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Recently, I discovered The Rainbow Parade in the children’s section of the Glencoe Public Library.

If you view the pictures below, you’ll find that the book contains multiple images that are explicitly sexual, including a nude woman, two men in leather BDSM gear, and more. The book also includes the message that people should “wear whatever makes them feel good, even if that’s nothing at all.”

It may seem obvious to you that this book doesn’t belong in a decent library, especially not in the reach of young, impressionable kids, but when confronted about this book, PLS Director Laurie Ortega made the following statement in an email and a letter:

If you, like me, feel that this book doesn’t belong in our libraries, there is a form you can fill out and mail to the Pioneerland Library System offices in Willmar. The PLS doesn’t make it easy to get this form (I had to ask for it at the library desk and wait quite some time for the librarian to dig it up) so I’ve made it available here as a downloadable PDF with the information for this book already filled in. You just need to print it, fill out your personal information, and mail it.

The Rainbow Parade isn’t the only book in the Glencoe Library or other PLS locations that promote degenerate sexual ideology to children, however. I’ve done previous reporting on other inappropriate books on a shelf near you. If there are any books besides The Rainbow Parade that you want the PLS to reconsider – and, more than likely, be on the record as continuing to shelve despite public concern – there is a blank version of the statement of concern form available here.

The following is a summary of the Ford Ave. feasibility report produced by the city. The full report is available here. A more thorough explanation of the project as explained at a recent open house is available here.

A more thorough description of the project based on the open house a few weeks ago is available here.

Another open house is being held at the City Center on July 14th from noon to 1:00pm and from 6:00pm to 7:00pm.

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Summary: 2027 Ford Avenue Street and Utility Improvement Project (Glencoe, MN)

This is a feasibility report prepared by SEH Inc. for the City of Glencoe, recommending full street and underground utility reconstruction on Ford Avenue, Greeley Avenue, 14th/15th/16th Streets, 18th Street (CSAH 2), plus mill-and-overlay/reclaim work on Fir Avenue, Park Street, and a new utility extension on Pryor Avenue.

Why it’s happening: The water mains, sanitary sewer, and storm sewer under these streets are more than 60 years old, nearing the end of their design life, and won’t outlast a newly rebuilt street on top of them, with some pipe undersized for current standards. On Ford Avenue and 18th Street specifically, the water main is 4-inch cast iron dating to roughly the 1940s — smaller than state health department minimums — and has had multiple breaks in recent years. The sanitary sewer on Ford and Greeley Avenues is old, vitrified clay pipe prone to leaking joints, cracking, and root intrusion.

Cost to homeowners (special assessments): The city will assess adjacent property owners for street, water, and sewer improvements using its standard per-foot rates:

• Residential reconstructed street: $160/linear foot; water main: $27/linear foot; residential water service line: $3,700 each; sanitary sewer: $20/linear foot; sanitary sewer service line: $4,200 each; residential mill & overlay: $29/linear foot; residential reclaim & overlay: $60/linear foot.

• Total estimated project cost is $14,016,000, funded by a mix of county funds, state aid, and $2,430,000 in special assessments to property owners, with the rest covered by the city and county. A specific home’s assessment total depends on frontage and which utilities are being replaced (this is broken out per-parcel in Appendix B of the report). Homeowners with lead water service lines are flagged for replacement in the assessment roll. Note these rates are estimates and will be reevaluated after the project is bid and awarded.

Timeline: This is a multi-year project:

• Design continues through 2026-early 2027, bidding in spring 2027, construction starting summer 2027, extending through 2028, with final paving in spring 2029 and an assessment hearing in fall 2028.

• A Public Hearing where residents can weigh in is scheduled for July 20, 2026, with an open house on July 14, 2026.

• During construction, driveway access will be interrupted periodically, and residents will be notified in advance of access changes, water shutoffs, and temporary parking needs.

Environmental/health notes: No major contamination or hazardous-materials findings were reported. The geotechnical work found shallow groundwater in only a couple of soil borings, generally below construction depth. The main “hazard” callouts are practical trip hazards in existing sidewalks (cracked, settled, non-ADA-compliant panels) — not environmental contamination. A stormwater infiltration basin is planned near 11th/Greeley to manage runoff into Buffalo Creek, requiring a watershed district and MPCA permit.

Noticeable before/after changes for residents:

• Greeley Avenue flips from one-way to two-way traffic (the old one-way pattern dated to a hospital entrance that no longer exists there); sidewalk shifts to the west side only, removed from the east.

• 14th, 15th, and 16th Streets: existing sidewalks will be removed and not replaced due to low pedestrian/vehicle volumes (streets stay wide enough to share with pedestrians).

• Ford Avenue: sidewalk kept on both sides from 13th–16th, but only the east side north of 16th to 18th.

• New curb, gutter, and drain tile with sump-pump connection stubs added along each reconstructed street — a convenience for homeowners with sump pumps.

• Street widths mostly stay similar, with minor changes (e.g., Ford Avenue 38–39.5 ft → standardized 38 ft).

• Larger storm pipes and a new infiltration basin should reduce the minor flooding currently seen at 16th & Ford during heavy rain.

(NOTE: AI was used to help create this summary from the full 112-page report, which is available here. To the best of my knowledge and understanding from the open house I attended and from partially reading the report, the summary is accurate and reliable.)

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On June 23rd, the Glencoe Historical Preservation Society hosted a screening of the 1985 documentary God’s Country by French filmmaker Loius Malle. In addition to hosting a lovely audience of Glencoeites, the GHPS was also hosting Justine Malle, Louis Malle's daughter, who will be in town for about two weeks doing filming and research for a follow-up to her father's documentary.

After the movie, Malle took questions from the audience, but she was more interested in asking the audience some questions of her own. Those in the room who were around during the original filming, or who knew people who were, told many heartwarming stories about what became of the Glencoe citizens featured in God's Country, as well as stories of how the film affected members of the community. One woman who used to work at the post office told of a letter that was received from Germany (where the film was relatively popular) addressed to “that young farming family in Glencoe,” which sparked a years-long friendship that spanned the Atlantic Ocean.

As a recent transplant to this city myself, I was deeply moved by this window into Glencoe's past and by the testimonies of those who have called her home much longer than me. If you missed the screening, you can watch it here for free. I highly recommend that you do so, and that you invite some neighbors to enjoy it with you. It could be a very special way to gear up for Glencoe Days, and indeed for the 250th anniversary of Independence Day.

And if you see a team of French people around town filming during Glencoe Days this year, be sure to smile for the camera. Who knows; you might just get a letter from Germany in a few years because of it.

It’s been a few months. You received my latest piece back in March, but I wrote that piece, along with the four or five preceding it, during a glut of free time I had during a layoff last November. Then I got picked up by a new employer, I was working overtime every week, and I didn’t have time to devote to writing articles for you guys anymore.

Now that I’ve started a new gig with fewer hours and more time to think, I’ve been reflecting on whether or not I’d like to continue this newsletter, and if so, in what manner. I’ve decided that, yes, I absolutely want to keep writing for you guys! But I want to do so in a more focused way.

I love writing about all kinds of things. In the past few years, I’ve posted news coverage, commentary on state, local, and national politics, religious articles, history pieces, book reviews, and even a poem or two. While I’ve enjoyed writing all of those things, and I think each piece I’ve posted here has real merit, I realize now that this project — this communication channel to a particular audience — isn’t serving any one function particularly well. I want this newsletter to be a valuable resource, not just a dumping ground for whatever I happen to be thinking about that week.

To that end, I’ve decided to rebrand this Substack as The Glencoe Notice. The overwhelming majority of my readers are from Glencoe and the surrounding area, and the articles that have gotten the most interest have been articles of local interest. That tells me that local coverage is something that most of you guys find beneficial and desirable. If devoting all of my Substack writing to local news, events, government, and culture is something that will serve and benefit the people of this town that has taken me in, then I couldn’t be happier to fulfil that need.

So, what’s going to change?

First off, all articles will be relevant to the people of Glencoe. If I write about something that is not Glencoe-specific, it will be because that topic is directly relevant for Glencoe residents (e.g. county government matters, events taking place nearby that Glencoe residents might want to attend, how a state law affects the city in particular, etc.).

Second, letters to the editor! If you become a paid subscriber and have something you want the people of Glencoe to hear, you can email it to jonahheuerwriting@gmail.com. Just keep it family friendly and under 400 words. I will post these letters or refrain from posting them according to my best judgement and discretion.

Other than that, you’ll get the same voice, the same insights, and the same hunger to write about this lovely place where God had brought me and my family — just with a little more focus. You can subscribe for free to get a post every other week in your inbox, or you can subscribe for $5/month to get weekly posts. Hopefully, as time goes on, I’ll be able to find other ways to add value to this publication for everybody in Glencoe.

I hope you’ll enjoy, and that this newsletter benefits you. And for those of you who have stuck around during my haiatus, thank you for sticking with me! It’s incredible to me that more than one hundred people have signed up to get my scribbling in their inbox. I hope you continue to enjoy it, and I hope you know that I appreciate your participation in this project.

