Modeling resistance in Minneapolis
Somehow, the longest January on record is over. February begins with hope because the citizens of Minnesota—my neighbors, my friends—have modeled how to resist the violence the Trump administration is inflicting on American citizens. Through collective action, a commitment to documenting the violent actions of DHS, massive protests, and extensive organic mutual aid networks, we've written new narratives for how to fight back.
Earlier this week I was in New York for a work trip, where I had powerful conversations with smart people, reveled in the quaint domestic crisis of a burst pipe, and learned to punch. I felt normal for the first time in a month. Less than 24 hours back in Minneapolis, I heard the sounds of nearby terror: car horns and helicopters.
There is no new Bruce Springsteen song this week, but DHS still has thousands of federal agents in Minnesota, abducting our neighbors and terrorizing our neighborhoods. Every adult I know, whether they are actively political or not, is working together to keep our city and our friends safe. Even people I've previously referred to as "cake-eaters" contribute, deliver food, and make the rounds for neighborhood and school patrol. We're all exhausted, and we need your help. The elections are not til November, and this administration has years to go, and the future is not set in stone.
To contribute, wherever you are in the world, check out the links on Stand with Minnesota.
Nine ways to begin your own resistance
Some other actions Americans from outside of Minnesota can take to start building networks and stop DHS in your area:
- Keep calling your reps and senators, especially as the arguments over DHS funding continue.
- Talk to your friends and colleagues about the actions in Minnesota. Ask them what they've heard and where they're getting their info. If they're only getting news from dubious sources, direct them toward high-quality local news sources like Minnesota Public Radio or the Minnesota Star Tribune.
- Talk to your neighbors. Get to know the people in your building and the small businesses in your neighborhood. If you're a parent, start understanding how you can help your child's classmates. Take notes from the Minnesotans who accompany kids to school. Note who might need help if DHS arrives.
- Be social. Eat in restaurants, among people. Go shopping in stores, among people. Stop ordering delivery and creating another underpaid underclass of service workers. Stop ordering Amazon and shop locally if you can.
- Keep posting your original reactions to the news in your social media channels, especially if you are using your own words, and especially if they are in text. Social listening remains a leading indicator of public opinion, and text data (especially in LinkedIn, Substack, X, and Reddit) is overvalued in corporate social decision-making. One mention per newsletter or longer post adds up to a lot of awareness.
- Therapy is practice for protest. Remember that there is no wrong way to protest, and being loud works. It's okay to be performative. It's okay to speak up against injustice, and it's especially necessary if you are a white adult in a position of power. If you consistently vocalize your thoughts, you won't get the exact words out every time. But keep practicing. Putting language to your feelings will improve your mental health (aka the whole point of talk therapy).
- Have some grace and compassion. Everyone in Minnesota is grieving, for our neighbors, and for the loss of our ideals. People are hurting and need to express their emotions. Too much social media will make a human believe we are all failing some nonexistent etiquette standard when we speak or write or interact online. People who are visibly, understandably upset are deemed "trauma dumping" or "cringe." Avoid judging them and listen.
- If you have a friend with a 3D printer, encourage them to start printing some whistles.
- It's a lot cooler to speak up than to stay silent. If you have the means and position to speak up—especially if you are a white American with immigrant ancestors—don't assume that everyone in your audience knows your position on the violence from DHS. When you're committed to speaking out, you are allowed to articulate your position, preferably with specifics, every time you write or speak with an audience. Collective action is not intellectual property to be coddled and protected; it is the belief that when people understand and converse with each other, we can accomplish more than through unnecessarily limiting expression.
Find your angle: Minnesota-related content for your curated links, no matter what you cover
What's happening in Minneapolis has affected everyone in the city, and even if you don't typically write about "politics," the attack on American freedoms in Minnesota transcends partisan politics. A child whose school bus is followed by ICE agents or whose neighborhood is tear-gassed does not have a political agenda. What to some outside the Cities reads as a "political" action is part of our environment, an aspect of our neighborhoods, inextricable from our commutes and our errands.
