Minneapolis, Minnesota
Source: Bigstock
In early January 2026, Minneapolis once again rediscovered its true civic vocation. Not commerce. Not culture. Not even ice fishing. Riot rehearsal. Once known as Prince’s hometown and briefly famous for the Vikings’ annual postseason collapse, the city has spent the past half decade rebranding itself as America’s most reliable supplier of moral tantrums, ever since the death of George Floyd turned a Midwestern police blotter into a global morality play. This time, the pretext was the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old anti-ICE activist killed during a chaotic confrontation amid federal immigration operations. The tragedy itself mattered less than the opportunity it provided: another chance for the American left to cast law enforcement as villainy, borders as hate crimes, and disorder as civic virtue, livestreamed, placarded, and stage-managed by the usual nonprofit impresarios.
No political production is complete without a canonization. The death of Renee Good was immediately elevated from tragedy to sacrament. She was described as a “legal observer,” a “poet,” a “community writer,” anything except what she was: an activist trained to obstruct federal agents during enforcement operations. That inconvenient detail was quietly set aside. The script demanded a martyr, and Minneapolis was happy to oblige.
“The script demanded a martyr, and Minneapolis was happy to oblige.”
Canonization, like compassion, follows rules of selection. The asymmetry is instructive. When Good was killed intervening in a federal operation, the activist machinery sprang to life: hashtags, vigils, media sanctification, and a GoFundMe windfall of roughly $1.5 million. By contrast, when Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian refugee who had fled a real war, was stabbed to death on an American train in 2025, her passing registered as a disposable footnote, briefly mourned, modestly funded, and quickly forgotten. No national protests. No canonization. No moral industry mobilized. Compassion, it turns out, is not universal; it is allocated. In modern progressive politics, it flows not to the innocent, but to the useful.
Once the hierarchy of victims was established, the rest was procedural. Within hours of the shooting, the choreography snapped into place. Protesters appeared with professionally printed signs. Legal observers materialized. Social media accounts broadcast identical slogans across cities hundreds of miles apart. Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, New York all lit up on cue. The supposedly spontaneous uprising bore the unmistakable fingerprints of the protest-industrial complex, that ecosystem in which “grassroots” movements always seem to sprout preassembled, well-funded, and camera-ready.
This time, the spark was Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s high-visibility interior enforcement push following historic reductions in illegal border crossings. With the southern border finally under control, Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned inward, deploying more than 2,000 federal agents to sanctuary-leaning regions like Minnesota to begin the unglamorous work of deportation.
What followed was less protest than production. According to reporting, a network of dark-money NGOs tied to American businessman and activist Neville Roy Singham swung into action within hours, coordinating demonstrations nationwide. Singham made his fortune in Silicon Valley before selling his firm and devoting himself to political activism abroad, funding an array of far-left organizations with substantial sums.
Singham is no accidental patron of unrest. Steeped in Marxist and Maoist circles from an early age, and shaped by a father who was a noted political scientist, his ideological inheritance hardened into a lifelong commitment to radical causes. Rather than pamphlets, his money flows to groups whose métier is agitation rather than persuasion, organizations that reliably surface at anti-police riots, demonstrations, and anti-ICE protests alike. Minneapolis was simply the latest venue.
This pattern of lavishly financed agitation is not new. A century ago, the Russian Revolution had its own indispensable patron in Alexander Parvus, a cosmopolitan Marxist fixer born in the Russian Empire, educated in Germany, and enriched not by factory work or peasant struggle but by wartime commerce, arms dealing, and financial speculation. Parvus understood what romantics preferred to ignore: Revolutions are expensive. He used his fortune and his connections to bankroll Bolshevik operations, underwrite propaganda, and support Leon Trotsky, whom he mentored and subsidized.
Most famously, Parvus helped facilitate the sealed train that carried Lenin and his entourage across Germany in 1917, a logistical sleight of hand that turned foreign money, geopolitical cynicism, and ideological fervor into regime change. The lesson was plain then and remains so now: Movements that advertise themselves as spontaneous uprisings of the people almost always rely on a discreet benefactor with deep pockets and a taste for upheaval.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna has since moved to subpoena Singham, arguing that his funding network operates as a financial and logistical backbone for unrest while sidestepping Foreign Agents Registration Act disclosures. Her charge is blunt: a billionaire ideologue bankrolling street chaos through nonprofit cutouts.
