Photographs by Jack Califano

It took only a few minutes before everyone in the church knew that another person had been shot. I was sitting with Trygve Olsen, a big man in a wool hat and puffy vest, who lifted his phone to show me a text with the news. It was his 50th birthday, and one of the coldest days of the year. I asked him whether he was doing anything special to celebrate. “What should I be doing?” he replied. “Should I sit at home and open presents? This is where I’m supposed to be.”

He had come to Iglesia Cristiana La Viña Burnsville, about 15 miles south of the Twin Cities, to pick up food for families who are too afraid to go out—some have barely left home since federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota two months ago. The church was filled with pallets of frozen meat and vegetables, diapers, fruit, and toilet paper. Outside, a man wearing a leather biker vest bearing the insignia of the Latin American Motorcycle Association, his blond beard flecked with ice crystals, directed a line of cars through the snow.

The man who had been shot—fatally, we later learned—was Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who had been recording agents outside a donut shop. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security claimed that he had threatened agents with a gun; videos of the shooting show him holding only his phone when he is pushed down by masked federal agents and beaten, his licensed sidearm removed from its holster by one agent before another unloads several shots into his back. Pretti’s death was a reminder—if anyone in Minnesota still needed one—that people had reason to be hiding, and that those trying to help them, protect them, or protest on their behalf had reason to be scared.

The church has a mostly Hispanic and working-class flock. Its pastor, Miguel Aviles, who goes by Pastor Miguel, told me that it had sent out about 2,000 packages of food since the federal agents had arrived. Many of the people in hiding, he said, “have asylum cases pending. They already have work permits and stuff, but some of them are legal residents and still they’re afraid to go out. Because of their skin color, they are afraid to go out.”

Federal agents have arrested about 3,000 people in the state, but they have released the names of only about 240 of those detained, leaving unclear how many of the larger number have committed any crimes. Many more thousands of people have been affected by the arrests and the fear they have instilled. Minneapolis Public Radio estimates that in school districts “with widespread federal activity, as many as 20 to 40 percent of students have been absent in recent weeks.”

I don’t know what the feds expected when they surged into Minnesota. In late November, The New York Times reported on a public-benefit fraud scheme in the state that was executed mainly by people of Somali descent. Federal prosecutors under the Biden administration had already indicted dozens of people, but after the Times story broke, President Trump began ranting about Somalis, whom he referred to as “garbage”; declared that he didn’t want Somali immigrants in the country; and announced that he was sending thousands of armed federal immigration agents to Minneapolis. This weekend, he posted on social media that the agents were there because of “massive monetary fraud.” The real reason may be that a majority of Minnesotans did not vote for him. Trump has said that “I won Minnesota three times, and I didn’t get credit for it. That’s a crooked state.” He has never won Minnesota.

Perhaps the Trump-administration officials had hoped that a few rabble-rousers would get violent, justifying the kind of crackdown he seems to fantasize about. Maybe they had assumed that they would find only a caricature of “the resistance”—people who seethed about Trump online but would be unwilling to do anything to defend themselves against him.

Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom. They aren’t looking for attention or likes on social media. Unless they are killed by federal agents, as Pretti and Renee Good were, other activists do not even necessarily know their names. Many use a handle or code name out of fear of government retaliation. Their concerns are justified: A number of people working as volunteers or observers told me that they had been trailed home by ICE agents, and some of their communications have already been infiltrated, screenshotted, and posted online, forcing them to use new text chains and code names. One urgent question among observers, as the videos of Pretti’s killing spread, was what his handle might have been.

Olsen had originally used the handle “Redbear” in communicating with me, but later said I could name him. He had agreed to let me ride along while he did his deliveries. As he loaded up his truck with supplies, he wore just a long-sleeved red shirt and vest, apparently unfazed by the Minnesota cold.

“This is my first occupation,” Olsen said as I climbed into the truck. “Welcome to the underground, I guess.”

The number of Minnesotans resisting the federal occupation is so large that relatively few could be characterized as career activists. They are ordinary Americans—people with jobs, moms and dads, friends and neighbors. They can be divided into roughly three groups.

