Does ‘Coalie,’ the Trump Admin’s Propagandic Pollution Mascot, Rip Off an Icon of MN’s North Shore?

The Trump administration's cartoonish levels of propaganda have yielded a literal cartoon.

He's craggy. He's anime-eyed. He's Coalie, and he's the U.S. Department of the Interior's smirking new mascot for the dying, calamitously polluting coal industry. Here's Interior Secretary Doug Burgum rolling out Coalie last month via tweeted AI illustration, which is a dark sequence of words to have to type:

Much has been made of Coalie's inherent evilness—even enemy of the state Jimmy Kimmel offered a take.

“I think it’s sick… and par for the course for this administration and the U.S. government to use AI to put a smiling face to one of the most heinous ways to produce energy that our world has ever seen,” climate activist Junior Walk tells The Guardian. "I will continue to be haunted by Coalie’s twisted grin and uncanny eyes."

The discourse around him has snowballed into dissections of his disarming cuteness, with Joshua Paul Dale Chuo, the author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World, weighing in for climate website Grist.

“Especially for this administration, I would have expected a little bit more macho twist to it,” the professor at Tokyo's Chuo University says, drawing particular attention to the adorable "kawaii" aesthetic that's ubiquitous around Japan.

Perhaps bringing this ordeal full circle, Slate even released a 45-minute, four-guest podcast episode on how the true Coalie is "more complicated" than he seems. "His origins tell a story about what it’s like for federal employees to try to do their work while navigating the Trump administration’s agenda," Slate writes. "Coalie may be widely seen as a mascot for coal mining, but that’s not what he was made for." (Coalie originated as a running joke inside the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement as early as 2018; his four-part visual evolution can be seen here.)

We've not mined Coalie for all his content, however. Not yet at least. 

Lacking proper provincial knowledge, the national media have ignored one key controversy. As for local media? It's a story they're too proud to gleefully gin up.

But Racket is unafraid to ask: Is Coalie a rip off of Rocky Taconite, the beloved mascot of Silver Bay, Minnesota? That's the verbatim question we posed to the OSMRE communications department.

"Coalie is a communication tool, and his cartoon format allows us to explain complex issues in ways traditional graphics often cannot," a spokesperson tells us. Additional PR-speak followed. 

Great.

We followed up, asking if OSMRE is at least aware of Rocky Taconite. We also asked about Coalie (literally) being a cartoonish propaganda device meant to put a (literal) smiling face on a uniquely climate-hazardous industry that supports just 43,000 jobs.

Crickets.

If nothing else, the conversation around Coalie can be spun off into a much happier and locally angled one about Rocky Taconite, the one-time recipient of the Star Tribune's 8th-best Minnesota statue award.

Rocky was dreamed up in the early 1960s by Dr. Otto Ringle, "a very young and enthusiastic dentist" who moved to Silver Bay from Walker with visions of Bemidji's Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statue dancing in his head, according to the Bay Area Historical Society. At the urging of Ringle's Silver Bay Jaycees biz-boosting org, the Reserve Mining Co. agreed to pay Minneapolis-based Star Iron Works $500 to realize the concept.

"My partner didn't know beans about fabricating, so he didn't know what he was getting us into," Neil Forsberg of Star Iron Works said in 2018, noting that forging the hands proved especially vexing. "There were four of us who spent many hours a day working on Rocky for darn near a year. It took us a while to figure out how to build the darn thing."

Once the 7-foot iron man was completed, two name finalists emerged through a contest: Peter Pellet and Rocky Taconite. Silver Bay resident Louis M. Stefanich's submission won, and in 1964 Rocky Taconite was dedicated by Dr. Edward Wilson Davis, whose honorific is either "Mr. Taconite" or "The Father of Taconite," depending on who you ask. In 1990, Rocky was moved closer to Hwy. 61 to better greet tourists; in 2014, he received a fresh coat of shiny black paint to commemorate his 50th birthday. Mugs, socks, puzzles, ornaments, bobbleheads, and other merch depicting Rocky Taconite are available for purchase to this day.

Aaron Brown, the Strib's Iron Range-based columnist, doesn't think Coalie can hold a smoggy, coal-powered candle to Rocky. Even if he looks more like… well, we'll let Brown address that:

Of course, "Coalie" as he is called, is an AI-generated derivative of the very real, three-dimensional "Rocky Taconite" who has stood sentry over the entrance to Silver Bay, lo, these many years. Rocky has taken his share of ribbing over the years for his very specific resemblances to deer scat, but he represents an iron ore industry literally reborn thanks to the Minnesota-grown innovation of taconite, an industry that is very much alive today. Iron ore and steel production are moving toward electric-powered furnaces, which is among the many market-based reasons coal mining has continued to decline regardless of who's in office. It costs money to dig holes the size of cities, and no one does it if they can't make money.