Minneapolis isn't backing down, will Trump?

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Alex Pretti, a nurse and VA worker, was shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Saturday. According to multiple videos filmed by bystanders, Pretti was trying to protect a woman from ICE agents when they tackled him to the ground and shot him nearly a dozen times.

Not that it actually matters — no one deserves to be extrajudicially murdered in the street — Pretti was known as a kind and decent man. Yes, he did have a gun on him, which was holstered at the time ICE tackled him to the ground. He also had a permit for it.

According to an affidavit filed over the weekend, agents didn’t administer CPR to Pretti and, instead, were audibly counting the bullet holes. (And it looks like at least one of the agents was doing a fucked-up little jig in the street, as well.) After celebrating Pretti’s murder, the agents arrested as many witnesses as they could. One witness told CBS News that he was detained for hours and was labeled a “USC,” or “United States citizens in custody.”

Not only have residents have barricaded the site of Pretti’s murder and turned it into another living memorial/autonomous zone, as they did with the neighborhood where Renee Good was killed. But there are now residents patrolling the area with assault weapons. There was also a brief showdown between ICE agents and local police, after Minneapolis law enforcement was asked to leave the scene. The city’s police chief, Brian O’Hara, ordered officers to stay put. Meanwhile, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz finally sent the National Guard into the Twin Cities. They’re wearing reflective vests to differentiate themselves from ICE agents and were handing out coffee and donuts at the Whipple Federal Building yesterday. To say nothing of the one-man army that is X/Twitter/Bluesky superposter Will Stancil, who has been stalking ICE agents all week, while also begging ICE online to arrest him for filming them to prove that it’s actually illegal.

The Trump administration’s response to Pretti’s death has evolved considerably since Saturday. Immediately after his death, Vice President JD Vance, in a post on X, tried to blame the “chaos” in Minnesota on “far-left agitators.” And Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller wrote on X, “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” There’s a Community Note underneath that post with links to all the videos that prove that’s complete and total horse shit.

Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Walz that all of this will stop if the state hands over its voter rolls. As Democratic strategist Matt McDermott wrote on X over the weekend, “They’re openly using state violence as a bargaining chip to seize election infrastructure.” And as NPR’s Stephen Fowler pointed out in an X post, the Department of Government Efficiency was reportedly very interested in collecting voter rolls as a way to overturn election results. Bondi’s letter is currently being torn apart in Minnesota courts right now.

For a brief moment, it seemed as if President Donald Trump was going to invoke the Insurrection Act, writing on Truth Social, “Much of what you’re witnessing is a COVER UP for this Theft and Fraud. The Mayor and the Governor are inciting Insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric!” But the administration signaled to The Wall Street Journal that ICE agents will leave the state at some point. And this morning Trump announced that he’s sending Border Czar Tom Homan to the state, hopefully to manage some kind of end to the occupation. Walz and Trump also reportedly had a call today that was “positive.”

It wasn’t just the Republicans who seemed unable to figure out exactly what to say about Pretti’s death. The Democrats had a fairly chaotic weekend, as well. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy wrote on X that “Congress should not fund this version of ICE — that is seeking confirmation, chaos and dystopia.” Oh, interesting, Chris, what “version” of ICE should they fund?

Meanwhile, pathologically millennial Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez was one of seven House Democrats left holding the hot potato this weekend. These seven absolute losers voted to increase the Department of Homeland Security’s funding literally last Thursday. So, needless to say, her statement on Pretti’s death hasn’t been well-received. One X user called her, “a wolf in meep's clothing.” Another one of the seven ICE Dems, New York Rep. Tom Suozzi, apologized to his constituents in an email this morning. I honestly hope the Democratic “rotating villain” theory is correct, because if it’s not these guys are either really stupid or just think we are.

Thankfully, Senate Democrats are saying that they plan to vote no on the bill. And Republicans refuse to take out the Department of Homeland Security funding. Which means it’s increasingly likely we’re heading into another government shutdown by the end of the week.

If only the Democrats were as clear on this issue as the, uh, Libertarian Party? In one of those big dumb long posts on X this weekend, Party Chair Steven Nekhaila wrote, “What we are seeing in the United States is the rise of the warrior cop. Masked federal agents donning multicam and plate carriers, injected into civilian life with a GWOT mentality. This is no routine law enforcement. This is occupation-style policing.” Concluding the statement with, “Abolish ICE. Reform the broken immigration system. Do not give the police state an inch.” I’m glad libertarians could take a break from their busy schedule of arguing about age of consent laws to weigh in.

