A New American Development

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, February 09, 2026

 

MINNEAPOLIS—Uff da! Minneapolis has seen better days.

 

If you were going by the hallucinogenic Fox News/talk radio/your weird uncle who is on Facebook way too much/X/GOP press release/ipso-facto-nutso/parallel universe view of the world that informs so much of the right-wing side of the American political conversation, then you’d think that Minneapolis, the “City of Flour and Sawdust,” was pretty much exclusively run by some kind of al-Shabaab-adjacent Somali mafia, that it was all halal butchers and mosques and the muezzin’s call of Ashhadu an la ilaha illa Allah! ringing out incongruously over the frozen urban Wonder Bread tundra. But turns out, it’s a lot of familiar American slop: chain strip clubs and drag-show cabarets and ersatz retro diners, faux Irish pubs that fill up promptly at 5:03 p.m. on weekdays with broad-bottomed government workers in stretchy slacks knocking down a couple of vodka-and-Sprites after a long day’s bureaucratting, the now-ubiquitous sickly stench of marijuana smoke on the streets, and just scads and scads of downscale white people, both the expensively educated kind (“Try dunking some of that gluten-free chai cookie into this depth charge!” is a literal thing I heard from a young woman at the May Day Café recounting her internship in ceramics, and, by God, she really did say “gluten-free”) and the genuine lumpenproletarian cigarette-smokers, including these two pockmarked, runty Midwestern specimens in a crappy green Subaru who pulled up alongside me as I was walking down Lake Street inquiring with as much modest menace as they could muster about my “credentials.” Their faces were largely obscured by over-the-nose black masks (just like the insidious agents of you-know-who!) and big black sunglasses, but they were unmistakably pallid, dead-guy white and just trying real hard to sound like tough guys. They weren’t sharing their names, of course, but I immediately nicknamed them Elwood (the thinner one, at the wheel) and Jake (who had had a few more Twinkies in him and did the talking) inasmuch as they looked like a couple of antifa dorks trying to launch a Blues Brothers tribute act.

 

Credentials, they said.

 

The half-assed surveillance started a few blocks back, around 34^th and Cedar, in a stretch of south Minneapolis that has the look and feel and smell of one of those mid-gentrification Brooklyn corridors a decade ago, where I was walking around looking for roadblocks—because of course there were roadblocks, since you cannot be a bunch of social-media Jacobins cosplaying the French Revolution without a Comité de salut public demanding that people produce their papers in order to protect the neighborhood from some different guys demanding that people produce their papers. Some of the roadblocks were more involved affairs—piles of wooden pallets and bonfires—but the one I encountered was just four middle-aged Dolores Umbridge types standing in the middle of an intersection where there was no automobile traffic to be observed and no pedestrian traffic other than your favorite correspondent, easily identified as a member of the press by … the patch on his bright yellow cap with two-inch letters spelling out the word “PRESS.”

 

As I approached, one of the women nervously asked another: “Is this … person … with you?” I nodded hello, pointed to my cap, and kept walking in hopes of finding a more interesting-seeming roadblock crew to interrogate, but I had apparently raised some suspicions among the Ladies Who Loiter. Once I was about a block away, two of them began to follow me, trying to be discreet about it, which was cute and kind of hilarious since they were skulking around in blaze-orange safety vests and probably could have been easily spotted from the 57^th floor of the IDS Center, 3 miles away.

 

I turned down the commercial corridor of Lake Street and started making my way to the scene of the death of Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse at the local Veterans Affairs hospital and ICE protester who was shot in the back and then shot all over by jumped-up federals in what sure as hell looked to me like straight-up murder. It was a bit of a walk, but the sun was out and the air was fine and it seemed like it might be a very good day for protests, roadblocks, or some kind of high-spirited civil disobedience that would make the trip to Minneapolis worth it.

 

And then Jake and Elwood rolled up in their Subaru.

