It is sad. I remember the city of the Mary Tyler Moore show not some Third World backwater. This is an opinion piece from today's WSJ.

I wrote an August 1973 cover story for Time magazine that praised Minnesota as “the state that works.” The cover photograph showed Gov. Wendell Anderson, dressed in a plaid flannel shirt, grinning and holding up a northern pike that he had just caught in one of Minnesota’s 12,000 lakes.

The story began with this archaic rhapsody: “It is a state where a residual American secret still seems to operate. Some of the nation’s more agreeable qualities are evident there: courtesy and fairness, honesty, a capacity for innovation, hard work, intellectual adventure and responsibility. . . . Minnesotans are remarkably civil; their crime rate is the third lowest in the nation (after Iowa and Maine).”

Almost 50 years later, I received an email from an old friend who lives in Minneapolis. He began: “Another report from the hinterland. The people of Minneapolis now share online updates of carjackings and other crimes. It would be difficult to exaggerate the extent of violent crime throughout the city. Everyone now knows someone who’s a victim. This will be a huge issue in this year’s elections.”

More than 650 people were shot in the city last year; 95 died—just short of the city’s record. There were more than 2,000 robberies. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, carjackings in the city rose 537% from November 2019 to November 2020, and then rose another 40% in the 10 months after that.

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What happened? Minnesota once enjoyed a high degree of social cohesion rooted in the traditions of previous waves of immigrants. But as the region has grown and become more diverse, the Twin Cities in particular developed most of the problems that bedevil much of the rest of urban America (crime, unemployment, drugs and so on). The reasons for this are complicated and widely debated. In any case, Minnesota now ranks among the worst states in the country when it comes to racial inequality.

In 1973, there were two strong political parties in Minnesota, both centrist and in touch with the state’s voters. A profound change occurred in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, especially among the wealthy and young. They contrived to seize political power by leveraging certain idealistic or merely sentimental impulses in the public mind. It was the prospering woke who elected the progressive Minneapolis City Council that supports defunding the police, and it was those white elites who, more than her fellow Somali-Americans, elected Ilhan Omar to the House. A mostly white “meritocracy,” caring more about, say, transgender rights than about job creation, took command in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the country. Both parties have become much more ideological, controlled by angry amateurs—the woke and the antiwoke.

The woke had this unhappy fact to support them: The Minneapolis Police Department harbored an unusual number of racists and bullies. There were fatal and well-publicized encounters between police and black men that stirred rage and protest demonstrations.

The great crisis came amid the pandemic. George Floyd died in a gutter outside Cup Foods under Derek Chauvin’s knee. There was endless video of that and all that followed. (The smartphone verifies the Heisenberg principle, which states, roughly, that the observing of an event alters the event itself.)

The summer of 2020 followed. Black Lives Matter emerged. The progressive mayor of Minneapolis abandoned a police precinct and allowed the mob to loot and burn it. George Floyd was declared a saint. Mr. Chauvin, damned as the devil who murdered the saint, was cast into prison. Minneapolis cops left the force in droves and the ones who remained stood down, reluctant to risk any new incident.

A similar pattern imposed itself elsewhere, until prosecutors in Democrat-ruled cities across the country (Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York) began to refuse to prosecute minority criminals—almost no matter their crime. See no evil, prosecute no evil. An age of magical thinking persuades itself to embrace many inversions of the truth—one of them being the idea that the criminal is the victim.

The left, now dominant, will pay the price. Fantasies of retaliation will play vividly in voters’ minds when they go to vote in November—just how vividly, the Democratic Party and President Biden will discover.

The difference between my 1973 story and the news reports of 2022 amounts to the difference, as it were, between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Tom gives you the boyish, innocent, sun-shot rendering of Hannibal, Mo., in the middle of the 19th century. Huck’s story is the version of America that includes poverty, murder, alcoholism, child abuse, race prejudice, blood feud and imbecility. Minneapolis today looks a little more like the Huckleberry Finn version, although without Huck’s humor or his rascal charm.

Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His latest book is “God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money.”


LINK: https://www.wsj.com/articles/m..._opin_pos_4#cxrecs_s

I'm originally from Minnesta and I can barely go back to visit family because the Minnesota I remember is no longer.

It's so frustrating even talking to most of them anymore. Unfortunately "Minnesota nice" is a real thing. The sad thing is that it makes for the perfect city to take over. The nice is seen as week and easily exploitable and that is exactly what is happening.

quote:

Originally posted by 1s1k:
I'm originally from Minnesta and I can barely go back to visit family because the Minnesota I remember is no longer.

It's so frustrating even talking to most of them anymore. Unfortunately "Minnesota nice" is a real thing. The sad thing is that it makes for the perfect city to take over. The nice is seen as week and easily exploitable and that is exactly what is happening.

I was born and raised and spent most of my adult life in MN. I left during ‘99 and I totally agree with you! It’s hard to go back to visit, and see what has become of my home state.

Minnesota has the same problem as Michigan. A large Democrat run city (metro area) sets the political tone for the rest of the state. In the case of Michigan, it is multiple large Democrat cities.

I spent 30 years in the Twin Cities designing digital logic for “supercomputers”. Weather aside, a pretty good place to be when I escaped in 1990.

I’ve now lived in San Diego for 28 years, also a pretty good place to be. But now people from LA and SF, having ruined those cities, are arriving in droves. I’m not optimistic for the future of San Diego.

