Songs of Minnesota: 'Singing through the bloody mist, We'll take our stand for this land, And the stranger in our midst"

One of the great things I remember about the 60s was the music of revolution, that opposed the Vietnam War and celebrated rebellion. 

Right now, we are again hearing music that pays tribute to the courage of the people opposing the ICE Gestapo in Minneapolis and Minnesota:

Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Minneapolis

Billy Bragg - City of Heros


Minnesota, by Chad Elliot

"Minnesota" - Marsh Family adaptation of "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)"

Green Day - Holiday (Support for Minnesota)

And that Super Bowl half time show should be fun this year - no wonder Trump isn't going!

After hearing all the anti-ICE songs coming out, imagine being the underling assigned to go brief Trump on the success of the assault on Minnesota and as he walks into the shabby gold encrusted oval office Trump puts down his burger, eyes full of expectation, and the guy says, “They’re singing”

— ogoais.bsky.social (@ogoais.bsky.social) January 28, 2026 at 8:02 PM

Also, here is a link to a fascinating Medium post by music professor Noriko Manabe ICE protest songs and chants, Minnesota general strike (January 23) and beyond

In The Atlantic, Adam Serwer writes about how Minnesota has proven MAGA wrong

...Perhaps the Trump-administration officials had hoped that a few rabble-rousers would get violent, justifying the kind of crackdown he seems to fantasize about. Maybe they had assumed that they would find only a caricature of “the resistance”—people who seethed about Trump online but would be unwilling to do anything to defend themselves against him.
Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom. They aren’t looking for attention or likes on social media. Unless they are killed by federal agents, as Pretti and Renee Good were, other activists do not even necessarily know their names. Many use a handle or code name out of fear of government retaliation...
If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme...
...Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs.
The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.
No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.

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In his substack, Paul Krugman asserts Minnesota is the Beginning of an American Color Revolution Ordinary people are ready to save democracy

... a “color revolution” is a widely used term for the nonviolent uprisings that overthrew some of the autocratic regimes that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The most famous of these uprisings was the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought democracy to Ukraine...
...Early in the second Trump administration it was clear that something like a color revolution was the only way to reverse the destruction of American democracy. Empowered by a corrupt Supreme Court that gave him blanket immunity and unconstitutional powers, fueled by a tidal wave of billionaire money, and abetted by a sycophantic Republican party, Trump was able to steamroll any opposition. Elites and elite institutions, from big corporations to law firms to many universities, capitulated without a fight.
And despite the massive turnout for the No Kings Day protests, it wasn’t clear if American patriots were tough enough, determined enough, to succeed where elites had failed. One day of marches at which the atmosphere was, if anything, festive, isn’t the same as the grim business of standing up to an autocratic regime, one willing to employ violence, on a sustained basis. Do Americans really have what it takes?
Yes, they do — in Minnesota and, I believe, in the rest of the country. ...
...MAGA can’t understand the willingness of so many people to endure so much hardship and run so many risks out of a sense of civic duty and care for their fellow man. Surely, they think, there must be hidden paymasters and puppet masters coordinating the anti-ICE resistance.
But there aren’t. Ordinary Americans are braver and more determined than was dreamt of in their philosophy....

Everybody hates the ICE Gestapo now:

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Trump is literally telling his 2nd Amendment base you can’t carry guns to public protests. His presidency is in freefall.

— Tea Pain (@teapainusa.bsky.social) January 27, 2026 at 7:08 PM

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