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Why Minneapolis? If you had asked me eight years ago where I felt the culture wars were going to be centered I would have said Portland. Being in the PNW it was the epicenter of wokeness and it seemed like you had antifa and Proud Boys gearing up for street battles there. If not Portland I would’ve picked somewhere else stereotypically woke, Seattle, San Francisco, even NYC while not unusually woke is at least especially prominent.
Minneapolis really had no reputation in my mind, I wouldn’t have imagined it was any woker than any other semi-large American city, and probably comparable to Oklahoma City or St. Louis or something. But from George Floyd to Somali Daycares and Renee Good it has clearly become the main battleground. Does anyone have any theories as to why this is?
When I read about radicals in the 70s it always seems to come back to Ann Arbor and Berkeley.
Today it’s Minneapolis and Portland.
Part network effects, chance, circumstance. There are only so many radicals to go around and when they start to concentrate somewhere, like begets like. Same as hipsters or country music stars.
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In retrospect it seems telling to me that Pixar's most successful film of the 2010s, cash-in sequels aside, was about brain drain from Minnesota to California.
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I think people below are reading too much into this. It's just a coincidence. If the same thing happened in any other city there would be similar explanations.
I tend to agree with you, however I do think that in hindsight, this type of incident was more likely to take place in Minneapolis than in, say, Austin, Texas. The two women, especially Good's partner, seemed to be (1) very aggressive and provocative with law enforcement; and (2) very naive about the nature of violent confrontations; the wisdom of baiting cops; and so on.
One commentator recently observed that it takes a lot of white female privilege to drive a car at a cop and think nothing will happen to you. And I think there's some truth to this. In a place like Minnesota there are a lot of Leftists who are leading extremely sheltered, privileged lives.
Obviously there are a lot more Leftists in places like Brooklyn and San Francisco, but I think such persons would be a bit more likely to appreciate the risks involved in driving a car at a police officer.
So yeah, this could easily have happened anywhere but the fact that it happened in Minneapolis doesn't seem like a huge surprise.
This kind of theorizing is based on nothing more than conjecture, though. First, you're describing a single incident of the three. Second, if it had happened in Austin we would have talked about how the woman exhibited a typical Texan brashness in a city that's known for being a liberal enclave in a stereotypically conservative state.
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And yet despite being 70% of the population, white people run over very few cops.
It occurs to me that yours is the first "white privilege" complaint I've heard about this incident. If this had happened in 2015, there would almost instantly be thinkpieces about how we're focusing on a white woman being killed by police when thousands of unarmed black people are gunned down every year. To me this is more evidence that peak wokeness has long since passed. Occupy Wallstreet was the last liberal or populist movement that wasn't subverted by identity politics. Maybe this will be the first of the new post-wokeness era.
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The middle-class white liberal protesters seem to have two contradictory ideas firmly entrenched:
(1) Cops, ICE, all such federal agencies broadly, are fascist racist [fill out the reset of the bingo card yourself] MAGA murder squads and will disappear innocent refugees/asylum seekers to torture in jails abroad and are killing brown and black people in the streets with impunity, because the fascist dictator Cheeto Hitler has no regard for law and is grabbing power for himself and using the Constitution as toilet paper, abetted by his far-right packed Supreme Court who have declared everything he does legal
(2) I am a nice, middle-class, white liberal who is protesting the Fourth Reich in the USA, so the murder squads have to obey the law of the land and give me all my rights and when I get my day in court the judge will inevitably see the rightness of my actions
The idea that if (1) is true, then they themselves are gonna get murdered with impunity in the streets by the jackbooted thugs doesn't seem to compute for them. The only way I can imagine they make sense of this is that they believe "Ah, but I have White Privilege and since society is Systemically Racist and set up to support White Privilege, nothing bad can happen to me, white person, so I can use my superpower for good!"
Main Character Syndrome. Obviously, bad things only happen to other people. I have plot armor!
