The Week: Unrest in Minneapolis | January 16, 2026

◼ Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Minneapolis continue to be the focus of an intense campaign of harassment meant to chase them from the city. Apologists call these agitators “legal observers” or say, as Mayor Jacob Frey does, that they are “protecting” their neighbors. But they aren’t mere observers, and they often break the law. It wouldn’t be considered admirable neighborliness if residents, say, tried to obstruct the arrest of drug dealers or car thieves. The anti-ICE campaign—which is semiorganized, involves coercive tactics and sometimes violence, and is meant to resist a lawful operation of the federal government—is insurrectionary activity. Sure enough, President Donald Trump is now threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act. It would be better if everyone de-escalated, and de-escalation should begin with progressive politicians’ telling their residents not to impede and threaten federal law enforcement agents.

◼ The Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas. They relate to testimony given to the Senate Banking Committee concerning an over-budget renovation project and come with the threat of criminal indictment. Chairman Jerome Powell’s response was blunt. He argued that this was not about his testimony or the renovation. Rather, it was “a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president.” We cannot pretend to know every detail of the renovation project, but given the Trump administration’s penchant for targeting for investigation or prosecution anyone who crosses it, Powell’s comments ring true. If this is a baseless effort at revenge or pure intimidation, it’s a disgrace, and administration officials are running away from it for good reason.

◼ The Supreme Court heard arguments challenging West Virginia and Idaho laws that limit girls’ and women’s sports to—brace yourself for this one—girls and women. With the current Court unwilling to invent transgenderism as a legally protected class, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that banning males from female sports can be sex discrimination under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title IX. But the very existence of female-only sports that exclude males is sex discrimination, which the law allows when it’s based on biological sex differences. In competitive sports, those differences are glaringly obvious and consequential. Justice Samuel Alito cut to the heart of the issue when he asked the ACLU lawyer, “What does it mean to be a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman? . . . How can a court determine whether there’s discrimination on the basis of sex without knowing what sex means for equal protection purposes?” Her response: “We do not have a definition for the Court.” That ought to be the end of the case. Unless and until federal law defines sex by something other than biology—which neither the Constitution nor the Civil Rights Act was written to do—states can apply common sense, which acknowledges elementary biology.

◼ Trump has promised to institute a one-year cap of 10 percent on credit card interest rates. In theory, this idea would probably prove popular with the public—perhaps even wildly so. In practice, it would be a disaster. Leaving aside that any such change would have to be passed by Congress rather than declared on social media, the consequences of a cap would be deleterious. Credit cards are unsecured loans, and the high interest rates they carry (which apply only to those who do not pay their bills in full and on time) are a simple reflection of risk. If those high interest rates are outlawed, the risks they reflect will not be taken. The result would be less credit for the very people whom Trump seems to believe that he is helping. Many of those people would be denied cards completely, which would force them to use other services, such as payday lenders or pawnshops. Others would have their credit limits reduced, or, if they miss enough payments, their accounts summarily canceled. There is no universe in which the government can maintain all other aspects of the status quo while capping rates. If it tries, it will engender a backlash for the ages.

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◼ Mary Peltola is running for the Senate in Alaska as a Democrat. Peltola won a special election for Alaska’s at-large House seat when Don Young died in 2022 and a full term that fall, so she is a plausible statewide candidate. But her two victories were consequences of divided Republican opposition (with Sarah Palin as the party’s leading candidate) combined with Alaska’s idiosyncratic ranked-choice voting system. In a de facto one-on-one race in 2024, she lost by two points to Nick Begich. Incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan is a harder target, having last won reelection by twelve points in 2020. But if the national environment is sour enough for Republicans, the Peltola-Sullivan race is precisely the sort that could produce an upset—one in which the votes likely won’t all be counted until weeks after Election Day. Moreover, it is a grim sign for Republicans that Democrats are getting their first choice of recruits in Senate races such as Alaska and North Carolina, while top Republican recruits passed on running in Georgia and New Hampshire. Sullivan should be favored for reelection, but the GOP can’t take this one for granted.

◼ Less than a month into his tenure, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appears to feel compelled to condemn incidents of anti-Jewish hatred, perhaps only to prove his critics wrong. Some of his strongest language was deployed in opposition to a group of protesters who descended on a Queens synagogue, where they chanted slogans expressing their outright endorsement of Hamas. “Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here,” the protesters barked in the faces of Jewish congregants. “Chants in support of a terrorist organization have no place in our city,” Mamdani wrote. He was joined in his condemnation by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Marching into a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and leading with a chant saying, ‘we support Hamas,’ is a disgusting and antisemitic thing to do,” she wrote on X. The sentiment is noble and welcome, if unacceptably belated. But these progressives should not be surprised that their anti-Israel agitation so far has led antisemites to conclude that the city is open to their vile brand of activism.

