Episode 131 - STATE IN CRISIS: Medicaid, Defunding, and Deleted History

Should Minnesota students continue learning about D-Day?!

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Did you know Minnesota students are no longer required to learn about D-Day? Why is our state’s Medicaid spending going completely off the deep end? And what happened after Minneapolis disbanded its Shoot Team during the “defund the police” fervor? We get into it all on this week’s episode of the American Experiment Podcast. On the back half, John Phelan discusses his brand-new book, “Star of the North: Essays in Minnesota History” (available here!)

QOTW: What makes you proud to be an American and/or Minnesotan?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to the American Experiment Podcast. Catherine, what do we have on the DACA today? Well, this week we're filling you in on how Minnesota students are no longer required to learn about D-Day, how Medicaid spending in Minnesota has gone completely off the deep end, and what happened after Minneapolis disbanded its shoot team in the wake of 2020. On the back half, we're talking to John Phelan about his brand new book on Minnesota history, Star of the North. Let's dive in. Our audience question of the day, and this is because we have two stories today that reference history. The first one is what you just heard how Minnesotans, Minnesota students are no longer required to learn about D-Day. Really crazy. And then on the back half, we talked with John Phelan about Minnesota history and some of the false narratives that exist out there. And one of the things we see is that a lot of times young people today are taught really negative versions of our history in both the US and in Minnesota. So all that to say, our audience question of the day is why are you proud to be an American or a Minnesotan? Drop it in the YouTube comments if you're listening on Spotify or Apple. Thank you so much for being here. Pop on over to the YouTube and leave us a comment. Why are you proud to be an American or a Minnesotan?

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Yeah, let's get right into this. So the 82nd anniversary of D-Day was this last Saturday, June 6th. And of course, that was the moment when nearly 160,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, pushing back Nazi Germany in World War II, and marking the beginning of the end of Adolf Hitler's regime. It is arguably one of the most consequential military operations in world history. And for years, over 10 years, seventh graders in Minnesota have been required to learn about the key battles of World War II, including D Day, as part of their social studies education. The problem is the standards, the social studies standards that require that knowledge to be demonstrated are expiring. They were passed in 2011. And starting next school year, schools are going to be held to a completely different set of standards. And those standards are instead of emphasizing, you know, learning key figures, dates, events, moments in history, it's emphasizing learning broader, vaguer concepts. And Catherine Wigfall has reported on this extensively at AmericanExperiment.org. Under these new benchmarks, which again go into effect this coming fall, seventh graders will simply be asked to analyze connections between World War II, fascism, and the Holocaust. Which is good. It's a little vague, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

It's a little vague. So if you were a teacher, say you could just opt to skip over D-Day altogether if you wanted, it's not required by one.

SPEAKER_02 3:06

It's not it's not required in any sense. They are they're not banned from teaching it, but no, it's no longer required by name. And the problem is the history standard that's paired with this benchmark no longer spells out the events that have traditionally anchored students' understanding of World War II. So before seventh grade, under these new standards, the only reference to World War II in any form comes in sixth grade, when students are asked to, quote, identify multiple narratives about how World War II and the Cold War impacted Minnesotans. Again, narratives, not key events, not figures, not dates, it's narratives. And again, that's that's fine, that's good, that understanding of history is probably helpful, but shouldn't they be able to name and explain the significance of key battles and key dates like D-Day? Not just point out narratives and the connections between events?

SPEAKER_01 3:53

Yeah, exactly. Especially when they used to be in there and now they've been removed. I think that's key, is that it used to specify on our standards they have to learn about these things, and now it doesn't. So what does that change mean exactly? People say, of course, you know, they're still gonna learn about it, teachers are going to teach it, but there's been a change made. Um, if this happens in the law, a change like this happens, you know, judges will look at it and say, well, that change is meaningful. They don't make a change in the law just because of for whatever reason it was frivolous or whatever. You look at that as being meaning meaningful. And so it is meaningful that these things were removed from the standards. What does that mean? Does that mean that kids aren't going to learn them anymore? That's what you have to assume, and that's what a legal understanding here, I think, would tell us to understand it as. Right, that's the problem.

SPEAKER_02 4:37

They've made the choice to take it out of the existing standards. That was a decision that was made. And it's part of a very intentional and very public, they're not trying to hide it, shift within the Minnesota Department of Education away from what they call, you know, rote memorization or just reiterating content. And the problem is, you know, how are students supposed to develop any sort of historical thinking or literacy or analysis skills if they don't have that base of factual knowledge to start from? Right. Background knowledge, Catherine Wrigfall's writing at americanexperiment.org, is what makes critical thinking possible. And starting next year, starting in fall of 2026, students are not gonna have it.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

History, the Minnesota Department of Education says, is quote, the construction of a narrative, and the narrative is the product.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Well, wow, I actually I just disagree with that. I mean, who's narrative? History is facts. I mean, there is right and wrong, there is truth and there is fiction, and someone's personal narrative about what happened in history, while it can often be very informative and important, isn't always completely factual. Our students should be learning the facts of history and then deciding for themselves what to take away from that.

