I left the law business at the end of 2015 and took over as President of Minnesota’s principal conservative organization, Center of the American Experiment. The Center is playing a leading role in transforming Minnesota from a regressive blue state into a modern red, conservative state. We have a complex communications strategy that in 2017 led to more than 30 million contacts with Minnesota’s adult population of around 4 million, but one of our best weapons is our quarterly magazine, Thinking Minnesota.
The January issue of Thinking Minnesota has just hit the newsstands. You can read the whole thing here. My staff does 98% of the work on the magazine, so whenever a new issue comes out, I am amazed at how good it is. The current issue may be our best ever.
The cover story is taken from a paper by Power Line’s Steve Hayward and the Center’s Peter Nelson on the failure of Minnesota’s “green” energy policies. We have spent at least $15 billion, have driven electricity prices to unprecedented heights, and have done little or nothing to reduce the state’s CO2 emissions. The failure of Minnesota’s “green”–read, crony–energy policies is summed up in a 30-second radio ad that we are running state-wide:
But that is only the beginning. No doubt the most red-hot article in the January issue is Katherine Kersten’s follow-up to her cover story in October’s Thinking Minnesota on left-wing indoctrination and bullying in the Edina public schools. The October article may have had more immediate, nuclear impact than anything the Center has ever done, and the current follow-up is hard-hitting, too.
It features, among other things, the story of a Hispanic family whose gifted son was forced out of the Edina schools by far-left bullying. The article also spotlights conservative students and parents who have sued Edina High School to try to obtain relief from threats of violence from far-leftists and to vindicate their First Amendment rights against threats from the administration. The image below is of a fascist Guy Fawkes mask that a far-left student wore on YouTube while making threats against conservative Edina students–something the school’s administrators made no attempt to punish. Edina was once considered one of the top public school districts in the U.S., but those days are long gone:
And that only scratches the surface. The January issue includes a story on American Experiment Vice President and Senior Policy Fellow Peter Nelson, who was hired away from us to take responsibility for health care regulation in the Trump administration–another great Trump hire.
There is a story on disastrous solar energy investments, and another on Minnesota’s $119 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. Another article, by our economist John Phelan, explains why Minnesota’s economy is nowhere near as strong as liberals like to pretend.
One of my personal favorites is the article by Jon Lauck, the South Dakota historian who is leading the effort to resuscitate the study of Midwestern history. It includes a Q and A that I did with Jon. What is most ironic to me is that Midwestern history is the history of success, especially as it relates to civic culture. And yet historians avoid it like the plague.
There is much, much more. The issue concludes with my own back-of-the-magazine column on the Center’s historic 2017, and our plans for a bigger and better 2018. All of this is available online, but if you want to subscribe to Thinking Minnesota–and, trust me, you don’t have to live in Minnesota to enjoy it–all you need to do is send an email to [email protected] with your mailing address, and we will add you to our free subscription list.
Thinking Minnesota is already the state’s second-biggest magazine with a circulation of 70,000, and we will be #1 before long. If you are a conservative, I guarantee you will enjoy the magazine. And Thinking Minnesota is only one part of what we do to lead the fight for conservatism. If you want to help us–and you should!–just go here to contribute. We are a grass roots organization, which means that no donation is too small. But we have doubled our budget since I took over the organization two years ago, because thousands of conservatives have seen our success and have chosen to join our team. It would be great if you would join us, too.
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