The Freedom Forum published a tepid First Amendment analysis of armed protest after Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. It’s barely competent, an example of what’s wrong.

It correctly identifies time, place, and manner restrictions, content neutrality requirements, narrow tailoring doctrine. It asks a constitutional question:

When can the government restrict someone’s right to protest because they’re lawfully armed?

It’s also useless. The question isn’t what the law says. It’s who the law protects. The answer to when has historically been that the government restrictions are based on who: race.

The Pattern

Case	Legal Status	Circumstances	NRA Response
Black Panthers (1967)	LEGAL open carry	Monitoring police, protesting at California Capitol	Helped draft the Mulford Act ban, supported passage to deny gun rights
Philando Castile (2016)	LEGAL Licensed, permit holder	Informed officer he was armed, reached for wallet, shot dead	Silence. Then blamed him, based only on a police claim they found marijuana. Refused to defend gun rights
Kyle Rittenhouse (2020)	ILLEGAL—Couldn’t legally acquire rifle	Killed 2 people at BLM protest	Awarded him $50k and AR-15 assault rifle to execute more protestors, promoting “warrior for gun rights”
Amir Locke (2022)	LEGAL Licensed, concealed carry permit	Asleep on couch, woken by no-knock raid, grabbed gun, shot dead in 3 seconds	No support, “not commenting”
Alex Pretti (2026)	LEGAL Licensed, VA nurse, no criminal record	Filming immigration enforcement, disarmed, publicly executed, shot in back while face-down	Attacked gun rights leaders

The Only Illegal One

Every person on that list except Rittenhouse was exercising legal gun rights. The Panthers were carrying legally under California law. Castile was licensed. Locke had a concealed carry permit. Pretti was a permitted VA nurse in the ICU serving the military with no record.

Rittenhouse didn’t stumble into a felony. He got his sister’s boyfriend Dominick Black to break gun laws for him. Kenosha police already knew Black from “numerous interactions” yet Wisconsin courts rapidly reduced his two felonies to a small fine under a no contest plea. Then Black was arrested multiple times again for fleeing police, and for armed robbery—with a rifle. Gun crime pays, if you are a young white boy named Black in Wisconsin.

Rittenhouse couldn’t legally acquire the rifle. He did anyway and then crossed state lines for the sole purpose of pointing a hunting rifle at innocent people. He panicked, while hunting humans, and killed two. ICE agents with handguns panicked and executed two.

It was this that the NRA looked at and decided to flagrantly mock the courts and their felony charges by dispensing huge gifts to Rittenhouse: $50,000 and a trophy AR-15.

The only person using a gun to deny other Americans their constitutional rights, is the one the NRA gives rewards. The only person breaking gun laws is the one that the NRA has openly and repeatedly celebrated.

Armed Protesters in State Capitols

I’ve read so many articles about American gun-toting protesters entering state capitol buildings, that I’ve lost track of the number:

• Protesters storm Michigan capitol
• Protesters, some armed, enter Michigan capitol building
• Fully armed rally-goers enter Kentucky capitol building with zero resistance
• Gunmen swarm Kentucky capitol—umbrellas and sticks are banned but not guns

However, only very rarely have I seen anyone reference that the NRA’s firm position on this issue was to ban guns. Guess why.

The Mulford Act

In 1967, the Black Panther Party was legally monitoring police in Oakland—armed patrols using California’s open carry laws to document police brutality. On May 2, several armed Panthers entered the California State Capitol to protest a proposed gun control bill. Republican Assemblyman Don Mulford drafted the Mulford Act to ban public carry of loaded firearms. The NRA helped write it and supported its passage:

The display so frightened politicians—including California governor Ronald Reagan—that it helped to pass the Mulford Act, a state bill prohibiting the open carry of loaded firearms, along with an addendum prohibiting loaded firearms in the state Capitol. The 1967 bill took California down the path to having some of the strictest gun laws in America and helped jumpstart a surge of national gun control restrictions.

Reagan’s Lies

Not so long ago we had a President named Ronald Reagan who was known for being a horribly racist exaggerator. Here’s the Snopes perspective on his justification for banning guns:

“The Black Panthers had invaded the legislative chambers in the Capitol with loaded shotguns and held these gentlemen under the muzzles of those guns for a couple of hours. Immediately after they left, Don Mulford introduced a bill to make it unlawful to bring a loaded gun into the Capitol Building. That’s the bill I signed. It was hardly restrictive gun control.”

