This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 25 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. Right now, I’m joined by Michelle Phelps. She’s a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. She wrote a book about the protests in Minneapolis in 2020, and the sort of reckoning in police and this discussion of policing and so on that happened there afterward. And so I’m going to talk to her about what happened in 2020 and what happened in 2026 here in Minneapolis, and kind of connections between the two. Professor Phelps, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.
Michelle Phelps: Thanks for having me.
Bacon: So let me start with 2026, because the reason I want to ask, in part, is I think it’s become conventional wisdom now that Trump is unpopular. But I think what really happened was Minneapolis had a big resistance to show the country, in a certain way, that ICE was opposed and people did not like this immigration approach.
And so the first question I wanted to ask was, did the resistance in 2026 come from nowhere, or was some of that built in 2020 or even before then?
Phelps: Yeah. I’m a sociologist, but I like to pretend periodically that I’m a historian. And as any real or pretend historian will tell you, nothing comes out of nowhere, right? There’s always this longer history. And in Minneapolis, I think the 2020 memory was really salient for people, and salient in a couple of different ways, sometimes working at cross-purposes. Let me start with the most obvious.
I think the most obvious was that the people of Minneapolis and the broader Twin Cities metro area had built up this muscle memory of resistance. And actually, we can think about 2020 as the culmination of years of organizing efforts, and seeds being planted that then blossomed in 2020.
But even if we start the clock at 2020, as literal as, there’s networks of neighbors that have each other’s contact information, so when things flip to Signal, it’s easier to invite people, because you know each other, right? It also means that people were used to getting out and protesting, and people were used to thinking about state narratives of violence with a critical eye, right? And so when we hear that first news about what had happened in Minneapolis, people were immediately critical of DHS’s narrative, right? Immediately critical about whether this lethal use of force was justified or not.
But you can go farther back. So in addition to the sort of decade or so before 2020, where you start to see more organizing around police violence, you can go back even farther. If we go back to the 1960s, Minneapolis is one of many cities across the country that erupts in protests around what we now understand as a fight for racial justice.
You can go back to the 1940s, when Hubert Humphrey was the mayor of Minneapolis, and Minneapolis was at the forefront of racial equity policies at a city level. Some would trace it even farther back, to our Scandinavian roots of immigration, or the very cold winters and the way that causes people to pull together in moments of crisis.
But the other thing that’s important to tie to 2020, and that doesn’t have to do with Minneapolis in and of itself and its resistance capacity, is that we were on Trump’s target list, right? And there were lots of indications that the administration was directly trying to prompt a redux of the unrest of 2020, and to have it end with more state violence. And that was in people’s minds too, this idea that the president is attacking the city politically, that this is a politically motivated invasion of federal agents, and that there is an attempt of federal provocation to get people to riot, to instigate a more repressive state response.
And people remembered the memories of 2020, for both good and bad. The helicopters circling reminded people of traumatic memories, but so did the community coming together in protest and solidarity. And I think that really helped in terms of people resisting, but also resisting in ways that didn’t play into that hand, right? Resisting in ways that kept a public order, even in the midst of this pretty active resistance to a federal occupation.
Bacon: So you’re hinting at 2020 lessons learned, but I’ll ask it more explicitly. So I guess, what is the reception among the population of Minneapolis, hard to stereotype, about the 2020? Was it successful, in that the officers were convicted, or failed, in that there was a perception of disorder and no lasting police changes happened?
Phelps: Yeah, I think it’s a range of responses, and those aren’t the only two. You can see different configurations of things. I think people on the kind of farthest left of the political spectrum believe that the protests were effective and radical and profound, and also that there have been fewer changes in public safety than they wanted to see, particularly with the failure of that 2021 charter amendment to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with the Department of Public Safety.
You have people further on the right, which, in Minneapolis, is largely kind of a centrist Democrat but leans into sort of the beginning of the Republican Party, if we’re thinking about the political spectrum. And I think those folks that are towards the center and further to the right in Minneapolis see the protests of 2020 as having gotten out of hand, and the critique of the police as having gotten out of hand, and see as having reestablished what should be a deference to police and policing in the city, in part by growing the budget of the police, and by working to address the staffing shortages that have still continued to impact the department.
