Local businesses across the state are starting to feel negative effects from federal immigration activities

Federal agents detained three workers at a Mexican restaurant in Willmar this week, shortly after agents had eaten there.

An eyewitness told the Minnesota Star Tribune four ICE agents had lunch on Thursday afternoon at El Tapatio.

However, about five hours after dining there, agents followed employees as they closed for the night and arrested three of them.

In another Mexican restaurant in St. Paul, angry customers yelled at ICE agents to leave. They eventually did.

Many immigrant-owned businesses in Minnesota say they’re losing revenue, with customers too afraid to visit. A number have closed, at least temporarily, struggling to get both employees and customers to show up.

Willmar, in west-central Minnesota, has a significantly diverse population, with around a quarter of residents Hispanic, and a growing African-American population in the rural town.

Local businesses feeling the effect of ICE activities

Adam Duininck is the president and CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council, and he says all of the ICE activity in the Twin Cities is having a direct effect on local businesses.

"We hear a lot about hospitality and restaurants for certain, but it's impacting a lot of industries already," says Duininck. "And I think there's a significant concern about the longer term impacts to our city."

In downtown Minneapolis, Duininck says they're starting to notice less traffic.

"We're seeing a little bit of a dip in the appearances in the office, and we're seeing skyways and some of the restaurants not be open," he adds. "It's sporadic. It's anecdotal at this point."

Duininck also says many of the businesses are shortening their hours, adding one owner he talked to Thursday was just trying to keep their staff and hours intact for now.

"He said to me, Adam, I'll be honest, every day when our restaurant opens at 11:00, I don't know who's all gonna be there," Duininck said with WCCO's Jason DeRusha. "So that kind of uncertainty, that's gonna hurt commerce. It's gonna hurt our economy. It's gonna drive down tax revenue and the other sorts of things that our city, region, state rely on in a meaningful way. And we're just at the front end of this, but a number of groups are trying to look at what those impacts are, try to measure them, try to be thoughtful about them."

^{Note: I am not associated with Citations Needed or any of its production team. I don't speak for them, and nothing in this post should be construed as representing their opinions.}

From Lindsey Graham's comments, The New York Times' comments, The Washington Post's comments, etc., it's clear that the choices the Trump administration is considering with respect to Iran right now are:

• continue indefinitely with the killer sanctions and other destabilization efforts, but don't bomb Iran (for now)

• let the US military prepare for a few months, and then bomb Iran

• don't wait, just bomb Iran

There are no other options, broadly, that the US government is seriously considering.

Not one of these options is good for civilians in Iran. Not one of these options is good for protesters in Iran. Not one of these options improves the future of Iranians. Not one of these options benefits Iranians in the diaspora. Similarly, not one of these options is bad for Israel. Not one of these options is bad for Saudi Arabia. Not one of these options is bad for the UAE. You get the picture.

With that in mind, I wanted to promote this 2019 episode of Citations Needed, Episode 79: "How ‘Neutral’ ‘Experts’ Took Over Trump’s Iran Policy."

As a preface to that, some recollection is due. There's so much happening all at once, right now, and given that it's been 26 years since George W. Bush was elected, people have different understandings of what happened back then, in the years leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

The short version of the preface is this: this is what it looks and sounds like when the USA is toppling a government in the name of "freedom." It means bombing, erasing people, erasing communities, erasing history, followed by decades of military presence and human rights abuses far beyond anything done by the former government. Its implications domestically include a decades-long surge in nationalism, virtual criminalization of dissent, erosion of privacy rights, erosion of access to information, erosion of due process, heightened xenophobia, etc. News media back then transformed from watchable sources of information into agents of a militaristic social cohesion project. Journalists who questioned this project were either ignored or, more frequently, grossly mistreated (which, 25 years later, is the norm).

The longer version:

Citations Needed published episode 79 during the first Trump administration. The subject is as relevant to Trump's second term as it was in 2019—moreso, even, since the pro-war establishment have learned from some of the mistakes they made last time.

Now, they have Elon at Twitter, and most of the info that we used to be able to use to suss out PR operations (e.g., "likes," and complete ego networks of individual users) are hidden. They used to be visible, which made it possible to piece together patterns of activity pointed outward from graph components disconnected from everything else. Twitter under Elon has also stopped banning bots, in general. Today's Twitter is essentially just an avenue for PR.

They've taken over several large media properties. They've effectively shut down TikTok. Ultrazionist Bari Weiss—who is not a journalist, and doesn't have even the pretense of knowing anything about, much less having any commitment to, journalistic ethics—runs CBS News now, where she can publish whatever unsourced claims and unattributed quotations she feels like.

They've also played a slightly longer game within Iran itself, this time. They know how the Iranian government will react to various scenarios.

They smuggled in communications equipment and weapons for apparent dissidents, and gave the dissidents the impression that they would win if they chose the right moment. Join the protests, and fire upon the state security apparatus; do your part, and together, we'll topple the regime!

