Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Woke Antifa's Secret Weapon

On Wednesday, I wrote an article for Slate Magazine about Minneapolis residents standing up against ICE: why they do it, what that looks like day-to-day, and where they find the courage despite the danger. Please check it out if you would like to!

And here’s a different article about the secret weapon that residents in Minneapolis are using against ICE…

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“Come get some food! Don’t let the food go to waste!” the protester shouted into his megaphone. Behind him, three people pushed a dolly loaded with a large box of snack-sized chips and four large coolers through the crowd of hundreds in front of the Graduate Hotel by Hilton, a four-star hotel in the heart of Minneapolis where the secret police are staying. “Fuck ICE! Get food! Get some food for your neighbor!”

Steam billowed into the razor-cold air as they opened one of the coolers and began to aggressively hand hot foil-wrapped burritos to anyone within reach. Protesters took a break from banging pots and pans, blowing whistles, playing horned instruments, rapping on lampposts with small silver hammers, blasting Rage Against the Machine through neon speakers, screaming, shouting, clapping, and/or playing syncopated beats on upturned Home Depot buckets to accept this gift of food and the warmth that came with it: physical, emotional, spiritual.

You hear the word “neighbor” a lot in Minneapolis, and it means something different there than anywhere else I’ve been. When I think about my neighbors, I think about people temporarily living in close proximity to me. Out here, there are wider implications. There’s affection, and a desire to help out that often manifests in the irrepressible desire to provide, to give, to offer. Some people I spoke to during my week-long trip told me this meaning of “neighbor” is a new thing here, established in the wake of George Floyd with thoughtfulness and purpose. Whatever it is, it’s ubiquitous, and not just in activist circles.

Everywhere I went in Minneapolis, someone tried to give me something. At a different hotel wake-up in the suburb of Maple Grove, someone offered me a whistle immediately after arriving; when I explained that I was press, they offered hand-warmers instead. A box of hot coffee sat on the axle of one of the massive snowplows the city used to block off the street, free for anyone who wanted it.

At Alex Pretti’s memorial—a backyard-pool-sized monument of flowers and stuffed animals and signs and hundreds of candles—a woman walked around with a large foil roasting pan and offered everyone homemade sambusas. I try not to accept free things at events—these resources are intended for the people in attendence, not parachuting New York journalists—but she was insistant, and saying no would have been unspeakably rude, so I gratefully accepted. A few feet away, two women poured homemade coffee for people as they chatted in Arabic. This was not a scheduled event. These were people here to mourn, and to give comfort to each other.

When I visited Renee Good’s memorial the next day, I found a small box nestled between the flowers. Inside the box: a few flat rocks. “We are all deeply saddened by the death of our beloved neighbor Renee Nicole Good,” a printed sign next to the box read. “But the journey can be hard, sometimes we get discouraged. Please take a pocket heart. Keep it with you to be a constant reminder that you are loved!” A few feet away, unmanned card tables bore packets of goldfish, fig bars, and handwarmers—free to whoever wanted them. Next to them sat wood for the nearby braziers that offered warmth to anyone stopping by.

MAGA cannot comprehend these acts of generosity. “This is PROFESSIONAL-grade logistics. Someone is BANKROLLING this autonomous zone,” X user Gunther Eagleman posted alongside a video of a similar table at an action loaded with free handwarmers, coffee, bottled water, and milk (which temporarily relieves the pain of tear gas and pepper spray, though a saline rinse works better). MAGA seems similarly baffled by the ICE watch groups working together to keep their neighbors safe, from broad dispatch groups to hyperlocal block patrols. Far-right propagandist Cameron Higby recently provided screenshots of Signal chats he described as proof of a complex, well-funded network of professional agitators. “Who is paying for all this?” he asked.

From what I’ve seen, the answer appears to be everyone. People across the city are donating whatever time, energy and resources they can spare. An hour to patrol the neighborhood before picking their kid up from school. A trumpet played with bare fingers in five degree weather outside a hotel where ICE is staying. Logs from the woodshed to warm cold hands. A sambusa, made with love.

Yesterday, Tom Homan announced a “drawdown”: a “period of transition” in which ICE would transfer “command and control” of the region. This is yet more militarized language from the Border Patrol chief, who seems to think he’s talking about a war zone instead of a large Midwestern city. Homan has, of course, declared victory: Minnesota is now assisting ICE, they’ve arrested a bunch of criminals, the local police have quelled the “agitators” who have been “forcibly assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating, [and] interfering with federal law enforcement officers,” and I’d like to take a second to point out this ugly rhetorical trick all these assholes deploy in all these speeches. Assaulting—sure, illegal, makes sense for him to say this. Resisting—can mean assaulting, sounds plausible. Opposing? It’s not illegal to oppose ICE, actually. They slip that word in the middle of their little lists to get us used to thinking of opposition as assault, as criminal, as deviant.

