🆕 Never Post! What Is Going On In Minnesota

Happy weekend. Quick question - what is even happening in Minnesota?? Let's talk through it together.

Producer and Minnesota resident Hans Buetow talks with journalist and Minnesota resident Em Cassel about Minnesota - the fraud, ICE raids and killings, and how it’s all about the posts.

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Eat Hot Chip, Post and Lie

• RacketMN
• Em Cassel on Bluesky
• 2024 Auditor Report on Department of Education
• Feeding Our Future timeline - Axios
• Feeding Our Future timeline - Sahan Journal
• FBI Investigates Autism Schemes - Minnesota Reformer
• Autism and Housing Scheme Charges - US Attorney’s Office
• DHS Suspends Housing Stabilization - MNDHS
• The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer - City Journal
• Key Source Disputes Reporting - Star Tribune
• I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal - Nick Shirley
• Health Department Pauses Child Care Payments - NYTimes
• Child Care Centers Operating As Expected - MPR News
• Charlie Warzel
• Don Moynihan
• Cooper Lund 
• Ryan Broderick
• All of them at the same time
• Right-Wing Influencers at Whipple Building - Ryan Broderick

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a show for and about the Internet. I am your senior producer and today's host of the show Hans Buto. I am also a resident of Minnesota, born and raised in the Twin Cities. I am sixth generation Saint Paul, and I'm coming to you now in your ears with a sudden unexpected off publish day episode because my state, Minnesota, is at the epicenter of a few things that are happening right now in politics. I'm realizing that I don't really fully understand all of it and I need some help.

If I'm a local who's having trouble I can only imagine how confusing it is if you have questions about Minnesota and what on earth is happening but you don't live here. So today, I am hoping to get some perspective with the help of one of my favorite local reporters in the Twin Cities to help me understand because local reporting, if you don't know, helps us understand ourselves. We're gonna understand a little bit about how this what this has to do with the Internet, which is spoiler alert quite a bit because of just, you know, how the world is, what the administration is. But I have with me to help me understand M Castle. Hello.

Hello, M. I'm so happy I'm to see so happy to see you. You are the co owner and founder of the excellent local independent journalism powerhouse Racket, which covers arts, culture, restaurants, politics, kind of everything else relevant to living here in the Twin Cities. I redo every day, and I'm so happy to be talking to you.

It is such an honor to be here, Hans. Thank you so much. We have a lot of fun doing what we do.

Yeah. I can tell and I love having fun alongside you and with you, and you helped me have more fun in the cities by far.

I hope that's true. Yeah.

So, Em, you have been out in the streets, in the courtrooms, in the press conferences for Racket, and just generally reporting on all things that are happening in Minnesota. Right now, that's a lot of fraud and a lot of ICE And in I bring both of these together side by side because with the congressional hearings on fraud, all of the comments that are happening about fraud all over the place, and now with the surge that's happening in Minnesota with the killing of Renee Goode earlier this week by ICE, I think there's reasons that everyone is looking at our state.

Yeah, Minnesota and the twin cities specifically like once again finds itself at kind of the epicenter of the national attention, which is unusual. It's another, just a weird thing from the last couple of years.

Yeah. Once again, and I want to get to that because I have a lot of questions about why once again, but I want to walk up to it because I think that these stories of fraud, which some people may or may not have heard of, and the ICE surge and killing that most people probably have heard of, I think they're deeply related and connected to each other, and I think the through line to them is the internet. And I'm really curious to step through them all to better just have a sense of what they are so that I just know what they are, and then to map them against the Internet. And I want to do that by looking at three moments in recent history, if that works for you.

I love it.

Great. So let's take a quick pause, and unless you're a member, you're gonna hear a quick break. And then let's start with fraud in Minnesota. Okay. Let's start ourselves off in Minnesota in June 2024.

So two big things happen with fraud in June 2024. And the first of those is a 200 or so page report comes out from the Minnesota Department of Legislative Auditor, which is looking into the Minnesota Department of Education and their oversight of the Minnesota nonprofit. That's a lot of layers. So Department of Legislative Auditor reports on the Department of Education who's been giving money to a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future. So Em, can you walk us through what is this report?

Why is this being done about Feeding Our Future?

Certainly, yes. So the broadest strokes answer is that Feeding Our Future and the people associated with Feeding Our Future have been perpetrating massive fraud. They have referred to it you know, since looking back as sort of the the biggest pandemic program fraud in the country. Wow. In the end, you're gonna have more than 50 people so far Yeah.

