“Minneapolis, MN —”
The air up here doesn’t just cold-cock you; it tries to peel the skin off your face to see if you’re still bleeding red underneath. It is five degrees below zero, a temperature that legally qualifies as a hostile act of God, and I am standing in the parking lot of a Super Target, watching the end of the American Experiment unfold in real-time.
It didn’t come with a bang. It came with a bladder emergency.
The Praetorian Guard Needs a Piss
You may have heard the name Greg Bovino. If you haven’t, count yourself lucky, then count your silver, because he’s the kind of guy who looks like he was manufactured in a vat of unset concrete and bad intentions. He is the U.S. Border Patrol Commander, a title that implies he should be patrolling, you know, ‘the border’. Yet here he is, a thousand miles from the Rio Grande, turning the Twin Cities into a militarized zone that feels less like the Midwest and more like an occupied sector in a dystopian graphic novel.
They call it “Operation Metro Surge.” A surge. Like a power spike that fries your refrigerator, or the rush of bile you get when you realize the guys in the tactical vests aren’t here to save you.
I watched them march into the Target. A caravan of federal agents, strapped with enough firepower to annex a small Caribbean nation, clomping past the dollar bins and the Starbucks kiosk. Why? To use the bathroom. I am not making this up. This is the state of our Union in 2026: The Praetorian Guard needs a potty break, and they’re bringing the AR-15s with them.
The crowd didn’t roll out the red carpet. They booed. They cursed. It was a beautiful, feral chorus of Midwestern rage. “Get out!” they screamed, a sentiment that usually takes a Minnesotan three hours and a hotdish to express politely. But the veneer is cracking, folks. The “Minnesota Nice” has frozen over and shattered into jagged shards of “Get the hell off my lawn.”
Statistical Hallucinations and the 4,000-Pound Missile
Bovino, for his part, seems to be operating in a reality tunnel so narrow it could be a straw. He walked out of that store, chin jutting like the prow of an icebreaker, and later told the press that “90 to 95 percent” of Minnesotans support them.
Let me tell you something about that number. That number is a hallucination. That number is the fever dream of a man who thinks fear is the same thing as respect. I have been drinking in dive bars from Uptown to St. Paul for three days, listening to the terrified whispers and the drunken shouts, and I have yet to meet this silent majority. What I see are people looking at their neighbors with wide, panicked eyes, wondering if the Honda Pilot parked across the street is a family car or, in Bovino’s words, a “4,000-pound missile.”
That’s what he called the car Renee Good was driving when an ICE agent put a bullet in her head last week. A missile.
Renee Good. Say the name. She was a citizen. She was in a car. And now she is a statistic in a war that was declared on us without a vote, without a debate, without so much as a polite cough. They shot her in the street, in the snow, and then they went on TV and told us we should thank them for it. They told us they are here to keep us safe from the “criminal aliens,” a term they use with the same casual venom an exterminator uses for roaches. But when the smoke clears, it’s a local woman bleeding out on the asphalt, and the “peacekeepers” are gassing the neighbors who dare to light a candle for her.
Chemical Warfare in the Slush and the Expansion of the Abyss
I stood on the corner of 35th and Park last night, the air thick with the acrid sting of tear gas and the metallic taste of fear. The Feds were there, faceless stormtroopers in the gloom, firing pepper balls at kids who looked like they should be worrying about algebra, not chemical warfare. It was a scene from a bad cyberpunk movie, played out in the slush.
And this is the vibe check, friends. This is the terminal diagnosis. We are watching the normalization of the unthinkable. We are watching the “border” expand until it is everywhere. The border is now the Target vestibule. The border is your driveway. The border is the inside of your skull, where you edit your thoughts before you speak because you don’t know who’s listening.
Bovino and his boys are just the symptoms. The disease is the rot at the core of the system, the idea that safety can be purchased with brutality, that liberty is a luxury we can no longer afford. They are turning this city into a proving ground, a petri dish to see how much we will take before we snap.
Sanity Not Guaranteed in the Frozen Rot
“Sanity not guaranteed,” the sign on the bunker door says. No shit. How can you be sane when the guys with the badges are acting like a conquering army, and the guy in charge is telling you that you love it?
I lit a cigarette in the Target parking lot, watching the caravan roll out, heavy black SUVs looking like hearses for democracy. A woman next to me, bundled in a parka that looked like it could survive a nuclear winter, spat on the ground.
“You believe this bullshit?” she asked.
“Lady,” I said, smoke curling into the frozen air, “I believe it because I’m seeing it. But I don’t have to accept it.”
The lights are flickering, America. The voltage is dropping. And the only thing keeping the darkness at bay is the screaming. So scream. Scream until your throat bleeds. Scream at the architects of our doom. Scream at the man in the suit telling you that the boot on your neck is actually a hug.
Because when the screaming stops, that’s when the silence wins. And in this cold, that silence is fatal.
‘Rip Thorne is currently freezing his ass off in Minneapolis, searching for a drink that doesn’t taste like despair.
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