Speaker 1: It is Thursday, January twenty ninth, twenty twenty six. And
if you're in the Twin Cities right now, you you
know this feeling in the air.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's unmistakable.
Speaker 1: It's that deep, bone cracking Minnesota cold, the kind that
usually forces everyone indoors.
Speaker 2: Right, you huddle up, you complain about the heating bill,
and you eat for spring exactly.
Speaker 1: But if you were to walk down say Lake Street
or Portland Avenue in Minneapolis right now, the silence you'd
find isn't it's not just about the winter. It's heavier.
Speaker 2: It's so much heavier than that is the sound of
a city holding its breath.
Speaker 1: Holding its breath, That's a good way to put it,
or maybe like a city under siege.
Speaker 2: I was going to use that exact word, siege.
Speaker 1: Okay, siege is a pretty loaded word, though. I mean,
we're talking about a major American metropolitan area, not a
medieval fortress. Is that hyperbole or are we actually seeing
something that justifies that kind of language.
Speaker 2: I wish I were being hydrobolic, I really do, But
we're not using that term lightly. We've been looking at
the reports coming out of Minnesota for weeks. But yeah,
especially focusing on the escalation. Just in the last few days,
and the entire visual landscape of the city has fundamentally changed.
The streets are lined not just with snowbanks, you know,
but with these unmarked SUVs everywhere. Everywhere. You have men
in heavy tactical gear, full face masks, carrying military great rifles,
just standing on corners where people usually wait for the
Metro transit bus.
Speaker 1: And right in the middle of all that hardware, all
that gray and black tactical gear against the white snow,
there's a vigial growing. Right now as we speak, there
is a gathering for Alex Prey. He was killed just
days ago on Saturday, January twenty fourth, And looking at
the footage from the ground, the contrast is it's just jarring.
Speaker 2: It's a collision of two completely different realities.
Speaker 1: Really is. You have this raw human outpouring of grief,
candles flickering in the wind, laminated photos, families crying, and
it is literally surrounded by this rigid, faceless federal presence.
Speaker 2: On one side, you have the Department of Homeland Security
calling this Operation Metro Surge. They frame it as this
critical mission to restore safety in.
Speaker 1: Order and on the other side.
Speaker 2: On the other you have local residents, business owners, city
officials all saying this isn't safety, this is terror.
Speaker 1: So welcome to thrilling Threads. This is the show where
we don't just read the headlines. We pull out those
loose ends until the whole story starts to unravel. We
are going to try to make sense of the chaos
in the North Star State. I'm your host, and with me,
as always, is our resident expert to help us map
this all out.
Speaker 2: Glad to be here, and map is exactly the right word,
because the geography of Minneapolis has effectively been rewritten in
the last month. We need to navigate a very messy,
very bloody timeline today we do.
Speaker 1: Our mission today is to look at this breakdown. We're
not just looking at what the shootings, the arrests, the
press conferences. We are looking at the why. We're looking
at the massive constitutional clash that's happening between the White
House and local leaders and the human cost of all
that friction.
Speaker 2: We had a lot to get through. We're going to
break down the launch of Operation Metro Search, what it
actually is versus how it was sold to the public.
Speaker 1: Then we'll look at the tragic deaths of Renee Good
and Alex Pray and the wildly conflicting narratives surrounding them.
Speaker 2: We'll also have to discuss the massive Day of Truth
and Freedom strike that happened on the twenty third.
Speaker 1: And finally, the legal battle, the fight over who actually
controls the streets of an American city.
Speaker 2: It's a huge question, it is.
Speaker 1: So let's start at the beginning, or at least the
beginning of this specific chapter. What exactly is Operation Metro.
Speaker 2: Sarch Well, technically, the operation began rolling out in December
of twenty twenty five. It's a massive initiative and it's
led by the Department of Homeland Security.
Speaker 1: And it's crucial to understand who is at the helm here.