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Something I've realized in finding my way around contemporary fiction is that a big issue with writing about politics is that parody is now impossible. No matter how ridiculous the character, they will turn out to be real, and probably have an outsize representation in your feed. Anyone remember the "Wall of Moms"? It's an accepted part of current year protest tactics for older white women to use themselves as human shields to protect the poor PoCs, because their privilege will protect them from ICEstapo. I'm not saying this is at all the case with the woman in question, just that the most absurd hypocritical straw character you could imagine not only exists, but has already been made into a tool of the egregore. What did we think hyperstitional acceleration meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
Every time I read some reference to a thing I think "That cannot possibly be true, this person misunderstood or is exaggerating or the likes" and I go to search out the original - well, it's not always true, but the majority of the time yes it is, and sometimes it's even more nuts than the reference.
I swear, I thought the Racist Truck was simply a first season so-bad-it's-good episode of Supernatural and then we got a 2017 attack ad featuring nice POC kids having nightmares about racist trucks, and then going through the Transgender Murdered List for the recent Day of Remembrance, I found reasoning about "we include car accidents because in a transphobic society even getting knocked down by accident counts as murder" (I can't remember the exact wording, my brain refuses to retain the idiocy).
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Noblesse oblige.
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You do raise an interesting point -- if these protestors seriously believe that ICE agents are terrible people why would they taunt and provoke them so aggressively, even to the point of body-shaming, which is usually thought to be a no-no among liberals.
But I think it's pretty common for people to hold contradictory beliefs in the same way that a dishonest businessman keeps two sets of books -- one to show to the tax authorities and one to keep track of his actual business revenues and expenses. Your typical Leftist believes that ICE agents are jackbooted thugs for purposes of demonstrating their virtue to their comrades, but that's just a matter of performance.
I think because they are filming the interaction and a) they get away with bravely poking the bear as the opponent doesn’t want to filmed while doing something bad or b) the opponent will be triggered does something film-worthy.
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To quote Ian Flemming, "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence..." we shall see if there is a third incident.
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Minneapolis, and to some extent the state of Minnesota itself, is essentially a hyper-liberal exclave in otherwise very "red"/MAGA territory. This makes it a natural flash-point.
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Minneapolis is unusual for being a non-coastal city that is majority white liberal and has no neighbors fitting the same description. This... causes some tensions with the hinterlands, and woke is optimized for environments where your neighbors don't like it.
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Minneapolis has been stagnant economically compared to more "woke" cities. In 2000, Minneapolis had a GDP per capita significantly above the US average; now it's basically average. Maybe it's vibes: when you're relatively treading water, you have worse outcomes on a range of measures?
I had ChatGPT pull data (change in GDP per capital; data sources are BEA and the Fed):
Supports my hypothesis, but it doesn't really ring true to me.
I think perhaps it's the white people in Minnesota. When I think of the prototypal white person there, I think of some middle manager for Fortune 500 #352. Competent and well-meaning, but not quite a go-getter. And that ends up reflected in the political culture, in that it's not especially responsive to changing circumstances. California, by contrast, has the same issues, but it encountered them earlier and its system has rapidly evolved to be resistant to shocks from them. A billion dollars in corruption and fraud, you say? Race riots? We found ways for the system to manage those decades ago.
Minnesota is naive; its system assumes good intent and isn't able to deflect or absorb the actors with bad intents.
This was what came to mind, too. Minneapolis was spared the ruin of the rust belt, even though it lacked the thing that saved the only other major city in the Midwest (Chicago), which was being the economic capital of the whole region. But over the last 20 years a lot of the economy it did retain has either stagnated or declined.
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Democratic party machine politics that evolved over the post-90s with invitation / incorporation of the Somali diaspora, which was part of an evolution from from a blue-collar/labor coalition to the more modern progressive/racial-interest group coalition.
Minnesota in the 90s was a soft blue-tribe area in the 90s, but also politically heterodox enough that spoiler candidates or waves could reverse general trends. It was that sort of 'close-but-just-enough-of-an-edge' that consistency in turnout machines can provide a decisive edge. You can see an example of the narrowness of edge in the district political leanings table, where- for example- the Democrats hold onto the 2nd district with a D+1 margin. (Note also the 4th district, which is D+30. That will be important later.)
In the 20th century, that political machine was a farmer-labor party, mixed with the political machine of the major cities. Basic late new deal coalition politics, the gradual decline of the new deal coalition model, etc.
But in 1991, as a result of the Somalia Civil War, Somalis were designated with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The Immigration Act of 1990 authorized TPS under a general concept of 'if something goes down while they are here, you don't have to send them back.' It was, as the name implies, intended to be temporary, and subject to renewal by the executive branch every 18 months.
Of course, the civil war didn't end within 18 months, and so it kept getting extended. And Somalis in the states could use their position in the states as a basis for getting family back in Somalia under family reunification policies. According to a flier from the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, 2/3rds of US legal migration is under family reunification policies. Vague but hard-to-objectively-assert claims are that Somalis are a prominent family reunification community, not dominating the applications but a disproportionate share (that I was unable to verify).
Of course, back in 2008 a State Department found
This, of course, is the scandal referred to by the International Refugee Assistance Project, though the scandal is how requests-for-evidence delay refugee applications from various muslim countries like Somalia, not the false family claims. The IRAP helpfully offers a help-sheet for avoiding requests for evidence in refugee family reunification petititonns. This includes a significant emphasis on challenging the legality of the request for evidence to push back against having to provide such evidence.
Anyways, Minnesota and the Somali community. The somali diaspora settled heavily in the Twin City areas, i.e. the political nerve center of the state, i.e. includes the 5th district area referenced before. Citing wikipedia to track that growth over time-
Or to reframe- of about 24k that arrived over a 38 period, over half arrived between 2005 and 2018. 2005 is about 15 years after the first TPS admissions would have started, which is also about 3 naturalization cycles (5 years from legal resident to US citizen). That broader period is itself about a generation and a half of born-in-the-US-to-legal-adulthood generations as well. Which, of course, allows them to participate in family reunification appeals as well. And most of that hyper-growth period was under the Obama administration, which was certainly sympathetic to the idea of the permanent Democratic majority thesis of demographics and destiny, and involved a whole host of activist groups- such as the IRAP- who wanted to help it along.
The point here isn't that the Somali diaspora growth in the Twin Cities region was illegal, but rather that it was purposeful. Purpose without a shared intent between all the actors involved, but purposeful all the same.
And this goes back to the point of Minessota as a previously soft-blue tribe state with a relatively even equilibrium. In a relatively weak balance of power, even a relatively small block- if concentrated and coherent enough- can decisively shape the balance of power. And not even the balance of power between parties, but within parties.
It's not that the Twin Cities were previously a republican stronghold that was flipped by mass migration. Rather, the post-new-deal coalition of labor, farmer, and city machines saw a relatively organized and consolidated Somali community dropped onto the city machine, whether they promptly pursued their self-interest in things ranging from migration assistance lobbying to, well, social welfare such as childcare. They might not have been able to dominate the Twin Cities themselves, but they could play Kingmaker in democratic coalition politics, which is how you get things like years of Democratic administrators too afraid to confront the Somali fraud scandals.
And that shift came within the broader shift over the same decades of the Democratic party in general, which shifted from a general new deal labor coalition- the stuff of the Minessota farmer-labor party origin- to an urban racial-spoils coalition, where DEI was the policy mechanism by which to reward / advance allies in the racially-self-conscience coalitions. Like, say, the political Somali community. They didn't cause the game, but they are a product and a player in the game.
But remember- there's a discrete start point to this. The number of Somalis in Minessotta before 1990 was a not-quite-0k. Almost everything starts with the 1991 TPS admissions. But it still takes 5-ish years for people who were just arriving then to naturalize, and then use their citizenship as a basis to bring in people who will need another five years. So the policy started in he early 1990s, would only start to self-catalyze into a critical mass by the 2000s, where it coincides with the Bush-era immigration debates and then leads into the start of the Obama coalition. And even then, it's not a sudden change, but rather a shift in the internal balance of the city-machines of already democratic places. But they are a part and parcel of the shift of the democratic party from the previous labor-leaning coalition of the pre-1990s, to the urban culture warring coalition of the 2000s.
So for an outsider, it's relatively easy to have not see the ground shifting underneath until... bam. Democratic coalition of progressive culture warriors and racial coalitions has taken over the Democratic Party in general, and Minesotta in particular.
That explains only the Somali daycare fraud, though. George Floyd wasn't Somali, and Renee Good wasn't trying to save an illegal Somali immigrant. And I don't see Somalis as having some Svengali like ability to warp the entire culture; Good, after all, had only been in Minnesota for a couple months, without giving an opportunity for them to work their hypnotic magic.
You are conflating causal and correlation relationships.
George Floyd and the anti-ICE protests are part and parcel of the same progressive-urban-racial spoils systems democratic party coalition. This coalition is what more broadly leads/coordinates/self-catalyzes the progressive front of the culture war, which emerged over the last 20 years as the Clinton coalition fell apart and was replaced by the more culture-war-enthusiastic Obama coalition. The Somalis don't cause this, they correlate with it as one part of the broader coalition.
This progressive democratic political machine, in turn, dominates the twin city region in part because of the Somali kingmaker status, which the Somalis support because it expands the spoils of the party spoil system. The Somalis are causal in this dominance due to their kingmaker role as a cohesive voting block, and the spoils they have capitalized on / engineered. Their influence emerged in the late 2000s/early 2010s due to the family reunification/naturalization cycle which only became apparent in the 2010s with the rise of a political Somali elite such as AOC.
The Somalis stand out due to how they leveraged the culture war / spoil system axis to stand out in their locality, which itself embraced the broader culture war in a way that it hadn't before their arrival enabled the progressive-municipality cluster to dominate to the degree (D+30) that they could pursue the culture war rather than the typical moderation for Minnesota politics. They stand out all the more as one of the remnants of the Obama coalition that more or less validated the emerging democratic majority thesis, just locally instead of nationally.
This makes for easy presentation of their political machine-area as emblematic of what's wrong with the culture war from the opposition side.
Correction: Ilhan Omar, not AOC. Both members of "the squad," so forgivable to mix up.
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Except the Somalis aren’t a cohesive voting block. The Somalis are clannish, and don’t all vote with one another.
In the last mayoral election the Hawiye clan went for the Jewish incumbent, Frey, while the Daarood went for the Somali Fateh.
https://sunatimes.com/articles/6442/Somali-Clan-Divisions-Surface-as-Jacob-Frey-Wins-Third-Term-in-Minneapolis-Mayoral-Race
They don't need to vote with one another. They only need to vote for the Democratic Party over the Republican Party, with the broader political machine papering the gaps and normal inter-party friction as competing sub-factions jostle for influence and favored candidates.
In terms of American party alignment, Somalis are very reliable voting block.
Both Jacob Frey and Omar Fateh ran as Democrats. Moreover, the Minneapolis mayoral elections are ranked choice voting, which is a system ideal for dominant political machines to prevent inter-coalition splits from compromising inter-party competition.
This is the party machine working as intended.
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"Somali's aren't a cohesive block, they're actually 2 cohesive blocks that are using American Democrat politics as a proxy for their eternal clan war" is maybe not so much of a reassuring counterargument.
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Minnesota was settled by Scandinavians who brought along their particular political tendencies, which included a strong labor movement and a certain brand of pathological altruism (cf. Swedish immigration policies). I'd say Minneapolis is about as distant culturally from Oklahoma City as any two cities in America could possibly be, nor is St. Louis much like either of them.
Yeah, Oklahoma city is culturally part of greater Texas and not a generic flyover city. It's much redder, in the flat, behaves like a smaller city than it actually is, etc. Minneapolis is the opposite.