The largest is the protesters, who show up at events such as Friday’s march in downtown Minneapolis, and at the airport, where deportation flights take off. Many protesters have faced tear gas and pepper spray, and below-zero temperatures—during the Twin Cities march on Friday, I couldn’t take notes; the ink in my pens had frozen.

Then there are the people who load up their car with food, toiletries, and school supplies from churches or schools to take to families in hiding. They also help families who cannot work meet their rent or mortgage payments. In addition to driving around with Olsen, I rode along with a Twin Cities mom of young kids named Amanda as she did deliveries (she asked me to use only her first name). Riding in her small car—her back row was taken up by three child seats and a smattering of stray toys—she told me that she’d gotten involved after more than 100 students at her kids’ elementary school simply stopped coming in. Parents got organized to provide the families with food, to shepherd their kids to school, and to arrange playdates for those stuck inside.

Amanda’s father and husband are immigrants, she said, and she speaks Spanish. “I can be a conduit between those who want to help and those who need help,” she told me. She calls each family before knocking on the door, so they don’t have to worry that they are being tricked by ICE. At one home, a woman asked us to go around back because a suspicious vehicle was idling out front. At another home, a little girl in pigtails beamed as Amanda handed her a Target bag full of school supplies.

Finally, there’s those most at risk of coming into violent contact with federal agents, a group that’s come to be popularly known as ICE Watch, although the designation is unofficial—as far as I can tell, you’re in ICE Watch if you watch ICE. These are the whistle-wielding pedestrians and drivers calling themselves “observers” or “commuters” who patrol for federal agents (usually identifiable by their SUVs with out-of-state plates) and alert the neighborhood to their presence. Pretti and Good, the two Minneapolis residents killed by federal agents, fit in this category.

Trump-administration officials and MAGA influencers have repeatedly called these activists “violent” and said they are involved in “riots.” But the resistance in Minnesota is largely characterized by a conscious, strategic absence of physical confrontation. Activists have made the decision to emphasize protection, aid, and observation. When matters escalate, it is usually the choice of the federal agents. Of the three homicides in Minneapolis this year, two were committed by federal agents.

“There’s been an incredible, incredible response from the community. I’ve seen our neighbors go straight from allies to family—more than family—checking in on each other, offering food and rides for kids and all kinds of support, alerting each other if there’s ICE or any kind of danger,” Malika Dahir, a local activist of Somali descent, told me.

If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme. Vice President Vance has said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’” Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.

On Wednesday, I met with two volunteers who went by the handles “Green Bean” and “Cobalt.” They picked me up in the parking lot of a Target, not far from where Good was killed two weeks earlier. Cobalt works in tech but has recently been spending more time on patrol than at her day job. Green Bean is a biologist, but she told me the grant that had been funding her work hadn’t been renewed under the Trump administration. Neither of them had imagined doing what they were doing now. “I’m supposed to be creeping around in the woods looking at insects,” Green Bean said.

Most commuters work in pairs—a co-pilot listens in on a dispatcher who provides the locations of ICE encounters and can run plates through a database of cars that federal agents have used in the past. Green Bean explained what happens when they identify an ICE vehicle. (Both ICE and Border Patrol are in Minneapolis, but everyone just calls them ICE.) The commuters will follow the agents, honking loudly, until they leave the neighborhood or stop and get out.

The commuters—as my colleague Robert Worth reported—do not have a centralized leadership but have been trained by local activist groups that have experience from past protests against police killings, and recent immigration-enforcement sweeps in L.A. and Chicago. The observers are taught to conscientiously follow the law, including traffic rules, and to try to avoid physical confrontation with federal agents.

If the agents detain someone, the observers will try to get that person’s name so they can inform the family. But ICE prefers to make arrests—which the ICE Watchers call “abductions”—quietly. More often than not, Green Bean said, when these volunteers draw attention, the agents will “leave rather than dig in.” She added, “They are huge pussies, I will be honest.”