Speaker 2: Yes, Secretary Christi nom Right.
Speaker 1: The former governor of South Dakota exactly, And.
Speaker 2: If you followed her political career as governor, you know
she isn't exactly known for a subtle, soft touch approach
to policy. She built her brand on being aggressively tough
on crime and prioritizing border security above all else.
Speaker 1: And she's bringing that specific, very aggressive brand of enforcement
to the DHS.
Speaker 2: She is, it's her signature.
Speaker 1: So what's the official line. If I'm sitting in Washington,
DC and I read the press release, what is the
elevator pitch for this operation?
Speaker 2: Success? Unmitigated resounding success, that's the pitch. Okay, if you
look at the statements coming from Secretary Nomes office, they
frame this as a major victory for the rule of law.
They cite thousands of arrests connected to immigration activity.
Speaker 1: So the narrative their building is that the Twin Cities
had become this what lawless hub of criminality.
Speaker 2: Ecisely, and that Metro Surge is the vacuum cleaner that's
finally sucking up the mess.
Speaker 1: I want to zoom in on how they presented this
success because the presentation itself, it tells us a lot
about the mindset. We have reports describing a press conference
at the Whipple Building. Now, for those who don't know,
the Whipple Buil isn't just some office park. It's this
massive federal facility at Fort Snelling. It's imposing, it's.
Speaker 2: Designed to project power, and the visual rhetoric at that
press conference was fascinating and frankly disturbing to a lot
of legal experts. What do you mean you have top
us immigration officers standing there looking very serious, flanking these
large projection screens, and they're just clicking through a slide
deck like a.
Speaker 1: Corporate quarterly review, but for arresting people.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what it felt like. And one of the
slides was titled, or at least the presenters described it
as the worst of the worst. These were supposed to
be the most dangerous criminals they were rounding up.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they're showing photos of known terrorists, convicted murderers.
What are we seeing on the screen?
Speaker 2: That's the implication, right that these are the people you
should be terrified of. But here's the thing about the
photos they showed. What's that They showed faces mugshots. Effectively,
they listed the country of our origin next to each
face they listed in the late defense, but there was
one glaring omission.
Speaker 1: Let me guess, go ahead.
Speaker 2: Names There were no names, dingo, no name, no names,
just face from cutry x accused of Why correct.
Speaker 1: Just a face, a nationality, and a crime. Okay, let's
uttack that. Why does that specific detail stick out to us?
I mean, on the surface, maybe they're protecting privacy or
is it something more calculated.
Speaker 2: I think it's something more. In a democratic legal system,
justice is inherently individual. You arrest John Doe for a
specific crime he is alleged to have committed. You don't
arrest an archetype.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: When you present a rogues gallery of anonymous faces, you
aren't accusing a specific person. You are creating a generalized
image of the threat. It strips the humanity and the
legal identity from the people on the screen.
Speaker 1: It feels like it's designed to create suspicion of a
type of person rather than a specific criminal.
Speaker 2: It absolutely is. It tells the public don't worry about
who they are, don't worry about their stories or their families.
Just know they look like this, They come from there,
and they are bad. It creates a narrative of faceless criminals.
Speaker 1: And from a community trust perspective, that has to be
a disaster.
Speaker 2: A complete disaster. How do you say to a skeptical community,
many of whom are immigrants or refugees themselves, trust us,
we are only getting the bad guys. When you won't
even say who the bad.
Speaker 1: Guys are, You're just showing pictures of people who might
look like their neighbors, their cousins, or even themselves. Exactly,
and that leads us directly to the reality on the ground,
because the success on the power point slides inside the
Whipple Building does not match the feeling on Lake.
Speaker 2: Street, not even close.
Speaker 1: We need to talk about the sheer scale of this. Yeah,
you mentioned a number earlier that just blew my mind.
Speaker 2: The ratio. This is the one statistic that really defines
the current moment in Minneapolis. We are looking at a
deployment of roughly three thousand federal agents.