◼ In Iran, the largest outpouring of anti-regime sentiment in years culminated in an unspeakable massacre. Iranian regime officials will admit that about 2,000 to 2,500 demonstrators have been killed in clashes with security services. Humanitarian activists and Iranian expatriate networks put the number in the tens of thousands, with far more wounded in street fights with the Iranian regime’s praetorian guard. But the demonstrators have brought the Iranian theocracy to perhaps its weakest point in a generation. Trump has encouraged the protesters, promising them that “help is on the way.” Whether that will be true is unclear, as Trump has blown hot and cold on his threats. But it would be an enormous boon to our national security if this regime—which has American blood on its hands up to the elbows and was founded, in part, on anti-Americanism—falls into the dustbin of history after nearly 50 years of terror and misrule.

◼ The U.S. may have solved the mystery of “Havana syndrome,” a series of mysterious ailments that befell U.S. diplomats, military officials, and intelligence officers. According to a CNN report, the Department of Defense has been testing a device, acquired in an undercover operation, that “produces pulsed radio waves, one of the sources said, which some officials and academics have speculated for years could be the cause of the incidents.” And “although the device is not entirely Russian in origin, it contains Russian components.” In 2024, Greg Edgreen, who ran the investigation into Havana syndrome incidents for the Defense Intelligence Agency, told 60 Minutes that “this was happening to our top five, ten percent of performing officers across the Defense Intelligence Agency, and consistently, there was a Russia nexus.” That is, “there was some angle where they had worked against Russia, focused on Russia, and done extremely well.” While most of the cases were overseas, individuals located in Miami, Alexandria, and even on the grounds of the White House reported symptoms of Havana syndrome. The recovery of one of these devices represents a major intelligence coup. If, as the report suggests, either Russia or one of its allies have used this weapon to attack Americans at home and abroad, the consequences to that regime must be swift and severe.

◼ Claudette Colvin received little recognition throughout her life, but her influence on the civil rights movement was profound. Born in Montgomery, Ala., in 1939, she grew up in poverty and faced the realities of Jim Crow from her childhood. One afternoon in 1955, she was traveling home from high school on a segregated bus. When the driver demanded that she give up her seat for a white passenger, she refused. The police were called, and Colvin was subsequently convicted of assaulting an officer—charges of disturbing the peace and violating segregation laws were dropped. In 1956, she became a plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, a federal case that found that segregation on public transportation was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling, which paved the way for the broader desegregation of America’s institutions. While Rosa Parks became a historical icon for her act of defiance on a segregated bus, Colvin’s name fell into obscurity. Her life is proof that courage, however overlooked, can have extraordinary consequences. Dead at 86. R.I.P.

◼ Scott Adams was the bard of America’s disaffected, cubicle-dwelling drones. His comic strip Dilbert was unsparing in its satire of corporate America. It lampooned management fads, excessive jargon, pointless meetings, and all the rest. The strip, which gave life to multiple books and an animated series, was based on Adams’s experience working for a bank and a regional phone company. It may have been America’s last culturally important comic strip. Adams’s vision was relentlessly cynical and misanthropic. Other comics used animals to leaven their view of humanity; Adams surrounded Dilbert with Dogbert, a megalomaniacal management strategist, and Catbert, a sociopathic human resources director. Once syndicated in thousands of newspapers around the world, the comic strip was eventually canceled because of comments Adams made about black people during a YouTube live stream in 2023. After preparing for assisted suicide during a painful bout with cancer, he abandoned the plan and ultimately succumbed to the disease. Dead at 68. R.I.P.

◼ Bob Weir’s journey with the Grateful Dead was a long, strange trip. The band, which he co-founded as a teenager in the Sixties, helped propel the counterculture into the mainstream. With its traveling following, the Dead represented a strand of hippiedom that was libertarian in its distaste for law and government as well as entrepreneurial, considering that the band eventually made a business empire out of flower children, young and old. By fusing live rock music with the free-form structure of jazz, they created the template for jam bands. They also pioneered a new kind of fandom by encouraging their fans to make bootleg recordings of their shows. Weir was crucial to the Dead’s success. He was the band’s distinctive co-songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist, and he brought elements of mellow soul, country, and bluegrass to the Dead’s unique musical stew of all things Americana. Dead at 78. R.I.P. to an American original.