Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Rebecca Solnit on Long Term Strategy, plus Resisting ICE in Small Town America / Start Making Sense

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Rebecca Solnit on Long Term Strategy, plus Resisting ICE in Small Town America / Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the nation magazine, this is start making sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm John Weiner, later in the show, Minneapolis made history with its mobilization against ICE.
• 0:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what about small town America, where the immigrant population has been growing for a couple of decades?
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: What kind of resistance has developed there?
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Emma Jensen went to small town Minnesota to find out.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But first, it's been only a couple of weeks since the no-kings 3 protests, but we can see now how resistance is changing in America.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The latest one wasn't just bigger than the previous no-kings, it was different, deeper, more connected, Rebecca Solnet will explain in a minute.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now it's time to talk with Rebecca Solnitt.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's a writer and activist who's authored more than 25 books, including men explain things to me, or well's roses, and hope in the dark.
• 1:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's a columnist for the Guardian US edition.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: She writes for the nation, and you can read her regularly at Meditations in an emergency.com.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: and she's featured right now in the three-part Thorough documentary on PBS.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her new book is The Beginning Comes After The End, notes on a world of change.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rebecca, welcome back.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello, John!
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I've read several obituaries about the death of feminism lately, but what did you make of the first lady of the United States, Trump's wife, Malania, appearing to throw him under the bus, just when he was hoping his war with Iran was distracting people from the Epstein files, last week she held her own news conference at the White House to announce
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is going on here?
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just think it's hilarious how she's learned from her husband how to act guilty as hell.
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she's rendering it perfectly.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't have a press conference like that saying I have nothing to hide unless you have something to hide.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think everyone on earth except her seems to fully understand that.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet she wants to create distance between herself and her husband, who apparently, she implies pretty directly, does have something to hide.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I got a shocker for you, John.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think she likes the guy.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what does this say about the feminism is dead obituaries?
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, a lot of times when people proclaim the death of feminism, they're pointing to some sucky thing that recently happened to women, the overturning of Roe versus Wade, et cetera.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, of course, with Roe versus Wade, American women are not all women on earth.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: 70% of American women still have in states where abortion, access, exists, but the larger thing is,
• 3:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: not only is there a death wish in a lot of those, you know, orations, but there's a refusal to understand the whole trajectory, second wave feminism, and what came after over the last 60 years, my lifetime, has changed the status of women far more profoundly than almost anyone reckons with.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, there are setbacks.
• 3:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, there's the manifest fear and the haters, etc.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: But women were so unfree, unequal, so excluded, degraded and disempowered through both culture and law.
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the world I was born into, that the extent to which feminism has changed everything, including men, is really pretty astonishing, again, despite those setbacks and bad things that happen.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And some of them, like this recent New York Times piece, are just really dumb, where it's like,
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Epstein files do not prove that Me Too failed.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Epstein files were only seized as a result with a resting of Jeffrey Epstein, which was the result of Julie K. Brown's incredible reporting at Miami-Herald, which was almost certainly in result.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I should go ask her.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: of the other stories that launched me to, which was not a freestanding spontaneous eruption, but a consequence of the several years of feminism before.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So without me too, there would be no absteen files.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that, you know, the Prince Andrew, okay, the Andrew, formerly known as Prince, the various other men have fallen that it's really kind of shifted the conversation in a lot of ways.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, there's not the sound of feminism failing.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the fact that the first lady is holding a press conference at the White House to say, this has nothing to do with me, itself is testimony to the fact that feminism is not dead.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Such beautiful nervousness we love.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's been two weeks since the No King's three protests on March 28th, that one was mostly famous for being bigger than the previous No King's one, but it wasn't just bigger.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was different.
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Please explain.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I know bunch of studies noticed that first there were no kings protested every single congressional district in the country.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Secondly, they were more than ever before in rural small town in suburban America and Red State America.
