SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
minneapolis
Frey Defeats Democratic Socialist Fateh to Win Third Term as Minneapolis Mayor
“They may have won this race, but we have changed the narrative about what kind of city Minneapolis can be,” Omar Fateh said.
Nov 05, 2025
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey fended off a challenge from democratic socialist Omar Fateh to secure a third term by winning enough support in the second round of the city's ranked-choice voting system.
City election officials declared Frey, a Democrat, the winner Wednesday morning after tabulating second- and subsequent-choice votes. Frey won 42% of first-choice votes, followed by Fateh with 32%, former pastor DeWayne Davis with 14%, and entrepreneur Jazz Hampton with 10%.
Fateh—a Democratic state senator and son of Somali immigrants—congratulated Frey on his victory.
“They may have won this race, but we have changed the narrative about what kind of city Minneapolis can be,” he said. “Because now, truly affordable housing, workers’ rights, and public safety rooted in care are no longer side conversations; they are at the center of the narrative.”
Thank you, Minneapolis!While this wasn’t the outcome we wanted, I am incredibly grateful to every single person who supported our grassroots campaign. I’ll keep fighting alongside you to build the city we deserve. Onward.
[image or embed]
— Omar Fateh (@omarfatehmn.com) November 5, 2025 at 10:03 AM
Frey said in a statement Wednesday, “From right now through my final seconds as mayor, I will work tirelessly to make our great city a place where everyone, regardless of who you are or where you come from, can build a brilliant life in an affordable home and a safe neighborhood."
Fateh’s campaign drew comparisons with that of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, another progressive state lawmaker and democratic socialist who was bombarded with racist, Islamophobic, and xenophobic hate by prominent right-wing figures. Like Mamdani, Fateh hoped voters would focus on his record of serving his constituency in the state Legislature.
Among the dozens of bills authored by Fateh were a successful proposal to fund tuition-free public colleges and universities and tribal colleges for students from families with household incomes below $80,000, including undocumented immigrants, and another measure that exempted fentanyl test strips from being considered drug paraphernalia.
Fateh was also the chief state Senate author of a bill that would have ensured that drivers on ride-hailing applications like Uber and Lyft were paid minimum wage and received workplace protections. Although the bill was approved by both houses of the state Legislature, it was vetoed by Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Gov. Tim Walz, sparking widespread outrage among progressives.
Initially chosen over Frey by state DFL delegates, Fatah's endorsement was rescinded in August by state party officials, sparking widespread outrage from progressives including Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who condemned the "inexcusable" move, which she chalked up to "the influence of big money in our politics."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Our Journey Beyond the God of Violence
The consciousness of fear won’t go away, but our sense of what constitutes power over it—what constitutes God—must, and will, continue to evolve.
Sep 07, 2025
Who am I (now)? I’m still trying to figure this out. It’s a harder job, I fear, even than putting all my dishes, all my clothes, all my books and miscellany away. I have moved, as I’ve noted, from my house of 40 years—from the city of Chicago, where I lived for almost half a century—to a retirement community in Appleton, Wisconsin, to be near my family.
Yeah, it’s called a retirement community, not an old folks’ home or some other cynically realistic name, which is fine with me, even though, dadgummit, I ain’t retired. But as I sit at my computer today—my primary writing day—I feel the urge to retire, aka, give up, shrug, and do nothing except kill time. At the same time, a terrifying cry rips through me. I’ve gotta keep writing! Never has this cry felt more urgent.
My life is totally different now, but my journey, to face the soul of the unknown, to carve understanding from it and put it into words, continues. Yes, things are different. The unknown is larger and more profound for me than it’s ever been. and I feel, in a way, more lost than I’ve felt since childhood. So my writing has to confront a paradox. How can I presume to write with certainty if I don’t know what I’m talking about? I see only one way forward: Intensify the honesty I bring to my words—personalize it—and in the process turn certainty into complexity.
I say this as I try to transition beyond the sheerly personal columns I’ve written in the last two months, as my life has changed, and look again at the world at large, which, oh Lord, continues to run amok... from the school shooting last week in Minneapolis to the bombing and starvation and endless horror in Gaza and around the world, which “world leaders” continue to inflict on those dubbed the enemy, or children of the enemy (and thus the future enemy).
This is my world. I feel, ever more deeply, the dehumanization that is inextricably a part of the global boundaries—national and personal, political and spiritual—we have created, and which we sustain with an us-vs.-them militarism that puts the whole planet in danger. Even as I age, I cannot let myself grow dull to this. I can only scream: No-o-o-o!
And I quote part of a poem I wrote in the wake of the 1999 Columbine massacre, about a vigil gun-rights advocates held in defiance of President Bill Clinton’s visit to the site of the horror. They held signs that said “Gun Control Kills Kids” and “We Will Never Give Up Our Guns.” The poem is called “Vigil.”