Convicted of stealing so far, dollars 250,000,000 through this fraud, which is, I don't need to tell you, Hans, a tremendous amount of money. The start of the story is actually really back in 2020 when the pandemic hits, schools are closed, schools are not feeding lunches to children. And as a reaction to that, the federal government kind of lowers the requirements for states to access, what's called federal child nutrition programs money. So this is what feeds underprivileged children, and these funds are distributed by the Minnesota Department of Education. So that's kind of like the, like, just laying the very basic groundwork for, like, what will become this massive fraud.

Feeding Our Future, in response, starts working with a ton of other vendors. Like, they're kind of this this broader nonprofit that works with, vendors. They also call them food sites, I think, on the ground. And they start upping the number of vendors they're working with. I think it ends up being around 70 at one point.

And the vendors who they're working with are saying that they're feeding a tremendous number of meals to local children. Like, there's one restaurant, it's a small restaurant that says it's feeding lunch to 6,000 kids a day. There's another site in Wilmar, Minnesota that says it's feeding 2,000 kids a week, which would be like half of the school district's population.

Oh my goodness.

The math does not math to use the nuance of our times. So and so, you know, fairly quickly, actually, people are raising alarm bells about these figures. As early as, I think, October 2020, people are are reaching out to the Department of Education and saying, like, this doesn't seem quite right.

How can you actually feed? How are there that many kids in the first place? But how do you feed all of them? Can you feed 12,000 kids? Practically,

You cannot feed this many children this many meals. Like, it just it doesn't add up. The end result is that by May 2021, the FBI is now involved. They are investigating the claims that Feeding Our Future and Feeding Our Future's vendors have been filing false claims. It all eventually snowballs.

By 2022, the FBI is raiding the the businesses and individuals who are, sort of associated with this fraud. And then finally, by September 2022, charges are brought against 48 total people, I think, as the first time for around $250,000,000 in this money, which has been spent on things like personal trips. Amy Bach, who's kind of widely referred to as the ringleader in air Yeah. Quotes

Yeah. Of this,

yes, of this fraud. She is accused of spending tens of thousands of dollars on things like trips to Vegas. I think her boyfriend took, like, a huge trip to Vegas. And, like, spent a bunch of, like Cartier or whatever. Like, don't know.

Yeah. It's, like, really, like, like, extravagant fraud. Like, not even this is not, like, super sneaky. It's, like, it's, like, pretty bold. Yeah.

Brazen, I think, is a word that comes up a lot in media reportage around this fraud is, like, it was really brazen.

And I think that's kind of like, I it's weird to laugh at fraud and be like, these people stealing millions of dollars from us. Doesn't that suck? But I think when something's that brazen, that's You do kinda have to laugh. Yeah. There's like element of like, what?

Yeah. Like, this is like cartoonish levels of fraud. Like, you like, I guess how did they think they would get away with it? And then, like, second, how did they get away with it for as long as they did?

As long as they did. And we're under investigation and still doing it and spending the money. And I remember one of the things that sticks in my mind about the whole process was there was one point where they were going on trials after the charges got brought, they were going on trial and they tried they gave one of the jurors a $150,000 or something.

Yeah. There was a really weird situation where they, like, dropped off a little, like, gift bag full of cash on one of the jurors' doorsteps.

I

mean, really, like, there are weird layers to this, the way this fraud was perpetrated. And then and truly, like, the way that they still thought, like, maybe we can get away with this. Like, maybe we'll bribe a juror. Yeah. Let's do it.

So so in 2024, this report comes out about the Department of Education and how they handled it. So what did this report in 2024 tell us about how all of this stuff over those couple years was handled?

Yeah. The report, I would say, is kind of damning. It it's long. It's like a 100 page report. But the upshot is that, like, the Minnesota Department of Education failed on several fronts.

So for one, they failed to act on the warning signs, like, before the COVID nineteen pandemic had even set in that, like, there are not the right guardrails in place. Like, we don't have the right systems in place to begin identifying this kind of fraud. Then after that, that the department did not effectively exercise its authority, I think is the phrase that they used to basically, like, hold Feeding Our Future accountable. Like, they have ways that they could have stopped this fraud from happening, and they did not have it. You know, they had people contacting them and saying, hey, this fraud is happening and continued to pay out money to Feeding Our Future and and therefore to its, you know, vendor sites.

And then thirdly, that the department was ill prepared to respond then. So, like, they were alerted to the fraud. They kind of knew that it was happening, and yet they're they did not respond in any kind of way. I mean, truly, until kind of the FBI gets involved, like Yeah. You are a government agency.

Get it together.

