Like Marlon Brando, I Refuse To Accept The Award

Minneapolis has the most corrosive inferiority complex.  

Don’t get me wrong – it’s always batted above its weight, economically and culturally. 

Well, it did until a few years ago, anyway.   

But even back when Prince ruled the charts, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis dominated the nation’s dance floors and Fodor’s travel guide was calling the Twin Cities “the Athens of the 20th Century”, it was never quite enough to get Minneapolis past that crippling insecurity; in the 1980s, the city’s advertising motto was ‘The Mini-Apple” – as in, a little New York.  Minneapolis never quite figured out it was good enough just being itself.  

Local TV shows and newspapers troll the national headlines for any plausible, or not-so-plausible, tie-in with Minnesota, like a dog desperately seeking its master’s approval.  

So boy, were they happy last week.  

And I need to have a word with everyone about it. 

The Twin Cities – more specifically, the people of the Twin Cities – won an award every bit as prestigious as a modern Grammy award; a John F. Kennedy Library “Profile in Courage” award:

The people of the Twin Cities will be honored with the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for their stand against federal immigration enforcement. https://t.co/mpLfpOZXj1

— FOX 9 (@FOX9) March 19, 2026

And the local booster community is pleased as punch, I tell ya:

The John F. Kennedy Library and Museum gave Minnesotans and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell the “profile in courage” award, which has recognized presidents, first responders and heads of state:; https://t.co/p6ZZ1Avibw

Video: Kyeland Jackson/The Minnesota Star Tribune. pic.twitter.com/3kksRxay0C

— The Minnesota Star Tribune (@StarTribune) March 19, 2026

The Kennedy Library said:

The people of the Twin Cities of Minnesota will be honored with a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award® for risking their lives to protect their neighbors and immigrant community members from an unprecedented federal law enforcement operation, peacefully defending the human rights and values that serve as the foundation of our Constitutional democracy.

Well, that certainly set some homers’ legs to tingling.  

Of course, the only people who “risked their lives” were a woman who either (depending on who you choose to believe) was brutally shot by an ICE agent for no reason whatsoever, or who gave an ICE officer a reasonable fear of being run over by a deadly weapon – take your pick – and a guy who appears to have been a victim of a drastic miscommunication between Border Patrol agents in the middle of a situation deliberately made as stressful as possible by the, er, award winners.   

The rest of the “mostly peaceful” protesters were likely safer than the average Twin Citian, all in all.  

The people of the Twin Cities responded with extraordinary courage and resolve. Tens of thousands took to the streets to peacefully protest federal overreach and threats to immigrant families and constitutional protections, while others documented enforcement activity and alerted neighbors to federal agents’ presence. Faith leaders organized demonstrations, community groups built rapid-response networks, labor leaders and small businesses defended workers, and volunteers provided critical support and resources. 

They left out the bit about “making a safe place to be a drug and sex trafficker” and, of course, the main reason for all the protests, deflecting attention away from the DFL’ s colossal fraud racket.  

Across religious, racial, and political lines, a broad coalition of residents of the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs united in peaceful resistance despite violent confrontation and real personal risk, defending their neighbors’ rights and strengthening the national movement to protect American democracy.

Well, no – the only thing that went “across religious lines” was an attack on a less “progressive” church service with Don Lemon as a passenger.  

At any rate – a quick point of order:   the “award”, and much of the breathless media coverage, made it sound like the Twin Cities were “under siege” – that was literally the phrase you’d see.  The truth was a little more prosaic – the “siege” was confined to a few neighborhoods in South Minnepolis and, courtesy of the roving bands of whistle-blowing white progressive ninnies, occasionally chasing ICE out into outlying neighborhoods and the suburbs.   Most Twin Citians who aren’t stricken with “Main Character Syndrome” would likely tell you they never saw a single ICE agent and, other than the little packs of sign-waving demonstrators at strategic corners, not much of anytrhing else.  

Anyway – the award was given to, I kid you not, “the people of the Twin Cities”. 

As a person in the Twin CIties, I thank the JFK Library – but I can not in good conscience accept (my share of) this award. Indeed, on behalf of John F. Kennedy’s legacy, I reject it.  

JFK was an ardent anti-communist – and who do you think was running these demonstrations?  The Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America – the “vanguard elite” of modern American Marxism.  People who would have shoved JFK into the rhetorical wood chipper if he were alive and practicing politics today.