But I think most people in Minneapolis are in the middle. I think most people in Minneapolis think that the protests were a righteous cause, that they were largely peaceful, which they were, and that those protests were spotlighting what was a true injustice of state violence, and that there have been changes since then, though the pace and the scale of them, I think people have varied perceptions of how quick or effective that has been.
But certainly, I think the kind of modal perspective is that 2020 was spotlighting an important injustice in Minneapolis, across the country, and that it has led, in complicated and not always as far as people want them—but that has led to changes, and changes around policing and public safety that have nudged us in a better direction.
Bacon: To be extremely reductive, the mayor of Minneapolis is more, quote unquote, “center left.” He was opposed by someone who was more progressive in 2022 or 2023?
Phelps: It would’ve been—I’d have to go back and look. I think it was 2022.
Bacon: And he won, but it was narrow. It was close. So there’s a divide, the divide that might be a good parallel for—there’s a divide here, but neither side is overwhelmingly one or the other.
Phelps: Yeah, and I would say the mayoral politics tend to skew towards the kind of center left. So Mayor Frey has been in office for longer than any of the mayors in recent political history, actually, and certainly skews more centrist. But in some of the wards, some of the city council members, we’ve seen DSA members, we’ve seen other people that are farther to left-wing, and then we have some council members that are to the right of the mayor.
And so I would say that kind of center left is about the kind of center of gravity, at least for people who are showing up at the polls, which is not, of course, a perfect representation of the city itself.
Bacon: So the anti-ICE organization we saw, does that mostly happen after Renee Good is killed, or before even? What is the timetable, when does the sort of activity really start?
Phelps: Yeah. So I would say, much earlier than even the initial surge into the Twin Cities, people were doing things like mass distributing whistles. I think workplaces were getting together and talking about how we were going to protect neighbors. We had seen what was happening in other cities, and there was a sense in the city that Minneapolis would be a target and would be a central focus at some point, although it was unclear when that would happen.
So there had been lots of prep work. I would say the whistles and the trainings were the kind of entry point for a lot of people, on getting prepared and getting connected to people in your neighborhood.
Renee Good’s killing really accelerated all of that. So I would say people were already ready. We saw, even with Renee Good, right, there were people on the street. There were people on the street with whistles. She had been part of organizing at her kids’ school. There was that infrastructure starting to build, but certainly it explodes in terms of interest in the Monarca trainings, or other legal observer trainings, and really rapidly proliferates.
And I think there’s been really a series of kind of transition moments, right? So there was the kind of initial building moment. There was the, like, mass escalation and crisis moment, when Good and Pretti are killed. And then in the aftermath of that, things shifted again, as people started to get more nervous about federal infiltration of a lot of the community networks. And then of course, once the surge shifted and there was this visible pullback—even as we still see people being deported, but not the same sort of flooding of the streets in this hyper-visible way—those networks have shifted yet again. So it’s a very dynamic process.
Bacon: The federal pullback, as you say, is not full, but there was some. Is there a sense of victory there, or a sense that we—not victory in a sort of, we won the NBA finals, but a sense of, a concession that they were wrong, and they did something bad?
Phelps: Yeah, again, I think it depends where you sit, but I would say, for the average person in Minneapolis, I think there is this sense of, we fought back and we won, at least the immediate fight. We may not have won the war, but we won the battle and pushed them out. I think the people who are really active still in the grassroots day-to-day work resist that narrative, in part because they worry that it’s demobilizing, right?
So if ICE is gone and the threat is gone, then nobody needs to do patrol anymore, right? Nobody needs to be on their guard. Nobody needs to be going to Whipple. And of course, across the country, ICE abductions and deportations continue, but they’re much more targeted.