Minnesota 1918 by Curt Brown was an accidental find for me while browsing the Minnesota history section at my local library. I’ve been diving deep into the story of settlement and early statehood of Minnesota in recent years, but had so far neglected to do any reading on more recent history. Brown’s book about the many grave trials endured by my state a hundred years ago was a simultaneously enjoyable and sobering book for me to read to begin to rectify that problem. Reading this book was a bit of a “come down” from the excitement and pride felt while learning about the conquering of the American west and the establishment of this great state, but it was moving in its own way, reminding me that shared suffering and trials have at least as much to do with the establishment and growth of a people as their shared triumphs do.

To that end, there was no shortage of shared suffering in Minnesota in the year 1918. As Brown’s subtitle suggests, the cumulative toll of WWI, the Spanish Flu, and the great fires in Cloquet and Moose Lake devastated the people of Minnesota, exacting a steep price in lives, property, and social harmony. Brown’s book is arranged as a series of episodes examining various experiences of these tragedies from many perspectives, including northern farmers and lumbermen, city doctors and nurses, recent immigrants from Germany or descendants of Germans in the southwest, various public officials including Governor Burnquist, Judge McGee, and Doctor W.W Mayo, and more.

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Of the fires in the north, Brown tells many stories through the eyes of various survivors. The pictures painted by the recollections of northern Minnesotans of the horror of the fires is vivid and dramatic. To read of women pinned under cars that crashed while trying to escape the flames, or families finding loved ones’ corpses in wells and lakes in the aftermath of the blaze, fills the gut with sympathetic pangs of grief. The reader is glad to learn of the relief efforts made on behalf of the people of Minnesota who lost everything, even in the midst of two pressing catastrophes of national concern, and is proud to read the accounts of the Minnesotans who, upon surviving, simply got to work rebuilding what was lost. The grit of our forebearers is inspiring to read of.

Of the war, and of the effects of the war in Minnesota, there is naturally a more complex story to be told. I will not attempt to retell it here, but suffice it to say that the conflicts between pro-war and anti-war political leaders in the state, the controversial acts of the Commission on Public Safety, the conflict between the Commission and German settlers in Minnesota while America was at war with Germany, and the various personalities who played out these diverse and dangerous games of power, politics, and law, were quite dramatic to read about. While the stories of the fires filled me with sympathy and pride for my fellow Minnesotans from generations past, the stories of the war and the domestic fallout in my own backyard piqued my interest in a whole new era of Minnesota history that I had not yet investigated.

Of the Spanish Flu, the stories Brown told were somber. Minnesotans got sick and died and tried to not get sick and die and tried to help others not get sick and die. Brown devotes one chapter to the efforts of Doctor W.W. Mayo and others at his hospital to fight the disease, which was interesting, but mostly the stories about the Flu were simple vignettes about men and women who lost loved ones to the horrible illness. One story that did stand out, however, was of a Minneapolis nurse. When dozens of babies who had been orphaned by the Flu were brought to her hospital, this nurse violated their safety protocols and doffed her mask and other accessories that were meant to ward of sickness. This was to make herself appear more human in an attempt to make the babies feel more comfortable with her. Then, during the night shift, she entered the pediatric ward and rocked the crying, frightened babies to sleep, one by one. She never got caught, and she never got sick.

The stories delivered by Brown about this one turbulent year in Minnesota history are well-told and compelling. This book has opened up a new world of curiosity for me about Minnesota’s history in the 20th century. If you are looking for a book that, in addition to being enjoyable on its own, may serve as a launching point into one of any number of directions of historical reading, I think you will enjoy this one.

In my latest binge of Minnesota history reading, this book brought me closer to current events than I have yet read in a book about Minnesota history, government, and politics, and it was a pleasure to get some insights into what has seemed like a unicorn during my lifetime: a successful Republican political force in statewide politics.

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I knew from the get-go that I diverge dramatically from Carlson on many questions of policy and philosophy, and that is probably the case for most Verily readers. But that doesn’t matter. This book isn’t about Carlson’s philosophy or policy opinions. This book, as the title suggests, is about political victory, and I will take lessons on that from any source for the sake of my beloved state, as should we all.

The book gives a brief introduction about Carlson’s upbringing and how that affected the political agenda he would pursue, especially regarding children and education. But the majority of the book is taken up with analyzing the main goals of his agenda across his two terms after initially winning the governorship in 1990. The authors do this analysis topic by topic, rewinding to the beginning of Carlson’s administration whenever a new policy goal is addressed and rolling forward to the end of the 90’s. The structure was easy to read and particularly fitting for a book that is more about practical politics than it is about history or biography.

The book also makes it clear that Carlson was not anywhere near the conservative wing of the Republican Party, despite some positions that would line up with that faction today. He was a fiscal hawk, but pro-abortion. He stood up to teachers unions, but was willing to spend a lot of money on schools, even while making massive cuts on the overall budget for the state and pushing for school choice. In some ways he was downright progressive, as demonstrated by the fact that he went out of his way to appoint many women and minorities into positions of power, citing reasons that sound as if they come straight from a modern corporate D.E.I statement.

But despite what some centrist Republicans today wish for more staunch conservatives to believe, Carlson’s moderate and progressive views did not, in and of themselves, make his tenure easy, especially considering the fact that the legislature was controlled by the DFL for all eight years that he held power. His success, according to the book, stemmed from his ability to build strong coalitions on an issue-by-issue basis, as well as his willingness to use every tool at his disposal to enact his will. Of particular note was Carlson’s willingness to use his veto power, which he did more than any other governor in Minnesota history. By using the veto and getting Republicans in the legislature to back him up, he was able to get much of his agenda through despite a Republican minority in the House and Senate. That is precisely the kind of lesson in wielding power that today’s Republicans need to learn.

As homeschooling increases in popularity nationwide, more and more families in McLeod County and the surrounding area are likely considering whether it is the best option for their children.

In a context where public schools around Minnesota are producing worse and worse results in basic educational benchmarks, not to mention certain religious and political concerns, many families with kids in public schools are weighing their options and looking for a way out of public school. Hopefully, these unfortunate trends will be reversed in the future and all of our public schools will be havens of excellent education, but in the meantime, there are plenty of options available to families right here in McLeod County that might make homeschooling a more realistic option than many people assume it to be.

COST

Top of mind for many McLeod parents is affordability. We are not a rich community, and some people may be tempted to think that homeschooling is unrealistic due to prohibitive costs. However, the actual cost of homeschooling is very minimal, especially for younger kids. One popular resource alone, Kahn Academy, contains countless hours of free videos, quizzes, sample questions, and interactive lessons on subjects like math, science, technology, and other subjects that often threaten to scare families away from homeschooling. As your students advance, there are many university classes that share lectures online for free. There are sites like Internet Archive where you can read thousands upon thousands of books and other materials for free. There are free curricula available online to help you get started, like this one that my wife and I are using to start out our three-year-old with pre-k at home. And in the later years, you can take advantage of the Post Secondary Enrollment Options program to enroll your kids in college classes for free while they are still juniors and seniors, enabling them to complete half of a bachelor’s degree for absolutely no tuition cost by the time they graduate high school.

If you don’t find free resources that satisfy your children’s needs, there are more upscale options for curricula and classes available for a fee, of course, but it is entirely possible for you to at least get started in the early years of your child’s education at home for little to no out of pocket cost.

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Extracurriculars and field trips will cost money, but that’s no different than it is in public or private school. And yes, there are many ways for homeschooled students to get involved in extracurriculars, whether it be through the local public school or through homeschool-specific groups. And field trips to museums, state parks, and other activities can be enjoyed for relatively low fees or no fee at all.

Even with these and other valuable resources, the homeschooling life may very well pinch the budget, especially if you have to transition from two incomes to one to keep mom at home with the kids/students. But if your family is already feeling a tug toward homeschooling, you owe it to yourselves to weigh the possibilities carefully and not dismiss anything out of hand. Many families with limited resources have managed to homeschool and will continue to do so. It’s worth it.

LOCAL GROUPS

While free or low-cost materials and classes are a huge help, the most powerful resource for those who want to succeed in homeschooling is other homeschoolers. A community of families supporting and encouraging one another in the goal of home education will always create a better result for every member of that community than would be had by each family going it alone. Luckily for families in the McLeod County area who are homeschool-curious, there are already families in the area who are homeschooling that you can get to know through a local group called Nucleus.

Nucleus is a group for students aged 3-12 years old. They meet two Fridays per month and do an additional four field trips every year. Their meetings cover a variety of subjects, with a priority on the kinds of topics and lessons that can be most difficult to accomplish alone at home. Some lessons that Nucleus leadership highlighted include a finance class, a book club, and speech.

Another particularly interesting feature of Nucleus get togethers is what they call “Expert Education Days,” where someone from the community with a unique skill or area of knowledge comes to teach the kids something that they might not have learned otherwise. So far, they have hosted lessons from a nurse, a beekeeper, a police officer, a biologist, and a 4H representative.

Groups like Nucleus that bring several homeschooling families together are one of the greatest things about homeschooling. So whether it’s Nucleus or another group like them, of which there are many, you should look into involving your children with one if you want to homeschool in McLeod County or anywhere else.