As we cruised through the Powderhorn neighborhood, practically every business had an ICE OUT sign in the window. Graffiti trashing ICE was everywhere, as were posters of Good labeled AMERICAN MOM KILLED BY ICE. Listening to the dispatcher, Cobalt relayed directions to Green Bean about the locations of ICE vehicles, commuters who had been boxed in or threatened by agents, and possible “abductions.”

About 30 minutes into the patrol, Green Bean saw a white Jeep Wagoneer with out-of-state plates and read out the numbers. “Confirmed ICE,” Cobalt said, and we began following the Wagoneer as it drove through the neighborhood. Another car of commuters joined us, making as much noise as possible.

After about 10 minutes, the Wagoneer got onto the highway. Green Bean followed until we could be sure that it wasn’t doubling back to the neighborhood, and then we turned around.

Most encounters with ICE end like that. But sometimes situations deteriorate—as with Good, who was killed while doing a version of what Green Bean and Cobalt were now doing. The task is stressful for the observers, who understand that even minor encounters can turn deadly.

The next day, I drove around with another pair of commuters who went by “Judy” and “Lime.” Both told me they were anti-Zionist Jews who had been involved in pro-Palestinian and Black Lives Matter protests. Lime’s day job is with an abortion-rights organization, and Judy is a rabbi. “I did protective presence in the West Bank,” Lime told me, referring to a form of protest in which activists try to deter settler violence by simply being present in Palestinian communities. “This is very similar.”

About an hour into our drive, we came across an ICE truck. Judy started blaring the horn, and I heard her mutter to herself: “We’re just driving, we’re just driving, which is legal. I hate this.” I asked them both if they were scared. “I do not feel scared, but I probably should,” Lime said.

Judy said she had been out on patrol days after Good was killed, and had gotten boxed in and yelled at by federal agents. “It was very scary,” Judy told me. “Murdering someone definitely works as an intimidation tactic. You just have no idea what is going to happen.” She said that ICE agents had taken a picture of her license plate and then later showed up at her house, leaning out of their car to take another picture—making it clear to Judy that they knew who she was.

Green Bean had told me the same thing—that agents had come to her house, followed her when she left, and then blocked her vehicle and screamed at her to “stop fucking following us. This is your last warning.” Green Bean was able to laugh while retelling this. “I just stared at them until they left,” she said.

We drove past Good’s memorial. Tributes to her—flowers and letters—were still there, covered in a light powder of snow. We didn’t yet know at the time that residents would soon set up another memorial, for Pretti.

The broad nature of the civil resistance in Minnesota should not lead anyone to believe that no one there supports what ICE is doing. Plenty of people do. Trump came close to winning the state in 2024, and many people here, especially outside the Twin Cities, believe the administration’s rhetoric about targeting “the worst of the worst,” despite what the actual statistics reveal.

“You don’t have to go too far south” to find places where Minnesotans “welcome ICE into their restaurants and bars and sort of love what they do,” Tom Jenkins, the lead pastor of Mount Cavalry Lutheran Church in suburban Eagan, which is also helping with food drives, told me. “A lot of people are still cheering ICE on because they don’t think that whatever people are telling them or showing them is real.”

Although most of the coverage has understandably focused on the cities, suburban residents told me that they had seen operations all over the state. “There are mobile homes not far from where I live,” Jenkins said. Agents “were there every day, you know: 10, 15, 20 agents working the bus stops and bus drop-offs.” He added: “They’re all over.”

Even among those involved in opposing ICE in Minnesota, people have a range of political views. The nonviolent nature of the movement, and the focus on caring for neighbors, has drawn in volunteers with many different perspectives on immigration, including people who might have been supportive if the Trump administration’s claims of a targeted effort to deport violent criminals had been sincere.

“One of the things that I believe, and I know most of the Latino community agrees, is that we want the bad people out. We want the criminals out,” Pastor Miguel, who immigrated from Mexico 30 years ago, told me. “All of us came here looking for a better life for us and for our children. So when we have criminals, rapists—when we have people who have done horrible things in our streets, in our communities—we are afraid of them. We don’t want them here.”

