madi mcvan
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madisonmcvan.bsky.social
madi mcvan
@madisonmcvan.bsky.social
970 followers 180 following 33 posts
reporter @ minnesota reformer. covering the trump admin's impact on minnesotans. texan in st. paul. DMs open. eng/esp
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January 21, 2026 at 7:22 PM
madisonmcvan.bsky.social
the best way to follow our work at the @minnesotareformer.com is to subscribe to our daily newsletter. the whole team (5 full-timers!!) takes turns writing it.

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from my newsletter this week:
I’m no historian, but having studied the rise and fall of Latin American dictators, I know that the conditions surrounding the ascent of fascism are often very specific to that time, place and culture — and conditions now are different than they were in Europe in the 1930s. But David French of the New York Times wrote today about a phenomenon first described by the German Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel, who finished his book “The Dual State” after fleeing to the U.S during WWII. I’ve been struggling to articulate to my family and friends what it’s been like to alternate between the world of immigrants and ICE observers, who face daily violations of their constitutional rights, and my daily life: grabbing a drink with friends, reading at a café, watching football. French, writing about Fraenkel, put the experience into words: “The two components of the dual state are the normative state — the seemingly normal world that you and I inhabit, where…the ‘ordinary legal system of rules, procedures and precedents’ applies — and the prerogative state, which is marked (in Fraenkel’s words) by ‘unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.’ …While we’re thankfully not yet close to the Nazi reality, you can see the emerging dual state in action in Minneapolis right now. In much of the city, life is routine. People create new businesses, enter into contracts, file litigation and make deals as if life were completely normal and the rule of law exists, untainted by our deep political divide. But if you interact with ICE, suddenly you risk coming up against the full force of the prerogative state.”
January 21, 2026 at 4:15 PM