This is a post for people in Minnesota. I’m going to do a separate post for the non-Minnesotans when I’m done with this one. (If you’re in a hurry you can go to Stand With Minnesota and find somewhere to donate some money.)

Hi! Hello! What a year the first half of January has been! If you’re already doing stuff, I’m not telling you to do different stuff, but I also know there are people who are having a hard time figuring out where to jump in, and there are people who are doing stuff who want to do more stuff. This is hopefully going to be a living document for people who are looking for ways to defend our neighbors.

My personal motto in this (and many other things) is a Jewish saying from the Pirkei Avot that goes, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to give up on it.” We are not in this alone. We are each picking up a tiny piece of the work and doing it, and like the people who jumped on and weighed down that carnival ride that almost tipped, we build power by working together.

There are a lot of ways to help right now, and I’m going to try to split them into useful categories and give you links to more information.

MUTUAL AID

Right now, a lot of groups out there are supporting the people who need to stay at home to keep themselves safe. (This includes undocumented immigrants but given that ICE has been detaining fully legal documented folks with work permits, and also detaining citizens, it is not just undocumented immigrants.)

Food:

• Iglesia Dios Habla Hoy/DHH church in South Minneapolis packs and delivers groceries. Fill out this form to volunteer.
• Sanneh Foundation needs volunteers to pack boxes on Thursdays.
• Calvary Food Shelf also does deliveries. Here’s their volunteer signup.
• La Viña Church in Burnsville is delivering food and needs volunteers on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays.
• Smitten Kitten has been running a mutual aid hub supplying necessities to those in need. You can learn more and help sort/pack/etc. by going in person to their store at 3010 Lyndale Ave S.
• You can check the StandWithMinesota site’s food section for more options. (Many more options.)

Laundry:

You can help with laundry services: pick up and drop off of clothes, wash/fold, or both. The form to volunteer is here.

Pets:

Some people have been forced to leave pets behind when detained, though, and local animal person Dallas is coordinating fostering for cats. (DM her on Facebook if you can help.)

Unmet Needs

Among the things I have not yet heard about: I don’t know if there’s a dog-walking mutual aid group, if there are any medical folks willing to make house calls, if anyone is organizing in-home volunteer tutors for the kids doing at-home learning for now, and if anyone is organizing snow shoveling or, given the number of people abducted at gas stations, gas-tank filling services. I will add those if I hear of any.

Personal Assistance

One way to address things like this: if you know a family where some or all of the people are unable to leave their house, ask what they need. You can volunteer directly to help your neighbors, and people you know through other communities (church, school, fandom, whatever.)

COMMUNITY DEFENSE

Community Defense is the stuff a lot of news articles are referring to as “protesting.” It is the work of watching for ICE, warning people if you see ICE, taking video if you see ICE abducting someone, and trying to get the name and any other personal information of abductees and passing names and video along to Monarca (612-441-2881).

At the most basic level: carry a whistle and know what to do if you see ICE. (If you see ICE, make some noise! Blow your whistle, honk your car horn!) You can get a whistle for free at many area stores, and keep your eyes out as you go about your daily business.

If you’d like to get more deeply involved in community defense, here’s how.

1. Get trained. The training you want is called legal observer training, constitutional observer training, Upstander training, or ICEWatch training. It is offered by Monarca, by the DFL, and by many other groups. You will learn important information like what to report if you see ICE (“SALUTE: Size [of the group], Action [what they’re doing], Location [where they are and where they’re headed], Uniforms [what they’re wearing], Time [when you saw them], and Equipment/weapons [what they’re carrying].”) Also, how to tell a real warrant (signed by a judge!) from the “warrants” ICE usually has. Also, what to do if you get arrested even though observing ICE is legal. (Say, “I am invoking my fifth amendment right to remain silent. I will not answer any questions without a lawyer present.” and then STOP TALKING.) You can find out some of what’s covered in the training by reading this manual.
   
2. Get on Signal. The organizing for this is all happening on Signal. If you don’t have Signal, download it and sign up. If you’re on Signal but use your legal name, change it. (“But you just said it’s legal to be a constitutional observer!” Yes! But ICE is harassing people who are doing this; make it harder for them to harass you. Also, it’s the norm in these communities and people will helpfully remind you not to use your legal name, over and over. Just use your made-up name.)
   