The problem is that federal agents are not going after just criminals. Growing distraught, Pastor Miguel said that one of the men who helped organize the food drive, a close friend of his who he believed had legal status, had been picked up by federal agents the day before I visited.

“I just—I didn’t have words,” he said. “And yet I cannot crumble; I cannot fall. Because all these families also need us.”

Two days after Pretti was killed, my colleague Nick Miroff broke the news that Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official who had led the operation in Minneapolis, would be leaving the city and replaced by Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan. Bovino, strutting around in body armor or his distinctive long coat, seemed to relish his role as a villain to his critics, encouraging aggressive tactics by federal agents and sometimes engaging in them himself. The day I accompanied Green Bean and Cobalt, Bovino fumbled with a gas canister before throwing it into a sparse crowd of protesters.

Bovino’s departure seemed an admission that Minnesotans aren’t the only Americans who won’t tolerate more deaths at the hands of federal agents. The people of Minnesota have forced the Trump administration into a strategic retreat—one inflicted not as rioters or insurgents, but as neighbors.

After Friday’s protest, when thousands marched in frigid downtown Minneapolis, chanting, “No Trump, no troops, Twin Cities ain’t licking boots!” I spoke with a young protester named Ethan McFarland, who told me that his parents are immigrants from Uganda. He had recently asked his mother to show him her immigration papers, in case she got picked up. This kind of state oppression, he said, is exactly what his mother was “trying to get away from” when she came to the United States.

McFarland’s remarks reminded me of something Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser, had written: “Migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” In Minnesota, the opposite was happening. The “conditions and terrors” of immigrants’ “broken homelands” weren’t being re-created by immigrants. They were being re-created by people like Miller. The immigrants simply have the experience to recognize them.

The federal surge into Minneapolis reflects a series of mistaken MAGA assumptions. The first is the belief that diverse communities aren’t possible: “Social bonds form among people who have something in common,” Vance said in a speech last July. “If you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow social cohesion to form naturally.” Vance’s remarks are the antithesis to the neighborism of the Twin Cities, whose people do not share the narcissism of being capable of loving only those who are exactly like them.

A second MAGA assumption is that the left is insincere in its values, and that principles of inclusion and unity are superficial forms of virtue signaling. White liberals might put a sign in their front yard saying IMMIGRANTS WELCOME, but they will abandon those immigrants at the first sensation of sustained pressure.

And in Trump’s defense, this has turned out to be true of many liberals in positions of power—university administrators, attorneys at white-shoe law firms, political leaders. But it is not true of millions of ordinary Americans, who have poured into the streets in protest, spoken out against the administration, and, in Minnesota, resisted armed men in masks at the cost of their own life.

The MAGA faith in liberal weakness has been paired with the conviction that real men—Trump’s men—are conversely strong. Consider Miller’s bizarre meltdown while addressing Memphis police in October. “The gangbangers that you deal with—they think that they’re ruthless? They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough? They have no idea how tough we are,” Miller said. “They think they’re hard-core? We are so much more hard-core than they are.” Around this time, Miller moved his family onto a military base—for safety reasons.

The federal agents sent to Minnesota wear body armor and masks, and bear long guns and sidearms. But their skittishness and brutality are qualities associated with fear, not resolve. It takes far more courage to stare down the barrel of a gun while you’re armed with only a whistle and a phone than it does to point a gun at an unarmed protester.

Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs.  

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.

“You want to know why philosophy matters? This is the true answer, and the one upon which we must plant our flag: philosophy is the most productive force ever discovered by human beings and we are responsible for modernity. Philosophy is the great gear deep in the heart of the world, and when that gear moves, the Earth trembles.”

That’s Steven Hales, professor of philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, in a glorious rallying cry posted at his newsletter, Scriptorium Philosophia.

He continues:

It is philosophers who created systematic ethics, interconnected principles defensible by reason, instead of mere lists of rules handed out by the gods. We are the ones who developed formal logic and the laws of deductive inference. We are the ones who criticized the divine right of kings and laid down the foundations of constitutional governments. We are the inventors and architects of the scientific method.

