Yet the bookish 40-year-old with a reedy voice has undergone a surreal, gritty glow-up. Stancil, who didn’t respond to my interview requests, is now the bespectacled public face the anti-ICE resistance, with his visibility second only to the movement’s two martyrs: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. His transformation comes amid the broader backlash against President Trump’s Operation Metro Surge, especially following the killing of Good on Jan. 7.

In response, Stancil didn’t just tweet through it (though he’s doing that, too). He got inside his battered 2011 Honda Fit with an iffy transmission and took action. Stancil and his army of — as he describes it — pissed-off baristas and suburban moms are speeding through south Minneapolis neighborhoods, bird-dogging federal agents, documenting raids, confronting ICE on the streets with whistles and curses to interfere with their daily snatchings of immigrants (and sometimes citizens).

He’s been tear-gassed, he says, every other day. He’s also narrating confrontations in real time, coordinating responses, and making melodramatic statements on the liberal social-media network Bluesky as if a field general rallying his troops. “Minneapolis is winning. The tide is shifting. Can you feel it?” he posted this week after the Trump administration withdrew Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino. “It’s their Gettysburg. The first Minnesota is charging down the hill, bayonets drawn. This is their furthest advance and they will go no further. WE ARE GOING TO WIN.”

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Stancil is hardly the second coming of Ulysses S. Grant. Even so, online progressives are eating up this real-life Revenge of the Nerds. Social media is filled with half-ironic tributes casting Stancil as a conquering hero. “Hearing word that Trump has abdicated and handed power to Will Stancil,” one post joked. “The Stancilphate is here, inshallah.” Another dubbed the moment “the siege of Stancilgrad.”

Other images circulated of Stancil photoshopped into Braveheart, sword raised, or likened to other conquering historical figures. “The Revolution Will Be Stanciled,” said a caption accompanying a photo of the nebbish lawyer, looking defiant, toward a line of armored ICE agents. Even some of the liberal media are caught up in the mythmaking. Atlantic staff writer Tyler Austin Harper mused that Bovino’s withdrawal symbolized “Total Stancil Victory.”

This kind of hero-making — arched eyebrow or not — isn’t new. But what makes Stancil’s case distinctive is the stark contrast with his recent past, when he existed primarily as an object of ridicule and algorithmic abuse. “Most-harassed man in the history of Twitter might be the first line of my obituary,” he told Slate.

Earlier in the decade, Stancil’s online persona read as exactly the kind of performative woke liberal male ally holding “The Future is Female” tote bags and Ibram X. Kendi books that are now a punchline among college-age Gen-Zers. He was a relative nobody, a research fellow at the University of Minnesota specializing in housing policy, civil rights, and metropolitan planning. He first became one of Politics Twitter’s “power users” during the 2020 presidential campaign, when he mocked Trump and relentlessly hyped Elizabeth Warren’s doomed bid for the Democratic nomination. He assailed both the socialist Left and the MAGA Right with equal fervor, and wrote exhausting threads in defense of wokeness.

In December 2023, Stancil briefly became unavoidable online after hyperbolically arguing that the US economy under then-President Joe Biden was strong and that claims to the contrary were not merely mistaken, but dishonest. The insistence, delivered with his usual maximalist confidence, triggered a familiar dogpile from both directions.

“For the crime of pointing out the economy looks very strong,” he posted, “I was already getting pummeled by cosplay Twitter communists…. I’m now being swarmed by the right-wing anti-vax types…. This must be how Poland felt in 1939.” It’s the kind of comment that earned him a reputation as a know-it-all who knew very little. “It’s delusional, but it also betrays a staggering level of Messianic arrogance and condescension towards all the people who he thinks he’s manipulating,” Left-wing commentator Carl Beijer told New York magazine.

In Minnesota’s 2024 Democratic-Farmer-Labor primary for House District 61A, that persona followed him into the real world. He was defeated by Katie Jones, an engineer and community figure who went on to win the general election. Stancil blamed the Minneapolis far Left for his loss.

Then came Grok. Last July, Stancil made national news for being the object of grotesque hallucinations of Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok after an update that dialed back “woke filters.” Prodded by Right-wing trolls, the AI began generating graphic, violent rape fantasies specifically targeting Stancil, even offering step-by-step instructions on how to break into his home. It was a moment of peak-derangement: a man so loathed that even an entire artificial network wanted to join in. Stancil responded by threatening legal action and publicly criticizing the platform, pointing to tech companies’ failure to protect individuals from dehumanizing algorithmic behavior.

While the AI was busy hallucinating his assault, the human side of the internet was busy turning him into a literal cartoon. The Will Stancil Show, an AI-assisted animated series and its catchy theme song became an earworm for the irony-poisoned Right. It portrayed him as an overconfident liberal trying and failing to solve problems in a stereotyped black neighborhood with little more than a graduate degree in African-American studies and some free housing vouchers. Some commentators described the series as a glimpse of a racist, AI-generated future of entertainment, while Stancil remarked that it was “extremely surreal to become a main character of the online Nazi phantasmagoria.”