 

They said I had been “reported”—the language invariably takes an East German turn in these encounters—as “suspicious.” As it turns out—and as I explained to Jake and Elwood—I am a very suspicious-looking man. (I just am. Always have been. I once got stopped after being “reported” as “suspicious” for going on a walk down the street on which I lived—it was apparently my cowboy hat that brought me to the attention of the police, which might have been understandable if I weren’t talking about the Dallas police, who have surely seen a Stetson or two.)

 

Jake and Elwood wanted to know what outlet I was associated with. I told them The Dispatch, of course, but that, if they were curious, they could also see my stuff in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or the Washington Post—even The Atlantic if they didn’t blink!—all of which seemed to confuse them. I told them to Google me or look it up on Wikipedia or whatever and that I wasn’t the Kevin Williamson who wrote The Vampire Diaries and Dawson’s Creek, because if that were the case then I’d be sunning myself by the pool at my Palm Springs mansion instead of scooting around in the shin-deep dirty snow in South Minneapolis, advice that only seemed to deepen whatever kind of pig-eyed stupor had a grip on them.

 

“Are you on the Signal chat?”

 

Uff da.

 

“No, I am not on the Signal chat.”

 

“Do you use Signal?”

 

“No. I have been known to use a typewriter.”

 

“We need to get you credentialed.”

 

“No, you don’t. One of the things I like about my job is that I don’t have to ask anybody’s permission to do it. I’d love to interview you for my piece, though.”

 

“We don’t want to talk.” This was not true, of course; they wanted to do nothing but talk. They were the chattiest guys I’d met all day. You could just about see, even through the mask, the struggle not to address me as “bro.”

 

They were furiously tap-tap-tapping away on their phones and speaking to somebody back at Dips—t Central.

 

“The Dispatch, he says.”

 

I hate internet kids. (In fairness, these guys are not The Dispatch’s target demo.)

 

Some parts of Minneapolis feel pretty rough, but it isn’t a warzone, either, and I’ve had a far better class of asshole try to interfere with my work in the past, and Jake and Elwood weren’t going to do anything past annoying me. And so off I went. Like the Ladies Who Loiter, they made an effort to follow me stealthily, which is hard to do in a green Subaru dressed like the Blues Brothers dressed like cartoon anarchists. And you don’t exactly have to be James Bond to see that you are being followed when you’re going down a commercial avenue lined by largely darkened glass storefronts (the economy here is hurting), which act like mirrors on both sides of the street. And if you aren’t very familiar with the streets of South Minneapolis, there isn’t a lot going on there most of the time, and it is really, really hard to sneak around with nothing and no one to hide behind.

 

But they kept at it for miles. I stopped to wave to them just as we were approaching the corner of 26^th and Nicollet, which is the place where it happened.

 

***

 

“ANY RIGHTEOUS PERSON WOULD HAVE DONE THE SAME.”

 

So reads the banner over the spot near 26^th and Nicollet where Alex Pretti was shot in the back by agents of his government. Like the nearby site where Renee Good was shot in her car by agents of that same government, that 50-odd feet of sidewalk has become a place of pilgrimage. There are a few more of those wannabe goons in oversized sunglasses with hoods pulled up over their faces—the irony of how much they resemble ICE agents must be entirely lost on them—and the local police are there but seem intent on keeping a respectful distance. Volunteers manage the traffic, and the overall feeling of the scene is one of profound sadness rather than one of anger. A lot of these people are semi-pro marchers in marches and wavers of besloganed placards, and some of them seem to really enjoy it at times, but it is not a lot of fun and games and gluten-free chai cookies when your neighbors are getting killed.

 

Unless you are old enough to remember the death of Princess Diana, you may not know that there was a time—and it was not that long ago—when the kinds of impromptu public shrines to the recently and tragically deceased, so common now, were not generally seen in the Western world. After Diana died in that awful car wreck, the park in front of Kensington Palace was incredibly transformed, entirely covered with thousands upon thousands of bouquets, not one layer but layers and layers of them, with notes and pictures and candles and the like. It was unlike anything modern London had seen. As the journalist Peter Watts observed two decades later:

 

One thing that stood out—above the general public insanity and my own utter bewilderment at how people were responding—was the strange, seditious, slightly exciting undercurrent to it all.

