Draft Script: The Power They Forgot You Had
Metadata
- Target duration: 13 minutes
- Word count: ~1,950 words
- Date: 2026-02-16
On March 7th of last year, Erwin Chemerinsky -- the dean of Berkeley Law, one of the most respected constitutional minds in America -- sat down and wrote an op-ed for the New York Times. His subject was the crisis of the republic. His conclusion was bleak. If Trump continues to defy court orders, Chemerinsky wrote, there may be "little further recourse." His best hope? "Perhaps public opinion will turn against the president." His worst case? "Perhaps, after 238 years, we will see the end of government under the rule of law."
And while he was writing those words, 50,000 people were standing in negative-twenty-degree weather in Minneapolis, proving him wrong in real time.
That gap -- between what our credentialed expert class could imagine and what ordinary people were already doing -- is the story of this moment.
Here's what happened. Starting in December 2025, the Department of Homeland Security deployed approximately three thousand ICE and CBP officers throughout Minnesota in what they called Operation Metro Surge -- the largest immigration enforcement operation in American history. On January 7th, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old American woman, in her car in Minneapolis. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide. Seventeen days later, CBP agents killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti -- a 37-year-old ICU nurse at a VA hospital. An American citizen. Shot ten times while filming on his phone.
Those weren't immigrants. Those were American citizens, killed by federal agents on American soil. And the administration defended the shootings.
Meanwhile, Chief US District Judge Patrick Schiltz found that ICE had violated at least 96 court orders in Minnesota since January 1st. Ninety-six. The courts issued orders. ICE ignored them. The institutional guardrails -- the ones Chemerinsky was writing about -- didn't just bend. They snapped.
And then the community responded. Fifty thousand marchers on January 23rd. Seven hundred businesses shut their doors. One hundred members of the clergy arrested at the airport. Six weeks of daily direct action. And on February 4th, 700 federal agents were withdrawn. On February 12th, Homan announced the end of the operation.
As Mark and Paul Engler laid out in The Guardian yesterday, there are two fundamentally different ways to understand how power works. The monolithic view says power lives in institutions -- courts, Congress, elections, the White House. Senators, generals, billionaires, presidents, and CEOs. This is the view that dominates mainstream political thinking. And when you hold this view and those institutions fail -- when ICE ignores 96 court orders and keeps going -- it breeds despair. Because if the only levers are institutional and the levers are broken, what's left?
This is exactly what happened. A prominent Democratic consultant literally advised progressives to "roll over and play dead." Chemerinsky could only offer "perhaps public opinion will turn." As the political theorist Corey Robin devastatingly observed, people with far fewer rights and far fewer resources across the globe have found more forceful ways to confront authoritarianism -- mass strikes, boycotts, occupations, artistic resistance -- yet among American establishment elites, "no one dares even to talk about picking up the customary political tools that democrats across the centuries and continents have traditionally wielded against runaway rulers."
The social view of power says something different. It says that authority depends on the cooperation of the governed -- and that cooperation can be withdrawn. This isn't radical theory. It's the oldest insight in democratic life. Frances Fox Piven, the great scholar of disruptive action, put it plainly: "A lot of the tragedy of American democracy is the result of quiescence. Agitation and rising up from people at the bottom are good for democracy. They nourish democracy."
The abolitionists knew this. The labor movement knew this. The civil rights movement knew this. Solidarity in Poland knew this. The American political class forgot it.
Minneapolis remembered.
So what does it actually look like when people figure this out for themselves? Because that's exactly what happened in Minnesota -- and the how matters as much as the what.
This was not a story about one march. It was a story about a coalition deploying every tool they had, simultaneously. Graduate labor unions struck. Postal workers rallied to push ICE agents off postal property. Airport workers fought to bar federal immigration agents from MSP. A hundred clergy sang and kneeled in civil disobedience at the airport, demanding that Delta Airlines and Signature Aviation stop facilitating deportation flights. The Singing Resistance movement -- emphasizing nonviolence and what they called "joyful resistance" -- drew two thousand people to single events, gained seventy thousand social media followers in under a month, and launched virtual training sessions nationally with 2,500 people at the first meeting alone. Mutual aid networks sprang up: in Worthington, local ethnic stores immediately organized grocery deliveries to families too afraid to leave their homes.
