Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
History According to Royce White
Did you know that GOP Senate candidate Royce White has a podcast where he shares his peculiar perspectives on the world? We’re certainly not gonna listen to that shit, so we’re grateful to the Minnesota Reformer’s Chris Ingraham for enduring it on our behalf and posting a few representative quotes to Bluesky today.
(Keith here with a parenthetical soapbox moment regarding Bluesky: I have personally all but abandoned Twitter/X, using it only to promote links to my work, and I regret even spending that much time at a site whose owner retweets white nationalists and reactionary election misinfo. I’m over at Bluesky now; it's the next best thing to abandoning social media completely.)
Here’s White on the Civil War: “The slave holders were the minority. The Blacks weren’t the minority.” Makes you think! He goes on to say they were standing up for the principle that “Just because we’re the minority doesn’t mean we have to do what everyone else says.” Hey, you know who’s a minority in today’s world? School shooters! Why should they have to do “what everyone else says,” huh Royce? They’re just standing up for the little guy. Ingraham also heard White raging against “finocchio omnisexual egalitarian shills,” for some reason using a Italian slur against gays.
Not all White’s beliefs are nonsensical. Why, he believes the Earth is round (whew). But! He also holds that there’s no “epistemological” reason to believe that this is the case. (Guessing he means “empirical,” but you never know with this guy.)
The Civil War isn’t the only conflict White subjects to his DIY historical revisionism. The folks at Heartland Signal excavated a 2022 tweet where White opined, “The bad guys won in WWII.” (See? Twitter! The worst.) “There were no good guys,” just “controlling interests,” according to Professor White. Anyway, if you’d like to elect a “just thinking out loud guy” to Senate, Royce White is your man.
National Media Zero in on Actual Walz Liability
For just about a microsecond, we thought the unthinkable: Do crackpot Rep. Mary Franson (R-Alexandria) and lesser crockpot Sen. Karin Housley (R-Stillwater) have a valid point?
Well, not exactly. Earlier today, while praising this comprehensive CNN article, they both lambasted the Minnesota media for being asleep at the wheel regarding fallout from the massive Covid-era Feeding Our Future fraud case. But if the esteemed lawmakers had read just four paragraphs in, they'd see that national story credits the Star Tribune's Ryan Faircloth and Briana Bierschbach for more or less writing the same in-depth piece... four months ago. (Never mind the fact Sahan Journal scooped the damn scandal in the first place.)
The CNN version adds some new reporting, but the gist is the same: nonpartisan Legislative Auditor Judy Randall issuing damning reports about how the Walz administration failed to hold itself accountable in the wake of FoF. Gov. Tim Walz is "a hands-off leader when it comes to seeking accountability for episodes of fraud and mismanagement on his watch," according to the trio of reporters, who studied Randall's audits and conducted interviews about 'em. With Feeding Our Future, “The buck is still running down the street and stopping nowhere, and that is unacceptable,” Sen. Ann Rest (DFL-New Hope) said at a hearing earlier this summer. The governor's office would only supply prepared statements to the Strib and CNN.
Walz takes a whole lotta heat over bad-faith manufactured outrages, like the ceaseless right-wing propagation that he's a baby-butchering Maoist who laughed as Minneapolis burned. But his sloppy rhetorical adherence to facts is a real liability, and Feeding Our Future is an even bigger one. It's worth reporting on, and deserves full answers from the VP candidate.
Yes, we understand the other guys are much worse. And here's a little evidence of that: A Texas baker is reportedly receiving death threats for making—and quickly selling out of—cookies with Walz's smiling mug on 'em.
Land of 10,000… Rest Stops?
I’ve driven around Minnesota a fair amount, but I’m not sure I’ve ever visited a Minnesota rest stop. (In this instance, the “I” refers to Keith—reader Steve Brandt gets annoyed, and justifiably so, when we forget to ID ourselves in individual blurbs of Flyover newsletters written by committee.) But after reading Erica Pearson discuss the history of the state’s well-regarded stops in today’s installment of the Strib's Curious Minnesota, it might be time for a road trip. Things I learned: MnDOT owns and operates 62 toilet-equipped areas, along with 165 pull-offs where weary travelers can rest; the earliest stops were built in the 1930s; and far from adopting cookie-cutter designs, the state has built several stops in architecturally significant ways.
TGIF. Time to Take It Easy.
Rest stops aren't the only way to relax! You can experience the glory of Minnesota without leaving your house (let alone getting in your car) by watching the video below. Here you'll witness serene scenes of our state's autumnal majesty as a calming piano score plucks away. It was uploaded last week, already has attracted 23K views, lasts for almost 12 hours (!), and the lone comment is a sentiment we can all get behind: "明尼苏达的秋天，来自中国深圳的爱