Homeschooling is no small undertaking, but it isn’t the impossible hurdle that some people think it is, and it is worth the effort. If you are considering it for your family, I hope the resources in this article will be useful to you, and that your children will receive the best possible education.

For the past ten years, there has been much conversation about borders. Mostly, we’ve talked about opening, closing, securing, or enforcing them, but lately, we’ve heard a little bit more about moving and altering them as well.

Donald Trump has recently announced exciting plans to annex Greenland and Canada and to reclaim the Panama Canal. Those proposals have got me thinking about what it would look like for not only America, but the state of Minnesota to expand her borders.

Before she attained statehood, the Territory of Minnesota covered an area nearly twice as large as she does today, including most of North Dakota and a good chunk of South Dakota. When she entered the Union, Minnesota’s holdings contracted. I say it’s time to expand once again, and we can do so in every direction.

NORTH

The Northwest Angle on the Lake of the Woods is the northernmost point in the contiguous United States. It is the reason Minnesota is called the North Star State. And yet that little patch of land is isolated from the rest of our state. By land, the Angle borders only Canada. It’s a tragedy and a shame that our Minnesotan brothers should be forced to suffer the indignity of living as practical Canadians. But rectifying this injustice would be as simple as claiming the sliver of land that separates the rest of Minnesota from the Angle. This could be done with a modest seizure of land from Manitoba so that the whole northwest shore of Lake of the Woods becomes territory of Minnesota, allowing Americans to travel to the Angle by land year round. A more ambitious solution would be to penetrate northeast and claim the entirety of Lake of the Woods. And while we’re traveling in that direction, we can continue all the way to Lake Superior, claiming all of the natural beauty south of Canadian highway 17 from Moose Lake to Thunder Bay. If we completed such an acquisition, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area could simply be the Minnesota Canoe Area, which would be much more dignified, and the Arrowhead would evolve into something more like a mighty Spearhead.

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Of course, the nature of the territory up that way with all of the various bodies of water cutting the land, any new border that would be drawn would run the risk of creating more situations like the one Angle Inlet is currently in. But those could always be solved by further acquisitions. In the worst case scenario, we could simply take the land all the way up to Hudson Bay. This would be an elegant solution that would simplify many of the otherwise worrisome details of our glorious northward expansion. But while such an expansion of Minnesota’s territory would obviously be a good and beautiful thing, it may be more reasonable and modest for now to plan on taking, in the northwest, territory up the banks of the Red River to the city of Winnipeg, and in the northeast, the shore of Lake Superior up to Thunder Bay, and all the land between these two spots, thus uniting the entireties of Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake comfortably inside the Minnesota border, as God intended.

EAST

To the east, I would not do much to molest our neighbors in Wisconsin. We already took from them when Minnesota, in her infancy, claimed the land between the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers when the Badger State first joined the Union. Our eastern neighbor needs no further great humiliation.

With Michigan, however, there is an injustice to be rectified, namely the fact that Isle Royale, which lies just off of our own North Shore and many miles away from Michigan, is claimed by the Great Mitten of the North.

While we harbor no hatred for our American brothers in Michigan, it’s hard not to notice that they have been hoarding Great Lakes shoreline for far too long. Between their mainland and the Upper Peninsula, they should have no problem with the relatively tiny loss represented by Minnesota taking Isle Royale off of their hands. And yet, why should we stop there? The Upper Peninsula and the mainland have no great love for one another. They are geographically and culturally distinct. If the UP must be the territory of some other state, why not Minnesota? Minnesota already shares more in common with the UP than Michigan does, such as Lake Superior shoreline. And with the acquisition of the UP, Minnesota would become the state with the second greatest amount of Great Lakes shoreline, although Michigan would remain number one in that respect and thus retain that pride of place. We wouldn’t want to be greedy, after all.

As for what the Yoopers would think about this change, I can’t imagine they would mind too much. Being under the territorial governance of Minnesota would be no worse than being governed by the “trolls” from under the I-75 bridge. They wouldn’t even have to see us all that much, given the distance. It would be a net gain for everyone involved.

I know some readers will think that, if the UP is leaving Michigan’s hands, it would make more sense for Wisconsin to take it, but such a notion fails to consider how amusing it would be for the UP to bounce from Michigan to Minnesota without ever being controlled by the only state in the Upper Midwest that shares a physical border with it. The opportunity is too beautiful to pass up.

SOUTH

To the south, I see no grave geographical injustices that need to be remedied. If, after completing our northern and westerly campaigns, the North Star Empire still hungers for further conquest, perhaps she could seize the northernmost row of counties from the state of Iowa to add to her own already exquisite stock of agricultural land, and perhaps she could send the odd raiding party down the Mississippi River to plunder cities like Dubuque, Galena, and perhaps even St. Louis. We may find utility in extracting resources from the states below us, but the imperial destiny of the North Star State does not lie mainly to the south.

WEST

In the direction of the Dakotas lies the most expansive opportunity for Minnesota.

When Minnesota was first incorporated as a territory in 1849, she stretched from her current eastern boundaries all the way to the Missouri River in the west. Even after her borders shrank upon entering the Union, this boundary remained partially ingrained in the identity of Minnesota, as demonstrated by General Henry Sibley’s second campaign against the Sioux Indians, the mission of which was to drive the Sioux across the Missouri River and away from Minnesota’s people forever. The land that once was Minnesota even then yearned to remain Minnesota, and it ought to be made Minnesota once again.

Such an enormous exchange of land might seem selfish on the part of Minnesota and cruel to the Dakotas, but in truth, such an alteration of borders would be a mercy to our poor western neighbors. For many decades, the Dakotas have existed in regional limbo with one foot in the Midwest and one foot in the Great Plains. With this one alteration, the schizophrenic condition in which the Dakotas have so long wallowed could at last be healed, and they could flourish and thrive with one cohesive identity long into the future of our glorious nation. Perhaps, upon being so shrunk in size, the two sister states could even merge into a single, beautiful state of Dakota, freed at last not only of regional ambiguity, but also of their present division into two separate political entities. When all of this has been considered, how could Minnesota, with her characteristic compassion, refrain from offering the charitable service of relieving her western neighbors of their cumbersome excess of territory? To refrain from the act would be the cruelest thing of all.

INTERNALLY

Even within the current borders of Minnesota, there are parcels of land that are not her own, namely eleven Indian reservations. These reservations are part of a long, overplayed myth in American history, namely that the tribes which have been conquered by the United States may still operate as independent, sovereign nations. This is absurd, and the gigantic holes in the map of the state of Minnesota, especially in our beautiful northern woodland areas, serve only to mock all parties involved. Who is benefited by these policies of pretending? What good has been done by maintaining an arbitrary wall of separation between the Indians and the United States proper? The most loving thing we as Minnesotans can do is to fold our Indian neighbors into the American project once and for all by absorbing them – and the reservations themselves – into the full, unadulterated jurisdiction of Minnesota. No more disunity. No more ugly holes in the map. Just one, vast, beautiful expanse of woods and waters and prairies.

When all is said and done, Minnesota will go from being one of the greatest states in the union to the undisputed champion of all fifty states (or of all forty-nine states, if the Dakotas decide to merge after our western acquisitions) and she will enjoy a golden age of prosperity, beauty, and magnificence.

May we all live to see the great and glorious day when the North Star shines her light from the St. Croix to the Missouri, across the Great Lakes, and deep into the forests and lakes of North America, bringing peace and civilization wherever her light may fall.

After the state of Minnesota passed a new law legalizing recreational marijuana for adults, local governments across the state were left with the task of adjusting their regulations and ordinances to comply with the new statute.

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McLeod County adopted an ordinance that is compliant with the state while being weighted heavily toward the restrictive end of the marijuana legality spectrum, limiting the number of licenses it would issue to three, the bare minimum according to the standards outlined in the state statute.

The city of Glencoe has adopted an ordinance that limits the number of licenses that may be issued to one. Hutchinson, on the other hand, does not appear to have at all limited the number of licenses it may issue.

Lester Prairie and other smaller municipalities in the county have opted to be governed by the McLeod County ordinance rather than adopting their own particular ordinances.

As things currently stand, the county ordinance controls all territory in the county except for the cities of Hutchinson and Glencoe. To the best of my understanding at the time of writing, this means that the maximum number of cannabis retailers that may exist in McLeod County is four, (one in Glencoe, three in the rest of the county) plus however many Hutchinson might permit within her own city limits. That being said, my brief correspondence with one county commissioner and some remarks from the county attorney have made it clear that there are still a lot of questions about how exactly the different layers of state and local laws surrounding cannabis will interact with one another in the future. If you have further questions after reading this article, it would be wise to reach out to your county commissioner or another county official for clarification.

It is also worth noting that, as of October, at least one permit has been granted for a cannabis growing facility in Helen Township.