At this point, for all intents and purposes, Stancil seemed more meme than man, a guy who seemingly existed only to be swarmed online by people with hammer-and-sickle emojis and others with Roman-statue avatars. Viewed against this backdrop, the evolution of his image in 2026 is striking. The traits that once made him an object of derision — his earnestness, his verbosity, his high-frequency posting — now make him beloved in a moment that prizes visibility and the documentation of ICE in action.

Many on the liberal left are reconsidering their hatred of him. “Did not have ‘become a huge fan of Will Stancil’ on my bingo card, but gotta give the man credit,” noted Georgia State law professor Anthony Michael Kreis. “He’s stepped up for his neighbors when it mattered most.” Not all Leftist types are convinced, however. Stancil remarked this week that it “sometimes feels like a little bit of a race to see if BORTAC (Border Patrol Tactical Unit) kills me first, or revolutionary Leftists.”

Ironically, some of Stancil’s outsized reputation flows from the Right. Conservative media and Trump administration officials have been eager to depict anti-ICE observers and neighborhood defenders as not just bothersome interlopers, but existential threats, even domestic terrorists. One Right-winger on X even compared him to Leon Trotsky and the ancient Persian emperor Xerxes (“commanders who achieved victory by throwing waves of their own infantry to be slaughtered until the enemy’s will finally broke. Minneapolis was a great moment in the history of human wave attacks.”) That inflationary rhetoric, meant to scaremonger, has paradoxically burnished figures like Stancil into symbols of mainstream resistance. If the state calls you an enemy of the state for pursuing ICE vehicles in a broke-ass Honda Fit, you’re no longer a weenie; you’re an outlaw.

If last summer’s resistance movements in Seattle and Chicago and other blue cities had furries and men in frog costumes as their mascots, Will Stancil fills that role for Minneapolis: a slightly ridiculous figure whose very unseriousness mocks the idea of menace. In an irony-poisoned, hyper-online age, his dissonance — looking like someone who used to be stuffed into a school locker, not a guerrilla fighter — becomes the point, and ultimately the weapon. To paraphrase The Dark Knight, he’s not the hero that Minneapolis deserves, but the one it needs.

A haphazard Kamala Harris campaign plucked Walz straight from cable news, where he was effectively defining the Trump-Vance ticket as “weird” throughout the mid-summer of 2024. Clips of Walz — a Midwestern Dad seemingly straight from central casting — were going viral on social media during the heyday of Couchgate: baseless allegations that JD Vance had once engaged in sexual activity with a couch. Indeed, just one day after Harris named him to the ticket, Walz referenced the meme about Vance’s supposed lust for living-room furniture. 

“I can’t wait to debate the guy — that is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up,” Walz smirked. “See what I did there?” (Vance was widely regarded as the winner of their debate.)

It was an early sign that the second-term governor might not have been as wholesome as depicted. As the country acquainted itself with Walz, the signs became impossible to miss. In retrospect, it’s remarkable the Harris campaign ever took a gamble on a man with Walz’s record — though unsurprising in the context of the Democrats’ Biden-era hubris. 

On paper, Walz had characteristics that made the consultant class swoon. He was a teacher, a veteran, a football coach, a gun owner, a father of two from the Upper Midwest. Like the uncle you catch up with every Thanksgiving, Walz was affable and balding and fluent in sports. 

Vibes aside, Walz had also pursued a progressive agenda in a rural state. This made him an enormously attractive pick for Harris, who was herself a perfect embodiment of the party’s rudderless direction in 2024. Democrats needed to maintain the Biden coalition by appealing to suburban voters and winning back some of the white working class that Hillary Clinton lost, while also keeping young voters and activists energized.

Walz was slightly less popular than Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Harris’s other option for the ticket, but a 54% majority of registered voters in Minnesota approved of his job as governor. As Walz ascended to the top of the ticket, multiple outlets profiled his shift Left-ward since serving in Congress. “How Tim Walz Went From ‘Blue Dog Democrat’ to Progressive Champion,” ran a headline from National Public Radio.

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CNN enumerated the items in Walz’s progressive agenda: “codified protections for abortion access; restored voting rights for felons who’ve completed their sentences; driver’s licenses for people regardless of their legal status; a state child-tax credit; free public college for families making less than $80,000 annually; protections for gender-affirming care; and a paid family and medical leave program.” Most Democrats couldn’t pull that off with a 54% approval rating, so national Democrats saw in Walz a relatable “prairie populist” who could sell the Harris campaign’s cultural progressivism to middle America. 

Enter “Tampon Tim.” Trump World immediately neutralized Walz’s efficacy as a critic of “weirdness” by calling attention to a bill Walz signed that required public schools to provide tampons and pads “to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students.” In other words, Walz put tampons in boys’ bathrooms; Trump knew just how to brand him. 

