Rest assured, this is coming from an expert on the place. I am not a native Minnesotan, but that is an advantage here because no native Minnesotan is capable of being frank enough to acknowledge the state’s flaws, and thus cannot be an expert, except on ice fishing.
I lived in Minneapolis for ten years, with an additional year when I was fleeing the FBI (this is true, but not for criminal reasons) but mostly while earning my PhD at the “U of M.” My home was the Uptown neighborhood, which was mildly chic, very safe, a few blocks from Hubert Humphrey’s cemetery, and a few more blocks from wonderful scenic lakes that I, a mere graduate student, could bicycle around each morning. Cute coffee shops, crunchy corner co-op groceries, and amazing used bookstores were everywhere. The leftists were amiable. No wonder it took me eight years to defend my dissertation.
Towards the end of my stay, I was mugged on an icy sidewalk by a hapless druggie looking for his next fix. Unfortunately for him, my purse had zero money in it, but it did have my apartment keys, and I raced after him and jumped on him when he fell on the ice. Someone with testosterone came running out of his house in stocking feet and kept the guy down on the pavement until the cops arrived. So I have had experiences with Ice in Minnesota.
When the druggie’s hand covered my mouth, I had bitten hard on a finger and drawn blood. So sitting in the patrol car, I was not pleased when the police officer said laconically, “Yah, our records show he’s got AIDS.” In the end, aggravated assault was plea bargained to plain assault, I didn’t get AIDS, and the Minneapolis Police Department awarded me a plaque for my idiotic heroism. But in hindsight, it seems to have heralded a disturbing new stage in Minneapolis’s history. I took my PhD and left for Washington.
The white Minnesotan eagerness to please thing came out in full force in 2020, when George Floyd, full of fentanyl (cf. Hennepin County coroner’s report), meth, and a cocktail of other narcotics, died while being arrested for pushing a counterfeit bill at an immigrant storekeeper just trying to earn an honest living. Mobs burned down the businesses of Lake Street, the main east-west artery through South Minneapolis. Estimates are that $500 million in damage to 1500 property locations happened, 604 arrests, 164 instances of arson, and two riot-related deaths.
Governor Tim Walz took three days to call out the Minnesota National Guard, by which time it was too late. His wife publicly rejoiced at opening her windows to the “smell of burning tires.” And this was the political leadership. But no one wanted to be called a racist. Police officer Derek Chauvin went to prison at the hands of a hung jury; he survived a brutal knife attack in prison, and when Minnesota finally has a decent and rational governor again, he may be pardoned. Few of those arrested in 2020 were prosecuted let alone jailed. But policing would never be the same.
I last visited Minneapolis in summer 2024, and was shocked by how a favorite restaurant, It’s Greek to Me, at the intersection of Lake and Lyndale not far from the scene of the 2020 riots, was on its last legs (the meal was as tasty as ever). The once-bustling intersection felt dark and intimidating. The staff admitted that their customer base had fled because of the aftermath of riots and covid, the effluvium of the virtue signaling left. It is now out of business after many decades.
Last year, a mysterious political killing took place. The victims were the Minnesota House Majority Leader Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the soon-apprehended killer also wounded another legislator and his wife. The mainstream media tried to frame him as MAGA, because he supposedly resented the Leader’s pro-abortion stance and had preached at a church, albeit in Congo. But then why did he have all those stacks of No Kings flyers in his car? Hmm. No trial date has been set for what is ironically, being prosecuted as a federal case. Overall, the story has sunk deeper than a rock in a pond, which suggests the liberal media sees no political advantage to mentioning it further.
And this brings us to January 2026 and Minneapolis’s descent into, as a recent meme put it, a Call of Duty scenescape.
Necessary background: The Minneapolis City Council not only has no Republicans, but three of the 13 Democratic council members “identify with” the Democratic Socialists of America, New York mayor Mamdani’s outfit, and one is outright DSA. So, the policy line, or range of acceptable policy proposals toggles back and forth between the Democratic Farmer Labor Party (a.k.a. “the Democrats”) and DSA, or ordinary crazy versus batshit crazy. And just so you know what the Republicans were like, in the early-mid 1990s when I was involved in the party, they called themselves the “Independent Republicans,” so they would not be confused with the evil Republicans at the national level.
As for the Somalis, it has become a large enough population that no one will be elected in Minneapolis without their support, which is why Mayor Jacob Frey, desperate for re-election against an actual ethnic Somali candidate, was forced to eat their trademark banana and spaghetti dish, and to dance wildly alongside them at campaign events. It was alarming to see this genteelly-reared William and Mary College grad bark in Somali at another event.
The Somali refugees have been in Minnesota since the mid-1990s, brought under the auspices of Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities, which had previously imported thousands of Hmong, Lao, and Vietnamese to the Twin Cities. At least we got some good restaurants out of it (“Perfume River” on the now-Somali West Bank), and in any case, it was our fault for trying to save them from Communism. True to their storied history of piracy and pillage, the Somali community astutely identified the soft weak spots in the Minnesota underbelly: reluctance to confront (a.k.a “Minnesota Nice”); passive liberalism backed by money, and fear of being called racist. The new Minnesota state flag looks oddly like Somalia’s. Nine billion dollars later, here we are, standing outside the “Learing Center,” marveling at how Ilhan Omar’s fortune ballooned to perhaps over $30 million while she served in Congress.
