WITNESS: Bearing witness was simple as ringin' a bell!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2026

Last night's attack on Omar: "Citizens with smartphones are supplementing journalists in gathering facts." 

So writes George Will in his newest column. Along the way, Will reports a fairly obvious fact:

Today, it is more than prudent to assume that everything ICE says, and everything the administration says in support of its deportation mania, is untrue until proved to be otherwise

It's hard to argue with that. At any rate, a new technology—that of the smartphone—is allowing us to witness things we never could have witnessed in even the recent past. 

In the 1985 film, Witness, a different technology served that purpose. We refer to the ringing of a bell. 

The ringing of a bell produced created a state of community witness! We'll let the leading authority on the film start to attempt to explain:

Witness (1985 film)

Witness is a 1985 American neo-noir crime thriller film directed by Peter Weir. Starring Harrison Ford, its plot focuses on a police detective protecting an Amish woman and her son, who becomes a target after he witnesses a brutal murder in a Philadelphia railroad station.

Filmed in 1984, Witness was released theatrically by Paramount Pictures in February 1985. The film received positive reviews upon release and became a sleeper hit... At the 58th Academy Awards, it earned eight nominations, including Best Picture.

[...]

Schaeffer, McFee and another corrupt cop arrive at the Lapp farm and take Rachel and Eli hostage... Schaeffer holds Rachel and Eli at gunpoint, but Samuel secretly comes back to ring the Lapp farm's bell. [The Ford character] confronts Schaeffer, who threatens to kill Rachel, but the bell has alerted and summoned all of the neighbors. With so many witnesses present, Schaeffer surrenders and is later arrested.

Let us expand upon that:

Ford is cast as John Book, a Philly police officer who discovers murderous corruption within that police department. Seeking to save his own life—but mainly fleeing "the wickedness of the times"—he goes into hiding with the Lapp family in Pennsylvania's Amish country, 

The corrupt cops discover where he is; they go to the Lapp farm to kill him. When the Lapp family bell is rung—in a no-telephone Amish culture, it's a signal of the need for aid—neighbors arrive from all around. 

In the face of so many witnesses, the last surviving corrupt policeman puts down his gun and surrenders.

Metaphorically, the film is a beautifully disguised metaphorical portrait of an attempt at "internal exile." The film ends with Book returning to the wider world, thereby walking away from a love affair with Rachel Lapp, as played by Kelly McGillis.

He has come to see that he can't live the rest of his life within this internal exile—within this avoidance of the need to confront the wickedness of the time. 

The love affair with the McGillis character encourages him to stay. But as in Casablanca, so too here. In the end, the Ford character, like Monsieur Rick, decides to "return to the fight."

We've often wondered why Witness isn't one of our three or four favorite films. We'll skip that question today. 

All in all, it may seem that it took an Aussie, the director Weir, to film this brilliant portrait of American dismay and despair in the face of the urban crime disasters taking form during that era. That said, the basic story idea, and the Oscar-winning screenplay, were developed by a series of Americans, by way of a Gunsmoke episode.

At any rate, the ringing of a bell called neighbors to come and bear life-saving witness. The situation may be a bit more fraught today.

Two of the three homicides in Minneapolis this year have been committed by the Border Patrol or by ICE! The blowing of whistles has been part of the call to bear witness there, but it's the smartphone which has let everyone across the globe take part in a new form of witness.

That has been especially true in the past five days.

Witness features a complex but hopeful ending, in which the act of witness subdues the immediate act of corruption. The power of smartphones notwithstanding, we can't necessarily picture a good way out of our current American mess.

Smartphones have let us witness recent actions—but are we prepared to bear witness? Last night, a type of physical attack was conducted against Rep. Ilhan Omar. We were struck by how little background information was provided by this news report in the New York Times:

Representative Ilhan Omar Is Attacked at Town Hall in Minneapolis

During a town hall with Representative Ilhan Omar in Minneapolis on Tuesday evening, a man rushed the lectern and appeared to spray her with a strong-smelling liquid before he was tackled by security.

The man, who had been seated directly in front of the lectern in the front row, suddenly jumped up as Ms. Omar was speaking and ran toward the podium. He used a syringe to spray her shirt with a substance that smelled strongly of vinegar. As he stumbled backward and pointed at her, a security officer tackled him to the ground, handcuffed him and removed him from the room.

Gasps were audible through the crowd, as well as cries of “Oh my God, oh my God.” 

And so on from there. 

Reasonably or otherwise, we were struck by the lack of background information in the Times report. Over at Mediaite, Michael Luciano reported the reaction by President Trump, and background was provided:

Trump Floats Conspiracy Theory After Man Shoots Liquid at Ilhan Omar: ‘She Probably Had Herself Sprayed’

President Donald Trump suggested that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) orchestrated the incident in which a man sprayed her with liquid on Tuesday night.

Omar held a town hall in Minneapolis, where she called for the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose agency has overseen a brutal crackdown by federal immigration agents in the city. As she spoke, a man approached the lectern and aimed a plastic-looking syringe at the congresswoman and squirted an unidentified substance at Omar.

[...]

About two hours later, Rachel Scott of ABC News said she had just spoken with Trump and asked him if he had seen the video of the incident.