In Hutchinson, MN, overlooking a beautiful spot on the Crow River, stands a handsome statue of the Little Crow, a Sioux Indian chief. The plaque beneath the monument states that Little Crow “fought for the Indian’s right to live in peace in this land.” The plaque says nothing of the bloody war waged by Little Crow and the Sioux who followed him on the people of Minnesota. The plaque makes no mention of the innocent farmers and other civilians who were the principal recipients of violence at the hands of Little Crow’s people.

Another Sioux chief relevant to the history of western Minnesota is John Other Day. Other Day, unlike Little Crow, committed to living as a farmer on his piece of land and assimilating to the customs of American civilization. Other Day, unlike Little Crow, forsook his pagan religion and, by God’s grace, converted to Christianity. And when the Sioux War of 1862 broke out on the Minnesota prairie, Other Day, unlike Little Crow, did not lead or join in the carnage. Instead, Other Day gathered up dozens of innocent whites and mixed bloods at his home and personally led them to safety, guiding them around Little Crow’s forces through the wilderness to towns like Hutchinson, Glencoe, Chaska, and all the way to St. Paul. Other Day is also honored with a memorial in Sibley County, but a much smaller and more humble one.

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I’ve written before on the subject of Americans honoring the men who occupied the land before them. Going all the way back to our first contacts, Americans have shown a particular willingness to see the best in the tribesmen with whom they would fight for centuries for control of the continent. Even in the recently retired State Seal of Minnesota, which liberal critics decried as “racist,” the Indian depicted in the design is impressive and noble, astride his horse with his weapon in his hand, a cause for awe and caution in the white farmer also depicted in the design. In short, there is a long American tradition of showing honor and respect to the people whom we have conquered. At its best, this tendency is an expression of humility and Christian charity. At its worst, however, this tendency has been warped into a kind of self-hating shame that elevates the Indians to a status of semi-divine perfection and condemns our white, Christian forefathers to the status of rapacious demons who violated an otherwise innocent and noble people.

The dichotomy between Chiefs Little Crow and Other Day exemplifies this well. On the one hand, Little Crow was a formidable leader of his people during a significant historical conflict. The Sioux Indians as a people, even the ones who clung to their pagan ways, were incredibly robust and impressive in many ways, from their strength to their courage to their knowledge of the land. There is no shortage of features of the Sioux broadly or Little Crow in particular to be commended. And yet the memorial to Little Crow in Hutchinson does not honor him for being a formidable foe with impressive qualities; it honors him as a virtuous hero who led a noble struggle against America and Americans. The Little Crow monument is one giant whip of self-flagellation against our ancestors and our heritage as Americans. You are meant to look upon his statue and feel shame for the crimes committed against the Indians, not grudging respect for a formidable, albeit finally defeated, enemy of the United States.

By contrast, while it is good that a monument to John Other Day exists to memorialize his act of selfless heroism, it is comparatively vague and does not tell any kind of story. Additionally, a nearby historical marker about the Sioux War presents the narrative as that of injustice against the Indians more than that of tragedy and triumph for the people of the United States. The marker spends many more words on the plight of the Sioux than it spends on the plight of the settlers who were killed or displaced by the violence. And it ends with a call for “understanding among diverse cultures today.”

Altogether, the monuments mentioned in this article, along with so many monuments in our state and nation, serve a purpose of shaming and discouraging Americans rather than celebrating and cherishing their heritage. Little Crow is honored as a hero of the innocent and oppressed, not as a formidable enemy whom we finally defeated. Other Day is honored for a solitary act of kindness, not as a hero and friend of the American people and the United States, nor as a beautiful example of a man who forswore his loyalties to a pagan religion and people and devoted himself to the Christian God and Christian people. The whole Sioux Uprising is remembered, not as a horror and an evil that was thankfully vanquished by Henry Sibley, but as an understandable tragedy that was mostly the fault of white Americans greedily grasping for land and treasure.

This is a sad state of affairs. It is a dishonest remembrance of the people whom our ancestors conquered, and it is an ungrateful insult to the men who built the country that we call home. In the future, I hope to see monuments erected to men like John Other Day and Henry Sibley that explicitly praise them for the deliverance of innocent settlers in the face of Indian aggression. I hope to one day live in a Minnesota that remembers her fathers with gratitude, humility, and honor, instead of shame and disgust. Without this, there will be no lasting future for our state or our nation as a whole.

And as for you, next time you hear some story about the 1862 Sioux Uprising and are tempted to feel shame and guilt for your homeland, remember Little Crow and John Other Day, and hold your head up high. Entertain no embarrassment for your heritage. Instead, give thanks for it and for the men who have defended and preserved it.

Tad Jude is running for the GOP endorsement for Minnesota Secretary of State, and on December 1st, he stopped by the McLeod County GOP meeting to give a presentation.

After the humiliations Minnesota has endured at the hands of DFL Secretary of State Steve Simon, including presiding over the scandalous swearing in of DFL House members who boycotted the first several weeks of the 2025 legislative session, Republicans in the state should have no dearth of motivation to elect a Republican to that often overlooked but crucial office. Beyond that, considering the fact that elections are overseen by the Secretary of State, voters concerned about election integrity should be eager to elect a candidate who will clean the voter rolls of ineligible voters, help usher in voter ID requirements, and crack down on fraud and insecurities in our elections.

All of that and more was part of Jude’s pitch to McLeod County Republicans. He is currently the only Republican running for Secretary of State.

Another matter that came up during the meeting was the matter of judicial elections in Minnesota. One gentleman in the McLeod County GOP is working on organizing Republicans to win elections for judges in Minnesota’s first judicial district, which covers seven counties in and around the Twin Cities metro. The problem with judicial elections is that, despite the fact that our state constitution provides for a judiciary elected by the people, in reality our judiciary is overwhelmingly appointed by the governor. What typically happens is that a sitting judge will retire before their elected term is finished, which enables the governor to appoint a replacement for the rest of that term. Then, when that term is over and the judge is up for reelection, his name has the “incumbent” label on the ballot, which is an enormous advantage, especially for the judicial elections which are much less widely participated in by the voters. This has left us with the unfortunate experience of having the overwhelming majority of judges in Minnesota having been appointed by Democrat governors Mark Dayton and Tim Walz.

Tad Jude was still present during this discussion and was asked for his perspective. As a former judge himself, Jude acknowledged that his own victory in a judicial election was made much more possible because it was an open seat with no incumbent, and he said that he would work to de-rig our judicial elections.

Whether or not more candidates join the race for Secretary of State, every Republican in Minnesota should be making a plan to replace Steve Simon so that we can undo the damage of the DFL trifecta and restore Minnesota to an orderly and reasonable state.

This day, on the eve of Thanksgiving, 
two soldiers went down in D.C.
T'was a foreign invader who shot them
just as soon as he'd shoot you or me.

No distinction is made by these monsters
so quick to shed innocent blood.
They'll as soon rape civilian daughters
as murder our millitary sons.

Yet the loathsomeness of these barbarians 
seems benign in comparison to
that of rulers who opened the floodgates
to loose them upon me and you.

Whether done for gain merely material,
or to harness political might,
it does not make the tiniest difference 
on this bloody Thanksgiving Eve night.

May the law raise a gallows, and quickly, 
for the neck of the murderous beast
who shed blood of American brothers
on the eve of our Thanksgiving feast.

And then let the scaffold be raised
to a height twice as high as before
for the necks of American traitors
who opened America's door.

May we witness – at last! – proper justice
for the men who invited the hordes.
While their toes are yet twitching above us,
we will sing praise and thanks to our Lord.

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“The Prince of Pioneers,” “First Citizen of Minnesota,” and “The King” of the North Star State; these are a few of the titles given to the subject of Nathaniel D. West’s 1889 biography of Henry Hastings Sibley, Minnesota’s first governor.

Due to the facts that The Ancestry, Life, and Times of H. H. Sibley was published while Sibley himself still lived, was partially sourced from an incomplete autobiography of Sibley’s own writing, and was copyrighted by Sibley himself after its publication, one who reads this book should assume that he is receiving the most positive possible presentation of Sibley’s life. While some might see that as a drawback so grave as to render the book wholly unworthy of reading, I am of the opinion that, in an age when this man’s name has been dragged through the mud wholesale by our state’s leaders and academics, it is refreshing to hear him praised and shown in as good a light as possible. Certainly the man must have had his faults. He was a human being, after all. But a civilization needs heroes, and if the volume which I am reviewing contains even half of the truth, then Henry Hastings Sibley is a hero worthy of the admiration and gratitude of every American citizen who calls Minnesota home. I’ll find a more critical biography of Sibley to read and review in the future, but in the meantime, I’m content to balance the litany of abuse the man has received from modern, liberal critics with a thoroughly positive interpretation of his life.