He notes that “philosophy is the first academic discipline, the first show from which all the others are spin-offs” and proceeds to describe the disciplinary speciation philosophy gave rise to.

Furthermore, philosophers have “sacrificed everything” to bring you all of this, he says, recounting many of the philosophers who have been punished or killed for philosophizing in history. And now today, there’s this: “our entire field is under attack by a managerial class convinced the only purpose of college is getting 22-year-olds their first job. They are cynics who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.”

He writes about the personal and cultural importance of philosophy, the humanities more broadly, and the arts, telling philosophers to stand tall.

If you need some motivation this morning, or just want to feel good about philosophy, check it out. And then send it to your dean.

 

The post On Philosophy’s Importance first appeared on Daily Nous.

The U.S. Labor Department is embracing Nazi slogans and tropes, the Pentagon’s research office is deploying neo-Nazi graphic elements in its social-media feeds, and the Department of Homeland Security recently posted lyrics mimicking a popular song by a band with ties to an ethno-nationalist social club.

The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery. The leaders of these departments so far refuse to answer questions about their social-media strategies, but the trend is impossible to miss: Across the federal government, officials are advocating for a radical new understanding of the American idea, one rooted not in the vision of the Founders, but in the ideologies of European fascists.

On January 10, the Department of Labor posted a video with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” which sounds eerily similar to the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“One people, one realm, one leader”). The post has 22.6 million views. One week ago, the Pentagon’s research office posted silhouettes of Revolutionary-era troops with glowing white eyes. The glowing eyes, and the filter that gave their boots a red and cyan tint, are often used in the Right Wing Death Squad subgenre of “fashwave” memes—content posted by neo-Nazis trying to make their views more aesthetically pleasing. DHS also recently posted an image of a horse rider with a B-2 bomber overhead, superimposed with the text “We’ll have our home again.” That phrase is nearly identical to lyrics from a song by a group affiliated with the Mannerbund, a far-right folk group that draws upon Germany’s ethno-nationalist Völkisch movement: “Oh by God, we’ll have our home again.”

The themes and styles of this mimicry vary. And posts with allusions to extremism have popped up on occasion in individual department or agency feeds, especially at DHS, which oversees both Customs and Border Protection and ICE. But the variety and ubiquity of the recent posts point to something new. 

In August, the Department of Homeland Security posted an image across multiple platforms that included the line “Which way, American man?” a reference to the book Which Way Western Man?, written by the late neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson and later published by the far-right press National Vanguard Books. In November, DHS posted a video highlighting important moments in American history, also edited so that it resembled fashwave videos. Last month, the agency posted an image of ICE agents, overlaid with VHS text and a glitchy filter—two characteristics of fashwave memes.  

Many of the memes promote the idea of “remigration.” The term can mean the voluntary departure of immigrants to their birth country but has gained popularity in white-nationalist circles in Europe and America as a euphemism for the expulsion of nonwhite immigrants from Western countries, potentially including naturalized citizens and their descendants. 

In November, DHS posted on X: “The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear: Remigration now.” In another DHS post in recent weeks, viewed by 20 million people on X, a vintage car sits on a beach in front of palm trees. Serene, serif text declares, “America After 100 Million Deportations.” The same day, the official White House X account posted a portrait of President Trump with a single word: “remigration.”

[Read: The wrath of Stephen Miller]

The notion of removing 100 million people from the United States is dramatic, to say the least. Deporting all undocumented immigrants would mean removing some 14 million people, according to one of the most recent estimates by the Pew Research Center, from 2023. Canceling all green cards would remove roughly 12 million more. Trump has voiced interest in revoking the citizenship of naturalized Americans and deporting them from the country—an additional 26 million people. But even adding all of those categories together gets only about halfway to the fantasy of 100 million deportations. The only way to reach that figure is to include tens of millions of native-born Americans.