Speaker 1: Three thousand in one mid sized American city.
Speaker 2: Let me put that in perspective for you. Please, That
outnumbers the actual sworn officers of the Minneapolis Police Department
by five to one.
Speaker 1: Five to one. Wait, hold on, let's just process that.
For every one local cop, the beat cop, who might
know the neighborhood, who knows which bakery has the best coffee,
who might know the shop owners by name, for every
one of them, there are five federal agents, correct.
Speaker 2: Five.
Speaker 1: And these are not guys in standard blue uniforms walking
the beat, twirling of baton right.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. These are agents equipped for what's
known in the field as high risk interdiction.
Speaker 1: High risk interdiction. Translate that from me, what does that
look like.
Speaker 2: It means they are dressed and equipped for a raid
twenty four to seven. We're talking unmarked SUVs with tinted windows,
heavy body armor, ballistic helmets, long guns, military style rifles
slung across their chests.
Speaker 1: So the whole posture isn't community policing or keeping the peace.
Speaker 2: The posture is crowd control and suppression. It is dominance.
Residents we've seen quoted in reports have described it as
a violent occupation.
Speaker 1: Trying to imagine the physics of that. Think about it.
If you have six hundred local cops who are part
of the community's civic structure, and then you flood the
zone three thousand guys who don't answer to the mayor,
who don't answer to the chief of police, and probably
don't even know the street names.
Speaker 2: The local police stop being the authority.
Speaker 1: They become irrelevant.
Speaker 2: At best, they become a liaison office, a point of contact.
At worst, they become bystanders in their own precinct. It's
not just that they're outnumbered, it's that the entire jurisdictional
weight of the city has physically shifted. The people with
the most guns and the most numbers on the street
are not accountable to the local voters.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to the human impact the economy
of fear. Because you can't drop three thousand federal agents
into a city and not break something. The whole atmosphere changes,
it has to. We have this story from a man
named Daniel Hernandez. He owns the Colonial Market and Restaurant right.
Speaker 2: And Colonial Market isn't just a shop, it's a staple.
It's a community hub on Lake Street.
Speaker 1: But Hernandez says his business hasn't been this empty since
the height of the pandemic lockdowns.
Speaker 2: Think about that. Not since a global pandemic has he
seen his business this deserted.
Speaker 1: Now. The easy assumption, and I think this is the
assumption the DHS would want you to make, is well,
if people are hiding, they must be here illegally, they
must be afraid of getting caught.
Speaker 2: But Hernandez corrects that immediately. He says, and I'm quoting
from a report here, No, that is not correct.
Speaker 1: What's his reasoning?
Speaker 2: Then he points out that the fear isn't just among
the undocumented, it's pervasive. He says people are fearful because
they are Latinos, being targeted by IC regardless of their
legal status.
Speaker 1: He mentioned, people are afraid of being snatched from the streets.
Speaker 2: That's the exact phrasing that keeps coming up in witness statements.
Snatched when you have unmarked cars and these aggressive tactics
agents just jumping out of SUV's Legal residents and US
citizens become terrified too. Of course, imagine you're a third
generation American citizen of Latino descent. Do you want to
be the person who has to prove your citizenship while
staring down the barrel of a rifle held by a
masked agent on the sidewalk.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not. You stay home, you don't go to the market,
you don't go out to eat.
Speaker 2: You hunker down, and so the economy, the neighborhood freezes.
It's an economy built on fear.
Speaker 1: And it's not just the Latino community feeling this. We
have specific reports about the Smali community in Minnesota, which
is one of the largest in the country.
Speaker 2: A very vibrant, established community.
Speaker 1: And this has a political layer to it as well,
doesn't it.
Speaker 2: Oh, it certainly does. President Trump has been very vocal
recently specifically targeting the Minnesota Somali community with rhetoric that
many are calling xenophobic, explicitly calling for removal.