This wasn’t true.

The Panthers were disarmed by capitol police soon after entering the building and, according to contemporaneous accounts including the Associated Press, were escorted out 30 minutes later. No one was held at gunpoint for hours.

Reagan’s crooked mythology required to justify the gun ban had to be inflated because the reality—Black men legally carrying, reading a statement, leaving peacefully—wasn’t scary enough to strip their rights. They needed the story to be an armed invasion.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the NRA we know today remains very much the same organization with these same values that it suddenly became in the 1970s.

Building the Base

The pattern the NRA follows extends beyond selective defense. It actively recruits children into the political identity. Business Insider reported on essay contests for kindergarteners asking how the constitutional right to bear arms affects them personally.

Leaving aside the oddness of asking the youngest of grade schoolers how the constitutional right to bear arms affects them personally, the contest raises alarms for gun-control advocates. Gun violence was the No. 1 cause of death for US children in 2021… “They’re selling a lie, and it’s a very dangerous lie,” Brown [the president of the gun-safety group Brady] added. “They are selling it to your kids, and they don’t care if it’s killing them.”

Imagine tobacco companies sponsoring contests for children to write about cancer-causing smoking as a Constitutional freedom:

By the time they are capable of making a mature judgment, their health may be harmed irrevocably and their decisional capacity impaired by the product’s addictive qualities.

That analysis misstates it. By the time they are capable of making a mature judgment, these targeted kids—and those around them—are already dead.

I say this as someone who grew up in the heart of rural American gun culture. By 12 years old I had been shot and wounded, requiring hospitalization.

The number of children and teens killed by gunfire in the United States increased 50% between 2019 and 2021…

As a historian familiar with Nazi Germany, I have to point out their children were motivated towards mass violence by rapid dissemination of highly targeted authoritarian disinformation. The NRA runs the exact same playbook (not by coincidence)—capture children ideologically before they can evaluate the claims, normalize the violence that identity produces. An inverse effect also helps illuminate the cruelty. British soldiers in WWII reported a strategy of offering God and Chocolate to melt a Nazi child’s cold coal heart full of false fears and nightmares.

The 180-Degree Flip

The NRA has an origin story that is the exact opposite of its current incarnation.

In 1871, Union generals under President Grant founded the NRA to train Black freemen—emancipated slaves—to defend themselves against white supremacist militias like the KKK. The organization was “a roster of Union commanders” who had just defeated the Confederacy. Training emancipated Americans with marksmanship was seen as logical: help citizens protect the federal government from regression and rebellion.

Then came 1977.

The NRA developed a splinter extreme right-wing Institute for Legislative Action lobby group that suddenly seized complete control of the organization in what’s called the “Cincinnati Revolt.” The timing matters: the United Nations Security Council Resolution 418 of 1977 had unanimously adopted a mandatory global arms embargo against apartheid South Africa.

Post-1977, the NRA represented primarily the interests of gun manufacturers—and arguably became a channel for running guns to white nationalist regimes despite international embargo.

Founded to arm American Blacks against white supremacist gang violence. Pivoted to pass a ban on gun rights for American Blacks. Captured entirely after international embargo of South Africa, in order to arm whites-only-rule. Now celebrates an illegal gun used to kill innocent people at a racial justice protest. Silent when police murder Black men with legal permits. Silent when ICE publicly executes Americans. Not drift. Inversion.

The Legal Architecture

The NRA isn’t the only institution built for one purpose and captured for the opposite.

Grant’s Enforcement Acts were designed to prosecute the Klan. The Supreme Court gutted them within a decade. United States v. Cruikshank (1876) established that the Fourteenth Amendment only restricts state action—the federal government cannot protect Black citizens from private white violence.

Southern states declined to prosecute Klan. The Klan’s members often were state actors—sheriffs, deputies, judges—who refused to prosecute themselves. The doctrine gave them an obvious loophole: put on a hood, become a “private” actor. The same men who wore a badge by day wore a sheet by night.

It’s why ICE wears masks today.