Grew up along the ND border (live in ND now). Honestly outside of Mpls/St. Paul the state is solidly conservative and generally pretty nice.

But the Metro dominates the state politics. Sad to see the state drift into the morass as it has.

It's like two separate States. The metro, Duluth, Rochester are all solid beds of liberal bullshit. Everywhere else is like Texas; God fearing, freedom loving, gun owning conservatives.

Minneapolis. Chicago. NYC. Birmingham. Memphis. Detroit. Atlanta. Philadelphia. New Orleans. Charlotte. Baltimore. Etc etc etc. Red and blue states alike poisoned by progressive blue cities. And all of the “woke” people not only refuse to admit it, they utterly refuse to even believe the evidence right in front of them. Instead, they flee what their party has destroyed to carry their flawed ideologies to attractive clean, law abiding areas to spread the poison of leftist ignorance.

I knew something was wrong with Minnesota when they voted for Mondale in 1984. My favorite political joke of that election was, Why do cats walk around with their tails up? To show off their Mondale buttons. He was worse than Michael -Beetle Baily- Dukakis. Yet, Minnesota went for Mondale; the only State to do so.

I grew up in South Dakota, 30 minutes from the MN border. Moved to Colorado in the early 70's and watched liberal California slowly infest Colorado. Moved back to SoDak in the mid 80's and watched, seemingly overnight, MN become infected with liberal dogma. Now I'm beginning to see the same thing happening here in South Dakota. It seems the liberal agenda targets the large, populated metropolitan cities, Sioux Falls in this case, and like an insidious cancer it begins to infect the population. Once it has infested the majority of the city's population it is only a matter of time before the state follows suit.

My son graduated from Gustavus. I really enjoyed my time in St. Peter, but the only exposure to Minneapolis was the airport.

As far as the decline of blue cities goes I've always said we have a people problem. Not a politician problem. People are voting these schmucks into office that are causing all of this and will continue to do so. Reasonable people will vote with their feet, and that describes the liberal encroachment on otherwise red areas. They are leaving the hell they've help create, but they still carry their ideology to new places, and the cycle begins again. It will get worse and the feds will bail out the blue areas. But, people vote for those folks as well.

The very nature of a politician identifies where the people want to go so that they may lead them. From that point its all a majorities game.

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
Minnesota has the same problem as Michigan. A large Democrat run city (metro area) sets the political tone for the rest of the state. In the case of Michigan, it is multiple large Democrat cities.

It seems like many western and mid-western states suffer the same thing.

You get a pretty nice state with a rotten big city and it takes the whole state down. The only states that are immune are states without a big city, like Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana as examples.

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:
The only states that are immune are states without a big city, like Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana as examples.

Hardly

quote:

Originally posted by TMats:

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:
The only states that are immune are states without a big city, like Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana as examples.

Hardly

Indeed… A lot of ignorance in this assumption.

Do people never go see the west?

Understanding that more than 50% of the land is owned by the federal government, and that people who live on federal lands tend to be quite liberal/progressive and dependent on federal monies?


No one shoots Santa Claus.

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
Minnesota has the same problem as Michigan. A large Democrat run city (metro area) sets the political tone for the rest of the state. In the case of Michigan, it is multiple large Democrat cities.

This is, unfortunately, true in many states. Washington & Seattle, Oregon & Portland/WVL, Idaho & Boise (though in fairness, Idaho has not yet capitulated....though it will soon), Colorado & the Denver area, Illinois & Chicago, etc. The problem is large cities with liberal ideologies that simply outnumber the voting population of the rest of the state.

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
Minnesota has the same problem as Michigan. A large Democrat run city (metro area) sets the political tone for the rest of the state. In the case of Michigan, it is multiple large Democrat cities.

It seems like many western and mid-western states suffer the same thing.

You get a pretty nice state with a rotten big city and it takes the whole state down. The only states that are immune are states without a big city, like Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana as examples.

Boise gets bigger every year....it's only a matter of time before Idaho goes the way of Washington state.

quote:

Originally posted by SIGnified:

quote:

Originally posted by TMats:

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:
The only states that are immune are states without a big city, like Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana as examples.

Hardly

Indeed… A lot of ignorance in this assumption.

Do people never go see the west?

Understanding that more than 50% of the land is owned by the federal government, and that people who live on federal lands tend to be quite liberal/progressive and dependent on federal monies?


No one shoots Santa Claus.

Try breaking down how people tend to vote on a county basis. You will see that counties that contain the large cities tend to vote blue and more rural counties tend to vote red.

That's just a fact which has been illustrated several times via maps and tables. I can't predict how the future will be, but for now, what Yooper originally said about Michigan certainly has merit, and is true in other states.
Here is what he said:

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
Minnesota has the same problem as Michigan. A large Democrat run city (metro area) sets the political tone for the rest of the state. In the case of Michigan, it is multiple large Democrat cities.

I agree based on the present data. I'm not predicting the future.

Radioman, I just had to look up "The Beaver State" Turns out it is referring to Oregon and the 4 legged kind.

quote:

The problem is large cities with liberal ideologies that simply outnumber the voting population of the rest of the state.

Not always true. The large cities have their cheating apparatus in place as insurance. Al Franken cheated his way in. This state came out hard for Trump in 2020 and if not for Dominion he won this state.