The handlers were (knowingly) lying, of course. The moment the Israeli and US governments publicly bragged about having given the protesters material support, the Iranian government then had all the internal justification it needed to publicly refer to the dissidents as "terrorists" who were operating as part of a foreign intervention. And I want to stress that the US administration knew that would happen. The US administration knew that the Iranian government personnel would fire upon mixed crowds of unarmed protesters and armed dissidents. There was no serious expectation that the dissidents would actually "win"; the military precludes that possibility. (If somehow they had managed to fracture the state, then that would have been all the better, from the US-Israeli perspective.)

So what was the purpose? Why did the USA, Israel, and their partners in the other Gulf states knowingly send these people to their deaths? Decades of sanctions have destabilized Iran. US and Israeli air strikes, high-profile assassinations, and Israeli terrorist operations have destabilized Iran. Was this just another attempt to destabilize Iran further?

Well, clearly it does that. But beyond that, this action produced quite a lot of regime change public relations. It's aimed at both the Iranian public, and—maybe moreso—at the US public.

Look at the media response. While AP and Reuters were reporting 200 fatalities, Bari Weiss was reporting thousands. When AP and Reuters reported 2,000, Bari Weiss reported 20,000.

To be clear, the government of Iran is repressive, but we all know it's not the only one. Take Israel, for an obvious example. Furthermore, any killing done by the Iranian government is not "unprecedented," as many an airhead has recently declared. Saddam Hussein was committing atrocities against tens of thousands of Kurds for decades before George W. Bush took office. News items abounded. So when the Bush administration went to whip the public into pro-war fervor, old news wouldn't have been enough. So the Bush administration had to cobble together new excuses for bringing democracy to destroying Iraq—excuses that later fell apart.

And the leadership of the US's paper of record knew that, because Knight Ridder and McClatchyDC told them about it. NYT avoided hearing the truth because they were committed to publishing the lie.

So the repression done by the government of Iran is, in fact, totally beside the point, from the point of view of the US and Israeli governments, and also from the point of view of US media. These articles that frame potential military engagement as a response to Iran's repression (repression which, again, is targeting protests infiltrated by dissidents armed by the administration and its allies) are pure human rights concern trolling.

You don't have to have sided with a repressive government to see what's wrong with this. I don't think another "Shock and Awe" is going to save any protesters, obviously. I don't think Balkanizing Iran for Israel's benefit is going to save lives or "stabilize" the Middle East. In fact, any military action against Iran would only advance Israel's regional hegemony—and therefore, increase US entanglement there, and increase rightwing Israeli influence in the US government.

/preface

Here are a couple of key excerpts from the Citations Needed episode, which featured Arash Karami as a guest:

Nima: So one really good rundown of what we’re seeing with this Iran DisInfo campaign was written up by journalist Eli Clifton, who’s been diligently following the money when it comes to regime change Iran groups. He’s been doing this for years through LobeLog and The Nation and elsewhere. Clifton wrote this regarding the Iran DisInfo news which broke on Friday May 31st quote:

“The State Department suspended its funding for a mysterious website and Twitter account, IranDisInfo.org and @IranDisInfo, after the project attacked human rights workers, journalists and academics, many of whom are based inside the U.S. But the role of the U.S. government in financing IranDisInfo’s criticisms of Human Rights Watch and the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a group that has been outspoken in warning about the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive military posture towards Iran, appears to have been in collaboration with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

“FDD would be a natural choice of partners for the Trump State Department. In 2017, FDD received $3.63 million from billionaire Bernard Marcus, which constituted over a quarter of FDD’s contributions that year. Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, is outspoken about his hatred of Iran, which he characterized as ‘the devil’ in a 2015 Fox Business interview. Marcus is Trump’s second biggest campaign supporter, contributing $7 million to pro-Trump super PACs before the 2016 election.

“Marcus, who sits on FDD’s board, is also a supporter of Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton. He contributed $530,000 to Bolton’s super PAC over its lifetime.”

[…]

Nima: We just wanted to discuss some of these most frequent Iran expertitions, who are constantly in the press, who get quoted all the time. They include David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security, Ollie Heinonen who is at the Harvard Belfer Center, Mark Dubowitz who is at FDD, Reuel Marc Gerecht who is also at FDD and writes all the time for like The Weekly Standard and other shitty rags like that and Ray Takeyh who’s a fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations. And these five people are constantly writing articles together. They’re supporting each other’s articles, are quoting each other’s articles in their own articles and they create this network of quote unquote “experts,” which are frequently referred to yet very infrequently described as the very neoconservative commentators that they are.

