What Narrative Power Is Doing in Minnesota, and Beyond
By Eleonore Wesserle
The murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by ICE in Minnesota were not an anomaly or a breakdown. They were political violence made standard operating procedure through intentional narrative strategy. Claiming the field of meaning is an all too foreseeable authoritarian practice, and yet it still seems to catch those of us on the side of democracy flat-footed.
I first drafted this piece after Jonathan Ross fatally shot Good (a mile east of where I live in Minneapolis), but before ICE murdered Pretti (a mile north of where I live).
My original sentence here was: “To us in Minneapolis, the murder of Good felt less like a rupture and more like an echo.” It’s painful that choosing that word, “echo,” is tragically apt. With the execution of Pretti, that same echo resonates once more.
The government-authorized murder, the rapid institutional justification that followed, the political recalibration on the part of supposed allies, and the scramble to control the story were all resonant not only of Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd in 2020, but of every killing justified through political meaning-making. It confirms what happens when narrative clarity is postponed, when power is allowed to operate inside ambiguity, and when institutions learn that they can always explain violence after the fact.
What we are witnessing in Minnesota is the latest example: yes, it is state violence, but more insidiously, it is the use of story to make that violence feel inevitable, legitimate, and narrowly targeted, even as it harms far more people than those it claims to be aimed at. That means the danger is not only what ICE is doing on the ground. It is also that authoritarians have long held the stage to explain why the violence is justified, while the pro-democracy movement has too often allowed them to speak unchallenged.
Across history and across the globe, authoritarians justify their tactics by scapegoating specific groups loudly, relentlessly, and with malice. In the US in 2026, authoritarians favor villainizing immigrants and trans people, with Black people (and Black immigrants and Black trans people) a longstanding favorite target.
And, in the US, again and again, much of the pro-democracy movement responds to identity-based scapegoating by going quiet. The prevailing beliefs seem to be that silence is safer than engagement, that refusing to “take the bait” will prevent escalation, or that we can’t afford to unsettle non-immigrant, non-trans, or non-Black people by daring to speak to topics deemed to be away from the mainstream.
But the result of this silence is not the advancement of democracy; it is the abandonment of narrative terrain altogether. It is the pro-democracy movement ceding the territory of meaning to the loudest authoritarian voices.
When one side keeps talking and the other side stops, the story does not pause. It digs in.
Why Refutation Fails
Too often, the response to authoritarian othering is to refute the lie instead of exposing the strategy.
We say: immigrants are not criminals. Trans people are not predators. Somali and Latine communities are not fraudulent. All of that is true, but all of it backfires.
Refutation traps us inside our opponent’s frame. It treats their story as the baseline and asks us to argue within it. Worse, it reinforces the idea that these groups must be defended because they are “not that bad,” rather than because the attack itself is illegitimate.
What actually needs to be said is simpler and sharper:
These groups are targeted because attacking them helps consolidate power and money in the hands of the already wealthy and powerful. These groups are targeted to justify policies that will eventually harm anyone outside of the billionaire’s circles.
How We Keep Losing Ground We Think We’re Holding
For years, many of us have gotten better at articulating a vision. We can describe the world we want: one where people have dignity, where communities are safe, where every person, whatever their skin color or place of origin, has a say over the decisions that get made about their lives. Visioning doesn’t just matter: it is the lifeblood of hope that keeps us going. It is a north star to navigate by. It shows us what we are fighting for.
It is also insufficient on its own. (And I say this as a narrative practitioner who centers visioning.) For us to preserve, restore, and renew democracy, we must pair the offer of a better world with a clear, accessible explanation of the world that already exists, and the forces actively shaping it.
But right now, we talk about outcomes without naming causes: “Jobs were lost. Homes were lost. Lives were lost,” as though they slipped through a hole in our pockets. We name harms without naming who benefits from them. We insist something is wrong without explaining why someone is doing that wrong on purpose.
Minnesota makes the cost of that failure visible.
What the killings revealed was not a sudden expansion of state power. They revealed the absence of any widely enforced story about what that power is allowed to do, to whom, and under what moral authority. When that story is missing, institutions do not hesitate. They act, knowing legitimacy can be constructed later.
Why This Hurts Everyone (White Men, too)
One of the most persistent failures in pro-democracy messaging has been the refusal to connect this targeted harm to universal consequence.
