In Minneapolis, the temperature is below zero and people are still in the streets because the government won’t stop shooting their neighbors. In the span of a few weeks, federal agents have killed Renee Good in her car and now Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, during an immigration operation, and the official story keeps changing faster than the body count. When a city has to learn two new names this quickly, something is wrong with more than “procedures.”So Minneapolis did something Washington almost never does: it stopped. Shops pulled down their gates, restaurants went dark, unions and faith leaders called a general strike, and tens of thousands of people used the only leverage they really have in a surveillance economy built on constant motion, they withheld their labor and their money. For one frozen day, Minnesota reminded ICE, and the president, that “law and order” still needs the consent of the people it’s allegedly protecting.If you’re watching from the outside, the temptation is to call this “polarized” or “complicated” and move on. But it’s actually simple: federal agents keep killing people in a city that has already buried George Floyd and lived through a militarized crackdown, and residents are saying “no more” in the only language power can’t easily mute... coordinated, economic disruption. The question isn’t whether Minneapolis is going too far; it’s why the rest of the country isn’t already there.
Jan 25, 2026
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1 min read