A closer examination revealed other obvious red flags. Despite being heralded as a white-working-class whisperer, the governor did poorly outside Minnesota’s deep-blue urban centers in both his 2018 and 2022 races, losing most rural counties handily. Pundits and consultants may not fully realize how wealthy and how progressive the Minneapolis suburbs have become. A re-election landslide in Hennepin County won’t translate to support from swing voters in the Rust Belt. 

Walz’s record included a burgeoning fraud scandal of massive proportions among the state’s Somali community; 70 people had already been indicted in the Somali fraud ring by the time Harris tapped him. The record also included Walz’s memorably horrific response to the George Floyd riots of 2020 that permitted the state to burn rather than allowing police to intervene; inconsistencies in his military record; and a deeply strange affinity for China (he made a whopping 30 trips to China over the course of three decades, including on his own honeymoon). 

If anything, Harris may have caused a net drag on her campaign by adding Walz — and that wasn’t an easy thing to pull off, since few people’s votes are influenced by veep picks. As Republicans battered Harris with “Kamala is for they/them” ads, it didn’t help Democrats that “Tampon Tim” attacks only reinforced some voters’ impression of the ticket as being out of touch.

When Trump mounted the comeback of a lifetime and easily defeated Harris, Walz went back to Minneapolis with a bruised ego but also with national name recognition and clout in elite spaces. He slimmed down and dressed up. Yet by November, just one year after Walz was at the top of national politics, everything started to crumble. 

Conservative media had for years sought to draw national attention to swelling fraud allegations among Minnesota’s sizable Somali community. During the pandemic years, Somali scofflaws in Minnesota escaped scrutiny by weaponizing identity politics, fraudulently accepting millions of dollars in taxpayer funds that were supposed to be distributed to children and other vulnerable Minnesotans. As governor, Walz presided over the bureaucracy that allowed this to happen despite clear warning signs. 

Federal investigators, for example, uncovered massive fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services, as well as federal child-welfare and autism programs. Indicted and convicted conspirators, for example, would recruit Somali children into autism therapy services — even if a child didn’t have a diagnosis — facilitating fraudulent claims. Parents reportedly received monthly kickbacks ranging from $300 to $1,500 per child, with some allegedly threatening to go to other fraud networks unless their rates were increased.

After City Journal and County Highway published exposes around Thanksgiving, The New York Times published a lengthy investigation of its own into the scandal. The headline was devastating: “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch.” 

From there, the story took on a life of its own, both in mainstream media and Right-wing social media. Walz responded by taking responsibility and claiming to have cracked down on fraud while also putting up identitarian deflections: he talked about “white men” and said the Somali community was not to blame, even as some Somalis disagreed. 

The war of words between Trump and Walz heated up. As the scandal broke into mainstream spaces, Republicans saw an opportunity for high-profile immigration enforcement in a sanctuary city with clear-cut immigration problems. Trump launched “Operation Metro Surge,” dispatching thousands of ICE agents to the Minneapolis area and pledging to arrest “over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens” in the area. 

The Associated Press notes that Trump “has repeatedly linked his administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota to fraud cases involving federal nutrition and pandemic-aid programs, many of which have involved defendants with roots in Somalia.”

The eyes of the country have been focused on Minnesota since the fraud story led to the ICE surge. While polling is hardly going in Trump’s favor, the picture emerging of Minnesota is one of a state in chaos — not unlike what unfolded in the summer of 2020 under Walz’s supervision. 

On Jan. 5, Walz shocked the political world by suddenly — and angrily — dropping his re-election bid, connecting his decision directly to the attacks he’d sustained, starting with the recent wave of fraud coverage. According to Axios, it was actually “fellow Democrats” who applied the “mounting pressure” that forced the governor’s hand. 

Just two days later, Renée Good died in her car, shot by an ICE officer on duty as part of Trump’s crackdown. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti died during an interaction with Customs and Border Patrol. Between the incidents, organized activists disrupted a Baptist worship service, drawing more criticism that Walz and his allies were inciting raucous disruptions that left ordinary Minnesotans vulnerable. 

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Walz, for his part, has practically begged anti-ICE rioters to remain peaceful — to no avail. While it’s clear the public is not cheering on Trump, anti-ICE disruptors are also causing property damage and creating a sense of general bedlam, producing viral moments on a near nightly basis in clashes with federal officers. 

After Pretti’s killing stirred up days of escalating confrontations, Trump and Walz tried to smooth tensions. Both sides claimed victory. Trump yanked Gregory Bovino, the face of the operation, out of Minneapolis. A MAGA pundit claimed that “Tim Walz and Jacob Frey bent the knee and local law enforcement is doing their job” as police made arrests shortly after Walz and Trump spoke. 