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West begins, as the title suggests, by tracing Sibley’s lineage from 11th century England all the way to arrival at Salem, Massachusetts, in the early 1600s. The Sibley family eventually migrated to Michigan Territory, where Solomon Sibley, father of Henry Hastings, served on the Supreme Court. From Detroit, Michigan, the city of his birth, Henry Sibley set off at the age of 18 to start his career. A series of jobs would eventually lead Sibley into service with the American Fur Company. The fur trade would serve as a foundation for a life full of successes for Sibley. The young pioneer performed a variety of work, including both the clerical and the adventurous. One particularly dramatic mission brought Sibley from his station in the relative wilderness back to his hometown, Detroit. He was sent by his superior from Mackinac to obtain a set of licenses from the governor of Michigan Territory, and in the course of his journey with a team of French-Canadian Voyageurs, he survived perilous conditions of near-starvation. Under Sibley’s leadership, the team arrived in Detroit, doning flashy, ceremonial vests and hats before canoeing into the city. Sibley obtained the licenses and returned to his boss, successful.

West narrates through several such adventures before bringing us to the point when Sibley settles in Minnesota. The first stone house to be built in Minnesota was built by Henry Sibley in Mendota, near Fort Snelling where the Minnesota, Mississippi, and St. Croix Rivers meet. Sibley would eventually move to St. Paul, but his Mendota house stands to this day as a monument to the First Citizen of the state, as well as to the expansion of American civilization into the western territories.

At this point, West describes the transition of Sibley’s career from a commercial one to a political one. This begins with the dramatic yet amusing account of the “risiduum” of the Territory of Wisconsin. When Wisconsin entered the Union as a state, a piece of what had been Wisconsin Territory was not included in the new boundaries of Wisconsin State. As a result, the strip of land between the St. Croix and Mississippi rivers – home to about 40,000 Americans at the time – was left in a sort of governmental limbo, uncertain whether it was still an incorporated territory. According to West, the people who lived in that region still very much desired to be part of an organized territory, and so elected a delegate to be sent to represent them in the U.S. Congress as the representative from Wisconsin Territory. As the leading man in the region, Henry Sibley was easily elected to this position.

Sibley caused a stir in Washington when he arrived demanding to be seated as the duly elected representative from the Territory that was thought to no longer exist, but he gathered enough support to keep the seat that he claimed. Thus began a career that was devoted almost solely to the almost imperial project that would see a tiny strip of land with 40,000 Americans blossom first into the Territory of Minnesota and finally into the Land of 10,000 Lakes becoming the 32nd state in the union.

Upon the drafting and acceptance of the Minnesota state constitution, Sibley was elected as the state’s first governor and served less than two years in that office. Later in life, after he had left the highest office in the state and completed two military expeditions against the Sioux Indians, he would end up returning to politics, not by running for the high office, but by joining the state legislature to help sort out a problem regarding payment of railroad obligations that was plaguing the state at the time. After serving in the United States Congress and the governor’s mansion, Sibley was not too proud to ascend to the much lower office. This seems to back up the notion that, for Sibley, public office really was about serving the people of Minnesota more than serving his own pride.

Between the lopsided bookends of his political career, Sibley served as a reluctant military commander. West writes one of the earlier accounts of possibly the most famous event in Minnesota history; the Sioux War of 1862. In that conflict, Sibley was called upon by Governor Ramsey to lead the Minnesota volunteers to fight the Sioux, led by Little Crow, and regain the many hostages being held by the Indians. From correspondence reproduced by West in the book, it seems that Sibley was not naturally inclined to military leadership, but his experience in the Minnesota wilderness and his familiarity with the Sioux people and their language had left him with skills that made him otherwise ideal among the men who remained in the state to prosecute such a campaign. Thus, Sibley rose to the occasion and served his state in yet another demanding capacity, concluding the three-month campaign with the famous Mankato hanging, the largest mass execution in American history.

Such was the quality of Sibley’s success in the eyes of men like General Alexander Pope and War Secretary Stanton that Sibley was promoted and sent on a follow-up campaign to drive the Sioux completely out of Minnesota and across the Missouri River, which he did. Thus was “Major General of Volunteers” added to his long list of titles.

West’s account treats the stories of Sibley’s military campaigns tastefully. He presents a narrative that highlights Sibley’s compulsion to serve his own people. Thus, despite the fact that Sibley had previously warned during his time in congress that just such a catastrophe as the Sioux Uprising would occur if the policy of the United States toward the Indian tribes did not change, once that calamity finally broke out, he defended his countrymen. The real troubles and grievances of the Sioux Indians did not wash the American blood from their hands, nor did they cloud Sibley’s assessment of his duty. Even so, West tells the reader of Sibley’s efforts to wage a civilized campaign, including one episode of the general condemning and forbidding retaliatory scalping of Indian warriors on the grounds that such barbarism was unbecoming of Christian men.

According to West, Sibley was a man of deep Christian sympathy who wished for the Sioux and the other Indian tribes to be folded into our own Christian civilization. He funded homes for Indian families and fought in Congress to get America to improve her policies in regards to relations with the tribes. But when it came to conflict between the Indians and his countrymen, Sibley did his duty without shame. He prosecuted the war without condoning barbarism among his men. He tried and condemned to death hundreds of prisoners of war, then consented to President Lincoln’s merciful commutations of most of those sentences. He marched the condemned prisoners to Mankato to be hanged, and he prevented mobs of angry Minnesotans from exacting vigilante revenge on the road. Whatever his modern critics may say, the man described in West’s biography was a man of honor, conviction, and restraint.

After his retirement from battlefields both martial and political, Sibley did not retire from public life. In many ways, West describes a post-retirement life that was more busy than his previous careers. Just a few of the activities of the aging Henry Sibley included serving on the boards of various charities, banks, and companies, as well as serving as a regent of the budding University of Minnesota and president of the Minnesota Historical Society. From pre-teretorial days to the flowering of her youth as a state, there was no stream of Minnesota’s lifeblood the course of which was not directed, to some degree or another, by Henry Hastings Sibley. Thus is it justified toward the end of West’s book when he gives an account of a toast made in Sibley’s honor which stated simply, “Long live the king!”

In conclusion, I will make one more defense of the value of this book, despite the fact that some may see it as inherently biased in favor of the subject and therefore tainted. Certainly, any biography will contain at least some bias, and this work is no exception. Without further evidence, you should assume that you are reading a most favorable interpretation of Henry Sibley’s life between these covers. But that is not a bad thing. There is no deficit of critical, even abusive, accounts of Sibley and most of our other state and national Founding Fathers. It does us well to consider the accounts that praise these men, rather than assuming that the critical accounts are inherently more accurate.

Furthermore, there is one particular fact of this book that commends the author’s integrity as a historian. At the end of the generous appendices is included correspondence between the author, Henry Sibley, and a man by the name of Colonel W. Pfaender, who wrote to Sibley to object to the inclusion in the biography of the account of a group of “infidel Germans” desecrating an image of Christ at New Ulm. Colonel Pfaender was a friend of Sibley, who passed the message along to West. West could have responded by deferring to the subject of his book and to his friend and removing the account, but as he could not verify the truth of Colonel Pfaender’s refutation of the account, he felt duty-bound to include the account, but to refer to the objection in the appendix and allow both sides to be heard. Rather than deferring to the friend of the man who he was currently describing as the “king” of Minnesota, West chose to abide as closely as he could to the historical account in this instance. In my eyes, that speaks well of the author’s integrity, and therefor of the integrity of the whole volume. This, in addition to the beautiful style of West’s language and the undeniably compelling narrative of Sibley’s life, make this book well worth your time if you can get your hands on a copy.

- How Dawn got involved in politics, starting with running for city council at 20 years old, and how others can do likewise.

- Why localities that vote Republican in state and national elections still have so much liberal influence in their local governments.

- What avenues are available for interested individuals to dive into the game of local politics, and how to choose.

And more. Click here or watch the video above to hear all of Dawn’s answers.

And if you want to get more interviews, articles, and commentary like this in your email inbox for free, click the subscribe button bellow.

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People who are interested in politics frequently hear that they need to “get involved locally!” You may have felt compelled to do just that, nodded along when hearing this imperative from your favorite talking head, but then asked yourself, “How exactly do I get involved locally?”

One option for local involvement is to get involved with your Basic Party Operating Unit (BPOU), which is your local Republican Party. Depending on where you live, your BPOU might be a county GOP or a Senate District (SD) GOP. In our neighborhood, the BPOU is the McLeod County GOP, which meets on the first Monday of every month at 7:00pm at the Hutchinson Municipal Airport unless otherwise specified.

Among Republicans, it is common to complain about the dysfunction of the GOP, but too rarely are those complaints followed by any proposals for improvement. While some of the lack of follow-through may be attributable to apathy, I think more is attributable to the murkiness and confusion that surrounds local politics. Americans tend to know more about what’s going on in the U.S. Congress or the RNC than know about what’s going on in their state legislature or their BPOU, and too little is being done by the people in charge at the local level to change that. Consider this article my attempt to clear away the fog, at least enough to help you take your first steps toward involvement in the McLeod County GOP. God willing, this will be followed up with similar posts relating to city government, the county board, school districts, and other local institutions. Stay tuned for more of that.

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WHY BOTHER GETTING INVOLVED WITH YOUR LOCAL GOP?

Like I said, Republican voters in Minnesota love to complain about the alleged uselessness of the party. Republicans all over the country accuse the GOP of being a losers’ project. While my experiences since June of this year have not led me to believe that the GOP in Minnesota is actually a perfect, well-oiled machine, I have seen an institution that is worthy of the attention and participation of the kinds of Minnesota citizens who care about their state and the way she is governed.

