Sometimes it’s really hard to be living in Minnesota. I’m a Pacific Northwest boy born and bred, I like temperate climates, gentle rains, and an ocean nearby. We woke up this morning to 0°F, 30mph winds, and more and more snow; my wife had to go to work, and I was up at 5 to help her armor up and strap on layers and layers so she can survive the walk to her job (I’m staying home and doing housework and prepping for the next week of classes — I get to stay in the warm).
Sometimes I think we have to be crazy to live here.
But then we see our fellow citizens rise up and do the right thing, and I instead feel like we’re incredibly lucky to live here.
Today, an obnoxious right wing provocateur had scheduled an anti-protest march in Minneapolis. It’s not clear what his goal was, other than to tromp around and declare that he hates Muslims. It was supposed to be a big rally led by this clown, Jake Lang, whose claim to fame is that he was a convicted January 6 rioter who was pardoned by Trump, and has in the past led similar hate rallies in Dearborn, Michigan, as well as Texas and Florida.
His Minnesota rally did not go well for him.
His side was represented by maybe a half-dozen people (also defended by a swarm of city police and a big black war machine with a sonic cannon), while the streets were packed with thousands of people chanting “fuck Nazis” at them.
A group of right-wing anti-Islam protesters arrived at Minneapolis City Hall Saturday morning, facing off against a much larger crowd of counter-protesters.
Jake Lang, a conservative social media influencer, organized the rally downtown. He arrived with several other right-wing protesters, carrying anti-Islam signs and chanting.
The counterprotest was mostly nonconfrontational, but several counter-protesters immediately surged in to meet the far-right group when they arrived.
Some participants yelled back at the far-right protesters, chasing them as they walked around the block in front of City Hall.
The confrontation was brief, with Lang and most of his supporters leaving the scene quickly. Most of the counter-protesters were also dispersing.
That’s right. They ran away. Lang was overwhelmed by Minnesota citizens. He whined a bit while escaping.
You’re being replaced! Do you not understand you’re being replaced!Lang screamed into the microphone, later yelling,We deserve a future for white Americansandsend the Somalis back.
For his trouble, he was punched, like a good Nazi, and walked away bleeding.
He was punched in Michigan, too, although they didn’t draw blood. Lang might want to quit before the escalation continues.
He’s a pathetic loser with a lost cause.
I guess it’s not so bad to be a Minnesotan.
Ahem. Remember those civil war Minnesotans I mentioned? Do not assume they will run away from a fight
(yes I know they got mostly killed but they did not back down.
If fifty thousand Jake Langs with muskets and bayonets cannot do the job, half a dozen will not suffice)
My own replacement theory is that I would love to see these Nazi thugs replaced by ordinary, law-abiding citizens.
Wow! Skimmed the video, impressed by the presenter’s professionalism and insouciance.
Nice civic response, weird liminal superposition in which the USA stands right now.
The population vs the powers-that-be.
I’m hopeful about the outcome, based on this footage.
Seems Minnesota is the last outpost of civilisation in the USA. Bravo you brave people.
At about the 10:00 minute mark one of the cowards tries to walk through the protestors while surrounded by police escorts. It is heartening to see the crowd of typical Minnesotans turn as one and watch him practically fill his pants as he high-tailed it back across the street with his bullhorn and zero police escorts.
No day in which nazis get punched will ever be considered to be a waste.
The koran is not the issue whatever Jake Lang claims. Race is.
At our last protest rally in my area, which has yesterday, the number of protesters was around 800.
The number of counter demonstrators was…one (1).
No one punched her. No one even shot her in the face.
At 20:00 minutes, Jake gets a flying punch to the head while he tries to flee the protest like a coward. Apparently he is being pelted with snowballs, and it appears someone managed to hit him with a water balloon because his hair is wet. Some of the crowd is pursuing while blasting ‘Let it go’ from Frozen.
Jake then proceeds to hide in a hotel and try to escape the jeering crowd of citizens and media by going out the back door.
At 27:43 the protestors who caught him have taken his bulletproof ‘infidel’ vest and perhaps his keys?
I hope he is enjoying MNice. He just got a little bit bloodied and chased by a very angry mob.