As I wrote on Friday, Springfield, Ohio, was the prototype for Minneapolis, not some stupid right-wing misadventure like the Cracker Barrel logo or Sydney Sweeney’s jeans. The Trump campaign’s swarm in 2024 around the conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs was disorganized, but clearly an early experiment. To see what it would take to engineer a moral panic, how far you would need to push a community before you can fully dehumanize them through political violence and propaganda. A hazy first attempt that they are now following up with the full force of the federal government, moving at the speed of the internet. But Springfield didn’t back down, and, now, neither has Minneapolis. The only question that remains is whether the Trump administration will or not.

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Many many things are on fire, and bad. There is no denying the garbage. If you're a manager, trying to exude calm and confidence, support your people, keep everything moving, it's... a lot. 

In the middle of all that, you've been sitting on feedback your team needs. Avoiding hard conversations. Working longer hours, feeling drained. Wondering when (and HOW) it's gonna get easier.

Here's the good news: there's an answer for the management part. Like, right now, the solution actually exists:

Raw Signal Group runs the best management training in the world. Designed by execs, tested by thousands of leaders, and… well, as a wise philosopher once said: “we’re calling this controlling what you can when things feel out of control” (OK fine it was Olaf from Frozen).

There’s a hot new AI tool out there called Clawdbot. It’s basically an open source wrapper for generative AI that let’s you build an AI agent into whatever chat app you use most. I spent some time playing with it over the weekend and I’m seriously impressed. I have a bot that lives on Discord that can basically carry out tasks on my laptop. It’s kinda neat. But I purposely limited its capabilities because I didn’t feel super comfortable giving it access to my entire computer, the internet, every password I have, etc. Lots of other people, apparently, did not feel that way.

Thousands of users have installed Clawdbot on virtual private servers around the world and, seemingly, given the bot access to their entire digital lives. So, you know, expect some very scary headlines shortly.

TikTok users are reporting that political posts are being complete throttled on the platform right now. There’s screenshot circulating on X of the producer Finneas’ account showing 0 view counts on his most recent videos. Which showed up for me, as well, when I checked it. But after a few refreshes, the page did start loading properly.

A TikTok spokesperson is claiming the view counts are due to a power outage. But the timing is a little suspect. Over the weekend, Oracle, the tech conglomerate owned by Trump ally Larry Ellison, finalized a $14 billion deal to carve off a US-only version of the app.

Normally, I would say that it would take a considerable amount of time to completely overhaul the algorithm for site like TikTok. But now that we’ve seen how fast X, formerly Twitter, changes due to the whims of its own mad king, Elon Musk, I wouldn’t say it’s totally impossible.

In another similarity to X, there is a Bluesky-esque competitor that’s climbing the app store charts right now, as users race to find somewhere else to post. UpScrolled, an app owned by a Palestinian-Australian developer, is now top of the Apple App Store. We parked an account over there, you can follow us there.

—by Adam Bumas

Kanye West took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal today. The ad is an apology addressed “To Those I’ve Hurt,” specifically his use of Nazi symbols and imagery. West has been making amends for a while, meeting with a major Orthodox rabbi last November. This is a more direct apology, but it’s also an ad — West has a new album out on Friday. And that’s not the only factor here.

As we reported, West’s song “Heil Hitler” has reentered the cultural conversation. Earlier this month, a Miami nightclub played it at the request of Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, and Clavicular (more on that last one below). Whether it’s for moral or financial reasons, West is clearly trying to distance himself from the hate-filled sewer carnival he’s performed in regularly for years. Which is why it’s a sober, thoughtful piece in the Wall Street Journal instead of his first stab at this from last year: an X post saying he’s “done with antisemitism.”

West was more or less the first person at the apex of mainstream pop culture to be terminally online. We talked about it on Panic World, but not long ago it was sort of a cultural oddity that he would choose to apologize for interrupting Taylor Swift at the Grammys with a blog post, or release songs sampling obscure YouTube memes. Now that we all live online, it’s interesting to see where he’s decided to retreat. In his apology, the only online reference is to “Reddit forums,” where he says he got help coming to terms with his bipolar diagnosis.

It’s definitely better for everyone than pirating OnlyFans, the only other thing we know West has used Reddit for.

We’ve written a little bit about Braden Peters, the profoundly unwell TikTok looksmaxxer better known as Clavicular. He’s very quickly climbed the echelon of bad internet men, being canonized by Andrew and Tristan Tate last week in Miami. That’s where he discovered that jestermaxxing at the club was officially the meta.

He’s been on various Kick streams doing weird drugs ever since. He was injected with some kind of erection medication by Vitaly Zdorovetskiy, the Russian YouTuber who was just released from Filipino prison. He was kicked out of an escape room after he was apparently caught snorting ketamine on the security cameras. And then, over the weekend, while at a boxing match, his dad texted him to tell him he was a drug addict. Peters seemed to be holding back tears as he read the text out loud.

He then quickly recovered and went into a trance as he explained the importance of mogging.

P.S. here’s a video with a very interesting timestamp.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***