 

A shrine is a very public way of responding to private grief, and they are almost always political in some way in the sense that [they] are the public’s way of drawing attention to somebody who they feel was otherwise neglected by authority. Shrines are often about the way a violent or unpredictable [death] provokes a proletariat response that has rebellious, anti-establishment bent. Shrines are rarely sanctioned, they are impromptu and organic. This shrine felt as close to a revolutionary act as anything that had happened in London since the Poll Tax Riot, and it was far more wideset, an angry reaction to what was perceived as the cold, heartless behaviour of the establishment. It also felt very un-London like, as this city isn’t usually so ostentatious in its response to tragedy or crisis. It unleashed a national trait for emotional drama that has never fully gone away and I’ve still to completely understand.

 

Considering that Diana had been married to a future head of the Church of England, the display was strangely and decidedly Catholic, as no less a figure than the Archbishop of Westminster observed, with its prayers for the dead and popular veneration of the admittedly not-sainted and not-quite-saintly Diana. If the building of Diana’s shrine struck English observers as “close to a revolutionary act,” the shrines in Minneapolis are more like temporary cenotaphs. They do not announce the beginning of a fight—they acknowledge the dead in medias res.

 

Flowers and items are left at a memorial for Alex Pretti on February 6, 2026, in Minneapolis. (Photo by Jerome Gilles/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

 Pretti’s shrine may be somewhat lacking in the Christian spirit: Surrounding graffiti reads not only “F—K ICE,” a sentiment that can be read on practically every wall in Minneapolis, but also “KILL ICE” and such. (A somewhat more humorous posted placard reads, “ICE AGENTS: We beg of you—please stop crashing Grindr,” the gay hook-up app.) But it is a scene of demonstrative emotionality on a practically Pentecostal level, with many tears and what looked for all the world like genuine grieving by people who never knew the man and who had no connection to him beyond the ordinary ties of civic life. There are messages, posters, T-shirts, curios, knick-knacks, memorabilia, slogan-festooned placards—everything short of a literal altar. The come-and-go crowd numbers around 40 or 50 at any given time over the course of an hour, and, like most of the protest movement I observed, involved almost exclusively white people, the exception at the Pretti scene being two black women in fluorescent green safety gear directing traffic.

 

(If you want to see Somali immigrants, try the Karmel Mall, where they are working at the businesses they have started, i.e., doing pretty much the same thing your average anti-immigration activist’s Italian or Irish or Armenian ancestors did two or three generations back. They’re busy. White people who smoke a lot of weed, in contrast, tend to have a good deal of time on their hands.)

 

White people in North Face jackets out there looking for meaning—easy to mock, but I cannot say they are insincere. And who can blame them for being a little bit freaked out? This isn’t George Floyd—they’re shooting white people this time around.

 

A police car sits quietly at the end of the block, with another parked somewhat more discreetly two blocks away in the other direction. The mourners mill about and gape and gawk and leave trinkets behind and take selfies, but there wasn’t so much as a “hey-ho” chant attempted, no prayers and no hymns. Just cold, bleak, awkwardly socializing grief in front of something calling itself the New American Development Center, which, according to its website, seeks “to build a strong and vibrant African Immigrant community through sustainable community and economic development programs by leveraging resources and addressing cultural needs.” Business development among immigrant communities is far from a new American development—it is one of the oldest and finest American traditions.

 

But there is something afoot here that is, to be sure, a new American development.

 

The public grief and outrage are familiar enough from the George Floyd era, but Minneapolitans’ response to the Trump administration’s histrionic thuggery—and the shocking deaths, at the very least somewhere in the general moral neighborhood of willful murder, of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—is different: more organized, more disciplined, and, in spite of the silly attempts at low-level Jacobin menace, more sophisticated. “I support what they are doing,” one restaurant worker told me, saying that he had helped to organize rides to and from work for staff afraid to take public transit, not because they are illegals but simply because they are brown-skinned and Spanish-speaking. “But I also was the guy who put the plywood up on our windows the last time,” referring to the George Floyd riots.

