The War on Consciousness in Minnesota Only Increases Consciousness Awareness

On June 14, 2025, Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman were brutally assassinated by a 57-year-old male right-wing Christian Nationalist. Hortman’s legislative colleague, John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, also were shot by the same individual. The alleged assassin is currently charged with multiple counts of murder and terrorism and is awaiting trial.

Just two months later, on August 27, 2025, a shooter opened fire on Annunciation Catholic Church in South Minneapolis, killing 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel, 10-year-old Harper Moyski, and injuring 18 others. The shooter, identified in news reports as a “radicalized individual,” took their own life.

Let us not forget May 25, 2020, when George Floyd was brutally suffocated by the boot of a Minneapolis Police Officer, while other officers stood by and allowed it to happen. In the days that followed, significant portions of South Minneapolis were torched and looted by angry crowds. Investigations that followed revealed that a shadowy group of right-wing provocateurs used the chaotic haze of the riots to commit arson and other forms of violence at Lake Street and Uptown businesses, while right-wing political mouthpieces blamed “Antifa” for the carnage. Not only was that not true, but it was completely fabricated. A psyop committed by right-wing extremists against neighborhoods of people of color, the poor, and the working class.

Then this week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agent Jonathan Ross was captured on video circling a maroon Honda Pilot, then drawing his service weapon and opening fire into the windshield and open window of the vehicle, striking and killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good. Like the Hortmans, the Hoffmans, the Annunciation victims, and like George Floyd, Good was unarmed. Good’s partner and dog were adjacent to and inside the vehicle. When nearby physicians attempted to render medical aid to Good, ICE and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents prevented them from doing so, in effect allowing Good to bleed out and die behind the wheel. As he walked away from firing, as he holstered his pistol, ICE Agent Ross was captured on his own body camera calling Good a “fucking bitch,” and then he got in his gold Chevy Suburban and drove away from the scene. Rather than secure the scene of the shooting and keep Ross at the scene of the incident, fellow ICE/DHS agents created a security perimeter and allowed him to leave.

Just a few hours later, U.S. Border Patrol, ICE, and DHS personnel swarmed the campus of Roosevelt High School, attacked school personnel and students, and deployed chemical irritants into the crowd. Roosevelt and other MPS facilities have been on lockdown and classes canceled since that incident.

Around the same time as the Roosevelt incident, Red Lake Band Native American U.S. Citizen Jose Roberto “Beto” Ramirez was pulled from his vehicle, savagely beaten by ICE agents, and disappeared from the scene, all while his intimate partner, Raelyn Duffy, also a Red Lake Band U.S. Citizen, was detained and forced to watch the carnage unfold. In news reports, Duffy states that even though she brought Ramirez’s documentation of Red Lake Band and U.S. Citizen status to ICE’s Whipple Federal Building near Fort Snelling in Minneapolis, she was turned away from seeing him.

Each of these incidents is an example of unconscious violence happening in Minnesota. Like the Floyd killing, a mere five years and nine months before it, the killings this year each have resulted in vigils, marches, protests, and yes, violent responses from a public spun-up by the outrage.

We have to be honest about the multitude of ways that the average human being might respond to these incendiary acts of violence. We can set aside the violent actors involved for the moment, as many of them are currently facing judicial consequences. The impact on the mass psyche, however, is palatable.

What the provocateurs, assassins, lone wolves, jack-booted thugs, and alleged murderers did not count on, at least as far as we can tell, brought about is not the race wars, civil wars, armageddon, apocalypse, or other mass psychosis they were counting on. At least, not yet.

Since the 2020 Covid Pandemic and the George Floyd murder and subsequent riots, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, like many areas of the country, have been sites of so-called “consciousness elevating” activities. These activities included community organizing, cross-ideological bridging of ideas and understandings through community conversations in private and in public, faith community and public funding re-investment efforts targeting homelessness, addiction, mental health crises, housing affordability, job scarcity, food insecurity, and yes, the dangers of extremist beliefs and behaviors. Through these efforts, MSP built a new, more resilient culture of cross-tolerance, sanctuary, compassion, and resolutions denouncing violent reactions, encouraging peaceful but firm conscious mass responses, communicating boundaries against violence, and ultimately a more determined and disciplined population that responds with “not in my city.”

Despite these efforts, 2020-2025 proved to be very challenging and daunting years. The discipline was tested time and time again, in the form of confrontations in homeless encampments, political fights, widespread waste, fraud, and abuse of public agency funding, and the ever-present racial, religious, and social tensions unique to a metropolitan area that survived the Floyd riots. Things were going okay, but not solved. Minneapolis Police continued to struggle with trust among the community and with recruiting new officers.

2025 brought political assassinations, violence against innocent children, and escalated ICE raids against immigrants (i.e., anyone who, in the eyes of a right-wing Nationalist Christian male, regardless of their actual status, could “look like an illegal”) and now, an ICE shooting of an unarmed woman documenting ICE activities. An estimated 2500-3000 ICE agents have surged into Minnesota and are snatching people off the street, raiding businesses and residences, and disappearing people seemingly without cause or reason. The current occupant of the White House put a giant target on Minnesota, calling Somali residents “garbage,” disparaging LGBTQIA+ individuals who moved to Minnesota for sanctuary from discrimination as “freaks” and “domestic terrorists,” and insinuating without any evidence that political opponents, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were somehow complicit in the killing of the Hortmans.