NBC News had a very brief report tonight of just the fact that there was a counter-protest in Minneapolis. I don’t recall any mention of what the Jake Lang group was chanting about, that they were few in number, or that they ran away.
billseymour, for context, here’s the FOX news coverage: https://www.fox9.com/news/minneapolis-ice-shooting-latest-jan-16-2026
(Reads rather anodyne, comparatively)
Firefox won’t let me open the video. Could you post a link to it, please? thanks
Never mind! It shows up on the comments page.
rabbitbrush, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQg-G-Ebscg in the OP
[OT] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/17/thousands-of-greenlanders-march-in-protest-of-donald-trumps-threats-of-us-control
Nuuk, the capital, has a total population of 20,000 so if thousands turned out for a protest you are talking a very sizable percentage of the population. Nuuk itself is older than the US, formally established in 1728 though people had lived in the area for centuries. It didn’t get its current name until 1979.
The thing is, as we discuss this, Trump is readying troops from Alaska to move into Minnesota once he declares martial law. This stuff will potentially get much more serious very quickly.
Although it’s not good for MN, that’s heartening for the knife edge in Greenland. The troops in Alaska are the only ones who are even close to being in sight of the NATO and EU forces in Greenland now when it comes to cold weather warfare, so deploying them domestically means Trump isn’t setting up for an immediate invasion.
This is interesting.
The governor, Walz, just called up the Minnesota National Guard. To protect the demonstrators from the Federal terrorists, ICE.
This is actually an incredible act of courage.
It is going to seriously make the Trump regime very angry.
Minnesota veterans should organize a welcoming reception for those Alaskan troops, bearing hot cocoa and cookies, and stories of how the US ICE thugs are so reminiscent of the Fedayeen Saddam in Iraq. Also, that those thugs were volunteers like ICE and Saddam’s elite army unit under his direct command was called the Republican Guard (hint, hint about repeating history.)
A Federal judge in Minnesota has ruled against ICE.
They can’t arrest peaceful protesters or randomly use tear gas and pepper bullets on crowds in Minneapolis.
This is also what a Federal judge ruled in Chicago.
This will slow ICE down.
They aren’t there for immigration enforcement.
They are there to break laws, cause trouble, and hopefully, provoke a violent response from the citizens.
Beat on the brat
Beat on the brat
with a baseball bat
oh yeah, oh yeah…
raven: the difficulty is that ICE already wasn’t allowed to do any of those things. The judge is reaffirming what was already known. It might have some effect, but probably not much.
Yeah, I know.
It will help a lot anyway.
.1. If ICE ignores the Federal judge’s orders, they can be held for contempt of court.
When the judge in Chicago did the same thing, ICE eventually left.
Without being able to toss tear gas around, shoot people with less lethal ammunition, and arrest and beat up random people, ICE doesn’t have much to do.
They aren’t immigration enforement, they are right wing terrorists.
.2. Ignoring a Federal judge is also going to make their court cases a lot harder.
Almost all of those people that ICE arrests who are US citizens never get to court, or if they do and plead innocent are let go.
ICE doesn’t have any credibility in most courts, and if they don’t have any evidence which is the usual, the judges and juries assume you are…not guilty.
As a general rule I don’t trust cops. They’re liars.
The way I see it, this thing comes down to a turf war. Do the locals want to stand up for their little bit of order and control is the question.
The army is bound to disobey illegal orders, like deploying them against US civilians within the United States. How stupid would it be to send a unit of Alaska paratroopers into Minnesota?
I suppose some mush-brained member of the fascists thought, Alaska is cold, Minnesota is cold, let’s send the paratroopers! They won’t be thwarted by the weather itself.
I have read that ICE has a massive retention problem which has accelerated recently. That’s why Minneapolis also has border patrol agents terrorizing the city, along with a bunch of barely literate stormtroopers. Life imitates farce?
While that is true in theory, it rarely happens in real life.
The system is set up to make it almost impossible for soldiers to disobey any orders.
A few recent examples.
.1. Those boat strike-murders in the Caribbean.
Clearly illegal to the point where the admiral in charge of the task force actually quit his job rather than kill unknown people for unknown reasons.
They still went on.
Note that they have since stopped. Right when we gained control of Venezuela’s oil. It is almost like that whole operation had nothing to do with drug enforcement.
.2. The National Guard and US army were called up in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. The monster in chief even sent the Texas National Guard to Illinois. No one refused even though the courts have since ruled that these callups were in fact, illegal.
Tethys, I think we are all about to find out.
Latest headline.
I can’t see how this deployment of US soldiers to Minneapolis isn’t going to happen.
This is basically an announcement that it is going to happen.
Trump is senile and he has no executive mental governor left.
Whatever twisted thoughts cross his mind end up as orders to do something.
To do this he will invoke the Insurrection Act, which he has wanted to do since he regained power.
Ironically, Minneapolis was a peaceful, normal US city before Trump was elected and the ICE thugs showed up.
Trump turned it into a battle zone. ICE aren’t law enforcement, they are law breakers.
raven, I took a look.
No.
Not the US Army in any of those places; only the NG.
The Supreme Court held that the administration lacked lawful authority to federalize and deploy the Guard in Chicago (and by extension other places), but the order itself was not unlawful.
The distinction matters, legally. I think.
Here is what happened when the US army was called out in LA last year.
.1. It is a violation of the law, Posse Comitatus Act to use the US military for law enforcement.
.2. Most of those US soldiers never left their base and the ones that did, ended up doing more or less nothing.
There was no reason to call those soldiers up and send them in.
It was the same in Portland,
While the right wing claim was that the city was a war torn disaster area, the reality was that there were peaceful and legal protests that covered a whole two blocks.
The order was issued and carried full force when it reached the soldiers, but the authority required to issue it was missing. Definitionally an unauthorised order.
Truth is that a soldier cannot refuse a mobilisation order simply because they believe it is illegal or unauthorised under U.S. military law; an order is treated as lawful unless it is plainly criminal on its face such as directing a soldier to shoot civilians, commit a crime, or torture a prisoner. A mobilisation order does not meet that threshold and therefore cannot be refused as manifestly unlawful.
That the order is later found to lack proper authority, in short, does not allow a soldier to refuse it on those grounds. Worse, I see that if a soldier refuses a mobilisation order on the grounds that they personally believed it was illegal, they could face charges: Article 92 for failure to obey a lawful order, Article 87 for missing movement, or Article 85 for desertion, depending on the circumstances.
So, don’t put the onus on soldiers refusing to be mobilised. It’s unfair.
@Raven
I live in the Twin Cities, and am well aware that we are under an invasion. ICE is literally abducting people off the street based on their ethnicity. The vast majority are legal residents and green card holders. They abducted a 17 year old from his job at Target and tortured him before dumping him on the street. He was immediately aided by local bystanders who witnessed them dumping him. The footage is heartbreaking.
Being put on standby is not illegal. That’s a bunch of military speak to appease the rapidly deteriorating top executive. He could legally send them to our base in Greenland sadly.
3:05 p.m. — Don Lemon livestreams protest during church service
According to the former CNN anchor, activists protested during a church service at Cities Church. Why? Because protesters believe that a pastor at the church is the acting field office director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in St. Paul.
https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/list-of-ice-raids-protest-updates-in-minnesota-on-sunday-jan-18
@JohnwhoisnowanexpertonUSmilitary
Every soldier takes an oath to defend and uphold the constitutional republic, and it is their patriotic duty to refuse unlawful orders. Invading Minnesota would be an unlawful order, and the Commanding Officer is the person to refuse such an order.
Malicious compliance to lawful orders is also an option.
‘@JohnwhoisnowanexpertonUSmilitary’
I am not an expert. But I can read.
I can look things up.
And I can speak for fairness.
What exactly are you attempting to dispute by paraphrasing me?
Am I right, or am I wrong?
Excellent video from a veteran and scholar of cults on the topic of lawful and unlawful orders. He could send in active military, but they are only allowed to guard federal property so it’s rather pointless saber rattling.
I think they would be safer than the poorly trained, panicked agents that are currently here.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rXVqOfUrp7U&pp=ygUbRGFuaWVsbGEga25pdHRpbmcgY3VsdCBsYWR5
Tethys, trade union analogue is ‘work to rule’. Same concept.
Point is rules are not breached in the process.
I don’t see the point in Walz sending out the MN National Guard when Presnit Dementia can then just federalize them like a Reversi/Othello move.
Tethys and John:
Knock it off. You’re both partly right, a little bit in grey areas, and partly wrong.
First, there are considerable nuances to the standard for “what kind of order is required to be disobeyed?” (Note that it’s not discretionary: If the order is unlawful under the correct standard, it must be disobeyed.) And the burdens of inquiry/evaluation are substantially greater on commissioned officers, and somewhat greater on warrant and noncommissioned officers, than they are on low-level troops; for this purpose, “first enlistment” is a crude proxy.
The standard absolutely positively is not “plainly criminal on its face.” Not all unlawful orders relate to criminality; as an example, an order in clear violation of a treaty would not be criminal. The best statement of that standard comes from a distressingly famous habeas corpus proceeding about fifty years ago:
The “knew or should have known it was illegal” standard appears again and again in both civilian and military law, and was specifically adopted (for this quotation, by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit; previously in those proceedings, by the US Court of Military Review). Further detail in the direct appeal points at whether a military member in the general pre-incident circumstances (rank, sufficient time on station, similar direct exigencies) would have reasonably known or reasonably suspected but failed to reasonably inquire that the orders violated governing law.