Now watch what happens when you reverse the polarity:

The Trump administration is using an anti-Ku Klux Klan law to prosecute Minnesota activists for demonstrating… charged with conspiracy to deprive rights—a federal felony under Section 241, a Reconstruction-era statute enacted to safeguard the rights of Black Americans to vote and engage in public life amid the KKK’s racial violence. Levy Armstrong and Allen are both prominent Black community organizers.

Black organizers protested violence by a federal official. The state is acting. No doctrinal barrier applies. Section 241—the fragment of Grant’s law that survived—activates instantly to target the very people it was meant to protect.

The law was carefully stripped of power by jurists who saw Reconstruction as the crime. It couldn’t protect Black Americans from private violence. Yet it retained full power to punish Black Americans if they dared to confront state violence.

Whatever is architected for safety will be weaponized into a tool of terror. Decades of saying gun registration would be the end of freedom, then forcing registration. Decades of open carry as a sacred right, then wearing a holstered gun in public becomes a crime punishable by immediate state firing squad execution.

What “Shall Not Be Infringed” Actually Means

The NRA is no longer a gun rights organization. They’re a white nationalist political organization that uses gun rights selectively. The Second Amendment applies to people they consider legitimate political actors, and doesn’t apply to people they don’t, based on race.

The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus—not the NRA—defended Castile, Locke, and Pretti. Principled gun rights advocacy is possible. The NRA chooses not to practice it.

They promote illegal gun use for political purposes and work to ban guns when the wrong people carry them legally. That’s the NRA today, opposite of why it was created.

As a historian of disinformation, especially of both World Wars and after, I can’t help but compare tactics deployed by America overseas to the recent “voter” focus of Trump’s stormtroopers.

Minnesota is currently experiencing the domestic deployment of destabilization and election-capture techniques developed by U.S. military and intelligence services over seven decades of foreign interventions.

The playbook is public and extensively documented in declassified CIA records, academic studies, and post-Cold War analyses. It’s what you study if you are interested in being a historian of regime change tactics like disinformation.

What makes the Minnesota operation so Trumpian is the inversion: techniques designed by America to overthrow foreign governments are being applied by Trump to capture election infrastructure and undermine the 2026 midterms.

This is not metaphor. The structural elements align precisely. The playbook is more obvious than you might think, you just have to like history. Although, to be fair, it’s also being said out loud now.

“I’m not sure what gave [Trump] the indication that at this point in time, what’s happening to my state, that I’m interested in Venezuela,” [Minnesota Governor] Walz continued. “But he told me how well that went, which really was strange to me was, he saw an operation in Venezuela, against a foreign nation, in the same context he saw an operation against a U.S. state and a U.S. city.”

How the U.S. Aimed to Overthrow Governments

OG Postwar Regime Change: Italy 1948

The nascent CIA’s first-ever covert action was electoral interference. Facing strong left-wing leaders in post-war Italy, the Truman administration authorized an operation that became, in the words of the CIA’s own chief internal historian, “a template for what the agency then did in many, many countries.”

The template included:

• Massive covert funding to right-wing parties
• Propaganda and scare campaigns to frighten voters
• Grassroots initiatives manufactured to appear spontaneous
• Media acquisition and influence operations

The operation worked and a lesson was recorded: ballots don’t need to be stuffed like 1850s Kansas if you can control the infrastructure around them in the 1950s.

Refinement: 72 Cold War Operations

America attempted to change foreign governments at least 72 times after Italy. The techniques grew and evolved:

• British Guiana (1964): The U.S. plan was explicit—“change the electoral rules, then work to ensure [the target’s] party could not win an election.” The CIA orchestrated strikes, bombings, and ethnic violence while U.S. diplomats delayed independence until electoral systems could be restructured.
• Chile (1970-73): When Salvador Allende won democratically, the CIA spent millions to destabilize his government, funded opposition media, and supported the eventual military coup. A senior CIA official later defended the interventions as preserving “the democratic constitutional order”—the constitutional language that always accompanies authoritarian capture.
• Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Brazil (1964): Each operation refined the model of using security forces, economic pressure, propaganda, and electoral manipulation in combination.
• Panama (1989): The CIA paid Manuel Noriega around $200K/year to “disappear” left-wing leaders and ship drugs into America—until a sudden unexplained plane crash killed the Panamanian President and Noriega consolidated power. He remained useful until the former CIA director who handled him became American President and wanted him gone. After massive military invasion of the country, Delta Force failed a dozen times to assassinate him, so they negotiated his surrender instead.