3. Find your local Signal group (there should be one for planning, one for Rapid Response.) If you’re in Minneapolis, intake is through Defend the 612. Outside of Minneapolis, there’s a document with information on the groups in other areas. Ask your friends, or if you can’t figure out how to find it, e-mail me and tell me your Signal username (the one that’s a name + 2 digits) and I’ll send it to you. Both of these take some time (the big groups are unvetted but individuals still have to be added manually) — the fastest option is to find someone in your immediate neighborhood who can just give you the link to your local group.

Once you’re in: there is a daily Signal voice call for people who are actively engaged in community defense, including mobile patrol, stationary observation, dispatch, and notetaking.

• You can read a best-practices document explaining the nitty gritty here.
• You can read a narrative discussion of how it works here.
• You can read a journalist’s description of mobile patrol here and another one here.

If mobile patrol sounds too scary but you want to be involved in community defense, notetaking / license plate checking is always needed. This is also a great option for people who are homebound. If you always wanted to be Ned from the MCU, the “guy in the chair,” dispatch could be the perfect job for you.

One final note about this: if you will be doing something like picking up laundry from the homes of vulnerable neighbors, do not also do mobile patrol, because ICE is absolutely recording license plate numbers and sometimes following people home. You don’t want to accidentally lead them to a person they would like to abduct. Pick a lane. (Also avoid that job if you share a household with a vulnerable person.)

PROTEST

There has been an ongoing presence at the Whipple Building in Minneapolis. (Near Fort Snelling.) There are lots of smaller events on bridges and street corners. There is a general strike being organized for January 23rd, with a march at 2 p.m.

I have been to some protests but I’m less expert on knowing where to find the small ones than some are.

SUPPLIES

Lots of people with 3D printers are using them to make whistles! Here’s more info on doing that. Lots of people with regular 2D printers have been printing up zines to go with the whistles: you can find printables at that same site.

If you’re part of a community defense or mutual aid group that has some identifiable need that can fulfilled with an Amazon wish list, you can DM mostlybree.kitrocha.com on Bluesky or contact emidly.08 on Signal; they can signal-boost your wish list.

FUNDRAISING

Anyone can fundraise and there are a gazillion ways to do it. But the basics, if you’ve never done it before: pick a group or cause (standwithminneapolis has loads) and ask people to donate to it. Ideally, you’re asking people who are currently outside Minnesota, or at least outside the metro area. If you have money of your own, you can offer to match donations. You can offer something of nominal value to anyone who donates over a certain amount (if you do some craft you enjoy and have a box full of crocheted pot holders, this can be a terrific use for them). If you have a higher capacity your can organize an event. Ideally, have people donate directly to the group you’re supporting, rather than sending money to you to pass along.

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS

If you are a lawyer licensed in Minnesota and want to help out, there is work specifically for you and there is a lot of need for it. Start here.

BUSINESS OWNERS

Here is information on becoming a Fourth Amendment Workplace. Signage is available from the City of Minneapolis. Alternate printables here. (There are a lot of versions around.)

COUNTERING DISINFORMATION

I am absolutely positively not telling you to spend your time on the Internet yelling at trolls. HOWEVER. If you have family and friends out-of-state who might listen to you, there are a couple of things I think it’s worth trying to communicate:

• The danger is coming from ICE, not from immigrants. The first murder committed in Minneapolis this year was committed by ICE.
  
• ICE is not looking for fraud; none of these yahoos would be able to recognize fraud if they tripped over a set of faked books. If this were about fraud, Kristi Noem would have sent accountants.
  
• ICE is not looking for criminals. The overwhelming majority of people abducted have been ordinary, hardworking people. There are legal immigrants with work permits who have been abducted and sent to Texas, that the government is now trying to deport. They have snatched US citizens, beaten them, and stolen phones and wedding rings. The undocumented folks they’re snatching are a whole lot of people who have lived here working hard for years.
  
• Those jackbooted government thugs that Wayne LaPierre claimed to be worried about: they’re here! They’re in Minneapolis, right now!

REST AS RESISTANCE

If you’re in the Twin Cities right now, remember that part of your job is to take care of yourself. You need to sleep. You need to eat. You need to take your meds. You need to stay healthy. (Wash your hands, wear a mask, stay home and recover if you feel sick.)

I’m going to suggest a couple of specific things. You probably don’t actually need to be told any of these things; I’m basing them off the dumb stuff I’ve been doing.

• For the love of all that’s holy, if you’re on Bluesky or Twitter, turn autoplay off on videos. I don’t know why it took me as long as it did to do this, but my sleep significantly improved once I did, because guess what, even if you’re scrolling past the bad ones, just seeing ICE agents aggressively walking towards someone on a street that looks familiar is going to give you an adrenaline spike. You don’t need that happening to you when you pull out your phone on the toilet.
  