SPEAKER_02 5:48

Here's a very black and white example, comparing the old and the new standards. And the old standard, this is a quote the economic growth, cultural innovation, and political apathy of the 1920s ended in the Great Depression, which spurred new forms of government intervention and renewed labor activities, followed by World War I and an economic resurgence. A lot of facts in there. Not a lot of meat, I would say. The new standard, just for the record. Yes, yes, that's from a larger section called The Great Depression and World War II, 1920 to 1945. There's key events, there's dates, there's content. The new standard. Quote context, change, and continuity. Ask historical questions about context, change, and continuity in order to identify and analyze dominant and non-dominant narratives about the past. And again, it's narratives, it's oppression, it's systems of power. That is MDE's new focus.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

And so vague, you could learn, learn, take away so much from that very vague question.

SPEAKER_02 6:46

Yeah, exactly. And and and and and that's that's sort of the problem. Again, you know, teachers are not prevented from teaching their students about D-Day. But there was a choice that was made at our state's Department of Education to take out that requirement. And D-Day is, of course, not the only one that's been removed. And this change is it, I mean, it's gonna be in place for the next 10 years. That's that's the that's the sad reality. These new social studies standards are on a 10-year cycle. And so this is what students are gonna be held to for years to come.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Yeah, it's really sad. I mean, when you think when you think about D-Day, it's such an incredible example of um the willingness of kind of like the heart and soul of people and humans. I mean, think of the narratives you could tell of those men that climbed up the beaches at Normandy, the slope where they just were attacked with a barrage of gunfire and they they fought through, they did it anyway, for a greater purpose. You could have these incredible narratives told about D-Day, but instead it seems that the social study standards are really focused on the oppression lens and the lens that everything we learn about in history, everything you should learn about in American history is negative, is bad, when the reality is American history is also beautiful and incredible. It has these really heroic stories like the stories of those men who climbed the beaches at Normandy on D-Day. And so the idea that those might be skipped over is really sad for our future students who might not have that full picture of what our country's history looks like.

SPEAKER_02 8:13

If you do want to see more of you know what content is or isn't coming to a classroom near you this fall, you can go to americanexperiment.org slash ethnic studies.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

All right, so for our next story, we have got Minnesota spends $57,000 per Medicaid enrollee with disabilities. Is this sustainable? No. Yeah. Probably not. Okay, according to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in 2023, Minnesota spent $12,000, almost $13,000 per average Medicaid enrollee. Only Pennsylvania and Washington exceeded this amount. This is all according to Martha Jolamoli at americanexperiment.com. If you want to see more, you can find all the data that accompanies this story there too, along with a lot of very helpful charts and graphs. But for people with disabilities, Minnesota spent $57,000 per person, the highest level in the entire country. So think of that jump: $13,000 for average Medicaid enrollee, but then Medicaid enrollees with disabilities, we spend over $57,000 per person. And that's the highest in the whole country. The median state spent $26,000, less than half as much. And Minnesota spent over $9,000 more than Washington, the second highest state, and nearly 16,000 more than New York, the third highest state. So Martha details how the main reason for this is the long-term care service industry faces persistent worker shortages. And recent years, the legislature has tried to address this issue by raising wages. As a result, spending on long-term care has consistently grown. And worker shortages may justify an increase in long-term care waivers, but that stance is highly debatable given the rampant fraud plaguing these programs, like the personal care assistance program. Not to mention, LTC long-term care worker shortages are a nationwide issue. It's not like we are the only state facing this, and yet we are the highest spending state by a mile when it comes to this. Right.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

That feels like a very lazy explanation for what's going on with our Medicaid spending. Right. Because we're so far beyond every other state. We're, you know, we're more than double the median. We're almost $10,000 higher than, you know, the second highest spending state. That cannot account for the huge difference in overspending.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Yeah, it doesn't seem like it could possibly be the full story. Uh, warranted or not, the tremendous growth in long-term care has significant implications for the state budget. HHS, Health and Human Services, is the primary driver of state budget growth. And the vast majority of HHS is Medicaid spending. So basically, in my words, Minnesota's huge welfare state is taking over our budget. And I think it's worth asking how much of this is legitimate. I mean, how much of this money is actually going to the people who need it? Look at the PCA program we mentioned earlier. That's the personal care assistance program, basically, where a family member or someone can take care of a person who needs care if they have disabilities or they're older, things like that. The money goes directly towards, like a family member, say, for taking care of them. It sounds like a good idea. In theory, and in theory, it would also actually bring down the cost of helping these people. But in Ohio, the Daily Wire actually did a really big investigative report into basically the same program that they have there in Ohio. And what they found was rampant fraud, where people were claiming to care for all kinds of people that they never even looked at, right? So I think that's worth asking how much of this money is legitimate. And then of course, how much are we expected to take care of every person who needs it in Minnesota? If we are providing so much more than other states, um, to what end do we do that, right? To what there could be no end to the size of a welfare state. There are so many people who who could use help, but what's our limit, right?