Maturation: The Color Revolution Model

By the 2000s, regime change had been systematized into what analysts discuss as “color revolutions”:

1. Manufactured crisis (“If the political situation is stable, destabilization must be created in an artificial way”)
2. Security force deployment to create leverage
3. Election infrastructure capture (USAID spent $1.5 million computerizing Georgia’s voter rolls before the Rose Revolution)
4. Propaganda framing the target government as illegitimate
5. Constitutional/legal cover for extra-constitutional action

The formula worked in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005). U.S. officials publicly celebrated democracy promotion while classified assessments acknowledged the covert dimensions of regime change.

Minnesota 2026: Foreign Playbook Turned Against US

1. Security Force Deployment as Leverage

   Foreign template: Deploy military or paramilitary forces to create instability, then use their presence as bargaining leverage.

   Minnesota: Thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents occupy Minneapolis—a city 1,500 miles from the southern border with no unusual immigration patterns. Within weeks, federal agents have shot and killed two people: Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and nurse. The occupation creates the very “chaos” cited as justification for demands.

   Attorney General Pam Bondi’s letter to Governor Walz explicitly links the two: comply with federal demands and she can “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota.” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon called this “an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security.”

   This is the color revolution model inverted: instead of deploying assets to pressure an authoritarian regime into concessions, the federal government deploys assets against a democratic state government to extract control of election systems.

2. Voter Infrastructure as the Strategic Target

   Foreign template: Gain access to or control over voter registration systems before elections.

   Minnesota: The DOJ is demanding complete voter rolls including names, addresses, partial Social Security numbers, and driver’s license numbers. This demand extends to roughly two dozen states—all states Trump lost in 2020.

   The infrastructure already exists to weaponize this data. The Department of Homeland Security has built a system called SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) that cross-references voter rolls against immigration databases. Tens of millions of records have already been processed. The system has produced no evidence of the “widespread voter fraud” claimed as justification—but in one Texas county alone, 15 of 84 voters flagged as “noncitizens” were false positives (an 18% error rate).

   An 18% false positive rate, applied to millions of voters in swing states before a midterm election, is the simple mechanism.

3. Crisis Manufacture

   Foreign template: “The first and basic condition is political instability in the country, which is accompanied by a crisis of the current authorities. If the political situation is stable, destabilization must be created in an artificial way.”

   Minnesota: There was no immigration crisis in Minnesota requiring federal intervention. The “emergency” was manufactured:

   • Claims of massive welfare fraud in the Somali community (investigations ongoing, no mass convictions)
   • Claims of voter fraud (no evidence found despite years of searching)
   • Federal agents deployed in numbers appropriate for border operations, not interior enforcement

   The occupation itself generates the instability: protests erupt, federal agents kill civilians, national media coverage creates the impression of chaos, and the federal government demands concessions to restore order it disrupted.

4. Constitutional Cover for Extra-Constitutional Action

   Foreign template: Frame coups and interventions as “preserving the democratic constitutional order” or “election integrity.”

   Minnesota: Every demand is framed in legal language—”Enforcing federal election law,” “Election integrity,” “Common sense solutions.”

   But federal judges are not fooled. A California court dismissed the DOJ’s voter data lawsuit as “unprecedented and illegal.” An Oregon judge signaled the same. The Kobach Commission in 2017 found no fraud before being disbanded. The legal framework is a legitimacy facade over an extra-legal power grab.

5. Target Selection

   Foreign template: Target governments not aligned with U.S. interests or identified as obstacles to strategic objectives.

   Minnesota: The DOJ is suing approximately two dozen states for voter data, which just happens to be all states Trump lost in 2020. This is blunt targeting. Minnesota is a swing state with competitive 2026 Senate and House races. Control of Congress depends on states exactly like Minnesota.

   The targeting is strategic, not administrative.

