Guess who’s considering running for governor of Minnesota?

MAGA election conspiracy theorist and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell has eyes on what could be his next gig. And it isn’t selling pillows.

Lindell on Monday teased a run for Minnesota governor, a race that could see him face off against popular incumbent Tim Walz, who is said to be sizing up a third term in the post.

“I live here in Minnesota,” Lindell said of his potential opponent. “Everywhere I go, no one wants Tim Walz. They don’t.”

Everywhere I go, we all laugh at Mike Lindell. I suspect there might be some consistent differences in the company we run with.

I hope he does run, though. He’ll siphon off money from anyone who is a competitor to the DFL candidate for the position.

Teen Vogue is the surprising vanguard. Here’s an article by a former Democratic staffer who has some strong criticisms of the Democratic leadership.

I walked away from my job as a writer for Senator Chuck Schumer after realizing the cost wasn’t just political fatigue — it was my values and mental health. I spent a year on Capitol Hill in 2019 crafting messages for Senate Democrats. Every day, I wrote essays that trapped me between the progressive principles I held and centrist compromises that felt like betrayals. Eventually, the disconnect between my ideals and the institution I served became impossible to ignore. Leaving my job in the Democratic Party wasn’t just a career move; it was survival.

This summary hits the nail on the head.

In recent years, Democrats like Newsom and Schumer have embraced centrist, incremental approaches to issues that are fundamentally about humanity and dignity. That disconnect continues to push young voters away. But it doesn’t stop with trans rights. Whether it’s watered-down climate policies or half-measures on student debt and health care, the Democratic Party’s reluctance to take bold, unapologetic stances clashes with what young people expect from a so-called progressive movement. To be clear, we’re not asking for perfection — we’re demanding urgency, empathy, and courage. Instead, we’re met with compromises on core values, as if basic rights are up for negotiation. For a generation facing existential crises, that’s not leadership — it’s alienation.

Young voters have historically trusted Democrats to work against outdated policies and toward systemic change. But the shift in party dynamics has left many young voters increasingly disaffected by politics and disconnected from a party that once felt aligned with our values. Reflecting on my time on Capitol Hill, I notice this rupture more than ever.

Resign, Schumer.

I should read more Teen Vogue.

This video from Some More News has some good suggestions about what how to resist a fascist takeover. One little suggestion I want to bring up is that the video recommends a pamphlet, the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a book published by the US government during WWII to provide ideas for the citizens living under the Nazi regime. Suddenly, the old is new again!

The book first talks about how to motivate citizens to become subtle saboteurs. Spread the news around!

To incite the citizen to the active practice of simple sabotage and to keep him practicing that sabotage over sustained periods is a special problem.

Simple sabotage is often an act which the citizen performs according to his own initiative and inclination. Acts of destruction do not bring him any personal gain and may be completely foreign to his habitually conservationist attitude toward materials and tools. Purposeful stupidity is contrary to human nature. He frequently needs pressure, stimulation or assurance, and information and suggestions regarding feasible methods of simple sabotage.

(1) Personal Motives

(a) The ordinary citizen very probably has no immediate personal motive for committing simple sabotage. Instead, he must be made to anticipate indirect personal gain, such as might come with enemy evacuation or destruction of the ruling government group. Gains should be stated as specifically as possible for the area addressed: simple sabotage will hasten the day when Commissioner X and his deputies Y and Z will be thrown out, when particularly obnoxious decrees and restrictions will be abolished, when food will arrive, and so on. Abstract verbalizations about personal liberty, freedom of the press, and so on, will not be convincing in most parts of the world. In many areas they will not even be comprehensible.

(b) Since the effect of his own acts is limited, the saboteur may become discouraged unless he feels that he is a member of a large, though unseen, group of saboteurs operating against the enemy or the government of his own country and elsewhere. This can be conveyed indirectly: suggestions which he reads and hears can include observations that a particular technique has been successful in this or that district. Even if the technique is not applicable to his surroundings, another’s success will encourage him to attempt similar acts. It also can be conveyed directly: statements praising the effectiveness of simple sabotage can be contrived which will be published by white radio, freedom stations, and the subversive press. Estimates of the proportion of the population engaged in sabotage can be disseminated. Instances of successful sabotage already are being broadcast by white radio and freedom stations, and this should be continued and expanded where compatible with security.

(c) More important than (a) or (b) would be to create a situation in which the citizen-saboteur acquires a sense of responsibility and begins to educate others in simple sabotage.