On what basis would they be targeted? Proponents of remigration have taken aim at, for example, the Somali population in the United States, the majority of whom are citizens. Last month, Trump said of Somalis during a Cabinet meeting, “I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you,” adding that the U.S. will “go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” Last week, during immigration-enforcement actions in Minnesota—a large Somali-population center—the administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals, making noncitizen Somalis eligible for deportation. During his remarks today at the World Economic Forum, Trump attacked Somalis in Minnesota again. “We’re cracking down on more than $19 billion in fraud that was stolen by Somalian bandits. Can you believe the Somalians? They turned out to be higher IQ than we thought,” he said, adding, “They’re good pirates, but we shoot them out of the water just like we shoot the drug boats out.” Trump also made clear that he isn’t targeting just Somalis. “The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the West cannot mass import foreign cultures, which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own,” he said in his speech, parroting white-supremacist rhetoric about immigration from nonwhite countries.

Some may shrug off the figure of 100 million as an example of Trumpian exaggeration spilling into the ranks of the government’s social-media posters. Others see cause for great alarm. “It is a plan for ethnic cleansing,” Wendy Via, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an advocacy group, told me. “We can’t think of it as anything else. It just is a plan for ethnic cleansing.”

The Trump administration has said little publicly about the specific intentions behind these posts. I mentioned the Instagram post that included “We’ll have our home again” and the phrase’s association with German ethno-nationalism to Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, over email. McLaughlin responded that it’s “pretty milquetoast language about 20 million illegal aliens being removed/exiting the country.” I asked directly about remigration, but she didn’t get into its specifics or its history on the European far right. “There are plenty of policy debates to be had, making up stuff to be outraged about is schizophrenic,” McLaughlin told me. This appears to be an administration-wide response. When I asked the Department of Defense about its meme containing obvious fashwave references, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson replied in an email: “If you see pro-American content with references to the American Revolution and your brain somehow begins making connections to ‘fashwave’ or ‘neo-Nazism,’ then you may be schizophrenic or have severe Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The Department of Labor didn’t respond to a request for comment, and the White House declined to comment.

The posts’ invocation of language and imagery employed by historical and contemporary white supremacists could, in theory, be a series of unintentional coincidences. Yet the message emanates from the administration in other ways. Amid the memes and mug shots the DHS usually posts, Micah Bock, the deputy assistant secretary of strategic communications, occasionally appears in explainer videos to offer nationalist perspectives. In November, in a DHS video posted on X, he attempted to “dispel a lie” that “America is a nation of immigrants.” On Thanksgiving, Bock offered the standard “Thanks for the tireless work of the department under President Trump and Secretary Noem” but then told viewers that “there will be no second helpings for invaders.”

[Read: I watched 12 hours of Nick Fuentes]

Bock’s rhetoric is not as far-right-explicit as many of the DHS’s memes, but he makes similar points. Bock tells the viewer that Thanksgiving is “not a global potluck. It is a feast of specific people remembering specific mercies granted to them and their nation alone.” Bock doesn’t say which “specific people” should enjoy the exclusive privilege of eating a large bird and mashed potatoes in late November every year. But elsewhere in the video, he references early New England settlers who did not suffer harsh 17th-century winters so that “four centuries later, their descendants would hand the table to strangers who never gave thanks for the sacrifices that built it.” His rhetoric echoes something Vice President Vance said last summer in a speech: “America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” He added, “The people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.” This is the watered-down but fleshed-out version of the memes.

Taken together, the messages represent an effort to redefine what it means to be American so as to justify the expulsion of people who don’t fit that definition. This comes directly from an emerging concept on the right, sometimes referred to as “Heritage America,” or being a “Heritage American.” Not everyone on the nationalist right uses or likes this terminology. But they broadly agree with the principle: that America is not actually “a proposition” of equality and liberty, as Abraham Lincoln described it in the Gettysburg Address, but a specific place, with a specific culture, made up mostly of Anglo-Protestants who can trace their lineage in the U.S. back for generations. It posits a version of America that is based not on ideals, but on blood and soil.

Isabel Ruehl and Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting to this story.

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.

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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.)

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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!

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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.

A drawing that riffs on the latest news and happenings.