Structural Comparison

Element	Foreign Operations (Documented)	Minnesota 2026
Security force deployment	Military/paramilitary assets create instability and leverage	ICE/CBP occupation; two civilian deaths; “chaos” cited as justification
Voter infrastructure target	USAID computerized Georgia’s voter rolls pre-Rose Revolution	DOJ demands unredacted voter rolls with SSNs from states Trump lost
Crisis manufacture	“If stable, destabilization must be created artificially”	Immigration “emergency” in non-border state; occupation creates cited chaos
Concession extraction	Instability as leverage for political demands	Bondi letter: voter data compliance as condition to end “chaos”
Constitutional cover	“Preserving democratic constitutional order” (Chile)	“Election integrity,” “enforcing federal election law”
Target selection	Governments opposing U.S. interests	States Trump lost in 2020; swing states before 2026 midterms
Propaganda integration	Control/influence media messaging	Disinformation about “welfare fraud” and “voter fraud” using any random immigrant community
Legitimacy infrastructure	Bipartisan commissions, “election monitors”	2017 Kobach Commission; DOJ “election law enforcement” framing
Local collaborators	Fund opposition parties/NGOs	2017: Alabama GOP bypassed Secretary of State to provide Kobach data
False positive weaponization	Crosscheck purged legitimate voters via “errors”	SAVE system: 18% false positive rate in Texas county sample

The Precedent Chain

1. 1947: National Security Act creates CIA
2. 1948: Italy operation establishes election interference template
3. 1953-1989: 72 regime change operations refine techniques
4. 2000-2005: Color revolutions systematize the model—security force pressure, election infrastructure capture, crisis manufacture, constitutional cover
5. 2017: Kobach Commission (domestic dry run)—requested voter data from all 50 states, 44 states refused, commission disbanded after finding no fraud, pattern established: claim fraud to demand data and plan purges, failure mode identified: no coercion mechanism
6. 2026: Minnesota operation—same data demands, added coercion via armed federal occupation, explicit quid pro quo (Bondi letter), pre-built processing infrastructure (SAVE), lawsuits against non-compliant states

The 2017 Kobach Commission failed because states could simply refuse.

The 2026 operation fills in what Kobach always said was missing: the crushing arm of the law, like how South African apartheid worked. Armed Trump stormtroopers on the ground create explicit linkage between compliance and creating chaos that only they can “end.”

The “Competent Complicity” Problem

Color revolutions and regime change operations require skilled professionals who understand their actions serve no legitimate stated purpose yet execute them anyway. This is the most dangerous form of institutional capture: competence in service of illegitimate ends.

Foreign operations: CIA officers understood “election integrity” was pretext. State Department officials provided diplomatic cover knowing the democratic rhetoric was instrumental. Military and intelligence personnel executed operations while maintaining plausible deniability.

Minnesota 2026 operations:

• ICE agents know their occupation of Minneapolis is not standard immigration enforcement
• DOJ attorneys file lawsuits courts are rejecting as “unprecedented and illegal”—and continue filing
• DHS personnel operate SAVE knowing the false positive rates will disenfranchise legitimate voters
• Federal judges rule against the administration; operations continue anyway. Over 300 courts have rejected Trump’s stormtrooper tactics

The system doesn’t require true believers, and it certainly doesn’t want to be popular. The more unpopular the stormtroopers, the more they feel unleashed to commit random violence and spiral aggression. It requires professionals who follow orders while understanding the orders serve purposes other than stated.

What’s Actually Being Built

Seven years of searching have produced no evidence of the mass fraud claimed, because it’s not about that anyway. Just like a year of “releasing” Epstein files has produced nothing. The goal is total control over narrative and physical spaces, to disable state election infrastructure before November 2026.

If successful, the administration will have:

1. Voter data with SSNs and identifying information for swing state voters
2. Processing infrastructure (SAVE) to flag voters for removal
3. Legal precedent for federal override of state election administration
4. Coercion mechanism (demonstrated in Minnesota) for non-compliant states
5. Propaganda framework (“election integrity”) to legitimate purges

This is the opposite of election security. Cities are far less safe, America is far less safe, wherever the stormtroopers go. It is not unlike describing the sentiment after Boogaloo, Proud Boys, KKK, or Nazi marches. But this is highly tactical as well, pushing American election capture using techniques developed, tested, and refined over seventy years of foreign interventions.

