Rock Is Back! Pilllar Forum, Mpls Reach Fire Code Agreement.

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.

Pilllar of Fire (Code)

If you showed up at Pilllar Forum for the Manitou Studios showcase on Thursday night, you found the joint’s all-ages venue sadly punkless. Earlier in the day, owner Corey Bracken shared a video on Facebook stating that because Minneapolis was “not continuing to work with us on fire code” the venue would have to cancel shows indefinitely. Ticket refunds will be issued, and to cover this cost, as well as staff wages and operating expenses, a GoFundMe has been set up. Also, the cafe side is still open, so you can show some love there as well. 

When I emailed with Bracken on Friday morning, he seemed slightly more optimistic. “Council President Payne called me yesterday evening to get more information about the situation, and he followed up with the mayor,” he wrote. “At this point I have not heard back, but it has visibility to all the right people.” 

Bracken then clarified the situation. “I have no issues with the city's fire code,” he added, “but since we had been in communication and working together to get everything where it needs to be, I found it surprising that they decided to close operations seemingly out of nowhere.” 

Pilllar’s not just the only all-ages club in town. It was a bulwark in the resistance to ICE this past winter, providing warmth and beverages to patrollers and earning a mention in Rolling Stone. Here’s hoping this gets sorted out quickly so I can get back to battling autocorrect to spell the venue’s name correctly in the concert listings. 

UPDATE: Calling your City Council Member works! Sometimes, at least. Council President Elliott Payne posted this on Friday afternoon:

Trusted Trump Collaborator Thomson Reuters to Help Undermine Elections

Election fraud? Still not a real thing. But that’s not about to stop President Donald Trump from boosting repeatedly disproven claims as an excuse to fuck with our free and fair elections this November, especially if it allows his administration to target immigrants. 

For help, Trump is turning to Eagan-based enemy of personal liberties Thomson Reuters. The Department of Homeland Security, which should never have been created, is ponying up $125 million to access Thomson's databases, 404 Media reports, which will provide the feds with “peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information.” 

(Perhaps some future historian of our present dystopia can look into how a legal publishing company and a respected news corporation fused to become a clearinghouse for our personal data.)

So what will stop Trump? The Minnesota Reformer’s J. Patrick Coolican spoke with Doran Schrantz, whom he calls “one of the most influential people you’ve probably never heard of,” about that very subject. The former director of the left-leaning faith group ISAIAH is among those circulating a memo called “Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework.” 

The case the Act Free people are making is that state and local governments can’t just sort of “be” against federal election interference. They need to look precisely at how elections can be disrupted and build in protective measures. I’ll share a longer Schrantz quote that Coolican highlights:

Knowing who sits in which seat is not enough. A genuine power analysis asks: who has leverage over that person? What does it take to move or block a specific decision? Who are the allies already inside the system? What is the procedural timeline for each key decision? Who could be positioned for sabotage? What conservative or election denier lawyers are positioned to act, and when? What have you already seen play out, and what does it reveal about the network of power being utilized? This is the organizing discipline most pro-democracy coalitions skip. It is the most important thing to do first.

Hajj in the Age of Anti-Immigrant State Terror

Even if you know nothing about Islam, you may be aware of the significance of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, that Muslims are required to make during their lifetime. But as with so much in the lives of foreign-born U.S. residents, this religious practice has grown increasingly fraught because of federal anti-immigrant action.

In Sahan Journal, Viktorie Spurná and Mohamud Farah write about how fears of immigration hassles (and worse) has U.S. Muslims, especially Somalis, canceling or otherwise delaying their Hajj, as well as the shorter pilgrimages known as Umrah. 

The piece also underlines the importance of the Hajj to Muslims. “You cannot imagine how people’s lives transformed to the better after they performed Hajj,” says Imam Abdirizak Hashi of the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center in Minneapolis.

Airlines Flying Away from MSP 

Aer Lingus, which made a splashy return to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in 2024, will be discontinuing its nonstop flights to Dublin, Thrifty Traveler reports.

It’s not that the airline has anything particular against us, or that Minnesotans aren’t looking to visit a little place I like to call “the Emerald Isle,” or even that Aer Lingus parent company British Airways is pressuring the Irish air carrier from ditching routes.

No, it seems that Delta, with its global hub at MSP, “bullied” (in TT’s words) Aer Lingus off the route. Delta responded to its competitor’s incursion into MSP by adding nonstop Dublin flights of its own, and as a result, Aer Lingus was filling, on average, less than 70% of its seats. 

In other flight news, Allegiant will be cutting a third of Sun Country flights from MSP from in September. The airline, which bought out its rival in May, is blaming a pilot staffing shortage.