The Minneapolis Insurgency Poses A Very Serious Challenge For The Federal Government

Andrew Korybko

Folks can acknowledge that this is indeed an insurgency regardless of their opinion about it

Elon Musk shared a post by Eric Schwalm, a retired Green Beret, who argued that the unrest in Minneapolis should be considered an insurgency. For background, Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol (BP) have been tasked by Trump 2.0 with enforcing associated laws, during which time two US citizens were killed thus far in separate incidents while physically obstructing their work. The last point leads to the insurgency dimension of this unrest as explained in Schwalm’s post.

Citizen journalist Cam Higby infiltrated the Signal chats used by opponents of ICE and BP to coordinate city-wide obstruction of their activities in a scandal that he calls Signal Gate. ZeroHedge published a detailed review of Signal Gate here, which also links to posts by other citizen journalists such as “0HOUR1” and “DataRepublican (small r)” investigating these chats’ members (reportedly including local and state officials) and their donors. Their work confirms this campaign’s high degree of coordination.

From rapidly shared detailed reports about their ICE’s and BP’s law enforcement activities to license plate readings, medical aid, and charitable support for some of the participants, there’s no doubt that this campaign is professionally coordinated at a level far beyond anything hitherto seen in the US. Summer 2020’s nationwide unrest, which can be described a “Hybrid War of Terror on America” brought about through various forces’ “Syncretism of Economic Leftism & Social Fascism”, pales in comparison.

The organizational methods employed by ICE’s and BP’s opponents are based on the Color Revolution teachings of the late Gene Sharp, all of which can be read in multiple languages at his “Albert Einstein Institution”. Schwalm described the gist as building a “distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity.”

This transitional phase between a Color Revolution and an Unconventional War, which could last an indefinite length of time for strategic reasons, can be considered a form of Hybrid Warfare and was written about in my 2015 book that can be read for free or digitally purchased at Amazon. My model is applicable to summer 2020’s nationwide unrest and the latest city-wide unrest in Minneapolis, the latter of which is veritably a form of Hybrid Warfare as proven by the earlier cited citizen journalists’ work.

Regardless of one’s opinion about this latest example of Hybrid Warfare being waged by Americans against the federal government, it poses a very serious challenge for the authorities. Never before has there been such a modern, tech-savvy, and locally popular insurgency in a US metropolis. The goal is to neutralize the federal government’s authority in Minneapolis, which could lead to a domino effect in other metropolises if this insurgent network replicates its by-then successful campaign there too.

If the situation doesn’t improve, then Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act, which his team might have prepared for in principle despite Vance downplaying this scenario as suggested by their National Security Strategy’s and National Defense Strategy’s explicit focus on the American Homeland. This new era of “protest politics” is being pioneered by the Democrats, whose Republican rivals have nothing resembling their level of coordination, but if parity is ever reached, then lethal partisan clashes are likely. 

Andrew Korybko, Substack, January 27, 2026 

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