There is a lie we are told every winter in Minnesota, and it sounds harmless until you recognize it for what it is. The lie says this is the season to retreat. To hibernate. To shrink your life down to the warmest, smallest version of itself. Stay home. Stay quiet. Stay online. Stay isolated.
Authoritarianism loves that lie.
Which is why Big Turn Music Fest, coming to Red Wing, Minnesota on February 20–21, 2026, matters far more than most people realize.
If you’ve never heard of Big Turn, you’re not alone. It isn’t a corporate spectacle. It doesn’t scream for attention. It doesn’t parachute in with branded tents and VIP lounges. Big Turn is a two-day, multi-venue music festival that takes over downtown Red Wing every February and turns a historic Mississippi River town into a living, breathing map of sound. One wristband. Over one hundred bands. Bars, theaters, churches, basements, unexpected rooms repurposed into stages. You walk. You wander. You discover. You run into people you didn’t plan to see and hear music you didn’t know you needed.
It started in 2018 for a simple reason: Red Wing refused to let winter kill its culture. The name comes from the big bend in the Mississippi River that curves around the town, but the meaning goes deeper. A big turn away from isolation. A big turn toward community. A big turn toward the idea that culture doesn’t stop just because conditions get harsh.
That choice alone is political.
Here’s the thing polite conversations skip: fascism does not arrive all at once. It creeps in through loneliness, fear, fragmentation, and the slow erosion of public life. It thrives when people stop gathering. When neighbors stop knowing each other. When culture becomes something consumed privately instead of created collectively. Isolation isn’t a side effect. It’s the goal.
Big Turn stands directly in the way of that.
When you show up to a local music festival in the dead of winter, you are doing something quietly subversive. You are occupying public space. You are choosing proximity over paranoia. You are reinforcing the idea that community exists in real rooms, with real people, breathing the same air and reacting to the same sounds. That matters more than any think-piece will ever admit.
Now place this festival where it actually exists. Red Wing is not an abstract arts enclave floating above reality. It sits in Goodhue County, where federal immigration enforcement activity has been acknowledged. ICE has operated in the county. Local officials have stated, publicly and repeatedly, that they do not coordinate with ICE and often are not informed when federal agents conduct enforcement actions. That is the kind of environment where fear spreads quietly and fast. Where immigrant communities feel watched. Where silence becomes a survival strategy.
And silence is exactly what authoritarian power depends on.
This is why culture matters here. This is why music matters here. This is why Big Turn matters here.
Packed venues full of people laughing, listening, singing, and showing up for one another is not escapism. It is infrastructure. It is social glue. It is the kind of visible, lived solidarity that makes communities harder to intimidate and harder to fracture. You cannot scare people as easily when they know each other’s names. You cannot isolate people as easily when they are practiced at gathering.
Minnesota has been fighting fascism in the streets, in the courts, in mutual aid networks, and in the media. But it has also been fighting fascism in less obvious, equally essential ways: by refusing to let public life collapse. By insisting that joy, art, and connection are not luxuries reserved for peaceful times, but necessities during dangerous ones.
Supporting local music is part of that fight.
Local musicians are not buffered by corporate PR teams or billion-dollar platforms. They live where they play. They feel the pressure in their own neighborhoods. When you buy a wristband, tip a bartender, or stand in a crowded room listening to someone pour themselves into a song, you are keeping culture alive at the local level. You are funding voices that do not require permission to speak. You are strengthening the cultural immune system that authoritarianism tries to weaken first.
Big Turn doesn’t pretend to overthrow anything. That’s not its job. Its job is to keep the ground fertile enough that resistance can grow. Its job is to remind people what shared life feels like before fear convinces them to forget. Its job is to make winter loud, crowded, human, and inconvenient for anyone hoping people will stay home and keep their heads down.
So go.
If you’re in Minnesota, please consider going to Red Wing next weekend.. Put on your boots. Walk between venues. Talk to strangers. Support artists. Take up space. Be visible. Be human in public. That is how communities stay alive. That is how culture resists being flattened into silence. That is how Minnesota fights fascism not just with protest signs, but with presence.
Big Turn Music Fest and similar events are not distractions from the moment we’re in.
They are one of the ways we survive it.
This post has been syndicated from CLOSER TO THE EDGE, where it was published under this address.