I’m working at the table in my tiny apartment overlooking the Cincinnati skyline when three people message me, all with the same video attached. “Have you seen this?”
I watch. It opens in a familiar CorePower Yoga studio lobby in Minneapolis. Following claims that anti-ICE signs were taken down by staff, a crowd of women in yoga gear gather around two young workers, hectoring them. A couple of older women are filming, one lobbing questions in sing-song. There is snapping, shouting, and clapping from the crowd. As the employees get flustered, the mob surges in.
Oh, yeah, I’ve seen this. Not this particular scene but several like it, and all the ones that led up to it. I belonged to that exact CorePower studio for a dozen years. It’s among the myriad reasons I picked up in late 2025 and left Minneapolis, my longtime home. The internet is all agog about the shrieking yoga ladies, but nothing in that video surprises me.
In Minneapolis, it’s 2020 again. Or rather, it’s been 2020 for a long time, and it never stopped. It was only that summer that most of America began to behave this way: calling out, compelling language, ceding more and more public space to mob rule. If you live elsewhere in America, you’ll recognize the spirit of 2020 in the confrontation. “Let’s hear it, Delaney—loud and proud, baby. You want to say it? Let’s fucking say it.”
