Winter Bazaar

Six-of-the-best in the round up of what's around

Dear friends,

Here in Tennessee, we had quite the ice storm! Our house lost power for twelve hours, which was unfortunate, but had the kids at home all week, which was more problematic… They’ve been going crazy with cabin fever, but we’ve done our best to keep them entertained. The snow is gradually receding, and the icicles – some up to six-inches long – began to crash down like hail stones yesterday.

In this Winter Bazaar, I’ll be taking the usual tour of current events with six stories that capture the bizarreness of the worlds we now live in. Strap in for a bumpy ride!

1. Iranian Massacres

I have already expressed my interest in the Persian plateau, a region with a very long history, and I’ve been extremely anxious about the protests that have been going on there. However, I have struggled to find good pieces to share about this, alas. The best I can offer are these two contrasting perspectives from either side of the US political aisles, both of which express something of the issues, neither of which captures what I would wish to be said about all this.

• From the left-of-centre, Vijay Prashad writes “Six Points to Navigate the Turmoil in Iran”:

Real problems bedevil the population, but these problems are not going to be solved through a hyper-imperialist aerial bombardment by the United States and Israel. The Iranians will need to sort out their own problems. The sanctions regime and the threats of violence do nothing to allow that to happen. It is easy to say “solidarity to the Iranians” in the West, where protesters are being beaten and even killed for their support of the Palestinians and their anger at the anti-immigration policies. And somehow, it seems to be much harder to say “end the sanctions,” and therefore allow the Iranian people to breathe into their own future.

• From the right-of-centre, Nadav Eyal writes “Why Western Streets Go Silent for Iran”

Even if the current uprising does not lead to regime change; even if it is once again crushed by the regime’s brutality, the record is already clear. The failure of the clerical establishment to enable a good life for its citizens, or its well-documented role in exporting violence and terror across the region- these facts alone should have rendered the regime a pariah for anyone who claims to care about human dignity. It should have led people from all walks of life and political opinion to be enthusiastic about seeing a possible fall of a fundamentalist polity.

I fear for the Persian people, and I am disgusted at the legacy media for refusing to cover the enormous protests the Iranian diaspora have conducted. Unforgiveable.

2. ICE Watch

Meanwhile in the United States, the political flashpoint is around the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. Bad behaviour is evident more-or-less everywhere: in the bullish tactics of Federal agents from ICE and Border Patrol, in the national government’s ill-considered comments, in the local government’s refusal to allow local law enforcement to support Federal operations, and in the local citizens failure to distinguish between legitimate protest and obstruction.

• The best piece I’ve read on this topic so far is by the former Democrat political operative Van Jones: “America Isn’t Divided on ICE – It’s Divided on REALITY.” If you only read one thing on this topic, this is the one I recommend:

We can have smart immigration enforcement that’s constitutional, accountable and effective.

We can have legitimate protests that don’t put officers, bystanders or undocumented families at greater risk.

We can have both safety and freedom. Liberty and justice.

But not if we keep living in split-screen realities where your side is always perfect – and the other side is always evil.

Those shortcuts are how we lose the plot. And more importantly, that’s how we lose each other.

I’ve been on both sides of the barricade. Literally. I’ve been a protester in the streets. I’ve been in rooms with law enforcement trying to keep people safe. And here’s what I know:

This country is better than these screaming matches that dehumanize anyone who dares to disagree with “our side.”

• If you don’t know who ICE Watch are, this piece from December 2025 is effective at setting the scene:

An ICE spokesperson has confirmed that ‘Operation Metro Surge’ in the Twin Cities began Monday, Dec. 1. They’ve identified 12 men arrested so far during the action, including five originally from Somalia.

But it’s not clear how many other people may have been detained — or how long the federal crackdown is set to last. Arrest data shows that most immigrants swept up by ICE in other cities had no criminal record.

Trump’s statements this week, which critics described as “racist” and “vile,” supercharged efforts by Twin Cities advocates for immigrants. There are now decentralized Signal chats like the one that Webb was using to find the ICE agents in many parts of the Twin Cities. One Minneapolis Signal chat has over 500 members.

Users on the chats coordinate with one another to vet reports sent into a tipline, gather protesters at the scenes of arrests and organize actions like a late-night noise demonstration on Thursday at a hotel where ICE employees are reportedly staying.

• But legitimate protest shades into illegal obstruction rather easily… You may be interested in this document, “ICE Watch ‘Quick Start Tips’”, which circulated among those performing both legal protest and illegal obstruction using Signal chats to co-ordinate.