Second, the nature of disobedience matters. A mere “movement order” (which includes orders calling reserve and Guard members to active duty in support of specific operations) offers a lot more variations than an order to employ force, either with or without discretion. It gets very complicated very quickly, as some people found out in the aftermath of 9/11 when they tried to refuse deployment (and especially when they tried to refuse deployment to places not specifically identified in the Authorization to Use Military Force, when operations spilled over into Afghanistan and ill-marked parts of Pakistan from the AUMF authorization limited to Iraq, which was only later extended).
Third, Posse Comitatus matters… but it makes the persons giving the orders, who may or may not be military, liable for consequences. It only indirectly applies to the boots-on-the-ground (or fingers-on-the-buttons, or eyes-on-the-screen) military members actually engaged in the operation to implement the laws of the United States against a civilian object/objective. (That’s what Posse Comitatus actually prohibits.)
What ties these three together is that a Posse Comitatus violation would make the order “unlawful” — but Posse Comitatus is not a criminal restriction on individual members, only on orders given (distinct from followed).
“Tethys and John:
Knock it off. You’re both partly right, a little bit in grey areas, and partly wrong.”
What about the actual claim that caused those claims? You know, raven’s 27.2.
“No one refused even though the courts have since ruled that these callups were in fact, illegal.”
Very simple: They were mere movement orders and thus due considerable deference (as, as I noted, some Gulf War II refuseniks discovered). As to the “domestic deployment” issues, under the duties of inquiry applicable to those individual — which are, remember, stricter for higher ranks — at the time of refusal those individuals did not know, and were not in the “should have known after reasonable inquiry” category, that those particular orders were unlawful. The best evidence is that not all courts have made a similar blanket determination that the entire orders were unlawful; in Chicago, for example, callups to protect specific federal buildings were excluded from the rulings (and similarly but only as to a different subset of federal buildings in Los Angeles). Since movement orders don’t ordinarily tell one what one will be doing at the far end, that makes it even harder to determine that they’re “unlawful”: They wouldn’t tell Joe Weekendwarrior that “you’re being activated and sent to Chicago, where you’ll be patrolling near 95th and Cottage Grove looking for nonwhite people” — the movement orders would omit the comma and thereafter. Once Joe was in Chicago, there would be further orders, and those are more likely to be the unlawful ones.
Note on Posse Comitatus: There’s some persuasive authority that merely causing presence is not a violation; there must be specific action to implement the laws of the United States, and standing around in uniform doesn’t suffice.
@jaws
Knock what off? I’m not engaging with John’s silly ideas about the US military. Unlawful orders have nothing to do with trade unions.
I encourage people to watch the video I linked @36.
Daniella is a former intelligence officer, she lays out the difference between lawful and unlawful orders very clearly without getting into posse comitatas.
[Thanks, Jaws (@41)]
“Unlawful orders have nothing to do with trade unions.”
Wow, you really don’t get the obvious, do you?
In your featured video, what you call “Malicious compliance” is exactly the same concept as “work to rule”.
(See, US Armed Forces don’t get to unionise — I looked that up; can’t really go on strike)
@ Morales
Gramps. FFS do us all a favour.
https://pendantry.wordpress.com/2021/02/22/how-to-quote-someone-elses-words-in-a-wordpress-comment/
Almost everyone else on this blog will do the bare minimum to make their comments readable. Do you really want to be the one prick?
Actually, let me rephrase. Do you really want to lose your last vestige of plausible deniability you’re not going out of your way to be a prick?
@ John Morales : (meta)
Question please – Why don’t you blockquote your
in the greater than and lesser than / angled brackets > & < symbols and use bolding and italics with i and /i & b & /b inside those bracket greater / lesser than signs anymore?
Pretty sure you used to do that before?
Even I can do that.. usually successfully – & I know I’m not great at computers and coding and typing stuff. Html yeah?
It does make comemnts easier to read and follow.
@ John Morales : (meta)
Question please – Why don’t you blockquote your
in the greater than and lesser than / angled brackets > & < symbols and use bolding and italics with i and /i & b & /b inside those bracket greater / lesser than signs anymore?
Pretty sure you used to do that before?
Even I can do that.. usually successfully – & I know I’m not great at computers and coding and typing stuff. Html yeah?
