The People’s Weapon, Wargames, and Minnesota Escalation

The people’s ultimate weapon has been deployed in Minnesota and I’m both impressed and scared.

The Trump administration has decided that Minneapolis will be where ICE concentrates forces for now. The entire state of Minnesota has responded with a dizzying array of resistance tactics, crescendoing into a general strike. The first general strike in Minnesota in 80 years.

Any lover of democracy will, by sheer reflex, resist and oppose ICE—a paramilitary force conducting a large-scale ethnic cleansing mission in American cities. But ethnic cleansing is far from all it’s doing. ICE is also:

• Collecting intelligence on every protestor and legal observer, using Palantir software for the sake of labeling citizens who have broken no laws “domestic terrorists”;

• Racially profiling people and communities as standard practice, treating identity attributes as probable cause for harassment and arrest;

• Systematically violating the unalienable rights of US citizens guaranteed by the Constitution (especially the First and Fourth Amendments); and

• Engaging in both coercive intimidation and brute force, including extrajudicial murders in public.

ICE is chasing spectacle (the reason they bring camera crews to raids) and spectacle means violence in how they respond to…anything. It’s not clear that there’s a strategy here other than pure terror, but the larger political purpose remains ethnic cleansing and we should be plain about that.

But there are a few other—very dark—things worth being plain about. This is not time for naïveté.

Martial Law Prevents Fair Elections

First, the Trump administration has been extraordinarily transparent about why it wants ICE conducting spectacles of violence: It doesn’t intend to have elections:

Trump will establish martial law by invoking The Insurrection Act , which will allow large-scale deployments of active-duty troops to US cities.

I said last year he would do it, and I’m doubling down on that because the mid-terms are approaching; last year was too soon but now we have only months to go. Military occupation is a way to ensure that either elections don’t happen or they happen under conditions that make free-and-fair elections impossible.

This Non-Violence Stuff’ll Get You Killed

Second, Jacob Grumbach in the post above is right about Trump’s plan but wrong about the assumption that what people on the ground do can prevent martial law. The American people are not in a “When they go low, we go high” situation.

Trump wants an inciting incident as a pretext for violent escalation that justifies martial law and therefore rules out free elections. We’ve known this for a year. But if Trump/MAGA wants pretextual violence, Americans won’t be able to deny it to them for long. Hitler was able to fabricate an inciting incident in the Sudetenland. Imperial Japan was able to fabricate an inciting incident in Mukden in 1936.

In a world where politics has been reduced to a stream of lies, inciting incidents can be invented from whole cloth. I’m on the record explaining why violence is unfavorable terrain for the people, especially for people living in a surveillance state. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Don’t be so deluded as to think that non-violent tactics alone will keep you out of trouble. They’re publicly executing citizens with impunity!

The Wargame Tells Us How

Third, everyone I know in the US is feeling bad vibes right now—even proponents of “It’s not fascism” are bemoaning how dark 2026 is looking. Those vibes are, unfortunately, justified. In October 2024, the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania conducted a tabletop exercise simulating a crisis that led to civil war in the US.

Their scenario focused on Philadelphia (also on ICE’s hit list), but the process through which civil war arises matches the conditions in Minneapolis:

a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania national guard. When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces. The core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.

The Insurrection Act is the missing step in this process.

This is all building toward a scenario in which Minnesotans surrender their rights as citizens in some way or continue resistance in the face of escalating state repression until Trump declares martial law. When that happens, much will depend on what the troops do.

I have a conversation on one of my shows coming out soon mulling the question of whether the troops will dutifully follow Trump’s orders or refuse in some way—both possibilities deliver more violence and put democracy further out of reach. My co-host Lyle Rubin and I have been debating this question for over a year, often during the show, because we’re both veterans and we both know people still serving.

What pushes everything in the direction of a giant imperialist car crash with no exit is that Trump’s coalition—from Stephen Miller to Pam Bondi to Greg Bovino to ICE rank-and-file—is overseeing gross violations of the law and the Constitution. If MAGA loses the Congress, or eventually loses the White House, these guys know they’re going to spend their lives in prison. Steve Bannon even confessed:

As God is my witness, if we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison, myself included…

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