Minnesota

Five years ago this month, anarchists set on fire my adopted town of Minneapolis in the wake of Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd. Now, as President Donald J. Trump has made a triumphant return to the Oval Office, some of the blogosphere are calling for him to pardon Chauvin for his crimes. Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, of the United States Constitution grants the President the “Power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.”  President Trump should respect the verdict of the people and protect his own legacy by rejecting the ignoble calls to absolve the fired officer of his guilt.

When a white mom called a black kid the N-word the immediate expectation was that she’d be canceled, possibly arrested. It was not that just a few days later she would have $700,000 in the bank.Shiloh Hendrix accused a five-year-old Somali boy of rummaging through her diaper bag in Rochester, Minnesota, last week. “Did you call that child the N-word,” a man who filmed her asked. “Yeah,” Shiloh snarled back, “if he’s gonna act like one.”She didn’t back off. She repeated the accusation, then turned on the man filming her with a string of insults. The video quickly went viral. But Shiloh didn’t follow the usual playbook of hunkering down to weather the online storm. She fought back. On GiveSendGo, Shiloh painted herself as the victim.

Fans of South Park are familiar with the long-running gag involving the show’s portrayal of Canadians as crudely animated, detail-less animated cutouts, perpetually outraged — almost always an overreaction to something America has done. In a rather hilarious instance of life imitating art, President Donald Trump’s assertion that Canada become the 51st state has enraged the notoriously polite society, and age-old suspicions that America has always been poised to overtake their northern neighbors have resurfaced. I get it. When you have an inferiority complex, you can lose your sense of humor.

Matt McCaw doesn’t want to live anywhere but in Oregon. But during the pandemic he felt like he was living under tyrannical rule imposed by the state’s progressive majority in metro Portland. The school that his six children attended closed for more than a year due to a state mandate — and they received just four hours of online instruction per week. His church was forced to close, and his business selling textbooks suffered because school districts were buying online curricula, not physical books. Mask and vaccine mandates were ubiquitous; McCaw couldn’t even take his wife out to dinner to break the monotony, because all the restaurants were takeout-only. “I thought there would be a huge political backlash against all that,” he says.

Who knew there were so many fluent Somali speakers in Washington? Talking to a crowd of Somali émigrés in Minneapolis over the weekend, progressive representative Ilhan Omar dived into African politics in her mother tongue, lambasting Somaliland, an unrecognized state that declared independence from Somalia in 1991, as well as regional actors that she claims are infringing on Somali sovereignty. A subtitled video was then widely shared on X Sunday, appearing to contain usage of the "blood and soil" nationalistic rhetoric that would trigger a response from other progressives. “Somalia is for Somalia only (a genocidal mantra) as over 45 percent of Somalia’s population are not even ethnic Somalis,” the translation indicated. That video was shared by Rhoda J.

For the fourth time in the last four years, Minnesota is trying a police officer for excessive use of force in a highly-publicized case watched by people around the world. In three of the four cases, an officer killed a black man during an alleged misdemeanor stop in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. On April 11, 2021, Kim Potter, a former police officer from Brooklyn Center, Minnesota was training a new officer, Anthony Luckey, when they pulled over twenty-year old Daunte Wright. Luckey told Wright he was questioning him for displaying in his white Buick both an air freshener from his rearview mirror and  expired license plate tabs.

The jury rendered guilty verdicts on all three charges against former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter — after 10 hours of deliberations. He will be sentenced on the second-degree murder charge that was the most serious of the three. The charges were brought in an atmosphere of mob justice on May 29 and June 3, 2020, within days of the death of George Floyd on May 25. Indeed, the charges were filed in response to the demands of the mob while the Twin Cities were burning down at its hands.

Americans now know to expect riots. Minnesota has been dreading more carnage for weeks as the Derek Chauvin trial approaches its climax. For people intent on violence, the facts of any case are by the by. All that matters is the race of the victim. In the Minneapolis suburbs the rage broke out early, after Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old African American man, was shot by police officer Kimberly Potter. The video went inevitably viral — and everybody knew what was coming. The protests started instantly and haven’t stopped. A man carried a severed pig’s head on a stake. By the sixth day, Little Trees air fresheners hung from the police department's chain link fence — a nod to the alleged reason Wright was pulled over.