Never to be outdone, acolytes of the occupant of the White House also have lied about the nature of all of these events, disparaged the deceased Renee Good as “a domestic terrorist” who deserved to die. Incident videos show that Good said to Ross “It’s okay, I’m not mad at you bro,” complete with a smile, right before she tried to escape a hail of gunfire unleashed from his service weapon. Still the authoritarian acolytes attempted to sell their lies to the press even before her body had been removed from her Honda Pilot, while her partner wailed in pain hugging their dog, before her 6-year-old who was dropped off at school moments before even knew that her mommy had died in a barrage of bullets unleashed by a so-called law enforcement officer.

But the authoritarian, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynist provocateurs have miscalculated the effects of their actions.

People are not, in fact, reacting the way provocateurs may have hoped. People are not, by and large, choosing greater unconsciousness and chaos.

Led by the people of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and Saint Paul, the nation is waking up and becoming more conscious in responses to authoritarian violence. There have been only a handful of very brief episodes of people losing their tempers and lashing out in anger. In MSP, tens of thousands have turned out to peacefully protest, just like they did when the Hortman/Hoffman shootings happened, and exactly like after the Annunciation Catholic Church Massacre. Hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters have taken to the streets in an estimated 600 American cities. In each of these places, people are expressing their opinions and displeasure, but they are doing so in mostly measured, clear, and conscious ways that set boundaries. Not throwing fireworks or Molotov cocktails. Not setting pipe bombs. Not pulling out weapons of war or committing reciprocal acts of domestic terrorism. Nope, they’re setting consciousness awareness boundaries with themselves and each other, and they’re winning the consciousness awareness war as a result.

This is not to say that everyone protesting is doing so consciously. However, when observing vigils, marches, and protests, one who is sensitive to it can feel a shift in the collective consciousness awareness energy.

Yesterday, I witnessed this shift in response vs. reactivity personally. As USBP/ICE Field Commander Greg Bovino and his agents snatched a man walking down the street in Northeast Minneapolis in broad daylight, neighborhood members emerged from storefronts, blew whistles, and observers recorded, but no one became violent. There was discipline amongst the estimated 60-70 people in the gaggle around the agents making the arrest. When one protester was also arrested for unclear reasons, the crowd continued to act mostly peacefully. Not perfect, of course, as there was some yelling, a lot of whistles, and escalated emotional response, but by-and-large, almost no one was acting out.

I also saw that Bovino, in particular, was just itching for a fight. Video shows Bovino gripping what appears to be a tear gas canister, and he repeatedly grips and regrips the trigger mechanism nervously. One could tell that he was prepared to deploy it on a hair-trigger notice — he was licking his lips for an excuse like an agitated hyena. The protesters and observers didn’t give him a reason, and suddenly he was sneering as he walked back to his waiting vehicle, the chemical irritant going un-deployed.

This moment of presence and restraint, amid the dizzying stream of collective chaos across the city, was in fact a first-person example of how consciousness awareness perhaps derailed a possible escalation. It is a small version of a larger collective shift, but an important one -- if we can hold on to it.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the coming War on Consciousness Awareness that appeared to be building in the background of national and international events. Driven by ego and power, authoritarian leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the United States’ Donald Trump, China’s Xi Jinping, and others appeared to be continuing to turn up the heat on their own citizens and borderline geographic neighbors, through war, intimidation, and social crackdowns. In parallel, multiple scandals, revelations of hidden truths, efforts at authoritarian and social control processes, mysterious deaths, disappearances, coverups, and leaks of secret information caused people to become escalated, angry, and venomous in their outrage. These responses, driven by emotion and drama, shift from conscious back to unconscious in a split second, whipsawing back and forth seemingly without a discernible ability to track them.

What we are challenged with now as a species is the ongoing “tightening of the net” by authoritarians and hidden influencers of control and manipulation. We commoners are the fish in that net. We can choose to freak out like those fish, or organize in one direction to consciously respond instead of react in the face of global tyranny against us. If we look at the first-person example I witnessed on the street yesterday, bad actors like Greg Bovino and his ICE Gestapo are just itching for us to make a slip and give them a reason to escalate to full-blown militaristic takeover of a major American city. So far, they have tried it in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Chicago, Portland, and now Minneapolis. We need to keep our shit together and not be the ‘tipping point’ city.

So far, we are doing okay, holding the line at the right level. We just “need to not take the bait” that the forces of darkness are dangling in front of us. After all, once the mass population embraces unconsciousness, the more pain cycles we have to go through before the pendulum swings back to consciousness awareness, in the form of mourning more deaths. Minneapolis and Saint Paul can’t afford any more unjustified deaths. We’ve had enough of that.

Rather, we need to start countering unconsciousness with greater consciousness. We need to continue pushing back on this authoritarian nonsense with massive numbers of peaceful but firm engagements. We need to swarm, overwhelm, and do so smartly.

Don’t take the bait. Watch your surroundings. Eyes ahead, behind, above, and below. Most of all, love your neighbor, lock arms, and walk forward. Surround the haters with layers of consciousness and presence.

Watch what happens next. - IYKYK, SF.