• 5:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it felt like it's going deeper into
• 5:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: The country has a whole deeper into places that weren't previously involved, deeper into places where lots of people, including democratic leaders would love to tell us that all they care about is kitchen table issues, or their moderates, or all these other things that rely the fact that people are getting pretty whatever the opposite of a moderate is about what's going on, do we call it radical?
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Don't say with me.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And one other thing about the bigger no-kings demonstration, 700 more demonstrations in places they were not before, that means lots more people learning how to organize their friends, their neighbors, how to deal with the officials, how to get the permits, how to find out if they need permits, how to get the training in de-escalation, it's a lot more organizers
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and there was a sudden wave of disparagement just before this third no kings that really felt pretty astral turf to me, including claiming things like, oh, you know, what does a demonstration do, but a lot of people showing up are organizing otherwise, a lot of them are getting recruited.
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: and something beautiful and magical often happens in these moments that I've seen over and over again and more or less the lifetime of going to protests and demonstrations.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: People feel they stop feeling alone, which really happens for I think a lot of people when the right feels like it's in power, or kind of sort of is in power.
• 7:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, people feel a sense of strength and membership in
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: they're important to democracy to see so many people, including in these little towns and red counties, standing up for what they believe in, I think it's just beautiful, powerful, and of course so much of my work has been about all the things that matter, even if we can't quantify them so readily, even if their impact is indirect or immeasurable,
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: or slow, but, you know, I think it was huge.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's pretty upsetting to the right, which it's often a good measure of what we're doing.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'd love to talk about what happened in Minnesota.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: We ran a segment on this show last week, headlined, Minnesota changed everything with Deepak Bargaba, long time organizer, now runs a big foundation.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: He argued that people in Minneapolis
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: They ended the ice surge in the state.
• 8:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: They actually changed how leaders think about immigration policy.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Greg Bovino lost his job, Kristi Nome lost her job.
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there were some big moves in popular culture.
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Started with Bruce Springsteen and bad bunny.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: How did this happen?
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, he said it happened because of years of organizing by community groups and unions and faith organizations.
• 8:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what seemed like spontaneous organization by ordinary people in their neighborhoods, organizing those rapid response groups, the whistles and the cameras, you've noticed the same thing.
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the thing that blows me away the most about Minnesota is I think behind the Trump administration's assumptions about how the is attack on immigrants and brown and black people would play is as is often the case with conservatives in assumption about human nature they assumed that we are basically selfish and basically cowardly
• 9:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: We might protect ourselves, but are we going to protect our neighbors who are different color, you know, ethnicity, religion than us?
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: They gambled on selfishness and they lost.
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's so beautiful.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the moral beauty of the way people showed up for each other and stuck up for each other, was such a profound lesson in who we can be, who we sometimes are,
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, a lesson about human nature in times of crisis that I've looked at in my book paradise built in hell and that really matters for us because we are in the in a very different kind of disaster than the earthquakes and things I wrote about, but nevertheless we are in a disaster or catastrophe I think is a little bigger.
• 10:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, in your new book, the beginning comes after the end, towards the end you quote Mike Davis saying, I've seen social miracles in my life once that have stunned me, the courageousness of ordinary people in the struggle, and as soon as a good example of that.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god, it is so good and I don't want to forget Chicago and L.A. and New Orleans and Charlotte and these other towns in North Carolina, people have been showing up all over the country, but boy, Minnesota really riveted the world with what went on in St. Paul and Minneapolis, that bitter cold weather even after people died, people would not, you know, other people would not start keep showing up in public, but also doing the private work of bringing food to people,
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: afraid to leave their houses, driving kids to school, protecting the kids at school and daycare centers and other things.
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was just extraordinary.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I hope people are making a documentary.
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I hope people are writing books about it.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I hope it's being really well documented because
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's just such an extraordinary profound thing that happened and there aren't that many moments in American history quite like this.
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it really to me stretches back to the St. Louis commune of 1877, the abolitionist movement in the underground railroad.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, forward to some of the strongest moments in the civil rights movement of the late 50s, early 60s.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: My favorite story here is one that appeared in of all places, our national newspaper of record the New York Times.
