Minnesota Is in Revolt Against Tyranny
A first-person account of living through a movement whirlwind.
In the face of an invasion by thousands of ICE agents, the abduction of hundreds of neighbors, and the killing of Renee Nicole Good, Minnesotans have responded with an immense wave of protest, mutual support, and community defense organizing. A long list of groups, including an array of major unions, has joined the call for a mass strike on Friday, January 23, with participants pledging “no work, no school, no shopping — only community, conscience, and collective action.”
Last year, we wrote about the five key traits that characterize peak surges in social movements, or what we refer to as “moments of the whirlwind”: They are set off by trigger events that polarize the public. They draw in new participants from outside established organizational structures. They give rise to a rash of viral and decentralized action. They come in waves. And they leave behind an altered political terrain when they subside.
We have repeatedly argued that these moments are critical because they are vital in shaping political identities and mobilizing public opinion. During these whirlwinds, it often seems that the ordinary rules of social engagement are suspended and new possibilities instead come to the fore. We are seeing that now in Minneapolis.
In a widely circulated “Call to Action from Minnesota Organizers,” local leader Doran Schrantz writes: “I have learned as much or more about organizing in the past 10 days as I have learned in the past 10 years. I have learned that people will take great, great risks to defend themselves, their neighbors and one another. I have learned that our job as ‘architects’ is to build the larger containers for people to act and, when the moment calls for it, they absolutely will. I have learned so much about courage in the face of great fear, real threat and extreme uncertainty.”
Today, we are pleased to be able to share the following on-the-ground account from Minneapolis, written by our friend, the poet and activist Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs. Aaron describes the experience of living through this intense moment, the palpable fear and terror that Trump’s assault has created, but also the remarkable sense of community and solidarity that has emerged: “[A]ll of the organizations seem to be overwhelmed by the numbers of people wanting to volunteer,” he writes, “and I have heard and seen countless examples of everyday folks acting and speaking with love and moral clarity.”
We hope you enjoy this first-person report. For more, make sure to subscribe to Aaron’s substack here.
In solidarity,
Mark and Paul
Report from Minneapolis -- Friday, January 16th
“We have whistles, they have guns.”
by Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs
(published on Substack)
I’ve connected with a group here that is organizing volunteers around mutual aid/material support: buying and delivering groceries, rent support, giving people rides (in Palestine we would have called this “protective accompaniment”). They’ve been overwhelmed with volunteers, an explosion of support in just a few days, and I’ve joined the team that is reviewing applications and interviewing applicants. Although this slows down the expansion of our work, it’s a necessity, for reasons of safety. We have to be very clear about the environment in which we’re working. It’s a scary and sad reality we face, and we have to protect ourselves in the ways that we can. It’s unsettling, to say the least, to have to take into account that someone who approaches as a volunteer might in actual fact be someone with harmful intentions — but that’s the reality we’re living in.
In this process of getting connected and learning how to participate, I’ve been teaming up with a neighbor and fellow Zen student, who is also named Aaron. This is one of the big lessons — that there is safety in numbers, and our strength resides in building relationships founded on trust…
Today we’ve been co-working at a Somali cafe not far from my apartment. This morning I met someone who has been working to organize people who do their jobs remotely (like me) to work from establishments like this, in the most impacted neighborhoods — to be a presence, to pay attention, and be prepared to witness and document (to be a human rights/legal observer). This was the core of the work that we did with International Solidarity Movement, Community Peacemaker Teams, and others in Palestine in 2014 — witnessing, documenting, maintaining a visible presence.
Doing this work is so uplifting. In spite of everything, I’m surprised to find myself mostly feeling hopeful and inspired. In this regard, two big things in my mind and heart:
1) The outpouring of support, love, and courage here in the Twin Cities — all of the organizations seem to be overwhelmed by the numbers of people wanting to volunteer, and I have heard and seen countless examples of everyday folks acting and speaking with love and moral clarity. Not to mention the creativity and ingenuity of this culture of nonviolent resistance that has emerged here. To quote Becca Good (Renee Good’s wife): “We have whistles, they have guns.” Last night we hosted a sharing session at Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. The room was packed, with another two dozen joining online — and mostly new faces! In the midst of this war zone, I am surrounded by people like myself — unwilling to be frightened into submission, denial and despair, to turn away. Instead, we are becoming stronger. Our resolve is growing deeper, taking root. We are becoming empowered, learning how to make use of our privileges and resources to protect each other, to organize, to witness and document and communicate the reality of what is happening here, to resist and impede our government’s capacity to harm our communities.
2) I realized something important yesterday, as I was reading perspective from some of my favorite, trusted communicators (Rebecca Solnit, Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich) — as scary, dangerous, and harmful as this moment is, what the violence and lawlessness of this administration represents is not strength, but weakness. I see that it’s still true, what we were taught — strength in governance comes from our consent, our participation. And consent is founded on trust. We trust our leaders when we see that they are truthful, that they act in good faith to carry out the work that we have entrusted them with — that they are in fact what they have promised to be: public servants.
