We ran high-level US civil war simulations. Minnesota is exactly how they start Developments in Minnesota closely mirror a scenario explored in a 2024 exercise conducted at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, which I direct. Claire Finkelstein. 1/21/26.
Since 6 January, roughly 2,000 ICE agents have been deployed to Minnesota under the pretext of responding to a fraud investigation. In practice, these largely untrained and undisciplined federal agents have been terrorizing Minneapolis residents through illegal and excessive uses of force – often against US citizens – prompting a federal judge to attempt to place limits on the agency’s actions. The Trump administration is encouraging the lawlessness by announcing “absolute immunity” for ICE agents. But if the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, does not heed the court ruling, the consequences may be nothing short of civil war.
In just the past week, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, shortly after she returned from dropping her child off at school. They blinded two protesters by shooting them in the face with so-called “less deadly” weapons. They fired teargas bombs around the car of a family carrying six children, sending one child to the emergency room with breathing problems. They violently dragged a woman out of her car and on to the ground screaming. They have shot protesters in the legs. They have forcibly taken thousands of individuals to detention facilities, separating families and casting people into legal limbo – often without regard to their legal status.
Rather than investigate this conduct and the officer who shot Renee Good, the justice department has opened a criminal investigation into the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, and Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, accusing them of conspiring to impede federal agents. Renee Good’s widow is also under investigation, a move that prompted six US attorneys in Minnesota to resign in protest.
As public outrage grows, ICE has escalated its actions, increasingly engaging in what appear to be random acts of violence regardless of immigration status. Governor Walz has placed the Minnesota national guard on standby to support local law enforcement, while Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act – an extraordinary move that would grant him sweeping domestic military powers and potentially sidestep recent supreme court limits on the use of federal troops in law enforcement. One thousand additional ICE agents have been sent to Minnesota, suggesting that Trump is essentially using ICE as a specialized paramilitary force to target protesters and suppress dissent. And the Pentagon has readied the army’s 11th Airborne Division – roughly 1,500 active-duty soldiers – to back up the president’s threat.
This scenario closely mirrors one explored in an October 2024 tabletop exercise conducted by the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL), which I direct, at the University of Pennsylvania. In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s national guard. When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces. The core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.
While our hypothetical scenario picked a different city and a slightly different sequence of events, the conclusions we reached about the possibility of green-on-green violence are directly applicable to the current situation. First, none of the participants – many of them senior former military and government officials – considered the scenario unrealistic, especially after the supreme court’s decision in Trump v United States, which granted the president criminal immunity for official acts.
Second, we concluded that in a fast-moving emergency of this magnitude, courts would probably be unable or unwilling to intervene in time, leaving state officials without meaningful judicial relief. State officials might file emergency motions to enjoin the use of federal troops, but judges would either fail to respond quickly enough or decline to rule on what they view as a “political question”, leaving the conflict unresolved. This is why Judge Menendez’s ruling is so critical: it may be the last opportunity a federal judge has to intervene before matters spiral completely out of control.
Third, we warned that senior military leaders could face orders to use force not only against state national guard units, but against unarmed civilians – and that they must be prepared to assess the legality of such orders. Any domestic deployment of federal troops must comply with the Department of Defense’s Rules for the Use of Force and with the constitution, including the Bill of Rights. Even under the Insurrection Act, federal troops may not lawfully shoot protesters unless they are literally defending their lives against an imminent threat – yet such conduct is already happening in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents.
Finally, it is not legal for federal troops to back up ICE agents who are behaving illegally.
Every member of the US military has sworn an oath to defend the constitution. That oath carries legal force. Service members are not only permitted but obligated to refuse patently illegal orders.
That obligation is now under pressure. Senator Mark Kelly is under investigation by the Pentagon for publicly reminding service members in a video he made with five other members of Congress that they may – and in some cases must – refuse illegal orders. But they were essentially correct: troops must refuse to carry out patently illegal orders.
For members of the 11th Airborne Division, this may soon cease to be a theoretical question. Minnesota may be the first test of whether constitutional limits on domestic military force still hold – or whether the United States is about to cross a line from which it cannot easily return.
Claire Finkelstein is the Algernon Biddle professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She is also the founder and faculty director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center
The real reason the Vietnam War ended is that the soldiers stopped respecting their commanding officers and started killing them with so called "friendly fire"
"In just the past week, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, shortly after she returned from dropping her child off at school. "
That representation of what happened there is completely misleading.
It makes you think of all the sweet, gentle moms you know who drop her kids at day care.
Just like we project our feelings and personality, our own mental acumen & judgement onto the people who are out in the streets at minus 4 actually acting as insurrectionists. Causing chaos and being violent.
We have professional rioters and chaos makers, and we have dupes.
The dupes are the people who have been told for 10 years that Trump is Hitler, and those who support his policies are racists and scary Christian nationalists, who want everyone in concentration camps. I am not a Christian, but I do love America and I stand with the motto America First.
As a "mother of 3" - true she did give birth to 3 children. She hasn't lived with her two older children in years, her husband has had complete custody.
The 6 year-old was dropped off, and then Renee and her partner went to wherever they were sent by their directors, who use Signal ICE Watch, Alex was on there too BTW, to thwart the arrest of an actual criminal, who likely committed rape, or murder.
The father of Renee's 6 year-old child suffered from PTSD, and died in 2023 at the age of 36.
I have not seen how he died, but I can guess, and that would leave Renee with
having 2 failed straight marriages, and now in a third she's left as a young widow with a baby.
That is a lot; that is trauma. That is all what got her to be in that situation. It was her doing, and her likely mental instability that clouded her judgement as a mom.
She spent 4 minutes blocking the one-way road with her car while her partner filmed outside the car. She was honking her horn the entire time.
The agents stayed back likely deciding what level of danger this woman was to them.
These men also have families, wives, and children.
Unbalanced people have literally hit PO with their cars after being pulled over.
Once they began to give her commands to get out of her car she taunted them, and her partner was taunting them outside the car. Renee was all brazen and courageous in the face of men with guns. Yay for her. She was smiling and not at all intimidated. That is not normal.
She would not obey orders of LE and one of the two agents mistakenly got in front of her car. One was at the driver's side door.
The woman was not going to move her car off the road, she was not cooperating, and she escalated the situation, then at some point with all the yelling, she kind of backed up a tiny bit, then her partner yelled DRIVE,DRIVE and Renee went forward and hit the agent.
Immediately after she was shot, her partner was screaming it's my fault I made her come here and....ready...They used real bullets. This shows these people are living in some kind of sick fantasy. Like they are in a movie, and their actions are no big deal.
Now she's dead leaving her son an orphan.
The agent had some internal bleeding, and now he has to live with her blood on his hands.
Do you know what her dad said? If she had God in her life, she wouldn't have gone there.
I don't know what everyone here is watching, clearly not the actual events.
If you want to know about a thing that happened all you need to do is watch the videos that people took at the scene. Then judge as best you can, if not, you will be lulled into a narrative that leads you to make incorrect conclusions.
I watched the entire thing.
Joe Scarborough described this event this way
"An American mother was shot and killed for going to a protest. "
This is the kind of thing that splits people right down the middle. Lies and misrepresentations.
This is not an "organic" movement. This is not simple protest.
This is a Color Revolution being conducted in our country.
A Marxist revolution.
Well funded, highly organized.
People need to pull the camera back to the 30,000 feet view.
We are ALL being manipulated.
Antifa is announcing publicly:
"Most civil wars are actually fought in a few locations even though they effect the entire national territory. It is important for people who are able to send delegates to Minneapolis in order to get a sense of what is possible and what's at stake. Minneapolis can be Fallujah. Organize a supply drive, arm the proletariat."
We are not in the 60's or 70's anymore. This is a beast of a different color and it has many enemies with different motivations and deep pockets o bring our country down. You don't have to believe me.
The Far Left Network that Helped Put Alex Pretti in Harms Way
I first heard you speak of the concept, hope, many years ago in a piece that you wrote… Leave all Hope at the Door, or something similar… I was young at the time, and found this to be a bit morbid and ominous.
I have since tried to embody this non belief, and it is rewarding in the most surprising ways- it doesnt take away from one’s positivity- rather it just keeps one in the center. Love is a powerful force that remains ever present. Thank you for this reminder.
"Being manufactured" by whom? Trump's DHS and DOJ are the ones doing this. So yeah. Yes Trump is either being given a long leash to live out his racist fantasies or being told what to do by others with those raciest fantasies. The "deportations" are being conducted with maximum chaos value.
I do not trust this writer. He would give Trump the best blowjob of his life. You don't have to do much dot-joining to see what this is really about, and if the president and his minions represent a foreign government, they are still personally culpable. The depth of Domioninst religous zealoutry and bigotry are misunderstood and misunderestimated. However, the digital environment is the boiling, roiling source of all of this insanity, including how it's not an automatic game over disaster for Trump. THAT's the real question. How is he not being forced to resign IMMEDIATELY? That one is on us. This is ALL on us.
