Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: We’re Taking the Soucheray Bait

Plus a W for press freedom, a rare old plane, and cheap concert tickets in today's Flyover news roundup.

3:50 PM CDT on May 6, 2024

Pioneer Press; Walmart

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.

Again, Sorry!

If we chimed in on every bottom-feeding, reactionary, minimal-effort Joe Soucheray column, well, we'd be writing about Joe Soucheray columns each and every week. (We promise to not do that.) But this week's is related to Racket's recent feature story on the pro-Palestine protests at the U of M, and, as you might expect, it's particularly void of: well-articulated points, original thoughts, and compelling prose.

Yes, Joe was finally ready to assume his rarefied perch as a columnist at Minnesota's oldest newspaper to... flop around, dying-fish-like, for 600 words while belching out variations of "duuuuh what about them tents?"

Without any substantiation, Souch echoes right-wing chatter that, in order to afford encampment tents, protesters must be receiving steady streams of shadowy funds from "outside agencies." With maximum condescension, he makes tired wisecracks about protester hair colors that "mimic a snow cone drizzled in rainbow colors" (elsewhere he mentions, bafflingly, "$300 haircuts" on two non-consecutive occasions). There's almost zero energy expended at answering his pointless thesis ("Where are they getting the tents?"), and just a tiny bit more spent teeing off on the "dumbest" and "most entitled" generation of college students—his precious grandchildren excluded! He whines, he brays, he makes bad-faith whataboutisms related to other persecuted groups he'll never again mention in future columns.

And that's the most frustrating part of this. No amount of well-deserved mockery will get Soucheray to have better opinions or, god forbid, try even a little bit harder. But as long as he continues to fart out bad takes east of the river, PiPress readership won't hear from someone who could make the most of an increasingly rare soapbox. Instead, St. Paul is left to suffer the lazy thoughts of a man who's convinced coyotes are taking over the city.

Oh, and about those tents! Wielding my considerable journalistic might, I spent a total of one minute getting to the bottom of it.

"That's crazy," Mira Altobell-Resendez—a U of M staffer, protester, and member of Students for a Democratic Society—said upon seeing Soucheray's column. "But yes, we sourced the majority of our tents from Walmart because that's where they were cheap and accessible, and we could afford it because of the generous donations we were receiving from the community."

Sure enough, the very tents that dotted Northrop Mall last week are available today at Walmart for $29.97. Forget garage logic—how about Occam's razor logic?

Unicorn Riot Wins In Court

Not a great day for press freedom over in Israel, where the increasingly "extreme" right-wing government just moved to shut down Al Jazeera offices. But here in Minnesota champions of a free press are celebrating a "huge win": Unicorn Riot, the lefty nonprofit media org that's based in the Twin Cities, won't need to comply with a subpoena that would've required it to submit newsgathering materials to Energy Transfer, the Dallas company responsible for the Dakota Access Pipeline, according to independent journalist Tony Webster. This matters because Unicorn Riot has published highly critical stories of that pipeline's construction for years.

"This morning, the [Minnesota] Court of Appeals handed down a resounding win for the free press," UR's lawyer, Christopher Proczko, wrote earlier today. "Chalk up another one for the good guys." Unicorn Riot reportedly racked up $50,000 in legal expenses fighting Energy Transfer, and you're welcome to pitch in to help cover those costs. (This one seems a lot more legit than Dangerous Man Brewing's disastrous crowdfunding attempt from last week.)

Look at This Neat, Decaying Piece of Aviation History

Cool find by our pals at Old Minneapolis: Apparently the last remaining Northwest Airlines-branded Boeing 747-100 has been rotting away at a North Carolina airport since 2002. This matters for local-angle purposes, of course, because the erstwhile airline was headquartered in Eagan, Minnesota, before being absorbed into Delta in 2010. (That 185-acre site is now the development playground of Vikings owner Zygi Wilf.) Committed aviation history buffs are welcome to visit the Northwest Airlines History Center, which I just learned is an honest-to-god museum located just outside the Mall of America in Bloomington. Or you can simply watch the following video tour of that ol' Northwest Airlines 747—they truly don't make 'em like they used to.

You Know About Concert Week? It's Almost Concert Week.

Folks, it's almost Concert Week. For those not familiar with the, er, holiday (?), it's actually a corporate promotion ginned up by concert behemoth Live Nation (full disclosure: a regular Racket sponsor). In practice, the May 8-14 mega-sale will provide $25 tickets to 65 major Twin Cities concerts—provided you're fast enough to snatch 'em beginning at 9 a.m. Wednesday. We're talkin' Janet Jackson at Xcel Energy Center (June 18), Vampire Weekend at The Armory (July 31), Drive-By Truckers at Uptown Theater (October 25-26)... in fact, we're talkin' about all of the shows listened below. May they all end by a proper hour.

Somerset Amphitheater