Daniel Herriges

Thinking a lot lately of @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social's magnificent book "A Paradise Built in Hell." Time and again people organize to take care of each other in response to disaster (and this is a non-natural disaster but similarly imposed on a whole community) in ways the state can't and won't.

I did an (optional) assignment like this in middle school: they called it the "third world diet" (it was the 90s) and it was 48 hours with a bunch of restrictions on what we could eat and a very limited number of calories.

I remember finding it illuminating.

By the way, for those of you not in MN: Homan’s strategy was to withdraw some agents, so it felt like we were in the denouement of the crisis, and then escalate hard against observers. They’re being incredibly aggressive with observers now. National media may not want to check out just yet

Before Keith Porter, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti… ICE killed a father after he dropped his kids off at school.

We didn’t hear much about it because he was undocumented.

They said he was trying to flee & shot him in the back of the neck.

Silverio Villegas-González.

Don’t forget him.

Everything you’re hearing from the Trump administration is a lie. Today was one of the most active days in Northeast since the entire Operation Metro Surge began.

Nothing is changing on the ground in Minneapolis, no matter what headlines Trump and Homan try to create.

Axios had a story today about how hard Minnesota’s economy is being hit and how slow the recovery could be. So, I’m going to take this opportunity to say that if you want to support the Twin Cities, you should plan a visit for this summer, spend some money here, & see how amazing it is for yourself.

a cartoon of a person holding a yellow triangle ALT: a cartoon of a person holding a yellow triangle

And Chapel Hill joins the other two points of the Research Triangle, Raleigh and Durham, in unlocking the mythic power of total parking flexibility. dailytarheel.com/article/city...

Missoula looks to increase housing with new zoning regulations The new code allows for increased development in more areas of the city, making way for the thousands of units needed to meet demand over the next two decades.

Missoula's new Unified Development Code removes a bunch of barriers to infill housing and small neighborhood businesses, as well as removing the city's remaining parking mandates. (Missoula is the first city in MT to go all the way on parking reform!) montanafreepress.org/2026/02/03/m...

2026 is starting out strong for parking reform as a couple prominent college towns repeal *all* of their parking mandates: let's hear it for Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Missoula, Montana!

Build needed homes and make your city financially stronger with One Neat Trick

Having a theory of mind for your political opponents means grappling with how they can have basically understandable and normal moral instincts, AND also come to support a policy or program you find obviously abhorrent.

This is not easy to do, and most people can't seem to do it at all.

More mainstream liberals do this too sometimes; a good example is that perennially viral article on HuffPo or whatver titled, "I don't know how to convince you that you should care about other people."

It's a garbage article, but people I respect still share or quote it routinely.

I don't think this is specifically a left thing. I think people who are very strident are often people who think of their politics in starkly moralistic ways.

"If you can't see that my position is obviously correct, it must be that you are morally defective. And I can't reason with that."

Agreed. If you're not encountering the stupid discourse about this that is several days running now, count yourself lucky.

I highly doubt most of the people doing either ICE rapid response or various forms of organized mutual aid think of themselves as activists at all.

Or are inclined to take lessons from self-serious activists eager to lecture them about why you should set dumpster fires. 🙄

There Is a Word for What Is Happening in Minneapolis What ICE’s opponents are doing in Minnesota is part of a long and successful historical tradition: dissidence.

This piece is imperfect but I do appreciate the idea of dissidence laid out here: not so much explicit political / ideological protest, but rather insistence on normal life and community in the face of a regime that is trying to make those things impossible. www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...

Anyone talking about black blocs, or trying to use WTO '99, Occupy, RNC 20xx, or even BLM, as the blueprint for the ICE/DHS resistance in MN is committing a category error.

Your seasoned-activist rules of engagement don't apply. This is not really protest or activism, and its goals are different.

Horrifying beyond words.

Interestingly, what is typically the most “safe” mutual aid work—like delivering food to people in need—is now the most necessarily secretive, while that which is typically “risky”—directly confronting armed agents of the state—is unavoidably public and open.

That's of course not the same thing as saying, "I saw it coming that he would *succeed* in radically corrupting institutions and turning the GOP into a personality cult."

But he has always told us what his intentions were.

Was it a performance? Sure. Fascism has always had an element of theater.

I remember saying, over family dinner, sometime in late 2015 or early 2016, "Can we call Trump the fascist candidate yet?"

I still hold it was obvious if you paid attention back then that was the campaign he was running—the rhetorical style, the preoccupations, the explicit pitch to his supporters.

This was only about two time-lapsed minutes of the Alex Pretti memorial ride in Minneapolis today. I'd guess there were at least 5x more people there than this, and probably significantly more than that. Absolutely mind blowing love and support showing up on bikes today.

Saying a lot of Mr. Rogers "Look for the helpers" stuff with her. She doesn't fully understand, of course. But most of her classmates are non-white and many are from immigrant families. She hears.

And I wouldn't be able to look her in the eye and say I didn't do everything I could to help stop it.

My 5-yo asked what "ICE out" meant. "People want Trump's police to leave our state."
"I heard there are men taking people away. Are those Donald Trump's police?" "Yes."
"Were all those people outside on TV because of this?" "Yes."
"... Is that why [Classmate] doesn't come to school anymore?"

Fuck.

No stolen valor here: I am not personally doing the rapid-response stuff. Helping in other ways. But I have so much respect and admiration for those putting their bodies directly in front of these violent goons even after all that's already happened.

Continuing to defend our community -- for who knows how long we'll have to -- is daunting. But NOT continuing to do so is unthinkable.

That's what the fascists in charge fundamentally don't understand.

Or, in the words of George W. Bush at Trump's first inauguration, "That was some weird shit."

Bush, notably, is as responsible as anyone for laying the groundwork for the Trump admin's authoritarian moves (Patriot Act, creation of DHS and ICE). But every other word out of his mouth was "freedom."

Every prior US administration that has pushed either segregationist or authoritarian policies has still wrapped them in the flag, and in "freedom," "democracy", "equality", etc.

MAGA's pseudo-intellectual class doesn't even pretend to be part of that American tradition. This is something alien.

Many others have pointed out that Miller is factually wrong here, but what's most striking is that he isn't attempting to sound remotely *American*. Nothing here is rooted in any recognizable US tradition of political thought or rhetoric.

He sounds like a blood-and-soil fascist because he is.

America has always had cruel, racist, or xenophobic policies whose proponents couch them in the language of America's shared civic heritage—freedom, democracy, and the like.

This new thing where open fascists talk in ways that are contrary to any shared US cultural touchstones breaks my brain.