We Are Winning
The show of force is the tell.
Trump is Scared. MAGA is Scared. That’s Why They’re Doing This.
On Tuesday morning, before most of Minnesota had made coffee, federal agents fanned out across Minneapolis and arrested twelve people.
By mid-morning, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen was at a podium calling them terrorists. Anarchists. Antifa.
The cameras rolled.
The message was loud.
It was a lie.
What the Indictment Actually Says
Here is what the 94-page federal indictment actually documents as evidence of a criminal conspiracy:
Posting opinions on Facebook,
Attending meetings,
Wearing certain clothes,
Standing on public streets and watching federal agents haul neighbors into unmarked vans.
Among the 15 people charged:
Trade unionists,
Educators,
Community organizers.
Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, called the charges “completely disproportionate” and predicted they would be dismissed.
The government’s own track record backs him up. Of the 36 Minnesotans previously charged with interfering with ICE operations during Operation Metro Surge, at least 15 cases have already been dropped outright.
They arrested people for attending meetings. Then held a press conference to announce it.
That is not what winning looks like.
What Demoralization Is Designed to Do
If you’ve been feeling ground down lately, you’re not alone.
Some of you attended the DFL endorsing convention and watched the process feel frustratingly slow. A lot of you have been protesting every week.
Some of you were standing on cold streets, documenting what the federal government is doing in Minnesota, and now you’re watching neighbors face six-year federal conspiracy charges for it.
The exhaustion is real.
The frustration is real.
Some of it is engineered.
Scholars who study authoritarian governments call this tactic “lawfare”: using the legal system not to win in court, but to exhaust people, drain their money, scare off their friends, and make the cost of resistance feel higher than the cost of giving up.
The point is not conviction. The point is fear. The point is to make you feel small and alone and helpless, and to make you stay home.
They are doing this because they are losing. A movement that is winning does not need to arrest people for posting on Facebook.
The Numbers Say So
A president who is winning does not hold a 34% approval rating, the lowest of his second term, according to Pew Research Center. A political coalition that is winning does not lose ground in every single special election held in the country for the past year and a half.
Democrats are outperforming their 2024 margins by an average of 15 points in every special election this cycle, including flipping a Texas State Senate seat that Trump won by 17 points.
Just Security’s litigation tracker shows plaintiffs winning 272 federal cases against the Trump administration to the government’s 133. The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, struck down Trump’s sweeping tariff program in February, with Chief Justice Roberts writing that the administration’s legal claim “cannot bear such weight.”
For the first time since 2010, Democrats are more trusted than Republicans to handle the economy.
They know they are losing the public. They know they are losing the culture. So they pick a handful of people and make a spectacle of them. That is what scared movements do.
The Long Road
Today is Juneteenth.
On June 19, 1865, a Union Army general arrived in Galveston, Texas, and read aloud General Order No. 3. “All slaves are free.” The enslaved people of Texas learned, for the first time, that the law had already changed. The machinery of oppression had been doing everything in its power to keep that knowledge from reaching them.
Freedom came. But it came slowly, and under fire.
Reconstruction was dismantled. Jim Crow laws locked Black Americans out of schools, out of voting booths, out of restaurants and buses and neighborhoods.
Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. Four little girls were bombed in a Birmingham church in 1963. Medgar Evers was shot in his driveway.
And through all of it, Black Americans did not stop. They organized. They marched. They went to jail. They came back and marched again.
The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. The Voting Rights Act in 1965. Not because the opposition gave up. Because the people pressing for freedom never did.
And they are pressing still. The disparities that Black Americans face today in housing, in health care, in policing, in wealth: They are still fighting those, too. Every generation has had to fight for the same ground their grandparents already bled for, and every generation has shown up anyway.
That is the road we are walking on. Their road. And we should be clear about that.
When federal agents pepper-spray legal observers in Minneapolis, when a U.S. Attorney labels union members terrorists, when the full machinery of the federal government turns against the people watching it: This is not a new story in America.
It is the oldest story. And we know it ends when people refuse to stop.
