The following is a report The Masses Editorial Board received from members of People’s Defense Twin Cities.
MINNEAPOLIS – Jake Lang, a January 6 rioter, recipient of a Trump pardon, and fascist agitator has been a regular thorn in the side of the Twin Cities’ multi-national community. Lang is locally infamous for his ultra-reactionary attempts to foment hatred and national enmity against the local Somali community and to generally promote supremacist ideology, including an attempted rally in January of this year where he was met with a community-beating and balloons filled with urine.
On August 22, Lang planned to hold a demonstration he called the “N-Word March,” aiming to lash out at Minneapolis’s many national minority citizens, including the local Somali immigrant population.
Under the guise of a “free speech” event, Lang attempted to orchestrate a terror march and pogrom against the local community, just as he attempted to do earlier in the year, January, 2026.
Lang brought all sorts of hateful and provocative propaganda including signage with slurs, hired thugs dressed as ICE agents, and agitators milling through the crowd attempting to get pictures of faces and provoke bystanders into further trouble. Precisely as had happened in January, Lang found himself under the righteous fury of a community that found him, his cronies, and his ultra-reactionary bigotry unacceptable and intolerable. With even greater speed and force than before, Lang’s entourage was beset by militant local community members who delivered swift retribution to their enemies.
Much as his attempt to do the same in January, Lang fused supremacist anti-national minority rhetoric with overtly Islamophobic sentiment to target a particularly politically and economically vulnerable sector of the population. An ideological fascist emboldened by presidential pardon, Lang sought nothing less than to incite a violent confrontation with protesters, one calculated to escalate into generalized chaos that would provide cover for targeted attacks on Somali community institutions, namely the Albi restaurant in Loring Park. This action was but one stop on a broader offensive against the Midwest’s Muslim population centers, a campaign Lang himself has openly branded a “Crusade.”
A mixture of factors, primarily a robust community response and the detainment of twenty-two of Lang’s troupe of ultra-reactionary thugs in Michigan, led to the failure of this effort. Lang was beaten and chased out of his own rally, within minutes of its start, by local counter-protesters who exhibited a generalized and ideologically eclectic opposition to his hate-mongering. In fleeing, Lang and his goons pepper sprayed protesters and had roving plants in the crowd attempting to incite further action. Lang fled under the protection of the police, a qualitatively different outcome than when the National Guard and police abandoned him to his beating in his January effort.
The Minneapolis Police Department protected Lang, attempting to escort him and his private security, dressed as ICE agents, to safety. But Lang and his fellow swine could not leave well enough alone and began spraying bear mace into the crowd and even attempted to drive through the counter-protesters, at one point rolling over a cop’s ankle in the process.
Lang, overwhelmed by the rage of the hundred or so community members who turned out to oppose him, fled the scene in his truck shortly thereafter, having fully deserted the area ten minutes after his rally was set to begin.
The Minneapolis Police Department, despite having initially attempted to protect Lang, was forced by community agitation and Lang’s own belligerence to place him and his cronies under arrest. They also arrested valorous community members who attempted to defend their city, their community, and their neighbors from this hate-monger.
Mayor Frey put out a pathetic memo stating “we will protect people’s right to peacefully express themselves, even when we find what they’re saying offensive or hateful…” The framing tacitly suggests Lang’s conduct was peaceful and merely “offensive,” something the city deemed tolerable enough to protect. This laid bare, for all to see, that such tolerance means arresting those who actually stand up for the progressive values the city regime claims to uphold.
Once again that it is only the community, organized militantly against ultra-reactionary forces, who will keep us safe in the face of assault. The State authorities, the police, will only ever protect themselves and the interests of the capitalist-imperialist ruling class. A man who managed to block Lang and drive him away is forced to resort to a GoFundMe for medical and legal fees he never should have had to pay, arrested for the crime of defending his community from this blatantly ultra-reactionary hate-mongering.
This robust response from many within our city gives us heart, hope, and inspiration that the masses, those politically-organizationally advanced and novice, have the heart and willingness to fight oppression and exploitation within their communities. It is the duty of class conscious revolutionary activists to combat oppression in all its forms, to see the energies of the masses sharpened and organized into premier weapons of class struggle, such as neighborhood defense units, ready to confront not only ultra-reactionary clowns such as Lang, but the more serious threats and violence that pervade our communities in the form of the capitalist-imperialist ruling class and its State-sponsored foot soldiers.