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Right. And and the problem is I think Minnesota is rapidly approaching that limit. I mean, our our budget has serious structural imbalances, and Medicaid spending, human health and service spending uh is the biggest portion of that pie. And it's it's been growing basically unchecked for the last, you know, 10 odd years. And we're reaching a breaking point. We're gonna hit a point where Minnesota can't afford to be as generous as it has been.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Yeah, and it's at the expense of the taxpayers who are also struggling. Now you see so many people in Minnesota's middle class who would really, really use relief from the extremely high taxes we see in Minnesota. Those people are struggling as well. So it comes at their expense. It's not like this is just an endless pot of money and there's no downside. Also, think of the things that don't get passed because we don't have room for them in our budget. Like this session, I know there was a school safety bill that didn't get by. I mean, all of us, I think, could get on board with some more school safety measures, but there just simply wasn't room in the budget. It didn't make it through. Despite the federal government covering over half of all human services spending, okay, so this is we already get a ton of money from the feds for this, HHS's rapid expansion has monopolized the state budget, leaving little to no room for other essential public services. Compounding this issue is a persistent structural deficit, which severely limits Minnesota's capacity to absorb additional Medicaid spending without further sacrificing other public services, such as roads, say, or uh raising taxes, of course.

SPEAKER_02 13:48

Yeah, it's it's something's gonna have to change in the next several years, in my opinion. And we are not on a sustainable course at all. And I think that we've hit the point, too, where fraud has become such a huge part of like the public consciousness in Minnesota. I wonder if people are gonna be more receptive to cutting back in certain areas of the budget because we know that so much of it has been stolen.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Yeah, exactly. I know, I hope so. Because the other option is we raise taxes, and you see legislators in St. Paul say things like, Well, all we need is more revenue. Like that's always their solution. That's always their solution. It's like, come on, there are so many places on our budget where we could look and we could see how we can cut down on this. Because look at this situation. We're a huge outlier. In these other states, are they really struggling to take care of the people who need it? I doubt it. So I hope that now, like you say, with the fraud issue really really being at the front of people's minds, legislators are a little more willing to look at other solutions like cutting spending besides just raising our taxes once again to deal with the budget issue. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 14:50

We wanted to end on more of a positive story uh in the front half of today's episode. We had talked uh in an earlier episode about the non-fatal shooting solve rates uh issue that we've been working on here at American Experiment for the last year or so. And we thought we'd actually backtrack a little bit and give kind of a history of what led up to that push, uh that suc ultimately successful push that happened in the last few months. Uh David Zimmer was right, you know, reporting on this at AmericanExperiment.org. Uh so way back in the late 2010s, uh the Minneapolis Police Department staffing was healthy and they had enough resources to actually maintain a standalone investigative unit, the shoot team, that investigated nonfatal shootings, which again are often linked to gang violence and often produce uncooperative witnesses and even uncooperative victims. So they're notoriously difficult to solve. In 2019, so when this you know this shoot team was active, still working on these cases, the MPD recorded 266 nonfatal shootings and 48 murders. Now in 2020, following the whole Minneapolis uprising and the defund the police movement and and and the huge, you know, the calls from the Minneapolis City Council to defund the police, um, all of that rhetoric and the prosecutions of the four Minneapolis police officers meant that the yeah, well fun little stroll down memory lane, wasn't that? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. PTSD had triggered. Uh the Minneapolis Police Department had their resources and staffing, you know, cut, uh, whether whether just from officers leaving or literally from the budget getting slashed by the city council. So they had a vacancy approaching 40% uh in the months following all of you know that debacle. The staffing crisis led, of course, MPD to make some tough choices, which included disbanding its shoot team working on these nonfatal shootings. That decision resulted in the already overburdened homicide unit being assigned all nonfatal shootings as well, which of course was destined to fail. They were taking on way more than they could handle. Fewer officers meant less deterrence and a corresponding spike in violence. By 2021, after the city had slashed its police force, had pulled all of its public support from its officers, the number of nonfatal shootings had jumped from 266 in 2019 to 658 just two years later, and murders had nearly doubled as well. By 2024, despite the surge in violence sort of starting to dissipate from the city, the solve rates had dropped to a shocking 65% for murders. Not nonfatal shootings, murders, 65% solve rate, and just 22% solve rate for nonfatal shootings. And this is such a good reminder that police budgets and public support from officials for police departments have serious consequences. You have murders and you have nonfatal shootings that are going unsolved, and of course then you're seeing a corresponding spike in those murders and in those non-fatal shootings to begin with. Well, you know, this is not these are not abstract policies that we're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

