Hate Has to Scatter When Minneapolis Arises
At the general strike.
“NUREMBERG IS COMING.” It was not so much the sign itself, black block letters on plain white cardboard, as the contrast between the sign and the man holding it: White, mustached, middle-aged, well-dressed, strolling alone on a downtown Minneapolis street.
“NUREMBERG IS COMING.” This represents not the radical, but the median view of the regular folks in Minneapolis towards our current federal government. This is the average view of the normal middle-aged guy in the office. This helps to explain a lot of things. January 23, for example. When the temperature creeps down towards -20, as it did yesterday, being outside becomes difficult. Glasses fog over into an opaque film. Ice crystals form on men’s beards and the downy, transparent hairs on women’s faces. Warm breath condenses on the scarf covering your mouth and then freezes into an ice sheet that loses its utility. Toes begin freezing the second you step outside and take hours to defrost. Even in thick gloves, hands begin freezing as soon as you withdraw them from your pockets, so that even the act of holding a sign at all requires great commitment. Thighs freeze, knees freeze, eyelids freeze, the tiny spot on your forehead that your hat can’t reach freezes. You yearn to be covered in a full-body suit made of hand warmers. I had 11 hand warmers on me yesterday, stuffed in various pockets and socks, and it was not nearly enough.
So—good day for a general strike? Good day to march outside for hours on end? Well, the question is relative. Normally, no. But if you are living in the sort of times that cause sober people to believe that Nuremberg is coming, you might make a special exception.
Was there a general strike in Minneapolis yesterday? I have no idea. That’s like asking a man in tiny sailboat in the ocean to name the exact dimensions of a hurricane. Hundreds of businesses shut down thousands of union members stayed out of work and tens of thousands of people joined the day of action against ICE. A number of people in other places remarked that this goes to show that Minnesotans are simply immune to the cold. I think not. Nobody is immune to that cold. That’ll kill you. They just had larger priorities. The famed “Minnesota Nice” attitude was repurposed on many signs into “Minnesota NOICE.” Others carried, simply, flattened packages of ICE NO MOR brand Ice Melt, unadorned with anything else. ICE is a plague, yes, and a deadly one, but the city stood up to declare: We know how to deal with you.
By 9 a.m. Friday, people were trickling off the light rail and tottering their way down a frozen sidewalk to take their place across from the Whipple Building where ICE is headquartered. The protest area there is a blank canvas for expression. Two men yesterday morning had megaphones. One was somberly reciting the text of the Declaration of Independence. The other was screaming “Fuck you, pussy bitch!” at the agents’ SUVs as they drove past. All bases were covered.
An hour later, one stop away at the Minneapolis airport, hundreds and then thousands of people streamed into Terminal 1 for a major protest planned by a coalition of unions. A team of police stood calmly strapping on their riot gear as the terminal filled with protesters bundling up to face the outdoors. We all filed outside and formed an enormous picket line that stretched hundreds of feet, the length of the entire terminal sidewalk. The fact that everyone was draped in heavy coats and had their faces wrapped served to emphasize that this was not a march of some faction. This was everybody. This was the people, chanting “ICE Out!” and calling on Delta and Signature Aviation to cease their cooperation with the deportation machine. Union members in yellow vests served as marshals to keep people in line. A circle of younger students locked arms and held a sit-in in the area where passengers walked in to catch their flights. And something like 100 clergy members, draped in stoles over winter coats, knelt down in the road outside the terminal and were arrested.
Nuremberg is coming, and god is on our side.
By 1:30 that afternoon, thousands and thousands of locals—some who had already been to the airport and back—were making their way to The Commons, a large park in downtown Minneapolis, set amid high-rise towers and the gleaming, angular stadium where the Minnesota Vikings play. People risked frostbite to hold up signs and upside-down American flags attached to hockey sticks. Somewhere in the middle of the park was a stage, and a speaker, but due to the gentle hills in the park, neither I nor at least half of the people there could see any of that.
It didn’t matter. The importance of all of those people in that park on that frigid day was not the speeches nor the signs nor even the enormous march they were about to make through the urban canyons of Minneapolis. Instead, I think, it was their own manifestation of a way of being that is different from the fear, division, hostility, and revenge that ICE embodies. That park was instead a place of love, of unity, of openness, of commonality. People wandered around passing out free hand warmers and snacks. People made way for one another, politely. People there were, collectively, willing to inconvenience themselves, to undertake some level of sacrifice, in order to help their neighbors who were in even greater need. Yes, I will take off work, and I will close my business, and I will follow around federal agents in my car, and I will freeze my ass off in to protest on the coldest day of the year, because the outrages being perpetrated against my neighbors is important enough to warrant that. That is what the day represented. As much as we dream of general strikes as the magical solution to our biggest problems, there will always be a morning after the general strike, and the problems will still be there. What will eventually grind those problems down is the sustained determination of the people to sacrifice for one another.