Speaker 1: And that rhetoric it's not just happening on TV or
at a rally. It translates directly into action on the ground.
Speaker 2: It does. We're seeing reports from South Minneapolis and the
Cedar Riverside neighborhood areas with vibrant Somali populations of federal
agents in unmarked cars just circling properties. There have been
at least five specific arrays of Somali immigrants recently that
have really heightened tensions.
Speaker 1: It feels targeted.
Speaker 2: It's described as feeling very targeted.
Speaker 1: There's a voice from that community. I want to highlight
a resident who's been here since nineteen ninety four. They
arrived when they were just three.
Speaker 2: Years old, so they've known no other home.
Speaker 1: None, and they said, this is my home and this
has got to stop.
Speaker 2: That's the sentiment of someone who is, for all intents
and purposes, American. They grew up here, they went to
school here, They probably cheer for the vikings, but suddenly
they're being made to feel like a foreigner and invader
in their own city.
Speaker 1: And then there's the story of whereas Mohammed This one
really struck me because it complicates the easy narrative, really does.
He's a business owner, Somali American and he voted for Trump.
Speaker 2: This is such a crucial perspective because it disrupts the
simple binary idea that this is just left versus right,
or Democrats versus Republicans. Right. Mohammed supported the President. He
says he wants to make America great, but he feels
completely betrayed and insulted by what is happening to his community.
Speaker 1: He said, I want him to change his tongue because
he doesn't know us. And then he makes this offer.
He invites the president come over here, have a tea,
and you will learn who we are.
Speaker 2: It's a pre for humanity, isn't it. He's saying, you're
emonizing us from a podium hundreds of miles away, But
if you actually sat down and had tea with us,
you'd see we're the ones building businesses, employing people, raising families.
Speaker 1: But instead of tea, they're getting federal agents and tactical gear.
That's the reality and the irony, and this is a
really dark irony, is that this whole operation is supposed
to be about public safety, that's the banner it's flying under.
But is the city actually safer?
Speaker 2: All the data and the anecdotal evidence we're seeing suggest
the exact opposite. How so it's creating a catastrophic breakdown
in public safety. We are seeing a phenomenon where residents
are now hesitant to.
Speaker 1: Call nine one one wait really, not just for reporting crimes,
but for everything.
Speaker 2: For everything, for medical emergencies or house fires, for domestic disputes. Yeah,
because there is a deep seated fear that any interaction
with the system, any official call for help, brings the
Feds to your door.
Speaker 1: That is terrifying. I mean, if my father is having
a heart attack or my kitchen catches fire, I shouldn't
have to weigh the risk of a family member getting
deported before I dial nine to one one.
Speaker 2: But that is the calculus people are being forced to
make right now in the Twin Cities and when that happens.
As any expert in policing will tell you, the currency
of law enforcement is trust.
Speaker 1: And that currency is bankrupt.
Speaker 2: It's completely bankrupt. If the community won't talk to you,
won't call you, and won't be a witness for you, you
cannot solve crimes. Real emergencies go on reported the city
becomes exponentially more dangerous for everyone, not just the immigrant communities.
Speaker 1: So we have a frozen economy, a terrified population, and
a breakdown of basic emergency services. You have this eerie
silence in the shops right, people are hiding. But physics
tells us that when you compress a population like that,
when you trap them, pressure builds, and eventually that pressure
finds a release valve.
Speaker 2: It always does.
Speaker 1: And in January, that release wasn't just a protest, it
was gunfire. We need to look at the moment the silence.
Speaker 2: Broke, Yes, we do. We need to place these shootings
in the timeline because the escalation is incredibly rapid. We're
looking at three shootings involving federal agents in just three weeks.
Speaker 1: And just for context, because context is everything here, what
does a normal year look like for the Minneapolis PD
in terms of officer involved shootings.