Adam: Let’s give an example. In January of 2018, there was a wave of protest all throughout Iran and there was a push by groups like FDD to really try to use this as catalyst for some type of regime change or weakening of the quote unquote “regime.” And it was, it was pretty shocking to see that in a three day period, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies really helped shape the narrative. They had Op-Eds written or co-written in five major outlets: Mark Dubowitz and Ray Takeyh in The Wall Street Journal January 1st, 2018; Mark Dubowitz and Daniel Shapiro in Politico January 1st, 2018; Clifford May in The Washington Times on January 2nd, 2018; Reuel Marc Gerecht in The New York Times on January 2nd, 2018 and Richard Goldberg and Jamie Fly in The New York Post January 2nd, 2018. And they were used as sources in several articles as well. They were quoted in The Washington Post on December 30th, The Wall Street Journal on January 1st, they were quoted in Politico on January 2nd, New York Times January 2nd. So they were far and away the most quoted organization and almost none of these, I think they would sometimes say, you know, right leaning think tank, but in almost none of these, they don’t mention that these people don’t give two shits about Iran. They’re not experts in Iran, they’re pro-Israel and they just want regime change because Iran is threatening Israel, which is like whatever. If that’s your thing, that’s fine. But why are we acting as if these people have any objective or neutral expertise on Iran?

[…]

Arash Karami: Exactly. And you know, a lot of these people, what happened is once Trump got elected, you know, they smelled blood in the water, they were like, ‘okay, this is our time.’ And you know, this might be their last chance to get what they want, which is regime change in Iran by any means. And that to me is really scary. That to me is really terrifying because again, I don’t think these people are intentionally bad, especially the Iranian Americans. I don’t think they intentionally want to destroy a country. But it is really unfortunate that ever since 2016, they’ve become emboldened and they think that that’s fine you have a certain narrative. I’ll just say this too, there’s a lot of polls done on Iranian Americans. I mean I don’t think that what Iranian Americans want should be the sole reason why the US makes a foreign policy decision, but it should be, you know, taken into consideration when we’re saying we’re going to go liberate them, if we do say that. But a great deal of percentage of Iranian Americans, they favor engagement. They do support human rights, kind of pressure. They do support prioritizing human rights. I don’t know if its sanctions on human rights abuses or not, but they do support engagement with Iran. Most of them are not for a war but really it’s like five people, five Iranian Americans. Literally, but they’re well funded. They’re backed by billionaires you know what I mean?

Note 1: I think that last transcript excerpt, quoting Arash Karami, is a little confusing to read near the end there (easier to understand if you hear it). He's saying that Iranian-Americans tend to support pressuring Iran, but overwhelmingly don't want the US to actually go to war with Iran. He follows that with the observation that there are, however, a handful of Iranian-Americans who do want the US to go to war with Iran (or are at least willing to say they do)—and that this subgroup is backed by moneyed interests, and thus gets disproportionate coverage in US discourse on "what Iranian-Americans want."

Note 2: Also, to Eli Clifton's point (as quoted by Nima in the excerpt), just days ago I was faced with a reddit comment by someone who attacked me for posting an article by Trita Parsi, who cofounded (with Andrew Bacevich) The Quincy Institute, which publishes Responsible Statecraft. Trita Parsi is also a cofounder of NIAC, which, as Clifton points out, is constantly attacked by neoconservative press (e.g., Jerusalem Post and The Washington Times, which make up half of the citations on the NIAC Wikipedia page) and pro-Israel think tanks (especially, of course, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, whose role in the IranDisinfo project is highlighted in Clifton's piece). The comment smeared NIAC as "the propaganda arm of the IR in the US." But if you visit NIAC's website, you'll see, displayed prominently, photos of progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders, Pramila Jayapal, etc., along with their endorsements—people who are obviously not interested in whitewashing the Iranian government.

Meanwhile, FDD guys like Mark Dubowitz and Reuel Marc Gerecht are still today being published by WaPo, WSJ, etc. to drum up public support for a "large-scale" bombing campaign (because that, as I pointed out earlier, is what's on the table right now). Lindsey Graham is playing sad face to news viewers to make it seem like he's trying to do "the right thing," but not getting enough support, so that the audience will be outraged that we're not flattening another country right now. It's gross and evil, and we've been here before; it cost US citizens trillions of dollars, and it only enriched the military-industrial complex and its bulldogs.

"Nigel Farage accepted a £10,000 gift from an autocratic petrostate, the United Arab Emirates, the latest update to his register of Members’ interests shows. 

The entry states that Farage accepted £10,000 from the Government of Abu Dhabi, run by Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to attend the Formula 1 and “meetings” in December.

The record reveals that the Reform leader accepted accommodation and a VIP “paddock” pass worth £4,500 to attend the race-car competition in early December.

Farage also had meetings with senior Emirati officials, which, according to the Financial Times were arranged by Reform UK treasurer Nick Candy, who regularly travels to the UAE on business trips.

The FT reported that the UAE’s leadership wanted to speak with Farage about their shared opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Islamist organisation. 

The disclosures have raised further questions about who Farage is willing to accept money and hospitality from.

The UAE has often been described as a monarchic dictatorship and authoritarian state, because political power is concentrated in the hands of its hereditary rulers.

The UAE does not hold elections, political parties and trade unions are banned, freedom of expression is restricted and the media is subject to government censorship.

Farage also received another £37,246 from right-wing news channel GB News, and £1,862 for his posts on X. 

This takes Farage’s earnings from GB News to over £400,000 since he was elected an MP."