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 Americans and send 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.

As someone who spent many hours reading Richard Scarry books to the kids, this resonates.

I appreciate the local atmosphere, with all the snow and ice on the ground. It’s snowing right now, as a matter of fact.

It was a whole thing for a while, liberals getting irate with liberals for throwing around the “Nazi” label too casually. I got emails from people telling me to cool down the rhetoric, and I did. I shouldn’t have.

The University of Pennsylvania has been asked to give the Trump administration a list of Jewish faculty.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.

Huh. What “terrifying history” would that be, I wonder. I also wonder who specifically is behind this initiative to construct lists of Jews. Stephen? Is that you?

You might be thinking that this is just one example, that the similarity to the Nazi agenda is coincidental, and that the intent of the list is entirely benign, to protect Jewish people. Sure. Keep telling yourselves that. Americans have been blind to this sort of thing for decades, it’s traditional.

But have you looked at @DHSgov on Twitter? I know most of you don’t bother with that far right propaganda site anymore, but right now it’s full of Nazi shit.

In this context, one might think the White House would be bending over backward to make the goals of its immigration policy appear as benign as possible: If you want to persuade voters to accept ICE’s radical methods, you’d presumably want to assure them that it has mainstream objectives.

Instead, the administration opted to associate its immigration agenda with a Nazi slogan.

Adolf Hitler’s regime famously advertised its rule with the tagline, “​​One People, One Realm, One Leader.” Three days after Renee Good’s killing, Trump’s Department of Labor tweeted, “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.”

This post is, on its face, evocative of white nationalism. The United States is a multiethnic society. To say that it has only “one heritage” is to suggest that only one of its ethnic groups is truly American.

But the remarks are even more sinister when the Nazi allusion is taken into account. And this echo is almost certainly not coincidental. Under Trump, the official accounts of federal agencies have repeatedly referenced white nationalist memes and works.

On January 9, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted, “We’ll have our home again,” a lyric from an anthem adopted by the neo-fascist group The Proud Boys and other white nationalist organizations. This was accompanied by a link where one could sign up to join ICE.

Last August, DHS shared an ICE recruitment poster beneath the phrase, “Which way, American man?” — an apparent reference to the white supremacist tract, “Which Way, Western Man?” which argues that “Race consciousness, and discrimination on the basis of race, are absolutely essential to any race’s survival. … That is why the Jews are so fiercely for it for themselves…and fiercely against it for us, because we are their intended victim.”

In October, the US Border Patrol posted a video on its Facebook page of agents loading guns and driving through the desert, as a 13-second clip of Michael Jackson’s song “They Don’t Care About Us” plays — specifically, the lines “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me, kick me, k*ke me.”

Other Trump administration posts have suggested that its immigration policy aims to return the United States to its condition in 1943 (it is hard to see what specifically this could reference beyond the nation’s racial composition at that time) and implored ICE recruits to “Defend your culture!”

Meanwhile, last fall, Vance refused to condemn a group of Republican activists who had praised Hitler and disparaged Black people as “monkeys” in their private group chat.

We have put Nazis in positions of power to run the whole goddamn country. They call themselves “MAGA”, but don’t be fooled. They’re Nazis. Nazis through and through. And what do we do with Nazis?

But other people do. Here’s a horrific example of a door dash gone incredibly wrong, wrapped up in some wry commentary by Reese Waters.

For those who’d rather not watch a video for 38 minutes (I don’t blame you, although I do find Waters entertaining), the short summary is that a family in Minneapolis ordered a food delivery through door dash, and ICE followed the delivery driver, and arrested one of the people in the car (his whereabouts is currently unknown, ICE tends to whisk people away without documenting their actions). The woman driver fled into the home of the family waiting for the food, and she was clearly distraught and crying and trying to communicate through the wails in Spanish.

The woman in the house is also greatly distressed. She’s in this house, most of her children are away at school, she’s got one child there who is less then two years old. She doesn’t know what to do. She is freaking out as ICE agents surround her home and start pounding on the door, and her first impulse is to get rid of this stranger who has made her family a target.

I can’t blame her. This creepy squad of armed vigilantes are wandering about in her yard, hands on their guns, demanding that she surrender the woman she is protecting. She is more concerned about her child, and starts to lead the weeping woman to the door. You can hear her resolve gradually steeling itself, though; she demands a signed warrant before she’ll let her go.

They don’t have one. Of course they don’t have one. They’re just cruising around looking for brown people to intimidate.

The neighbors are coming outside after hearing all the commotion. They are blowing whistles (the latest thing to sound the alarm about ICE thugs, rather like what prairie dogs do when predators are around. I should probably get a whistle, too). The woman is now yelling, threatening ICE with exposure. The cowards back down, and start retreating to their cars. Hooray for community action! Teach ICE to fear us.

One thing we all have to work on is how to get that community support, beyond just blowing whistles. During this event, the homeowner is on the phone, having called 911 to get help. The police dispatcher is worse than useless, advising her to simply surrender the woman — they’re not there to defend every citizen, just the white English-speaking ones, and that is contemptible. Our police need to learn a lesson from Philadelphia.

Philadelphia sheriff Rochelle Bilal recently made a declaration.

Yes! That’s what I want our police to do — just shut down this invasion of armed thugs who are harrassing, detaining, and killing the citizens they are supposed to serve and protect.

I don’t know what I’d do in a similar situation. I know for sure I’d be terrified — my house has a lot of windows, and seeing those men standing around, peering through windows in their tactical gear, reminds me of scenes from a horror movie. I think I’d make sure all the doors were locked and tell them to go away, but then, we all say we’d have defended Anne Frank from the Gestapo, but apparently lots of people didn’t. I might try calling the local sheriff’s office, but this is rural America, and I don’t know what the odds are that they would actually help rather than join the besiegers.

I didn’t learn what to do from this one example. I have learned that many of us are living in a state of fear and uncertainty, just the way MAGA wants us.