Then the fun stuff. There are many little ideas about how to screw up the smooth operation of factories, but reading it first made me think of annoying high school pranks. One of the unfortunate side-effects of disseminating this information is you can expect to see more exploding plumbing in the toilets of your local public schools.

(1) Ruin warehouse stock by setting the automatic sprinkler system to work. You can do this by tapping the sprinkler heads sharply with a hammer or by holding a match under them.

(2) Forget to provide paper in toilets; put tightly rolled paper, hair, and other obstructions in the W. C. Saturate a sponge with a thick starch or sugar solution. Squeeze it tightly into a ball, wrap it with string, and dry. Remove the string when fully dried. The sponge will be in the form of a tight hard ball. Flush down a

W. C. or otherwise introduce into a sewer line. The sponge will gradually expand to its normal size and plug the sewage system.

(3) Put a coin beneath a bulb in a public building during the daytime, so that fuses will blow out when lights are turned on at night. The fuses themselves may be rendered ineffective by putting a coin behind them or loading them with heavy wire. Then a short-circuit may either start a fire, damage transformers, or blow out a central fuse which will interrupt distribution of electricity to a large area.

(4) Jam paper, bits of wood, hairpins, and anything else that will fit, into the locks of all unguarded entrances to public buildings.

Somebody needs to print out copies of this manual and hand them out at the protests at Tesla factories and sales rooms. We need to understand that Tesla and Elon Musk are the enemy. Likewise, Trump’s hotels need to be brought down. I notice that the manual has had 77,604 downlads in the last 30 days. Get yours before the government shuts it down!

I can’t really use it, though. I’m at one of the institutions targeted for destruction by the MAGA regime, and what I need is information on how to reinforce the spines of our administrators, and how to support a university under siege.

We’re all aware that the Secret Police swept in and sent a Tufts graduate student to a concentration camp in Louisiana. They also detained Mahmoud Khalil from Columbia University (we also know that Columbia is chickenshit).

Now it’s the University of Minnesota’s turn.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials Thursday detained a University of Minnesota graduate student at an off-campus residence, according to an email to students and staff from the University of Minnesota.

We here at the University of Minnesota learned about this through an email message sent out by the administration.

Dear students, faculty and staff,

We are writing to inform you about a deeply concerning situation involving one of our international graduate students at the University of Minnesota.

We learned that, on March 27 at an off-campus residence, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials detained a graduate student enrolled on our Twin Cities campus. We are actively working to gather more details about this incident.

In cases like this, the University takes steps to ensure students are connected to internal resources and support, such as Student Legal Service and International Student and Scholar Services.

The University had no prior knowledge of this incident and did not share any information with federal authorities before it occurred.

It is important to note that our campus departments of public safety, including UMPD, do not enforce federal immigration laws, and our officers do not inquire about an individual’s immigration status. Their focus remains on public safety, fostering trust and maintaining strong relationships across the University community.

As we work to gather more information, please know the University has information, resources and FAQs about federal immigration policies available on the Rapid Response website.

We understand how distressing this news may be for members of our University community. If you or someone you know needs mental health support during this time, please visit mentalhealth.umn.edu, which connects you to resources across all five campuses.

Rebecca Cunningham
President

Calvin Phillips
Vice President for Student Affairs

Mercedes Ramírez Fernández
Vice President for Equity and Diversity

They’re trying to gather more information, but the primary purpose of this email was to say “we didn’t do anything, it’s not our fault!” I’d like to know what the university is preparing to do in response, and how they intend to stop future abductions of our students by the criminals running ICE and DHS. Because that’s what’s happening: the federal government is trying to intimidate our universities by random kidnapping of our students, and we need to take strong positive action to prevent it.

It doesn’t help that the University of Michigan and Harvard, along with many others, have been in a mad scramble to surrender to the totalitarians.

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Here’s a handy list of students who have been targeted for harassment and deportation. See if you can tell what they all have in common.

Only two months into Trump’s reign, and three prominent Yale professors depart for a Canadian university. These professors started planning to leave the country back in November, which is amazing — they negotiated salaries and startup and facilities, and the University of Toronto cleared everything and made room and got them positions in only two months? That’s moving at light speed for a university.

