These columns frequently describe the devastation ‘Blue state’ governance has caused, particularly in Minnesota. There’s a reason for it. My mother was born in the NorthStar state. It was where we raised our family and spent most of my broadcasting career. I represented Minnesota’s 2nd district in Congress.
But there’s also a reason I live in Florida now. And it’s the same reason so many folks from New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and California do as well.
Their home states are growing increasingly uninhabitable. I’ll spare you the footnotes and documentation here, but they are readily available on the previous posts referenced below at Jason’s Newsletter.
Blue State Madness
Tim Walz doubled down on failure by taking his show on the road and reminding voters one more time why they rejected him. But don’t look for the emasculated Governor to change his mind. In fact, Walz is even teeing things up for a third term in Minnesota.
This is my third summer in the Sunshine State (despite an annual rainy season, it really is) and that’s a pretty good time to trek back north to what will always be one of my favorite spots for a few days.
If you’re lucky, you can enjoy the hospitality of good friends, reminisce a bit and—as I’m sure most transplants to the south do as well—gauge the pace of decline in places that used to be considered quite livable.
This trip down memory lane was no different.
If anything, worse—starting with the commute past medians un-mowed for months from MSP airport toward St. Paul. From there to George Floyd Square in Minneapolis where business activity is absent and the streets dangerous, especially at night. The Minnesota Twins (whose owners did so much to promote the current state of affairs) have more day games and 6:00 o’clock starts.
Can Minnesota Be Saved?
If you ever wondered whether the people running Blue-state America are crazy, this year’s legislative session in Minnesota should remove all doubt. Still reeling from unprecedented rioting and dystopian lockdowns that killed seniors and traumatized kids, Democrats in control of state government in St. Paul have been unrelenting in their zeal to keep the chaos going.
As we highlighted over two years ago, it wasn’t always so. That’s why Minnesota deserves a special dishonorable mention. It had the ‘good life’ and let it go. One could argue the state’s long-time liberalism finally caught up with it once LBJ’s Great Society began subsidizing transplants—foreign and domestic.
But it was the one-two punch of the Floyd riots and the despotic COVID lockdowns engineered by Gov. Tim Walz that finally turned the Twin Cities into a place my mother would no longer recognize.
Which Way…Minnesota?
Even before the magnitude of recent events, blue states such as Virginia and New Mexico were moving Donald Trump’s way, yet my home state of Minnesota has remained frustratingly out of reach for GOP presidential hopefuls since 1972.
Despite the palpable carnage, the dominant population centers ignored warnings from the sane among them and doubled-down on crazy in the subsequent years. A quisling opposition only expedited things.
As I write in Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press, 2020 was a turning point.
Today, one look at the ‘house organ’ for Minnesota Democrats inadvertently tells the tale. In the business section of a random weekend edition, you’ll see that Target is finally requiring workers to show up at the office—three days a week. The Twin Ports is shuttering one of its oldest grain elevators, symbolic of Duluth’s radical indifference to commerce on the Iron Range while a rash of Twin Cities retail businesses call it quits.
The front page is no better as the City of Minneapolis ponders a new ‘wealth tax.’ The DOJ investigates Minnesota’s compliance with federal election law (a victim of COVID voting rules put in place five years ago) as well as the state Department of Human Services’ nasty habit of requiring ‘justification’ if their supervisors hire ‘nondiverse’ candidates.
A shootout in a grocery store on pg. A6 ranks behind perpetually closed freeways. The editorial page decries the state—of ‘refugees.’
Only in Minnesota.
Elections have consequences and when you look at what is the most bizarre set of elected state officials in the nation, you can see why. If you thought ‘Tampon Tim’ was bad, take a look at his Lt. Governor pictured below.
The Agenda That Dare Not Speak Its Name
The nation may have been shocked last week when Minnesota officials agreed to half-a-million dollars in ‘damages’ and the transfer of a male inmate to a female corrections facility based on the prisoner’s gender identity.
Minnesota’s congressional delegation fares no better. In Minneapolis Ilhan Omar doesn’t shy away from her brazen anti-Americanism, but her urban counterpart in St. Paul is just as extreme. And given their Democrat dogmatism, not to mention an obsession with abortion and transgenderism, Thelma and Louise (guess who?) have surely helped take the state and country over the proverbial cliff.
Combine them all and it gives unsuspecting Minnesotans the greatest collection of political misfits since the bar scene in Star Wars.
Minnesota's Thelma & Louise
We are in the midst of the greatest deterioration of living standards in memory. Unrelenting crime is gripping our cities, gasoline and grocery prices are skyrocketing, real hourly earnings are falling, fentanyl freely flows across our open border while while we go bankrupt defending others. Even life expectancy, perhaps the ultimate measure of societal…
And yet, there are places in Greater Minnesota where the original state flag flies and the Carlsons and Andersens still reside. Communities not yet ravaged by the perverse depredations of the Walz administration.
As the video above demonstrates, these are places worth saving.
Nationwide, more city dwellers are escaping the confines of urban bureaucrats and heading outstate. Unfortunately, like Colorado and Oregon, Minnesota remains a state dominated by one, large metropolitan area, despite the fact it is bleeding people.
For all the optimists who say things are about to turn the corner, there are many more who say, ‘let me know when the city councils of Minneapolis and St. Paul change hands. Not in your lifetime.’
So, for those folks, Up North will once again be a summer destination for a few days a year. It saddens me to say, I’m afraid I’m one of ‘em.
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