And yet, our resistance is underrepresented and unacknowledged in many online influencer spaces, especially those of the national business/culture/tech/media variety. Ground-breaking work is being made here, right now, under immense pressure—and it's being passed over or ignored.
If you curate links for a newsletter, especially a business newsletter, here's a selection of links that might be of interest to your audience. Resist fascism through good linkage.
Marketing and advertising: Did you know Minneapolis is one of the largest U.S. advertising and media markets outside of New York, LA, and Chicago? We punch above our weight, population-wise, in ad buys. And a lot of the leaders in advertising in Minnesota are... writing about resistance. Social media thought leaders who are not typically politically oriented are writing about resistance: Greg Swan wrote about our 1,000-person SOS signal; Arik Hanson is pissed at Hootsuite; Tim Brunelle played drums for peace.
Design and creativity: Rockstar designer and close friend Abby Haddican created Times New Resistance, a riff on the Trump administration's favorite font. Local printshop Burlesque made some clever resistance merch, and you can support their printing fund. Concert poster printers Landland are also contributing excellent work.
Arts and culture: The Minnesota arts community, whose vibrance and idealism keep me rooted in this city, are no slouches in the way of protest. MPLSArt published an overview of local artistic resistance; MspMag reported on anti-ICE art and iconography; the cool folks at Racket posted their take on the art of resistance; and MPR covers the steps arts organizations are taking to keep patrons and artists safe.
Small business: I've never been prouder to be a Minnesota-based small business owner. Read about what small businesses in Minneapolis are doing to support resistance efforts in the New York Times and the Star Tribune (both gift links).
The economy, more generally: Despite our best efforts, ICE raids are still crushing the local economy, also per the New York Times and the Star Tribune.
The Creator Economy: Keep an eye on Georgia Fort, an independent journalist arrested for covering protests in Minnesota. Check out this profile in Ebony magazine, or follow Fort directly.
The work of journalism and media literacy: Minnesota's resistance is successful because we have a robust media market and high literacy across the board. If you're one of those people for whom "media literacy" is a recent discovery, local superstar journalist Jon Collins breaks down exactly what works about our local news ecosystem in Nieman Reports. The Associated Press talked with The Star Tribune to detail exactly how newsroom collaboration works during crisis, and Rachel Karten's Link In Bio describes how Minnesota Public Radio is using social media to broaden their audience.
Social movements and local history: It's not only Christian "neighborism" or Scandinavian collectivism guiding Minnesota organizers. A national media outlet—and USA Today, nonetheless!—finally examined the American Indian Movement's influence on Minneapolis organizing. Today the New York Times nodded to the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers in our methodology of organized resistance. A good portion of us believe that no one is illegal on stolen land, and that awareness originates in AIM, and the community support network it established in the Twin Cities.
Feminism and community activism: The first thing I noticed about the Minnesota resistance, back when it was a bunch of casual conversations between friends, was that it reminded me of feminist consciousness-raising circles. I was pleased to see the connection between resistance and caregiving outlined in The 19th (an outlet that's picked up steam and I'll be following regularly from now on).
The scale of nonviolent protest: If you're only seeing videos of the most disruptive protests on social channels, here's a great primer, again via the Strib, on what's actually happening on the streets regarding observation and obstruction.
If you can't find anything to love and share above, check out former media reporter David Brauer's Bluesky feed, the alt-weekly vibes at RacketMN, RadioK.org, and The Salt Cure fund.
Don't let the cynics or the jerks win
On a quiet summer night in 2021 or 2022, when many remained cautious about socializing inside, I walked with a friend around northeast Minneapolis. A small cadre of smokers lingered on the patio outside the 331 Club, a dive bar and music venue more in the Brooklyn indie tradition than the neighborhood's more stereotypically blue-collar bars.
A dog-walker and his Doberman Pinscher had stopped on the sidewalk, dressed in an unusually formal outfit, to chat with the smokers on the patio. As we approached, it became clear that he was wearing not a suit, but a uniform: he was fully dressed as a German SS officer.
