Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Stay in touch
Sign up for The Flyover newsletter
Preserving the Law or a Political Agenda?
Helluva scoop here from ProPublica's Megan Rose and Andy Mannix:
"Over the 'strongest possible' objections from the federal prosecutor handling the case, leaders at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., quashed plans to bring civil rights charges against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant and then lying about it."
That immigrant, Julio Sosa-Celis, was the man shot in the leg, through a closed door, on a January evening in north Minneapolis. (You may recall that the feds' version of the story, in which Sosa-Celis attacked them with a broom, fell apart very quickly.) The alleged shooter, 52-year-old ICE agent Christian Castro, fled to Texas after the fact. Federal prosecutors in Minnesota planned to file charges against Castro similar to those filed against Minneapolis police after the murder of George Floyd, but though state officials requested his extradition, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott refused to cooperate. Castro was held in jail for 90 days and was released last week.
On Thursday afternoon, Castro was federally indicted—he's been charged with making false statements to federal investigators, according to the Associated Press. If convicted, as ProPublica notes, it'll likely carry a far less severe punishment. Sosa-Celis, meanwhile, is seeking damages from the federal government with the assistance of the ACLU of Minnesota.
Loring Park Shooting: What We Know
Chaos unfolded at a Loring Park apartment building Wednesday afternoon in Minneapolis, where a shooting left two people, including the suspect, dead and another six people, including three police officers, injured.
The Star Tribune's breaking news team was quickly on the scene and has been publishing live updates (gift link) from Shoreline Plaza, formerly known as Loring Towers, which sadly has seen other violence recently (there was a double homicide there last September). The suspected shooter, Carlton Johnson, had previously made threats against his ex-girlfriend and Shoreline Plaza's property managers. “He said, ‘I’m going to shoot people,’” resident Chris Miller tells the Strib. According to court records, Johnson was fighting eviction after he allegedly assaulted one resident in March and made threats against others.
It's awful stuff—another mass shooting in a city that has been through so much. As I have found myself saying too many times to too many people over the last several years, can Minneapolis catch a fucking break?
The Manly, Manly Man Behind Hegseth
We know Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is crazy. But how did the shame of Forest Lake, Minnesota, come to his specific brand of crazy, the one that has him developing an army of high-T soldiers as he purges women and "fat generals and admirals" from the ranks?
You can thank Doug Wilson, who gets the longform profile treatment in Mother Jones today. Wilson is a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist (cool) and the founder of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, who believes deeply in a patriarchal society (cool!). “Women are the kind of people that people come out of," he told CNN last year. Yeah, yeah, and men are the kind of people that jizz all over the place.
Anyway, MJ's Kiera Butler writes that she's developed a "mildly adversarial email rapport" with Wilson as she's covered the rise of Christian nationalism. She invited herself to Moscow, where she spent several days documenting the ways of the families in his manly community. (Interestingly, the people of Moscow are not exactly huge fans of "Kirkers," as Wilson's followers call themselves.) The whole thing is an eye-opening if maddening look into the life of the man whose beliefs inspire the guy in charge of the Pentagon.
And Now For Something Completely Different
Awful Flyover today, huh gang? Sorry about that. We live in hell!
Let's wrap up with MPR News' profile of Beatrice Ojakangas, a prolific talent who's written more than 30 cookbooks, won a James Beard award, and invented the freakin' pizza roll, though she never profited from it. And where'd she get her start? Why, by entering her recipes at the Minnesota State Fair, of course. Now 92 and living in Duluth, Ojakangas sat down with MPR's Dan Kraker for an adorable walk down memory lane.
