targeting of Black and brown communities, both in America and across the world. The same blueprint. The same communities. The same lies dressed up in a new language.Now, in Minneapolis, we are seeing the latest iteration of this centuries-old playbook. On Jan. 24, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen, during an anti-ICE protest. This happened just after President Donald Trump called the Somali community in the U.S. “garbage” to reporters after a Cabinet meeting last December, and claimed the state had massive fraud — rhetoric plastered across the official White House website. It’d also only been two weeks since ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, also 37, during an encounter in south Minneapolis on Jan. 7. The unfortunate reality is that white allies who put their bodies on the line to stand up for us are just expendable as we are to racist law enforcement.Last July, Congress voted to add an unprecedented $170 billion to the Trump administration’s already massive budget for immigration enforcement. Now, federal agents are patrolling America’s streets with the same equipment used in war zones. The pretext always changes — weapons of mass destruction, crack cocaine, illegal immigrants — but the formula remains the same. Manufacture fear of the Black and brown “other,” use that fear to justify the unhinged misuse of power that restricts everyone’s freedom, then keep us distracted and scrolling through A.I. and algorithmic slop designed to fragment our attention and disintegrate our ability to mobilize and take action.But something has been shifting. For the last decade or so, we’ve been seeing it with our very own eyes and then capturing it on the very devices they are using to control us. Social media, which is often just a vehicle for distraction, has become our weapon of documentation. The world is watching what’s happening across the United States because civilians have turned their phones into instruments of witness. This documentation doesn’t always bring justice — as we’ve seen in countless cases where clear video evidence still didn’t lead to accountability — but it’s undeniably a crucial first step toward it.Famous jazz poet and activist Gil Scott-Heron shouted that the revolution would not be televised back in 1971. Our revolution will be livestreamed, posted, shared and archived, captured by millions of phones in the millions of hands documenting every moment of this state-sanctioned violence.This is not about immigration policy. It’s about power, control and the systemic erosion of freedom. They want us afraid and isolated, scrolling and consuming — anything but organizing and demanding accountability.Document everything. Record everything (safely). Share everything. Once we record the truth, again and again, it becomes hard to unsee.