Fooled Again in Minnesota

Minnesotans’ world view: being swindled is a good thing

76 Trombones: The absurd becomes real

Recently a TV station near me aired The Music Man, the 1962 movie adaptation of Meredith Willson’s 1957 play. I’d seen the movie decades ago and had largely forgotten it, so this was a nice break – some mindless entertainment. Or so I thought until the final scene, shown in the photo above.

The main character is Harold Hill, a professional swindler who travels the nation by rail, looking for little towns full of suckers that he can take to the cleaners. He arrives in River City, a fictional Iowa whistle-stop filled with prim folks living out the final years of the Victorian era. With the arrival of a new-fangled pool table, Hill convinces the residents that they must avert the coming depravity of their youth (due to idleness) by forming a student marching band. Thereafter he collects deposits on uniforms and instruments that he has no intention of actually ordering.

While relieving the townsfolk of their cash, Hill seduces Marian the Librarian, who (like Hill, but with good intentions) seeks to liven the town by stocking books that residents feel are inappropriate for young people. Initially she rebuffs him, but gradually his deceptions win her over. Meanwhile Hill pretends to teach the town’s children to play on the few instruments they already own, convincing them that they can simply use the “Think Method”, wherein they become proficient by simply imagining that they can play.

Upon realizing the fraud, the townsfolk convene a meeting at which they propose to tar & feather Hill, but Marian persuades them that they’re actually better off for having been swindled – because their lives are now so much more interesting. Then it gets even more bizarre. Suddenly Marian, Harold, and the town’s children are actually wearing the uniforms and playing the instruments that Hill never ordered, performing a tune that they cannot possibly play. Hill proposes marriage, and in the final scene the duo lead this preposterous marching band through the town.

There are two absurdities in the final scene:

• Marian is betrothed and expects a happy life with a man who has never done anything but swindle people.

• The town has an enormous marching band, wearing uniforms and playing instruments that do not exist while sounding like professionals despite being incompetent.

What was Willson’s intent here? Lest you think me over-analytical, there are others online who are troubled by this. Perhaps this concern is justified, considering that The Music Man is still one of the most popular plays being produced by high schools nationwide. People come away from the movie and these plays, comforted by these ideas:

• Being a “progressive” makes you a better person, even though you’ve clearly been swindled.

• You’ll have a happy life living in a preposterous delusion rather than by reconciling yourself to the real world.

The movie makes suckers out of its viewers; they leave the show feeling good about Harold Hill and River City. At some level they have been taught that the world will conform to whatever they imagine, if only they would believe strongly enough.

Minnesota Nice

I knew there was something strange about this place when I moved here in 2011. Minnesotans have a term for their culture: “Minnesota Nice”. It’s taken me awhile to grasp the implications.

The whole state has this bizarre “cutesy” parochial culture, the likes of which I’ve never seen elsewhere. This alone wouldn’t dissuade me, and some might even find it charming. But it is SO weird that many folks living here have never been outside the state - ever once in their lives. There are people in Minneapolis who’ve never been to St. Paul and vice-versa. Many elder adults here live within a few miles of where they grew up; they’ve never lived elsewhere, and would never contemplate living elsewhere. To get a sense of the cutesy oddness here, watch this brief PBS-produced comedy describing it: How to talk Minnesotan.

Politically, they are so clueless that it’s downright disturbing talking to them. My theory is that they’ve lived in a childlike, insular, high-trust society for so long that they cannot even conceive of any outsider not similarly being a citizen of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

How Minnesotans view the world. Except for the king part. “No kings”.

Really, they are that naive. They’ve even been conned into adopting a minor variation of the Somali national flag as their state flag:

Democrat leaders insist there is no resemblance

Minnesotans reelected Tim Walz after he let Minneapolis burn (at a cost of $500M) and locked the state down under fanatical COVID restrictions for two years, permanently destroying much of their small-business economy. No matter what, most Minnesotans will vote Democrat until the day they die, and even afterward. There’s nothing “nice” about any of this.

Minnesota Madness

Here’s a rundown of recent activities in just Minneapolis alone:

• In May 2020, a frequent criminal named George Floyd apparently killed himself by ingesting drug evidence while being arrested for passing a counterfeit bill. After subverting the initial coroner’s report to instead blame Floyd’s death on asphyxiation, Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison convened a kangaroo court to convict the officer who subdued Floyd (during which the police chief and other police staffers lied under oath); Derek Chauvin is still in prison for having simply followed the documented police procedure in which he had been trained, contrary to the blatant lies of those who testified against him. Minneapolis residents responded by burning buildings along Lake Street (a miles-long east west corridor) for an entire week and subsequently looting the city’s businesses for months. For two years following this insanity, lawns in the entire metro area were decorated with “Black Lives Matter” signs, despite the fact that nobody here seems to care whatsoever that at very least 2500 Black lives in the U.S. are snuffed out by Black offenders every year (see Table 6); apparently those Black lives don’t matter. Meanwhile, thug George Floyd has been elevated to the status of a martyred saint.

