It is late and I am tired. Specifically, I am tired of Minnesota.
Others, both here at National Review and across the media, are currently talking and writing about today’s fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by an ICE officer. Was it a “good shoot,” or a blatant crime? Will the city burn once more? Are these the inevitable results of federal intervention? What’s the Somali angle in all this? These are good and important questions, and everyone here — and I hope at least a few elsewhere — will have smart and informed takes. Not me. Me? I don’t care.
Which isn’t to say that I fail to see the political vectors all playing out quickly, zooming across my social media transom. Mayor Jacob Frey — still captive to divisive feelings left over from a bitter mayoral race against Omar Fateh — demanded that ICE “get the f*** out of Minneapolis”; Governor Tim Walz attempted to simulate anger; all of this falls in the shadow of Walz’s recent announcement that he would retire in 2026, in the wake of a massive Twin Cities Somali fraud scandal. Some have warned of a potential rerun of the rioting of August 2020. (I doubt it, if only because of the unavoidable reality that it is currently January in Minnesota.) And unless that happens, I don’t care.
No, I’m simply done with Minnesota overall. It keeps resurfacing in the national news, like a bad penny. Trump just banned pennies; can he ban Minnesota via executive order as well? I’m not a superstitious man, but I suspect it’s time to write their experiment in statehood off as a loss and revert it to non-voting territorial status, or maybe trade it to Canada for Alberta plus a PTBNL (province to be named later). Between the bookends of the Floyd riots and Tim Walz’s sudden implosion, it feels like every time I turn my head, yet another national disaster is tumbling forth from what we now know to be one of the worst-run states in the Union.
And to speak selfishly: If nothing else, that means they’re stealing Illinois’s spotlight. I have had it up to here with this third-tier Midwestern state dominating national news, when we deserve to: Illinois once cornered the regional market on headline-grabbing criminal political behavior. But we earned it the honest way, after over a century of hard work. They’re just stumbling into one nationalized civic disaster after another with no plan.
I know that some of our readers may hail from the Land of 10,000 Lakes, so I want to say this as gently as possible: To hell with your state. We gave your weird Scandihoovian hinterland a shot, and it looks like it just didn’t work out. Despite being anonymously ensconced in the iciest and least hospitable regions of the far north, you have completely bungled it by repeatedly showing up in national news — with negative headlines. Granted, Minnesota once had its good moments, particularly back in the ’80s: I used to like it back when I knew of it only as the birthplace of Prince, The Replacements, and my favorite television show of all time. But that’s over now. Now Minneapolis has become, despite all expectation, even more of an open sore upon the Midwest than even my own hometown.