So and they're not the only government agency. So this is what the other thing that happens in June 2024, this report comes out, and at the same moment is the FBI starts investigating for Medicaid fraud in autism centers, because suddenly autism centers around the state have increased spending 700% in five years, and a whole bunch of other metrics are just suddenly there's all of this money going into these autism centers without any related rise in the need for them. Since then, seven people have been charged, some of those people with connections to Feeding Our Future. And then in 2025, the next year, the Minnesota Department of Human Services suspended the housing stabilization benefit, which they did because they said there were credible allegations of fraud from 77 providers, and 13 people have been charged since then. All told, with all of these different avenues of fraud in Minnesota in these government situations, 98 people have been charged with various fraud schemes in various sectors since 2022, totaling, prosecutors say, a possible $9,000,000,000 of stolen money.

It's a huge amount of money. Billion with a b.

When we see these congressional meetings and we hear people talking about fraud, there is a legitimate thing to say. There was fraud committed. Yeah, and it was rampant. So I think it's important then for the rest of this story to say, who are those people of those 98 who was accused of perpetrating this fraud?

Yeah. So the kind of wild thing is, you know, obviously there is Amy Bach, the sort of the CEO of Feeding Our Future, the ringleader. She is a white woman, but all but eight, I think, is the total of the people who are accused in this fraud are Somali Americans, and the vast majority of them are American citizens.

This is a big thing in the Twin Cities, especially because we are one of the largest populations of Somali folks, most of them American citizens. There's big parts, especially of Minneapolis, that are very Somali oriented to And that so that's already a thing that there are certain members of the community and then especially of the wider community, especially of the administration who are already against African and East African people in the first place, much less people who have come here despite them being citizens or not. So when this starts to come out, who really gets the blame for all of this fraud?

I would say the blame kind of falls in two places. One is on Minnesota governor Tim Walls and his administration, like, basically, the the failure to do anything to stop the fraud and to just kind of let it proliferate, under under his watch and his administration's watch. But then, yeah, to your point, Hans, the other place that it falls is on the broader Somali community, you know, people who I think maybe already have preexisting prejudices definitely use this as a way to say, look at this community, like, look at this community of immigrants and and and how they are acting basically, which is just not I mean, it's it's still a very small fraction of the, as you mentioned, very large Somali American population here in the Twin Cities.

Absolute. But it's such an easy thing, I think, to target now when you say, look all of this massive, we can call it massive fraud, and look at how disproportionate it was coming from this one particular community. You can imagine the therefore that start to emerge. And I think this moves us into our second moment that I want to talk about, which is jumping us ahead to Thanksgiving of this past year, which involves the escalation of rhetoric that leads to the deployment of ice in the Twin Cities. So I want to move us to 11/19/2025, just a month and a half ago.

There was an article that was published, I'm not sure if you've read this article, it's a wild article. Woah. It's by this group called City Journal, which is not in Minnesota, it's not really affiliated, Independent Journalism, which I say that in quote Marks, even though both of us are independent journalism.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're not like those guys. We're not like we're not

because they go on, they claim in this article that the Minnesota childcare program funds, so this is childcare now that we're moving into, the childcare program funds are being sent back to Somalia to Al Shabaab, which is the terrorist organization in Somalia, a lot of them responsible for the Somali civil war in the early nineties that led to the diaspora. So that they're taking government money, taxpayer money, and shoveling it back to terrorist organizations in Somalia. The problem is the source for this, who they quote in it, comes out afterwards and it's like, woah, woah, woah, they took me out of context. I didn't say that. So that is not true.

Yep. That's not what's happening.

But it's kind of like too late.

It's too late. The posts are made. The cat is out of the bag and I think that this is a theme we're going to see a lot coming from this point because Trump elevates this claim almost immediately on Truth Social, he says, quote, Minnesota under governor Walls is a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity, end quote, which again, there is fraud. Like, let's not lose sight of there is fraud. But this is saying that it's laundering when there's no evidence for that, but he takes a real world step and he cancels temporary protected status for Somali folks in Minnesota.

Yeah. Do you have a

sense, Em, of what that meant around here?

There were only a couple 100 immigrants, I think, who were immediately affected by that. I think it's like that that's just like the first, like, the opening volley in his escalation.

Yeah. That's interesting because most of the Somali folks in Minnesota are citizens. They're not.

They are. Exactly. So, yeah, it was just kind of like a here's what I'm gonna do first, and then I'm gonna

Yeah. So then very shortly after that, on Thanksgiving, the day after an Afghan asylee shoots two National Guard soldiers near the White House, killing one of them. Trump's in an interview, and he responds to reporters by saying that there is nothing linking, that's in quotes, nothing linking the shooting that happened with Somalia, and then immediately goes on truth social and posts, quote, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great state of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for prey as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. Did you feel that way, M?

You hoping against hope clutching a picture of him. Oh, please come help us.