• In 2022, after being widely acknowledged for failing to subdue the 2020 riots and for destroying much of Minnesota’s small business community by enforcing some of the strictest COVID lockdowns in the country, Minnesotans re-elected governor Tim Walz and his attorney-general sidekick Keith Ellison. You just can’t make this stuff up.

• As I write this, Minnesota’s Somali fraud scandals are exploding in the news. I’ve already written an article regarding just one of them: Minnesota’s Biggest Criminals Run The State. And then of course we have the now-notorious Nick Shirley video (“I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal”), in case you somehow haven’t seen it yet.

• Also as I write this, the ICE killing of Renee Good is also national fodder for the clueless. Here is how I explain ICE to Democrats, who generally have no concept of what is going on here: Minneapolis is controlled by four groups of Black gangs: Highs and Lows in the North, and the 1627 Boyz and Somali Outlaws in the South. In North there’s a drug house on every block; I know because I used to live there. Addicts buy their drugs from the Black gangs, which don’t produce any product; local gangs are just the distribution network for illegal-alien cartel members (Sinaloa, Jalisco, Los Zetas, Tren de Aragua, and so on) who are embedded in the cities. Democrat leaders know exactly what’s happening because they take what must be a massive cut from the sales - in return for enabling all the drug crime, plus the related murders and other violence. Minneapolis mayor Frey is making much noise over the Renee Good death because he knows that with ICE around his income is being reduced, and he also knows his voters are stupid enough to side with him in trying to stop ICE from removing the cartel suppliers who are killing them. Same with Walz, Ellison, Smith, Klobuchar, Omar, and the rest. The reason we can’t remove gangsters from Minne-hopeless (as El Salvador demonstrated can easily be done via gang incarceration) is that the Democrats don’t want them removed. In 2023 there were 100,000 drug-overdose deaths in the USA, the vast majority of which were in Democrat cities. In just one year that’s almost twice the Americans who died in the Vietnam war over the span of a decade. This is how Democrats remain in power. Comprende?

Can’t Be Woke Enough

It’s another day here in Minnesota. Local residents are turning on their TVs, where they listen to a constant stream of lies from the mainstream media: CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, whatever. Their radios are tuned to NPR. Their conception of what’s happening here is so distorted that it’s hard to grasp. Like the residents of Music Man’s River City, they live in a preposterous world that doesn’t even exist, and they revel in it. For example, each rare police-involved death of a criminal spurs them to riot, yet they have nothing to say when criminals murder folks in Minneapolis at a rate of about 1.5 per week.

Mostly-rich White Minnesotans burning down a poor Black community and Black businesses, carrying signs saying “Black Lives Matter”

Talking with Minnesotans about politics is almost impossible; they regale me with their worldview as if it were the only conceivable reality, on the presumption that I certainly must already agree with them. Presenting Minnesotans with data is pointless; they have been somehow well trained in mechanisms to shut down any message they don’t want to hear. In the face of conflicting data, they:

• change the subject,

• disparage the person presenting the data,

• or disparage the source of the data.

Minnesota residents, avid members of the Church of Woke, strut around with their moral superiority, lording it over the rest of us who live in the real world. Minnesotans, by and large, see themselves as social justice warriors, saving the world from Republicans.

The crazies are Nextdoor

I could probably tolerate watching the nutcases in Minneapolis enthusiastically burning down their own city, but it’s much larger than that.

I live in a near suburb, where I can see what both my suburban and urban neighbors are saying on Nextdoor. The comments I see are almost universally in support of the lunacy; I don’t know whether the one-sidedness is due to Nextdoor removing essentially all conservative comments while permitting essentially all “progressive” ones, or whether I’m just seeing the prevailing opinions. I suspect it’s a combination. There is something unsettling about the fact that I live on a street where easily the majority of my neighbors are, politically, quite out of their minds.

Despite occasional optimism from long-suffering conservatives here, Minnesota is doomed. Our problem is not the diabolical officials who our residents elect; our problem is the residents who elect them. While many attribute the elections of DFL officials to the rampant election fraud that occurs here, the problem is much deeper. Our problem is Minnesotans and their lifelong indoctrination.

Minneapolis is host to the largest campus of the University of Minnesota, a bastion of far, far-left lunacy. The U of M graduates thousands of brainwashed useful idiots into the Minnesota population every year. Among them are deeply deranged public school superintendents whose underling teachers brainwash our youngsters into a hysterical, delusional mindset in which largely fictional social injustices define their entire world view.