For Walz — whose fame rested on the idea that he could be the adult in the room, a normal Midwestern Democrat fed up with MAGA’s bullshit — the turn of events must sting painfully. 

Perhaps the most devastating rebuke of Walz’s career came on Monday from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After Pretti’s death, Walz lectured in a Sunday news conference: “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody is gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”

The Holocaust Museum called this deeply offensive, releasing a statement the following day that read: “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as anti-Semitism surges.” 

Walz, the embodiment of “Minnesota nice,” the man so relatable he could supposedly sell a progressive culture war to the white working class, was finally revealed to be reckless, divisive, and incompetent. The party’s over. The Walz balloon is now a sad piece of plastic lying on the floor. 

The SIG P320 is a source of endless controversy in gun circles. From shooting ranges to online forums, wherever gun guys gather, there are strong opinions on this pistol. If you aren’t a gun guy, you might mistake the dispute as a matter of brand loyalty: think Ford versus Chevy, Pepsi versus Coke. And the SIG debate is that, in part, but it’s also far more than that. 

The issues go a lot deeper, and the backstory reveals something about gun culture in America, and how it’s crossing the political divide from red to blue.

But to get something out of the way upfront, to save my fellow gun nuts a bunch of scrolling through this essay so they can figure out where I stand on The Issue: I’m a die-hard SIG guy with a small yet primo collection of raced-out DA/SA pistols to prove it. But I don’t touch the P320, nor do I recommend it to anyone.

There are exactly two things a loaded firearm absolutely must do with 100% reliability. First, it must go bang every time the shooter intends for it to do so. Second, it must never go bang when the shooter does not intend for it to do so. There is zero room for error in either of these two requirements, which, incidentally, is the reason why electronically authorized “smart guns” — which identify the user before permitting the gun to fire — have never taken off in the market and probably never will.

The Beretta M9 that the US Army issued to troops up until 2017 as a standard sidearm struggles to meet requirement No. 1, for example. For starters, the M9 had basic mechanical problems, at least initially. A 1988 Government Accountability Office report detailed significant quality and safety shortcomings: namely, slide failures and frame cracks. But the M9 and guns like it also have what we might think of as a user-interface problem that can prevent them from going off even when the gun is working exactly as designed. I’m speaking of the challenge posed by the presence of a manual safety mechanism.

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Even a perfectly functioning pistol can fail to fire when a shooter intends for it to do so, if that shooter has forgotten to flick off the safety before pulling the trigger. This safety issue is well-known for all guns that have manual safeties. When I took my concealed-carry class, the two veteran Austin Police Department detectives who taught it spent time scaring us with stories of dead cops whose corpses were found with their trigger fingers swollen from desperately squeezing a trigger that was never going to fire, because they “missed the throw” of the safety lever in the stress of a shootout.

The instructors told us these horror stories to stress the importance of training yourself to the point that your body reflexively flicks the safety off when bringing the gun up; you shouldn’t even have to think about it. But what about those of us who just don’t have time to ingrain the safety flick so deeply into our muscle memory that our thumb will automatically do it, without fail, under life-or-death levels of stress? What about new recruits?

Training is one way to address this issue. Another is to simply remove the safety, which is essentially what striker-fired pistols like the Glock and the Smith & Wesson M&P ultimately did. (The Glock does have a tiny little safety built into the trigger, so that when you pull the trigger you’re pulling the safety, but it’s basically like not having a safety. Note also that you can get versions of these pistols with a manual safety, but this isn’t a popular option and is typically only selected in situations where a department still requires the safety.)

Striker-fired pistols became popular over the past few decades with police and special forces because they nail our requirement No 1: every time the trigger is pulled, these light, partially plastic handguns go bang. They may not have the ergonomics and heft of a nice Colt 1911. But these “plastic-fantastic” shooting appliances have proved to be extraordinarily reliable. And most important, they’re dead-easy to use under pressure, because you don’t have the added step of manually disengaging the safety before engaging the target.

Which brings us back to Pretti’s handgun. In January 2017, the US Army announced that the SIG P320 had won the bid to become the branch’s next standard-issue service pistol. This announcement brought the Army into the striker-fired era, and was a huge victory for SIG Sauer over rival firms like Beretta and Glock.

The P320 is more than just a striker-fired pistol. It’s a modular weapon system — a “platform” that lets buyers mix and match the parts so that the same gun can be configured in more than one size and capacity.

This concept of a gun as a “weapon system” or “platform” was pioneered by the AR-15, which an executive at high-end AR maker Daniel Defense once told me is like “Legos for grownups”. In recent years, Glock has also evolved in a similar direction, with an ecosystem of aftermarket parts so extensive that it’s possible to build a complete “Glock” out of entirely non-Glock parts from other manufacturers.

The P320 fully embraced this hacker ethos and incorporated it into its design. From the point of view of federal firearms law, the “gun” is legally whatever part of the firearm has the serial number on it. In the case of the P320, the serial number is engraved on a small metal frame that houses the trigger and the core mechanical parts — all of which can be swapped out, or the frame itself can be moved around into different-sized grips and matched with slides and barrels of different lengths.

