St Cloud is a distant suburb of Minneapolis — it’s about an hour’s drive away from the Twin Cities (can you still call that a suburb?). It’s a nice big town; my oldest son attended St Cloud State University, and still lives there. Unfortunately, it’s also Michele Bachmann country, is very Catholic, and is also infested with wingnutty Protestant megachurches. You get the vibe when you drive through it from just the billboards that seem to feature Jesus and Donald Trump in equal measure.
You can also guess what kind of culture is thriving there. There is a group calling itself the St Cloud White Student Union (not an official student organization at St Cloud State, and they also disavow any connection, but still, piggybacking on the reputation of the biggest nearby college is kind of skeevy) that has been posting signs, illegally, around the area.
Ray Sjogren, a St. Joseph resident, said he first spotted the posters leaving the post office on Wednesday. Signs said “unapologetically white,” “hate speech is free speech” and “there are two genders.”
Each poster contained a logo and the name of a group: “St. Cloud State White Student Union.”
St. Cloud State University spokesman Adam Hammer said in an email Wednesday night that the group is not a registered student organization.
A sampling of their signs:
At least there is a group, #UniteCloud, which is fighting back against this nonsense, and also, reading the White Student Union page, it looks like the racists are minuscule — it could just be one person who has been emboldened to spread more hate speech. But we mustn’t forget that Minnesota does have an undercurrent of ugly hate organizations, they’ve been here all along, and they’ve just been waiting for the proper conditions to blossom and spew their spores. Guess what? Those conditions have arrived.
Boys will be boys.
They are a product of their times.
They’re probably just awkward around people.
“Import from shit hole countries, become a shit hole country.” – pity someone didn’t tell that to the people of the nations that were here before the Europeans…
Sneaking around putting signs up anonymously when nobody is looking speaks so loudly of superiority.
“can you still call that a suburb?”
Only if you call the entire Netherlands a city – almost everything is an hour’s drive away from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randstad
An hour’s drive from Utrecht for instance means Germany.
No, but there are four lights!
Shred them. They’ll make a passable soil amendment.
The leaflets, too.
I think these people have been here all along, but during the previous administration, it wasn’t acceptable for them to speak out (although they did, then too). But now they are emboldened and vociferous. Rather than try to squelch them, I think we need to recognize that they are among us, and deal with it best we can.