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was this interview with a woman Lindsey Grout de D'Oreau, 62-year-old insurance claims the justor called herself a centrist Democrat, who said she grew up in a military family and often disagrees with progressives.
• 12:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: She said, watching the ice raids on the news motivated her, so on one of those super cold days at the end of January, she bundled up and went to her first protest and told the New York Times quote, I immediately felt comfortable.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like a Lutheran potluck, just go and you'll be fine.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, it was thrilling.
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a lot of cussing.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was fantastic, actually.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It closed
• 12:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, something that's been really big since January 20th, 2025 is first-time protesters.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I went to a lot of Tesla take down protests last, you know, particularly when they started up on the spring of 2025 or late winter of 2025.
• 13:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I talked to people there a lot and there were a lot of first-time people there.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's exciting too.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It means that we're building a movement and also as that quota illustrates, it means that people who are usually considered moderate
• 13:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, which and often portrayed as sort of jammed low low participation level.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: are really gearing up to show up, like we are in a different country than we were a year ago.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm just fascinated by how the Trump administration is constantly doing things and assuming that they're the only actor in the field, the backlash, whether it's Iran or Minneapolis, or anything else, always seems to come as a surprise to them.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: May the surprises continue to rain down.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've said recently that in some circles you were called The Hope Lady, I've often said that your book hope in the dark really changed my thinking about politics at about life.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's say it again, hope is not the same thing as optimism, optimism is the belief that you know what's going to happen and if you know what's going to happen you don't have to do anything to help make it happen.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hope is the opposite, it's based on the idea that you don't know what's going to happen.
• 14:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And therefore you need to take action because maybe it'll have an effect.
• 14:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: But for a year or more you've been saying you want to go light on the word hope.
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And lately you've written about the case for defiance.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: How come this shift?
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, since they started talking about hope in 2003, when a lot of people fell into despair when they wore on a rock, George W. Bush's war began, I found that people can flate hope with optimism or they think it means that you have to feel good, which it clearly does not, or that it's an emotion.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's really an ethical commitment and attitude a lot of things, but not an emotion.
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: in the sense of continuing to show up, and I think at the essence what we're talking about is not surrendering for those of us who are in relatively safe conditions, and what's interesting about the people who want hopelessness, you know, the abandonment of engagement of effort to seem swath and sophisticated, is that it's basically surrender.
• 15:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you say there's nothing we can do, and a lot of people say that loudly,
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're not only asserting that we have no power to impact what happens, you're also impacting what happens negatively by discouraging participation, you know, it's really kind of a drag on people's motivation.
• 15:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: to participate in understanding that we can participate because the outcome has not been determined.
• 15:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: People talk about the future like it's some country out, you know, or place we're going to go visit like, you know, the way you drive to stopping mall or it doesn't exist.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's something we're making in the present by how we show up or fail to show up.
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are parameters, and so then as we lose, but we always lose when we don't show up.
• 16:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I really want people to just keep showing up, and I think because this is going up on the radio, I need to leave out the F word, but I responded to a wonderful climate journalist to felt a little encouraged by something I said that if the word hope doesn't work for you, try never bleeping surrender.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because that's really the divide, are we going to surrender and just let all this stuff happen?
• 16:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: How can we?
• 16:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's breaking solidarity with the people most under attack.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And right now we're in this interesting weird moment, where clearly Trump is on the downhill slope mentally, physically and politically.
• 16:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Their powers pretty finite at backfires on them in the wall the ways they misestimate and misuse it.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they are one way or another on the decline.
• 16:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: We don't know what that means exactly, but maybe we define what it means by how we help them decline.
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, we've been talking about things that have happened in the last couple of months.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your new book, the beginning comes after the end, suggests we should take a much longer view of what is going on in our lives.
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you open your new book, not with millions of people taking to the streets, no kings, but with three dozen people at a landback ceremony where 500 acres north of San Francisco,
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: was returned to the indigenous people who, in your words, were, quote, it's original stewards.
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why did you make that your starting point?