Criminality in Minnesota has been so pervasive for so long that the public regards pathological behavior as the norm, actively resisting any effort to quash it. For example there are people here whose families have been intermarrying with illegal aliens for so long that they simply have no conception that entering our country illegally is a bad idea (much less criminal), and who vitriolically despise anyone who would simply seek to enforce immigration law. And it’s not just individuals who are deeply invested in the crime that pervades Minnesota: The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, in fact, believes that the hiring of illegal aliens is so acceptable that it announces its involvement while supporting legislation to enable more. Minnesotans’ delusions are partly fueled by their ignorance of history. For example I doubt that most people here know that Democrat Bill Clinton got a bi-partisan standing ovation during his 1995 State-Of-The-Union speech for denouncing illegal immigration. So far I haven’t tried rubbing this in any of their faces, for fear of how they might respond.

When we watch Minneapolis residents rioting in the streets once again, regardless of the current excuse, we are witnessing people suffering from the mental disease of insufferable self-righteousness. Being themselves clueless and brainwashed, they have no idea what they are truly rioting for or against; they are simply exhibiting their Woke virtue for all the world to see.

Even the Republicans here are delusional. Election cycle after election cycle, they reject rational strategy (which would involve controlling both houses of our state legislature by winning in winnable swing districts), while holding onto the fantasy that we are going to elect a governor (or AG, or SOS, or U.S. senators, or any other “statewide” office). In my many conversations with Minnesota Republicans, they stubbornly insist that their win-the-governor’s-office strategy, which has not worked in almost two decades, is suddenly going to succeed now. “This time for sure!”, as Bullwinkle used to say.

Epitaph

The response of Minneapolis Mayor Frey to the death of Renee Nicole Good was to say that she was merely “trying to leave the scene”. Sure, mayor Frey. By that logic, George Floyd was also merely trying to leave the scene while violently resisting arrest. For that matter, Derek John Thompson was merely driving through an intersection where he ran a red light and T-boned a car, killing its five young occupants:

Black Lives Matter. Yup. Sure. If you say so

Interestingly, Thompson went to trial and was convicted; Minnesotans seem to feel there is some great difference between obeying red lights vs. following lawful police orders.

Democrats use these kinds of ridiculous deceptions constantly because they understand their audience, which is to say, they understand their own voters: the suckers of the Church of Woke.

Here are some of the folks Renee Good was defending with her life: “Most Disturbing”. In the words of Mayor Frey, “They are our neighbors, our friends, and our family – and they are welcome in our city.” Yes Mayor Frey, we understand that you and your party fully embrace murderers, child rapists, and cartel drug mules. Those are your people indeed.

If you are a modern-day Harold Hill looking for suckers to swindle, look no further than urban Minnesota. Not only will Minnesotans open their cities and their pockets for you, but, like the folks in River City, they’ll be incredibly glad that you came; in fact, they’ll celebrate you. They’ll lay down their lives for you. Who knows, maybe they’ll even honor you with a parade.

Minneapolis’ version of the River City band

But back to the movie

When people return from their kids’ school performances of The Music Man, they no doubt mindlessly do so with smiles on their faces. But imagine what it would be like actually living in River City. Residents would march around town constantly, imagining themselves to be dressed in snappy uniforms and playing musical instruments – which they could not play even if the instruments existed. Everyone would be relentlessly cheerful about this, and also about their hero Harold Hill, who did absolutely nothing but swindle them. Everywhere you go, there is applause for Harold; every election season, the good citizens put up yard signs for him.

In every social situation you’d be expected to applaud the city’s nonexistent band. Not only that: River City residents will implore you relentlessly to join the band. Why wouldn’t you want to? How could anyone resist? In fact, if you’re not marching down the street imagining yourself playing along, there’s obviously something wrong with you.

Minnesota’s version of Harold Hill

To adapt to Minnesota, all you need do is adopt our great truths: Abortion isn’t murder. Trans women are women. There's nothing wrong with illegal immigration. Diversity is our strength. Black Lives Matter. Election fraud is a right-wing conspiracy theory. You Do You. Our financial scams are no big deal. Climate Change is killing us all. George Floyd was murdered. The police are our enemies. Social Justice is everything. No one is safe until everyone is safe. Our protests are peaceful. The Democrats are looking after us.

Really, it’s like being in a giant mental institution. Or maybe Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Welcome to Minnesota.

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

==== ADDENDUM of 1/14/26

“There are now hundreds of thousands of people like this woman. People who have been overly captured by the marxist propaganda. I want them to know something. There are billionaires out there laughing at their ability to indoctrinate you to do their bidding. I guarantee you, somewhere in this nation and around this world, there are people who hate our nation, fueling this and laughing at the their ability to control you and cause you to throw away your life. They indoctrinate you with the media outlets they control. They brainwash you at Universities across this country, robbing students of balance in thought and ideas. Even paying you. I pray you all will one day wake up from this. I am seriously praying for you.”

==== ADDENDUM of 1/23/26

Here are four videos that will help you understand urban Minnesotans better. Start with these two lighter ones:

• Visit Minnesota: It’s Somalia, But Closer

• Minnesota Somalia Day Care Center Fraud – AI Parody Song

and then get serious:

• How ‘Woke’ became a middle class status symbol

• What the French Revolution Tells Us about the Minneapolis Mobs