Igniting Minneapolis
Activists in Minneapolis, in an attempt repeat their success with BLM, are trying to ignite a national protest movement against ICE. Here's why it isn't working.
George Floyd’s death in 2020 turned Minneapolis into the launch pad for the BLM protests. From the participants' perspective, the protest was an unqualified success.
It quickly went national, with large protests in nearly every city.
Law enforcement was largely passive, absent, or supportive.
Political support was vocal, and all opposition was muted.
Any violence (and there was a considerable amount of it) was either explained away (“mostly peaceful protest”) or ignored by the major media.
Corporations provided generous donations $$ and rapid acquiescence to demands.
Finally, and not insignificantly, it galvanized political opposition to Trump in an election year.
Ever since the re-election of Trump, the blue tribe has been searching for another event it could use to repeat its success with BLM. They thought they had finally found it with ICE (its enforcement actions produce numerous excesses it could exploit). Let’s dig in.
Vanguard Action
In guerrilla warfare theory, the best way to ignite everything from protests to revolutions is by using a vanguard.
A vanguard (or foco in Che Guevara’s theory) is a dedicated group of activists, revolutionaries, or paramilitary fighters.
They set the stage for the protests and revolutions to follow by undertaking bold actions to demonstrate viability and compel the government (the usual adversary) to overreact, thereby initiating violence that discredits it (moral defeat).
They then hone, package (propaganda), and propagate a narrative depicting the government as cruel, illegitimate, and morally bankrupt, in an attempt to mobilize others to join them.
The Minneapolis Vanguard
The Minneapolis Vanguard (ICE watch) followed the playbook, updated for network connectivity. Here are some examples of the preparations involved;
They built discussion groups to manage the vanguard. Due to their prior success with BLM, these Vanguard discussion groups included senior government officials.
They developed and distributed a detailed training manual for confronting ICE and conducted training sessions for Vanguard members, teaching them to build the confidence needed to engage ICE agents aggressively.
They also built surveillance networks that enabled community members to report ICE activity via their smartphones (photos, license plates, geotags, etc.). This data was put into a database that automatically alerted Vanguard members in the area to mobilize and deploy.
This led to increasingly aggressive confrontations between the Vanguard and ICE.
Rapidly deployed crowds of protesters descended on ICE raid sites to harass and intimidate agents conducting raids.
Paramilitaries staged attacks on ICE facilities, including a hotel housing ICE agents, and random individuals were enraged enough to ram or kettle ICE vehicles with their own cars.
These aggressive confrontations demoralized ICE agents, making them fear for their safety, setting the stage for a violent counter-response that protesters and onlookers would capture via their smartphones.
Finally, after weeks of effort, they hit paydirt.
The first event was the shooting of Renee Good while trying to flee/depart a protest site in her vehicle.
The second event was the shooting of Alex Pretti after a struggle with ICE agents.
Both events were documented via smartphone and led to an immediate surge in vocal support for the anti-ICE protest (all the way up to two former Presidents).
Despite this preparation and apparent success in generating widespread outrage, the BLM-scale national protest didn’t ignite. Let’s dig into why.
