We Will Outlast Them

Hello, dear readers—I hope you're all hanging in there. It is a wild time to be alive and living...anywhere, really, but it's felt particularly wild here in the Twin Cities.

Never in my life have I been so proud to be a Minnesotan (which is saying something, because I have always had a deep affection for my home state). As you've doubtless seen in the news, ICE has been terrorizing Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the surrounding suburbs for several weeks now. It's clear they thought they could come in, do horrible things, and scare us into compliance. They were clearly unprepared for how people have come together to look out for each other and stand against their heinous operations of killing and kidnapping people. We're not standing for it. And as I saw someone post on Bluesky earlier this week: they made the classic Nazi mistake of invading a winter people in winter. We will outlast them, and we'll do it by giving a damn about our neighbors.

I have so many thoughts about the resistance and the reasons it's working here, but I will be able to articulate none of them half as well as what Margaret Killjoy captured in her latest newsletter detailing her experience of coming to Minneapolis as a journalist seeking to understand and document what's been happening. It's a long post, but please read it.

I released this song a couple of weeks ago. I wrote it back in October, but wasn't sure how I felt about it at the time. And then ICE showed up in my city and started kidnapping children and murdering people in cold blood, and I started asking myself what it was that I needed to hear to keep myself from faltering, and this song came back to me. May it be a balm and an encouragement to those who need it.

If you are outside of Minnesota, watching what's happening, and looking for ways to help, this is one of the best gatherings of links to people/places/organizations that are doing good work on the ground (note that, weirdly, if you use a VPN, you'll need to turn it off for the URL to resolve). Most of what's been most successful here has been hyper-local, just people helping their immediate neighbors, so the direct mutual aid funds are a great place to start.