So when you buy a P320, you’re essentially buying a fully assembled gun kit that’s designed to be disassembled and reassembled in a variety of configurations for applications like concealed carry, home defense, or military use.

As with its striker-fired cousins from other makers, there was little question that the P320 would go bang every time the shooter pulled the trigger. But about two years after the gun’s 2014 debut in the civilian market, rumors began cropping up of troubling incidents: to wit, a number of users claimed that their P320 had fired a round without the trigger being touched. By the time the gun won the Army contract, the uncommanded-discharge allegations were widely known, but not necessarily widely believed, in the gun community.

YouTube videos began circulating, as the “bro scientists” went to work proving or disproving the reports of uncommanded discharges rolling in from firearm classes, police departments, and gun stores.

The specific allegation is that if the gun is dropped — or even bumped or jostled just right — the internal mechanism that holds the spring-loaded firing pin striker will disengage and the gun will go off, even though the trigger hasn’t been touched. Accusations of such flaws have plagued other striker-fired pistols on and off through the years, including the Glock. But with the P320, there is such a great quantity of smoke that it seems pretty reasonable to many to assume there’s a fire, too.

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If the uncommanded-discharge reports were true and indicative of some sort of design flaw, then this would be bad. Very bad. It would be bad for SIG, obviously, but also bad for the legions of shooters who had rushed out to buy a modern, modular handgun billed as a garage tinkerer’s dream.

To decide if the P320 has a real problem, you can spend hours watching YouTube videos and forming your own opinion. I’ll just say that for me, as for many other gun enthusiasts and SIG partisans, the mere fact of the controversy is enough to keep us away from the P320. There are many other great handguns out there, and even SIG has a solid alternative in the P365 family of striker-fired pistols. (I own and shoot one of these.)

Why does this controversy matter within the broader debate over the Pretti shooting? First, as I said above, the P320 is absolutely going to bang if a finger or anything else gets inside the trigger guard and applies the required few pounds of pressure to the trigger. As you can probably guess, these kinds of negligent discharges resulting from improper gun handling happen all the time with striker-fired guns. They happen when someone is reholstering the weapon and a piece of clothing gets caught in the trigger guard. And they can certainly happen when someone is amped up in a high-pressure situation and has grabbed the weapon — either his own or someone else’s — and unthinkingly placed his finger on the switch.

If Pretti’s gun went off at any point — and there’s an ongoing dispute over whether it did — then it was most likely because the officer holding it accidentally pulled the trigger.

The second, more disturbing, and admittedly far more remote possibility is that this was an uncommanded discharge. That is, the ICE officer who removed the SIG from Pretti bumped the gun in such a way that it went off at exactly the wrong moment, causing confusion among his comrades, and costing the protester his life.

Whatever the truth, the discharge — whether it did or didn’t happen, or what role the peculiarities of the P320 ultimately played — should be part of a careful probe of what took place. That is, if we ever get such a probe. What’s most surreal for me, as a longtime shooter and on-and-off gun-industry reporter, is the fact that this very Republican-coded “gun-guy” controversy has now bled over into the blue side of my feed.

We now have the spectacle of a Left-wing concealed carrier sucked into the long-running SIG P320 controversy, and whose right to carry that gun at that protest is being defended by both the arch-gun-restrictionist lawmaker Gabby Giffords and the National Rifle Association. What a time to be alive.

This was Sammee’s first real action as a protester since moving to Minneapolis from Duluth a few years ago. “I just cannot in good conscience just sit home and do nothing while these people are terrorising my neighbours, my community,” she told me. On Monday, her first day picketing ICE’s local headquarters, she came unprepared and got pepper-sprayed in the face at this exact spot with only sunglasses to protect her eyes, and soon felt the pain of chemical burns on her skin. She returned the following day clad in a rainbow-striped ski suit and bright orange goggles placed over her silver-rimmed glasses for protection.

She’s tougher than she looks because of a roller derby hobby, a sport that trains you to stay upright when momentum is working against you. So when ICE agents failed to knock her down, more piled in, throwing her down into the filthy snow piled along the curb. As she lay there, they yelled at her to get back up, even as they continued to shove her back down like grade-school tormentors. The moment she rose to her feet, she received a dose of harsh pepper spray to the face that got partially deflected by her anti-ICE sign. 

“Do it again!” she responded in a fearless taunt. The agent who sprayed her looked nervously at his colleagues for guidance on how to respond. “If you look in their eyes, a lot of them look fucking scared,” Sammee told me. “I think they’re just genuinely afraid of the crowd, even though they’re the ones being violent toward us.”

