Don’t let the made-for-Fox News spectacle of the Minnesota Occupation distract you. The most important lesson the rest of us can learn from that state’s wide and deeply spread resistance is that Minnesotans’ solidarity didn’t just spring up when Trump’s goons came to town. It was forged in nature’s annual frigid grip and a bit of isolation; these connections are not the welcome-if-tenuous threads formed during a singular crisis, they’re the carbon-steel fibers wound together by generations of consistent, need-blind aid to anyone that happens to be close by.

When I saw videos of Minneapolitans pointing and laughing at ICE officers slipping and falling on glazed sidewalks and streets, I knew the city had taken some fundamental turn against the occupation. When I heard about people pouring water in front of ICE’s vehicles to encourage nature along in the destabilization, I knew it was war.

I spent 10 years in the Twin Cities before moving back to Texas, and nothing has gone quite like I thought it would: First, there have been two big freezes. (My Texas friends always joke that I brought the weather with me; they have no idea.) Among many other things, I now feel safer in Abbott’s Texas than in Walz’s Minnesota. After Trump’s election in 2024, I worried that creeping authoritarianism would come for me in the Lone Star State. Look where the jackbooted thugs actually wound up.

Today, I have a new appreciation for the guarded sociability of the northern Midwest compared to Texans’ twangy garrulousness. In much of the country, connection can be measured by how much you have in common and how often you exchange small talk. I believe that what........

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