Realize: this administration, and the MAGA movement that empowers it, is smaller than we are, in every respect — in numbers, in vision, and in means. The vision of a world ruled by violence, designed to protect the interests of a few, is a small vision, with few resources and no foundation. It has no foundation in law, or in modern democratic norms and values, is unconstitutional and antithetical to the foundational principles of our country. It has no intellectual substance — its ideas and arguments are spurious, incoherent, dissonant in every way with its own professed values. It has no empathy, no capacity for awareness of the interdependent reality of human society, or the ecosystem of life on our planet. It has no science, no philosophy, no insight, no art, no poetry, no spirituality. While this makes it dangerous and harmful, it also reveals weakness, an essential and inevitable fragility. This is a terrible time we are navigating, but the vision that drives it has no real future. It is self-defeating and self-destructive.
Witness how the tide of public opinion is rapidly shifting, gathering momentum. Recent polling is striking. As of Jan. 12, polling by The Economist/YouGov reveals that more Americans now oppose ICE than support it. Only 34% now believe that ICE is making us more safe. 46% support abolishing ICE altogether, versus 43% who oppose abolition. While it is true that support for ICE is still far, far greater than it should be, in our modern political environment, the age of “alternative facts” and razor-thin margins in every election, these numbers are very significant, and trending — truth is trending, reality is trending.
73% of Americans oppose invading Greenland. 62% of Americans heard and believed Trump the many times he said he wants to take Venezuela’s oil, and a majority oppose it (a majority of us oppose U.S. military intervention in Venezuela in general, and rightly believe that such actions require Congressional approval). More Americans disapprove of the administration’s actions on every specific issued polled, and a majority believe that the country’s international standing has been damaged since Trump took office. More Americans than not view Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and JFK Jr. unfavorably. Americans’ biggest concerns are around the economy, inflation, jobs, and health care, and more believe the economy is getting worse. Americans oppose Trump’s tariffs.
Returning to ICE, the poll shows that more Americans view the killing of Renee Good as unjustified. More Americans believe that Minnesota’s state government should not have been excluded from the investigation. 73% of those polled believe that ICE agents should be required to be uniformed when making arrests, and a majority believe that they should not be allowed to wear masks. The poll asked people to rate their confidence in a variety of institutions. 49% registered the lowest possible confidence (“very little”) in ICE (second only to the news media, at 52%). Americans currently trust the CIA more than we trust ICE.
The ICE insurgency is a performance of strength, a desperate raising of the stakes by a ruling cabal that knows how tenuous its position is, and has only one tool in its toolbox. But it isn’t working. Instead, it is rapidly destroying the support and legitimacy that strong governance requires. More and more Americans are seeing this administration for what it is — lawless, reckless, amoral, selfish, cruel, and stupid — a complete and obvious betrayal of every principle and value of democracy, the U.S. Constitution, international law, and every value that MAGA culture has claimed for itself, not to mention promise after broken promise.
The mask has slipped, the curtain has blown open, revealing nothing more than a bully — a small, frightened creature frantically groping at all the levers and pulleys of the State — turning it into a clumsy, violent machine thundering blindly across the country and the rest of the world, capable only of chaos, violence, and insatiable greed — it destroys and it devours. It creates nothing.
But this machine is fueled by trust, by consent, by legitimacy — by us. And we are depriving it. And it will run out.
Please witness what is happening in Minnesota. Please connect with us, share and amplify our voices, all the photos and videos, the firsthand accounts, the reality of this moment — listen to the people who are here. Drown the Big Lie in the light of truth. In this regard, I’ve been thinking a lot about the U.S. Civil Rights movement — it’s one of my touchstones for understanding what is happening now, and how we need to respond. Remember how the Civil Rights movement created change — by withdrawing consent from injustice, enduring the violent reaction by the powers that be, in their effort to create submission — and holding that up for the whole world to see. By doing that, they deprived denial of its fuel, they made injustice impossible to ignore. So the whole country saw, and each person had to confront what was seen, in heart, mind, and conscience — and in seeing, in seeing the faces and voices of the real people who are being hurt, and seeing the agents of that violence in action, the reality of our situation confronts us, and forces us to choose.
In the midst of writing this, I heard the sound of whistles and car horns outside, close by — the sound of caring neighbors raising the alarm: Protect yourself, ICE is here, and also Come and witness, and document, and protect. This happens all over the city now, all the time. I wear my boots indoors now, all the time — it takes too long to put them on. I wear a whistle around my neck.
Even so, by the time we got outside, they were gone. I spoke with a pair of young women who had also come out of the cafe. They said they had some whistles they wanted to donate. I explained that the cafe’s owner had asked for some — their supply had run out a couple of days ago. The women told me they were headed to a high school in the neighborhood — the school day would be ending soon, and they were going to join the group that had organized to watch and protect the kids. I’ve been looking for a chance to get started with this, to learn how to help in this way.
