Greg Bovino, who was voted “most likely to run a lawless band of white nationalist secret police” in high school based on looks alone, might be out, but Minnesota is still under siege. 3,000 ICE agents continue to run rampant, and neither side of our government seems particularly interested in reining them in. It’s one thing to watch the carnage play out on a phone screen; it’s another entirely to be there. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we talk about that.
This time around, we’re joined by Ben Hanson of worker-owned media outlet MinnMax to talk about what it’s been like covering games – and just generally existing – amid ICE’s violent occupation of Minnesota. Ben tells us about the strange juxtaposition of tragedy (abandoned cars, large portions of the population terrified to leave their homes) and triumph (ordinary people working together to protect their neighbors on a previously unprecedented scale, the generally good vibes of any given protest) that characterizes Minnesotans’ daily existence.
He also explains his decision to publish a video demonstrating what ICE is doing to people in Minnesota on the YouTube channel of MinnMax, which, again, typically focuses on video games. Keep politics out of games? Kinda hard to do when politics are literally banging down your door. (MinnMax is also collaborating with Giant Bomb to host an ICE OUT charity stream today, which you should absolutely tune into.)
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that as many people as possible can hear us tell ICE to fuck off. Speaking of, in the unlikely event that an ICE agent is reading this: Fuck off.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Ben: Some of [our show ideas] are going out in Minneapolis and filming stuff on location, so to speak. And it’s like, well, we just can’t do that. It doesn’t feel safe to be recording and having fun in the streets of Minneapolis these days.
There’s smaller things. The plan was, Jacob Geller and I were going to do a reaction stream to the Super Mario Galaxy Direct that was happening on Sunday. Obviously the most important thing in the world. And then with the second murder happening on Saturday, it was an unbelievably devastating day – a tough day to try to wrap your mind around what’s happening here. Still, throughout that day I was like “I can do the Mario stream, I can do the Mario stream. I can spend ten minutes with Jacob Geller looking at Mario. That seems fine. That seems fine.” It was midnight the night before that I had to reach out to Jacob and be like “I can’t do it. It just feels disingenuous for me to be like ‘Look how cute Yoshi is!’” with “federal murder, federal murder” blinking in my mind.
Then I ended up watching the Mario movie trailer later in the day, and there’s a freaking scene in it with Luigi being scared, and some Mario enemy comes out of a cave, and Luigi panics and fires a thousand fireballs in it. Even just that connotation of somebody panicking and unloading everything they have with their weapon – not to be a complete wimp about it, but that would have hurt to stream Sunday morning and see that live with everything so prominent in my mind. So it impacts content like that in a strange way, I suppose. It’s odd when it sort of sneaks up on you like that.
Riley: Are you introducing your listeners and viewers to what’s happening and to politics, or are most of them pretty clued in?
Ben: Most of them are pretty clued in. That was definitely the goal of that standalone video: If you’re not paying attention, maybe this will get you to look at it. Maybe MinnMax has enough clout for you to give it a chance if you’re like “Well, I’m sick of the news. I just want to get away from politics. But I don’t know; if that Ben guy put this together, maybe I’ll watch it. I like his travelogues to GDC.” I don’t know what the comparison is.
I haven’t seen too many comments of “Wow, I had no idea.” But I have seen a lot of comments of “I’m gonna share this with family members and friends.” That’s impactful. It’s not that common that we’ve seen people be like “F this, stop talking about politics.” We see it every once in a while, but because I think we choose our lanes and try to have an impact, it’s coming from a place that feels like it’s necessary. The part I always like to emphasize too is just that idea of, you can say, “Stop talking about politics,” but at a certain point, this is beyond the realm of politics. When our neighbors are being dragged out of their houses, is it politics to speak up and say, “Uh, guys? We should talk about this! This is happening!”
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Luke Plunkett
