“Won’t no ICE agent ever run up on me. I guarantee you they won’t, I’ll put a hole in their chest the size of a fucking window,” Birdsong said. “An unarmed woman was killed by ICE. If you think you about to come and brutalize people while we’re standing here? Fuck around and find out. We patrol the community, and we hold [ICE] accountable.
The clip triggered a good week of heated online intra-left discourse. Who did this Paul Birdsong guy think he was, trying to take up the sacred mantle of the Black Panther Party? He had to be some kind of COINTELPRO psyop, right? Or at the very least a grifter who only showed face in tense times to generate clicks and sow discord. And even if he was genuine, why should Black people invite danger upon themselves to protect immigrants? More importantly, why did he say he had songs with Snoop Dogg and Gucci Mane coming out? And was it true that he infiltrated the Piru Bloodz in Compton?
Look, maybe those who find this all a bit suspicious now will be vindicated in a year or so when they find Birdsong guilty of embezzling mutual aid funds or something. But right now, to their neighbors—especially those who are poor, homeless, and most at risk of deportation—the Black Lion Party is stepping into the breach at a time of need. And they are just one of many examples of the kind of direct action and community organizing that can arise when the inadequacy of traditional politicking becomes something that people feel viscerally. What may look extreme viewed through the lens of viral social media can feel vital to those closest to the conflict between the Trump administration’s masked goons and their neighbors and families.
Nonelectoral action is nothing new, and the Black Lion Party is really just one more organization of note performing this kind of activism, from Occupy Wall Street to the Iraq War protest movement, to Black Lives Matter. And while they—and their guns—have generated real attention toward nonelectoralism, it’s the residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul that have spun up the blueprint for this current version of neighbor-to-neighbor, permitless, confrontational activism.
“These last couple of weeks in particular, I think there’s this frustration that’s set in with a lot of the national media and, frankly, with a lot of national progressive organizations,” Basta told me. “There’s this sentiment of ‘alright, things are starting to settle down in the Twin Cities, and we gotta start looking where [ICE and BPD] are gonna go next.’ But they’re still abducting people left and right. It feels like a pretty low bar—like yeah, they haven’t murdered somebody in the last two weeks. The abductions and detentions are still happening at a fairly large scale. Day to day, it hasn’t felt much different here than it did three weeks ago.”
“In the moment when things first started to escalate, with [Mayor] Frey in particular, there was a ‘wow,’” Basta recalls. “His first statement where he was like, ‘Get the fuck out of our city’? We’d never seen that side of him.
“With Democratic leadership, there’s just been this undercurrent of like, ‘We’re not going to wait for you all to do something about this.’ We’re not looking to you for leadership right now,” Basta continued. “In the last several years of the [Walz] administration, resistance from Democratic leadership has been disappointing, and it’s reflected in this moment of organizing. People are [realizing] we’re not gonna solve this with elections. We’re not gonna solve this with lobbying a politician to do better. We just have to go out and do this.”
The vast majority of these ICE watchers, or “commuters,” are not activists at all. They’re just people Trump tried, and failed, to break.
Sheikh, Basta, and thousands of Minneapolis residents have been involved in these observer, or commuter, networks. They are the mostly Signal-based network of neighbors who do the grueling work of trailing and reporting federal agents.
The bulk of this organizing is ad hoc and unofficial. Still, I’ve been struck by how many on the right are convinced that these Minnesota Signal chats are evidence of some well-funded, Soros-backed, left-wing insurrectionist network. It seems that it’s impossible for those with MAGA predilections to even imagine this all might simply be a natural, organic reaction to tyranny by a community of ordinary people—that neighbors would look after one another without their palms being greased.
Fellow right-winger Jack Posobeic echoed Bannon’s warped version of reality, stating that leftist insurgents were flooding into Minneapolis on “Soros buses.”
The far right has given the left a lot of credit here, so much so that it almost feels like reverence. But it’s telling that they just can’t comprehend the notion of ordinary Americans being united around—and inspired to defend—some simple civic ideals.
The Bannon crowd is right about one thing, though. By forcing the people of Minneapolis to come together, the Trump administration has inadvertently helped create a blueprint for community resistance that will almost surely meet them wherever their next immigration operation is.
I don’t think any of the parties involved in the defense of their neighbors are going to completely give up on electoralism. They might be giving up on the Democratic establishment, however. From the gun-toting Black Lions in Philly to soccer moms in Minneapolis staking out at elementary schools, Americans are realizing that a midterm election won’t protect them or their neighbors, and they are acting accordingly.
Minneapolis is still occupied, and it will be some time before they finish picking up the pieces. As the Trump administration grows more bellicose, and bent on causing more suffering—which it surely will in these next three years—these various nonelectoral strategies will become more prominent, and more necessary. It’s important that we pay attention, share notes, and expand our communities’ ability to defend themselves. Your neighborhood could be next.
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