Rebecca Traister

REP. OMAR after being attacked with liquid: “We will continue! These fucking assholes are not gonna get away with this! Here is the reality people like this ugly man don’t understand — we are Minnesota Strong. We’ll stay resilient in the face of whatever they might throw at us.”

Trump-administration officials and MAGA influencers have repeatedly called these activists “violent” and said they are involved in “riots.” But the resistance in Minnesota is largely characterized by a conscious, strategic absence of physical confrontation. Activists have made the decision to emphasize protection, aid, and observation. When matters escalate, it is usually the choice of the federal agents. Of the three homicides in Minneapolis this year, two were committed by federal agents. “There’s been an incredible, incredible response from the community. I’ve seen our neighbors go straight from allies to family—more than family—checking in on each other, offering food and rides for kids and all kinds of support, alerting each other if there’s ICE or any kind of danger,” Malika Dahir, a local activist of Somali descent, told me. If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme. Vice President Vance has said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’” Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.

One thing I found deeply moving about resistance in the Twin Cities was the universalism of loving your neighbor, the philosophy driving the opposition to the ICE/BP invasion. I couldn't help but notice the contrast with the blood and soil-ism of Miller and Vance. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

YouTube video by Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie ICE Kills Another American

The montage towards the end hits especially hard. www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_71...

A-fucking-men.

This is important. And partly why the entire rightwing infrastructure from GOP to Heritage to Manhattan to ALEC were so terrified of 2020. Millions of the folks marching for racial justice and demanding a racial reckoning were *white*

Our initial analysis is up.

The video footage appears to show that the gun was taken away from the man before he was shot.

He was UNARMED before any of the shots were fired.

But why does the chyron refer to a “violent scene” *after* the killing? This guy shouting?

Protester in Minneapolis just before disappearing in gas: "Fuck you! Stop. Damn! I'm 70 years old and I'm fuckin' angry!"

Live Updates: Newly Released Records Detail Chaos During Fatal ICE Shooting in Minneapolis

Holy shit.

Renee Good was alive when the bystander physician asked to check her pulse. She was alive when ICE refused to let him help. She was alive when they told him “I don’t care.”

www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

Gateway to Freedom The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom., Gateway to Freedom, The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, Eric Foner, 9780...

We are dealing with an institution modeled on slave catching and the great news is that we also have resistance models

This is a great book about the Underground Railroad in an urban environment, New York City:

wwnorton.com/books/gatewa...

Part of what's great about Eric Foner's scholarship on this, for our purposes, is that it's about responding to kidnappings in an urban environment!

Oh shit, is this it? The one and only time I've really got to hand it to him?

Someone sent me this video of Trump’s goons in action today in the Twin Cities. The audio is disturbing.

If you need inspiration to keep going right now, may I recommend the story of Robert Smalls, who stole a confederate steamboat and piloted his family and almost 20 others to freedom and went on to become one of the first Black people elected to Congress ✊🏽

www.usatoday.com/story/life/b...

"Government silence is a statement, not a VETO."

Me Too Forever Why the backlash was so short-lived.

"It was always fanciful to conceive of progressive victories as permanent, just as it was a shortsighted fantasy that edgelord heterodoxy would remain cool. It’s never been waves but circular eddies..."

Me Too Forever Why the backlash was so short-lived.

"The story of women’s liberation isn’t a straight line; the state of women’s rights is blurry and contradictory." the always great
@rtraister.bsky.social writes for @nymag.com
www.thecut.com/article/why-...

Me Too Forever Why the backlash was so short-lived.

"Reports of patriarchy’s death have always been greatly exaggerated. But so, too, have reports of feminism’s." www.thecut.com/article/why-...

Me Too Forever Why the backlash was so short-lived.

“while the misogyny is hard to banish, so is the resistance to it.” @rtraister.bsky.social www.thecut.com/article/why-...

Me Too Forever Why the backlash was so short-lived.

"Every day makes clear that the claim that Me Too went too far is simply a lie."
www.thecut.com/article/why-...

Thanks to you both and sorry I was too late with it! (I’m stupidly bad at figuring out gift links for social and always forget about archive)

Excellent read. Here’s the gift link. archive.is/2025.11.26-1...

Not sure that’s so different from what the piece is arguing!

This piece by @rtraister.bsky.social is like an antidote to snake venom. Read it and it will save your life. The backlash to “me too” was never about moderation it was about submission. Feminism has not gone too far. The world of men simply moves at the pace of a glacier from its Neanderthal past.

Me Too Forever Why the backlash was so short-lived.

“There are no clean demarcations between feminism and its backlash and the backlash to the backlash, between progress and regress. It was always fanciful to conceive of progressive victories as permanent, just as it was a shortsighted fantasy that edgelord heterodoxy would remain cool.”

"The contention “Me Too went too far” is not exactly bearing up under scrutiny. Rather, a year after Donald Trump’s reelection, we are beset by daily reminders of why Me Too, and feminism more broadly, came to exist in the first place."

Great stuff from the inimitable Rebecca Traister.

“Reports of patriarchy’s death have always been greatly exaggerated. But so, too, have reports of feminism’s.”

"The contention 'Me Too went too far' is not exactly bearing up under scrutiny. Rather, a year after Donald Trump’s reelection, we are beset by daily reminders of why Me Too, and feminism more broadly, came to exist in the first place."

Me Too Forever Why the backlash was so short-lived.

Wrote about the backlash to the backlash to the backlash to the backlash there are no waves we are swimming through circular currents and why we’re not on the Faludi style backlash of the right (& center and left’s) dreams: www.thecut.com/article/why-...

Me Too Forever Why the backlash was so short-lived.

🎯Me Too Forever: Why the backlash was short-lived, by @rtraister.bsky.social
www.thecut.com/article/why-... Or wildly exaggerated? Like cancellation, this “backlash” wasn’t data-based (or reality? Laws passed!) It’s performative misinfo spread by foreign bots & GOP-owned media?

Bask in the sanity