I’m going to say this carefully—not to provoke, not to posture—but to explain just how close I believe Minneapolis is to losing the road.

Last night, protestors gathered outside a Homewood Suites—one of those interchangeable corporate bunkers where federal agents now hole up after a long day of “law enforcement.” ICE was staying there. The press captured a photograph.

In it, we see what passes for a tableau of American order in 2026.

Two civilians holding cameras. One woman appears to have two. No weapons. No physical engagement. No visible threat.

Opposite them: an ICE Agent threatening to shoot them with a shotgun.

This is the moment people should sit up straight.

Police officers—federal or otherwise—do not get to wave firearms at civilians as a matter of intimidation. The badge does not suspend physics, law, or doctrine. Deadly force is not a prop. It is governed by rules that exist precisely because the consequences are irreversible.

Under the federal use-of-force doctrine, a weapon is not presented unless the officer reasonably believes there is an imminent threat of death or grave bodily injury to himself or others.

Imminent. Not speculative. Not insulting. Not inconvenient.

Imminent.

Look at the photograph. Ask yourself—without ideology, without tribal reflex—whether that standard appears to be met.

I don’t see it.

And this is not an isolated image. It is a pattern.

Over the past several weeks in Minneapolis, three people have been shot in encounters involving ICE. Two are dead. One is hospitalized. Hundreds have been beaten, pepper-sprayed, and struck with so-called “less-than-lethal” munitions.

Let’s dispense with that euphemism while we’re here.

Tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets, pepper balls—these are not “non-lethal.” They are categorized that way for legal convenience, not medical accuracy. People are maimed by them. People are disfigured by them. People are killed by them. Their use is justified only when there is a credible threat of significant harm—not when citizens are standing in public spaces shouting “Shame” with a phone in their hand.

What is happening here is not “tension.” That word suggests elasticity. This is not elastic.

This is rage.

And rage follows rules that polite society prefers not to study.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: when people lose faith that restraint produces results—when every investigation clears itself, when every explanation collapses into boilerplate, when the gun keeps coming out anyway—the internal calculus changes.

Eventually, the perceived cost of restraint exceeds that of resistance.

That is not a moral argument. It is a descriptive one.

We have been here before. Minneapolis knows this terrain intimately. Very few people, in the hours before Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck, would have predicted a week of riots. History does not announce its ignition points in advance. It reveals them only in retrospect.

I feel that’s where we are now.

Another extrajudicial killing—another incident that reads, to this city, as unlawful and unaccountable—and the remaining credibility of non-violent protest could crack. Not everywhere. Not all at once. But enough to matter.

At that point, the risk of armed confrontation rises sharply. And once that line is crossed, the logic becomes tragically self-fulfilling: federal agents will suddenly find themselves in situations where deadly force is legally justified, because the environment has been transformed into one where it is expected.

That is how systems unravel.

This is why the presence of the Minnesota National Guard matters—not as muscle, but as a buffer. Observation. Interposition. A last, quiet attempt to keep one federal agency from lighting a fuse it does not know how to extinguish.

What we are watching now is a legitimacy failure. And legitimacy, once gone, does not return on command.

ICE is not restoring order in Minneapolis. It is consuming it.

And if one more person is killed under circumstances this city judges to be unlawful—judges correctly, based on what it sees and what it has lived—then yes: something is likely to snap.

Not because people are bloodthirsty. Not because they are radicals. But because, at some point, restraint stops looking like virtue and starts looking like surrender.

That is the line we are standing on.

And pounding it with a hammer is not a strategy.

PS: The photo where the guy has his hands up? That was the press, who, when ICE took an interest in them, immediately dropped their gear and put their hands up? Why?

What the press personnel told the AP reporter who wrote the story for the Daily Mail, they didn’t want to get murdered by ICE and immediately surrendered.

Comply or die. The more that message is reinforced by unlawful deadly force? The greater the risk the rubber band snaps.