Struggling with the yin/yang of this moment

Every morning as I peruse the news I feel like I'm on an emotional roller coaster. I feel the rage/grief as I read headlines like "Immigrant whose skull was broken in 8 places during ICE arrest says beating was unprovoked." On the other hand, I feel hope/pride as I read ones like "Nearly 30,000 Minnesotans trained as constitutional observers."

I suspect that's precisely why these lines from the Charles Dickens book, "A Tale of Two Cities" are so often quoted.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way...

Dickens captured something important that flies in the face of much that we believe about the world. It is in moments of darkness that light shines its brightest. 

All of that is why today, I'm thinking a lot about the ancient taoist idea of Yin/Yang.  

Don't ask me what I mean by all of that because honestly, I don't know. It just seems like a truism we're living out on a daily basis right now. I suspect it's has something to do with embracing the fact that we're intensely experiencing both the dark/light and not getting caught up in denying either one. 

Or maybe it's about something that showed up on my Facebook feed a few days before the winter solstice.

This is how I see humanity most days. Right when it feels like everything is tightening. When empathy gets quieter, patience runs thin, and it seems easier for people to choose outrage over understanding. When it feels like we’re losing more ground than we’re gaining.

But that’s the trick of the season. The darkest stretch convinces you this is how it will stay.

We’re three days from gaining daylight again. Not because anyone fixed everything overnight, but because cycles still exist. Because even after all our noise, the planet keeps reminding us that contraction is not the end of the story.

The light doesn’t rush back. It returns slowly. A minute here. A breath there. And somehow, that’s enough to change the direction of everything.

Maybe humanity is there too. Not healed. Not solved. Just quietly turning back toward something better, whether we notice it yet or not.

One thing I DO know is that this is still my favorite Bruce Springsteen performance. 

Trump's organizing principle: racism

During a discussion with Chris Hayes, Adam Serwer offered a great response to Donald Trump's racist social media post about the Obamas. 

Adam Serwer: “Donald Trump is still psychically wounded by the election of Barack Obama.” @adamserwer.bsky.social

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— Barbara Kaskosz (@kaskosz.bsky.social) February 6, 2026 at 7:45 PM

Here's what Serwer said: 

What people have to understand is that people like Donald Trump think that they are better that other people, not because of something that they've done, but because they are white. And so when they are confronted with an example of Black genius - for example, the first Black President of the United States - they have this violent emotional reaction, because they feel like their place in the hierarchy has been disturbed. And so they have to put Black people back in their place...What's very clear is that Donald Trump is still psychically wounded by the election of Barack Obama and his ongoing popularity. 

Chris Hayes also noted that, for Trump, racism is "an organizing principle." He's right. And it doesn't just apply to the Obamas.

To demonstrate, let's go back a couple of months to late November when the New York Times published an article about welfare fraud in Minnesota. Then in December, right wing podcaster Nick Shirley released a video of lies about fraud in Minnesota daycare centers. For most of December, MAGA was on offense, having hit the trifecta of a way to undermine Democratic Governor Tim Walz, demonize immigrants, and trash the social safety net. Democrats were on their heels trying to figure out how to respond - leading Walz to drop out of the governor's race in Minnesota.

How did Trump respond to all of that? Did he send in teams of prosecutors to investigate and prosecute fraud? No. He called Somalis "garbage" and said he wanted to kick them all out of the country. Then on January 6th, DHS announced the launch of the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, sending 2,000 agents to Minnesota. 

Last week Mark Mitchell, head pollster at the right wing firm Rasmussen, wrote something I agree with - but from the opposite perspective.

The discovery of rampant alleged fraud in Minnesota was a gift. It offered a rare opportunity to shift the national conversation away from Republican dysfunction and toward something Americans overwhelmingly agree on. Three-quarters of voters are angry about the level of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government...

This was the moment for a full-scale, anti-blue-state fraud push. Follow the money. Subpoena everything. Make examples. Send every agency in, even the 80,000 armed IRS agents we should have fired. If fraud is that widespread, maybe austerity is not the answer. Maybe arrests are.

Instead, the focus shifted.

ICE was surged into Minneapolis. What could have been a systemic fraud investigation became a performative deportation spectacle. Predictable protests followed. Then escalation: more ICE presence, masks, tear gas, aggressive enforcement. Within days, the headlines were no longer about uncovering fraud. They were about clashes, optics, and ultimately the tragic shooting deaths of two protesters.

Donald Trump is so consumed with racism that he missed the opportunity to implement a "full-scale, anti-blue-state fraud push" and, instead, let his goons loose in Minnesota to terrorize people of color. The political backlash to the latter has been epic.

Meanwhile, when it comes to fraud, the administration's actions have resulted in a decimation of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minnesota, leading to a level of incompetence that is staggering.  