And so in a way, we’re in this strange phase where the problem persists, but it’s a different kind of problem, in that it is not the sort of mass stop and frisk, but it is these more targeted operations, but they’re quieter, and they’re quieter by design. Because the Trump administration saw that this massive public campaign would have political blowback. And I think political blowback that the administration was somewhat not prepared for, the kind of scale and intensity of that political blowback.
But in some ways, it’s a hollow victory, right? In that the deportations haven’t actually stopped. The vulnerability of immigrant communities hasn’t dramatically changed. What has changed is the probability that the, like, average everyday person will see these agents in their day-to-day life. But the deeper problem and crisis around enforcement hasn’t actually been resolved, but it’s now off the political radar. In a way, it was a pyrrhic victory, right? In that we appeared to have won the battle, but also at this cost of, now it’s no longer this massive political liability for the Trump administration, and people are still vulnerable.
Bacon: So talking about the protests—I live in Louisville, so in 2020, the protests of Breonna Taylor being killed initially were biracial, and as they extended, it was mainly a Black cohort who was doing the protests. My perception was that that was a national trend as well, was, the protests, for a while you had all these white people, and pictures of it, and then gradually it became more Black people were being killed and more Black people protesting.
I’d be curious what Minneapolis was like in 2020, and their perception of these 2026 protests, is intentionally lots of white people being involved because Latinos are the ones being protected. I don’t know where Blacks and Asians would’ve fit into that, but talk about the sort of racial demographics of the protests, both in 2020 and today.
Phelps: Yeah. I think this is another place where you can draw these connections between 2020 and 2026. So I think part of the political conversation in 2020 was about white people and how they showed up for racial justice, and those lessons, I think, get accelerated in 2026. So in 2020, the protests were multiracial. And Minneapolis is still the most diverse place in the state of Minnesota, but the state of Minnesota is overwhelmingly white. So Minneapolis is still a majority white city. Its Black population is less than 20 percent of the city population.
And so all throughout the BLM era, Black Lives Matter protests just had lots of white people in them, right? Like, you weren’t going to get just the kind of, like, really boots on the ground, without having a sizable number of white leftists who were also present. And so it’s been intentionally a multiracial community, and a multiracial community that has tried to really balance these tensions around how to have an initiative that was focused on the value of Black lives, but that had so many white participants.
A lot of the movement leaders were Black. A lot of the, like, core organizers were Black and other folks of color. There would be moments at protests where they would ask the white folks to physically stand back in the crowd, so that Black folks could have a space of solidarity and to be around other Black people, right? So that they weren’t in a sea of white people at this protest around racial justice.
So there was a lot of this negotiating the whiteness of a movement around responding to anti-Blackness and state violence. And I think those lessons really show up in 2026, when you see white people saying, This is our moment to step out in front, because we’re a buffer, right? We’re a buffer for that state violence, and we have the privilege in order to do so. In 2020, yes, those movements were much whiter on the streets, and that was deliberately and intentionally—
Bacon: You mean 2026, right?
Phelps: 2026, excuse me. And that was deliberately, right? And you would still see these moments of interracial solidarity. There was a group of women who would pass out samosas at the protests to keep people fed, right? And, I think the Latino community here, there were these moments where people were expressing that solidarity and co-organizing events, even if it was an ask for people who were less vulnerable to step up front, and white citizens were understood to be the group that would be least vulnerable.
Yeah, I think both of the protests were multiracial in different ways, but who was sent to the front—both for visibility and protection—and the meaning of the movement shifted over time. But the logic was the same. It was just that the external conditions looked different.
Bacon: Can I ask this question, and maybe, hopefully, you can answer it candidly. Can Minneapolis, both in 2020 and 2026, be a place where activism this aggressive is described as activism and not rioting, always immediately, because Minneapolis is a white city, and Los Angeles is a Black and Latino city, and Chicago is a Black city, and Baltimore is a Black city, and I don’t know what Louisville is—but Minneapolis definitely is—I’m going to say, I know Minneapolis is not all white, but is it coded white in a way that is helpful both locally and perhaps more importantly nationally?
