![\"MINNEAPOLIS,](\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/GettyImages-2257846117.jpg?fit=5377%2C3585\")
There is a<\/span> possible future in which the events that unfolded in Minnesota on January 23, 2026, are forgotten. The fact of the largest general strike in the state in nearly a century may be only remembered, if at all, as a big day of protests and walkouts, and no more than that.<\/p>\n In that future, the possibility of mass, coordinated, and powerful action is wiped from the public imaginary \u2014 because, within 24 hours, federal agents had killed another civilian in cold blood.<\/p>\n Donald Trump\u2019s paramilitary forces shot and killed<\/a> 37-year-old nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday morning. Like in the killing of Renee Good<\/a>, video footage taken by witnesses appears to show a brutal, close-range killing<\/a>. Eyewitnesses told<\/a> The Intercept that Pretti was on the scene acting as a civilian observer. Videos show a group of more than four masked agents wrestle him to the ground and beat him, before one shoots him multiple times.<\/p>\n The shooting \u2014 the third<\/a> in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents since Trump\u2019s deportation machine descended on Minnesota with extreme brutality in December \u2014 is an unbearable follow-up to the most extraordinary day of mass resistance to Trumpian fascism to date.<\/p>\n It is also a searing reminder as to why Friday\u2019s mass strike in Minneapolis must not be swept from our minds. Rather, it must be treated as a powerful new phase of resistance against Trump\u2019s regime \u2014 a task that can only be achieved by building on and repeating it.<\/p>\n On Friday, tens of thousands of Minnesotans braved<\/a> extreme cold to march en masse and shuttered a reported 700-plus businesses<\/a> in a daylong general strike with the support of all major unions. They protested, transported, fed, and watched over each other, an outgrowth of weeks, months, and years of community care and abolitionist resistance. Their collective actions mark a breakthrough in the fight against the American authoritarianism of our time.<\/p>\n It is only a future with mass social strikes, or general strikes, involving large-scale disruption on the immediate horizon that has the chance of stopping Trump\u2019s forces.\u00a0<\/p>\n On January 23, the Twin Cities offered a small glimpse of the sorts of work stoppages, blockades, and shutdowns that aggregated practices of collective resistance make possible.<\/p>\n The task ahead of us, in the face of the government\u2019s unending violence and cruelty, is to take up, share, and spread the practices modeled by networks in Minnesota.<\/p>\n Saturday\u2019s slaughter does not disprove the power of Friday\u2019s strike; no one was under the impression that tides had somehow turned in a day. The point is that, thanks to Minnesota\u2019s resistance, we can see how to go on.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On Friday afternoon, when people filled the downtown Minneapolis streets, it was the coldest day of the year so far: a reported minus 20 degrees, with a wind chill reaching minus 35.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m seeing icicles form on people\u2019s eyelashes out here, on mustaches, on eyebrows, from just the condensation from their own breath freezing against their own face,\u201d a video journalist reported from the ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n The day began early with dozens of protesters barricading the road outside the Whipple Detention Center, the home base<\/a> of Trump\u2019s deportation machine in Minneapolis, for over two hours.<\/p>\nPeople in the Streets<\/strong><\/h2>\n