If you’d like more ordinary men to have a say in how the party is run; if you’d like for more ordinary men to have a say in who the Republican Party nominates for elections in Minnesota; if you’d like to help get the several thousand voting-age adults in McLeod County who didn’t vote in the last two presidential elections to the polls – understanding that about 70% of them will likely vote Republican – then your next action step is attending the next McLeod County GOP meeting.

WHAT YOU WILL SEE AT YOUR FIRST MEETING

After you’ve squeezed yourself around the tables in the airport conference room and found a seat, the meeting will start with an invocation and the pledge of allegiance. A stack of meeting agendas will probably be passed around the room so that everyone, executive committee members and visitors alike, can follow along with the proceedings.

As a new visitor, unless you are already familiar with parliamentary procedure that is followed for these kinds of board or committee meetings, you will likely be a little bit lost, but that should not deter you from attending. If you watch and listen, you’ll pick up on the order of operations quickly enough.

You may have to make peace with feeling awkward and out of place for an hour or two if local political involvement is new to you. If you wait to get involved until you feel comfortable, then you will never get involved. If you want to get involved, you shouldn’t wait to start attending meetings until you’ve memorized Robert’s Rules of Order and learned the differences between a delegate and candidate and a committee member. Just show up and figure it out as you go along.

Early in the meeting, there is a time for the elected legislators who represent McLeod County in the Minnesota House and Senate to speak for a few minutes. They generally give a brief update on whatever work they’re doing in the legislature at the time and answer a few questions.

After that, the main body of the meeting is taken up with old and new business. The content of the meetings will obviously vary depending on what is going on in the county at any given time. If it’s county fair season, plans will be discussed for the county fair booth, sharing resources with other BPOUs, etc. If there’s a fundraising push, the talk will be about fundraising. For your first meeting, your goal shouldn’t necessarily be to weigh in on the issue that’s being discussed. You don’t have a vote anyway, so unless your opinion is asked for, you don’t have any kind of say in the proceedings (though you can and should ask questions in a polite way. The McLeod GOP folks have been very gracious about answering questions during meetings). Instead, your primary goal will be to learn about the people and procedures that make the party tick. If you’ve shaken a few hands and learned a few people’s names and faces, you can walk away at the end of the meeting and call the evening a win.

CONCLUSION

If you start attending McLeod GOP meetings, I can’t guarantee that somebody will hand you a blueprint with ten easy steps to save Minnesota. In fact, I can basically guarantee the opposite. If you want to figure out how to “get involved locally” and move Minnesota toward decency and good governance one county at a time, you have an uphill trek in front of you. Answers can be hard to come by, and action steps even harder. But the ordinary men who aren’t quite sure what to do, but who love Minnesota and want her to be a haven of the good life for her citizens, can help each other learn what to do. If you start coming to McLeod County GOP meetings, you and I can help each other. We can cut through the bureaucratic gobbledygook and murky politics of it all together. Worst case scenario, you get to meet a couple of neighbors who share some of your views and priorities, and that’s never a loss.

So come to the Hutchinson Airport on Monday, November 3rd, and let’s help each other save Minnesota.

Dr. Scott Jensen, 2022 Republican nominee for Minnesota governor and current candidate in the GOP race for the same nomination, spoke at Lake Marion Ballroom on Monday, October sixth. He gave a brief speech followed by a somewhat contentious Q+A which you can watch here.

Multiple times during the event, Jensen alluded to the fact that his campaign had been in communication with people from Donald Trump’s team about how their race ought to be run. While that does not necessarily translate into an implicit Trump endorsement for Jensen – Trump’s team could be in communication with any or all other Republican candidates – Jensen is applying this council from above by steering his campaign away from the social issues and focusing on fraud, immigration enforcement, taxes and spending, and a roaring economy. The closest he got to a “social issue” was to take the stance that teens and preteens should not be castrated in the name of gender ideology, though he did leave the door open for adults who suffer with the same gender confusion being legally abused by their doctors.

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As for his victory strategy, Jensen outlined a plan that includes appealing to, rather than attacking, teachers (while remaining critical of unions), rebelling against the mainstream Minnesota media, aggressive use of social media (Jensen boasts of a following of around one million people and 80% name recognition statewide), and a get-out-the-vote campaign focusing on getting Trump voters and independents to vote for the Republican candidate for governor in 2026.

You can watch the Q+A for yourself, but I’ll offer the following summary: Jensen had some relatively strong things to say about enforcing immigration law in Minnesota and some creative ideas for reducing taxation in Minnesota. Those are the highlights. The lowlights include bad Q+A etiquette on the part of some questioners and the appalling spectacle of Dr. Jensen scolding State Senator Glenn Gruenhagen about the issue of abortion. Among other points that he raised, Senator Gruenhagen followed up on my own question to Jensen regarding abortion by pointing out the extreme abortion laws passed by the DFL trifecta and asking if Jensen thought that repealing those laws might be a winning position for a Republican candidate. My question was about Jensen flip-flopping on abortion in the 2022 race, and Jensen was not having it with that topic. After dismissing my question as a path to losing in 2026, he was clearly frustrated that Senator Gruenhagen wanted to continue that conversation, eventually blaming Gruenhagen and those like him for Republicans’ long string of defeats in Minnesota.

Before he left the building after the Q+A was over, I caught Dr. Jensen for a few more minutes of conversation. I called him out on an error he had made when responding to my question about abortion, namely citing Genesis 2:7 to claim that human life begins with the breath of God. That claim has become a staple for progressives who want to undermine a pro-life message using the Bible, but there are two serious problems with it. The first problem is that Genesis 2:7, which describes God breathing life into the dust of the earth to create Adam, the first man, is in no way referring to the general experience of all human beings who are born of woman, not from God breathing life into the dust of the ground, and that’s without getting into the numerous passages of Scripture that explicitly refer to human life being exactly that – human life – before “first breath” out of the womb. The second issue with Jensen’s flawed Biblical case is that he had previously said in the same answer that he doesn’t actually know when life begins, but now by referencing that Bible verse, he aligned himself squarely with the claim of radical leftists that, if we can know at all when human life begins, it begins at first breath rather than conception.

When I raised this point, Jensen dismissed me by saying that he had studied at seminary (Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul, which is part of the liberal ELCA denomination and includes an “Equity and Inclusion” statement on its website) and encouraging me to study more. He went on to declare that it would be foolish for a Republican candidate to try to run on abortion in Minnesota. To that, I responded that I brought up the issue of abortion not to convince him that he should make it the primary focus of his campaign, but because his flip-flopping raised serious doubts about the courage he might display on other controversial issues.

We went back and forth for a couple of minutes before Jensen dismissed me in what I took to be a very condescending and contemptuous manner. The only other detail from our conversation that I will convey is that he told me that he felt “attacked” when I was asking him my question. I was truly astonished to hear that. Jensen, who only four years previously had run an extremely contentious race for Minnesota governor and has endured all kinds of political conflict, was complaining about feeling attacked by some random constituent asking a pointed question about his record. All I could say in response was that, if he felt attacked by my question, Tim Walz would eat him alive. He scoffed and said that he could handle Walz just fine in a debate – never mind that Walz apparently thought so little of Jensen last time around that he didn’t even bother showing up to debate him on one occasion – and quickly ended our conversation.

I confess I was predisposed against Jensen as a candidate going into this event. I thought he was well-intentioned, but too soft. After the way he treated both a sitting, popular state senator and me, a random voter with concerns about his record, I now think that he lacks Donald Trump’s talent of coalition-building, as well as self-control. He is even more soft and moderate than I remembered from four years ago. In my opinion, it would be a grave misstep for Minnesotans in McLeod County or anywhere else to give him a second chance against Tim Walz in 2026.

WHAT’S HAPPENING

Meeker–McLeod–Sibley Community Health Services (MMS-CHS) has been incorporating “equity” principles into its public health approach since at least 2016 when they conducted their first “Health Equity Data Analysis.” This means that if you live in Meeker, McLeod, or Sibley Counties, your local governments are making public health decisions based on the same ideas and reasoning that have led them to conclude that, in order to be truly healthy, people need “social justice,” and that “structural racism” is as much a factor in a person’s health as are their genes and their personal choices.

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I first became aware of this latest example of small-town wokeness when I noticed a Facebook post from a Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) employee stating that our local health departments had reached out to him “to do a series of trainings on health equity, with one part being working with LGBTQ communities.” This led me to the webpage for MDH Health Equity Networks, which awarded grant money to dozens of local organizations in two rounds between 2022 and 2024. MMS-CHS was awarded funds from both rounds. Other organizations that received such funding include several other local public health authorities in rural areas of Minnesota, American Indian tribes and non-profits, and even something called the Hmong Shaman and Herb Center, which seeks to incorporate shamanistic practices into mainstream healthcare in several areas of the state, including Wilmar.

To learn more about what these “health equity” efforts actually look like, I reached out to the MDH employee whose post originally caught my attention. He explained that MMS-CHS initiated the whole process by reaching out to MDH to request equity training for their staff. He also told me that MMS-CHS identified “working with the queer community” as an important “growth point” for the organization.