And help is urgently needed because, on January 7, Border Patrol agents (it is not just ICE now) attacked the school at dismissal time, just a few hours after ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Renee Good.
Picture it. School is getting out. Kids are beginning to trickle outside. Suddenly, men in camo that says Border Patrol are here, jumping out of SUVs with assault rifles. Now people are yelling. A lot of people are outside now. Nobody knows why they are here, they’re not saying anything. There’s a lot of shouting but it doesn’t make any sense. You see them smash the window of a car. You see them pushing people, you see them tackle one of the teachers. Now there is tear gas in the air and its hard to see and you try to wipe your eyes but it makes it worse and snot’s all over your face — later on cbsnews.com you read that “a chemical irritant was deployed.” You see them put the teacher in a van and drive away. They shot and killed a woman earlier, over by Powderhorn Park, a lot of people were talking about it. Later you read Homeland Security saying they didn’t do anything wrong, they were chasing somebody and they didn’t target any kids or teachers but somebody assaulted them and people were throwing stuff. One of your friends shares a video on YouTube later — somebody threw a snowball at an agent, so he shoots tear gas at everybody. You read in the news where DHS says they did not use tear gas. They said they used “targeted crowd control” but they didn’t say what that meant. Then school was cancelled for the rest of the week, for the whole city, because that was they only thing they could do to try to keep us safe.
* * * * *
Driving to the school, I suddenly notice a change in the atmosphere — I see one, and then another, and then more police cars, parked here and there on the road. I habitually use GPS, and at the moment I don’t know the name of the street I’m on, or my direction of travel. Traffic is getting thick, and slow. I see a man standing in the street, a few feet out from the curb, holding up his camera, filming. I stop my car, roll down the window. “Hi, what’s happening?” I ask him. He pauses, looks me in the eye for a moment, starts to speak, then stops. He tries again: “This is where Renee Good was killed.” I nod, understanding. “Take care,” he says, and means it. In half a block, I am passing the site I have seen over and over on my computer screen, a memorial now, the street covered in flowers, messages of grief, images of Renee. A few people are there, standing quietly, one lights a votive candle.
I park my car a block from the school. Everything looks fine, the street feels calm. It almost feels normal. But I don’t feel normal — whenever I’m outside I’m on high alert now, head on a swivel. Looking at people, assessing people, trying to quickly figure out who they are, what they’re doing. Sometimes I think I see people looking at me this way. I see some people in reflective vests on the corner, and I think maybe that’s who I’m here to find, so I head that way. A huge, khaki-colored vehicle turns the corner and I feel a rush of adrenaline but it turns out just to be somebody’s truck — at least I think so, and I’m not exactly sure why. ICE and Border Patrol drive around the city in unmarked vehicles. There’s a growing database online with photos of known ICE vehicles and license plates.
I was right — the reflective vests are my people. I introduce myself and explain why I’m here, how I got here. Several other people are also new to this. I listen as they get organized. One petite young woman has a lead role today. It’s her first time. I listen and watch and wait, ready to be useful, glad to be here, wanting instructions. She gets on the phone and I hear talk of names and locations — one of the volunteers goes by “Thumper,” I hear a street name, something about a bakery. Nothing I recognize; I’m new to this part of town. Volunteers come and go, heading this way and that way, asking questions, giving information, pointing, explaining. Names and places. A journalist from Public Radio approaches, asks for an interview.
I spend the next hour on that corner, with a young father of two, and an older, awkwardly enthusiastic, childless guy with geeky hobbies (like me). It’s easy to connect with people in this environment, it happens fast. Driven by the urgency of our situation, it feels like people are more open, more aware; trust is established quickly — and accurately, it seems. It feels as though, maybe, deeper instincts have been engaged (engendering a new thought in the back of my mind — Could it always be like this? Without the danger, without the tragedy?).
It stays quiet. The time passes without incident, and now I’ve got to get back to my day job. I shake hands, say goodbye to new friends. I look each one in the eye, and each gives me the same in return — we see each other.
I have to close now, because I’m out of time. Managing time is never my strong suit, but in this moment the feeling of triage, of choices, is exponential. I have to get back to work — my normal work, my paid work. I am far behind schedule, and I see the weekend in front of me, like a frame, and the the things I need to do like pieces of a puzzle that looks impossibly too big to force inside it. But I feel ok about this. It could be that I’m not worried because I’m more aware right now — that I’m not just one person, alone, and isolated, tasked with figuring everything out, making all the right choices, always knowing what to do, and when to do it — today I feel myself taking part in something, a larger flow that is carrying me, and I trust it.
Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs is a Minneapolis-based poet, fiction writer, and activist. His recently launched Substack, Hat on a Hat, explores language and storytelling at the intersection of culture and politics.