Phelps: Yeah. And not just coded white, but coded white and Midwest, which is the—Midwest, the blandest of the whites.
Bacon: Not San Francisco white either, yeah. Not San Francisco white. Yeah, that’s a good point.
Phelps: Midwest white.
Bacon: Not elitist Boston white, and not San Francisco radical white either, yes.
Phelps: That’s exactly right. Heart of the heartland, heart of the country. Heartland. Although still a city, right? So we’re going to get the city’s earnest—
Bacon: Sports teams. Kevin Garnett.
Phelps: That’s right. That’s right. And I would say, because of the political leanings of the city, from the beginning in 2020, people in Minneapolis were very hesitant to call any of what happened riots, although there were these moments. So, like, the politicians, like the mayor and the governor, were very careful to distinguish between the peaceful protest that is happening during the day is different than the looting that is happening, or the arson that is happening at night.
And so even in the midst of, you had these press conferences at 2:00 in the morning where our elected officials look just exhausted, right? You could see the bags under their eyes, you could see their hair going sideways, and still they were very careful to say, some of what is happening, the protests that are happening, that is for a righteous cause, right? And so the way in which 2020 gets read as predominantly in this framework of a riot isn’t happening in the city. It is happening as you zoom out, right, and as you go into more conservative media spaces. But in Minneapolis, we understand 2020 primarily as a summer of protest, not as a riot.
And I think you’re right that the racial demographics here gave us a little bit of protection, although ultimately we lost some of that, right? In the same way that kind of racial stigma can rub off on people who are allies or who are in the fight. In some ways, I think Minneapolis, its reputation as this sort of, like, white Midwestern, high quality of life utopia gets tarnished for a moment. And one of the things that’s been interesting to see is how that tarnish has worn off over the years, as 2020 recedes from public memory in the national conversation, but then flares back to life in 2026, but with this sort of, we are the progressive warriors.
And in 2026, what’s different is, the entire city can come together to fight the federal government, in which there is uniform opposition from the everyday person at the protest all the way up to the governor’s office. Whereas in 2020, it was, of course, the city’s police department, and then the city’s residents sparring against police and National Guard and others. And so those politics were more complicated in 2020, whereas in 2026, everybody could say, This is our righteous protest. This is us pushing back against state oppression.
Bacon: Because there were anti-ICE actions in Chicago and in Los Angeles in 2025. It wasn’t as if you were the only city that fought this—that Minneapolis did maybe a better job, or gotten better praise for it. That’s kind of what I was getting at. Is that a part of, because of what Minneapolis represents as a city in this sense? Yeah, Middle America.
Phelps: Yeah. And what’s interesting is, I have this sentence in my book that says, before 2020, few might have predicted that Minneapolis would be the epicenter of this national cry for police abolition, right? And a lot of the cities that had sparked these massive BLM protests and really extensive global coverage had been places that were less white, right? And so people were surprised that it happened in Minneapolis, and in some ways that was part of, I think, what was so newsworthy to the media about it, was like, this was a place where you didn’t expect that to happen.
And but if you ask some of the Black organizers in Minneapolis, they did expect it to happen, right? They expected that Minneapolis was on the precipice of this explosion of protests, in part because the gaps between Black wellbeing and white wellbeing are so stark here, because of the racial demographics. So again, it plays out a little differently locally than it does in sort of the kind of national perception of what kind of city Minneapolis is.
Bacon: So you mentioned the local differences in 2020. There is some difference between—it’s an interesting state, where Flanagan won the Senate race as the sort of Bernie Sanders candidate, but Klobuchar does not like Bernie Sanders and would tell you so herself. Jacob Frey is doing well, but so is Ilhan Omar. So are there two kind of politics in Minneapolis? There’s the normal Democrat and the progressive Democrat, both reigning pretty well in Minneapolis at the same time.
It seems like it’s not like New York City, where the progressive Democrat is having their sort of moment right now. It’s more divided in Minneapolis, or you judge the person? Or how does it work there?