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's such a remarkable thing in a way, you know, 400 something acres seems like what's the big deal.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: But if you look in the long time scale, if you have a baseline for how white people thought and mostly didn't think about indigenous people of the Americas,
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: You see that we had to move heaven and earth.
• 18:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: We had to completely redefine the history of this hemisphere, our understanding of nature.
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm speaking for all a settler, cloningless.
• 18:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: We had to really adopt a radically almost revolutionarily different worldview to see.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: This land was always occupied.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was no such thing as virgin nature.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's an original inhabitants never disappeared.
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And their rights were never terminated.
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: that what happened to Native people wasn't a bad thing in the 19th century, it's an ongoing process whose chapters are still being written.
• 18:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's interesting when I go back and look at all those books like Barry, my heart at Wounded Knee, which even when they seem to be trying to ally themselves with the story of Native people, there are always stories of ending of decline,
• 18:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: of defeat.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: But what we've seen in the last 30, something years with a real turning point, a big watershed in the early 1990s is a lot of reclaiming of land, language, culture, ceremony, but also reclaiming arguably the rightful place in the public imagination and public life and a huge amount of leadership for climate and environmental issues.
• 19:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think even beyond that, it's something that I think is so important and that I couldn't find anybody writing about, so I just went out on a limb and
• 19:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: did it on my own.
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think this indigenous presence has really changed the way the rest of us think profoundly, if it's a completely different history of the continent than the one we're brought up with.
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But also, if you acknowledge that the indigenous presence for 10,000 years and more in this hemisphere, you stop being able to think of nature and culture as see separate, non intersecting spheres,
• 19:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you also stop thinking if human nature the way, like all the environmentalists, I was around when I was young in the 80s, used to think of it.
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Human beings are inherently destructive.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: We could only protect nature by putting a fence around it and keeping people out of it.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, well, people were in these places, you know, for thousands of years.
• 20:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they looked great.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: So human beings are not inherently at odds with nature.
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are a lot of ways to be human.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you think about everything differently, because these are such foundational.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: concepts for what we do in the present.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So all that had to change nationally and beyond because this is happening in Canada and Latin America too, you know, New Zealand, Australia, etc.
• 20:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Something colossal had to happen internationally for this one thing to happen specifically on the Marin Sonoma border in California.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I wanted to kind of like, I
• 20:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: take this very specific event and look at how much had to change for this to happen the same way that for same sex marriage to happen in 2015 we had to radically rethink what marriage was and what queerness is and what equality means and I feel like a lot of people can't see change because they don't have timeframes that go beyond you know last week last month last year
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's really over this, you know, if the arc of justice is long, but it bends in any direction at all, you better equip yourself to see long arcs and that means thinking in years and decades and so I'm centuries to see we are not who we used to be 50 or 60, 70 years ago.
• 21:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So many of our fundamental assumptions about nature, gender, sexuality.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: equality, justice, race, and everything else have changed profoundly, but so and conventionally, most people don't really have those baselines.
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to give them back.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Last thing, you say toward the interview in your book that the turmoil and chaos we're experiencing now is the chaos of the end of something.
• 22:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is at the end of?
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think if you look carefully at what the right wing project is in Russia and Hungary in Argentina and Chile in the United States, it's essentially backlash.
• 22:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's telling us all you environmentalists and feminists and anti-racists and indigenous rights activists.
• 22:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: climate people have changed the world profoundly.
• 22:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: We want to change it back because it's completely regressive.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the way they're announcing that their time is over, they see their white colonial patriarchal project coming to an end.
• 22:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're very unhappy about it.
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I, on the other hand, I'm quite happy about it.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: But if you listen to them carefully, they're the ones who are telling us that we've changed the world profoundly, that we have a lot of power, that all this different stuff we, the progressives have done over the last 70s years is connected.
• 23:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: They think we're winning, and that's actually kind of exciting.
• 23:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you see that the majority of people hold views that are really different than they were not so long ago,
• 23:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that also these far right entities are powerful partly because they have the backing of a lot of billionaires, including Silicon Valley and media billionaires behind them the fossil fuel industry.
