Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
City Earmarks $650K for Controversial Pastor
Jerry McAfee’s outbursts during a Minneapolis city council meeting last winter, along with his blustering and occasionally threatening online follow-ups, cost the North Side pastor his violence prevention contracts with the city. But as Deena Winter reports for the Strib today, we haven’t cut him off entirely: McAfee’s church and one of his nonprofits are in line to receive $650,000 for “community trauma response services.”
As you may recall, McAfee launched into a five-minute rant at a February council meeting, during which he said Council Member Jason Chavez, who is gay, was acting like “a girl.” (Mayor Jacob Frey did not respond to calls from LGBTQ+ activists to condemn McAfee’s comments.) On a second rant that evening, on Facebook Live, McAfee declared, “I ain’t shot nobody. However I will if I have to. I don’t want to.”
And yet, McAfee's nonprofit Salem Inc. is scheduled to receive $303,000 as part of a one-year contract, while the pastor’s New Salem Missionary Baptist Church is looking at $348,000. The contract was recommended by the Neighborhood Safety Department, “based on data analysis,” per director Amanda Harrington, and must still be approved by City Council.
McAfee’s entities have received $1.6 million from city contracts in total, with the majority of those funds awarded since 2022.
What’s in Your Wallet?
These days every supposed "feel-good story" about someone doing a good turns out to be a "feel-bad story" about how U.S. capitalism has failed us—"These wonderful children gave up their lemonade stand money to help pay for their favorite teacher’s cancer surgery" and so on.
So here’s the story of a good deed you don’t have to feel bad about, as related by AP. In 2014, Richard Guilford was working at a Ford factory in Wayne, Michigan, when he realized he’d lost his wallet. After a thorough search, he figured it was gone for good.
This June, in Lake Crystal, Minnesota, mechanic Chad Volk found that tri-fold—containing $15 in cash, $275 in gift cards, and some lottery tickets we can only hope weren’t winners—"sandwiched between the transmission and the air filter box of a 2015 Ford Edge with 151,000 miles on it." It had been sitting there since Guilford finished working on the electrical system of that vehicle 11 years earlier.
Volk messaged Guilford about his discovery, who told AP, "It restores your faith in humanity."
Then again, this story did happen on Facebook, a website that’s helped to destroy democracy and journalism. So maybe we can still feel bad after all!
It Can’t Happen Here
A battle over gerrymandering, that is. After Texas Republicans drew unconscionably GOP-favorable congressional districts, prompting Democratic legislators to recently flee the state rather than allowing the redistricting to occur, California Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened to retaliate with gerrymandered Democratic-favored redistricting in California.
Our own Gov. Tim Walz seemed to enter the fight at Farmfest earlier this month, saying, “We’re not dealing with a normal situation; we can’t on this say, ‘When they go low, we gotta go high.’”
Still, don’t expect a similar battle in Minnesota, Mary Murphy writes for InForum. Minnesota’s system doesn’t really allow for it. After the 2030 census, the state Legislature is supposed to draw congressional districts, but the typically divided lege can never come to an agreement on this. The decision is then passed on to the state courts.
Anyway, given the demographic makeup of the state, it would be hard for even the most inventive gerrymanderers to redraw districts to benefit Democrats, says constantly quoted Hamline professor David Schultz.
Let Us Now Condemn Overhyped Restaurants
Let’s end the week with a little hate. Last night a Reddit thread got to percolating on r/Minneapolis that asked locals to list area restaurants they thought didn’t deserve the hype.
It got off to a rocky start (if your friends are really talking up Crave, you simply need new friends). But then people got the gist and started badmouthing esteemed spots like Billy Sushi, Young Joni, and even (horrors!) Owamni. Personally, I was a little miffed that someone mentioned Khaluna, which seems to earn every bit of praise it gets. In fact, I learned recently that you can get take out there and we may now have to raise the price of Racket subscriptions.
Anyway, if you’re in a hatin’ mood, unload on some overhyped establishments you’ve dined at in the comments.