1. Without good reason, do not use your full real name as your Signal name. Create a relatively unique alias, not just initials. Instead of John Smith, use JS 862 or DogPerson (or just John, if you absolutely must)

2. Turn off phone number lookup. It is a legal risk to have it turned on. Tap on the three dots at the top right. Go to Settings, then Privacy, then Phone Number. Set “Who can see my number” and “Who can find me by number” to Nobody.

3. Do not share private/identifiable information (legal names, addresses, etc) in Signal groups. DM if needed, delete after. (Make sure to “delete for everyone.” NEVER click “delete for me.”)

4. Do not put anything into Signal you would not want read back to you by a lawyer (even in a vetted chat).

5. Only share Signal links (and this sheet) on Signal. Do not text links and do not post links on social media.

• The civil rights movements of the 1960s would have been shocked at any plan that involved such obvious attempts to avoid future legal recourse, but your prior beliefs will determine whether you think these are reasonable efforts to avoid retaliation, or tantamount to an admission of guilt to obstruction of law enforcement.

• Although I do not recommend anyone who ‘leans blue’ tries to read this piece by David Ziffer (a Republican supporter who lives in Minneapolis), I found his remarks about the background to the situation there both illuminating and harrowing:

Minneapolis is ruled by one pair of indigenous-Black gangs in the north and another pair of Somali gangs in the south. All could be easily imprisoned with a concerted effort, but nobody here even talks about such things. We have an organization called Crime Watch Mpls that monitors police radio and publishes a running log of what it hears. In a typical month it reports six to seven murders in Minneapolis. Nobody cares; nobody is interested. It’s like water dripping. A few examples:

In 2012, a five-year-old boy named Nizzel George was shot to death by a gangster while napping on a couch in a house exactly one block to the east of mine.

In 2021, six-year-old Aniya Allen was shot dead in her car while returning home from McDonald’s, presumably by stray gang bullets. Her killer is still at large because nobody’s talking.

In 2021, a store clerk named Darryl Wells, Jr. was mistaken for a gang member and brutally and repeatedly shot while trying to escape his gang killers. As with so many cases here, in order to get any sort of justice the case had to be tried in federal court (under the auspices of RICO), since our local authorities would have bent over backwards to release the murderers.

Here was the not-so-grand Minnesota public outpouring of grief for Nizzel George, which I witnessed personally as a neighbor:

That’s it. No protests. No press outrage. No grand public ceremonies. No social-media outcry. No permanent monuments in the streets.

• Lastly, the ultimate Rorschach test on this topic is this Open letter from more than 60 CEOs of Minnesota-based companies:

The recent challenges facing our state have created widespread disruption and tragic loss of life. For the past several weeks, representatives of Minnesota’s business community have been working every day behind the scenes with federal, state and local officials to advance real solutions. These efforts have included close communication with the Governor, the White House, the Vice President and local mayors. There are ways for us to come together to foster progress.

• Red-team allies read this letter as an indictment of Governor Tim Walsh, which is odd because it clearly mentions everyone involved and carefully avoids assigning blame to one party or another. The businesses are too smart to take sides on this… but they seem to be the only ones.

3. Minnesota Fraud

Why has Minnesota become such a flashpoint? It’s hard to avoid the long-running fraud story in that State, but because President Trump has now mentioned this a great many people discount the relevance of this part of the story. This is surely an error: there’s a huge scandal in Minnesota already, one that precedes the current Trump administration by several years, and the scale of the scandal continues to worsen.

• The most damning article on all this is the one that is often considered to have broken the story, written by Armin Rosen and published in County Highway during November 2025 under the title “The Shame of Our Cities: How Minneapolis-Saint Paul became the Medicaid fraud capital of the USA”:

Feinwachs’s explanation has the simultaneous flaw and virtue of condemning everyone: The DFL [Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, the Minnesota branch of the blue team] uses its Medicaid-funded money-pit to maintain the party’s patronage networks and the state’s de facto fraud-based system of government, while Republicans — the party of corporate greed rather than strictly political greed — don’t want to be stuck with the political and financial bill if the scheme collapses in some future era in which they are actually in control in Saint Paul.

• This CBS article, “Everything we know about Minnesota’s massive fraud schemes” by Jonah Kaplan and Joe Walsh (from January 5th this year) offers a more concise round up of the sordid history, which begins with prosecutions in 2021 under the Biden administration:

In 2021, federal law enforcement first probed a series of multimillion dollar fraud schemes. Those fraud schemes have led to federal charges against 92 people with 62 convicted — and counting. President Trump and other Republican lawmakers have focused attention on the state’s large Somali community, as most of the fraud defendants are of Somali descent, drawing stiff criticism from local officials, including Walz, who denounced Mr. Trump’s criticism as “vile, racist lies and slander towards our fellow Minnesotans.”