Oh god. This is the most bizarre thing. Like, it truly is just like I mean, the way this administration will just say stuff. Right? Like, way that they will just say say anything in the way that Trump specifically will just, like, make something up, like, just to, like, state the obvious, there are not Somali gangs roving No.

The streets looking for, quote, prey. Yeah. That has, like, never happened in my experience. I mean, it's like, again, it's not really funny, but, like, all you can do is laugh. Like, it is such an out outlandish claim.

Like, truly just, like, beyond the pale in terms of just, like, making up a a really, really, really crazy, like, set of facts, alternative facts.

And this is really the indication that we get that he's seizing on Somalia and Somali Minnesotans as a way to attack because then he immediately pivots, uses a super gross epithet about governor Waltz saying that he and the democrats are doing nothing. And then it's later that weekend that the administration announces operation metro surge. So what is Operation Metro Surge?

Operation Metro Surge is mirrors the previous actions in Portland or what we saw in Chicago, where the Trump administration deploys just a bunch of Department of Homeland Security agents to the Twin Cities, kind of using the Somali community, right, as a scapegoat of, like, we're gonna I mean, they basically say, like, this is gonna stop fraud somehow. Like, they this is gonna stop fraud, and also, we're gonna go after these these criminals who are running wild in the streets, again, in this, like, totally alternate universe that no one is living in where there's, like, just just rampant crime. So I think initially, the idea was like, we're going to send all these agents and we're going to round up the bad guys. Think the worst of the worst or whatever is the language that the administration uses. Like, we're going to come get the baddies from the Twin Cities.

Which they're using the fraud stuff in that case to be like, look at how many of these bad people. Look what they're doing. Look at the scale of things that they're doing, and look at how many of them there are. The the white folks in Minnesota aren't doing this fraud. It's all like, we gotta go in there because the Democrats aren't doing anything.

Now you did some reporting on the surge in what's happening. So talk us through a little bit because did you go to Carmel Mall?

I didn't report from Carmel Mall. The Minnesota reformer had a great story where basically they were like, it's empty here. Carmel Mall, for those who don't know, is kind of like a Somali hub here in the Twin Cities. It's on Lake Street. It's a big market and there are shops and there are restaurants.

And within a few days really of the surge starting of this Operation Metro surge, like, the streets were kind of empty. And you could see that playing out on other businesses on Lake Street, which is a huge immigrant corridor here. There's a lot of Mexican owned businesses, a lot of businesses owned by people of color in general, and they were pretty quickly struggling. Yeah. Struggling to get their workers here safely to have the people who would generally patronize those businesses feeling safe.

Lake Street in general really kind of cleared out and so did other immigrant hubs in the Twin Cities area.

Mhmm. There were efforts to to get people to shop at immigrant shops because their regular clientele couldn't go in, like spend the hubs, spend your money going to support some of these places with who haven't seen customers in days sometimes. Everybody's running scared.

Yeah. Yeah. People are locking their doors. I mean, there are restaurants that you'll go to on Lake Street now and the door will be locked. You'll have to knock to get in.

They're still technically open, but they're they're trying to protect themselves and their their coworkers and their loved ones. For most of December,

it felt like it wasn't it sucked and it was scary, but it wasn't any more remarkable than in other big blue cities where this was happening. Am I right on that? Yeah. I think

that's fair to say. I think if anything, you know, you could kind of look around and be like, well, it's actually not as bad, again, through December as it has been in Chicago and other cities. Not seeing Just these numbers wise. Simply in a numbers game, you know, it's bad and it's scary. But it was, you know, relatively small in scale to what we've seen here at the start of 2026, which is, I don't have to tell you, really bad.

Really bad. Really bad. Yeah.

So what was the local reaction that you felt happened when Operation Metro Search started?

It's been like actually very impressive to see the local reaction and see how the community has banded together to try to protect the the vulnerable members of the community. People signing up to deliver groceries to people who don't feel safe leaving their homes.

Their homes. That's right.

That's right. Or or escorting children from their bus stop to their house or from the bus into their schools.

Going like putting on a bib and going to stand in front of a mosque. Yep. Like, know, just to be a presence.

Yeah. There has really been a tremendous outpouring of support, would say. And I I think going back even further, like, this almost ties into 2020 and in earlier where the Twin Cities kind of rallied together in the wake of George Floyd's murder. And, like, there are sort of these networks that already exist in the Twin Cities where people have have done this before, unfortunately. And and so a lot of those people have really stepped up to try to protect their neighbors.

So of course, there's only so much you can do.

Right. Because, you know, we have we have armed forces patrolling

Yeah. The

And this reaction of at least a lot of folks around here was markedly different from the federal reaction and the reaction of the administration. So how did they talk about it?

I guess you could say they posted through it. Like like, truly truly, like, posting through it. Like, early December, you have that really bizarre video where Trump is hurling horrific insults at Somali just like blatant racism at Somali people calling them garbage. He's at a cabinet meeting and, like, JD Vance is, like, banging on the table. You hear that weird audio recording where he's banging his fists on the table.

He, of course, targets Ilhan Omar.

Who is Somali?

Who is Somali. Yes. Our representative. And I am not personally on Truth Social, but you would see, you know, people sharing screenshots of these posts where it's just like, again, it feels like an alternate reality from the one that we all live in where our Somali neighbors are wonderful. It feels insane to even have to say it, but like, it's just such a strange thing to watch an entire community be smeared like this by the president of The United States.

Like

And then when he does it, like, it wasn't just it was Vance, it was Cash Patel, it was the podcaster leader of the FBI, it was Kristi Noem, like everybody would would echo in posts a similar thing as they ramped up and escalated.

Yeah. You'd sort of see the groundwork being laid for, like, increased hatred, like, on Twitter, like, in tweets. Like Yeah. Like, I don't know how often Kirsty Noem was posting about Somali people before this December, but all of a sudden All of a sudden. She has a lot to say about them.

Yeah. And so this pattern emerges of something being posted, officials immediately reacting in posts to each other, and then this severe disproportionate policy or real world action or something emerges or gets generated from that flurry of posts. So let's take a quick break, and when we come back I want to talk about how this pattern escalates into the death of Renee Goode earlier this week. So our final moment that we're gonna examine here is the Internet of it all. And this happens in late December.

So we're almost a month at this point into Operation Metro Surge, and the day after Christmas, a video drops from a 23 year old, very MAGA friendly influencer sort named Nick Shirley. Nick Shirley releases this forty three minute video where he comes to Minnesota. They go to what he says is 11 different Somali childcare centers, and he just starts demanding whoever opens the door show him the kids. Hello. We'd like to ask where the money's going.

What do you guys think about the fraud that's taking place here in Minnesota?

Sorry. I don't think anybody is enabling that to happen.

Hold governor Walls accountable for this. What was this money spent on? 1,260,000.00. What was that money

spent on? If there aren't any kids.

Answer the question. Are there children? There's no children inside this building. I'm not sure why they didn't show him the kids when no random young person just starts aggressively demanding that, you bring the kids out to me or let me go in and see the kids. But he isn't shown any children in these 11, and so then he turns around in the video and claims this as evidence of a 110,000,000 more dollars in widespread fraud by the Somali community.

Did you watch this video by Nick Shirley?

I saw clips and I was kind of, like, again, talking about, like, brazenness. Like, this guy really, really just goes for it.

Which like a forty three minute YouTube video of a guy doing kind of stunt journalism without research. Like, okay. Yeah. This sort of stuff happens. Like, it's not weird that you wouldn't have seen it, but there are some people who definitely saw it and had this wildly outsized huge reaction to it.

So almost immediately, the vice president of The United States Of America, JD Vance, emphatically reposted on X saying this is some great better journalism than any of the people who want a Pulitzer this year. Elon Musk engages with it. Kash Patel, again, from the FBI. Kristi Noem, head of DHS, they all post. Kristi Noem says, oh, we're we're because of this, we're gonna start investigating this immediately.

In a statement from the White House, Abigail Jackson, who's a spokeswoman for it, said that, and this is a quote, quote, the country should be deeply appreciative to Shirley for shining a light on this issue. The legacy media should take notes, end quote.

Yeah. I think what we need is actually for Star Tribune reporters to just start banging on day care centers.

Just demanding. Like it's everybody in the cabinet seems to just immediately glom onto this, make their own series of posts about it. Within the week, the video has a 131,000,000 views on X, which who knows what that means. 2,500,000 views on YouTube. But it's also got Trump's attention because Trump then does this thing after this flurry of posts from everybody in the cabinet.

He orders the health department to freeze $185,000,000 in child care payments to the state of Minnesota day care centers directly in response to this video, which is the pattern that we've been outlining.

You manufacture a scenario and you post about it a lot, which makes it true.

Yep. And then the posting begets posting.

Yep. There's a whole like weird web ecosystem of posts and they all relate to each other. Yep. And then you use that web of posts to say like, this is fact now, and now we are going to, for example, withhold these funds as a reaction to the posts that we ourselves made.

It's early January when the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families did compliance checks in all of those places on nine of the 11 from the Shirley video and they concluded definitively that no, they're operating exactly as expected. There's no issue here. But that's like, it's what, two weeks after? Well, right.

It's too late. It's almost like the the outrage has been created. We have our followers now, the people who are MAGA, Jason, like they all believe what we have said. And so actually, it kind of doesn't matter.

There's It something really

doesn't. They're not gonna post again. Like, you're not gonna get a sign off from JD Vance that's like, oh, good. The Department of Children, Youth and Families said actually these daycare centers are great.

You know, guys, I'm gonna delete those old posts. I'm gonna issue a correction.

Like, no, that's not gonna fucking happen. So

And instead, in the meantime, they used that as a catapult, as a jumping off point, as a springboard to launch, I don't even know if it's got a name, but the latest assault, sending the largest force of DHS personnel into Minnesota that I think has ever been assembled. I think those are the latest. 2,000 DHS agents showed up in Minnesota in that gap before they came in. Were like, no, no, this video isn't accurate. This is not what's happening.

They came there like there's widespread fraud. Again, this fraud. Let's go. We gotta go do something because the Democrats aren't doing anything. So then 2,000 DHS agents show up, And, of course, end this week.

Yeah. I mean, it's been hell out there. December pales in comparison. It feels like they're the city is crawling with federal agents, ICE agents, DHS agents, border patrol agents. Yep.

They are kidnapping people, leaving school. They are flooding into local businesses. They are tackling workers at Target. I mean, it's just like a really you definitely get the sense that, like, maybe what they wanted the first time around was a shock and awe that they didn't get. And now there are these 2,000 additional agents and they are they are doing the shock and awe.

They are getting the visuals that they want of grown men tackling people to the ground and arresting bystanders and arresting legal observers, detaining people.

And as of Wednesday, killing somebody who was at one of the sites where they were without warrants, without a reason to be there, without anything, as JD Venn says, just going door to door, which is fundamentally unconstitutional. You need a warrant to go door. You don't just go door to door looking for crimes. It's awful. It's been an awful few days since Renee Goode has been killed by an ICE agent in her car on Wednesday.

We're not going to get too deep into that because I think that part has been pretty well covered and folks should look it up because it's heartbreaking and devastating. But I want to focus in on another thing that happened earlier this week when some really interesting writing came out from some really interesting internet thinkers. So earlier this week Charlie Warzel in the Atlantic, Don Moynihan and Cooper Lund, who each have their own blogs, and Ryan Broderick in garbage day, all of them thinkers about the internet independently of each other came to and simultaneously came to roughly the same theory and conclusion. That is that the people in the highest leadership positions in government think about their primary job as creating content. So power, as it exists now in that group, has changed to be centered around and wielded by people who get attention online.

So for a portion of the political ruling class right now, it's the only thing they literally know how to do or respect. I mean, we've got these podcasters. The head of the DOD is a news presenter. That's his qualification. It's how they got their jobs.

It's how their successors are gonna get their jobs. Creating content is the currency of power that's happening right now. And all four of these writers identified this in reaction to Venezuela and the invasion that we did of them watching the Twitter reaction in the quote unquote situation room at Mar A Lago. But I think this applies to everything that's been happening in Minnesota right now. Don Moynihan, one of these thinkers on his blog, and we'll link to all of these in the show notes, used the term click tatorship to define this.

He said that this behavior, that this thing leads to really big changes in behavior. He outlines that it incentivizes conflict between professional and online identities, which also leads to degrading professional norms and work practices. Recruiting others high on the meme supply to working government, you can see a way where Shirley, who posted this video, is job interviewing by posting this. Critically, think Don Moynihan says that it alters decision making to be responsive to social media. Charlie Warzel, one of the other writers, talks about it in this way that I think is helpful, which is as a culture of reaction videos.

So the memes and the reactions that happen to any piece of news event happen now simultaneously with the news event. There is no before and after anymore. So when respond to something, you're not just responding to facts, you're not just responding to news, you're responding to memes, in memes, with memes, about memes. It's already too far down that line. And this content mix of content fueling content, it creates opportunities for itself, which is in itself a way to kind of distance the audience from taking any sort of direct action because it abstracts things.

So Charla Warzel says, quote, this process is nihilistic, and it has a dehumanizing effect. Stories about people or countries in conflict become abstract, buried under a pile of memes and recursive references that exist for little more than scroll by entertainment. So I read all of this and I was like, wait a second, and then started mapping it against everything that we've just talked about. All the fraud and all the accusations of fraud and all the realities of fraud, and then what the fraud then means and how the fraud led to this invasion from ICE. And I'm just wondering, like, when you hear all of this now, how does a clicktatorship map onto that for you?

Well, it does feel like the nothing happens anymore without the sort of right wing blogger poster ecosystem, like, descending on that either physically or or online only. But we're seeing it this week in Minnesota, like, are right wing content creators who have sort of flown into town for this surge, for this, you know, increased number of troops that are here. Ryan Broderick, who's very excellent, Newsletter Garbage Day, you mentioned, like, is also in town right now. And he has a video from the Whipple Building this morning, which is the Federal building where sort of the ICE operations are, like, centered

and where they're the corridors.

Yeah. Where they're taking people who are detained and everything else.

And they're doing daily protests, morning protests.

Yes. Yes. So people people have been protesting outside the Whipple Building most mornings and and all day long. Ryan has a a video of an ICE agent sort of fist bumping with a right wing pro Trump content creator. And then, like, that content creator is allowed to cross the line that the ICE agents have formed while everyone else protesting or even covering the event.

Like, other journalists are pushed back. So you can really see the way that these right wing creator like, you can visually see with your eyes the way that these right wing creators have been given this sort of privileged place in the administration while everyone else is kind of left on the outside. It's like really worrying. It's really worrying.

I know. I think that it is really worrying, and it it's I think it's a little clarifying to have this theory kind of coalesce in the minds of a few different people who are really watching closely. And as soon as I read it, I was like, of course, that's what's happening. That makes it's one of those things that you're like, why didn't we see this before? I think we did see this before.

We saw how much they're addicted to Twitter and addiction is a big part of this. We saw how much they are addicted to the audience that they perceive, and this is a thing we come back to in the show a lot, especially in our editorial meetings, is the imaginary internet points that you think that you get from any action that you take online. They have created an ecosystem where those imaginary internet points actually have a orange face and actually like a bad haircut. This is an ecosystem that feels scary because it's so untethered from the realities that it creates, because that's what we're seeing. This is the pattern we're seeing over and over again, is it creates these real actions where people die, their lives are ruined, where people are deported, where people are harassed, where who knows what's happening.

People are losing funding, people are not able to feed themselves. That's real, but that's not considered or important in this. And it feels like sometimes posts are the only thing that matters. Like this group's only way to engage with the world is a post and using everything as an opportunity to generate more content. The ice surge as a content generating mechanism is such a depressing thing to say.

I know.

And yet And yet here we are mourning Renee Goode and trying to protest and trying to like have a voice in it. And it feels like that's a shocking thing to have to reconcile.

And to your point about Renee Goode, I mean, the folks in the presidential administration were were posting about her death before we had basically any information. You know, like, I think, like, the the sort of post first ask questions later of it all is really, really damaging.

Like Yeah.

Calling her, you know, whatever they call her a professional agitator or the language they use, domestic terrorist, When, I like, we had basically no information about who this woman was, why she was there. We have a lot greater clarity now, but she had only been dead for a few hours when Yeah. When people in the administration were posting about her as a person and her character and what she was doing there and everything else. Just creating the narrative that, you know, that we would have to then go on to debunk. It, like, puts you as someone who wants to tell the truth on your back foot because now you're in a position of having to react to the lies that have already started to proliferate throughout these online spaces.

That's right.

It's it's really damaging.

I've been thinking a lot about the raid that happened at Roosevelt High School on Wednesday. So just literally hours after the killing of Renee Goode, ICE agents stormed the grounds of Roosevelt High School, which is fairly nearby to that, and started tackling people. They punched out windows, they were shooting chemical weapons at people, they arrested two faculty members. And there's these videos that these students, these high schoolers are taking of this where they're just screaming and like it's just whistles everywhere. It's just this chaotic horrible thing and you're watching them body slam students into the ground on school property, which has been outlawed by the city of Minneapolis and the city of Saint Paul.

They are not allowed to legally do that sort of thing. And it's shocking in the way that you would expect a post like that. Like it feels like it's made for the gram in a way, like it's made to be posted about. And the casualness of it being mere hours after they shot and killed Renee Goode is really sticking with me as being an indication of like, okay, yep, we got that one. Immediately, what's our next viral clip gonna be?

Let's tackle some kids.

Yeah. It does make you wonder like, is there a bottom? Is there a depth that we can yet reach? Like, I have thought about those those videos and those photos from Roosevelt so much over the last few days because it really is like, you know, if I if my agency had killed a person in the street, I'd pack it up and call it a day. And I guess that's just, you know, they just keep right on going.

Yeah. You pause for a moment just to be like, hey, let's slow down. Yeah. No, that was an escalation, right? And so speaking of escalations like Philando Castile, Ja'Marr Clark, George Floyd, now Renee Goode.

Are we really about to do all this again? Like it's still tense here in the cities. There's protests happening in other cities around the country. The governor's getting mad. The National Guard has been activated.

Like this, it feels like 2020 all of a sudden. Like, we doing this again?