Yeah, and I feel like we we think about non-fatal shootings, at least when we say it, I in my head are like, oh, not so bad. Getting shot is like quite bad. You know, that's something you still obviously want to prioritize as being solved. Thankfully the person lived, but you could have lost a l a leg or a limb or or whatever. So it's not like these are nothing burger cases. That's a huge deal getting shot. And that's a gun crime that now we haven't solved. And when we have people on the left saying they care about gun violence so much, well, for a while now they haven't seemed to care so much about this issue, which is solving gun crime.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

And that's the problem. If you want dangerous individuals, dangerous criminals off the streets, if you want a safer Minneapolis that people actually want to visit, you have to treat these nonfatal shootings seriously. So last fall, as you may remember, we started partnering with the Minnesota Justice Research Center on this joint advocacy project to encourage MPD to rededicate investigators to, again, a standalone unit assigned solely to solving these nonfatal shootings. And that would free up the homicide unit in turn to focus on solving murders. Now, our two organizations, Center of the American Experiment and the Minnesota Justice Research Center, presented all of our data on our best practices to the Minneapolis City Council. And this ended up actually making its way all the way through the legislature, this this last session in 2026. And we ended up with over $900,000 in grant funding given to law enforcement across the state. This is not just Minneapolis, it's not just St. Paul, across the state. Agencies are getting more support to solve these non-fatal shooting rates and hopefully, hopefully make our community safer, you know, and stop gang violence before it gets out of hand, and you do have actual homicides. As a result, at the end of March of 2026, MPD quietly rolled out this new unit called the Firearms Assault Shoot Team, or FAST, that is such a good acronym, great branding, as part of its major crimes division. The FAST unit members were hand-picked, this is David Zimmer reporting at AmericanExperiment.org, to ensure they had the experience and tenacity to overcome the difficulties in investigating cases involving uncooperative victims, witnesses, and suspects that again are often associated with these nonfatal shootings. Now, it's still so new, it's only been in operation for a couple of months, and so we don't really have any any uh substantial data to evaluate how it's going, but it is worth pointing out that your date data from the MPD dashboard shows nonfatal shootings in 2026 are down 12% over the same period last year and 29% over the three-year average. And anecdotally, you know, the effort has been a a really a success so far, just in these early stages. They're getting lots of positive feedback from witnesses, from victims, and citizen members, and they're already seeing improved collections of evidence from these crime scenes as well as faster response times, which is exactly what you want to see. Again, we as a state need a thriving largest city. Minneapolis, a healthy and vibrant Minneapolis, benefits everyone in the state. And this is a a huge piece of that. Public safety is a huge piece of that vision for a better Minneapolis. And so this is very welcome news.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

Yeah, absolutely. And you need to make sure they have the resources to actually solve these crimes beyond just their day-to-day work. And so it it's it was really heartening too that we kind of came together with a group that was a little more on the left to focus on this because you know I did kind of shade people on the left for not wanting to solve crimes because I do see that a lot from people in the legislature. But there are a lot of sane people on the left as well who say, look, we need to help victims. We need to help victims of crime and we need to be solving these crimes. Otherwise, more and more people are just victimized. So this was a really positive thing to come out of this session, and um I'm glad to see that already the uh initial data coming back is looking really good. Because, yeah, like you say, we need a thriving Minneapolis as much as people want to avoid it, and I totally agree, like I sometimes want to avoid Minneapolis as well. Um, the the wealth and the economic activity that comes out of the city benefits the entire state. So you can say, I never enter Minneapolis, but you still see the benefits, no matter where you live in the state, of the economic activity that happens in the city of Minneapolis. So it's important that we all care about its success.

SPEAKER_02 21:47

We're now going to sit down with American Experiment's John Phelan, who just published a new book collecting his essays on Minnesota history. Don't go anywhere. American Experiment is supported by thousands of individuals like you. To join the movement. Go to www.americanexperiment.org and click the yellow donate button. From all of us here, thank you. We are joined today in studio by John Phelan, who is of course an economist here at Center of the American Experiment, but who also emigrated here to the US from the UK nine years ago, became a naturalized US citizen, and has since become very interested in Minnesota history. Welcome to the show, John.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

Thanks for having me on. It's my first time in the new studio. Very fancy.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

Are you enjoying your stay here in the new set?