• 23:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they are minority movements because they're bad for the majority if you're not a straight-white Christian man.
• 23:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you want to have rights and equality in participation, et cetera.
• 23:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're your enemy, and most of us are not all those things.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even plenty of straightaway Christian men have, they can make my friend Bill McKibbin, for example, have much better values and want a more egalitarian world, a more rights-oriented world, including the rights of nature.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they themselves are the ones telling us that they're losing, and that they see their world going away,
• 24:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I always think here of like old men in the 80s that they can hit rewind on the VCR of history and you know as a historian, there is no rewind.
• 24:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rebecca Solnett, who in the book is the beginning comes after the end notes on a world of change.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rebecca, thanks for everything you do and thanks for talking with us today.
• 24:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Always a pleasure, John.
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the peak of the ice surge in Minneapolis, that one day general strike in January brought 50,000 or maybe even 100,000 people into the streets, meanwhile every day for a month in Minneapolis, more than 100 hyper-local rapid response groups stood ready with those whistles and cameras in case ice showed up on their blocks.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the mass mobilization that drove ice out of Minneapolis at the beginning of February.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what about ice outside the Twin Cities?
• 25:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: What about small town, Minnesota, where the immigrant population has been growing for a couple of decades?
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: What kind of resistance has developed there?
• 25:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Emma Janssen went to small town, Minnesota, to find out.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's a writing fellow at the American Prospect.
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before joining the Prospect, she was a student at the University of Chicago, studying political philosophy, editing the Chicago maroon, and freelancing for the Hyde Park Herald.
• 25:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: We reach you today in Chicago, Emma Janssen, welcome to the program.
• 25:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for having me, I'm so glad to be here.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: You went to Southern Minnesota where many towns have significant immigrant populations.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are immigrants from where and why are they in these towns?
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like in the Twin Cities, in Greater Minnesota you definitely also have a large population of immigrants from Somalia, one of the towns that I spent a lot of time in Wilmer is one such town, but throughout Minnesota you also have immigrants who are coming from Latin America.
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you also have, in parts of the state, a pretty robust current population, and that is a group of immigrants from Myanmar, those were the three main groups that I encountered.
• 26:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the current are Christians, right?
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's correct.
• 26:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, active has ice bin in these towns.
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's only one that's gotten into the news in Wilmer.
• 26:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: A group of ice agents stopped at the Mexican restaurant downtown for lunch.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And at the end of the day, those agents came back and arrested the people at the restaurant who had served them lunch.
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: What happened to them?
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: the female owner of the restaurant was deported.
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the father, the male owner of the restaurant, he was returned to Wilmer eventually a few days later.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's one footnote here.
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wilmer had actually been in the nose a few years earlier in the New York times.
• 27:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so it was 2019, Tom Friedman, and I believe one of the headlines that I saw was something like Mr. President come to Wilmer and the thesis of the piece is that Wilmer had managed to kind of create a community where Somali immigrants, Karen immigrants, Hispanic immigrants and longtime white residents of the town lived in some sort of harmony.
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: the day that I was there, it just looked completely closed down businesses were shuttered, it was cold, it was quiet, and I had heard these horrifying stories about ISIS impact on the town, so that to me was just a really poetic and sad moment to read that.
• 28:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: You also went to Albert Lee, Minnesota.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has a place in the labor history of the Reagan era, not a happy place in that history.
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: The most famous strike in Albert Lee was in 1985 at the Hormel Plan.
• 28:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Hormel, by the way, is still the biggest company in that area.
• 28:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're headquartered in the nearby town of Austin, which I also visited.
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: But this strike actually was the subject of a documentary film called American Dream, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, that year.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: The most strike was defeated.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: the residents and the workers in both Albert Lee and in Austin.
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: looking at where the resistance is found in these places in Minneapolis, the resistance was led by among others what we call the faith community.
• 29:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Minnesota, the largest religion is Lutheran, 23% of everybody in Minnesota is Lutheran.