My friend and I stopped, both in light shock. "Don't worry!" one of the smokers said, "He's just in costume!" The Nazi cosplayer continued chatting with the patio smokers, and we walked briskly by. I had an urge to spit and shriek, but both my shock and his dog dissuaded me. One of us may have commented, "Fucken creep" as soon as we were out of biting range, but that's an apocryphal memory. Mostly it felt like when a stranger groped my chest in broad daylight: I should have screamed, but I didn't.
I had thought the bars hosting World War II German nostalgia nights stopped their reenactments in 2020. I had thought we had all learned our lessons, that we were done romanticizing this shit. I had thought anyone dressed as an SS officer would surely be socially ostracized, not making friendly chitchat with the smokers at the 331.
My friend who also saw the Nazi moved from the city within months. For me, the memory stuck around like the months of barbed wire in south Minneapolis: it was a military-industrial reminder of how much hadn't changed. The evil hadn't dissipated, and I grew more cynical about the progressive values of my adopted home city.
Over the years, as I read about my city being described as a lawless wasteland in conservative and "centrist" media, I thought about the Nazi I saw in Northeast. When Trump was reelected and I knew we'd be targeted again, I figured that all the secret cosplaying Nazis would come out of hiding and we'd be overwhelmed.
Until last month when I learned I couldn't have been farther from the mark. That Minneapolis has worked together, as hard as we can, to protect our neighbors and keep our city safe. That the Discord groups our blocks launched in 2020 transformed into cells of active resistance.
The current state of social media, no matter which platform you're on, may make you believe that the world is full of cosplaying Nazis waiting to come out of hiding. Depending on your media diet or your family or your coworkers, you may believe that you're powerless in the face of current events. You may think that you're the anomaly, and that everyone else in the country supports an oppressive, racist, authoritarian regime.
If you're down that rabbit hole, remind yourself that Doberman Pinschers can be very good dogs. Get off the internet and talk to other people. Talk to your neighbors, your colleagues, your mentors, and your friends. Build your communities. Media, social and otherwise, currently overrepresents harsh right-wing rhetoric (aka, Nazi cosplay), compared with what you'll find most Americans believe and value. Start talking, keep responding, and resist the urge to give in. Even though, yes, the state of the world is currently more exhausting than many of us ever expected it to be, hate is not a foregone conclusion.
In Minnesota, because the invasion has not stopped, we are exhausted, we are emotional, we are anxious, but we still resist.
We resist, each in our own way,
because children are being terrorized
because we value humanity
because we believe in fair trials and in a functioning rule of law
because we don't believe in torture
because we want to shed systemic racism
because we value facts over lies
because we value action over analysis
because we embrace our thriving local media ecosystem
because we know how to read
because don't tread on me
because no, we do not deserve this
because the violence is inescapable and abductions are all over the roads
because desiring a working legal system is not a political agenda
because it's not stopping
because we believe that diversity makes our culture better
because we already voted for our values, over and over again, and it didn't matter
because we voted to protect our neighbors
because we voted for Ilhan Omar
because we took First Amendment law from Jane Kirtley
because we lost our ideals
because you can't just kidnap people
because the distress is terrible for the economy and our public health
because let's talk about "fraud," shall we?
because our ancestors fought in the revolutionary war
because our ancestors left us in karmic debt
because our ancestors were immigrants
because our friends are immigrants
because our friends are Anishinaabe
because our friends are Dakota
because our friends are transplants from less welcoming states and cities
because we love our home
because the Minnesota Timberwolves come through in the clutch
because autocracy can't possibly be the future
because we know how to shake off a winter and after winter must come spring
because we have done it before and we understand resilience
because we need to keep each other safe.
The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, an independent content strategy consultant.
Brought to you by: Ghost publishing system
Did you read? is the assorted content at the very bottom of the email. Cultural recommendations, off-kilter thoughts, and quotes from foundational works of media theory we first read in college—all fair game for this section.
In my brief dalliances with the right-wing argument that for one reason or another, Minnesota deserves to be punished and traumatized, I have been thinking of this classic from my childhood. If you live through this with me, I swear that I will die for you.