Why is Minneapolis the only place where violent and profane mobs are besieging federal law enforcement officials trying to apprehend illegal aliens, many of whom have committed additional criminal acts, including against children? (check out the DHS website, where you can filter by state, for apprehended illegals). As DHS Secretary Kristi Noem points out, ICE is operating across the country, in many blue states as well, and yet Minnesota is the only place where obstruction and screaming mobs blowing whistles have been ubiquitous, where hotel clerks have on their own initiative sought to deny rooms to or dox federal agents, where rioters have ransacked FBI vehicles and last weekend tried to invade a hotel near the University because ICE agents were staying there, and where two people who brought lethal weapons to separate protests are now dead. Yes, a 2000-lb SUV is a lethal weapon if you are aiming it at a person while in drive. As lethal as a Sig Sauer semi-automatic known for impromptu firing. In an odd reprise of my mugging, one protester bit off part of an ICE agent’s finger AND another woman bit off most of (another) agent’s finger and ran off with it, so it will never be reattached.
The Governor, almost certainly his Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, and Mayor Frey are desperately seeking to distract from their deepening fraud scandal. Even though ICE had been operating in Minnesota before the scandal erupted, the riots themselves followed the scandal. No way that a $9 billion fraud would be overlooked by the authorities for so long despite whistleblowers if the authorities weren’t themselves benefiting from it. As we’ve seen from DOGE investigations during the second Trump Administration, the Democratic funding cycle involves giving generous infusions of taxpayer dollars to favored groups, who then donate generously to the politicians.
Some of these Minnesota politicians and staff are engaged in organizing the street violence. Flanagan herself and an aide to Walz are involved in the Signal chats that have been used to orchestrate anti-ICE violence. According to Jennifer Van Laar in RedState, “The chat—already linked to Walz staffers and local Democratic politicians—serves as an operations hub for blockades, marching orders, and sharing personal information on ICE officers to intimidate them.” (RedState, Jan 26, 2026, https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2026/01/26/link-to-walzs-administration-in-anti-ice-signal-chats-n2198511)
In a town hall in Alexandria, MN last week, Flanagan urged activists to escalate their anti-ICE efforts. “Our neighbors are being disappeared, P.S., without due process. It is just called kidnapping. Then show up and use your voice, put your body on the line.” Here is a sitting lieutenant governor urging people to physically obstruct federal law enforcement (“put your body on the line”) while calling lawful apprehensions “kidnapping.” Look up the videos yourself. And there is evidence that her network is also identifying federal agents with the purpose of harassing federal law enforcement.
The chaos is compounded by the emasculation of the Minneapolis police department (MPD) since 2020. At the news conference immediately after the Alex Pretti shooting, the city’s chief of police basically admitted that DHS was not communicating with the MPD. And why should it, when the MPD was not being permitted to cooperate with DHS, even to just guarantee law and order on the streets?
The fecklessness of the Minneapolis city government was underscored by Rachel Sayre, the city’s Emergency Management Director who spoke after the mayor. Sayre immediately presented her credentials: having provided humanitarian assistance in “conflict zones” such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Ukraine. She then proceeded to compare the situation in Minneapolis to those conflict zones. “What I’ve seen here is what I’ve seen there. A powerful entity violently and intentionally terrorizing people, making them afraid to go outside so they can’t earn a living, so that kids are forced out of school.” Emergency response means the city and the people of Minneapolis must come to the rescue of the beleaguered lawbreakers.
Speaking of lawbreakers, Pretti did everything that our firearms instructors tell us not to do. He brought a high-end semi-automatic to a supposedly peaceful protest, with two loaded magazines. If you are carrying for self-defense, you must know exactly how and when you would use the gun and all that ammo. Was he planning to shoot other protesters? Not likely. Who else, then? He also left his carry permit and ID at home, a gross misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $3,000 in Minnesota.
Any responsible gun owner knows that in an encounter with law enforcement, you let them know you are carrying and request and follow further instructions. You definitely don’t refuse to disarm. Even if he had kept the Sig Sauer concealed, once Pretti confronted Customs and Border Patrol agents and they realized he was carrying, it was going to become part of the calculation, and the agents had no idea what he planned to do. As we found out in the Renee Good case, law enforcement agents making split second decisions do not have the luxury of giving lunatics the benefit of the doubt. As we also say, “better sentenced by 12 than carried by six.”
The lawbreakers are the ones who are deliberately destroying Minnesota’s largest city to evade the evidence of their own criminality. No one in the state seems to want to hold them to account. But Trump spoke with Walz and Frey over the weekend, talks that Walz himself called “productive,” and the president has replaced the swaggering CBP commander with the well-regarded border czar Tom Homan to be in charge on the ground.
It is possible that Walz realizes with DFL involvement in organizing the protests increasingly exposed, and federal prosecution of Minnesota’s fraud looming, this is the time to pull back from the brink. For his part, Trump can afford to be gracious and make some concessions that will not humiliate Minnesota’s officeholders. In the spirit of Minnesota Nice, everyone will avoid jumping over the cliff, this time. The only question that remains is, will these agitated mobs of would-be revolutionaries now stop because the governor and mayor tell them to? The revolution must continue, somewhere.
Paula T. Weiss is the author of The Antifan Girlfriend (2020) and The Deplorable Underground (2023). You can find her short stories and essays on braeburnroadbooks.com
COMMENT RECEIVED VIA [email protected]
In particular, I enjoyed this piece because of Weiss’ wit and way with language as in Mayor Frey needed to “eat [the Somali] trademark banana and spaghetti dish, and dance wildly alongside them at [a] campaign event.” Not to mention the use of the verb “to bark”. I also enjoyed Weiss’ reminding us of what Pretti didn’t do correctly if he wanted to go home after the protest. It’s sad but true, and these are my words: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES CHALLENGE LAW ENFORCEMENT AT A PROTEST; it isn’t time to lay your life on the line; remember Kent State.
I believe, Dr. Weiss, that it is time for those Minnesotans who support Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers to step up and start supporting them. This is getting out of hand.
Amy L. Sandridge