• 29:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Minneapolis has the largest Lutheran congregation in the world, 13,000 members, Mount Olivett, Lutheran Church.
• 29:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Google is great things
• 29:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Lutheran pastors were leaders of the resistance in Minneapolis.
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: They led civil disobedience famously at the airport.
• 29:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: How are the Lutheran ministers doing in small town southern Minnesota?
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's very much a similar story and actually one of the pastors that I spoke to in North Field, which is one of the towns I visited.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's only about 45 minutes outside of the Twin Cities.
• 29:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: She had actually participated in that airport, per sit-in, that you mentioned.
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's a very similar environment where these faith leaders are coming together, lead such
• 29:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: large congregations and have connections, whether folks in their town are members of the congregation or not.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: In a lot of these towns, everyone knows the big church, you know.
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, these churches have become
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: focus points for every form of resistance that you can imagine.
• 30:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Whether it's the church is the place where you can bring in groceries that you picked up and then later they'll be distributed to immigrant families who are staying home or the churches where you can come and talk to folks who are maybe more involved in these resistance efforts and ask what they need
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: In the case of one church that I visited in Northfield, one group who was doing ice watch patrols, another group who was doing mutual aid of the form of grocery use rides to school for immigrant children etc.
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: The church is where those groups come together.
• 30:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: on say a weekly basis to just check in and see what the success is, the failures, the concerns of that week were.
• 31:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the faith leaders have really built this sense of what they call neighborism and neighborliness and using that as kind of the guiding principle and philosophy of how they are resisting ice.
• 31:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And which of these towns have Muslim populations and mosques?
• 31:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: of the three towns that I visited.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Wilmer certainly has the largest Muslim population of those three.
• 31:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's in some part because the main industry in Wilmer is based around the Genie O Turkey Processing Plant and
• 31:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Muslim workers will work at the turkey processing plant, but they won't work downstate in Albert Lear Austin where the meat being processed is pork because it's her own to deal with pork.
• 31:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that means that Wilmer is really a major
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: major place for the Somali community and there's a great Islamic center there where I went to an iftar dinner during Ramadan and got to speak to some community members who were able to speak to the specific impact that this immigration crackdown was having for them during the holiest month in Islam.
• 32:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The part of your report that I found most disheartening was about the white kids in middle school, where you talk to some parents about what was going on.
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: In Albert Lee, I spoke to two mothers.
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Both mothers are Mexican-American, and so their kids are facing racism at school.
• 32:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: White kids saying things like, all the Mexican kids line up, or I hope you have your bags packed.
• 32:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: I hope you're ready because Trump's coming for you.
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And things like that.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then in Austin, I spoke to a teacher who had witnessed some of this as well on,
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: his school's campus, and he also wanted to highlight that many kids were trying their best.
• 33:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: In Austin there had been some school walkouts, including kids as young as late elementary school and early middle school who were walking out in support of their peers and neighbors who had been targeted by ice.
• 33:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's not all bad, but there were these really harrowing stories of just casual everyday racism on the school yard.
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've been talking about these touts as if they're all pretty much the same, but in fact, you found significant differences between Northfield, which is a college town and Wilmer, which is a kind of farming industrial town, biggest difference was the county sheriff in Wilmer.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Wilmer is one of four towns in Minnesota where the local jail has an agreement with ICE to house immigrants who have been detained by ICE or CBP.
• 34:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: In Wilmer, the folks I spoke to said that they really do feel like the sheriff is
• 34:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: working with ICE and the federal government.
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a real source of profit for the county and for Wilmer because they receive money from the federal government to serve as a detention facility for them.
• 34:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: To the point where the jail has actually moved local detainees were not there for immigration purposes.
• 34:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Further a field, just a free-up space for folks who are detained due to immigration status.
• 34:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the other hand, you found a lot of what you call bright spots of solidarity, which were really the most significant parts of your report.
• 34:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most remarkable to me was you found a motorcycle club for cops and ex-military.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tell us about them.
