JokersUpdates.com: Current Affairs - NY Times: In Minneapolis, I Glimpsed a Civil War (this is a terrifying piece, read it and organize for your own safety)

Late last Wednesday night, I was standing on a street corner in the Hawthorne neighborhood in North Minneapolis when I witnessed an extraordinary confrontation. A federal agent marched up a narrow residential sidewalk flanked by modest bungalows, kitted out in gear fit for the battle of Falluja: full body armor, military boots and camouflage fatigues and helmet, with a heavy machine gun slung by his side. His carriage was erect, his gaze fixed straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to the crowd of protesters who blew whistles and shouted curses as he passed, enraged that one week after Renee Good was gunned down by an ICE agent, another civilian had been shot by ICE in their city.

Suddenly, the tense scene dissolved into slapstick. The federal officer slipped on a patch of ice and tumbled to the ground. A raucous roar of laughter and jeers erupted from the protesters surrounding him. He scrambled to his feet and marched on. But a few seconds later one of the protesters shouted, “He dropped his magazine!”

And sure enough, lying on the patch of ice was a fully loaded magazine from his automatic weapon. Dan Engelhart, one of the city’s parks commissioners, was standing nearby. He grabbed the magazine and turned it over in his hands.

“Well, we’re ---- close to civil war,” he told me.

As a longtime foreign correspondent, I have covered civil wars in countries across the globe. Not so long ago, I would have rolled my eyes at the notion that one could erupt anywhere in America, much less in my once placid home state of Minnesota. And yet there I was, eyes stinging and throat burning as tear gas wafted over me, watching heavily armed agents of the federal government invade a quiet residential neighborhood five miles as the crow flies from the suburb where I went to middle school.

Like many Americans, I had watched the video of the killing of Good by an ICE officer on a residential street in Minneapolis with horror and sorrow. From afar, this tragic and possibly criminal act of violence could plausibly be seen as incidental to President Trump’s mission to deport undocumented people from the country. But when I landed in Minneapolis on Monday and saw the size, scope and lawlessness of the federal onslaught unfolding here, I understood that Good’s killing was emblematic of its true mission: to stage a spectacle of cruelty upon a city that stands in stark defiance against Trump’s dark vision of America.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/opinion/trump-minneapolis-ice.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FlA.uMdS.bLHlWGLyrxIy&smid=nytcore-ios-share