Phelps: Yeah. I think each of those contests is a slightly different demographic, and we’re in a particular moment. I think Flanagan’s campaign was helped in part by the sort of anti-ICE protest, right? This is a moment in which it is safer to run with more lefty candidates, because the kind of public rage at the federal administration is so stark, right? And so it seems like there is an opening here. But I’ll also say, Flanagan has served under Walz, who is more of, somewhere between a centrist but progressive—
Bacon: He’s somewhere between, yeah. He’s not a good fit for either camp, really. Klobuchar is more in one, and Ilhan is more in the other.
Phelps: That’s correct. That’s correct. Walz is hard to pin, and in some ways his policies were quite progressive, but to come back to your earlier point, he’s got this kind of Oshkosh, Minnesota masculinity in a way that allows for a bit more coverage for some of those progressive policies. So I would say, just like the mayor’s office tends to be more centrist, so too does the governor’s office. And I would say that we’ll continue to see, in Minneapolis, whenever you have the biggest geographical swaths, you get this sort of skewing towards the more center left. Whereas when you get these campaigns that can run on more targeted congressional areas or council wards, you can get these more progressive.
And so I’d say both the progressives and the centrist Democrats have a lot of support in Minneapolis, and then Minnesota. The state, when you get farther and farther away from the cities, it gets more conservative, as you do in any state. But certainly in the Twin Cities, I would say those are the kind of two—those are, in all intents and purposes, like, those are our two political parties, not Democrats and Republicans, but progressives and center left.
Bacon: So what’s happening now? As you alluded to, the fact that there’s still ICE operations, so there’s not a—are these communities and Signal groups and so on still going, or what’s happening now in terms of the activism? You said ICE is less public and less active. ICE is less publicly aggressive, I think that’s correct. So what’s going on now?
Phelps: Yeah. And Minneapolis is no longer the center of the storm, in the way that it was in that moment. So I would say there are still active Signal channels, but the volume is way, way down, and a lot of those groups are really focused on community needs in the wake of the surge. The occupation went for a long time, and so if you didn’t feel safe, like, you could leave the house to go to work—there are people who are in rent crises, there are people that are in food crises, there are people that are in medical crises. And then there’s all the families and the networks of the people who have been deported, or who are expecting still to be deported. A lot of that kind of immediate response of, “Let’s flood people on the streets,” a lot of that has shifted to managing the community fallout from the surge.
And it’s been hard—just like in every month after the summer protests in 2020, and then every year since then, the attention fades from the room. People get exhausted, and they step back, and that makes it really hard to maintain these networks. I would say that the kind of fervor in which people were engaged in all of this work has faded, but those networks remain.
And I think it’s still an open question whether or not the Trump administration continues to attempt to make an example out of Minneapolis or not, or just goes to other cities where they expect to find less public resistance moving forward. But those networks are there and ready to be activated should there be another very high-profile event. And there are certainly still people who are monitoring the Whipple Building. There are still people who are tailing federal agents.
But the recent legal cases, I think, have really shifted people’s focus and attention to defending the people who are being tied up in those legal cases, and also being more careful about, like, what gets said on a Signal network, for instance. So if you’re part of any of these Signal groups, every, like, couple of weeks, there’s something that people get panicked about, and then you see a whole list of people, like, changing their profile name, or changing their phone number, or changing their email. So it’s kind of this cat and mouse surveillance game.
Bacon: Last question. This is not centered in Minneapolis, but I know you saw Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez used the phrase Woke 1.0—or she was quoting someone saying Woke 1.0 was crazy. Since you wrote a book about this whole period, I’d be curious, without debating whether she’s running for president or not, I’d be curious to say what you thought about what she said, and the discourse that’s happened since then about this sort of 2020, and what it meant then and what it means now.
Phelps: Yeah. And I saw you had Deva Woodly on, who’s brilliant, on this question.
Bacon: Yes.