I reached out to MMS-CHS administrator Kiza Olson by phone and email with questions about their goals for the training and the amount of grant money being spent on it. After a delay of two weeks, Olson returned my email and informed by that, between the two rounds of grant distributions, MMS-CHS has received $150,000. The money is being spent on things like MAPP and IDI training, which are types of surveys that focus on social justice criteria, and hosting a “community event.”

I also reached out to all nine members of the MMS-CHS board that are currently serving as a county board member in the three participating counties to ask if they are aware of these DEI efforts within the organization and if they approve, but I have not heard back from any of them.

WHY IT MATTERS

There are at least two reasons why you should care if this is happening in your community.

First, the jargon of D.E.I has only ever been a collection of euphemisms used to paper over the effort of the American Left to discriminate against people they don’t like and give special treatment to their preferred groups. And now, the same people who have turned the Ivy League universities and departments of the federal government into bastions of far-left political ideology want to do the same exact thing to your local high school and your county board. Indeed, they’ve already been doing so for many years. The rainbow flag at the small town library and the health equity study from your local health department are the signs that, despite living in a community that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump and is generally conservative, your local institutions are being operated by people who hate you and your way of life. At the national scale, we saw the destructive effects of this kind of leftist institutional dominance when, after a devastating hurricane, FEMA workers were instructed to skip houses with Trump signs without offering any assistance. If our local public health and safety apparatus is being operated by the same kinds of people, and if you have a Trump sign in your yard after a tornado tears apart your town or the train derails and takes out your neighborhood, do you feel confident that the same despicable practices wouldn’t affect you? If you want to be confident that your local government is actually serving you and your family and your neighbors, then you need to pay attention to what they’re doing, express your disapproval, and replace the officials responsible for this kind of folly come election day.

The second reason this stuff matters is purely practical. At the end of the day, there are only so many hours in the week. Every hour that your public health officials spend contemplating how racism is making people fat is an hour that they are not preparing for what to do in the event that you and your family are trapped in your home during an ice storm, or when a deadly contagion breaks out, or some other real, tangible threat to health and safety that puts every member of the community at risk. “Health equity” training and other D.E.I practices are, at the very best, a useless distraction from the real and important work of public health and ought to be discarded. When disaster strikes, what people want to know is that their local institutions are prepared to help them pull their neighbors out of the rubble and rebuild, not that they’ve hosted a large number of diversity seminars.

If you agree and want to make your opinion known, you can find the contact information for the members of the MMS-CHS board in one convenient place here.

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the subsequent ghoulish celebrations we’ve seen from many on the left, it’s time for politics in Minnesota to change. For my entire life, it has seemed that the strategy of the Republican Party has been to do and say nothing risky or aggressive while hoping that the Democrats would behave so outrageously that the people of Minnesota would abandon them and vote for republicans instead by default. That strategy has proven to be utterly useless. The impotent campaign slogan “Walz Failed!” used by the most recent republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota encapsulates that fact neatly. Governor Walz sailed to re-election in the face of such wimpy opposition.

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All across Minnesota and the whole nation, conservatives are acknowledging that nothing can be the same after Charlie’s death. To briefly summarize the commentary you’ve likely already heard, if the man who is famous for sitting down at college campuses and inviting liberals to challenge his ideas and prove him wrong was too controversial to be allowed to live, then nobody on the right is tolerable to our enemies. If Charlie Kirk is a nazi, then we are all nazis, and any of our deaths would be perfectly acceptable and legitimate to an enormous percentage of our political opponents.

If we want to avoid the kind of violent national disintegration that we’ve read about in history books, we have to take an off ramp at every level of society. At the federal level, that means we need to pray and petition that President Trump would use the full force of the federal government to dissolve the leftist terror organizations like BLM and Antifa that have normalized the kind of anti-right wing, anti-white, and anti-Christian violence that targeted Charlie. Thankfully, there are signs that the President understands this and will do what is necessary.

At the state level in Minnesota, the situation is even more dire. Our government is dominated by our enemies. State legislators and other powerful figures on the Left have joined unabashedly in the demonic chorus that has howled in celebration of Charlie’s demise and waved away conservatives’ lamentations as unmerited because of Charlie’s alleged far-right stances on guns or race. If Minnesota is to be freed from the shackles of leftism that have bound her for my entire lifetime, we have only three options; a federal option, a state option, and a local option.

FEDERAL

The federal option would be for the Trump administration to emulate Abraham Lincoln and perform an act of Reconstruction on the state of Minnesota. If the state government were investigated by the feds and found guilty for welfare fraud, election fraud, aiding and abetting illegal aliens en mass, and other policies of leftist extremism – which seems like it would be a given – then he could dissolve the DFL and replace Tim Walz, Keith Ellison, and other statewide leaders with conservatives. While that solution would be satisfying in some ways and would require no lawlessness, as well as being faster than waiting for the 2026 elections, I think it is unlikely. While Trump is signaling that he is prepared to dismantle BLM and Antifa and perhaps raid the Discord servers for the digital crockpots of leftist extremism, it would be a big step beyond that if he were to don the top hat and the funny beard and begin deposing state office holders. The fact that Walz was on the presidential ticket and used the same rhetoric that seems to have motivated Charlie’s assassin during campaign events makes the Reconstruction series of events marginally more likely in my estimation, but still not very realistic. Furthermore, such an action would likely be the final nail in the coffin of our alleged Constitutional Republic. It would be akin to Trump declaring himself Emperor of the United States. And while I would prefer to live in a conservative, well-governed empire than a liberal democracy the likes of which is dominated by wicked men like Tim Walz, I would prefer even more a solution that preserves and revitalizes the original American ideal of federalism and self-government. Perhaps there have been too many Rubicon crossings in recent years to leave that option open, but it is a worthy goal to aim for.

STATE

The state option is to so overwhelm the democrats on election day in 2026 that no amount of fraud or legal tricks can keep them in power. I’m not just talking about getting a centrist republican governor to squeak over the line against Governor Walz and flip two or three seats in each chamber. I’m talking about turning MN into the most deeply crimson state in the Midwest. We need to overpower the left so decisively that every statewide race and a wide margin of legislative seats fall into republican hands next year, and when that happens, we need that administration to wield their lawful powers with extreme prejudice.

I need to make a quick note about that statement: if your reaction to the above paragraph is to scoff, roll your eyes, shrug, and make some snide comment about how that will never happen, then you either need to get over yourself right now and pick a course of real action to take besides impotent complaining, or you need to shut up from now until election day and let the motivated people figure it out. Log off, keep your pessimism to yourself, and watch from the sidelines while the men who remain in Minnesota with the will to fight for her get their hands dirty. Throwing cold water on the people making an effort has always been insufferable, and it is no longer acceptable.

That being said, I readily acknowledge that achieving such a lofty goal is unlikely, but it doesn’t matter. If we don’t engage in this fight like we mean to politically conquer this state for a thousand years, we aren’t going to win jack squat. It’s time to play the game like the existence of Minnesota as a free, American state depends on it, because that’s the only way we’re going to win. And if we play it that way, we increase our chances of flipping the statewide races and the legislative chambers, even if not by the kinds of margins we would aim for. That would still make an excellent start.

To that end, what the non-candidates like you and me need to do is to push everyone who is running for office as a Republican to wake up and smell the blood-stained roses. No candidate can be permitted to get away with playing the same go along to get along track that Minnesota Republicans have been playing for decades. You have social media. You have the ability to visit candidate forums. You have the ability to tell these politicians what it means to you that the Left killed Charlie and cackled with glee after the fact. Do so. Make them hear you. Make them commit to changing the game in Minnesota instead of using the same old loser playbook. And don’t just do that for the gubernatorial candidates. Interrogate the people running for your state house and senate districts. Interrogate the people running for your school board and city council. If you think you don’t have political power, read this and think again. You have many votes. You have the ability to show up for nominating conventions that many other people will be too lazy to attend. You can affect who runs and how they run. The time for excuses and complacency is long since past.

LOCAL

Finally, there is the local option, which is the most dynamic for normal people like you and me.

There are political problems in your local community. These problems range from the mundane and practical to the greatest struggles of the culture war. It’s time for you and I to find those fights and engage in them.

To give a specific example, in my region, the Pioneerland Library System (PLS) shelves dozens of LGBT books for kids. The communities served by the PLS are communities that vote for Trump by about 70%. There is no reason for a community like mine to be promoting radical sexual propaganda to children in the public library.

My next step is going to be to try and change that. The reasons why I’m selecting this fight are threefold.

First, it’s a good fight. It’s bad to pervert the minds of children, and if we are able to remove these books from our libraries, that would be a change for the better.

Second, it’s winnable. Despite the DFL passing a so-called “ban on book bans” in 2024, the actual language of the bill leaves room for libraries and schools to remove or prohibit materials that are inappropriate or disruptive.

