Marxism

Military intelligence officers warn: Minneapolis is an organized insurgency

29 January 2026

By Eric Schwalm, Retired Green Beret (CW4), @Schwalm5132

As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency ops—both hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populations—I’ve seen organized resistance up close.

From Anbar to Helmand, the pattern is familiar: spotters, cutouts, dead drops (or modern equivalents), disciplined comms, role specialization, and a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly.

What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest.” It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.

  • Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone.
  • Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles.
  • Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery.
  • Vetting processes for new joiners.
  • Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups).
  • Home-base coordination points.
  • Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse.

This isn’t spontaneous outrage.

This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition.

Replace “ICE agents” with “occupying coalition forces” and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s.

The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they’re trying to paralyze law enforcement in.

When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers—complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that’s already turned lethal—you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience.

You’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies:

  • stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time,
  • force over-reaction when possible,
  • maintain popular support through narrative, and
  • never present a single center of gravity.

I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society.

That should keep every thinking American awake at night.

Not because I want escalation. But because history shows these things don’t de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists and the cadre believe they’re winning the information war.

We either recognize what we’re actually looking at—or we pretend it’s still just “activism” until the structures harden and spread.

Your call, America. But from where I sit, this isn’t January 2026 politics anymore.

It’s phase one of something we’ve spent decades trying to keep off our own soil.

His post on X has over 37 million views

Excellent post.

Two things I’d like to add:

1) As the old WW2 bomber pilot saying goes “If you’re catching flak 💥, you’re over the target.” The enemy doesn’t employ this level of resources, unless there’s something to protect. There is a massive fraud and money laundering ring in Minneapolis, with ties to the Governor, his inner circle, and likely Democrat elites.

2) My mentor when I was in the military, was a retired LtCol who did 5 tours in Vietnam. He wrote much of the U.S. Army’s original COIN (Counterinsurgency) doctrine, from real experience on the ground, fighting the Viet Cong. What’s going on in Minnesota sounds just like his stories about that era.

There were infiltration forces secretly running most of the towns in South Vietnam. You’d have a “legitimate,” above-ground government, that would greet the American forces, and pretend to be friendly.

Then, you’d have the “shadow” government, hiding in the tunnels underneath the town, holding everybody else’s wives and children hostage, forcing them to play along. Those guys actually ran the show, hiding behind the “innocent” civilians, who they would TRY to get into conflict with our forces – it bolstered their recruiting efforts.

It took a long time for U.S. forces to figure out what was really going on, and towards the end of the war, they started finding these guys and rooting them out, which wasn’t difficult once you knew their tactics and doctrine.

But, it cost a lot of lives (and innocence) to learn those lessons. As terrifying as that is, this is what we are facing now, on our own soil. It’s going to be a trial by fire 🔥, no matter how it ends up.

Stephen Coughlin is former Army Major and lawyer who worked as an Intelligence Analyst on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is the founder of Unconstrained Analytics and the author of “The Left’s Strategy and Tactics To Transform America“.

This person is doing nothing more than providing an IYKYK set of observations that define an activity operating within a known architecture from someone who has both seen and lived it. (Or so it seems.) And for calling it out, he’ll be gaslit as a tin-foil hat person.

And yet, that’s exactly what’s going on – plain to see by all who understand the form.

And yet, at the senior levels of domestic LE and CI, they actually have NO comprehension of the concept of insurgency and do not appear to be able to rise to the occasion to learn. Their entire action/reaction orientation to events is pegged to crowd-control measures in environments where the players are capped at that of the ‘protester’.

And who was put in charge of these organizations?

Are we witnessing a self-imposed ‘deer-in-the-headlights’ immobilization? Does this question answer itself? Just asking to be harvested. A parody-of-parody on display.

EVERYONE knows this. All of our foes. This permanent ‘deer in the headlights’ response has to be understood in terms of the ‘support and defend’ requirements of the positions they hold.

As if the Insurgency Pyramid was simply a pithy graphic to explain what can happen in other places but never here, and yet it clearly charts what everyone sees.

Through ‘open communications,’ we are witnessing a full-scale counter-state mobilization.