Phelps: So I would say, stepping aside from AOC’s specific comments, I would say in general, there has been this kind of pivot on the left to thinking about 2020 as this moment of failure, right? And this moment of, there was an overreaction, and now there needs to be this correction. And I would say particularly on the center left, but even in farther left circles. And I find, even in academic spheres—you can find Loïc Wacquant recently published a piece that was against abolition, against abolitionism.
So it’s not just happening in the political sphere. I think there are all of these places, from the, like, everyday community organizing work all the way up to the most high-profile comments about Woke 1.0, where people are looking back on 2020 and experiencing, I think, internal distress about how they responded in 2020, and how they tie that or not to the rise of the Trump administration and what we’re currently going through.
And to me, I would say a lot of these reflections, I think, are learning the wrong lessons about 2020. I think anybody who was prepared for 2020, anybody who had been steeped in these movements, anybody who had thought about the history around protest, around racial justice and police violence, predicted the backlash.
The backlash is not a thing we need to explain. The backlash is, in fact, the most predictable outcome that we should expect from a massive national uprising against police violence and racialized police violence. And so the fact that we see this pivot rightward shouldn’t surprise us at all. The same thing, of course, happens in the sort of transition from the 1960s to 1970s.
And there were a lot of really important lessons from 2020 that people held onto for a moment, and that I worry the, like, small gains in which are starting to be crawled back. So for instance, one thing we learned, or a lot of people seem to learn in the moment, is that it’s very difficult to regulate police violence. It’s very difficult to say, OK, we’re going to have a police force that is going to use lethal violence to eliminate lethal threats, but they’re only going to kill the right people in the right context in exactly the right way every single time.
Like, that is, at best—even if you think the police are fantastic defenders of democracy, like, that is always going to be difficult. And so anything we can do to reduce friction between communities and police, and reduce those moments where people could be killed by the police, should be seen as a positive development—not because, or not necessarily because, police are inherently flawed, but because violence is endemic to the police role, and that means that when we can prevent crises, when we can better respond to people’s needs, we should embrace that.
And the whole abolitionist premise that a lot of crime is driven by insecurity and precarity—if we give kids summer jobs, there is less crime. If we invest in school programs, if we invest in healthcare, if we give people drug treatment who otherwise wouldn’t have had health insurance, all of that can reduce crime.
So there were all of these really important evidence-based ideas about, how do we reduce the likelihood of state violence, that I worry have gotten lost today, and that too much of the blame for the rightward swing is being put on the 2020 protests. Whereas that is always the history of resisting state violence, right? Is that you’re going to have resistance, and then you’re going to have pushback. You’re going to have resistance, and you’re going to have pushback.
There are, I think, important lessons to learn from 2020 for organizers. I talk about that a bit in my book. I think there is a conversation that should happen among the left about, how do you win meaningful public campaigns and also mobilize people on the ground outside of traditional political structures? There are really important, I think, lessons to be learned there.
But the way the public conversation is going of, abolition was doomed, this was a terrible idea, and also it probably caused Trump—I think each step of that logic, there are problems with, and I think that is not a productive context in which to start a real conversation about what are the lessons organizers ought to take from 2020.
Bacon: Professor Phelps, this is a great place to end on. Tell people where they can find your book and other work you’re doing.
Phelps: My book is available at Princeton University Press and anywhere that you can find books.
Bacon: Give the title of it again, the whole title, just so I can—because I don’t think I did that.
Phelps: Yeah, it’s right here. It looks like that. The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America. And you can learn more about my work at michellesphelps.com. So that’s michellesphelps.com.
Bacon: Are you on Bluesky, Substack, Twitter, et cetera?
Phelps: Ah, it’s such an unsettled moment for social media. You can find me on Bluesky. You can find me on LinkedIn now. You can find me, as of this morning, on Substack. So I’m working on it. I used to be on Twitter. I’m not over there anymore. But you can still see my icon and see what I thought about the world years ago.
Bacon: You’ve not erased them all. You’re not running for office yet, it seems like.
Phelps: Yeah, that’s right. I haven’t nuked it.
Bacon: Professor Phelps, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.
Phelps: Thanks for having me.
Bacon: Bye-bye.