The libraries are currently run by leftists, but if we can apply enough political pressure, we may be able to get them to cave. And if we can’t get the library directors to cave, there is an alternative course of action; taking away money from the library system. Much of the library system’s funding comes from the state government, but nearly half of it comes from the cities and counties served by the PLS. If the PLS is going to push radical sexual propaganda on the children of our communities, it might not be so hard to convince some city councils in 70% pro Trump territory to take their money back from the libraries. And if the local governments won’t do anything, we can fight to replace them under the banner of an 80/20 political issue that cuts in favor of the republican voting base in these red counties.

The third reason for picking this fight is for the sake of practice. The mission forwarded by Charlie Kirk to take back our country from Leftism must be carried on. In order to carry it on, we’re going to need a million more men like Charlie Kirk. In order to become like Charlie Kirk, we need to get off our rear ends and start taking action. We’ll probably suck at it at first. My proclaimed goal of ridding the Pioneerland Library System of LGBT books may very well end in humiliating failure. But if ordinary people like you and me are ever going to be good at the game of politics, we’re going to have to risk embarrassing ourselves by being bad at it for a little while, and we simply don’t have the luxury of any more time to sit around and yell at the TV screen while other men do the real work. Expect to see more in the coming weeks on that effort, and pray for wisdom, courage, and success while you’re at it.

We’re in a battle for the souls of our state and our nation. I can’t tolerate sitting on the sidelines anymore. I hope you can’t either, and I look forward to seeing many of you, my fellow Minnesotans, taking to the political battlefield in the coming weeks. May God bless our efforts, and may God save Minnesota.

After the horrific attack that occurred at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, the perverse ideology of transgenderism has returned to the front of many Minnesotan minds.

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When Donald Trump soared to reelection in 2024, some predicted that, in response, the American left would “put the woke away.” While it can be argued than many democrats are attempting to mute some of the more extreme elements of their party, albeit with limited success, the fact remains that wokeness, including the cult of Pride, is still very much alive and well, especially in liberal strongholds like Minnesota, and most especially in the deepest blue cities like Minneapolis. Because of the decades-long rise of LGBT ideology, there are many people in our state and nation who are baptized members of a pseudo-religion which claims that men and women can morph from one sex into the other, be no sex at all, be some third imaginary sex, or shift between sexual identities from moment to moment.

The visible fruit of this ideology is that of mutilated and disturbed people like the man who committed last Tuesday’s atrocity. The obvious madness and perversity of the Pride cult has motivated many Americans to remove their children from public schools, which act not as the neutral, secular education centers that liberals and moderates pretend, but rather as doctrinal training centers in this sexual religion. There is no public school in America where you can be confident your child will not be exposed to teaching that tells him he can be the opposite sex, or that he should explore and experiment with his sexual desires at his young and vulnerable age. It is good that many American parents, even those who are not particularly religious, have woken up to the danger presented to their children by our public schools.

In the same vein as that recognition, however, there is another fact that needs to be acknowledged which I have never seen articulated. While more groups of people in the mainstream have at last begun to recognize LGBT Pride for the catastrophic religious doctrine that it is, it has yet to be publicly acknowledged that Pride, like Christianity, is a totalizing and proselytizing religion.

Christianity makes a claim that everyone is a sinner who is doomed to an eternity in Hell if they do not repent of their sin and confess in faith that Jesus Christ is Lord. Because of that claim, Christians are motivated – even commanded by God – to share the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection and the forgiveness of sins that He offers to all who repent and believe.

The cult of transgenderism also makes a claim, namely that a man can be a woman. But it isn’t merely that a man can be a woman. It’s that any man can be a woman. According to the religion of Pride, any man, at any time, for any reason, might just discover that in his innermost being, he is really a woman. He might learn this “truth” when he is two years old or sixty years old. He might discover his “true” identity in the throes of social pain and anguish while being bullied and ostracized as a teenager, while going through a stressful marital conflict in middle age, or by playing with dolls instead of trucks as a toddler. One way or another, any man might just find out one day that he is a woman. And because any man may discover that he is transgender, no man can ever truly know that he is not transgender.

There are other ways that the totalizing nature of the Pride cult can be seen, such as the insistence of using the insulting euphemism “cisgender” to describe anyone who has not (yet) “come out” as transgender, but the subtlest and most horrific way that Pride will fold you into itself, whether you like it or not, is by insisting that you, your children, or somebody else you love might just discover one day that they are transgender.

If you believe that merely pulling your children out of public school will be enough to protect them from the predations of the Pride cult, I beg you to reconsider. Only a few years ago, we were all told that all we had to do was accept the eccentricities of somebody like Bruce Jenner pretending to be a woman. Now, every public school in America flies the Pride flag in one form or another, whether it’s hanging over the main entrance or as a sticker on the guidance councilor’s office door. It’s no longer enough to merely tolerate Bruce Jenner, even if you consent to call him Caitlin. It was never going to be enough. You were always going to be required to submit your children to instruction in the doctrine of Pride. After all, if it’s true that anybody may be transgender, no child can be allowed to go through his education and upbringing without hearing that he himself might be transgender. Every child must be invited and encouraged to look deep within himself, with the bare supply of wisdom he has acquired in his young life and the advice of the school guidance counselor to assist him, and consider his own gender identity. If every child is not so encouraged, society could end up full of people who truly are transgender but have never discovered it and “come out.” According to the doctrines of Pride, that is unacceptable.

The next step of this trajectory, if it is not arrested, is likely to be as follows: all schools, including church schools, private schools, and homeschooling families, will be mandated by law to have their students and children exposed to the idea that they might really be transgender. After all, if that doesn’t happen, then religious families and other “bigoted” or “closed-minded” people will simply be able to exploit a loophole in the system to oppress “trans kids.” If the doctrine of Pride is true, then that would obviously be tragic and evil and must not be allowed. And make no mistake, the victory of Donald Trump in 2024 did not come anywhere close to eradicating the cult of Pride, especially not at the local level. Your state and school district are still full of vipers who want your children to be castrated – or at least to have the option of being castrated. Even if they continue to dominate your state’s public education system, adherents to the religion of Pride will never be content to rule that wide domain and leave your homeschooling family or your little private school alone. For the true believers in Pride, as in Christianity, there is submission to the religion’s truth or there is damnation. There can be no middle ground. The crucial difference is that, in Christianity, we recognize that the role of believers is to share the truth with our neighbors, and it is the role of God Himself to convert or condemn the souls of those to whom we witness, while adherents to Pride must serve as their own religious enforcers. They convert by the power of the state and the psychiatrist’s chair. They convert with threats of dead children. And they convert by threatening to take away your children if you try to pull them from the clutches of their cult.

What, then, are we to do?

First, we must be on guard, not only against the threat of violence from the most unstable of the followers of Pride like we saw last Tuesday, but against the progress of the doctrines of Pride in our own communities, including our state and local governments, our educational institutions, our businesses, and our churches. If your local coffee shop flies the Pride flag, whether in June or year-round, stop going there, and tell them that you are taking your business away from them for that reason. Push back in your church at the first sign of softness on this issue. You can do that with grace and charity, of course, but we must not be afraid of giving offense in this fight if we are speaking the truth in love. Whatever educational institution or curriculum you employ for your children, vet them for any whisper of transgenderism, and if you find it, take appropriate action to eliminate it or alert others to it. You may very well have friends and neighbors who would pull their kids from the local school if they knew about how much Pride ideology had infiltrated it.

Second, we must use every scrap of political power available to us to push back on the Pride cult. Perpetual retreat will not work. Whether you send your kids to private school or you homeschool, whether you’re in a blue state or a red state, they will come for your children or grandchildren eventually. While the 2024 Trump victory did not eradicate wokeness and transgenderism from public life, it has opened up a window of opportunity for sane men to fight back more boldly than we could before.

If you think that that sounds all well and good, but that you don’t have any political power to wield, you are mistaken. For more detail, read this piece from last November outlining the bare minimum amount of political power held by a voting citizen of these United States. For this piece, suffice it to say that you can vote in the primaries for your local elections, and you can interrogate the candidates to learn their positions on this crucial issue. With the power of social media and internet searches, you don’t have to let a political candidate get away with sidestepping controversial issues. And because primary elections get much less voter involvement, if you do step into the fray, you can have an outsized influence on the outcome not only of the primary, but the general election to follow.

Finally, and interwoven with the first two steps, we need to pray and take comfort in the fact that Jesus Christ is Lord, ruling and reigning over heaven and earth at this very moment and for all of eternity. Though the wickedness of men knows no limit, the day is approaching when every last sin will be punished and perfect justice will be complete. On that day, those who have feared the Lord through the trials of this life will know everlasting joy and peace, and the wicked men who attacked the innocence and the very lives of vulnerable children will wail and gnash their teeth if they have not joined us in repentance.

The battle against the cult of Pride is necessary and unavoidable, and it is possible that the side of decency, truth, and goodness will lose and suffer greatly for it on this earth. But in the end, the victory has already been won. Death and sin will be swallowed up forever, including the sins of Pride, and we will be forever free of their predations and persecution. On that day, we will sing for joy, and we can sing for joy until that day knowing that it will come soon, in God’s perfect time.