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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Why are you using the ghetto spelling of his name?

You'll notice this chaos happened in Minnesota, and only in Minnesota. So the formula for successful immigration surges is clear- get the local authorities to cooperate. The immigration surge has to end in a particular location eventually, for allotment of resources reasons, so temporary cooperation is the fastest way for local authorities to go back to whatever mismanagement and petty corruption they were doing before. Obviously Minneapolis and Minnesota more broadly had ideological reasons for not wanting to go this route, but so did LA and Chicago- one has to wonder if the bigger factor was looming federal investigations into Minnesota fraud was a bigger factor. I wonder if Trump could have gotten cooperation by using these investigations as leverage, or by waiting a minute until the investigations had some results.

Why are you using the ghetto spelling of his name?

As a protest against the degradation being imposed on me by the decline of our culture.

You'll notice this chaos happened in Minnesota, and only in Minnesota.

...huh? "Mostly peaceful" ICE protests occurred in every city that ICE launched major surges into. Minneapolis ultimately became the flashpoint for a variety of reasons, but the same protests occurred in metros across the country. Moreover, post Metro Surge, arrests are down across the country, not just in Minneapolis. So after Metro Surge, Trump's team has pulled back on these tactics across the country.

Trump got his way in LA and Chicago. He lost in Minneapolis. Yes there were all sorts of protestors in these places but it was all page five stories and professional activists getting arrested.

Yet detentions are down nationwide. We're not seeing the same tactics used nationwide.

The ironic thing was that while Minnesota got into the news due to the Somali fraud cases, the immigration surge paralyzed the US Attorney's office and didn't affect the Somalis one bit, as 90% of them are US citizens and almost all of the remainder are here legally. I remember reading some Minnesota Democrats complaining that the fraud wasn't being investigated properly because everything was tied up in immigration.

Well yeah, a more competent regime would have focused on the fraud first, then followed up with immigration enforcement after using it to take down local political machine structures- or simply avoided the high-profile immigration surge, because it's Minneapolis and you just don't need that many boots on the ground.

If a motivated administration could actually take down corrupt urban political machines, the deportations thing would be a footnote afterwards. But at that point you might as well ask for a new flag.