It does make comemnts easier to read and follow.
[OT]
Why do you have a problem with quotation marks marking quotations? ;)
Also, I use markdown these days, mostly. ** does bold, * does italics, > does a quote span.
I am quite familiar with HTML and markup and markdown, you see?
I can nest them, I can mix ’em, all sorts of stuff.
I myself can follow ordinary orthography, but I suppose it’s hard for some people.
Tethys @42:
Knock off nonsense like @34, which is so far removed from reality (admittedly, that’s extremely common) that it’s not even wrong. On all appearances, you’ve never even seen what a movement order looks like, so your extension of that to “invading Minnesota” is nonsense. Having been a CO for the better part of a decade, believe me that the CO is not “the” person to disobey that order; there are a helluva lot of other officers obligated to disobey an unlawful order as distinct from a policy with arguably unlawful objectives that is issued by those Constitutionally in control of the military (that “protect the Constitution” thing again) before the orders get to the CO to make that decision. It’s much, much more complicated than this glibness either states directly, implies, or bloody well ignores.
The video linked @36 is misleading for the same reason: It also fails to distinguish between policy and the actual order at issue. That’s why I cited the Calley case — “destroy the village to save it” is probably not an unlawful order but a dubious policy statement, although “kill everyone” is. Similarly, “go to Minnesota in uniform prepared to use weaponry as later directed” is probably not an unlawful order; it’s the “later directed” that would be.
Dammit, if y’all (that’s everyone) are gonna “go all Nuremberg” then engage with what was directed to the persons who are to obey/disobey the orders — which is exactly what the Nuremberg proceedings actually did. Judgement at Nuremberg is a fine film that gets the broad strokes of “sometimes, at least as to those at the very top, the broad policy really is the unlawful order” correct. However, not once is the actual direct order at issue; it’s a horror film, not a documentary. Orders and policy are not the same thing — that’s the real issue that the video linked should have engaged with. And military members aren’t there to debate policy, but implement it specifically: There are lawful ways to implement an arguably-unlawful policy. There are also unlawful orders implementing a fully lawful policy. (And that’s where the video @36 really gang awry.)
@jaws
In that case I kindly invite you to go fuck yourself. John could keep his asshole mouth shut, since I was conversing with Raven. Yes, my reply was snark and I never claimed to be a military expert.
Minnesota has already been invaded by federal forces.
I have a front row seat.
In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/19/kristi-noem-pepper-spray-minneapolis-ice
↓
Kristi Noem first denied that federal agents were using chemical agents against protesters, then after being shown video footage turned to blaming the protesters themselves, as tensions continued to run high amid the Trump administration’s surge of federal officers into Minneapolis.
The head of homeland security, who has acted as spearhead for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in the city – known as “Operation Metro Surge” – told the CBS show Face the Nation on Sunday that her department had not used pepper spray against crowds.
A federal judge on Friday had ordered that federal law enforcement stop using pepper spraying against peaceful protesters, whom Noem has accused of attempting to hinder the immigration crackdown. Kate Menendez found federal agents had used “chemical irritants” to punish protesters for exercising “protected first amendment rights to assemble and to observe and protest ICE operations”.
Noem first denied the judge’s finding, but after being shown a video of chemical agents being used on four occasions, she backtracked and said her department “only use those chemical agents when there’s violence happening and perpetuating and you need to be able to establish law in order to keep people safe”.
Tethys, if you’re not a military expert — you’re certainly no legal expert — don’t misuse technical terms and then claim that your redefinitions supports your position and personal attacks. What’s going on in Minnesota is horrific and unlawful, but as it relates to unlawful orders or the rest of this particular thread it’s not an invasion (in military or legal terms).
Your snark sprays onto veterans, specifically annoying those of us who’ve been investigators/voices of reason regarding other incidents. If you can’t snark accurately, knock it off. If you want to snark at Morales, fine; just don’t diminish an actual, important conversation not by being “uncivil” but by being inaccurate.
@jaws
Or John can stop derailing threads with his personal bugbears. Go read my comment at 26. I’m not denigrating veterans or the military at all.
We are currently under invasion by ICE and Border patrol. I personally would feel much safer with Army forces as they are properly trained.
I have never been military, but I have attended two Navy Inductions, so I am quite aware that that swearing an Oath to the Constitution is mandatory. At the very least the Army should be aware that their job absolutely doesn’t involve drawing arms on American citizens in American cities.
In the news: Twin Cities police chiefs: officers report being targeted while off duty by ICE agents