SPEAKER_00 22:29

It's a step up, I tell you, giving up in the world.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

A posher experience. Well, first tell us a little bit about what got you interested in Minnesota history in particular. I assume this is a more recent interest of yours. Or was the the interest in history always there and moving to Minnesota just kind of sparked the interest in local history as well.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

I've always been interested in history, and um one of the things about economics is that there's a lot of theory in it. And I did an undergrad degree in economics, and there was lots of kind of you know abstract models and math and all the rest of it. Um and I actually did my postgrade in economic history because I was a little bit fed up with that. It was also cheaper to do it as well. Um it's very economic of you. Indeed, indeed. Um so one of the things that I was kind of interested in trying to do was try and, you know, you can talk to people about particular economic concepts, but if you can tell them a story, um it's often more powerful. Um a lot of people aren't terribly convinced by a supply and demand chart, but if you can show them or tell them a story about something like, you know, um, so prohibition was one of the first ones that I wrote. Um then then I think people grasp things uh perhaps more intuitively if you do that.

unknown 23:43

Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 23:43

Well, and that's why storytelling is the new buzzword in you know comms and marketing and has been for the last five years. Yeah, everyone wants to be a storyteller. There are entire job descriptions that are storytellers now, which is so funny to me. Uh we wanted to bring you in today specifically because you just published a new book with us here at Center of the American Experiment called Star of the North, Essays in Minnesota History, which is now available for purchase on Amazon. And we'll drop that link in the description below, of course. Uh but tell us, tell us what this book is about.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

Um Well, it's what it's not is a complete history of the state of Minnesota. So there's an awful lot of stuff that's not in here. Um what it does do is collect um articles that I've written for the magazine over the last nine years now, correctly, um, which uh cover various bits of Minnesota history, and I've written them kind of in in different uh different for different motivations. So I mentioned the first couple I wrote were uh to illustrate kind of economic concepts through history, um Prohibition being the first one, um, and also the history of the brewing industry uh in Minnesota, because you've got a story there, you know, of kind of immigrant entrepreneurship, um, that's followed by the government just basically squashing the whole thing by ex legislative fiat with uh you know the prohibition uh uh amendment to the constitution, and then as those uh uh restrictions are slowly lifted, um the industry kind of comes back to life. Um so there's an interesting story there. But what happened uh eventually is that it was around the time of the kind of George Floyd uh death and all the unrest that followed that, the rioting and all the rest of it, is it became apparent to me that the state's history was being presented in a very particular and partial way. Um there was a particular narrative that was being pushed, and it had kind of always been there. But around 2020 it just started to get pushed as the narrative, the accepted narrative. Um, and so for example, I'll give you one example. Um I remember, I think it's quoted in the book, I think, but it was KSTP or Care11 or one of the local news outlets, they were covering that ride that happens uh the day after Christmas every year down to Mankato uh to remember the execution that happened there in 1862. And uh the newspaper article said 38 Dakota men were hung for defending their people. And I thought, well, that's not what happened, actually. That's incredibly misleading and partial reading of history. Um, and so it seemed to me that you know, if you ask anybody in Minnesota about the Dakota War, probably nine-tenths of them, all they know is that 38 people were hung at the end of it. Right. They do not know that many hundreds of civilians were butchered quite brutally at the start of it in the first couple of days. Now, that's not to say that you should forget about the one, but you should remember the other.

SPEAKER_02 26:34

Right.

SPEAKER_00 26:34

Um and so what I wanted to do was to try and, you know, put a different uh or or just to kind of highlight stories that were being lost in this narrative. Um it's important, I think, you know, that people remember their history, because if you don't, you get pushed all sorts of ways.

SPEAKER_01 26:51

Yeah, I've always gotten the sense that a lot of the the kind of like modern approach to looking at the history of America and Minnesota is one that's really negative. Um it's every seeing everything through the lens of um oppression or resistance, for example, as the new social studies standards would say. Um but what we maybe don't learn about so much in school is that we have a lot of great stories of Minnesotans that were brave and heroic. Like um, I think there's a story in here about Minnesotans in the Civil War, is that right? And was that something you tried to address in this book? Just some like a more positive vision of some of Minnesota's history?

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Yeah, and that's a really good example, that specific one. Um, well, there's actually three articles about uh civil war and slavery in the in the in the book. Um initially I intended to write one covering the whole period, but you accumulate so much material that you have to break it up into different bits. Um but that's a really interesting one because you you occasionally get these proposals for uh reparations. So St. Paul City Council, you know, for example, this thing kind of bobs up every now and then that there should be reparations for slavery. Now, I mean, if you're in Mississippi or Louisiana, you go and make that argument, you know. But one thing I would say is that if you know anything about the history of Minnesota, then you should basically just bounce this idea right out of town. Because, you know, this is a state where on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, possibly the crucial battle of the American Civil War, or the Civil War I should call it, um, you know, the Union line came very near to breaking, and it did not break because the first Minnesota Infantry Regiment, all volunteers from the state, um, sacrificed themselves. Now, at that point, these were guys who'd fought at First Bull Run. Uh they were the only Union regiment really to come out of the first battle of the war when the Army disintegrated with any kind of credit. Um, they fought at Antietam, which was the bloodiest day in American history. So when it came to 1863 and they were fighting at Gettysburg, these guys knew what they were doing. They knew that they were effectively marching off to their deaths. And indeed, 82% of them uh were killed in this in this charge. But what it did is it saved the Union line and saved the Union position and arguably saved the country. And these guys did that, you know, and if you know that, um, then I don't think that you can you you'd you'd swallow all these nonsense about reparations. Anybody who comes and comes around, essentially it's a shakedown. All these things boil down to a shakedown. They're shaking you down for cash, and they will tell you a story to justify that. But I think anybody who gets asked, you know, reparations for slavery in the state of Minnesota, just say to them, you know, drive out to Gettysburg, go and look at the cemetery, and there you'll see our reparations. It's buried in the ground.

