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Will Deeply Shameful Experience Humble the Minnesota Legislature's "Most Prolific Poster"?
That's the question Minnesota Reformer's Michelle Griffith set out to answer about Rep. Walter Hudson (R-Albertville). Through Twitter, podcasts, and YouTube, the "bombastic pugilist" became "semi-famous for his online presence" since getting elected in 2022. Then, as we're sure you remember, Hudson got busted last month for skipping work to go drunken joyriding till 2 a.m. with twerpy Rep. Elliott Engen (R-White Bear Lake). Engen had the wheel, which is bad, but Hudson had a freakin' handgun, which sure isn't great.
Since that March 27 incident, Hudson continues to retweet like a man glued to his phone, but he hasn't said much for himself. (Cops curiously didn't screen him for alcohol, despite a liquor bottle resting next to him inside a kid's car seat, so he wasn't charged with the misdemeanor crime of packing heat while impaired.) It “has been a humbling period of reflection," he tells Griffith, who writes that, in person, the purportedly humbled lawmaker is "non-confrontational, awkward, shy even."
We then learn about Hudson growing up in a biracial Jehovah’s Witness family from Detroit, discovering the Tea Party movement, and working on AM talk radio. Since taking office, he has used his growing online platform to demonize trans people, falsely claim that Alex Pretti “brandished a gun," and more or less splash around in the lucrative swamp of reactionary right-wing grievance politics.
But will Hudson return to posting takes to his 160,000 YouTube fans and 50,000 Twitter followers? He tells the Reformer he's on a "temporary hiatus from posting." To which Griffith writes: "Look for it to end with real-time reactions about this very story."
Real Human Service Not in the Cards at Cardamom
Sixteen servers and hosts at Cardamom, the Minneapolis restaurant inside Walker Art Center, lost their jobs Sunday. They learned late last week via email that they'd soon be replaced by QR ordering codes, Feven Gerezgiher of MPR News reports.
You might be unsurprised to learn that Cardamom is owned by Daniel del Prado's restaurant group, which made headlines in 2024 for allegations of union busting at the Café Cerés chain of coffee shops. As chance would have it, several Cardamom staffers have recently explored organizing options with the nonprofit Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL). Weird!
“I immediately felt like the layoff was retaliatory,” an ex-server named Maya tells MPR. “I felt incredibly angry and shocked. I felt betrayed.”
Adds Jac Kovarik, comms director for CTUL, “Some of the workers that we organize with received the email when they were working on Friday, which is just so horrible and disrespectful." Kovarik tells Racket that 10+ Cardamom workers are planning to "call out Daniel del Prado’s anti-worker practices" in the coming weeks.
Olivia Martin, a social media coordinator for DDP Restaurant Group, tells MPR that the shift to smartphone service had been discussed for years. "We believe this new format will create a stronger, more sustainable and viable path forward for Cardamom," she says. (Del Prado’s various ventures haul in almost $40 million per year, according to a glowing 2022 profile of his "culinary empire.") The Walker didn't provide comment.
Report: Federal Thugs Trade Ghoulish Little Coins at Whipple
As Operation Metro Surge thrashed about Minnesota in a fit of ethnic cleansing earlier this year, rumors swirled about "challenge coins" being awarded to federal agents whose hateful and racist actions set them apart. Well, Talking Points Memo confirmed that such coins exist, and they've been handed out inside Minneapolis's Whipple Federal Building as recently as this month.
The subtlety of the fascist imagery on display would make Paul Verhoeven blush. The coins depict a menacing skull with glowing eyes wedged between two guns up top. In the middle we've got President Trump and border czar Tom Homan ready to kiss, and below you'll find masked stormtroopers and a maskless dog who, I'm sorry, is a bad boy. "OPERATION METRO SURGE. MINNESOTA. ONE NATION. UNDER GOD," the evil little tchotchke reads. On the backside, there's a scene of police huddling around an American flag as a helicopter firebombs... Columbia Heights, I guess?
“It says ‘urban operations.’ That’s operations against American civilians. They’re celebrating that,” says the federal worker who supplied Talking Points Memo photos of the coin. “It’s obscene. It’s wrong.” A DHS spokesperson sidestepped TPM's questions about whether the coins are officially sanctioned by the department. Apparently various challenge coins are popular among Trump admin officials like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel, two of the dumbest and meanest motherfuckers alive.
NYT Makes 10th Deathiversary Prince Pilgrimage
Man, has it really been a decade since we lost Prince? According to the paper of record and any reputable calendars, yes, it really has. As such, the New York Times dispatched reporter David Farley to capture how Minnesota influenced Prince and vice versa.
“If Prince had moved to Chicago, New York or Los Angeles, his music would have still been phenomenal, but it would have sounded very differently,” Arizona State associate professor/Prince’s Minneapolis: A Biography of Sound & Place author Rashad Shabazz tells the Times. “Prince’s genius was that he took the Black-inflected music from the community where he was born—Minneapolis’s Near North Side—and synthesized that with the city’s other sounds.”
OK, keep buttering our provincial flyover bread!
Farley proceeds to take readers along the metro's “Purple Trail”—Paisley Park to First Ave to Electric Fetus and beyond. Two Purple One-adjacent culinary surprises? I was personally unaware that Prince's personal chefs, Ray and Juell Roberts, run a restaurant called Darling in Seward. And apparently former Paisley Park merch worker Vanessa Drews once made a piece of cheesecake that Prince adored so much he dubbed it “Cheesecake Funk.” That's now the name of the cheesecake shop Drews runs, which opened last year in Excelsior.
You can follow the whole Purple Trail via this gift link.