Yeah. It really feels strikingly similar. I on a personal level, I live basically equidistant between George Floyd Square and the intersection where Renee Goode was killed. And just the reaction from community members feels very much the same. The constantly circling helicopters overhead, that feels the same.

Yeah. This feeling from the community of being simultaneously activated and wanting to help, but also feeling like, what do I do with this energy? How do I be productive? And also this kind of feeling of helplessness, like Philando, Jamar, George, Renee, they are dead. They have been taken from us by, you know, agents of the state.

Yeah. This sort of feeling of like, does it ever stop? What would stop it? I don't know.

Yeah. Why do you think Minnesota, so many of these things have happened? Why what is it about Minnesota that makes it a hotspot for these sorts of videos and then the reactions they generate?

I've thought about this a lot and I have seen other people sort of working through this a lot online over the last few days. I think it's kind of twofold. I think one is that Minnesotans and people in the Twin Cities specifically really do show up for their communities in a way that I I'm not trying to be like a Minnesota exceptionalism about this. Other people don't. Yeah.

Not really. Yeah. I but I really do think that, like, people here show up for their neighbors and and get involved. And when there is a chance to protest, they protest. And when there is a vigil, they go.

And when, you know, so so it kind of creates these scenes that are very striking. At the same time, I think we talked a little bit about the media ecosystem component of this. And actually, unlike some other major American cities, the Twin Cities does still have a pretty robust media ecosystem. We have phenomenal journalists and photojournalists over at NPR, Minnesota Public Radio. We have a phenomenal daily newspaper in the Star Tribune.

We have lots of other, you know, the Minnesota Reformer, Hunt Journal. So we have like, are a tremendous number of local journalists There's

one called Racket?

Have you heard of it? Have you heard? Yeah.

But it's true. Like, you're a part of this ecosystem. Absolutely.

Yeah. So I think the kind of like getting the story out to the broader news media starts with that really robust media ecosystem that we have in the Twin Cities, where when something happens, when a woman is killed by ICE you know, a man was killed by ICE in Chicago, not not too long ago.

Like week or something ago?

Yes. And it just didn't feel like that kind of like got out beyond its immediate bubble unless you were really paying attention to this stuff. And with Renee Goode, I think several things that are different about it are there were multiple other observers, everyday citizens, who were there filming the incident at the time, and that sort of falls into the first point of, like, people show up here. Yeah. And then the second part of it being the local media ecosystem sprang into action immediately following that.

And I think that helps then get the story out and then it spreads online and it, you know, it becomes then a national and an international story in a way that it might not in other cities.

Well, Em, I don't really know what's gonna happen Me either.

Over the weekend.

A lot of people have been asking me. I go into meetings and stuff and a lot of people are asking me like, how's it feel there? How's it feel there? And I'd say it feels scary right now. And I think it's going to be a tough weekend.

There's a big protest planned for Saturday afternoon. We're going see what happens there over in Powderhorn Park. And they're not stopping. They're not pulling back. In fact, they've just sent more agents in to add to the 2,000 plus that are already here.

Are you going back out in the field?

Yeah. I'll be out again today. I've been returning to thirty fourth in Portland a few times over the last couple of days. I will be at the protest this weekend and, yeah, plan to

keep showing up. Thanks for showing up, both in a wider sense and then in a direct sense of like, thanks for showing up on my screen and like hanging out with me and helping me understand all this stuff. It's been really helpful to talk through the full ecology of these things or a little bit more of the full ecology of these things.

So thanks for taking the time today. Yeah. I hope that it was helpful. I know it's it's difficult even here in the Twin Cities to kind of keep track of everything that's happening. So if you're trying to keep track of it from beyond, I can't even imagine.

So, Em, where can people follow you if they want to follow more of this coverage and the stuff that you're doing? How can people find you?

Absolutely. You can find Racket at racketmn.com. And if you're interested in following along with me, my social handle is bike trouble on most platforms.

Yeah, it is. M Castle from Racket. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Hans.

So that is the show we have for you this week. We will be back here next Wednesday once more in your feed, and we have an update for you on what's happening with the show, some big big moves, and some fun moves. So make sure to tune in. Please go follow m Castle and Racket. And if you wanna follow more independent news in Minnesota, the Sahan Journal, S A H a n, or the Minnesota reformer are always worth checking out.

Citycast Twin Cities is another one that both m and I are contributors for. And, of course, if you have independent media in your town who covers your local space, please find them, read, and listen. And if you can, give them a little bit of cash. Never post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor. First name, last name.

Our senior producer is Hans Buto. That's me. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer. The show's host most weeks is Mike Rignan. Neverpost is a production of Charts and Leisure and distributed by Radiotopia.