SPEAKER_02 29:40

Well, and that's the problem, is there really is such a lack of understanding of our own state's history. I mean, I was born and raised here, obviously, and I I don't think it's a stretch to say that you know more about my state's history than I do. You just came here nine years ago. And I think that's the problem, is so many of the negative and misleading narratives that you know the leading institutions in Minnesota, media outlets, the Minnesota Historical Society, even, push uh so many residents don't have the basic facts and understanding of our history to push back against them. And it's a real problem.

SPEAKER_00 30:09

Yeah, and so the Minnesota Historical Society is a good example. Um last year was the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, which I think is a pretty big occasion. It's one of the last major anniversaries of that event for which there will be people who took part in that event. Right. That generation is very near the very nearly died out now. Um and when you look at what the Historical Society did to mark that, do you know what they did?

SPEAKER_02 30:34

Nothing, I assume.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Almost nothing. They released a book about interment camps, Japanese internment camps.

SPEAKER_02 30:39

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 30:40

As if that is all America's involvement in World War II and Minnesota's involvement in World War II amounts to. Right. There's all kinds of incredible stories, you know. So for example, uh in Hopkins, Minnesota, they built a shipyard. Now, if you're gonna build battleships or ships to sail on the ocean, you would not do it in Hopkins, Minnesota. But they did. Not only did they build a shipyard there, they built a uh a canal that went all the way up to the Minnesota River so that you could then sail them up the Minnesota, up the Mississippi, and then all the way down to New Orleans and out to the ocean. That's kind of crazy.

SPEAKER_02 31:10

It's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 31:11

But it's the kind of thing people used to do back then.

SPEAKER_02 31:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

You know, if you think of uh, I mean, D-Day, for example, they were really worried that they wouldn't capture ports quickly enough to be able to unload supplies. So what did they do? What would you do now? What would happen now? You know, there'd there'd be all kinds of environmental uh impact studies, there'd be, you know, equity impact studies. Back then they just built ports on that floated and dragged the things over the English Channel and dumped them on the beach. Uh mulberry harbours, fantastic things. You know, and so once you know these things and know what your your your history and what your people have been capable of, um I think it's a really inspiring thing. Um I do think it's deliberate, um, this fostering of ignorance. I saw it back in England actually, um, around the time of the Brexit results, when Britain voted to leave the European Union, there were people running around saying, oh, this is terrible, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to this country. And I thought to myself, you you can only say that if you know nothing about British history. If you know nothing about the Blitz or the Battle of Trafalgar or the Spanish Armada or the Danish invasions and Alfred the Great hiding out in the marshes of Romsey or something. But if you know those things, then you don't get pushed around so easily. You aren't so malleable. And so I think there's a deliberate attempt to make people ignorant and keep people ignorant so they can be pushed around.

SPEAKER_02 32:31

Yeah, you do truly. You have to know where you've come from in order to know where you're going.

SPEAKER_01 32:35

Yeah, because history does repeat itself. We see people make the same mistakes over and over, often because of an ignorance of what happened in our history. And I think another example of this that all of our listeners will be familiar with is the changing of the Minnesota state flag. Uh there's actually the old Minnesota state flag on the back of this book. Um and then under the DFL trifecta, it got switched. They completely erased it and made it kind of new and mod. What do you make of that kind of erasure of Minnesota's history? Is that just another example of um, I guess, the left trying to erase Minnesota's history? And and I I don't know. What do you make of that?

SPEAKER_00 33:14

Uh it is exactly that. I mean, if you look at the old state flag, what I'm kind of really interested in is this idea that there are rules for flag design.

SPEAKER_02 33:22

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 33:23

You know, I mean, I I this is this is a my weird little secret. My first ever hobby was vexillology.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

What does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 33:31

The study of flags. I became when I was a kid, I became obsessed with flags. And I I was really interested in the fact that Arab countries, they all had flags that were basically the same four colours. I was obsessed with the idea that Scandinavian countries all had, you know, the slightly off-center Scandic cross design. I was obsessed with the idea that um Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador next door to each other all are basically the same flag.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

You sound like a fun kid.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

Uh I yeah, well, you know, the long car trips, you know. Yeah. Um but you know, it so and I used to read a little bit about this, and there was nobody out there saying your flag has got to look like this. So I'll give you an example of all the British flags that there are, the coolest one is the Welsh flag, which has a dragon on it.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

Right.

SPEAKER_00 34:17

Now, anybody, you know, looking at these uh newfangled flag design rules will tell you that it's a bad design because it's actually a picture of a dragon. But it's cool. It's a dragon, you know? It's a lot cooler than the kind of St. George's Cross, which is just this cross, or the St. Andrew's Cross, or the St. Patrick's Cross, or anything like that. It's a dragon. You know, it's cool. It tells you something. And so what you've got now is you look at the, you know, so this I I don't buy this idea that there's some design problem with it. You know, I mean, it's I mean you like you can't graffiti the flag on the on a wall or scratch it on a school desk or something. You know, that's not a problem. Um, and what it does is that flag that they had, it actually is kind of based some way back on the flag that the first Minnesota Regiment uh flew at Gettysburg. Oh wow. If you look at that flag, yeah, it's not a straight copy, it's not that the battle flag, but it is inspired by it. So it's telling you a historical story. And really what flags do is they symbolize things, they represent things, you know. Um, and so if you you can't really just sit down and say, oh, we've got this new thing. It doesn't represent anything, it doesn't symbolize anything. And the new flag, I mean, it it looks like it's like if you if you were, you know, making up a kind of fake country in a movie, that's the flag you would have. You know, like Valverde in Commando or something, you know. This is the fake flag of a fake country from an 80s action movie.

SPEAKER_02 35:42

It's very impersonal. You're right. And it is, it is, it is straight erasure of the generations of of history and tradition that came before to produce the flag that we have today, which has gone through several iterations. Or I'm sorry, excuse me, the flag that we had as of a couple years ago.

SPEAKER_01 35:56

But why did they do this? Okay, this is part of my question. Why do they do this? Why do they want us to be ignorant to history, especially those on the left? How do you think it serves them? You mentioned um maybe control or something like that. What is your theory?

SPEAKER_00 36:10

Well, one of the things is, I mean, we're a policy organization, um, and these things aren't just kind of abstract scribblings. They do have policy implications. So I give you the example earlier of reparations. Um, you know, I mean, if somebody comes along with a reparations proposal, we would that's a policy, we would have to take a view on it. And one of the things that you can argue against that with is the history. Right. And it's the same thing. I mean, look at criminal justice. You know, apparently we need criminal justice reforms of various descriptions to make up for the history of racism in this state. Now, in actual fact, um, if you look back um at the very uh uh very founding of this state, um this is why the article split into three about abolitionism and uh the uh the civil war, is that when the state was founded, Minnesota, its foundation was tightly bound up with the whole issue of slavery in America. Um and there was a big push among slave states not to let Minnesota in because they were worried about another free state coming in. Now, when the 1860 presidential election happened, only one other state gave Abraham Lincoln a higher share of its vote. Uh that was Vermont, I think. Uh so Minnesota was solidly behind Lincoln, solidly behind his platform that year. Um and I think if you know things like that, you know, that they were drawing up the constitution. Um now the Democrats uh were the pro-slavery party, the Republicans were the anti-slavery party at that point in history. And what you had is both parties were kind of pushing their own. Actually, there were two constitutions for the state drawn up. Um and they were they differed. Um and that this wasn't actually legally resolved until the 1970s. Um, there was some commission that kind of ironed out the differences. Um but actually, by the time this con uh this constitution was passed, historians do say, and I think I quote it in the book, that Minnesota had one of the most liberal laws for the enfranchisement of you know ethnic minorities and immigrants of anywhere in the country. So if you look at this and say, you know, well, you know, America the state's got this awful history of whatever that we need to make up for. Um education's another one, education policy. Um, if you know the full history of this, you're a lot more skeptical of it. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 38:24

Well, and and that's sad, because it's something to be proud of. There are so many pieces of Minnesotan history that we should be proud of. Our kids should be raised to be proud of. And they're just getting overlooked or deliberately hidden. To that point, when you think back on you know, every every piece of information, every event, every figure that you encountered in writing the essays that make up this book, are there any that have really stuck with you? Any that surprised you?