---

Sources

Declassified/Official

• National Security Archive: CIA Covert Operations in British Guiana (2020 release)
• CIA Freedom of Information Act Reading Room
• Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity documents (released via FOIA litigation)

Academic/Analytical

• David Levin, Partisan Electoral Interventions by the Great Powers (2019)
• Foreign Affairs: When the CIA Interferes in Foreign Elections (2020)
• NPR: In ‘Rigged,’ A Comprehensive Account of Decades of Election Interference (2020)
• Brennan Center for Justice: Tracker: Justice Department Requests for Voter Information

Contemporary Reporting

• DL-Online: MN Sec. of State Rejects Feds’ ‘Ransom’ Request (January 2026)
• Washington Post: Bondi Presses Minnesota for Voter Data as Administration Escalates Pressure (January 2026)
• Democracy Docket: Bondi’s ‘Blackmail’ Letter Deepens Concerns Over DOJ’s Motives (January 2026)
• Common Cause: Lawsuits Nationwide to Protect Voter Privacy and Election Integrity

Pattern Recognition

• PONARS Eurasia: Russian Foreign Election Interventions Since 1991
• Insight Intelligence: Colour Revolutions: The Most Sophisticated Warfare Method
• PRIO: Re-examining the ‘Colour Revolutions’
• NPR: Database Tracks History of U.S. Meddling in Foreign Elections
• ProPublica: Election Commission Documents Cast Doubt on Trump’s Claims of Voter Fraud
• Rolling Stone: Kobach and Trump’s Spectacular Voter-Fraud Failure
• Union of Concerned Scientists: Pseudoscience on Trial: The Spectacular Fall of President Trump’s Voter Fraud Thesis

The question nobody seems to want asked in print: what would it actually take to win against fascism in America?

Not to resist. To win.

The question has ugly answers, due to the ugliness of Trump wanting to get as ugly as possible, which is perhaps why journalists avoid it.

We shouldn’t look at wrestling a big dangerous pig in the mud and think an article about stain remover for white socks is going to be our strategy.

What many seem to avoid saying: Trump is at war with America.

His team keeps saying they are waging war, calling innocent citizens domestic terrorists. Even those who defend innocent citizens being attacked by Trump are called domestic terrorists. Their war rhetoric is not by accident. They’re not stupid. “War on Christmas“, remember?

In the early 1920s, Ford’s Dearborn Publishing Company released a four-volume set of essays penned by Ford and a handful of aides called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. […] In a sense, this was the first shot fired in the “War on Christmas” wars and a blueprint for how these arguments would play-out for the next century. At no point has Christmas or anyone’s right to celebrate it been under attack, yet this endures as a way to attack…

Trump wants his followers to believe they are fighting a very particular kind of war in America. A war that Henry Ford wrote about. Meanwhile the American “resistance” acts like a moral witness campaign, which is what you do to feel good about losing. You end up starving to death holding nothing but receipts, while Trump gorges himself.

Let’s be honest about the dangers, because this is the exact reason why we study the rise of fascism in the 1930s so carefully and thoroughly.

This is why it’s appropriate to make the parallels to Henry Ford and his disciple Adolf Hitler: by the time you’re organizing food deliveries to families in hiding and don’t let children outside, you’ve already lost the phase of the conflict where winning was still within democratic norms.

The SPD after the Nazis seized control kept publishing newspapers, organizing workers, believing that exposing the Trump-like brutality would matter in 1933. They were documenting their loss of democracy in real time while calling it a resistance.

Imagine measuring water rising inside the Titanic and saying shovel coal, pump faster. There’s a certain level of situational awareness that predicts whether you are calculating actual survival paths.

The Atlantic, for example, published a sedative disguised as a stimulant. It makes readers feel something is being done in America about Trump. That evidence of courage is being recorded, that some community is holding, that the arc is bending. You finish reading and feel… what? Inspired? Reassured some good guys exist?

Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong:
The pushback against ICE exposed a series of mistaken assumptions. By Adam Serwer

Has a Holocaust movie ever been made that didn’t include a positive angle somewhere about survival or a glimmer of humanity? We cannot culturally process atrocity without a redemptive frame. Schindler has to save some. The boy in striped pajamas has to represent innocence. We’re narratively incapable of confronting “and then it just got worse, and worse, until external force stopped it.”

I have two degrees in it. Go figure.