• From this piece from November 2025, Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo reported that some of the money involved in these fraud schemes was going to fund the Somalian Islamist terror group Al Shabaab, as well as drawing attention to the political power the Somali community in Minneapolis now possess:

Gaither believes the mainstream media, alongside Minnesota’s Democratic establishment, have long turned a blind eye to fraud within the Somali community. This, in turn, allowed the problem to metastasize. “The media does not want to put a light on this,” Gaither said. “And if you’re a politician, it’s a significant disadvantage for you to alienate the Somali community. If you don’t win the Somali community, you can’t win Minneapolis. And if you don’t win Minneapolis, you can’t win the state. End of story.”

• From January 9th, two days after the tragic shooting of Renee Good, comes this Treasury Press Release:

Complex fraud rings in Minnesota have stolen billions of dollars from state programs for their personal enrichment in the United States and abroad. Perpetrators stole money to purchase residential and commercial real estate, luxury goods, vehicles, planes, international flights and other luxury expenses—all at the cost of the U.S. taxpayer.

• A common blue-team adjacent spin is to suggest that this focus on fraud is an attempt to persecute Trump’s political enemies. But this fraud clearly wasn’t merely invented – it is well-documented with numerous court cases, and investigations that began under the Biden administration. It looks ever more likely to lead to the indictment of prominent politicians in Minnesota. Indeed, I find it striking that (as reported by Andrew Solender at Axios) that, as of late this week, the blue team is suddenly wants to back off from the situation in Minneapolis, as per “House Democrats told by leadership not to go to Minnesota”, where the blue team leadership suggests:

“Visiting the state right now, although well intentioned, puts a burden on local resources and does not support our colleagues, the city and state government, local law enforcement and most importantly the people of Minneapolis.”

• That could be true… But it’s exceptionally rare for politicians of either stripe in the United States to miss out on political capital when it’s up for grabs. As ever, the conclusions your draw from this will differ according to your prior beliefs.

4. Alleged Dictatorships

Another political Rorschach test is President Trump himself. In this regard, I appreciated Niall Ferguson’s deflationary remarks in The Times about this, under the heading “No, liberals, Donald Trump’s US is far from a dictatorship”:

Yes, since his second inauguration Trump has cited emergency powers in about three dozen orders and memoranda. But both Obama and Biden did the same thing; they just did it more slowly. In any case, the law courts are grappling with close to 400 cases involving the Trump administration. According to the website Just Security, of 389 cases, none has been closed in favour of the plaintiff, 25 have been blocked, 79 blocked temporarily, 20 blocked pending appeal, 20 temporarily blocked in part; 39 have had a temporary block denied in part or wholly, 34 are pending appeal, 147 are awaiting a court ruling, 22 have been closed, and just seven have been closed or dismissed in favour of the government. This is Trump’s fifth year in government. I can assure you, this was not how German lawcourts worked in 1938.

5. More Convincing Dictatorships

Meanwhile, in the African nation of Uganda, the authorities shut down the internet ahead of elections (as reported by Reuters):

Ugandan authorities cut internet access and limited mobile services across the country on Tuesday, two days before an election in which President Yoweri Museveni will stand for a contentious seventh term after four decades in power.

The Uganda Communications Commission ordered mobile service providers to shut down public internet connections from 6 p.m. (1500 GMT) on Tuesday in order to curb “misinformation, disinformation, electoral fraud and related risks”, according to a letter seen by Reuters.

You may recall my warning that thinking in terms of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ is a gift to authoritarians everywhere. It certainly has been for Uganda’s Museveni.

6. …And One From Your Truly

Speaking of authoritarian regimes, I have a grimly humorous dig at the European Union in Café Américain this morning about a proposed new European social media platform, ludicrously called ‘W’, in “W is for Wrongthink Police”:

W’s CEO Anna Zeiter (formerly of eBay) hilariously announced that “there is an urgent need for a new social media platform built, governed, and hosted in Europe. With human verification, free speech, and data privacy at its core”—as if the EU had any concept of free speech worth defending! I won’t recite anecdotes about, for instance, the marvellous freedom of expression enjoyed in Germany right now, where posting wrongthink online—even in private message channels—will get you a visit from the wrongthink police for ‘hate speech’. It’s perfectly clear already that EU ‘free speech’ describes that set of statements left over after all ‘hate speech’ is removed, while ‘hate speech’ is defined as ‘anything we don’t want to hear’, which is shading towards being just about everything.

Thoughts welcome – comments are always open to everyone for the Bazaar!