Trump's posting of the video of the Obamas demonstrates that, rather than learning from his mistakes, he is preparing to double-down on racism. I suspect that he is not capable of doing otherwise. His narcissistic ego is dependent on thinking he's better than other people because he's white.

The Big Lie of Trump's Second Term

During an interview with Megyn Kelly on Wednesday, VP Vance said that the Biden administration let in "20 million illegal aliens." On the same day, President Trump told NBC News anchor Tom Llamas that "We allowed in our country, I say, 25 million people with an open-border policy for four years under Biden" It's something that we hear consistently from this administration. Way too many people believe that those claims are true, so let's do a bit of a fact check.

First of all, what about those numbers? It is true that, during the Biden administration, the country saw a record number of people attempting to cross the border. Factors that led to that crisis include the reality that the U.S. recovered from the COVID crisis much faster than other countries as well as the fact that there was economic and political upheaval in places that led to an increase in the number of people fleeing their home countries. Here's what that looked like:

The claim is that Biden had an open border policy, allowing all of those migrants to enter the U.S. But with that increase in "illegal crossings" came an increase in the number of deportations, returns, and expulsions.

In terms of percentages, Trump removed 47% of border crossers during his first term, while Biden removed 51%.

The other way to fact check the claim about Biden allowing 20-25 million people to enter the country illegally is to take a look at how many undocumented immigrants are actually in the country. The most respected organization on that front is Pew Research. They documented that the number did grow sharply from 2021-2023, but nothing near the numbers we're hearing from MAGA.

Rather than an increase of 20-25 million, we see an increase of about 3.5 million. It's important to note that the increase during the Biden administration came almost exclusively from immigrants with some form of protection from deportation.

There are other actions that Biden took that give lie to the claims that he had an open border policy (not all of them supported by immigrant rights groups).

• The first bill he sent to Congress was the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 - a measure for immigration reform. It was rejected by Republicans.
• He kept Title 42 in place until its expiration on May 11, 2023.
• He sent 1,500 National Guard troops to the border and hired processing coordinators to free up Border Patrol agents to carry out expulsions.
• He increased US removal flights by 55 percent.
• In February 2024, he negotiated a bi-partisan border control bill that would have closed loopholes in the asylum process, limited the use of parole for migrants at the border and given the president new authority to effectively shut down the border to migrants when attempted crossings are high. Trump told Republicans to reject the bill and they complied.
• In June 2024, he shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters reached 2,500 between official ports of entry.

That last bullet is one of the main reasons why so many of these data points stopped being compiled after 2023. As Pew reported, migrant encounters fell sharply in 2024.

It is important to recount this history because the lies about the number of undocumented immigrants and claims about Biden's open border policy form the basis of MAGA's complete embrace of the white nationalist great replacement theory. As an example, this video was recently reposted by Trump on social media.

WATCH: The Democrat Open Borders Plan to Entrench Single-Party Rule | Explained in Under Two Minutes pic.twitter.com/uWJxBiKive

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) March 19, 2024

Those lies have become so entrenched that this morning on CNBC Joe Kernan brought them up with Democratic Senator Chris Coons.

As Republicans attempt to pass voter suppression efforts like the SAVE Act and Trump talks about the federal government taking over state elections, these are the lies they'll rely on to go beyond terrorizing local communities and start attempting to control elections. It is important that we all stay armed with the facts.   

Stephen Miller and his pals want medicine to be racist again

While Stephen Miller is busy directing a terror campaign across America in an attempt to implement his white supremacist vision for the country, the law firm he founded - America First Legal - is working to inject racism back into medicine .Yes, you read that right. Here's the backstory.

For decades, the test used to determine whether a patient is eligible for a kidney transplant (GFR) was modified for Black people to artificially elevate their kidney function scores by 16-21% based on flawed assumptions about higher muscle mass. One study estimated that without that race correction, 3.3 million more Black Americans would have been diagnosed with a higher stage of chronic kidney disease. 

It wasn't until 2022 that UNOS, the organization that manages the kidney donor list, ordered hospitals to use only race-neutral test results in adding new patients to the kidney waiting list. But they took it a step further.

The transplant network gave hospitals a year to uncover which Black kidney candidates could have qualified for a new kidney sooner if not for the race-based test — and adjust their waiting time to make up for it...Between January 2023 and mid-March [2024], more than 14,300 Black kidney transplant candidates have had their wait times modified, by an average of two years.

It's that last part that has white supremacists lighting their hair on fire about DEI initiatives in the Biden administration.

Mr. Biden’s health czars discovered “systemic racism” everywhere they turned, and their remedy for this malady was to impose reparations. They granted preferential treatment to certain ethnic groups when they needed an operation to replace their kidneys...this meant paying less attention to the 40,000 white men and women who are just as desperate for the chance to stay alive.