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was sitting down in a different Mexican restaurant in Wilmer and in Wauks, Willy, who was one of the people that I spoke with in Wilmer.
• 35:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he walks in and he's wearing this like real tough guy like leather motorcycle jacket.
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: with this kind of Robin's egg blue colored lettering and it has some Bible quotes on it.
• 35:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's just like this kind of cool jacket and I have no idea what's going on.
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Willie tells me that he is a member of this motorcycle club where it's a group of veterans, former police officers, former firefighters, EMTs, paramedics, that kind of like law enforcement adjacent crowd.
• 35:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's their jacket and so willy is a member of the group and from what he told me it's a big part of his social life and the group is pretty tight in it.
• 35:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: As you can imagine, it's a pretty conservative bunch of law enforcement.
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: motorcycle club, you know, it kind of makes sense.
• 36:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yep.
• 36:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so Willie is the owner of a local restaurant right on one of the main streets in Wilmer.
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was hosting a fundraiser around the holidays in late December.
• 36:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he was really concerned that there would be some sort of disruption due to ice.
• 36:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's Mexican-American,
• 36:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: some of his customers are as well and we're just a lot of fear brewing under the surface.
• 36:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the conservative tough guys in his motorcycle club said, we've got your back.
• 36:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: You run the fundraiser, don't worry about ice.
• 36:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: They've literally formed a perimeter outside of Willie's restaurant and as far as he told it, the fundraiser went off completely without a hitch and it was just a really heartening moment of
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: otherwise super conservative guys just using their presence to say don't mess with our friend and don't mess with his business and what he's trying to do.
• 36:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: No Kings Day, March 28th was after you finished your reporting there.
• 37:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: I noticed that Wilmer did have a no Kings Day protest on March
• 37:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Local news reports there said 650 people went to a no-kings protest at the middle school parking lot on that Saturday.
• 37:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a indivisible can-de-oh-i-county that organized this.
• 37:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Albert Lee had a no-kings rally on that Saturday, March 28th, 300 people at New Denmark Park.
• 37:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: that was described as the town's largest protest in its history.
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, of course, the college town of Northfield had a big nookings protest.
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is, you know, Carlton College, St. Olos College, two or three thousand people in Ames Park, and then they had buses going to the rally, the flagship rally in St. Paul,
• 37:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So all of these places had no Kings Day protests and the one in Northfield was really big.
• 37:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wonder what your concluding thoughts are about resistance to ice in rural Minnesota.
• 38:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was struck by that term, neighborism.
• 38:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't surprise me that so many people showed out in all of these towns, including in the more conservative and smaller towns, like you mentioned, Wilmer and Albert Lee.
• 38:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: When I was there, you know, I spoke to some older, long time white residents of the town who
• 38:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you could be forgiven for assuming something about their politics, potentially assuming that they are more conservative or have some nostalgia for when their towns were all white working class and everyone had a job.
• 38:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: I met so many people who
• 38:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: would fit that description who were actually some of the most radical organizers out there.
• 38:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And people are really galvanized by this.
• 38:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: They see what's been happening to their own neighbors.
• 38:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they're determined to do something about it.
• 39:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And for some people, that means getting in their car at 5 a.m. and following ICE vehicles around.
• 39:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And for others, it means going to the first protest they've ever been to in their lives.
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: just kind of bravely standing on a street corner with a hand-drawn sign.
• 39:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of that happening in these small towns.
• 39:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it doesn't mean that everyone in Wilmer is suddenly going to become a leftist, you know, card carrying DSA member, Bernie Boder.
• 39:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it does mean that I think there's a level of empathy and care that is often a bit quieter
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: a bit harder to see, but it's there, and I think it's really growing as well.
• 39:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Emma Jansen, you can read her report when ice blows through rural America at Prospect.org.
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Emma, thanks for talking with us today.
• 39:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much.
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've been listening to Start Making Sense, a podcast from the Nation Magazine.
• 40:13
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• 40:15
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• 40:18
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• 40:21
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• 40:37
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• 40:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm John Weener.
• 40:45
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