Speaker 2: It's a stark contrast. Last year, the Minneapolis Police Department
recovered nine hundred illegal guns from the street, They arrested
hundreds of violent offenders, and in that entire time, they
did not shoot a single person.
Speaker 1: Zero officer involves shootings. For the entire.
Speaker 2: Department in that particular context. Yes, now, in under a
month of this federal surge, federal agents have killed two
citizens on the streets of Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: Okay, that statistic alone tells a story. It speaks to
a profound difference in the rules of engagement, or maybe
in the mindset, a.
Speaker 2: Different philosophy of policing entirely.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the first incident, Renee Good. This was
on January seventh.
Speaker 2: Renee Good was thirty seven years old. She was killed
on Portland Avenue South during what was described as an
immigration enforcement operation.
Speaker 1: And immediately after she was killed, we saw two completely
different movies playing out regarding what happened. What was the
official story from the fence.
Speaker 2: The official line from IC and the DHS was that
the officer feared for his life, that classic phrasing. They
said he fired defensive shots. Vice President Vance actually stepped
into this personally.
Speaker 1: He did.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, he labeled her a domestic terrorist and fully
defended the officer's actions as heroic domestic terrorist.
Speaker 1: Let's pause on that. That is an incredibly heavy label.
What does it mean when the Vice president of the
United States uses that term for a civilian in a
street encounter.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly significant when the Vice president uses the term
domestic terrorist. That isn't just heated. That is a legal
and political categorization that effectively strips away the expectation of
due process.
Speaker 1: It changes the whole game.
Speaker 2: It moves the conversation from the world of criminal justice,
where you have rights, where there is a presumption of innocence,
to the world of national security, where you can be
treated as an enemy combatant. It's a way of signaling
to the agents on the ground and to the public
the old rules don't apply here. We are at war.
Speaker 1: And did they provide any evidence to back up that
claim that she was a terrorist?
Speaker 2: None that has been released to the public that would
support that specific, very serious classification. And the local rebuttal
was immediate and furious.
Speaker 1: This is where Mayor Jacob Fray comes in, the mayor
of Minneapolis. He saw the video of the incident, he did.
Speaker 2: And he did not mince words. He called the federal
government self defense argument bull, just.
Speaker 1: Flat out bull.
Speaker 2: That was his word.
Speaker 1: When you have the mayor of a major American city
looking at video evidence and calling the vice president's narrative bull,
you know the relationship between local and federal government has
completely fractured.
Speaker 2: It's broken and for the community. Renee Good wasn't a
terrorist or a political talking point. She was a thirty
seven year old woman left dead in the street. Her
death personalized this crisis. It wasn't just about papers or
policies anymore. It was about lethal force being used in
their neighborhoods.
Speaker 1: And that was the catalyst for the first wave of
major protests we saw earlier in the month.
Speaker 2: It was but sadly that wasn't the end of it.
We have to talk about Alex Pray.
Speaker 1: This just happened days ago, Saturday, January twenty fourth.
Speaker 2: This one is it's incredibly volatile and the wounds are
still very, very fresh. Alex Pray was also thirty seven.
He was an icy U nurse.
Speaker 1: An icy U nurse, a person whose entire job, whose
life's work is saving lives.
Speaker 2: Exactly Now, listen to the DHS version of events. Secretary
Christy Nome held a pref conference and stated that Prey
approached border patrol agents with a nine millimeters semi automatic handgun.
Speaker 1: So they're saying he was armed armed, and.
Speaker 2: They claim he reacted violently. They said he was there
to inflict maximum damage. They painted a picture of an
active shooter scenario, someone who's there specifically to kill federal agents.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's the official line, armed, violent, looking to kill. Now,
what are the witnesses on the street saying, Because usually
active shooters don't have people vouching for them as innocent bystanders.
Speaker 2: The witness accounts are a complete one to eighty. They
are totally different. We have accounts from a witness named Javier.
He disputes the official story entirely.