Yet the greater scandal is not Singham himself. It is that this apparatus exists at all, openly tolerated, quietly protected, and reflexively defended by the Democratic Party because it performs an essential service. The NGOs supply the foot soldiers. The activists supply the spectacle. The party supplies the moral alibis. Together they form a machine designed not merely to protest immigration enforcement, but to make it politically impossible.
Why such desperation? Because mass deportation threatens to undo a central Democratic demographic strategy cultivated for more than a decade: import people, subsidize settlement, block enforcement, then convert presence into votes through pathways and amnesties. Sanctuary cities exist for this reason. Interior enforcement withered under Obama and was abandoned under Biden. The sight of ICE actually doing its job now triggers hysteria.
Trump’s second term shattered the arrangement. Border crossings collapsed to levels not seen since the Nixon administration. In 2025, total apprehensions fell to just over 100,000, fewer than in a single month under Biden. Nearly all those encountered were detained and deported, not waved into the interior under euphemisms like “processing” and “prosecutorial discretion.” The flow stopped. And once the border faucet was finally turned off, only one option remained for achieving mass deportations: the method Democrats had spent years dismantling, interior enforcement.
There is no gentle way to remove millions of people who are not supposed to be here. There never was. The fantasy of invisible, polite deportations is just that. The Obama administration’s much-touted record relied on accounting tricks, counting border turn-aways as removals while interior enforcement collapsed under executive amnesties and elastic discretion. Trump has no such mirage available. If deportations are to happen at all, they must be real, visible, and disruptive.
Hence the raids. Hence the protests. Hence the videos.
Critics on both left and right complain that the administration is being too theatrical, too aggressive, too visible. Even some conservatives have joined in. Joe Rogan has denounced the raids as “horrible” and flirted with “Gestapo” analogies, while Tucker Carlson has urged restraint and empathy over spin. But this objection rests on a category error. The visibility is not provocation. It is the inevitable result of enforcing the law in a society saturated with smartphones, activist NGOs, and professional interlopers trained to turn every encounter into a scandal. In such a culture, enforcement cannot help but be seen.
The alternative often proposed is employer enforcement. Go after the businesses, the argument runs, and migrants will self-deport quietly. In reality, this would produce its own political firestorm, complete with tear-soaked profiles of ruined small-business owners, criminalized landscapers, and handcuffed restaurateurs. It would also fail to address the core incentive structure. Many illegal immigrants are drawn not by work but by welfare, benefits, and the promise of indefinite residence in a system that refuses to say no.
Trump’s approach attacks that structure directly. Remittance taxes. Benefit denial. Alien registration. Financial incentives to leave. Pressure from all sides. It is unpleasant. It is politically costly. And it is working. Estimates suggest the foreign-born population has declined by more than 2 million in the first nine months of Trump’s second term, the first significant drop in half a century.
This is why the protests are so furious. This is why the NGOs are mobilizing. This is why Minneapolis is burning again.
President Trump’s warning about invoking the Insurrection Act was not bombast. It was a recognition of reality. When state and local officials refuse to enforce the law, and when federally funded NGOs coordinate unrest to obstruct federal operations, the line between protest and insurrection begins to blur. The act has been invoked before by Eisenhower in Little Rock, Kennedy during the Ole Miss riots, Johnson amid the urban unrest of the late 1960s, and most recently during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Minneapolis appears determined to audition for a sequel.
The Democratic Party understands the stakes. If deportations continue, the demographic project collapses. If NGO funding networks are dismantled, the street theater dries up. If fraud investigations spread beyond Minnesota, the grift is exposed. So the party has chosen chaos. Better to burn the city than lose the election. Better to cry tyranny than face accountability.
Renee Good’s death was tragic. It should never have happened. But it is being exploited, deliberately, to stop the enforcement of laws Democrats no longer wish to obey. The truth beneath the slogans is simple: A country that cannot enforce its borders cannot remain a country. And a political movement that requires riots to preserve its voter base is not defending democracy. It is dismantling it.
The choice is not between kindness and cruelty. It is between law and farce. Between a nation and a nonprofit-managed theme park. Trump has chosen enforcement—which is to say, the nation. The left has chosen fire. And Minneapolis, once again, is where the sparks fell.
