Name: ICE, Minneapolis, and the right to carry | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2026-02-20T17:04:23.000Z
Duration: 38 min 12 s
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Well, we should say that the two people ice have killed in Minneapolis were both white.

Modal verbs - B1

And so, as you point out, that may be the most impressive achievement in the DEI space, in the anti DEI space of the Trump regime.

Now we've extended cultural colorblind America.

My guest today is Tyler Austin Harper, one of my favorite writers, a pretty interesting guy with a pretty unique story.

He was until very recently a professor of environmental studies at Bates College, and

he's now a full time staff writer at the Atlantic, where he writes about all kinds of things, most notably a piece about the shooting in Minneapolis, which we are going to get into today.

But before we do that, Tyler, that is my intro of you.

That is my description of who you are and what you do.

How do you describe what you do, what you do?

I'm a degenerate journalist and podcaster.

I do a podcast with Jay Kang from the New Yorker called Time to say Goodbye.

Well, what did you feel like you could do as a journalist that you couldn't do as an academic, especially one on the tenure track?

The idea of tenure is that you have all this intellectual freedom.

You could do and say and write whatever the hell you want without any worries.

What did you feel like you could do here that you couldn't do in that space?

I think I realized I was doing more and more public writing, mostly for the Atlantic, but

also New York Times and a few other places.

And over the course of my time as a professor, I realized most of the people I encountered who were intellectually curious and most of the conversations I had that were, you know, driven by a deep interest in the world and ideas were mostly coming from editors and writers and journalists, not academics.

As an academic, you are so siloed and so specialized that it's actually really hard to have have a substantive and wide ranging conversation with your colleagues because most of them are so way down some rabbit hole that there's not a familiar corpus of work or ideas you can even discuss, even within something like an English department.

You know, you'd think you would have this common lingua franca, and

to a certain extent you do, but not nearly as much as you would think.

In certain ways I was well suited for academia, but I think I get impatient too quickly.

And, you know, always have the next project I want to jump on.

I think in a previous iteration of academia, I probably would have stayed.

I think, like I said, there were a number of things going on.

Both I wanted to write more than I was writing for the public, but

also, you know, teaching at a place that charges $95,000 a year while some of your colleagues don't have health insurance, and

I don't want to paint myself as having taken the moral high road in some sort of way if I would have kept dealing with the ubiquitous exploitation, if that was my only way of getting a paycheck, but

I could do something else without making myself financially destitute.

By the way, 10 points for using the phrase lingua franca.

You, like, I didn't know who you were, and

then suddenly you were kind of everywhere, like, on Twitter.

Like, you really lunged pretty aggressively into the, you know, the discourse.

Was there something about the politics of the moment that sort of compelled you, for whatever reason, that made you feel like, I've got to get involved?

Did you feel the political gravity of the moment, or were there just other reasons tangential that that led to it?

I was employed in a very progressive academic institution and really didn't fit in with the cultural milieu there.

And it was a moment where I felt like a lot of people were speaking on my behalf in ways that, you know, really conflicted with a lot of my core beliefs about the world.

And so, yeah, I just felt really compelled.

I felt like I had something to say about that moment and that I could say it in a way that was not reactionary, that was articulated through tradition, traditional leftist universalism, you know.

So, yeah, I felt sort of compelled to intervene, but mostly out of frustration.

I was, like I said, working in a very progressive institution that embodied a lot of the trends we saw in 2020, 2021, 2022, that was using the language of justice to paper over severe and spiraling economic exploitation.

Um, so, yeah, you know, I felt like I had something to say, so I said it.

I certainly am not shy about sharing my views.

I've toned down Twitter mostly because I just really don't like.

I don't mind being yelled at at all, truly.

I just do not like being yelled at when I'm not prepared to be yelled at.

So the experience of tweeting something you think is a kind of innocuous observation, then it gets 2 million views and a lot of people are shrieking at you.

Like, that experience I didn't like so much, but yeah.

So I've toned down Twitter a bit, but certainly was in the trenches for a while.

You wrote a piece about what happened there.

Alex Preddy, an American citizen, was shot and killed in the back on the street by agent who apparently was mag dumped.

10 rounds over five seconds, which sounds very quick if you don't shoot, but

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ICE, Minneapolis, and the right to carry | The Gray Area

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