...I am in awe
of the deadeye imperturbability
of the armed righteous,
who look upon the world’s suffering
and see targets.
They stand in potent prayer
with hands clasped
and arms extended,
judgment on a hairtrigger,
God in the recoil.
I believe them.
I believe they believe
in their own innocence
and the innocence of guns,
to clean, to cradle,
to cherish and employ.
What you have to understand
is the good they do,
picking off home invaders,
the furtive dark-clad,
the malevolent, the incomprehensible,
the hungry.
More innocent still
is the worship of guns
and the worship of the gods
they allow us to become...
The consciousness of fear won’t go away, but our sense of what constitutes power over it—what constitutes God—must, and will, continue to evolve. This is the hope I pray and bleed for. This is the hope I carry in my heart as I hobble through my new apartment, reminding myself that our journey isn’t over.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why We’re Gaslit on Guns and Don’t Know It
What has shaped how most Americans see guns is less the gun lobby’s money than the ideology that it’s been spreading for years.
Aug 29, 2025
“Not again,” countless Americans have said for decades after another mass shooting like the one on Wednesday, August 27 at a mass in church at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. Some experts say we should focus more on the “red flags” that potential shooters may give off so authorities could have a better chance of stopping them. Others say we need to fortify schools and deploy more armed guards to deter them.
Hardly anyone has said, however, what would work, and has been proven to reduce gun violence in every other advanced nation. To license new gun buyers and require both criminal and mental health background checks, and a permit each time they want to purchase either a semiautomatic weapon or handgun. A handful of states like New Jersey have required all these measures for decades every time to buy a handgun, and no court has ruled these regulations violate the Second Amendment.
Back in 1959, the organization that became Gallup reported 75% of Americans would not oppose requiring a permit to buy a gun. Today, however, few Americans including even gun reform advocates talk about gun permits. The reason is that Americans on both sides of our ongoing debate over guns have been gaslit and don’t know it.
There are few more powerful emotions to move groups of people at once like fear. This is where the movement for gun rights and the movement “to make America great again” meet.
The National Rifle Association (NRA), whose leadership has since been ousted over their embezzlements, and the gun industry, represented by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, have both wielded tens of millions of dollars in election campaigns. But their donations explain only part of their influence. What has shaped how most Americans see guns is less their money than the ideology that they’ve been spreading for years.
“They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away,” US President Donald Trump told reporters during his first term after a weekend of deadly shootings in a Walmart parking lot in El Paso and on a bar-lined street in Dayton. He said it after a phone conversation with the NRA’s now-disgraced leader Wayne LaPierre. The phrase is based on the idea that gun control is just a step or two away from gun confiscation and then tyranny.
This view is taken like gospel truth among the ranks and leadership of today’s Republican Party, even though it’s a myth. Gun control has never led to gun confiscation. Communist nations like the Soviet Union and Cuba declared firearms illegal under the threat of imprisonment to compel people to turn them in. Nazi Germany seized few usable firearms from Jews, as one NRA-funded author, Stephen P. Halbrook, admitted, but only in the back pages of his book, Gun Control in the Third Reich, published by a small California think tank. Democratic countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand have used buyback campaigns to voluntarily compel people to turn in semiautomatic weapons.
Democratic Party leaders and gun reform advocates are partly to blame. Despite their good intentions, they both chose to play it safe, while sidestepping the disinformation long peddled by the gun lobby. Reformers built the strongest movement for “gun sense” that this nation had ever seen after the Parkland high school shooting, which incorporated surviving students and parents from prior school shootings in Newtown and Columbine. But what its advocates failed to realize is that the movement for gun rights was even stronger.
Money on its own rarely moves people for very long. But what people may believe tends to resonate more, whether even one word of it is true. There are few more powerful emotions to move groups of people at once like fear. This is where the movement for gun rights and the movement “to make America great again” meet.
Donald Trump has flip-flopped over guns throughout his life, the last time in 2019 over better background checks after the El Paso and Dayton shootings. One doesn’t have to look back very far to find posters in online gun forums doubting his loyalty. But he seems to have proven himself to most pro-gun people today.
President Trump along with allies and followers continue to claim that he is the only one keeping tyranny in America at bay. Even as his followers, including paramilitaries like the Proud Boys and the National Front and the expanding ranks of federal immigration enforcement agents, gradually impose an armed presence loyal to the president across the land.
This is the kind of outcome that many gun rights activists have long said they feared. Considering how their alleged evidence has always been nothing more than a fairy tale may help explain why President Trump and his armed allies and troops are the ones imposing what looks like an emerging tyranny today, while our daily violence from guns goes on.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular