Michael Knowles breaks down the shocking January 18, 2026 incident where dozens of anti-ICE protesters stormed Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, during Sunday worship — chanting "ICE out!" and "Justice for Renee Good" while disrupting innocent families and children in the sanctuary.
In just 5 minutes, Michael explains: Why protesters targeted this church (one pastor allegedly doubles as a top ICE official in the area), the context of escalating anti-ICE unrest after Renee Nicole Good's January 7 shooting death during an enforcement operation, Don Lemon's reported involvement with the agitators, the DOJ/FBI investigation now underway for potential federal civil rights violations, and what this means for religious freedom, Christian persecution in America, and the broader culture war against faith.
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Recently, a leftist mob in Minneapolis invaded a church, stopped the service, and harassed the Christian congregants until they were forced to leave.
Many people were shocked by the antics.
The mob in this case said that they were protesting the deportation of criminals and the enforcement of federal immigration law.
So why would they target a church?
The answer is simple.
Leftists always target the church.
That has been true going all the way back to the very origin of the political left in the French Revolution.
The term first appeared in 1789 when members of the French National Assembly divided themselves between the left and the right of the hall.
As Baron de Gouville described, We began to recognize each other.
Those who were loyal to religion and the king took up position to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts and oaths and indecencies that enjoyed free reign in the opposing camp.
Almost a quarter millennium later, not much has changed.
After the leftists won the revolution, they embarked on a campaign of dechristianization, destroying thousands of churches, looting religious property, and forcing priests and nuns to renounce their vows when they weren't being murdered en masse.
When French socialists briefly overthrew the government again and established the Paris Commune in 1871, they quickly closed all churches in the city, desecrated religious sites, and executed the archbishop along with dozens of other clergy.
Churches fared even worse after the Russian Revolution, when the Bolsheviks implemented state atheism, stole church property, shuttered over 40,000 monasteries and churches, and executed thousands of priests through particularly sacrilegious methods such as boiling in tar, the consumption of melted lead in mock Holy Communion, and crucifixion.
By that same time, communists in Mexico had long sought to destroy the church in that country.
And in 1921, an employee of the president, Luciano Perez-Carpio, infamously placed a bomb beneath the tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a then 400-year-old garment that had converted some 10 million natives to Christianity thanks to what believers considered to be a miraculous image of Mary.
The bomb exploded, but the tilma, which naturally ought to have disintegrated centuries earlier, managed to survive intact.
Even as the bomb destroyed the altar steps and bent brass candlesticks, after the smoke cleared, a twisted brass crucifix was left appearing to hug the artifact, as if to protect it.
Perhaps a second miracle.
Nonetheless, Mexican leftists eventually did succeed at closing churches, banning religious displays, and executing hundreds of priests.
A few years later, their communist cousins over in Spain unleashed their own Red Terror against Christians, destroying thousands of churches, raping nuns, and murdering upwards of 7,000 priests, monks, and nuns, often by burning them alive.
In the early days of the Spanish Civil War, leftist regime supporters posed for a photograph firing rifles at a statue of Jesus in a mock execution.
They blew up what remained of that monument with dynamite the following month.
From the end of World War II until the fall of the Berlin Wall, leftists in Central and Eastern Europe imposed atheism, sending tens of thousands of clergy to prisons and labor camps where they were frequently tortured and killed.
But all of that was child's play compared to the Chinese communists of the era who imprisoned and killed an estimated 700,000 Christians, including tens of thousands of priests and pastors and publicly executed missionaries.
In North Korea during that time, the Kim regime sent hundreds of thousands of Christians to labor camps to be tortured and starved.
In Vietnam, communists shuttered churches and imprisoned clerics.
In Cambodia, communists under Pol Pot endeavored to exterminate religion entirely as they claimed to reset history.
History which had previously been measured in the years AD, Anno Domini, the year of our Lord, resetting it to year zero.
The Cambodian communists borrowed the idea of setting the calendar to year zero from the French revolutionaries, who had abolished Christian dating and declared year one on the first Vendemière.
And how could the French left do otherwise?
Resetting History00:00:27
For years, the French had been reading Diderot, who proclaimed, quote, man will only be free when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
And Voltaire, who said of the church, crush the infamous thing.
And later, Jacques Hebert, who demanded that the National Assembly, quote, declare openly that the priests are your enemies.
Hebert would go on to lose his head in the reign of terror that he had championed.