That need for positive emotional release, as displayed by The Atlantic, is the risk of obliterating signs of actual dangers. It substitutes for the harder but honest recognition that Minnesotans have been losing, badly.

Alex Pretti was unmistakably good. A real American hero serving his country, and he was publicly executed for it.

And that was right after Renee Good, also an innocent citizen, was publicly executed.

ICE killed as many people last year as the four prior years combined.

Tens of thousands are in detention already, with ICE concentration camp plans underway to detain hundreds of thousands without due process.

Families are hiding.

Children are being sent away and shielded from the horrors of ICE.

Three hundred forty-seven district court judges ruled against the administration’s detention policies, yet it didn’t amount to a hill of beans because Trump implemented a “Schutzhaft” court bypass method from… 1933 Germany.

The state brings guns and shoots people who dare to carry them. The resistance has whistles.

And the Atlantic piece frames all this disparity as victory because Bovino got fired after months of wearing a literal Nazi uniform while parading thousands of Trump stormtroopers through cities, beating, detaining and killing innocent people?

That’s the definition now of victory? At this rate by next year the definition will be a slice of bread on the table.

Let me tell you some Minnesota history that almost never gets told. I’ve personally confronted Nazis in Minnesota, I’ve spent decades working on this subject. Here’s some of what needs to be said.

The Silver Shirts came to Minneapolis in the late 1930s planning rallies, organizing, building the same momentum that their German counterparts had used. What stopped them wasn’t an ACLU or public solidarity or moral witness.

Nope. None of those made the difference.

It was Meyer Lansky’s networks coordinating with local Jewish communities to show up at Nazi rallies and beat them bloody. Repeatedly. Until organizing a fascist rally meant your people would end up scared for their lives and in the hospital.

The Office of Strategic Services (later, the CIA) in fact employed the Syndicate in some covert operations. During World War II, the Syndicate helped with the invasion of Sicily and in protecting the Eastern waterfront against German sabotage. Some of the Syndicate’s major drug traffickers were used as informants and assassins in the Cold War. As one White House official described the government’s relationship with Lansky, “The government turned to him because hiring thugs was what government and business had been doing for a long time to control workers, and because it could conceive little other choice in the system at hand.”

This is the history that doesn’t fit the narrative. American fascism in 1930s Minnesota wasn’t defeated by democratic norms or courageous nonviolent resistance. It was defeated by private organized pro-democratic violence that the state permitted through selective blindness.

Berman learned that Silver Shirts were mounting a rally at a nearby Elks’ Lodge. When the Nazi leader called for all the “Jew bastards” in the city to be expelled, or worse, Berman and his associates burst in to the room and started cracking heads. After ten minutes, they had emptied the hall. His suit covered in blood, Berman took the microphone and announced, “This is a warning. Anybody who says anything against Jews gets the same treatment. Only next time it will be worse.” After Berman broke up two more rallies, there were no more public Silver Shirt meetings in Minneapolis.

The Jewish community in the 1930s didn’t write articles about the Silver Shirts. They busted heads and broke bones until organizing fascist rallies became physically dangerous. That history is so uncomfortable to tell precisely because it’s instructive. It’s also almost impossible to find evidence, for a good reason.

So what’s the 2026 connection? Reversal. They threatened to “ice” the Nazis. Now ICE is the Nazis.

The state holds a monopoly on legitimate violence. When the state becomes fascist, any effective resistance is illegitimate by definition – the fascist state controls what “legitimate” means.

That’s the trap.

Trump understands this. That’s why he fraudulently pre-labels innocent nurses and moms as “domestic terrorists” so his troops can murder them before they’ve done anything. Hegseth fraudulently invokes “enemy within” and “wartime footing.” They’re building bogus justification frameworks now, so everyone sees any level of resistance is already authorized for extrajudicial execution.

In 1930s Minnesota, the state looked away while communities defended themselves against people who talked like Trump. That selective blindness made extralegal defense against Nazism possible.

Now? The guys in masks with guns ARE the state. The Klan, Nazis, Boogaloo and Proud Boys operate wearing federal authority masks. The institutions that might have looked away have been captured. There’s no third party. There’s no one to appeal to. Trump talks about governors and mayors like they are just one button-press away from detention or assassination.

