In the Winter of ’26: Tom Morello’s Concert of Resistance

---

The weekend after federal agents murdered Renee Good, I nearly lost my shit in a Play It Again Sports parking lot while trying to explain the lyrics to Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” to my daughter. Two weeks later, and six days after they killed Alex Pretti, I begged out of work to hear Tom Morello, Rage’s former guitarist, play that same song at First Avenue with fifteen hundred other people. I’d noticed by then that time moves differently since the arrival of four thousand federal agents in the Twin Cities.

In the last two months, we’ve lurched  between violent crises while hunkering down for prolonged resistance. We’ve stood guard at schools and bus stops and tracked ICE on Signal chats, attempting to slow their actions. Much of this work is about documentation. We want to catalogue agents’ crimes as evidence for a future reckoning that may never arrive. Hope for that future competes with despair at seeing the rule of law get discarded in real time. The return of constitutional order now feels as unlikely as an overtly fascist America once did. We don’t know which way we’re falling. It’s hard to say when daily life has lost its natural pace. 

I struggled to describe this new experience of time to friends outside the Twin Cities: the exhaustion of things moving too fast and too slow with no legible pattern. The fingersnap between playing “Killing in the Name” too loud in the car with my daughter, and Morello’s Defend Minnesota! show at First Avenue gave me some words for it.

When I saw the announcement, I felt like I’d willed Morello to come, that all of Minneapolis had willed him to come. A week before, the Twin Cities staged a small but mighty general strike. Signs proclaiming “Ice Out! Statewide Shutdown” became ubiquitous on telephone poles and store windows. Fifty thousand people marched on a day when the temperature hovered around negative ten degrees. My daughter’s school was closed for the cold, as if even the weather was an ally.

Morello’s January 30 matinee performance coincided with a second general strike. It was larger than the first, but more haphazard. A friend in Los Angeles knew about it, and the editors of NY Magazine ran a piece, but I saw few fliers around town, and the only local coverage I found was on a site I’d never heard of called Minneapoli Media. Depending on where I looked, the strike was both happening and not. My coworkers debated whether to cancel our Friday meetings, with the result that some were cancelled and some were not. I felt fried. Everyone did. Social media posts increasingly reminded people in the Twin Cities to get some sleep, but they were no help. 

•

Two days before Morello’s benefit concert, Bruce Springsteen released “The Streets of Minneapolis.” Lyrics about “a city aflame ’neath an occupier’s boot,” were obviously specific to us, but they had a distancing quality, too, as they herded recent events into the corral of history. Sure, this was the people’s history of struggle against oppressors, but the song felt maudlin and too soon. Alex Pretti hadn’t been dead a week. Springsteen managed to mention him by name, bleeding in the snow. News stories at that time were in their phase of attempting to humanize Pretti. We’d learned he loved cycling and dogs. “The Streets of Minneapolis” made him a martyr, a figure whose death you wouldn’t personally have to grieve. It was a song meant to be written fifty years from now. But, in the chorus’s archaic phrasing, Springsteen did manage to put a name to the experience of the present becoming a vague and ongoing past that I feared might never end. He called it “the winter of ’26,” picking the word “six,” from a dearth of choices, to make a near rhyme with “Minneapolis.” 

Given the song’s release date, people suspected he was the “very special guest” being teased for Morello’s show. Sure enough, he walked on stage at the end and played the song. It was galvanizing to hear it in person, easy to indulge this rock god determined to rally us. When he rasped, “Oh, Minneapolis, I hear your voice crying through the bloody mist,” it felt good to be heard while we sang along, effectively hearing ourselves be heard. And this duality became a metonymy for how time kept snarling.

•

The same day Springsteen released “The Streets of Minneapolis,” Tom Homan replaced Greg Bovino as Operation Metro Surge’s gestapo field general. Taking command, Homan announced a drawdown of federal agents that didn’t reduce ICE’s violence, nor their numbers in any immediate, or knowable way. He forbade agents from engaging with observers, and they went on arresting them and holding them at gunpoint. Weeks earlier a judge prohibited the use of tear gas against peaceful protesters, but agents claimed there was no such thing as a peaceful protester, and kept using it anyway. 

All this contributed to time feeling fucked. Things happened and not. Court orders went  unimplemented. News broke without consequence. The biggest example of this arrived on February 12, when Homan announced the end of Operation Metro Surge. The next morning neighbors told me two people were abducted on the same block as my daughter’s bus stop. For more than a week after Homan’s announcement, any site that maps ICE’s activity across the nation still showed the largest cluster over the Twin Cities. This led people to suspect that the crackdown’s supposed end mirrored the false spring we enjoyed that same week—not a conclusion of this terrible season, just an invitation to let our guard down against it.

•

The winter of ’26 grinds on. Time moves fast, and slow, and bent. Mostly this is an effect of the new authoritarian gravity stretching and clumping it. The abducted experience this acutely. In the Whipple Federal Building, they sit for days, shackled, denied medical care, food, beds, and adequate warmth. According to the feds, they don’t have to provide these necessities because Whipple is a holding facility, not a detention center. Others are flown to Texas less than four hours after their abduction. 

One feature of authoritarian time is that the occupation has an announced ending but no conclusion. Federal agents remain in numbers, maybe five hundred, maybe more. Minnesota Public Radio continues to air first-person accounts of people in hiding. A college student I know who stopped coming to class after agents hassled him feels no safer about returning even as the university I work at announced a return to normal instruction. 