Speaker 1: What does he say he saw?
Speaker 2: He claims Prey was a bystander. He says Prey wasn't
attacking anyone. He was trying to protect a woman in
the vicinity who was being harassed or accosted by the agents.
Speaker 1: And what about Prai's family.
Speaker 2: His parents are, as you can imagine, devastated and furious.
They called the official story a sickening lie. They described
Alex as a good man who was attacked by what
they called cowardly, icy thugs. They're pleading with the public
to find out the truth about their son.
Speaker 1: There's a detail from Javier's account, the witness that just
it haunts me. He describes what happened after the shooting,
after Alex Prey was on the ground.
Speaker 2: Yes, this part is critical. Javier says that after the
agents shot Prey, they turned their weapons on him, on
the witness. On the witness, he claims they were screening
profanities at him, get the exploitive over here, while he
was pleading with him, trying to tell them he was
just a bystander that he saw what happened.
Speaker 1: Imagine that terror. You just watched a man die. You
are a witness to a potential crime. And instead of
being treated like a witness, someone to be interviewed, someone
whose account is valuable, someone to be maybe comforted, you
are treated like a combatant.
Speaker 2: It speaks directly to the mindset of the operation. If
you view the entire city as a battlefield, then everyone
in it is a potential enemy combatant until proven otherwise,
civilians are civilians anymore. They are just unconfirmed threats.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to the war of words, the
jurisdictional fight, because this isn't just happening on the street
with guns, It's happening in the halls of power with
press releases. There is a massive disconnect between Washington and Minneapolis.
Speaker 2: It's a jurisdictional nightmare. Washington views Operation Metro Surge as
restoring order. From their perspective, they see Minneapolis as a
city that's out of control and needs a heavy federal
hand to fix it. But the locals, the locals view
the operation itself as the chaos generator. They see the
Feds as the source of the disorder.
Speaker 1: And caught right in the middle of this is Minneapolis
Police Chief Brian O'Hara.
Speaker 2: I do not envy his position one bit. Think about
the logistics. He has to manage a city with only
six hundred officers who are already stretched incredibly thin, and
suddenly he has three thousand federal agents operating in his jurisdiction,
often with blurred command structures, in different rules of engagement.
Speaker 1: He's trying to maintain community trusts, telling people we are
here to help, while the FEDS are effectively burning that
trust down a block away.
Speaker 2: It's an impossible situation.
Speaker 1: We talked about the credibility gap earlier, but there is
one specific story that I I think perfectly illustrates the
gulf between what DC says is happening and what is
actually happening. On the ground. The story of the five
year old boy, Liam.
Speaker 2: This is the defining example of that gap. It's just
so stark. Let's look at the two competing claims.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Vice President Vance, from a podium in Washington, accused the
media of lying about an incident involving the arrest of
a five year old. He claimed that agents went to
arrest the illegal alien father, the father ran away, and
the media fabricated the rest of the story to make
them look bad.
Speaker 1: Okay, So Vance's version is fodder. Ran media is lying.
That's the view from the White House. What did the
eyewitness say?
Speaker 2: The eyewitness was City council member Rachel James. She wasn't
watching on TV. She was physically there. She witnessed the
entire incident with her own eyes.
Speaker 1: And what did she see? Paint the picture for us.
Speaker 2: She saw the child, Liam, She saw him watch masked
agents take his father from the family's driveway. The father
didn't run away, he was taken right there, son.
Speaker 1: And what about Liam's reaction.
Speaker 2: That's the part that's just heartbreaking. She said he wasn't crying,
he wasn't screaming. He was, in her words, frozen and paralyzed.
Speaker 1: Frozen and paralyzed.
Speaker 2: So he looked so scared he couldn't even move, just frozen.
Speaker 1: The credibility gaps sounds like some kind of academic term,
but this is what it looks like in reality. It
looks like a vice president in a suit in Washington
telling you a man ran away, and a city councilwoman
standing in a snowy driveway in Minneapolis looking at a
paralyzed five year old boy, knowing the VP is lying.