The Resistance Has Already Worked
Operation Metro Surge sent more than 2,000 federal agents into the Twin Cities, thirteen times the normal federal footprint, and it ended with ICE withdrawing. That withdrawal happened in significant part because sustained community resistance made the operation politically and legally untenable.
The community defense work now being criminalized in this indictment, the very work of watching and documenting and standing in the street, was recognized with the Kennedy Center Profiles in Courage Award.
They’re arresting people for it because it worked.
Where Your Effort Matters Most
Presidential elections get the attention. But the fights that shape your daily life are decided much closer to home, by margins of tens of votes, sometimes fewer.
Minnesota’s current legislative maps were drawn by a court in 2022 because the legislature deadlocked.
The next redistricting happens after the 2030 census. If Republicans hold a governing trifecta when that moment arrives (or even before), we have every reason to expect they will draw maps designed to lock in their advantage for a generation.
We have seen them break poltical norms with their unprecidented mid-decade redistricting schemes. With racially-motivated redistricting schemes. It is not speculation. It is the documented playbook.
Keeping that from happening starts right now, at the precinct level, in your neighborhood.
The special elections in Minnesota House districts 47A and 64A this January were both won by Democrats, restoring an even 67-67 split in the State House. Two races. Two wins. The balance of power shifted. Local races in this state have been decided by single digits before and will be again.
Your two votes could be those two wins.
Don’t Give Them What They’re Working For
Today, Juneteenth, is the right day to let history do what it is meant to do: Remind us of what people before us endured, what they refused to accept, and the future they built by refusing.
They had so much more to fight through than we do. They did not stop.
We are not losing. The numbers say so, the courts say so, and the opposition’s own panic says so. Every show of force, every pre-dawn arrest, every press conference labeling teachers and union members as terrorists: That is a regime telling on itself.
Don’t give them the demoralization they’re working so hard to manufacture.
Show up.
Knock on your neighbor’s door.
Vote.
Go to the school board meeting. Volunteer for the state legislative race in your district. If you want to support the Minnesota 15 directly, a legal defense fund is live at chuffed.org/project/186570-minnesota-15-legal-defense-fund.
The road is long. People before us walked farther on it than we have to.
They didn’t stop.
Neither should we.
Foot on the gas.
Full speed ahead!
David
Full Report
For the full sourced research report with citations and links to primary sources underlying this article, download the Southwest Crier Research Report: “The Show of Force Is the Tell.”
Podcast Version
Here’s the podcast version if you don’t want to read it. (This was generated by Google’s Notebook LM tool.)
Chaska Protests
Every Friday from 3:00–4:00 p.m. at the corner of Chaska Blvd. and Chestnut Street (Highway 41) [Map]
Every Saturday from 1-2 pm at the corner of Hazeltine Boulevard and Highway 41 (Chestnut) [Map]
Chanhassen Protests
Every Saturday from 10-11 am at 7700 Market Boulevard [Map] Public parking is available behind City Hall.
Norwood Young America
Every Sunday, 11 a.m.–12 p.m. (Line up at the bike path south of Highway 212 and Faxon.)
Victoria
Every Wednesday from 4:30-5:30 pm on the corner of Highway 5 and Victoria Drive/County Rd 11.
Waconia
Every Saturday from 11:30-12:30 pm at Highway 5 and County Road 10 in front of the Starbucks and Jersey Mike’s. [Map]
SW Protectors
Every first and third Tuesday from 6:30 – 8:00 pm. It’s no cost and come and go as you like.
Please do buy something to eat or drink, though, to support our venue, which is The Bellows restaurant and it’s located at 232 Pioneer Trail in Chaska.
Why isn't someone putting your rebuttal as to who the people they arrested really are in a letter to the editor or demanding that this news...these facts .... be reported to the people who need to know it? You're preaching to the choir here!
I'm really so tired of the Democrats... including our representatives NOT meeting the moment with the truth and not backing down immediately with loud voices at the same time these outrageous acts are committed. I love that we protest and I'm right there with you. BUT the response has to be prompt, swift loud and clear.