Minnesota Derangement Syndrome
The right wing didn’t much care about Minnesota before 2018. Then my district elected Ilhan Omar to Congress, and they literally lost their minds. Ever since then, they have been determined to paint an image of Minnesota, and Minneapolis in particular, that is plainly, stupidly absurd to anyone who lives here.
In February 2019, convicted felon Jacob Wohl and confirmed lunatic Laura Loomer came to Minneapolis to play-act that they were being hunted by Ilhan Omar’s hitmen (yes, really) and pretend they were somehow in enemy territory. Wohl tweeted “Just left a no-go zone in Minneapolis. One of the friendly local Somali men asked me ‘Are you trying to get killed?’” and “the Islamicist forces have taken over sections of the respective police departments.” On camera, Loomer claimed “there are men who walk around in orange vests that say ‘Sharia police’ in some of these Somali communities.”
“This is a lie,” state Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, fired back at the stranger on Twitter. "For anyone outside of MN, please realize Minneapolis — like any large city — has some rough neighborhoods. But there is no such ‘no go zone.’ This is a farce.’
The whole excursion was such a trainwreck that even the director who worked on it with them admitted Wohl was a liar.
But the cartoon image of a Minneapolis wreathed in darkness and fallen to their worst enemies proved too fascinating for the soft brains of the manosphere to give up easily. In 2020, the property damage in Minneapolis turned out to have been started by right-wingers who desperately needed their idiotic fantasy of a dystopian Minneapolis to be real.
They tried the same tactics again at ICE protests in January 2026, both the false flag burning and the hyperventilating about an imaginary “autonomous zone” in Minneapolis.
On January 29, 2026, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan held a press conference in Minneapolis and was asked how many agents were operating in the state. He responded, “3,000. There’s been some rotations. They’ve been in theatre a long time.” I was shocked to hear this guy use the term “in theatre” in reference to an American city.
Of course by that point it was war, a war downstream of Wohl and Loomer’s farcical fantasy. They needed Minneapolis to be a war zone so they made it a war zone. They hoovered up all the sex offenders and domestic abusers they could get their hands on, made a point of not training them at all, put guns in their hands and dumped them here with strict instructions to find and detain 100 brown people every day.
This last Thursday, the president called on Minnesotans to engage in a race war against all Somalians.
I don’t know how this is going to turn out. I hope the lies and fearmongering will end. But it seems likely to continue, and it seems that the racists are determined to start more shit and have their big boy fights and kill more people.