“No. I don’t think about her. I think she’s a fraud. I really don’t think about that. She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her,” the president told Scott.

There the president went again! Later in Luciano's report, this background was provided:

The president has waged a long-running feud with Omar, who is from Somalia and has represented Minnesota’s 5th district since 2019. At a rally last year, Trump falsely claimed the lawmaker is “here illegally,” a charge that prompted the crowd to chant, “Send her back!”

Last week, the president called for Omar to be investigated for “political crimes.”

Trump has also called Omar “garbage” and said he does not want any Somalis in the U.S.

“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you,” the president said in December. “Some will say that is not ‘politically correct.’” I don’t care. Their country is no good for a reason.”

For whatever reason, there he went again.

At this site, we have long assumed that the president is afflicted with some (deeply unfortunate) version of what used to be called "mental illness." We don't think that's going to change, and we don't think that news orgs like the Times are ever going to come to terms with the tragic but dangerous state of affairs which seems to be right there before them.

Back in December, the president described Minnesota's Somali American population as "garbage." All in all, major news orgs took that familiar behavior in stride.

The Times has refused to center the president's endless unusual conduct within a basic front-page news focus. Dating all the way back to the start of his four or five birther years, the editorial board has never had the courage to stand up and say something like this:

Whatever else may be true within our political world, the ongoing misconduct of this president is completely unacceptable.

Medical possibilities to the side, the Times has never been willing to do those things—to bear witness in those fairly obvious ways. Beyond that, the Times has never been willing to report and discuss the work which emerges from the Fox News Channel.

Over the weekend, a news report in the Times suggested the possibility that this very important American newspaper might be willing to exercise a new type of witness with respect to that "cable news" channel. As we noted yesterday, the news report started like this:

Most Fox News Reporting on Minneapolis Shooting Supports Official Version

On Sunday morning, reporters on many TV networks were poring over multiple videos of the shooting over the weekend of a protester in Minneapolis by immigration agents, trying to understand what happened from slow-mo footage and freeze-frame images.

But on Fox News, the nation’s top-rated cable news network, there was little of that kind of analysis. Instead, most of its hosts, reporters and guests appeared laser focused since the shooting late Saturday morning on supporting the Trump administration’s official narrative: that Alex Pretti, a 37-year old intensive care nurse, brought the violence upon himself.

“Only one person could have prevented this from happening and it’s Alex Pretti,” said Charlie Hurt, co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Sunday morning. “He should have not been there.”

And so on from there. 

That's the way the report began. For once in its institutional life, the New York Times was bearing witness to what takes place, all day long and then all night, on that very powerful American "cable news" channel.

(Full disclosure: Some of what happens on Fox is more illuminating than the corresponding work on CNN or MS NOW.)

Coverage of the Fox News Channel is very badly needed. You don't see any such effort at the Times or at the Washington Post or at The Atlantic or at CNN or at MS NOW. 

We doubt that any such coverage will ever take a serious form at the New York Times—and if it does, we'll assume that it will be much too late to have a serious effect on the obvious, ongoing demise of the American nation.

Concerning the assault on Rep. Omar, let's be admirably frank:

President Trump has been begging for something like that. So has the Fox News Channel's gruesome Greg Gutfeld, along with the defectives with whom he surrounds himself on his nightly primetime program.

If the New York Times had been willing to report on Gutfeld down through the years, it would have had to come to terms with his endless claim about Rep. Omar. His endless claim is endlessly seconded by the wrestlers, chefs and former cheerleaders with whom he peoples his show.

The claim has been around for ten years. The truth of the claim has never been established, but people like President Trump and the acolyte Gutfeld never stop pimping it out.

To see the most recent fact-check by Snopes of this "rumor," you can just click here. To see the most recent pimping of this rumor by Gutfeld, you can click here, then you can click this, for the fun he had with this evergreen rumor on his January 15 program.

("It's like a three-legged stool of stool," the excrement-obsessed cable star said. "Nobody's refuting it," the defective star pitifully said.)

For the Times' original fact-check—all the way back in 2019!—you can just click here.

In fairness to the New York Times, it's hard to report, describe and evaluate the highly unusual types of behavior technological breakthrough has wrought:

We jumped from talk radio to cable news and then on to the internet. Every flyweight or stumblebum has his own podcast now. 

The most-watched American "cable news" show is driven by a pair of journalistic barbarians like Gutfeld and Jesse Watters. Almost surely, the high-falutin New York Times wouldn't know how to get its arms around the endless chaos there.

Borrowing from Huey Long, Every apparent defective a king! Mental disorder is always tragic, but in our brave new democratized world, it's also endlessly dangerous.

Blue Americans show bad judgment too, but the times, they're quite different now. We don't expect a positive change, and we'll let Chuck Berry explain how simple it was, long ago, before we made all the advances:

Back in those less complexified days, playing the guitar for Johnny B. Goode was as simple as ringin' a bell! Today, the beast is crawling across the land, and those of us who aren't incel-adjacent or semi-insane aren't smart enough, or honest enough, to come to terms with the beast's incessant sprawling misconduct.

Still to come this week: What we heard on Fox & Friends Weekend. 

Also, we'll revisit Kristi Noem's story.