In the middle of the park, amid knots of protesters, was a table piled with clothes. A handwritten sign read, “Free Hats + Gloves + Scarves + Jackets.” You could have wandered into that park naked and found yourself an entire winter outfit, along with hand warmers and hot chocolate, before you died of exposure. I don’t know who brought all that stuff out there. People brought it, for other people. That’s what I saw in Minneapolis. The extended hand of niceness, and the way that it can form a protective fist, when it needs to.
The march was big. It was officially announced as 50,000 people. Privately, some organizers said it was more like 100,000. I can only tell you it was big. The march ended at the Target Center, the downtown basketball arena, which organizers had secured at the last minute, when it became clear just how brutal the weather was going to be that day. A great DJ in a head-to-toe orange snow suit and fur hat mixed Kendrick Lamar with “Dancing Queen” as people filed in slowly, eventually filling the stadium’s entire lower level. It was kind of neat to see “ICE OUT OF MINNESOTA” displayed as the message on the huge overhead screen at an NBA stadium, in the place that normally shows Anthony Edwards dunk highlights. In the video crawl around the arena normally reserved for local ads and announcements, there was a rotating series of handpicked, appropriate slogans: “‘Resistance to tyranny is service to God.’ - James Madison.”
There was a benediction by a Native American professor, and music, and a speech by an imam, and another by a Christian pastor, and more by union leaders. It was, I realized, a tableau of the city of Minneapolis itself, and of the ethos that the entire day was putting forward. It was a suggestion of a way that America could be, a way better than what we are doing now. Here they say “Minnesota nice” and in New Orleans they say “Be nice or leave!” and in every other city they say their own variety of this, and all of it is just a way of saying that we can be open rather than closed, that we can welcome neighbors rather than despising them, and that we can, if necessary, fight to be nice just as hard as others can fight to be mean.
“To our migrant community,” the imam said, “You are not garbage. You are gorgeous. You are not foreign. You are familiar. You are not far away. You are our future.”
All types of people live up here, in this frozen city. Minnesota, for some reason! The most vibrant Somali community in America. One of the richest traditions of organized labor in America. The cradle of our generation’s racial justice movement. All here. To visit here is to be impressed by how many people in this city are willing to rise up to protect it from those who see all of its characteristics as a threat, rather than as a blessing.
This is a city full of socialists. This was a general strike organized with clear-eyed political and economic goals. But, I must admit, it was the religious man, the preacher—B. Charvez Russell, of Minneapolis’s Greater Friendship Missionary Baptist Church—that summed up the feeling of January 23 most effectively.
“This is not a call to violence,” he thundered from the podium in the middle of that arena. “But it is a declaration that when god moves, there is no room for the enemies.”
“When god rises, hate has to scatter.”
“When god rises, fear has to scatter.”
“Lies have to scatter!”
“Injustice has to scatter!”
“Division has to scatter!”
“Oppression has to scatter!” “
“Families being intimidated has to scatter!”
“Children being traumatized has to scatter!”
“Workers and labor being labeled as enemies and threats, all of those have to scatter!
“Renaming an invasion as protection has to scatter—when god arises!”
Also
Previously: Cold City, Hot Heart.
Find out how to support the people of Minnesota here.
It is your paid subscriptions and donations that enable me to do this reporting. If you’d like to support How Things Work in 2026, take a quick second to become a paid subscriber today. Thank you all for reading.
Godspeed, brother. Thank you for the humanity.
First to the MAGA commenters: ICE has utterly shredded its credibility by lying so much. But no one really objects to catching actual criminals, they object to the spectacles of fascist brutality and the failure to provide a path to citizenship to people who were de facto brought into the country (by Republicans even more than corporate Democrats) to be inexpensive labor. If ICE pepper-sprayed or shot in the face one white employer of undocumented workers for every Latino, they could easily dry up the demand for these workers and wipe out half the agricultural sector of Minnesota.
To Hamilton: Thank you so much for this excellent reporting! But I do have a comment/question and wonder if you might like to follow it up sometime. I've written to you in these comments or directly a couple of times, urging you to reconsider your hostility to the religious left. Basically I have said if we want successful coalitions we very often need religious left and labor working together with synergy at the grass-roots organizing and messaging levels. To me this Minneapolis organizing is an example of what I was driving at. It's not that I read the past hostility/condescension from you today--the opposite is true!-- it's that I wonder if your time in Minnesota has led you to rethink anything at more generalizable levels. Of course a "Minnesota" model wouldn't work the same everywhere... but that was part of my point before, where does it work and what can we do (and not do) to make it more likely to work in more places?