 

There is no plywood up this time, because—and here I will try to avoid giving a hostage to fate by adding the words “at least so far”—there is no riot. And that is a damned good thing, because Minneapolis cannot afford another riot. The civil breakdown of 2020 left low-income sections of the city devastated, and many have not recovered; even the better-off parts of the city are not exactly thriving. Minneapolis feels wounded and sick. The talk-radio guys will denounce it (enviously) as Alinskyite, but the anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis were very effective in making this episode about Gregory Bovino and his dopey Erwin Rommel coat, about ICE and the Border Patrol, about Kristi Noem’s mall-commando Barbie fantasies, and about Donald Trump.

 

Smoke billows from a fire at a Wells Fargo in Minneapolis in May 2020. (Photo by Renee Jones Schneider/Star Tribune via Getty Images)

Some local institutions—notably the Minneapolis-based Target Corporation, one of a half-dozen or so corporate giants HQ’d in the Minneapolis area—have been caught in the crossfire, with protesters rallying at their offices demanding that they hitch their businesses to the cause. But the protesters largely succeeded in keeping the focus on Washington and on the reliably indefensible actions of the Trump administration, which, it bears repeating, decided to make a political example of Minneapolis by responding to a welfare-fraud scandal carried out by U.S. citizens and legal immigrants in a city far from the border with thousands of agents from ICE and the Border Patrol who were not trained for urban policing. Minnesota has only a modest population of illegal aliens, but it does have a prominent population of black people with Muslim names concentrated in its major metro. The ICE deployment was meant to be provocative, and it provoked—protests, often ugly and stupid, but no riot so far. Reasonably effective message discipline and a smidgen of tactical sophistication gave the black-masked street-theater Left something it has not enjoyed in a good long while: a real political win.

 

That victory is no comfort to the dead or the grieving, of course, but it does speak to a change in momentum. Donald Trump, with the full force of the federal government at his disposal, went to war against Minneapolis—and he lost. The city may be economically hobbled and politically paralyzed, but Minneapolis will see off the ICE surge having stood its ground and making the White House blink. It may turn out to be a pyrrhic victory, but the counter-surge forces won. ICE is not going to walk off the field, but it does seem to be shifting its focus from kicking down doors to waiting for incarcerated illegals to be discharged from jails and picking them up at that point, or, in at least one case, waiting for suspects charged with a serious crime to show up for a court hearing.

 

It is difficult to figure out what to make of the politics of that. Trump and his movement are not in any meaningful sense conservative, but they managed to take over the supposedly conservative Republican Party and use it as a platform to launch a right-wing revolutionary movement that has inflamed and emboldened a pre-existing left-wing revolutionary tendency that dates back to the 1960s. And so Ronald Reagan-style conservatives and George McGovern-style liberals now have something in common: Both camps are watching, more or less powerless, from the sidelines.

 

***

 

“It’s a dirty word in MAGA world, but what I am is a Bush Republican.” There are Bush Republicans and then there is Ben Whitney, a longtime big deal in Minnesota and national GOP circles, scion of a famous old aristocratic American family (Eli Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, et al.) whose father, Wheelock Whitney, was a classmate of George H.W. Bush’s at Andover and Yale and at one point a part-owner and president of the Minnesota Vikings. Ben Whitney raised money and ran campaigns for the likes of Norm Coleman and was an important advocate of George W. Bush’s cause in the 2000 election. He did not deliver Minnesota to the Republicans, but he was asked to serve as ambassador to Norway in Bush’s second term, a job he very much enjoyed.

 

Now in his late 60s, Whitney is semi-retired from politics and has taken up training as a luthier, a builder of classical guitars. He showed me a photo of the rosette he is working on, and it looked pretty good. “I’m a dilettante,” he said. “But it has been a great life, because I have got to do so many different things.”