And the economic dimension -- this is where the monolithic view of power simply cannot explain what happened. Hennepin County estimated the operation cost the region $203 million in a single month. Seven hundred businesses didn't close as a gesture. They closed as an economic weapon. This was a sustained, multi-tactic campaign of non-cooperation that made the federal operation politically and economically unsustainable.
But here's the part of the story that too many people want to skip past. Because this victory was not free.
And here's the uncomfortable truth that honesty demands: a significant portion of that economic impact was not strategic withdrawal. It was fear-driven paralysis. Immigrants who stayed home not as an act of resistance but because they were terrified of being detained. Tens of thousands of workers who didn't make a choice to withhold their labor -- they were too scared to leave their houses.
We should not sanitize that.
Non-cooperation is a weapon that wounds the wielder too. The people of Minneapolis chose to wield it -- many of them -- because the alternative was worse. Two people were already dead. The operation would have continued indefinitely. But to celebrate the $203 million figure purely as a metric of strategic success without also honoring it as a measure of community suffering would be dishonest. And I'm not going to do that.
What the organized component -- the marches, the business closures, the clergy arrests, the singing -- actually did was provide the structure that converted chaotic fear into directed political pressure. That distinction matters. The fear already existed. The organizing channeled it.
The argument isn't that the protests were unimpressive. It's that we might be misidentifying what actually forced the retreat. Two American citizens were killed by federal agents. One of them was a VA nurse shot ten times while filming on his phone. Six in ten Americans now disapprove of ICE. Two-thirds say enforcement has gone too far. Those numbers moved in large part because of the killings and the administration's response to them -- not primarily because of a general strike. The protests amplified and channeled the outrage. But did they create it?
And then there's the conditions problem. Minnesota has one of the strongest labor movements in the country. Decades of organizing infrastructure. Sympathetic local and state governments that refused to cooperate with federal enforcement. A concentrated urban geography that made disruption tangible. Strip away any one of those conditions, and this looks very different. The administration has already threatened the Insurrection Act. The next confrontation may not follow a neat six-week arc from protest to retreat.
I'll concede the multi-causal point, because it's intellectually honest. The retreat was overdetermined -- there were multiple forces pushing toward the same outcome, and disentangling which one "really" did it is genuinely difficult.
But here's the question the pragmatic critique can't answer: if the backlash existed on its own, why did no one in the professional political class try to organize it? Outrage without organization is just despair with better reasons. The administration was perfectly willing to ride out outrage in other states where ICE was operating. It was not willing to ride out a sustained economic shutdown in Minnesota. The non-cooperation didn't create the anger. It converted the anger into power.
That conversion is the whole ballgame.
On the conditions question -- I'll acknowledge it fully. Minnesota had advantages other communities don't. But here's the constructive pivot: the Singing Resistance already has 2,500 people in its first national training session. Groups are forming in Nashville, Atlanta, Portland. The lesson is not "just protest." It's "build the capacity to protest effectively." The conditions can be created. That is the work.
It's a story about a democracy that has outsourced its own defense to a professional class that forgot how power works. The monolithic view of power -- that change only comes from elections, courts, and elite maneuvering -- isn't just an analytical error. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you believe the only levers are institutional and those levers fail, you conclude nothing can be done. And then nothing gets done. And then you point to the nothing and say, "See? Nothing can be done."
The social view of power breaks that cycle. Authority depends on cooperation. Cooperation can be withdrawn. This isn't some fringe academic theory. It's what the research of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan showed across decades of data -- that nonviolent civil resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006 were twice as successful as violent ones. It's what Gene Sharp documented across 198 methods of nonviolent action -- later expanded to 346 by Michael Beer. It's what every major democratic movement in history has known.
The American political class wrote it out of its playbook. Minnesota wrote it back in.