• Drink extra water and be aware that you may need extra food. Adrenaline will just burn you out. It’s like the original candle that burns at both ends.
  
• Action is an antidote to despair. I feel so much better — seriously, so much better — on the days when I do anything. It doesn’t have to be huge. (It does help if it takes me out of the house, because seeing how many people in my community are out there working to protect our neighbors gives me a whole lot of hope.)

I have seen a lot of people linking to my story The Year Without Sunshine, which is a story about networking and mutual aid. I have been thinking a lot about my own story, actually, because it’s a story where the protagonist is not the viewpoint character, Alexis, but the community itself. It is the community that makes the choices that drive the story, the community that experiences the character change, and the community that survives together until the sun comes back.

We’re doing this. We are doing this. And we are going to survive together until the ice melts.

Let me begin by quoting, in full, a letter that the president of the United States of America sent yesterday to the prime minister of Norway, Jonas Gahr Støre. The text was forwarded by the White House National Security Council to ambassadors in Washington, and was clearly intended to be widely shared. Here it is:

Dear Jonas:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

One could observe many things about this document. One is the childish grammar, including the strange capitalizations (“Complete and Total Control”). Another is the loose grasp of history. Donald Trump did not end eight wars. Greenland has been Danish territory for centuries. Its residents are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. There are many “written documents” establishing Danish sovereignty in Greenland, including some signed by the United States. In his second term, Trump has done nothing for NATO—an organization that the U.S. created and theoretically leads, and that has only ever been used in defense of American interests. If the European members of NATO have begun spending more on their own defense (budgets to which the U.S. never contributed), that’s because of the threat they feel from Russia.

[Eliot A. Cohen: How to understand Trump’s obsession with Greenland]

Yet what matters isn’t the specific phrases, but the overall message: Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.

Think about where this is leading. One possibility, anticipated this morning by financial markets, is a damaging trade war. Another is an American military occupation of Greenland. Try to imagine it: The U.S. Marines arrive in Nuuk, the island’s capital. Perhaps they kill some Danes; perhaps some American soldiers die too. And then what? If the invaders were Russians, they would arrest all of the politicians, put gangsters in charge, shoot people on the street for speaking Danish, change school curricula, and carry out a fake referendum to rubber-stamp the conquest. Is that the American plan too? If not, then what is it? This would not be the occupation of Iraq, which was difficult enough. U.S. troops would need to force Greenlanders, citizens of a treaty ally, to become American against their will.

For the past year, American allies around the world have tried very hard to find a theory that explains Trump’s behavior. Isolationism, neo-imperialism, and patrimonialism are all words that have been thrown around. But in the end, the president himself defeats all attempts to describe a “Trump doctrine.” He is locked into a world of his own, determined to “win” every encounter, whether in an imaginary competition for the Nobel Peace Prize or a protest from the mother of small children objecting to his masked, armed paramilitary in Minneapolis. These contests matter more to him than any long-term strategy. And of course, the need to appear victorious matters much more than Americans’ prosperity and well-being.

[Read: Denmark’s army chief says he’s ready to defend Greenland]

The people around Trump could find ways to stop him, as some did in his first term, but they seem too corrupt or too power-hungry to try. That leaves Republicans in Congress as the last barrier. They owe it to the American people, and to the world, to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests. He is at risk of alienating friends in not only Europe but also India, whose leader he also snubbed for failing to nominate him for a Nobel Prize, as well as South Korea, Japan, Australia. Years of careful diplomacy, billions of dollars in trade, are now at risk because senators and representatives who know better have refused to use the powers they have to block him. Now is the time.

In a dream someone said to me, ‘Any general thesis which is put forward without a concrete example is therein badly presented’. That was all he said, and I was about to point out the irony that in merely putting forward this thesis by means of a general statement the speaker had failed his own requirement of providing an example when it suddenly occurred to me, as I exclaimed to him, ‘Ah, I see. Your putting forward this thesis without an example is itself the concrete example’. But when I awoke I realized there was a problem here. If indeed the speaker is credited with having given me a concrete example of an example-less bad presentation, then that credit must be immediately withdrawn, because what he has given me is not an example of an example-less bad presentation. But if it is not an example, then it must once again be received as an example of example-less presentation, but then it once again is not an example, and so on forever.

