It has, however, been the epicentre of the most intense civil unrest in Trump’s second term.
As of this article’s writing, two civilians have been publicly executed by regime forces, while government spokespeople and Trump-friendly media have been feverishly defending the killings or at least trying to shift blame.
We’ve seen one general strike and growing resistance in the streets.
For non-American readers, Minneapolis might seem like a random city in the interior, unimportant compared to New York or Los Angeles. However, the reasons why Minneapolis has become the Bleeding Kansas of our time expose the fascist nature of Trumpism.
The state of Minnesota is an annoying place for the Republican Party. Bordering conservative Heartland states such as the Dakotas and situated near the Rust Belt, it is a Democratic stronghold. The last Republican presidential candidate to capture the state was Richard Nixon in 1972.
President Trump has been quoted in several reports saying that he believes he’s been robbed of the state’s electoral votes: “I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times…I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state—a corrupt voting state.”
Organised labour and openness are important Minnesota values. The state gave us interesting progressives like the late Paul Wellstone. Its musical legacy is revolutionary: Bob Dylan, Prince, Husker Du.
Minneapolis was the beginning of the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020, which contributed to Trump’s election loss. The state’s identity is no longer Nordic but Somali and Hmong. Native Americans are incredibly visible. Everything about its character is deeply offensive to the American herrenvolk.
Minneapolis’ liberal mayor, Jacob Frey, is Jewish, reinforcing the Great Replacement theory’s central myth that Jews are encouraging non-white immigration.
The insistence of conservatives to call Governor Tim Walz the r-slur is a targeted eugenicist attack on his son’s disability.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a part of the small socialist caucus in Congress, is a Somali Muslim, which irks the right to no end.
The state and the Twin Cities–Minneapolis and neighbouring St. Paul–have filed a lawsuit alleging that the federal invasion is retaliation for being out of line with the Trump regime’s far-right agenda.
Generally, the Twin Cities are viewed as a zone of liberal anti-Americanism that unfairly swings the state away from the Republicans. Rural areas of the state are mostly Republican-voting.
Cities, generally, are where the nation’s Jews live, forcing the rest of good Christian America to say “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.”
Rabbi Emma Kippley-Ogman of St. Paul was arrested during the anti-ICE general strike. The New York Times reported that Gregory Bovino, the chief Border Patrol field commander, “made derisive remarks about the faith of the US attorney in Minnesota, Daniel N. Rosen”, who “is an Orthodox Jew”, although according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, hardly a left-winger.
It is common online to see Republicans share the last presidential election map broken down by county, which appears to be a sea of Republican red with only pockets of Democratic blue.
The message is that Trump’s win was a landslide over small islands of liberalism.
Liberals scoff that these Republicans don’t understand population density–liberal New York City has 14 times the population of the entire state of conservative Wyoming. “Land doesn’t vote,” they’ll laugh.
The problem isn’t that Republicans think that land votes. They believe that it should.
These blue pockets aren’t truly America, the way sprawling suburban tracts, farms and small towns are. Cities are where you find immigrants, non-white people, religious minorities, secularism, deviant art, promiscuous sex, childlessness and gay people.
The cities don’t care about traditional gender roles, the centrality of the church, or the idea that America is, in fact, a racially and ethnically specific feature being undone by non-European immigration.
Conservative American identity, in a way, has always been rooted in one’s literal connection to land and in domination over it–whether it’s driving Natives out of their own homes, using slave labour on Southern plantations or segregating sprawling bedroom communities.
Those living in high-rises and row houses, running through chaotic urban spaces, are detached from the land and thus not really “American” in the way low-density, Republican-voting areas see it.
It sounds silly when Republican politician Newt Gingrich called people riding the subway–one of the most egalitarian spaces imaginable–“elitists”. But it successfully portrayed city life as foreign to Red America, where people are more interested in the hustle than in the dirt under their feet or truck tyres.
“Make America Great Again” adherents might avoid America’s biggest cities like the plague, convinced they are still the crime-ridden messes depicted in 1980s cinema. However, because we still share a nation, they hate the fact that these dense centres can supply enough votes to elect leaders who will protect immigrants, minorities, unions and LGBT people.
That a Muslim socialist like Zohran Mamdani can become the mayor of the nation’s largest city is too much to tolerate, even for populations a few time zones west.
The US Electoral College system for the presidential election is based on the notion that a popular vote would give densely populated cities disproportionate electoral influence. However, this lopsided system is insufficient for the right.
The mere existence of Minnesota, a blue state by virtue of its liberal urban heart, takes a Heartland state out of the right’s column. The Twin Cities must therefore be subdued.
Just look at how the killings of two citizens by a police force ostensibly dedicated to immigration enforcement have been celebrated by the right.
Their whiteness and lack of criminality didn’t save them from ridicule. Renée Good is mocked for being a lesbian mum, and her apparent deviation from traditional beauty standards means she is part of some kind of liberal cult.
By all accounts, Alex Pretti, a nurse who served veterans, had the milk of human kindness running through his veins by the quart. But that only worked against him. He was in a job historically done by women, and his dedication to immigrants meant he had to go.
Militarily, Minneapolis is an easy place for federal forces to impose martial law. It’s low and flat; they don’t have to worry about resistance forces on hilltops. Local police, whatever their mission, are outnumbered by Trump’s forces.
It’s unclear whether Trump could replicate this in New York City. His attempt to take over Los Angeles last year was met with fierce resistance, and his security operations there subsided.
This is no immigration sting, but an existential assault on what the far right believes is a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.
This is a ritual of violent national moral cleansing, one that MAGA Republicans and Evangelicals would like to see on a national scale.
Photograph courtesy of Fibonnaci Blue. Published under a Creative Commons licen