“With thousands of Americans dying on transplant waitlists each year, the public has a right to full transparency into how this program was created, because discrimination has no place in medicine,” AFL attorney Megan Redshaw said in a statement.

Did you catch that? What they're suggesting is that any attempt to remedy discrimination is, in fact, discrimination. As I wrote previously, "They aren't just attempting to roll back civil rights protections. They're claiming that any move to enforce civil rights is discrimination" against white men. A simpler way of putting it would be to say "they're using the concept of civil rights to enforce white supremacy." Stephen Miller and his pals at AFL want medicine to be racist again.

Dr. Oz does his best imitation of Nick Shirley

On December 25, 2025, right wing podcaster Nick Shirley released a video full of lies about fraud in Minnesota daycare centers. Trump responded by launching Operation Metro Surge - which has now turned into a nightmare for his administration. 

The president and his MAGA allies desperately want to turn the national narrative back to allegations of fraud in Minnesota. As part of that effort, Dr. Oz, who is in charge of Medicare and Medicaid services, travelled to the state with his buddy, Jim O'Neill (HHS Deputy Secretary) and did their best to imitate Nick Shirley.  

🚨 BREAKING: Dr. Oz and Jim O’Neill said they discovered a former linen factory in Minnesota that was converted into 400 Medicaid businesses, generating nearly half a billion dollars. 🤯

pic.twitter.com/as3BquX2i4

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) January 23, 2026

This effort would be humorous if it weren't so tragic. Almost everything Dr. Oz said is a lie. For example, the Griggs-Midway building was originally a food manufacturing plant when it was built in 1912 - not a linen factory. It was converted into an office building in 1955. 

While it is true that there is an industrial area to the northwest of the building, it is surrounded by residential areas to the west and south. 

 

I know about this building because it used to house one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in the city. It has also been home to state and public offices including the Ramsey County Workforce Center, MN Department of Human Rights, MN State Arts Board, and Public Defenders. It's a hub for government, nonprofits, and small businesses.

One of Dr. Oz's statements is particularly problematic for Twin Cities residents. The Griggs-Midway building is in St. Paul - not Minneapolis. Those of us who have lived in the former find this kind of confusion particularly troublesome. 

But let's get to the heart of the matter. Here's the big lie:

Roughly 400 Medicaid businesses were started in the building behind me over the last several years. They generated about $380 million of billing that you, the taxpayer, were putting up. That means roughly every business had a million dollars of billing...

The question is, how is it possible 400 businesses billing almost $400 million were able to thrive here? What did the owener of this building think was happeing inside? Why did no one in the state think this was a concern?

I have no idea where the allegation of 400 Medicaid businesses billing almost $400 million comes from. But here's what happened back in July 2025.

FBI agents on Wednesday raided five Twin Cities businesses and two homes as part of an investigation into Medicaid housing assistance fraud...

Twenty-two purported providers have business addresses at the Griggs-Midway Building on University Ave. in St. Paul. They collectively billed taxpayers $8 million over 17 months and used fake documentation to back their claims, the FBI alleges.

By September 2025, four of the five businesses targeted in the raid were charged in federal court. The fifth business was charged in December. While Dr. Oz wonders why no one is concerned, the truth is that state and federal officials have been on the case for months now. As all of that was unfolding, Gov. Walz completely shut down the housing assistance fund in October last year. 

The good doctor ends his nonsense with this:

There has been a censoring of the truth, and an inability to own what is happening in this state that is concerning to me. They talk about being "nice" in Minnesota, I want to be nice too, but a good person doesn't always have to be nice. They have to be truthful and honest.

Excuse me while I get a little blunt here, but - much like his pal Nick Shirley - Dr. Oz wouldn't know the truth if it bit him in the *ss. 

Why did the Trump administration target Minnesota?

The question in my title is one a lot of people are asking, but not many in the media are addressing. As I've pondered it, I've come up with four reasons.

First of all, Donald Trump is a racist. He wants to rid the country of people from places he calls "shithole countries." Given that Minnesota is home to the largest number of Somali residents, the state became a target when Nick Shirley posted his video with lies about fraud in Somali-run daycare centers.

Secondly, the state's governor, Tim Walz, became an enemy when he ran for vice-president on a ticket with Kamala Harris.

Thirdly, Trump lost Minnesota in all three of his presidential campaigns. As a matter of fact, the state hasn't voted for a Republican in a presidential race since 1972. 

I'm going to let Timothy Snider explain the fourth reason.

To give you some idea of what Snyder is talking about, Gov. Tim Walz posted this on Facebook last October:

Just this year, Minnesota has ranked:
A top 10 state for safety.
A top 5 state to live in.
A top 3 state for jobs.
A top 3 state to retire.
The 2nd best state to raise a family.
The 2nd best state for children. 

