A Shout-out to the Minnesota Resistance – Or, What Even Is Minnesota?

A-Shout-out-to-the-Minnesota-Resistance---Or,-What-Even-Is-Minnesota

By Mara Fridell, February 2026

I’ve just left Minneapolis and I am here, writing to explain Minnesota in case you’re interested. More, by doing that, I hope to illuminate why Canadians could express to Minnesotans (for example, Local 17, Minnesota’s hospitality union, or the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis) support and appreciation–even as an aspect of our support and care for imperially-besieged peoples around the world and survivors of colonialism at home. By recognizing the geography of inequality as well as economic and political inequality, and by recognizing that over the long feudal and imperialist capitalist centuries, democracy has only been started, we can reforge more effective democratic socialist solidarity reconnecting our anticolonialism (and maybe even our left-nationalism) with the grievous need for emancipation inside the imperial capitalist core.

Where other tributary populations can be described as capitalist or imperial sacrifice zones, deprived of support infrastructure, their agency devastatingly co-opted by the global oligarchy, Minnesotans have played a distinctive role. This role has a history. Along with Chicago, Minnesota has traditionally served as a connector between U.S. East Coast elites and their assets in the American West. There’s nothing Sonderweg about it: The history of Minnesota is indelibly stained by settler violence cultivated and compounded by a tyrannical state reaction to the 1862 indigenous Dakota effort to maintain their territory, their lifeworld.

It is also the case that Minnesota’s working-class has fought for, built up, and maintained key democratic capacities over the generations. Minnesota was the first Abolitionist state to enter the Civil War. Minnesota has built a thick democratic civil society, including by engaging commoning via rural cooperatives (Steven Keillor, Cooperative Commonwealth, 2000).[1] Minneapolis’ motley-crew communist and socialist-organized union strikes and general strikes between 1903 and 1934 served as the foundation for democratically-fruitful strikes across the US and Canada, and we owe our social-citizenship footholds to these democratic socialists.[2] Throughout their early 20th century democratic-socialist period, Minnesotans forwarded capacitating policies, inclusive of labor protections, public education, and red-green anti-racist programming and state-managed environmentalist commoning. The assassinated Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone embarked upon his career studying rural Minnesota social movement, learning about how the civic ethos and practice rearticulates with changed conditions.

Since the late 1960s, Minnesotans have served as a civically-organized, experimental vanguard for the US Democratic Party. This unique role was less of a democratic triumph than a top-down, Cold War co-optation of pre-existing Minnesota civic capacity and democratic infrastructure built by regionally-autonomous Abolitionist and socialist organizing and governance. This governance was commandeered in the mobilization of WWII, when socialists failed to measure the tenuousness of liberals’ antifascism, and Minnesota’s democratic political and civic infrastructure was used by liberal political entrepreneurs Humphrey-Mondale-Freeman to modernize (repel the slavers from) the national Democratic Party in the 1960s.[3]

As the U.S. transformed into a militarized imperial manufactory of financial excess, Minnesota found itself a primary target of the Right-wing ascendance. I have friends who carry trauma and anxiety inflicted by the Reagan administration siccing anti-union militias upon their parents, Hormel workers, and their hometown, Austin, Minnesota.

When in 2020 the police assassinated George Floyd and unleashed informants to wreak havoc on the city, Minneapolitans cohered a supportive form of security and restored their Abolitionist civil society. More remarkably, Minnesotans used that cohesion to get ambitious. Minnesota’s Democratic Farm-Labor Party and its civil society adherents successfully organized the first strategic liberal political coup executed in the US since the 1960s, the “Minnesota Miracle 2.0” of 2023-24. Designed to effectively defeat the long Cold War privilege of the Republican Party to set the legal and policy agenda on behalf of oligarchy, where the Democrat Party, as the liberal party in a two-party imperial political system, is consigned to the rear-guard role of rationalizing the right-wing law and policy introduced by the conservative (Republican) party, the 2023-24 Minnesota Miracle was distinguished by its solid, civil society-embedded preparation and strategic, unhesitating implementation in service of four pillars of pro-democratic reform:

  1. Progressive Policies: The DFL passed 20 weeks of paid medical and family leave and over $1 BN for affordable housing.
  2. Education & Tax: Secured free tuition at state colleges for low-income households and universal free breakfast/lunch for students.
  3. Environment & Energy: Enacted a standard to transition Minnesota to 100% clean energy by 2040.
  4. Social & Infrastructure: Legalized recreational marijuana, made significant investments in infrastructure, and passed Reproductive Freedom Codification

In an early-summer 2025 step toward the retributive siege on Minnesota to come, a far-right servant assassinated key strategists of the Minnesota Miracle political coup. Having researched the Minnesota Miracle strategists, disguised an SUV as a police car, and assumed tactical gear and a disguise, underemployed evangelist Vance Boelter assassinated State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and wounded other democratic strategists. The servant Boelter was schooled for thirty years, from St. Cloud, Minnesota to Texas, in the far-right evangelical and military “spiritual war” organized and proselytized by Gordon Lindsay’s Christ for the Nations Institute and the Pentacostal Assemblies of God, along with the US military brass conducting 21st century wars upon Iraqis and Afghans. The assassinator Vance Boelter’s Texas cohort includes a head organizer, Dutch Sheets, of the January 6, 2021 treason.