Correction: The US military's main target since its inception has been... the American people. Starting with Shay's Rebellion, which preceded the Constitution, in fact was used by advocates of a stronger central government as the reason why the US needed one, since the existing authority under the Articles of Confederation has problems repressing the rebellion. And this usage has continually taken place, including the US Army being used to break the July, 1877 General Strike, the National Guard in Ludlow, Colorado in 1914, the Palmer Raids from 1917 to 1920,.... Kent State and a bunch of other incidents in the late '60s-early '70s.
Yes, what's going on now is blatantly gross and more in our faces than before. And i agree, a failure on our part to react with anger and outrage will normalize such state violence, not something we can at all accept. But we need to be clear about history. The US Armed Forces do not exist to protect us. The naming of the Department of Defense was an Orwellian move, ironically taking place in full right as Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty Four was coming out.
A big reason why the outrage has been limited: government officials and MAGA supporters are spreading outright lies easily disproved by the evidence.
They know the look is horrid, and the majority of the populace is outraged. There have been reports of the agents saying to detainees: "You people need to learn from what happened to that woman [Renee Good]." It seems the intention of (at least) the administration's "justification" for the first killing was to stifle the protests and dissent. Clearly, that has not occurred. This suggests to me that the general populace will not roll over.
As far as civil war, I estimate the likelihood of such in the PRC is substantially higher than in the U.S., at the moment. It appears the Xi JinPing faction has gone to war against all the other groups in the regime's ruling elite. Most likely it is approaching life-or-death for both sides now.
This is what Atlantis Bureau Chief Shawn sent a couple of hours ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/21/ice-minnesota-trump
We ran high-level US civil war simulations. Minnesota is exactly how they start Developments in Minnesota closely mirror a scenario explored in a 2024 exercise conducted at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, which I direct. Claire Finkelstein. 1/21/26.
Since 6 January, roughly 2,000 ICE agents have been deployed to Minnesota under the pretext of responding to a fraud investigation. In practice, these largely untrained and undisciplined federal agents have been terrorizing Minneapolis residents through illegal and excessive uses of force – often against US citizens – prompting a federal judge to attempt to place limits on the agency’s actions. The Trump administration is encouraging the lawlessness by announcing “absolute immunity” for ICE agents. But if the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, does not heed the court ruling, the consequences may be nothing short of civil war.
In just the past week, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, shortly after she returned from dropping her child off at school. They blinded two protesters by shooting them in the face with so-called “less deadly” weapons. They fired teargas bombs around the car of a family carrying six children, sending one child to the emergency room with breathing problems. They violently dragged a woman out of her car and on to the ground screaming. They have shot protesters in the legs. They have forcibly taken thousands of individuals to detention facilities, separating families and casting people into legal limbo – often without regard to their legal status.
Rather than investigate this conduct and the officer who shot Renee Good, the justice department has opened a criminal investigation into the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, and Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, accusing them of conspiring to impede federal agents. Renee Good’s widow is also under investigation, a move that prompted six US attorneys in Minnesota to resign in protest.
As public outrage grows, ICE has escalated its actions, increasingly engaging in what appear to be random acts of violence regardless of immigration status. Governor Walz has placed the Minnesota national guard on standby to support local law enforcement, while Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act – an extraordinary move that would grant him sweeping domestic military powers and potentially sidestep recent supreme court limits on the use of federal troops in law enforcement. One thousand additional ICE agents have been sent to Minnesota, suggesting that Trump is essentially using ICE as a specialized paramilitary force to target protesters and suppress dissent. And the Pentagon has readied the army’s 11th Airborne Division – roughly 1,500 active-duty soldiers – to back up the president’s threat.
This scenario closely mirrors one explored in an October 2024 tabletop exercise conducted by the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL), which I direct, at the University of Pennsylvania. In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s national guard. When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces. The core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.
While our hypothetical scenario picked a different city and a slightly different sequence of events, the conclusions we reached about the possibility of green-on-green violence are directly applicable to the current situation. First, none of the participants – many of them senior former military and government officials – considered the scenario unrealistic, especially after the supreme court’s decision in Trump v United States, which granted the president criminal immunity for official acts.
Second, we concluded that in a fast-moving emergency of this magnitude, courts would probably be unable or unwilling to intervene in time, leaving state officials without meaningful judicial relief. State officials might file emergency motions to enjoin the use of federal troops, but judges would either fail to respond quickly enough or decline to rule on what they view as a “political question”, leaving the conflict unresolved. This is why Judge Menendez’s ruling is so critical: it may be the last opportunity a federal judge has to intervene before matters spiral completely out of control.