 

He did not sign up with the Republican Party because he wanted to be part of a revolutionary vanguard. He thought taxes were probably too high and that the government should be more responsible when it comes to spending money. You know: a Republican, as they once were. And, sure, you can mock a rich guy with a fancy surname for being disdainful of populist fervor, but that doesn’t make him wrong about it.

 

Whitney has lost much of his desire to talk about politics, but he is not without political opinions. He explained that what outsiders do not understand about Minneapolis is that Jacob Frey, the profane and emotionally incontinent (“Get the f—k out of our city!”) mayor Americans across the fruited plains have been seeing on their screens, represents the saner pole of local politics. “He is the adult in the room,” Whitney said, and he is right, incredible though the fact may be. The only non-Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party member on the 13-member city council is an independent socialist, and three of the DFL members are also affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America. There has been a lot of hyperbolic and conspiratorial talk about “paid protesters” and “outside agitators” (an agitator is a protester of whom you do not approve), though there is little or no evidence that the money and organization at work are in character much different from what one might have seen at Tea Party rallies a generation ago or at a TPUSA event today. Of course there is money from progressive groups and coordination with them—that makes it modern politics, not a conspiracy. There is nothing hidden about the kookiness of Minneapolis politics—it is all right out there in plain view.

 

“I know about this a little bit because of my work with nonprofits,” Whitney explained. “I work a lot in inner-city education. That’s really my passion. We have a lot of big foundations here, and, particularly after George Floyd, many of them stopped funding education and things like that and started funding these very local groups. The idea was, ‘We need to get the money to the people and let the people make the decisions about what to do with the money.’ And that led to the creation of a lot of small, and in many cases radical, nonprofits. That is part of the constellation of what is going on with the demonstrations, and adding fuel to the fire. But this already was a fertile place, and together with that, you have the rise of the Democratic Socialists in urban areas. And you have the unadulterated hatred of Donald Trump, which motivates a lot of people. You end up with a pretty combustible thing.”

 

A combustible thing to which the president of these United States applied a whole book of matches. Sanctuary cities are a natural consequence of the American constitutional order, a system of federalism under which the federal government has no power to commandeer state or local governments, which are free to set policies of their own and to decline to assist the federal government in carrying out its goals. They are even free, within certain legal limits, to actively resist such measures. That system is designed to produce negotiation and compromise, but the Trump administration is not interested in compromise and is utterly incompetent at negotiation, and so it responded instead with a small army of masked gun-thugs hyped up on martial rhetoric—with precisely the results that any sane person would have predicted: dead Americans.

 

Whitney is obviously irritated by the stupidity and dishonesty of it all. “Trump overplayed his hand so much that he is threatening his political standing in general because of this,” he said. “And I think it is very dangerous. And then you have the secretary of Homeland Security get up and just sort of make stuff up. As if people are not going to see. She says he was brandishing a gun, that he is a domestic terrorist, and people are going, ‘Now, come on.’” (For the record, I never heard one of the protesters say, “Now, come on.”)

 

“People expect a certain amount of exaggeration from politicians,” Whitney continued, “but not just absolute fabrication about that which they can see. Not when there are a thousand video cameras on you all the time.” About Kristi Noem: “I’m surprised she has a job. Instead of fabricating, they could have just said, ‘The reason we need cooperation is that it’s just a lot safer for everybody to go into the jails and do the transfer there rather than being out there grabbing people off the street—safer and better. Now, why couldn’t Kristi Noem say that? I don’t understand.”

 

(I am willing to entertain the possibility that the answer to his question is that Kristi Noem is dumber than nine chickens.)