The pain and illegitimacy of the subsequent federal militia invasion of Minnesota is visceral, and for many, it could not be stomached. “This city (Minneapolis) is literally being slaughtered for political sport,” the Guardian quotes a solidaristic citizen on an online back page in its Sunday edition. Trump high servant Kristy Noem’s Department of Homeland Security ICE militia brutalized, disappeared, and killed Minnesota’s residents. ICE savagely killed Minnesota defenders, mom Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti, adding them to the wall of police extrajudicial slayings of Black citizens including George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Philando Castile, and many others. As not only immigrants but Indigenous people as well were targeted by ICE, AIM rebooted with solidaristic Many Shields patrols, backed by protestors famously insisting that “No one is illegal on stolen land.” Minnesota’s enormous, supportive, multi-pronged civic strategy of defense prevailed. Unions brought the ICE warning whistle tactic. United Church pastors sang in defiance, counseled, and sheltered immigrants while caring for disabled trans refugees from the South. Film makers and professors trailed and monitored ICE. Youth led marches through the streets, and middle-aged women carried signs. Organizations including unions and the United Church distributed supplies to immigrants sheltering at home, picked up people the DHS dumped into the snow and picked up people DHS hijacked to the South. The Minnesota Attorney General launched lawsuit after lawsuit at the Trump regime. The bedfellows were odd, united, and that was effective. Only the transnational far right could try to deny that Minnesotans were disciplined and determined in demanding “ICE OUT.”

The Trump regime offered that in exchange for reducing brutal ICE thuggery, Minnesota political leaders would let the Republicans’ Antienlightenment lawyers run roughshod over Minnesota. While enjoining fellow Republicans to end democracy in Democratic Party-majority states, the Trump regime proposed that the ruling conservative coalition might reduce the neo-Confederate militia and replace them with a far-right Antienlightenment legal occupation of Minnesota and other states. Yet beyond the mortal threats to politicians’ lives and families, there was little incentive, and little imaginative possibility of attempting to negotiate with the Trump regime. A roll-back has been announced by the feds, but phalanxes of black SUVs continue to roll out of the Whipple black site in the morning, returning in the evening rush hour.

Minnesota has taken a hard hit admirably, but the plutocracy has likely cut down Minnesota as a model of democratic policy gains for the near future. With an upcoming governor’s election in fall 2026, Tim Walz is stepping out of the political arena, having taken quite a lot of attack (and possibly fearing for his life). Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor, Peggy Flanagan (White Earth Ojibwe) is running for Senate. While Republicans are, by their own account, no longer able to run for the governorship in Minnesota (thanks to Republicans’ ICE militia invasion of the state), gears are in motion to install conservative Dem Amy Klobuchar in the governorship. This would effect a traditionally professional political suppression of democratic civil society and a restoration of right-wing, imperial control over the state of Minnesota.

Historically, the only way that national coups like the Trump Republican-led anti-democratic coup can be effective is if they have the support of the military and other branches of enforcement. The Trump-Republican anti-democratic coup has enjoined the demonstrated cooperation of a sufficient, controlling faction of the United States’ legal community, the judiciary, the police, and the military. Law has been enforced egregiously unevenly, such as where immigrants and their citizen defenders are disappeared to the Whipple black site,[4] but when judges have ruled directing federal prosecutors to release prisoners, the lawyers have been blankly unable to enforce the legal ruling. Liberals still scurry about, proclaiming this can all be rationalized with legal code and professional credentialling. Yet the glaring ruling order of the increasingly-isolated US’s remnant UK-Israel-Canada-Australia coalition is the translucent thinness or absence of rule of law. This is what the Trump regime has been working so hard to instruct us all: There is no rule of law on a planet with billionaires secured by previous law, military, and oil. This is the degrading “civilization” of yes-men hierarchies, carceralism, and top-down depravity.

To my knowledge no US law and order institutions are reining in the Christ for the Nations Institute or the Pentacostal Assemblies of God.[5] On the contrary, we know that oligarchs and military elites fund and train murderous, antidemocratic, fundamentalist insanity from Indonesia to Brazil to Texas. Right now we’re all trying to get our heads around how toxically batshit the ruling oligarchs themselves are. It is very apparent that humans cannot handle extreme inequality. They plainly go berserk. Patriarchal, imperial capitalist inequality is a mirrored, claustrophobic echo chamber, with bombs and guns going off all the time. It is radically disconnecting elites and degrading humans and life on Earth.

The publicly-funded far-right militia siege unleashed by the federal government upon Minnesotans beginning in December 2025 is best understood as part of an international plutocratic assault on democracy. The means and motivation for this international de-democratization operation extends from London’s mid-1950s deregulation of finance as well as from the transatlantic carte blanche bestowed upon Israel, attested in the Epstein files and realized in the genocide of Palestinians. In this hydra-headed international class warfare, the Palestinian population was nearly annihilated after decades of being abused as a market test for anti-democratic warfare technology and techniques.