Back to the point: Homan has declared victory, but everyone knows he’s lying. Minnesota beat the hell out of ICE—not physically, but in the court of public opinion. They thwarted many of the illicit agency’s operations, made it punishingly difficult to execute their unconstitutional mission, and did it all without a single act of violence, all while enduring horrific brutality and inhuman provocation. Whether ICE actually follows through on this “drawdown” or not, this is a public retreat. The war is far from over, but the administration has lost this battle.

ICE lost in Minneapolis because they have the same enormous and insurmountable problem that all authoritarians do: they cannot understand regular people because they themselves are cowards.

“You know why I wasn't shot by Border Patrol this weekend? Because I kept my ass inside and out of their operations,” Megyn Kelly declared from inside her safe, warm studio two days after CBP agents executed Alex Pretti for the crime of filming and helping the woman they assaulted. A lot of conservative politicians, pundits and posters were similarly scornful, which makes sense—after all, these are the same people who have been too frightened to hold a single mass protest since January 6th. Authoritarians are primarily motivated by fear, so they assume fear motivates everyone.

But most decent people do not respond well to fear. Extralegal executions do not inspire them to cower inside their homes, but to come out in force. Contrary to popular right-wing belief, the streets of Minneapolis are full to bursting not with paid Radical Left Lunatics or even an army of political activists. Many of the people keeping Minneapolis safe are regular human beings who don’t need to obsessively follow the news to know evil when they see it.

Throughout the Biden years, as Trump’s indictments and indignities piled up, he warned his supporters: “They’re coming for all of you, I’m just the one standing in their way.” It was a ridiculous statement—how many MAGA supporters have paid off a porn star or stored classified documents in their bathroom?—but they seemed to believe it. Kyle Rittenhouse used a similar framing during his fundraising blitzes: they’re coming after me because I defended myself; if you don’t help me, they’ll come after you and your guns next. This protect-me-to-protect-you reasoning is a load-bearing pillar of the movement. The only way to get MAGA to care about a stranger is to make them believe they themselves are at risk. After all, why would anyone endanger themselves if it wasn’t life or death?

Meanwhile, regular human beings in the Twin Cities and beyond are putting everything on the line to protect their neighbors—all their neighbors, including the ones they’ve never met, regardless of race or country of origin. The cognative dissonance is breaking MAGA minds. This whole “Antifa is a well-funded domestic terror organization” thing is absurd, but they’re high on their own supply. These people literally cannot imagine a world in which people place themselves at risk, for strangers, for free.

For all their talk about Jesus, these Christian Nationalists do not love their neighbor, at all. They hate their neighbor because, on a fundamental level, they fear their neighbor. They project their own evil onto others, to the point that they sometimes shoot strangers just for knocking on their doors.

No one with this level of hatred and fear is capable of forming community around anything other than hatred and fear. “I’m not licking the boot. It’s my boot!” professional crybaby Tim Pool recently shouted on his videocast. “I’m wearing the boot! I’m stomping!” At this point, the only real community hardcore MAGA has to offer revolves around hurting others. They’re too broken for anything else.

Loving your neighbor can look like a lot of things. A homemade burrito. A bag of 3D-printed whistles. Delivering food to neighbors who can’t leave the house, breast milk to children of mothers abducted by ICE. Risking your life to follow and film, stepping outside your house in sweatpants and crocs and standing in the single-digit cold for 20 minutes to warn your neighbors that ICE is here. Running dispatch on a Signal chat, checking license plates against a volunteer-created database, alerting people as necessary. Restructuring your classes for hybrid learning so targeted kids can learn while in hiding. Making sure ICE can’t sleep. Standing up, standing up, standing up.

Almost every business in Minneapolis has a sign like this one on the door

And MAGA doesn’t get it, which is why MAGA underestimates it every single time. They are incapable of understanding the kind of community that revolves around helping. And because they cannot understand, they made a terrible mistake: they chose to stomp on Minneapolis: one of the most stomp-resistant places in the country.

The togetherness is happening everywhere. People across this country have learned from the brave activists and residents in Minneapolis, in Chicago, in LA. They’re forming their own ICE watches. They’re 3D-printing whistles, handing out literature and putting up stickers to let their neighbors know their rights. We are giving what we have and taking what we need. And, in the process, we are getting to know each other as more than just people who happen to live near each other. We are changing what it means to be a neighbor.

These connections could be the beginning of something so much bigger than getting ICE off our streets, if we want them to. They could mean the reversal of our atomization, the end of bowling alone. We could learn what it means to live in community, experience the joy of knowing who our neighbors are and the joy of caring for and about them. We could create a different, better future in which people are connected instead of hateful, secure instead of scared. All this horror, all this pain—what if, at the end of it all, we made it mean something?