 

Whitney is the kind of Republican who worries more about issues like his city’s high commercial vacancy rate than whether a secret globalist pedophile cabal is scheming to deprive our children of whole milk. Minneapolis is very proud of something called the Skyway System, which consists of about 10 miles of climate-controlled, glassed-in pedestrian bridges and indoor corridors that connect about 150 downtown buildings and keep visitors, shoppers, and office lunch-break-takers out of the bitter cold and dirty snow. “Downtown lives on the second floor,” Whitney said, but about half, maybe more, of the retail spaces connected to the Skyway are vacant. The economy wasn’t great before ICE showed up, but the crackdown and the resistance to it have pummeled the local economy, with the city, according to one estimate, suffering some $20 million a week in lost business.

 

“I don’t know if it was the president or Stephen Miller or someone got up and said, ‘Let’s make an example out of these people.’ And they did,” Whitney said. “And, obviously, it’s been a disaster. You have the activist base combined with the untrained ICE people, who obviously have no idea what they’re doing around protests and crowd control. They’re not police. It appeared they were here to escalate. And they escalated.”

 

The Skyway in downtown Minneapolis in 1996. (Photo by Joey McLeister/Star Tribune via Getty Images)

Minnesota politics is a model of American politics at large: The dense urban core of Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) is increasingly left-wing, dominated by socialist-leaning economic thinking as well as by the various boutique radicalisms that come and go in the progressive world, changing at about the same speed as fashion and for the same reason. The exurban and rural areas are increasingly in thrall to the right-wing populism of the moment, and Donald Trump has been the galvanizing force on both sides of the political divide. Whitney worries about further polarization and the possibility of more widespread political violence, especially with the Justice Department very strongly signaling that there will be no real investigation or accountability in the Minneapolis shootings. “People do lose faith in the system, that it will deliver some sort of fair—seemingly fair, remotely fair—administration of due process and justice. People say there’s no rules anymore.”

 

But Whitney ultimately takes a long view. “I have a lot of liberal friends who like to talk to me about this,” he said, even though he is generally disinclined to talk much about politics at all. “They feel that I am the lone conservative they can talk to. And I tell them that this, too, will pass.”

 

I hope he is right about that. But I am not entirely sure he is.

 

***

 

“It has all been just incredibly unfair,” said Evan Ramstad, a former Wall Street Journal guy now covering business and economics as a Star Tribune columnist. Sitting with me at a coffee shop on the Skyway, he described an “economic bomb” that has hit the largely Latino-owned businesses along Lake Street, and having just walked down Lake with Jake and Elwood cruising imbecilically behind me, it is hard to argue with that judgment. The greater MSP area is home to a handful of major national and global businesses—Cargill, the country’s largest privately held company, the aforementioned Target, U.S. Bancorp, Xcel Energy, Ameriprise Financial, etc.—but practically the only national business you see in the grittier bits of the south side is McDonald’s, which seems to have franchises planted at about 12-block intervals.

 

The fraud case was bad, Ramstad said, but he bristled at the notion that it somehow flew under the radar until it became a MAGA cause célèbre. “We wrote 300 stories since the first Feeding Our Future piece,” he told me, referring to the nonprofit whose managers stole some $250 million in federal child-nutrition subsidies. “My colleagues are on top of it.”

 

What happened was a very 21^st-century story driven, in large part, by a viral video.

 

“The scale of the fraud”—estimates have ranged from hundreds of millions to billions—“was the worst that we’ve seen,” Ramstad said, “but it was manageable. You start an office of the inspector general, and there’s a checklist of things you do to investigate. And we had a fine group of federal prosecutors and investigators running it down.” Had. Top lawyers have been leaving the local U.S. Attorney’s office for a variety of reasons, at least partly but not exclusively related to Trump’s targeting of Minneapolis, and there were several more resignations on the morning of our interview.

 

“The bureaucracy overreacted to the criticism,” Ramstad continued. “And then, suddenly, last fall, the politics of the governor’s race started to take shape, and somewhere a decision was made: ‘Let’s pound down the fraud stuff.’ And so then the department overreacted and clamps down on everybody providing Medicaid services. It was a massive disruption. And then we get this video that comes out”—by right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley—“and so then it becomes a national political thing. And you know there just can’t be a rational response from the Trump administration. And the whole of government is suddenly like, ‘Hey, look what I can do, Mr. President!’ There’s all these Cabinet secretaries and agency officials going, ‘Hey, look what I can do to Minnesota!’ And so they cut off farm aid, and they cut off SBA loans, not in huge amounts but just enough to get the headline and then, you know, hurt people a little bit. And then comes ICE. All I know is it’s just grossly unfair.”

