Killing in Minnesota

Posted: 25th January 2026

Death Squads Execute Second Dissident

Or what the US press would say if this was happening on the streets of a “shithole” country overseas

CAROLE CADWALLADR

JAN 25

This has been a week of explosions from destroying the NATO alliance to this fascistic street killing. It’s meant to stun us. 

What is happening on the streets of Minneapolis is a test. The city a petri dish where administration is testing the limits of its power and the strength of the resistance it encounters. In Wednesday’s newsletter I included video of the interview I’d done with conservative historian, Robert Kagan, in which he set out very clearly how the intention is to provoke street violence in order for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. 

This is intended to provoke a reaction and it’s the form that reaction takes, that’s so critical.

And that’s why again, I’m going to highlight Mark Carney’s speech at Davos. I wrote a newsletter about it on Wednesday because here, finally there was someone with authority prepared to acknowledge what the fuck is going on and defend what we may one day describe as the reality-based order.

And I’m so glad I did, because if I’d waited until the end of the week, it would already have been eclipsed, another fleeting moment in a frantic news cycle that is never going to let up, that’s also the point. 

But I want, again, to highlight the text he quoted from, The Power of the Powerless, by Vaclav Havel the Czechoslovakian dissident poet turned president. A book that had helped fuel an uprising that had ultimately led to a wave of revolutions across Europe which had in turn led to the downfall of the Soviet Union. 

In countries under the Iron Curtain, people felt powerless, but they weren’t, that was Havel’s message. And also, Carney’s. The job of power is to make people believe they have no power, but it’s a lie. 

And it’s the same in Minnesota. It’s because these protestors have power that they have to be stopped, crushed, silenced. ICE is shooting unarmed civilians in cold blood and beating disabled military veterans to prove that they can. 

But the more brutality they use, the more performative the violence, the more it reveals their own weakness.

There are other videos you should watch. I’m on shitty wifi and I can’t upload them but I screen recorded of NYPD officers tearing off masks of ICE agents and I can tell you how weak and ashamed and pathetic they look.

The elites are cowed. That’s what Robert Kagan also said when I interviewed him. Politicians, senators, CEOs, Hollywood royalty. They’re weak and cowardly and silent. But the ordinary people of Minneapolis aren’t. They’re showing what it takes to stand up to power. And this killing only proves it.