A bet against Minnesota is a bad bet.

As an example, WalletHub recently rated Minnesota as the second best state to raise a family. Their ranking included measures like affordability, safety, strong job opportunities, and access to quality education, healthcare, and entertainment. Here's what they wrote about Minnesota:

Minnesota is a great place to find a job to support your family, as it has the second-highest median family income, at over $109,000, adjusted for the cost of living. It also has the second-lowest poverty rate for families and the eighth-lowest wealth gap between the lowest and highest earners. In addition to good pay, residents also receive reliable long-term benefits, as Minnesota ranks 13th in the country for employer-based retirement plan access and participation.

Another great thing about raising a family in the Land of 10,000 Lakes is what it can do for your children’s health. The state has the fifth-highest life expectancy at birth and the sixth-best public hospitals in the country. It also encourages children to stay fit amid the obesity epidemic, as it has the eighth-highest percentage of children who live in neighborhoods with a park or playground.

To top things off, families tend to stay together in Minnesota, as it has the fifth-lowest separation and divorce rate in the country.

Also worth noting is that Minnesota consistently rates at the top in terms of voter turnout. 

The history that contributed to Minnesota being a state that works has been documented by many people. I've written about it a couple of times in the past myself. I would also point out that, while the rest of the country was still recovering from the COVID pandemic, state and federal officials were already investigating fraud in the Feed Our Future program. Similarly, state and federal officials began investigating fraud in daycare centers over a decade ago. Can you name a state that has done a better job of prosecuting fraud?

The occupation of Minnesota has been an attempt to destroy a state that works. But ironically, everything that contributes to that success has also contributed to the failure of Operation Metro Surge. Adam Serwer captured it best in an article titled, "Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong."

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.

As Gov. Walz said, "a bet against Minnesota is a bad bet." 

The entire ICE operation in Minnesota is based on lies

A few days before Alex Pretti was murdered, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem released a ridiculous statement.

We have arrested over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children and reigning terror in Minneapolis because Tim Walz and Jacob Frey refuse to protect their own people and instead protect criminals. In the last 6 weeks, our brave DHS law enforcement have arrested 3,000 criminal illegal aliens including vicious murderers, rapists, child pedophiles, and incredibly dangerous individuals. A huge victory for public safety.

The numbers can't be verified because DHS won't release all of the names of those that have been arrested. What they HAVE done is release the names of 240 individuals they call "the worst of the worst." As I noted previously, the Minnesota Star Tribune analyzed the list and found that those with actual felonies were either in federal prisons (managed by federal - not state - authorities) or were transferred to ICE when their prison sentences were completed. 

But the lies coming from DHS about their operations in Minnesota have become so ubiquitous that the state Department of Corrections has developed a web page, "Combatting DHS Misinformation" to document them. Here's what they wrote about Noem's claims:

DHS’s “Worst of the Worst” (WOW) website...allows users to search by state and city for “criminal illegal aliens that have been removed from their state.”

DOC quickly identified 68 cases in which individuals were lawfully transferred from Minnesota Department of Corrections custody directly to ICE, only for DHS officials to falsely claim these same individuals were “arrested” by waves of federal agents deployed into Minnesota communities...

What is troubling is DHS taking credit for “arrests” which are, in reality, state-to-federal handoffs occurring at prison facilities after individuals complete their state terms of imprisonment, as has been the long-standing practice.

Again, DOC is compelled to release this information because DHS continues to rely on these misrepresentations to justify expanded federal operations in Minnesota.

As just one example, Bovino said that the operation that was underway when Alex Pretti was shot involved a criminal illegal alien with a violent rap sheet that included domestic assault involving intentional bodily harm. 

MN DOC officials reviewed public records and found "no felony commitments associated with this individual." Here's what they DID find:

DOC records further indicate that an individual by this name was previously held in federal immigration custody in a local Minnesota jail in 2018, during President Trump’s first administration. Any decisions regarding release from federal custody at that time would have been made by federal authorities. DOC has no information explaining why this individual was released.

So Bovino and his thugs were out trying to track down someone the Trump administration had released from federal immigration custody in 2018. Furthermore, the individual in question is Ecuadorian - which might explain why ICE agents attempted to illegally enter the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis on Tuesday. 

It is important for all of us to recognize that the Trump administration isn't just lying about the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They're lying about the entire operation in Minnesota. They make up numbers about how many people have been arrested and claim they're deporting the "worst of the worst" when what they're really doing is simply what has always been done: those in prison who are undocumented are being turned over to ICE to be deported once their prison sentences are complete.

Meanwhile the entire population of the state is being terrorized by agents randomly grabbing folks because of the color of their skin or the sound of their accent in the hopes of finding someone who is undocumented to fill the quota set by Stephen Miller.