Third, we warned that senior military leaders could face orders to use force not only against state national guard units, but against unarmed civilians – and that they must be prepared to assess the legality of such orders. Any domestic deployment of federal troops must comply with the Department of Defense’s Rules for the Use of Force and with the constitution, including the Bill of Rights. Even under the Insurrection Act, federal troops may not lawfully shoot protesters unless they are literally defending their lives against an imminent threat – yet such conduct is already happening in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents.
Finally, it is not legal for federal troops to back up ICE agents who are behaving illegally.
Every member of the US military has sworn an oath to defend the constitution. That oath carries legal force. Service members are not only permitted but obligated to refuse patently illegal orders.
That obligation is now under pressure. Senator Mark Kelly is under investigation by the Pentagon for publicly reminding service members in a video he made with five other members of Congress that they may – and in some cases must – refuse illegal orders. But they were essentially correct: troops must refuse to carry out patently illegal orders.
For members of the 11th Airborne Division, this may soon cease to be a theoretical question. Minnesota may be the first test of whether constitutional limits on domestic military force still hold – or whether the United States is about to cross a line from which it cannot easily return.
Claire Finkelstein is the Algernon Biddle professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She is also the founder and faculty director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center
The real reason the Vietnam War ended is that the soldiers stopped respecting their commanding officers and started killing them with so called "friendly fire"
fragging. at least one per week...shot in the back...
Or killed by a grenade,.....
"In just the past week, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, shortly after she returned from dropping her child off at school. "
That representation of what happened there is completely misleading.
It makes you think of all the sweet, gentle moms you know who drop her kids at day care.
Just like we project our feelings and personality, our own mental acumen & judgement onto the people who are out in the streets at minus 4 actually acting as insurrectionists. Causing chaos and being violent.
We have professional rioters and chaos makers, and we have dupes.
The dupes are the people who have been told for 10 years that Trump is Hitler, and those who support his policies are racists and scary Christian nationalists, who want everyone in concentration camps. I am not a Christian, but I do love America and I stand with the motto America First.
As a "mother of 3" - true she did give birth to 3 children. She hasn't lived with her two older children in years, her husband has had complete custody.
The 6 year-old was dropped off, and then Renee and her partner went to wherever they were sent by their directors, who use Signal ICE Watch, Alex was on there too BTW, to thwart the arrest of an actual criminal, who likely committed rape, or murder.
The father of Renee's 6 year-old child suffered from PTSD, and died in 2023 at the age of 36.
I have not seen how he died, but I can guess, and that would leave Renee with
having 2 failed straight marriages, and now in a third she's left as a young widow with a baby.
That is a lot; that is trauma. That is all what got her to be in that situation. It was her doing, and her likely mental instability that clouded her judgement as a mom.
She spent 4 minutes blocking the one-way road with her car while her partner filmed outside the car. She was honking her horn the entire time.
The agents stayed back likely deciding what level of danger this woman was to them.
These men also have families, wives, and children.
Unbalanced people have literally hit PO with their cars after being pulled over.
Once they began to give her commands to get out of her car she taunted them, and her partner was taunting them outside the car. Renee was all brazen and courageous in the face of men with guns. Yay for her. She was smiling and not at all intimidated. That is not normal.
She would not obey orders of LE and one of the two agents mistakenly got in front of her car. One was at the driver's side door.
The woman was not going to move her car off the road, she was not cooperating, and she escalated the situation, then at some point with all the yelling, she kind of backed up a tiny bit, then her partner yelled DRIVE,DRIVE and Renee went forward and hit the agent.
Immediately after she was shot, her partner was screaming it's my fault I made her come here and....ready...They used real bullets. This shows these people are living in some kind of sick fantasy. Like they are in a movie, and their actions are no big deal.
Now she's dead leaving her son an orphan.
The agent had some internal bleeding, and now he has to live with her blood on his hands.
Do you know what her dad said? If she had God in her life, she wouldn't have gone there.
I don't know what everyone here is watching, clearly not the actual events.
If you want to know about a thing that happened all you need to do is watch the videos that people took at the scene. Then judge as best you can, if not, you will be lulled into a narrative that leads you to make incorrect conclusions.
I watched the entire thing.
Joe Scarborough described this event this way
"An American mother was shot and killed for going to a protest. "
This is the kind of thing that splits people right down the middle. Lies and misrepresentations.
This is not an "organic" movement. This is not simple protest.
This is a Color Revolution being conducted in our country.
A Marxist revolution.
Well funded, highly organized.
People need to pull the camera back to the 30,000 feet view.