F F S

Click to enlarge:

Sam Shoemate is a retired Army Intelligence Officer:

I think we’re in a hybrid between a color revolution playbook and an insurgency fueled by oppressor/oppressed sentiments.

The overall goal is the same: enable a minority to gain and consolidate total control “legally” without major bloodshed by convincing the majority they’re hopelessly outnumbered and overwhelmed.

“The concept of “pressure from above and below” (sometimes described as the “revolutionary use of pliers”) originates from a 1957 analysis by Jan Kozák, a theoretician and member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s Central Committee.”

Without delving into the entire post WWII scenario, Czechoslovakian communists conducted a soft coup in 1948 by exerting “pressure from below” through the use of rioters, strikers and protesters. They created the illusion of widespread chaos at the grassroots levels.

Communists in the government, who held democratically elected seats, came over top and applied “pressure from above” by creating laws to appease the protesters, even though it was the same group of people.

They would use “positions already held within government, parliament, ministries, courts, police, and media to enact legal changes, pass laws, appoint loyalists, and shift power incrementally toward the party.”

The idea was to squeeze the majority populace into “apathy and despair” and allow the lawmakers to make concessions to appease the rioters. This ultimately lead to communist overthrow through democratic means.

Though the precursor to the modern color revolution was rooted in communist seizure of power, post USSR color revolutions employed many of the same tactics by demonstrating against authoritarianism and fraudulent elections (see Serbia 2000, Georgia 2003 and Ukraine 2004).

While NGOs have been linked to the revolutions, “proponents of color revolutions counter that they were driven by domestic grievances and civil society, with any external aid limited to democracy promotion (e.g., election monitoring, civic education) rather than engineered takeovers.”

Modern color revolutions became popular due to the themes they used such as specific colors, flowers and “peaceful” means of government overthrow, but the concept behind them is one of a disenfranchised people who seek to throw off the reins of authoritarianism.

What we’re currently seeing in the U.S. is more akin to the “pressure from above and below” model from 1948 Czechoslovakia, as elected, sympathetic members of the government provide legitimacy to the riots and demonstrations carried out in the streets. Media cements the narrative by amplifying the messaging while often carrying scripted narratives that are repeated on every outlet by every anchor.

Many are hesitant to call it a full blown insurgency, though insurgency like methods are heavily involved in the “pressure from below” as autonomous zones are created and “protesters” take over legitimacy and sideline law enforcement, medical care, journalists and anyone else not sympathetic to their cause.

An insurgency is generally defined by a long period of time where terrorist tactics are employed such as assassinations and sabotage, and I think a valid argument can be made that many of these tactics have been employed across a national space for a decade or more.

The color revolution aspect of the resistance is employed through organizations such as BLM and No Kings, based in the oppressor/oppressed framework I mentioned earlier.

While these definitions are important and give context, there is one key factor missing from every other color revolution/coup previously mentioned: illegal immigration.

The number one priority of the Biden Administration was to flood the interior with as many foreigners as possible. By absorbing 20+ illegal immigrants, communists and progressives (working in parallel with converging interests), shored up their voting demographic for the foreseeable future. They will fight to the death to preserve it.

While grassroots AND paid actors demonstrate in the color revolution space for either their belief that Trump is an illegitimate authoritarian figure, illegal immigrants being allowed to stay, or simply because they’re paid to demonstrate, the communist NGOs and support networks creating the infrastructure and networks, plus the funding streams, are focused on government overthrow.

They’ve been working in both peaceful and violent spaces for over a decade, and communist rule is their focus. They leverage the media, their people in government and law enforcement, and the emotional ideology of their “grassroots” movements apply “pressure from above and below” with the sole purpose of overthrowing the Government of the United States.

J Michael Waller, Senior Analyst for Strategy, Center for Security Policy. Author, “Big Intel: How the CIA & FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains” (2024).

Professional organizers in the 1970s trained me as a teenager to do the stupid protest stuff like vandalism, destroying property, and creating provocations to get stomped and clubbed by National Guardsmen for the news cameras to turn people against the authorities.

We thought it was a fun adventure and enjoyed being part of an edgy “struggle” in what we had been led to believe was a righteous cause. In my case, it was anti-nuclear activism.

Those who knew what they were doing never put themselves in danger.