— Arnold Zuboff, in Analysis, July 1992

Humanities departments seem to be in perpetual crisis. Fewer students are enrolling in them. The Trump administration is cutting their funding. Smartphones and social media are hastening the collapse of reading and attention spans, even among students at elite schools. Americans are becoming more skeptical about the economic value of any four-year degree, let alone one in comparative literature.

In answer to these and other challenges, many colleges are trying to make the humanities “relevant.” Some are accommodating reduced attention spans by assigning excerpts rather than books. Others are responding to financial anxieties by restructuring departments to emphasize their practicality (if they aren’t eliminating programs altogether). But such adaptations and compromises only exacerbate perhaps the most insidious threat the humanities face, and one that’s not often discussed.

[Tyler Austin Harper: The humanities have sown the seeds of their own destruction]

As a humanities professor myself, the biggest danger I see to the discipline is the growing perception, fueled by the ubiquity of large language models, that knowledge is cheap—a resource whose procurement ought to be easy and frictionless. The humanities, which value rigorous inquiry for its own sake, will always be at odds with a world that thinks this way; that’s why relevance is a futile goal. For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it. Indeed, the most useful lesson the humanities have to offer today is a profoundly countercultural one: Difficulty is good, an end in its own right.

For the past several years, I’ve had the pleasantly vague title “visiting professor of humanities” at Bard College, a small liberal-arts school in New York’s Hudson Valley. Bard has given me a remit as simple as it is generous: to teach books and ideas I think are important. Every November, I submit course descriptions for two spring seminars—this year, one on Albert Camus and his influences, the other exploring the idea of the American dream through Black writers such as Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin. Within a few days of the courses being posted, prospective students start writing me to say how eager they are to immerse themselves in the texts. I’ve learned to relish their zeal, because I know it won’t last.

When they start my class, many of my bright, self-selecting students appear to be unacquainted with the difficulty of close reading. By the end of the semester, only a fraction seem to have gotten through the texts and writing assignments without outsourcing at least some of their work to AI. In my course on Camus, most students will be able to remember the philosopher’s famous injunction to imagine Sisyphus happy, but few will demonstrate mastery of the abstruse train of thought that led him to it. Not many are fully willing to try.

I began teaching in early 2023, two months after OpenAI released ChatGPT. It could generate some amusing parlor tricks—a personal favorite was interweaving Shakespearean sonnets with mid-’90s rap—but it wasn’t good at much else. During my first semester, one or two students turned in writing that featured AI’s distinct blend of fluency and superficiality, which was easy to detect.

Chatbots look very different today. As the technology has become more sophisticated, more of my students have tried to pass off AI-generated writing as their own. The craftier ones will use chatbots to come up with phrases or insights that they shape into their own prose. The work this yields is usually competent, making AI’s influence difficult to spot, but not exceptional. If I have suspicions about a student’s take-home essay—maybe it looks nothing like their in-class writing assignments—I run it through AI detectors. These are far from perfect, of course. But when they indicate the use of AI, I confront the student, and he or she almost always confesses. Still, in just three years, ChatGPT and its competitors have rendered take-home essays—what I consider the central exercise of humanistic learning—nearly useless to assign and almost impossible to assess.

More recently I’ve come to suspect that, in addition to using LLMs to ghostwrite papers, some of my students are relying on them to prepare for in-class discussion. At any rate, their contributions are getting blander and more interchangeable, less daring; eccentric or original observations are becoming rarer. If I’m right that AI is furnishing my students with talking points, then it has almost entirely eliminated the possibility that they arrive at some transformative insight on their own, which is what makes wrestling with words and ideas so joyful and fruitful in the first place.

[Kwame Anthony Appiah: The age of de-skilling]

Probing a text can be enjoyable but also tiring, even borderline painful. That’s good. Exhausting our mental faculties, such as through deep reading or effortful writing, is what makes them more potent. Physical exercise works the same way. AI, by contrast, promises knowledge without effort, just as many people see in GLP-1 drugs the possibility of weight loss without willpower. Although both have legitimate uses, their widespread adoption has diminished our capacity to appreciate, let alone endure, the sustained and challenging work required to flourish beyond the level of simple appearance. Only through difficulty do we improve our powers of thought and perception, which we carry with us in every endeavor. This is the true source of the humanities’ relevance.

Camus’s great realization was that, in a meaningless world, we create our own meaning and quality through willed struggle—a lesson that AI threatens to obscure but the humanities are uniquely poised to teach. Sisyphus is assigned to roll his rock for eternity, Camus writes. Yet he can still be happy so long as, each time he comes to the bottom of the hill, he’s the one who chooses to turn around and rise back up.