Unfortunately the part of the story that won’t make the news is all the faculty who want to get out but can’t. Someone like me, who has a good reputation as a teacher, is a dime-a-dozen nobody; Canada has swarms of people who are excellent teachers, and plenty of people who are great researchers, so most of the professors in the US aren’t going to be able to emigrate (I’m also near the end of my career, so there’d be no point to hiring me.) A lucky few are going to be able to escape, and they’re going to have to move fast, before the pipeline is clogged.

And yeah, if I were 20 years younger I’d be putting an application package together, and mailing them off to every college in Canada. Does the Northwest Territories have any openings? I’d take it. A shack on King William Island, with a population of auks needing biology training? Sign me up.

We now have excerpts from that Signal chat, where a reporter was accidentally included as they discussed bombing the Houthis in Yemen.

Jesus fucking christ.

Emojis? Cheering while they gloat about killing people? I know there are a lot of things wrong with this colossal fuckup, but please…can our military leaders take their own actions seriously? If you’re bombing someone, it is not an occasion for joy and laughter, it’s a catastrophe, a failure of policy that has led to violence. It may sometimes be necessary, but it’s also regrettable.

Others have noticed that these people are unqualified amateurs, putting on a clown show.

Zachary B. Wolf of CNN noted that “Trump intentionally hired amateurs for top jobs. This is their most dramatic blunder.” Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) told Brian Tyler Cohen: “My first reaction… was ‘what absolute clowns.’ Total amateur hour, reckless, dangerous…. [T]his is what happens when you have basically Fox News personalities cosplaying as government officials.” Foreign policy scholar Timothy Snyder posted: “These guys inherited one of the most functional state apparatus in the history of the world and they are inhabiting it like a crack house.”

Four more years of this. Great.

Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and Panama are even more relieved that the American war machine is run by idiots and incompetents. When they make war plans, they invite random journalists to the meeting…which is also held over a commercial app rather than all those secret channels the government controls. The editor of the Atlantic got advance notice about a recent bombing run over Yemen.

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

Is it? Is it, really?

It’s clear the military is being controlled by the gang who can’t shoot straight. My questions are: are they going to repeat this behavior next time they want to blow something up? Are they going to pay attention when the Pentagon tells them to not use that app? Will the Democrats be as persistent in hounding these baboons as the Republicans were about Hillary’s Emails?

And, was Pete Hegseth sober at this badly mismanaged meeting?

NASA’s budget is getting slashed.

NASA is terminating $420 million in contracts the agency says are redundant or “misaligned” with its core priorities, but has provided few details about what is being cut.

In a statement to SpaceNews late March 24, NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens confirmed a post by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that NASA had terminated about $420 million in “unneeded” contracts.

The question I have is…how much of that $420 million in contracts was going to SpaceX, which is run by Elon Musk, who is also running DOGE?

Much corruption, so respect.

We have two kinds of Democrats in the party, and I want to see more of the JB Pritzker kind.

He gave a great speech.

Donald Trump cannot take anything from us that we don’t choose to give him. He and his henchmen don’t want people to realize that. But now is the time for us to wake up. The good news is every day I’m seeing more and more people across this country realize that they don’t want to give him much at all.

The question I get asked most right now is, “So what can I do? What can I do?” And I’m going to be blunt about this. Never before in my life have I called for mass activism, but this is the moment. Take to the streets, protest, show up at town halls. Jam the phone lines in Congress, 202-224-3121, and afford not a moment of peace to any elected representatives who are aiding and abetting Musk and Trump’s illegal power grab. This is not a drill, folks. This is the real thing.

Seize every megaphone you have. Go online and make a donation to the legal funds fighting Trump, to HRC, and to the candidates for Congress that vow to take this country backward. And don’t limit your voice to the traditional political channels. Be like Lucy Welch. When JD Vance went to vacation at the Sugarbush Resort in Warren, Vermont, Lucy, who writes the Sugarbush Daily Snow Report, used her report to defend her diverse and wonderful community, ending by saying, “I am using my relative platform as a snow reporter to be disruptive. What we do or don’t do matters.”

What we do and don’t do matters. It matters right now more than it ever has before. When my future grandkids look back on this moment, I want them to know that my voice was one of the loudest in the room, screaming for justice and fighting against tyranny.

And in the midst of this existential fight, this battle that seems to consume everything, well, let’s not take the soul-sucking path of sacrificing the most persecuted for that which we deem to be most popular. I know that there are transgender children right now looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for them and for their simple right to exist. Well, I am. We are. We will.

Yes! More Democrats like that!