Speaker 2: That's it. Exactly that distance between the podium and the driveway,
that's the gas.
Speaker 1: And when the administration tells a story that is so
directly contradicted by the lived experience of local officials and residents,
reality itself fractures. Who do you believe the man at
the podium in DC or the woman standing in the
driveway in your own city.
Speaker 2: It forces people to choose a reality.
Speaker 1: And it seems like the courts are starting to step
in to try and I don't know, put up some
guardrails here.
Speaker 2: They are trying. A federal judge rule just this past
Friday that federal agents cannot arrest, detain, or retaliate against
peaceful protesters.
Speaker 1: It feels huge.
Speaker 2: It is significant legally speaking, it affirms that the First
Amendment still applies even during a searge. It's the judiciary
branch saying you can enforce immigration law, but you cannot
enforce silence. You cannot stop people from protesting your actions.
Speaker 1: But politically, the fight is just ramping up, isn't it. Oh?
Speaker 2: Absolutely, the President is now calling on Congress to ban
sanctuary cities entirely. He wants to pass a federal law
that would override any local ordinances.
Speaker 1: So Minnesota is basically the test case, the proof of concept.
Speaker 2: Precisely, Minnesota is the laboratory. If the federal government can
successfully override local jurisdiction here, if they can normalize this
level of federal presence in an American city year, it
sets the precedent for every other major city in America.
Speaker 1: Which explains why the resistance on the ground has been
so intense. We aren't just talking about a few dozen
people holding signs anymore.
Speaker 2: No, we are talking about a general strike.
Speaker 1: January twenty third, twenty twenty six, the Day of Truth
and Freedom.
Speaker 2: It is a powerful name.
Speaker 1: It sounds momentous, like something you'd read about in a
history book.
Speaker 2: I think it was momentous. The call to action was
for an economic blackout, a city wide refusal to work,
a refusal to shop, a refusal to go to school.
Speaker 1: And did people answer the call? Did they show up
or rather did they stay home?
Speaker 2: Tens of thousands participated by all accounts. It was one
of the largest coordinated actions in recent Minnesota history. And
what's crucial to understand is who participated.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just the usual suspects.
Speaker 2: No, this wasn't just you know, activists or professional protesters.
This was teachers who were deeply concerned for their students
and their families. It was union workers, it was small
business owners, it was entire families.
Speaker 1: There's a quote from a teacher that really stuck with me.
She was talking about how she couldn't, in good conscience
teach civics while her students' parents were being smatched off
the street. For them, it wasn't political, it was protective.
Speaker 2: The message of the strike was very carefully and deliberately calibrated.
They framed it as a choice between love and care
on one side, versus hate and violence on the other.
Speaker 1: That contrast is just so sharp. On one side, you
have the federal narrative of forced tear gas, metal canisters,
massed men, military grade weapons.
Speaker 2: And on the other you have reports of people in
church basements packing care packages for families who are afraid
to leave their homes.
Speaker 1: Right we have reports from a reporter on the ground
Atisha describing the scene at the protests, metal tear gas
canisters littering the ground, protesters chanting get out pigs and
get out ice. But at the same time you have
this deep grassroots community organization happening, neighbors feeding neighbors.
Speaker 2: It creates this powerful juxtaposition.
Speaker 1: It's the power of silence. In a way, the strike
wasn't about shouting. It was about absence, empty shops, empty schools,
empty buses. It's a way of saying, this city doesn't
run without us. You can occupy our streets, but you
can't make our city function.
Speaker 2: Exactly. You can patrol an empty street, but you cannot
force a community to transact, to engage, to participate. It's
a powerful assertion of local power against overwhelming federal force.
It's the citizenry saying we are the city, not the buildings,
not the roads, but us.