Nonviolent resistance works when there’s a third party appeal, a conscience to shock, an institution to intervene, an ally with power. When the state itself is the aggressor and also controls the narrative, all the valor means little more than defeat.

What’s the theory of change that isn’t just “bear witness until something external comes to our rescue”?

The next six months will tell. If Trump continues trying to lower his popularity before summer to invoke military dictatorship and cancel fall elections, you will see how and why The Atlantic was wrong to spin sugary tales of success.

The courts have not been defeated. They have been bypassed. In 1933, this distinction did not matter. There is no evidence it matters now.

A federal judge wrote Sunday that the Trump administration is attempting to “coerce perpetual, infinite detention” by defying court orders. Three hundred forty-seven district court judges have ruled against the administration’s detention policies. Twenty have ruled in favor.

Does a 95% win ratio sound good? It’s not enough, in a system designed to operate faster than judicial review. It is documentation of abuse, executive power operating without check.

The win ratio is both damning and the kind of success that failed to stop Hitler.

This requires explanation.

The Schutzhaft Mechanism

On February 28, 1933, Germany’s Reichstag Fire Decree suspended constitutional protections including habeas corpus. The decree enabled Schutzhaft (“protective custody”): administrative detention without judicial warrant or review. As the infamous saying went:

If you cannot recognise the will of the Fuhrer as a source of law, then you cannot remain a judge

Schutzhaft had three structural features:

1. Administrative classification. Detention was ordered by police, not courts. No judicial finding was required.
2. Speed. Detainees were moved to camps before legal challenges could be filed. Within two months, 25,000 people were detained in Prussia alone.
3. Parallel track. Regular courts continued to function for ordinary matters. Schutzhaft operated outside their jurisdiction entirely.

German courts were not abolished, packed, or corrupted. They became irrelevant to the detention system. Judges continued to rule. The camps continued to fill. These two facts did not contradict each other.

The Trump Version

The American detention apparatus today shares the exact same three features.

1. Administrative classification. In July 2025, DHS issued an internal memo reinterpreting existing law to classify most undocumented immigrants as “applicants for admission” subject to mandatory detention. No legislation. No judicial approval. A memo.
2. Speed. The administration provides detainees 12-24 hours to express intent to challenge detention. Physical removal frequently occurs before judicial review. When Judge Boasberg issued a restraining order halting deportation flights to El Salvador, the planes had already departed. The detainees are now in CECOT prison. DHS officials transfer Minnesota detainees to Texas within days of arrest, removing them from the jurisdiction of Minnesota courts before cases can be heard.
3. Parallel track. Immigration courts are executive branch entities under the Department of Justice, not Article III courts. The administration has fired immigration judges and is replacing them with military lawyers. Cases pending in immigration court are dismissed; detainees are immediately re-arrested and placed in expedited removal, an administrative process with minimal judicial oversight.

The Relevant Numbers

District court rulings on detention policy: 347 against the administration, 20 in favor.

Supreme Court emergency stays of district court orders: 17 granted to the administration, 1 denied.

ICE detainees as of December 2025: 66,000, a record.

Deaths in ICE custody, fiscal year 2025: 23. Previous four years combined: 24.

The Logic

District courts rule against detention policy. The administration appeals. The Supreme Court grants emergency stays. Policy continues during appeal. Appeals take months. Deportations take days.

The 347 district court rulings create a record yet do not prevent detention. The detainees those rulings concern have frequently been transferred out of jurisdiction or removed from the country before the ruling issues.

A system in which courts rule correctly but after the fact is a system in which executive action goes unconstrained.

The Nazi Schutzhaft of 1933 is the entire Trump bypass story of 2026.

Judge Davis, in his Sunday ruling, identified the mechanism: the administration is “stretch[ing] the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights.”

Stretching the process to the breaking point is not the same as violating the process. The process continues. The detentions will ramp even faster.

The 2026 Reality

The German legal profession in 1933 observed that courts were still functioning. This was true. Cases were heard. Rulings were issued. The Schutzhaft system was not subject to those rulings. We know how the concentration camps evolved after that.

The question is not whether American courts are ruling correctly. They are. The question is whether those rulings have any hope of constraining the American detention system tomorrow if not today.

Current evidence, based on Nazi history, indicates they do not.