On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eric Schwalm talks about the organized nature of the Minneapolis protests and points out how much work it takes to set up and run:
“No Kings, No ICE” protest on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota on 23 January, 2026.
Photo by Myotus via Wikimedia Commons.
As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency ops — both hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populations — I’ve seen organized resistance up close. From Anbar to Helmand, the pattern is familiar: spotters, cutouts, dead drops (or modern equivalents), disciplined comms, role specialization, and a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly.
What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest”. It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.
Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction — or worse.
This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition. Replace “ICE agents” with “occupying coalition forces” and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s.
The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they’re trying to paralyze law enforcement in. When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers — complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that’s already turned lethal — you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience. You’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity.
I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society. That should keep every thinking American awake at night.
Not because I want escalation. But because history shows these things don’t de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists and the cadre believe they’re winning the information war.
We either recognize what we’re actually looking at — or we pretend it’s still just “activism” until the structures harden and spread.
Your call, America. But from where I sit, this isn’t January 2026 politics anymore. It’s phase one of something we’ve spent decades trying to keep off our own soil.
On his Substack, Glenn Reynolds points out that the “protests” are serving to distract attention away from state and local officials’ role in enabling massive fraud rings in Minnesota which reportedly scored billions of federal dollars for phantom organizations:
This image depicts a similar action by the Trusts at the turn of the last century. (Library of Congress).
The squid was frightened, so we got the ink: Increasingly violent “protests”-cum-riots explicitly aimed at blocking ICE operations with the stated goal of forcing federal authorities out of Minnesota entirely, while generating maximum media attention.
These are not spontaneous uprisings of the aggrieved, but organized actions featuring out-of-state actors and organizations, detailed training programs for demonstrators, and large amounts of intentionally murky funding from organizations like Indivisible, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and others.
They’re coordinating their anti-ICE operations — identifying, chasing and blocking agents to keep them from arresting illegal-immigrant criminals — through highly organized chat groups on Signal, a secure communications platform, Fox News reported.
And Minnesota government officials are proudly touting their involvement in this coordination.
Sen. Bernie Sanders made much of Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s role in a fundraising email this weekend, praising her for “playing a key role in mobilizing grassroots opposition to Trumpism”.
That’s making these often violent, deliberately obstructive demonstrations look less like a civil rights sit-in and more like a government-backed insurrection.
Tragically, this aggressive and confrontational strategy has produced martyrs who can now be exploited for political purposes.
“Two things can be true at the same time,” Fox News’ Asra Nomani posted Monday.
The death of Alex Pretti, the armed demonstrator who got into a fatal tussle with ICE agents Saturday, “is a real and devastating tragedy, and there are several investigations appropriately occurring into the circumstances behind his killing”.
But also, “A far-left organizing network put Pretti in harm’s way and then turned him into a martyr … to sow the perception of chaos in America”.
Whatever investigators determine about how Pretti’s death unfolded, the fact remains that a cynical and corrupt political machine has fostered for its own purposes a situation that’s dangerous for its own supporters, and for the political future of our nation.