They trained and set up the rest of us as dupes to face the consequences. That was about 80 percent of us.

They used us to create outrage imagery, and to use our shouts and chants to intimidate political figures and the public. They used us to provoke situations that would turn the public against the police and National Guard.

We were just all-American high school kids. Harmless. Idealistic. Innocent-looking.

It was all engineered anger. PSYOP against the public and against ourselves.

When I realized that the cause wasn’t about the cause, but was about a Communist revolution against our country, I broke ranks and spent the rest of my life fighting them.

I was 16 years old at the time. Luckily I hadn’t gotten involved in any destruction or violence, but had learned enough to infiltrate and disrupt the movement until I was well into my twenties.

From that experience, I went on to infiltrate Communist guerrilla front groups, and Soviet international front organizations like the World Peace Council and disrupted their multimillion-dollar operations. This time, for Uncle Sam.

Used the enemy’s tactics against them.

Most of the rest just chose to remain dupes. That was almost 50 years ago.

The Minneapolis insurgency is nothing new. It has been evolving for decades, refined to an art form.

What about the 20 percent who were not dupes? They knew exactly what they were doing. Back then, they had supported Fidel Castro, the Weather Underground, and our Vietcong and North Vietnam Communist enemies.

Many of them are still around. Some remain sharp and militant. Others are the geriatrics you see with their “No Kings” signs, hauling out their grandchildren – or other people’s grandchildren – to train them as the fourth or fifth generation of militants. Many are still dupes.

URGENT UPDATE: I’ve never experienced anything quite like today in my life. I’ve interacted with the Cartel and have witnessed some crazy things in the desert in ‘24.

But what strikes me is how organized these agitators in Minneapolis are. They have spotters everywhere in the city and suburbs, on street corners, even 30 minutes away from downtown.

They have people at hotels that work with them and signal to them which made it making it difficult for us to lose our tail once my cover was blown. Usually I lose a tail. Not this time. We switched locations THREE times.

I recorded and posted this while leaving Wayzata, while they were STILL surveilling. We all agreed we must make the threats public ASAP, even if we had people still in the field with the hidden cams.

Earlier around noon, while @camhigby released his report on the Signal threads, I was inside what appeared to be a fully autonomous Zone. No police presence. The police were told to leave. I identified myself as Press and they said they will kill Press and will not let me leave. My skin was fully covered because it was so cold.

But because they couldn’t verify who I was, they screamed and started throwing ice bottles at us. One hit, @SKRUCHTENMMA, a marine who was with me. They patted him down like THEY were the authorities, attempting to confiscate any weapons. They were set to destroy our vehicle before we even got to it. I will have a full video report shortly.

But the bigger picture here is more important. I am angry. But not at the agitators. I find myself already angry at the people who don’t understand what we’re dealing with and will do nothing about it. When I got to the suburbs I felt like I was in a simulation.

I believe the American people need to wake up. This moment is a warning about where we’re headed. Fear pushes people to care only about their money and their families—I get it. But when fear turns inward, when self-preservation and greed replace moral courage, evil goes unchallenged. And history shows that what we ignore today will come for all of us tomorrow.

Ironically and incredibly, I see that these Communists do not fear death in the same way most good people seem to. The only thing the Communists fear is exposure itself. And that’s good news because it may be our only option.

I’m dead serious about investigating the prosecutors themselves if they don’t hold these Minnesota fraudsters and violent mobsters accountable for what they’re doing. Stay tuned for the videos.

Understand political and psychological warfare. Here’s my graduate course curriculum. (By J. Michael Waller)

Now that our country is being plunged into foreign-inspired political and psychological warfare, here’s some heavy reading.

It’s my own course curriculum. And it only scratches the surface.

Years ago, I developed and taught the only graduate-level academic program on public diplomacy, propaganda, political warfare, and psychological warfare.

I spun some of this curriculum into PSYOP training for 4th PSYOP Group and the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg.

Nobody has replicated the courses after I left the Institute of World Politics in 2013, after thirteen years as the Annenberg Professor of International Communication.

Others have cribbed heavily the syllabus, but they lacked the subject-matter and practitioner experience.

Rather than sit on the accumulated knowledge, it’s time to share it….

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