 

Minnesota has neither an especially large nor a remarkably small population of illegal immigrants—as a percentage, it ranks somewhere toward the middle of the 50 states. Whatever the reason for the crosshairs the Trump administration put on Minneapolis, it is not the raw prevalence of illegals in the population.

 

If anything, there is a case that Minnesota could use more immigrants. “The main thing that unites everybody doing business in Minnesota is the fact that the state is growing more slowly than it ever has,” Ramstad said. Population growth is modest, and the demographics are not great for economic vitality. “We have this large group of older white people exiting the workforce. And our workforce took four years from January of 2020 to get back to January 2020, pre-pandemic levels. You just cannot say that we are feeling a lot of competitive pressure from illegal immigrants in our workplaces.”

 

Minnesota at large is probably going to be okay—state spending has been growing at an unhealthy rate, but tax revenues have been keeping up, and the state went into the current biennium with a $5 billion surplus. But that surplus is projected to be spent down very quickly as higher costs driven by health care expenses and inflation eat into the reserves. The city of Minneapolis, on the other hand, is in serious fiscal trouble, with heavy unfunded pension liabilities, the hangover from a $75 million budget shortfall in the schools, inflation, and more—and it has already imposed significant property-tax increases just to keep up with current operations. There’s a reason there are so many marginally employed, part-time nonprofit managers available to march around the county government building chanting, “WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!” a display that is in both style and content just perfectly fascistic. A couple of bad quarters for Target or 3M or a big shift in business strategy for Cargill could plausibly tip things in a distinctly and unpleasantly Detroit-ish direction.

 

There are a lot of people with chips on their shoulders and time on their hands. But that is not where political violence really comes from. Political violence comes when people come to believe that the usual avenues of redress—the courts and the ballot box—are closed to them. I did not speak to one person, from black-masked street-theater dork to chamber of commerce-type Republican, who believes that the Trump administration will undertake an honest and competent investigation into the deaths of Good and Pretti.

 

You don’t get 40-odd lawyers quitting the U.S. Attorney’s office because they are confident in the work being done there. You get that because the FBI director, Kash Patel, hamstrung the investigation from the beginning because he is too much of a coward to tell his boss something his boss does not want to hear. What happened to Renee Good and Alex Pretti looks like murder and sounds like murder and smells like murder and deserves to be investigated like murder—and there is no sign that that is going to happen. And now the Trump administration, fearful that a Democratic takeover in the House will result in the third impeachment of Donald Trump—who would be breaking his own record for number of times impeached—promises to “nationalize” the elections, interfering with ordinary democratic procedure on the indefensibly risible pretext that the 2020 election was stolen from him by Venezuelan hackers and Italian spy satellites. This is some late-stage Henry-VIII-possibly-in-the-grips-of-neurosyphilis-type stuff.

 

Trump and his epigones want violence in the streets. The good news is that the people of Minneapolis have so far been smart enough not to give it to them. The bad news is that a lot of these people are idiots and more than a few of them are spoiling for a fight—e.g., Gov. Tim Walz and his irresponsible and idiotic “Fort Sumter” talk—desperate to act out some impotence-overcoming fantasy of agency and cosmic relevance that has a great deal in common with the fever-dream neuroses that dominate Donald Trump and the sycophants who compose his detestable little junta. That is not to suggest an equivalency—not unless Jake and Elwood have a navy and some nuclear weapons that I don’t know about—but a symmetry that is, however you look at it, the stuff of nightmares, a new American development combining the bitterness and corruption of the 1850s with the technology of the 21^st century.

 

There are a million different terrible ways for that to go catastrophically sideways, many of which can be observed from the Minneapolis Skyway.