Right now, there is growing attention in institutions across the political spectrum to the hardships white men are facing: declining wages, loss of job security, despair, addiction, isolation, suicide. That suffering is real. But the explanation being offered is deeply misleading.
White men are not struggling because they have been targeted.
They are struggling because racist, racialized rhetoric has been allowed to dismantle the social safety net that everyone relied on, including them.
For decades, authoritarians have used the racialized language of “illegals,” “welfare cheats,” and “undeserving others” to justify cutting healthcare, housing support, labor protections, disability benefits, and public investment. When MAGA says “no healthcare for illegals,” what they are actually doing is taking healthcare away from everyone: Black, white, brown, native, newcomer, documented, undocumented.
White men were told they were better, and therefore those policies would not hurt them. Too often, the pro-democracy movement allowed that lie to stand, either by refusing to contest the racial framing, or by failing to explain how these systems function universally.
The result is that white men now experience the collapse of systems they were assured were not meant for them anyway. Their suffering is real, but it is the product of racism, not its rebuttal.
Authoritarians cater to that suffering, not to solve it, but to weaponize it. They offer grievance instead of repair, salaried ICE jobs instead of solidarity. They explain decline and suffering with a clear story, while the pro-democracy movement too often hedges. They explain who deserves protection and who does not. And because the pro-democracy movement has too often treated naming these dynamics as dangerous or divisive, their version travels unchallenged.
This is how repression becomes normal: not because people are inherently cruel, but because no one else tells a clear story to explain what’s happening.
Legitimacy Is the Real Battlefield
The real narrative battle in Minnesota was never about the facts. It was about narrative legitimacy.
Almost immediately after ICE murdered Good, and again after ICE murdered Pretti, official language framed the events as procedural, lawful, tragic but justified. The familiar phrase appeared quickly: the agents were “doing their job.” That phrase is not neutral. It is a shield. It closes off moral inquiry by translating harm into routine and violence into professionalism. Once that frame takes hold, institutions are protected, procedures go unquestioned, and loss of life becomes collateral rather than consequential.
This logic shows up in Minnesota politics in concrete ways.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey issued sharp verbal condemnations of ICE enforcement in moments when national attention made silence untenable, while continuing to advance housing and policing policies that materially harm the same communities those statements claim to defend. And, since ICE murdered Pretti, Frey has made clear that he stands with ICE as an institution. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, for all his humanity, avoided naming the racialized political strategy at work in attacks on Somali communities, not because the analysis is unclear, but because naming it would require confronting the institutional legitimacy that protects those attacks.
Once legitimacy is conceded, everything else follows.
The question for organizers elsewhere is not whether something like Minnesota could happen where you live. The question is what narrative conditions already exist that would make it unsurprising if it did.
What We Have to Do Differently
The lesson from Minnesota is not more outrage; it is more meaning-making.
We cannot wait until after harm to do the narrative work. We must begin earlier in the story, before the next crisis, before the next justification. If the prevailing story says institutions are neutral and self-correcting, violence will always be framed as accidental. If certain communities’ suffering does not disrupt legitimacy, institutions learn exactly where force is safest to deploy.
If we want to preserve democracy for all of us – across skin colors, genders, zip codes, across all of our identities – we have an obligation to pair vision with explanation, aspiration with analysis, care with clarity. We cannot afford to speak only in aspirational language while refusing to name the opposition’s strategy. We cannot keep talking about the world we want without explaining why the world we have looks the way it does, and who benefits from keeping it that way.
That means saying, clearly and repeatedly:
- These attacks are intentional.
- They target communities already sidelined in US society.
- They are designed to consolidate wealth and power.
- They rely on racialized and gendered scapegoating.
- They will not stop with the first targets.
- They shatter freedom for all of us, whether mainstream or marginalized.
- And we have a much, much better offer.
We know this rhetoric works because the last time movement leaders spoke this way – MLK, Fred Hampton, Anna Mae Aquash – they created multiracial, multi-gendered coalitions powerful enough to threaten entrenched institutions, to the extent that institutions silenced their voices. The movements lived on, but the narrative power dissipated; we can regain it with practice.
State violence is enforced not only with weapons, but with stories. Until those stories are contested before the next crisis, not after, the outcome will not change. When we name and expose those stories, early, clearly, and consistently, and name the visionary stories of our own, different outcomes become possible.
Eleonore Wesserle is the Narrative Strategist & Principal at Dreams to Power.