She expected to be handcuffed and detained inside the federal building, but ICE instead escorted two of her fellow picketers past the gates and into detention; they’d likely be released back onto the street in a matter of hours. Minutes later, Sammee and her fellow protesters returned to screaming obscenities at unmarked black trucks full of masked ICE agents, who sometimes cursed at them, in turn. 

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Most interactions between protesters and federal agents in Minneapolis play out this way. By and large, they aren’t a matter of life and death. They’re more like a Tom and Jerry cartoon pitting an outmatched-but-fearless provocateur and a mean-but-incompetent bully. But since another white female activist who sought to observe or impede agents, Renee Good, was shot and killed by agents last week in a similar scenario, there’s an ominous cloud of danger hovering over these encounters. Yet Sammee managed to keep an unwavering smile on her face while recounting the story about how she just been assaulted by ICE.

But for how long? These days, the happy-go-lucky Midwestern demeanour that defines this place seems like the exception rather than the rule. What’s clear in my time touring the southern part of the city is that the weight of five years of stressful events, including the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge, a targeted deployment of ICE and border agents to Minneapolis, has taken an enormous psychic toll. 

Federal officials have billed it as the largest deportation operation ever undertaken in America, and have characterised last week’s deadly encounter with Good as a self-defence shooting, a version contested by local leaders and eyewitnesses and many Minnesotans who’ve watched the video of the incident.

Residents I spoke with also insist that Trump is employing ICE to sow chaos here to provoke a violent reaction and footage dramatic enough to justify escalation. One longtime local described it bluntly after showing me a video taken by his neighbor of ICE agents throwing gas and flashbang grenades on his block from out their car windows: “They’re trying to provoke people into confrontation,” he said. “They want the bad stuff to happen so they can send in more people, call it a civil war.” For his part, Trump has encouraged political protesting in Iran — “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he posted on Truth Social — but demonises it in Minneapolis, dismissing it as “unrest that anarchists and professional agitators are causing.”

Collectively, Minneapolis is pissed and scared. But most of all, the city’s tired in a world-weary way. Even the signs hung on houses or held in protesters’ hands reflect this attitude. The gentle virtue signaling of “In This House” signs of the early 2020s are gone, replaced by blunt or angry ones reading simply “Fuck Ice,” “Ice Out Now,” or “No Trespassing.” What this city really needs right now is a cigarette or a drink, preferably both.

This feeling is most pronounced in south Minneapolis’s leafy Powderhorn neighbourhood. The street where Good was killed by ICE and the intersection where George Floyd died sit at the heart of a cluster of largely residential blocks a few miles south of downtown that took shape in the early 20th century as a streetcar suburb of single-family homes, duplexes, and low-rise apartments. It’s home to institutions like the Minneapolis Institute of Art. 

Over the decades, this area evolved into one of the city’s most economically and racially diverse neighbourhoods, drawing middle-class artists, working families, and immigrants, while anchoring a vibrant local culture around Powderhorn Park. But it’s not a place historically accustomed to being the center of the universe. “Minnesotans generally like things quiet — shut up, get to work, get things done. It’s a very German Lutheran mindset,” said John Davis, a resident who embraced that low-key lifestyle when he moved here from New York City three decades ago.

Yet, Powderhorn is now a living-history museum of the current decade. Walking here as an outsider feels like an act of dark tourism, a term that describes sightseeing of destinations known for death, disaster, horror, or misery. Within a few square miles, you can trace nearly every pressure point of the 2020s. Five years ago, the neighbourhood became globally recognisable, almost overnight, when George Floyd’s killing at 38th and Chicago transformed an ordinary intersection into a hub of protesting and riots, and a pilgrimage site. Streets were closed, helicopters circled, and fires burned close enough that people kept hoses ready, just in case. Residents adjusted as best they could. Some embraced the transformation, but others merely tolerated it or were disgusted by it. “I was so distraught about (the Floyd protests),” said an elderly woman who asked not to be identified. “We shopped at places where people were stealing TVs and burning buildings, and we said this is not what Minnesotans do!”

Then came the long tail. The pandemic dragged on. Schools went remote, then hybrid, then back again. Teachers went on strike for multiple weeks in 2022. Businesses closed or limped along. In October 2025, a gunman shot through the windows of Annunciation Catholic Church during Mass, killing two children, ages 8 and 10, and injuring 17 other people, including 14 children. The neighbourhood began to resemble something like normalcy when the ground shifted and Trump announced on Jan. 6 that he’d deploy as many as 2,000 federal agents to the area for a sweeping crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents.

Residents here — immigrants and activists, along with everyone else — have been under the constant threat of low levels of violence, random catch-and-release-style kidnapping, tear gassing, and other forms of lawlessness from federal law enforcement for more than a week. You can walk down Powderhorn sidewalks and sometimes spot what looks like blood marking the ice, but is actually leftover reddish-hued chemicals from non-lethal weapons discharged by ICE. 

