Waiting for the Umbrella Man or someone like him.

Who can take a city, burn it to the ground? The Umbrella Man can, at least according to the search warrant affidavit filed by Minneapolis police officer Erika Christensen last week.

The Star Tribune’s Libor Jany told me he came across Christensen’s affidavit in a routine review of new court filings. He reported on the allegations of Christensen’s affidavit in “Minneapolis police say ‘Umbrella Man’ was a white supremacist trying to incite George Floyd rioting.” The story has made waves around the world.

According to Officer Christensen, Umbrella Man is a white supremacist who set off the week of riots and arson throughout the Twin Cities by knocking out the windows at AutoZone on Lake Street at Minnehaha Avenue in south Minneapolis on May 27. Did Umbrella Man also burn the AutoZone down? I can’t tell from Libor’s story, but it was in fact torched.

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Officer Christensen’s affidavit superimposes a mythical narrative over the events as we saw them unfold. Cockburn adds, by the way, that it took him “just a single minute on Google to discover rioting and destruction from May 26 — the day before Umbrella Man supposedly kicked everything off.” Spectator USA has made Cockburn’s column freely accessible at our request.

Officer Christensen, perhaps coincidentally, is “a frequent letter-writer to the Star Tribune” and the Minneapolis police department’s “rare ‘out’ liberal,” as she described herself in this Star Tribune column last year. See Christensen’s letters to the editor here (May 8, 2017) and here (March 25, 2019).