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Well, one guy that really surprised me was Charles Stenvig, who was the mayor of Minneapolis in Odd Spells between 1969 and 1977. Um he was but I mean, I I lived here for a few years before I ever heard of him. And I came across him by accident when I was writing something about Walter Mondale. Um there's a there's a brilliant book about uh about Mondale, actually, and and it has this throwaway reference to this guy, Stenvig, in there. And it said, you know, the the policeman elected mayor of Minneapolis to sort out crime. And I thought, wow, I've never heard this story. So I went and looked up about Stenvig, and it's an incredible story, actually. Um, because one of the things that really fascinates me in American history is the journey from, say, 1964, the presidential election, where Lyndon Johnson won something like 65% of the vote. Barry Goldwater just got absolutely toasted. Um, and you go from that kind of high point of American liberalism, followed immediately by Great Society and all the rest of it, and you go through from that to like 1984, when Reagan carried every state but Minnesota and just rinsed Mondale, you know, severely. And that the journey from the one to the other, that 20-year period, I find fascinating. Um, and I try and find little stories within that. And the Stenvig story, I think, is a really interesting one because it is a story of how, if you look at Stenvig, his support did not come from well-off Republican parts of Minneapolis. It came from the working class, formerly democratic areas of Minneapolis. And it was the people who were sick and tired of being robbed, and they were sick and tired of their schools being trashed in the names of various kind of social engineering goals. Um, this was at the time of bussing, you know, to achieve some kind of racial balance. And these working class people in Minneapolis, they pointed out that the people who were drawing, I mean, there was a very different kind of social makeup and political makeup at the time. Um they pointed out that the uh kind of liberal upper class Republicans who were pushing a lot of these policies, it wasn't their kids that were going to these schools. You know, it was their kids that were going through all this, it was their kids that are being uprooted and shifted from one place to another. And so that's where you got that real anger. And, you know, that with crime and everything else. And I think it's kind of interesting. You talk about, we talk now about, you know, how the conservative movement is more blue-collar than it ever has been. I'm not sure that's entirely true because Ronald Reagan managed to sweep up a big chunk of the blue-collar vote. The Reagan Democrats were a famous thing. Richard Nixon managed to sweep up a huge amount of blue-collar votes in 1972. Um, and so it's interesting to look at how these things have been in the past, I think.

SPEAKER_01 41:29

Yeah, so tell us a little bit about your goals for the book, who you hope reads it, and what we have planned as an organization to make sure that this book reaches people.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

Well, I hope um anybody who's kind of curious about history uh will read it. Anybody who, you know, sees the governor, um, whoever it may be, um, riding down to Mankato on the day after Christmas, um, you know, when they say we're here to commemorate, you know, this event, this 38 people being executed, know the full story or know the fuller story. And I would say, you know, these are short essays, about 2,400 words each. Um, there are much better books that are based on these things that give you much more detail. They're all listed in a bibliography. Go out and read those. You know, there are really interesting things about all of these incidents out there, and I've kind of boiled these things down. So I hope anybody who's curious, um, when you think history, I mean, none of us would be here if it wasn't for history, okay? So it's a really important thing to know. And so I think if you want to be kind of, you know, an informed citizen, you have to know your history. Um, so I would, I mean, obviously, you know, I'm I I would hope everybody reads it. Um things that we plan to do, we plan, I believe, to send it out to every, I think, high school in Minnesota and every public school in Minnesota. Um, I I think it's I think it's a good book, but I'm I anticipate some resistance, and who knows? Maybe I'll end up on a banned book list. Oh, um, wouldn't that be fun? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:58

Well, absolutely. If you're willing to support us getting this book into every school here in Minnesota, make a donation at americanexperiment.org. Click donate. We want this to be in the hands of especially high school kids all over the state who might not have access to the real stories of Minnesota's history and need kind of the inspiration that comes from this. I mean, I got chills when you were telling that story um from the Civil War. And it it's it's you don't get that in school today. At least I felt like I didn't in high school. I got a lot of negativity, a lot of reasons not to be proud of our heritage. And so I love this as um something for kids to read in high school to get a fuller picture, like you say, of um of their history and their ancestors.

SPEAKER_02 43:41

And what better way to mark the 250th birthday of America than learning more about our state's history? Once again, Star of the North, John Feeling, is available available for sale on Amazon. It is only $13.50, which I think is an incredible steal. You will read all about how we lost the Iron Range. You will read about Charles Stenvig, the mayor of Minneapolis, the Civil War, our involvement in World War II, and so many other incredible Minnesotan stories. John, thank you so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER_00 44:05

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 44:06

Thank you so much to everyone who made it all the way to the end of this week's episode of the American Experiment Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

Remember, please, if you would, go and rate us five summaries if you enjoy this podcast on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe on our YouTube channel. It helps us reach so many more people. The other thing is remember to answer our audience question of the day. That is, what makes you proud to be an American? Or what makes you proud to be a Minnesotan? Drop that in the YouTube comments, and we love reading those. If we get some good ones, we'll make sure to read one on next week's episode.

SPEAKER_02 44:40

It is always stay sane, stay safe out there, and we will see you next week.