Minnesota’s 2023-23 strategic, democratic legislative “Miracle” and its thick, democratic civil society’s significant rejection of the Nightwatchman state since 2020 has been successful, and as such it has been met with the classic American pincer formation reaction involving traditional conservative de-democratization executors and liberal party conservative-law rationalizers. Minnesotans are nonetheless keeping human—even as that success brings down the imperial capitalist hammer. After a century of conservative organization, the criminalization of democratic socialists in the US and world-wide, and with as-yet insufficient international and cross-national democratic collaboration, Minnesotans are currently more or less on their own.

Is most of the US then nothing more than megachurches full of oligarchs’ homicidal, maddened, Pentacostalist butlers, and gaudy, gilded ballrooms choked with Federalist Society lawyers? Is the US little more than a repeatedly-raped “incubator” for billionaires? Historian Adam Tooze indicates it’s time to give up on this decrepit circus, these monkeys, and get learning Mandarin. It’s not a bad idea. Perhaps also we can look up, re-learn to strategize and work as internationally, as collaboratively as elites do, striving again to protect the global working class’ organizers, democratic socialists, from the grotesque Antienlightenment that oil reanimated.

That Antienlightenment works on the US and it does not know borders. Following in Kissinger’s governance playbook–attack the sovereignty of most smaller states–the imperial US is concurrently directing war upon Venezuelans, Cubans, and others. Democratic protections for the domestic U.S. population have also been removed by the Trump regime, as where Louisiana is slated to be reduced to an oil-consuming pollution sink fueling an otherwise stagnating AI industry, and as where Minnesota’s Boundary Waters lakes and forests are being gifted to a Chilean mining company. Across the border in Canada mid-February, a Winnipeg politician Evan Duncan disparaged Minneapolitans as an irrational rabble causing chaos, and with the backing of local moguls and B’naith B’rith, Councillor Duncan and Mayor Scott Gillingham moved to immediately and permanent outlaw protest across Winnipeg, following the Israeli model enacted in 2020 in preparation for the Palestinian genocide.

Resistance reemerges across borders. Helping us understand how the militarized surveillance, policing, and annihilation of democratic socialists has crippled humanity and plunged Earth into life-systems failures, William Carroll, JP Sapinski, Vincent Bevins (The Jakarta Method, 2020), Greg Grandin (America, America, 2025), Samuel Moyn (Liberalism against Itself, 2023), Katharina Pistor (The Code of Capital, 2019), Thomas Piketty (Capital and Ideology, 2019), Melinda Cooper (Counterrevolution, 2024), Kevin Kruse (One Nation under God, 2015), Naomi Murakawa (The First Civil Right, 2014), Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, and Domenico Losurdo, among others have worked hard at contextualized, comparative research. Launched by the Minnesota “rebel loon”, the popular rise of the “rebel starbird” insignia signals that, to stave off the brutal militarized and clandestine attacks commissioned by 3,000 billionaire families, democrats across the U.S. and even the world seek working-class organization and a real collab.

The time we have been given together can be very hard, and capitalist exploitation and expropriation, along with state terror, abound. Yet the lines are not so blurry as we have been professionally, romantically, and quite-interestedly misled to believe throughout this long, demented Cold War.[6] There are no longer doubts: The Epstein-Maxwell class cannot lead. Macro change requires our collective human agency, even if we must act bravely into the barriers, lags, and twists of agency institutionalization, externally-driven change, random change, and inherent, dialectical change. I encourage you when you connect your democratic socialist aspirations for your Canadian community strategically with democratic socialists across borders, with developmental life on Earth, across metropoles and tributaries.

Minnesota democratic civil society organizations to support (financially, or with a letter of appreciation) include:

[1] To delve into research on commoning, see the pathbreaking work of historian Peter Linebaugh, as summarized on The Dig podcast, as well as the inspired work of Silvia Federici. In Canada, Jonah Olsen is a rising authority on commoning, and Thomas Marois has distinguished himself internationally, inter alia, by illuminating public banks’ capacity to check capital-strikes, to allow green and just transition.

[2] More repressively, the lessons Minneapolis oligarchs learned from Minnesota’s working class (Milikan, 2003, A Union against Unions) were taught to Winnipeg’s capitalists and lawyers (Kramer & Mitchell, 2010, When the State Trembled).

[3] See Jennifer Delton’s DNC-sympathetic account of this history, Making Minnesota Liberal, 2002.

[4] The Whipple Building at Fort Snelling used to be a multi-functional community resource and home of the US Fish and Wildlife Department. A brutalist building, it was taken over by the DHS in 2014 and converted into a black site in recent years. It sits on land formerly used as a 1862 concentration camp imprisoning Dakota and Ho-Chunk people. It is named after Bishop Henry Whipple, an 1800s advocate for Native American rights.

[5] But they have adjusted over time. Christ for the Nations organizing was conducted in an anti-Jewish “British Israelism” register up through WWII, but the ministry abandoned that form of “civilizations” warfare over the course of the Cold War.

[6] That’s right. I just gave another nod to Gabriel Rockhill right there.

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