Speaker 1: So where does this leave us? We're nearing the end
of our time, and we really need to look at
the so what of all of this? What are the
long term implications here?
Speaker 2: I think the so wet is that we are witnessing
a fundamental crisis of legitimacy.
Speaker 1: Unpack that for me. What does that mean?
Speaker 2: When the mayor of your city says the federal government's
explanation for a killing is bull When the vice president
of your country calls a dead citizen a terrorist without
providing any public evidence, When your local police chief can
actually command the streets because federal agents outnumber his own
officers five to one.
Speaker 1: There's no shared reality anymore.
Speaker 2: There is no shared reality. It's like we're living in
two different countries that are occupying the same map.
Speaker 1: And Tom Hman, who was mentioned in some of the
reports we analyzed, he noted that this isn't just a
local flare up. He called it a national flashpoint.
Speaker 2: He's absolutely right. This is not just about Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: Because if Operation Metro Surge is ultimately deemed a success
by DHS, if they can just point to the arrest
numbers and ignore the dead bodies and the frozen economy
and the terrorized children.
Speaker 2: Then this model gets exported. It moves three thousand agents,
unmarked cars, overruling the local police. This could be coming
to Chicago, to New York, to Los Angeles, to any
city that the administration deems out of order.
Speaker 1: It's a template that is a truly chilling thought. But
I also keep thinking about the psychological toll on the
people who are living through this. Right now. What does
this do to the psyche of a city.
Speaker 2: It's immense. But there was a quote from a young
man's father that I think defines the spirit of the
resistance that's emerging. He told his son something I can't
get out of my head.
Speaker 1: What was it?
Speaker 2: He told his son, never be scared of a person
that bleeds as much as you do.
Speaker 1: Wow, never be scared of a person that bleeds as
much as you do.
Speaker 2: That is the sound of a community hardening. The intention
of these shock and awe tactics is usually to force submission,
to make people keep their heads down and stay quiet,
But in Minnesota it seems to be having the opposite effect.
Speaker 1: It's breeding defiance.
Speaker 2: It is it's creating a general strike mentality where people
are realizing they have to rely on each other, on
their own community because the state, at least the federal
state is no longer their protector. In fact, it's become
the threat.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of that old idea. You can't really
police a community that doesn't want you there, not forever, not.
Speaker 2: Without it becoming a permanent military occupation. And that is
not what an American democracy is supposed to look like.
Speaker 1: So here we are Thursday, January twenty ninth, a city occupied,
two of its citizens dead in a matter of weeks,
a massive general strike, and a complete and total breakdown
of trust.
Speaker 2: And the central conflict. It really just comes down to
two words, safety versus terror. The DHS claim what they
are doing is creating safety. The residence on the ground
claim what they are experiencing is terror.
Speaker 1: And that leads us to the question we want to
leave with all of you today. We've laid out the
two realities coexisting in Minnesota right now. You have the
federal narrative of Metro surge stopping criminals, protecting the homeland,
and then you have the local reality. We've unraveled here
on thrilling threads, a story of fear, of frozen children,
of dead nurses, and a silence that absolutely screams.
Speaker 2: The questions about the price tag?
Speaker 1: What is the cost exactly? If the price of securing
the border or restoring order is turning an American city
into a battlefield. If the price is a place where
nine to one one calls go unmade because people are
too scared to pick up the phone. If the price
is that local police are overruled and outnumbered by federal
agents and unmarked cars. Is that a price you personally
are willing to pay, or is the.
Speaker 2: Very definition of safety being rewritten right before our eyes.
Speaker 1: We want to know where you stand. This isn't just
some rhetorical exercise. This is happening right now a few
hours drive or short flight away from wherever you are.
Leave a comment, let us know what you think, because
the threads we pulled today are fraying, and we all
need to decide if we're going to try to weave
them back together or just let them snap. Well said,
stay curious, stay safe, and keep pulling at the threts.
We'll see you next time.