As agents leave and some danger subsides, we have to reckon with what they’ve done to the Twin Cities, the families broken apart, the $81 million local small businesses are estimated to have lost. We have to reckon with their reassignment elsewhere, and the fact that, despite Minnesotans’ resistance, the fascists are still terrorizing people. There is no normal way to live while this is happening. 

•

Through the occupation, I’ve been surprised by the pull toward wild hope that wells up beside the dread. Much of this hope operates on the logic that each intolerable escalation makes the regime’s implosion more imaginable. I wished sometimes that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act if that might be the overreach that led to his downfall. This was a dream of the authoritarian’s accelerations working against him toward revolutionary ends. That’s the bashful fantasy I indulged each time I blasted “Killing in the Name.” In turn, that’s what made Morello’s visit to First Avenue intoxicating—that the song I queued up while running errands would become the centerpiece of a real concert that sold out in thirty minutes to other people who must’ve been blasting that song, too. The move from individual longing to collective happening was another metonymy, this one of revolutionary time when the impossible becomes possible and the possible becomes actual. 

Coincidentally, there is precedent for outraged Twin Cities residents gathering and chanting “Killing in the Name.” In 2008, the song was sung on the state capitol lawn while the Republican National Convention took place nearby. Police refused to let Rage perform when they made a surprise appearance at a sanctioned protest concert, so Zack De La Rocha and Morello led the crowd in singing it through a bullhorn instead.  

Inside First Avenue, after three brief warm-up acts that included half of the nineties pop-punk band Rise Against stumbling through an acoustic rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Morello leapt to the stage, pointed his finger at the crowd and said:

Brothers and Sisters, if it looks like fascism, acts like fascism, dresses like fascism, talks like fascism, kills like fascism, and lies like fascism, Brothers and Sisters, it’s fucking fascism. It’s here. It’s now. It’s in my city. It’s in your city, and it must be protested, resisted, defended against, stood up to, ousted, overthrown, and driven out. By who? By you and by me.

To hear him say this led me to sincerely believe a thirty-five-year-old anthem might inspire the overthrow of white supremacy, abolish ICE, and abbreviate Trump’s presidency. For a moment, I pictured a timeline in which the general strike took hold, and the next No Kings protest gathered the sustaining energy it has so far lacked. Morello could see it too. “In this very room Prince started a revolution. Now it’s our turn,” he said.

By then the crowd had been gathered for ninety minutes. The guys in front of me spent much of that time clowning on their friend Will, who was totally baked. Will wore a brown beanie with a headlamp sewn into it, which he lit each time he travelled to the bar to fetch his friends another round of vodka sodas. After Will’s last trip, when the guy who was supposed to be their designated driver expressed uncertainty about chugging a fourth drink, their other buddy said to him, “My brother in Christ, you don’t even have to drive us that far.” Presumably they wanted this guy to drive them to Government Plaza, less than a mile away, where a protest rally would kick off immediately after the show. Were me, these guys, and the fifteen hundred of us inside First Avenue about to launch a revolution? If so, when was it going to start?

That’s what me and my new vodka-drinking comrades discussed. The one who seemed the least sauced set the odds at “two more big fuckups from Trump” before his ouster. During the show, three million Epstein files dropped. That morning, the Justice Department had arrested journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort after failing multiple times to obtain a warrant. I wanted to ask my new friend if those fuckups counted or if we still needed two more. 

We stopped talking when Morello ripped the D5 power chord that starts “Killing in the Name” and turned the mic toward the audience. The only vocals came from the crowd, and we all sang it expertly, even landing the beat of the opening, “Hunh!” For those few minutes we’d entered a portal to a different world. Maybe that weekend a million people would surround the White House and refuse to leave.

The euphoria was real but brief. When the song ended, exhaustion arrived. Morello proceeded from his script for stirring revolutionary fervor, as he’d done in Los Angeles over the summer, and elsewhere throughout Trump’s second term. He stomped through a Rage medley made from parts of “Bulls on Parade” and “Know Your Enemy,” before playing more recent songs of his own. “Hold the Line” had a part where half the crowd yelled “Union!” and the other half responded, “Power!” Other songs—“One Man Revolution,” “Soldier in the Army of Love”—sounded as if Lenny Kravitz were a didactic leftist. Between each, “ICE out now” chants erupted and fizzled.

Inside this relative ebb, Springsteen arrived and sang “The Streets of Minneapolis” in a single spotlight at the front of the stage. After that he played “The Ghost of Tom Joad” with Morello accompanying. I hadn’t heard “Tom Joad” in forever, but that’s the song I’ve thought about most since the concert. It takes the protagonist of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and imagines him as a holy spirit of the long struggle: “where there’s a fight against the blood and hatred in the air, look for me, Ma, I’ll be there.” It was hard not to conclude that Tom Morello was our Tom Joad, called to Minneapolis to enliven an alternative history and new future. At the very least, he fortified our resilience in the face of whatever comes next.

Throughout the show, upwards of one hundred thousand people—possibly twice as many as the previous Friday—were gathering in Government Plaza. When the music ended, Morello joined them. On a sidewalk outside he told an interviewer, “It’s time to arrest the mother-flipping president.” 

The fifteen hundred of us followed him, emerging into the sunlight from a music venue that no one usually exits before dark. It felt like a second day grafted over the first. I let the exodus carry me toward the larger protest, to demand that time be ours again.