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My guess is that it's good a place as any. Wokeness, in its racial form, is in large part what we call "white guilt", which requires whiteness, which Minnesotans have, probably more than any other group. The kind of metastasized prosocial niceness that even if someone else does something bad right in your face you'd find a reason to excuse it and blame yourself for it. It also requires fairly recent multiracialism as over more than a couple of generations, white people tend to see that other races' successes and failures hinge on more complex factors than "white people".
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Demographically Minnesota is a Midwestern state with a 75% white population. In theory it should be winnable by Republicans. The right deciding to fight back in Minneapolis specifically is the kind of high-variance strategy that could flip the state red. If Minnesota white people become as
racistdemographically aware as white people in Ohio, then Democrats are screwed.But two-thirds of the state live in the Twin Cities metro, so the flip you’re hoping for can only occur in our suburbs, and shooting white women doesn’t go over well, there.
The FBI hammering Somali fraud was already the right track. This ICE escalation is politically moronic. It is the Trump administration putting on a show for the rest of the country, and his personal grudge against Walz from the last campaign, not working to turn Minnesota red. That’s done for this election cycle. Won’t happen.
Things were bad enough that earlier this week Walz had to drop his reelection bid for governor because of the fraud.
Klobuchar (governor) and Craig (senate) are done deals, now. Worse, Walz’s much more woke Lt. Governor Flannigan, who might have been kept out of office due to taint from the fraud scandal, will likely be appointed to backfill Klobuchar’s spot in the senate, unless the DFL primary voters are foolish enough to pick her over the comperably-moderate married ELCA lesbian Craig in the upcoming primary, with the latter already having flipped an exurban-to-rural house district from red to blue.
Also, Trump has recently stopped just short of endorsing ex-coke fiend turned crackpot Jesus-freak Mike Lindell. Demuth had a very, very real chance of beating Walz coming into this week and becoming the first Republican governor in decades. But the Republican Party being just a cult of personality for a narcissistic sociopath, it completely lacks the discipline needed for a winning strategy in Minnesota.
Favorability ratings and trust for the FBI/federal investigations are much higher than those for ICE and right wing social media influencers boosted by the POTUS and the VP. The slow boil of expanding indictments playing out across multiple news cycles between now and Election Day was already prompting come to Jesus meetings among local DFL leaders. Things were going great for Minnesota Republicans. Key word: were.
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Same feeling. I've always known Minneapolis as lily white Scandinavia in the heart of America. My cousins moved there in 1990 and lived there until 1994. I remember the joy of a white Christmas in 91 getting a Super Nintendo, suburban neighborhoods with no fences (which I thought was weird, coming from Cali) and the fun of a summertime skateboarding and hanging out at the Mall of America watching Naked Gun 33 1/3 among other even more throwaway flicks from that year.
To see it as lefty violence - or violence that triggers the left - I'd have never guessed was coming. For something like that I'd have said LA, hands down. Given the recent riots.
This is one of those spots where fixating on the racial angle is going to blind you to the more substantial points of cultural friction. The area between the south shore of Lake Superior and the west coast of Lake Michigan has always leaned left relative to the wider US. The Farmer-Labor Party, Green Party, Reform Party, and CPUSA all got their start in the region.
As I observed above, it is essentially a hyper-liberal exclave in what would otherwise culturally conservative territory. As a result you get a bunch of people who's model of reality is based around tik-toks of protestors in Portland fucking with cops with impunity, and pamphlets about de-arresting detainees, picking fights with a police force recruited from a population that is much less inclined to tolerate that kind of nonsense.
It’s also the only state in the union that went blue in the 1984 presidential election. Although admittedly Mondale was a local boy so that’s part of it.
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The west shore of Lake Superior also leans heavily left, even compared to MN as a whole. MN's 8th district, which covers that shore, was a DFL stronghold for over 50 years until redistricting merged it with more conservative districts to the south and west.
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