Federal officers are also sending agents into the parking lots of churches and schools; they’re marching into Targets to detain people. It often feels improvisational, reactive, and thin-skinned. Locals here were already on edge, but the slaying of Good has escalated those nervous feelings into a kind of existential dread. “Y’all, they’re shooting white ladies in the face in the street! What’s going to happen next?” exclaimed a black pastor to his flock at an evangelical church. Some churches, schools, restaurants, and other institutions have spent the last week closed or partially closed, and others are alerting their patrons or members when federal agents are nearby.

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Peter Vircks, a professional saxophonist, described Powderhorn as an open wound that cannot heal. “Everyone’s feeling like they’re in limbo, waiting for the next thing to happen,” he said. For Vircks, that next thing happened on January 9 after the killing of Good. He was walking his dog on 28th Street, where his teenage son goes to Roosevelt High, when he stumbled upon the aftermath of an incident in which armed US Customs and Border Patrol officers entered school property during dismissal, roughed up people (including students), handcuffed two staff members, and fired pepper spray and pepper balls on bystanders. 

“It’s really beyond the pale,” Vircks told me. “It’s not a suburban campus. It’s a neighborhood. Grandmothers and grandkids.” Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, a Roosevelt graduate, agrees. He arrived at the school shortly after Vircks to condemn ICE. “We’re a third-world country now,” he told a Fox News affiliate. “You want to know why? Because in third-world countries, they have the military doing their police work in the cities.”

Vircks’s son was not involved in the Roosevelt clash with ICE and hasn’t talked much about it — or about anything, really. “My wife is convinced he’s angry at adults for screwing up his world. Between riots, the strikes, murders, a kid can’t do anything about it — he can’t even vote.” Vircks is an adult and a voter, but even he feels exhausted and helpless in the new status quo. He has trouble sleeping because of the bright stadium lights illuminating the park across the street from his house since last week, and the constant din of helicopters hovering overhead. During the George Floyd protests, he was worried about his property, to the point of regularly dumping water on his woodpile to keep rioters from setting it ablaze. But the ICE invasion feels different because there is no end in sight, he says, and no authorities to appeal to.

“They say to email or call your representatives. But that seems like screaming into the void. You try to live your everyday life, pay your mortgage, and then you add this on top of it?” he said. Today, for his job as a professional musician, he’s supposed to write an upbeat pop song. But how?

Not everyone I encounter is as open as Vircks or as chipper as Sammee. Multiple Minnesotans tell me they aren’t talking to anyone, much less the media. Can you blame them? This city has already served as a battleground once this decade — symbolic and literal — and understands how quickly local tragedy can be nationalised, flattened into content, and weaponised by people who don’t have to live with the consequences. When this season finally passes, the deeper question will linger: how much cumulative strain can a neighbourhood absorb before something essential gives way? Not a riot or a revolution, but a collapse of the quiet civic trust that binds communities together.

Minneapolis will certainly endure the winter of ICE, but the deeper, more permanent damage may not be seen until the season’s deep freeze melts away and spring arrives.

Some establishments didn’t answer the door. Other attempts ended in confrontations with confused Somali women who appeared to have practically no English skills, bewildered by the young man and his old friend and partner in journalism, Dave, who’d just come by asking to see some kids.

In response, the Right-wing echo chamber went wild. “Prosecute @GovTimWalz,” tweeted Elon Musk. JD Vance exclaimed that Shirley had done more valuable journalism than the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. Before long, the Trump administration froze billions in funds for childcare and assistance to the poor going to Minnesota, and four other blue states for good measure. Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) has even introduced a resolution to award Shirley a Congressional Gold Medal.

Yet the real lesson of this story is how poorly suited the American Right is to engaging in journalism — and, indeed, the movement’s impoverished understanding of what journalism is all about.

Start by stipulating that there has been fraud involving Somalis in Minnesota. In 2022, the Biden administration charged 47 defendants in a $250 million scheme to exploit a child-nutrition program. This summer, the acting US Attorney for Minnesota said in an interview that his office had prosecuted cases amounting to $500 million in fraud over the past few years, and that in the case of the federal Housing Stabilization Services program, the “vast majority” of the money being distributed is fraudulent.

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It appears that most of this is coming from within the Somali community, and The New York Times in November reported on how Democratic politicians in that state were shy about shining a light on criminal activity in a way that could demonize a minority group or alienate a sizable new voting bloc.

None of this, however, means that Nick Shirley was engaging in real journalism. What he did was the equivalent of a reporter covering the mafia randomly showing up at Italian-owned butcher shops and restaurants with a prefabricated narrative that criminal activity must be going on. Almost immediately, Shirley’s narrative began to fall apart. The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families last week visited the daycares targeted by Shirley and determined that they were “operating as expected.” Children were, in fact, present at all of the sites, except for one that had yet to open for the day. Apparently, just showing up at a daycare and asking “Can I see the children?” does not get you access to them.