And here's something worth watching: a Democratic union leader just won a Texas state senate seat that Trump carried by 17 points in 2024. The Englers themselves describe this dynamic -- whirlwind moments of grassroots action altering political conditions and drawing in new recruits for the ongoing struggle. The direct action and the electoral power aren't competing. They're reinforcing each other. But -- and this matters -- non-cooperation without electoral follow-through is a burst of energy that dissipates. Minnesota has to feed the 2026 midterms, not replace them.
Erwin Chemerinsky -- and I want to be clear, this is not really about him as a person. He's a brilliant legal scholar doing the job of a legal scholar. The failure isn't individual. It's an entire class of experts trained to see power only through institutional lenses, and when those lenses show them a broken picture, all they can offer is eloquent despair.
Fifty thousand people in Minneapolis did not have that problem. They didn't wait for permission. They didn't wait for a strategy memo from a Democratic consultant. They didn't wait for the professional political class to remember that the governed have always had the power to withdraw their cooperation.
They just did it.
And it worked. Not perfectly. Not costlessly. Not in a way that solves everything. But it worked.
The question now is not whether mass non-cooperation is effective. Minnesota answered that. The question is whether the rest of us are paying attention. The Englers are right -- our collective future may depend on it.
Right now, 2,500 people are in a training session learning how to do what Minneapolis did.
Are you one of them?
Writer's Notes
Chemerinsky framing: Per the spine's production notes and the steelman's caution, I softened the Chemerinsky critique to make clear this is about a systemic failure of imagination in an entire expert class, not one man's personal failure. The line "this is not really about him as a person" near the close does this explicitly.
The "play dead" quote: Attributed carefully as "a prominent Democratic consultant" per the Engler piece. Did not build excess load-bearing weight on it -- it appears once in Beat 1, illustratively, alongside the Chemerinsky example and the Robin critique.
Costs section (Beat 3): I deliberately slowed the pacing here with a BEAT before and after, let the numbers land individually, and directly acknowledged the involuntary/fear-driven participation issue rather than glossing it. The framing -- "a weapon that wounds the wielder too" from the spine -- felt like the honest way to handle this. This is the trust-earning section of the episode.
Voluntary vs. involuntary tension: Addressed explicitly in Beat 3 with the paragraph about immigrants staying home from fear, not strategy. Then pivoted to show how the organized component channeled that fear into directed political pressure -- which is the actual mechanism that matters.
Causal attribution: Conceded the multi-causal point directly in the counterargument rather than dismissing it. The response -- "outrage without organization is just despair with better reasons" -- felt like the strongest version of our argument that still respects the objection.
Word "playbook": Used exactly once, in the bigger picture section ("wrote it out of its playbook"), per the spine's instruction not to overuse it.
Electoral displacement: Brief nod to the whirlwind/structure framework and the explicit line "Minnesota has to feed the 2026 midterms, not replace them." Two sentences, as the spine suggested.
Piven quote: Used in Beat 1 as recommended. It captures the thesis in another voice and provides authority.
Tone shift in costs section: This is where the episode should feel most different from the rest. The energy drops. The numbers are delivered individually, not as a list rattled off. The honesty here is what earns the right to end with hope.
Fact-check flags: The $203 million figure, the 96 court orders number, and the exact circumstances of both killings should all be verified against primary sources before recording. The Pretti detail -- "shot ten times while filming on his phone" -- is extremely powerful but needs to be airtight. The supplemental sourcing attributes this to Wikipedia/CNN/PBS but the specific detail of "ten times" and "filming on his phone" should be confirmed against the original reporting.
Deviation from spine: I compressed the Context section slightly and let some of its details (coalition composition, economic data) flow into the later beats where they have more narrative impact, rather than frontloading everything. The spine's structure is followed in spirit but the information distribution is optimized for spoken flow.
Energy arc: Cold open (quiet, sharp) -> Context (grounded, grave) -> Thesis (direct, deliberate) -> Beat 1 (intellectual energy, light-turning-on) -> Beat 2 (vivid, building) -> Beat 3 (slow, heavy, honest) -> Counterargument (fair, measured) -> Bigger Picture (reflective, building to quiet force) -> Close (controlled intensity, direct address). The Beat 3 dip in energy is intentional and critical.