We are ALL being manipulated.
Antifa is announcing publicly:
"Most civil wars are actually fought in a few locations even though they effect the entire national territory. It is important for people who are able to send delegates to Minneapolis in order to get a sense of what is possible and what's at stake. Minneapolis can be Fallujah. Organize a supply drive, arm the proletariat."
We are not in the 60's or 70's anymore. This is a beast of a different color and it has many enemies with different motivations and deep pockets o bring our country down. You don't have to believe me.
The Far Left Network that Helped Put Alex Pretti in Harms Way
https://nypost.com/2026/01/26/us-news/the-far-left-network-that-helped-put-alex-pretti-in-harms-way/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_campaign=nypost&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter#Echobox=1769442361
I first heard you speak of the concept, hope, many years ago in a piece that you wrote… Leave all Hope at the Door, or something similar… I was young at the time, and found this to be a bit morbid and ominous.
I have since tried to embody this non belief, and it is rewarding in the most surprising ways- it doesnt take away from one’s positivity- rather it just keeps one in the center. Love is a powerful force that remains ever present. Thank you for this reminder.
The people that read the ‘red’ media see messages like this one below. If true (I haven’t done a fact-check) no wonder people are polarised. https://x.com/c_3c_3/status/2015466334377660743?s=46&t=AemlTCssIkNsuFiQDh6QHQ
Clinton: 2 million with no protests.
GW Bush: 2 million with no protests.
Obama: 5 million with no protests.
Trump: 2 million with no protests.
Biden: 4 million with no protests.
Trump: 600K with protests and riots.
This is all manufactured to stop Trump.
============
"Being manufactured" by whom? Trump's DHS and DOJ are the ones doing this. So yeah. Yes Trump is either being given a long leash to live out his racist fantasies or being told what to do by others with those raciest fantasies. The "deportations" are being conducted with maximum chaos value.
Try a bigger context:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jameshowardkunstler/p/had-enough-9ec?r=mh6i&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
It’s as plausible as any other dot-joining. And connects more dots than just ICE/DOJ
I do not trust this writer. He would give Trump the best blowjob of his life. You don't have to do much dot-joining to see what this is really about, and if the president and his minions represent a foreign government, they are still personally culpable. The depth of Domioninst religous zealoutry and bigotry are misunderstood and misunderestimated. However, the digital environment is the boiling, roiling source of all of this insanity, including how it's not an automatic game over disaster for Trump. THAT's the real question. How is he not being forced to resign IMMEDIATELY? That one is on us. This is ALL on us.
Got it.
Just for the record, James Howard Kunstler is Jewish and is (apparently) a Zionist.
Correction: The US military's main target since its inception has been... the American people. Starting with Shay's Rebellion, which preceded the Constitution, in fact was used by advocates of a stronger central government as the reason why the US needed one, since the existing authority under the Articles of Confederation has problems repressing the rebellion. And this usage has continually taken place, including the US Army being used to break the July, 1877 General Strike, the National Guard in Ludlow, Colorado in 1914, the Palmer Raids from 1917 to 1920,.... Kent State and a bunch of other incidents in the late '60s-early '70s.
Yes, what's going on now is blatantly gross and more in our faces than before. And i agree, a failure on our part to react with anger and outrage will normalize such state violence, not something we can at all accept. But we need to be clear about history. The US Armed Forces do not exist to protect us. The naming of the Department of Defense was an Orwellian move, ironically taking place in full right as Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty Four was coming out.
A big reason why the outrage has been limited: government officials and MAGA supporters are spreading outright lies easily disproved by the evidence.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/26/trump-administration-maga-allies-spread-misinformation-on-pretti-killing
fascinating stuff here!
I believe i heard at one time that Minnesota was the 4th largest army in the world because so many residence are armed as per the Constitution.
The 2nd Amendment was not about people defending against the government. It was about slave patrols.
https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk15026/files/media/documents/DavisVol31No2_Bogus.pdf
https://planetwaves.net/eric-francis/next-battle-war-on-people.html
They know the look is horrid, and the majority of the populace is outraged. There have been reports of the agents saying to detainees: "You people need to learn from what happened to that woman [Renee Good]." It seems the intention of (at least) the administration's "justification" for the first killing was to stifle the protests and dissent. Clearly, that has not occurred. This suggests to me that the general populace will not roll over.
As far as civil war, I estimate the likelihood of such in the PRC is substantially higher than in the U.S., at the moment. It appears the Xi JinPing faction has gone to war against all the other groups in the regime's ruling elite. Most likely it is approaching life-or-death for both sides now.