Reporters from the Minnesota Star Tribune visited the 10 facilities in Shirley’s video, and found children in four of them. The other six were either closed or did not open their doors, which would be understandable, given what they had recently been through. At one facility, the paper reported, “the daycare’s phones now ring nonstop from early in the morning to late at night, with people pretending to want to place their children there or threatening harm.”

The Star Tribune reported that some of the facilities had been cited for large numbers of violations in recent years. And the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families is pursuing ongoing investigations of four of the 10 daycares in the video. One of them, Quality Learning Center, closed down after Shirley’s visit. But there is little in Shirley’s video that, without more, qualifies as evidence of wrongdoing.

From the video itself, Shirley appears to not have much understanding of how health-care and government licensing work. At one point, while wandering through a facility of various medical providers, Shirley wonders, “Why would you have the same company essentially inside of the same building?” The kid has apparently never heard of a medical plaza. While visiting an office that appears to have patients in a waiting room, he asks a bewildered receptionist what their “health-care rates” are — a question that no patient in the American health system ever asks a provider. At facilities like the ones in the video, payment is often provided through government health programs, and depends upon the exact services that are authorized. This isn’t like asking for a menu in a restaurant.

Shirley finds a facility that is licensed to care for 102 children, and expects to see exactly that number of kids, not understanding that this is the maximum number they are authorized to serve. When the Star Tribune went to the same place, the paper found around 50 children inside. They simply hadn’t been visible from the door. At another facility, Dave (Shirley’s partner) taunts people standing outside that they might need an Amber Alert for the exact number of kids that they are licensed to care for.

Shirley has inspired similarly ignorant imitators on social media. One December X post, from the sensationalist @WallStreetApes account, declares that regular homes in Minnesota being registered as assisted living facilities is indicative of fraud (it has garnered more than 900,000 views as of this writing). Yet as the journalist Christina Buttons points out, the trend in US policy has been towards encouraging home- and community-based care over large institutions, meaning that these homes could well be assisted-living facilities.

Some have followed Shirley in showing up to random Somali businesses and haranguing the people inside. One video with 16 million views as of this writing involves a YouTuber informing her audience that “90% of small businesses fail, yet the Samara Adult Day Care still has their lights on without having one customer seemingly.” The woman who answers the door doesn’t speak English very well, but communicates that she is waiting for a driver to bring the people they take care of. The lack of assimilation among Somalis clearly does hinder communication, but that is not the point the influencer is going for. Without any evidence that anything is untoward is happening, the woman is smeared as a fraudster based on her ethnicity and line of business.

The episode is another showcase of why the nation needs real institutions, and highlights the failure of conservatives to build or maintain ones Americans can trust. Elon Musk encourages “citizen journalism,” giving the impression that anyone can show up with a camera — without any background knowledge, editorial guardrails, writing ability, or fact-checking — and provide useful information on current events.

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The amateurism is corrosive to Americans’ capacity to reform real problems. Shirley’s partner, Dave, claims at one point that Tim Walz took Minnesota from having an $18 billion surplus to a $6 billion deficit, a swing of $24 billion, of which he attributes 90% to fraud. In fact, Minnesota still has a surplus for the current fiscal year. There is projected to be a deficit of about $6 billion by 2028-2029, but no evidence is provided in Shirley’s video for the claim that fraud will be a substantial reason why.

The only attempt to ground his so-called journalism in empirical data is Shirley’s running tally of supposed fraud uncovered, based on which businesses he considers illegitimate. That determination, in turn, rests on little more than his unsuccessful attempts to locate children or wrangle “health-care rates” out of confused receptionists.

In a sense, Shirley starts with a narrative and then grabs on to whatever evidence he can find in order to tell the story, including short videos and official government numbers provided without the necessary context to understand what is going on. Do mainstream-media institutions sometimes do the same thing? Undoubtedly. But the Shirley version is so much more grotesquely low-quality — and subject to none of the editorial scrutiny and pushback that is routine for institutions like the Times even on their worst days.

To be clear, conservatives have uncovered a real problem in the form of government fraud. There are points to be made about topics such as immigration from clannish, hard-to-assimilate backgrounds, and Democrats letting fraud run rampant to avoid accusations of racism and to curry favor with an ethnic voting bloc. Yet a Times reader could have learned about Somali fraud in Minnesota in late November, minus the encouragement to harass random people who may not have had nothing to do with criminal activity.

Shirley is far from the worst influencer in the new Right-wing media ecosystem. That’s not saying much, however, in a community in which it is completely normal to sit in a podcast studio and fabricate “facts.” What the young YouTuber reveals, however, is in some ways even darker. It is that, even when the Right has a point about a news story, its partisans, and even its leaders, are either unwilling or unable to either demand or adhere to basic journalistic or intellectual norms. Moreover, there appears to be a growing appetite for opportunities to harass minority communities in real life over the sins committed by individuals who share the same background. That is a greater threat to the future of the country than welfare fraud.