He’s always been this revoltingly racist, but somehow he got elected, because a lot of the citizenry are revoltingly racist.

Trump lied. Back in 2018, it was reported that he used the phrase “shithole countries” to describe various nations of brown people, and he denied it, claiming that he [n]ever said anything derogatory about Haitians. He was quite vehement about it, issuing repeated denials, claiming that this was another Democratic effort to discredit him.

That was then. Now, in 2025, open racism is fine and popular.

Two things about that speech. I avert my eyes from Trump typically, because I despise him so much and am sick of seeing him every goddamn day, and I instead focus on the gawping baboons in the claque behind him. Where do these people come from? What is wrong with them, that they would laugh and cheer at such ignorant remarks? These are the people who would attend a lynching and pose for photographs with the corpse afterwards. They are the monsters in our own backyard. We’ve got all this facial recognition technology that is currently used to track down people who oppose fascism; every one of these videos ought to be labeled with the names of the people performing hatefully in them: like, “at 1:18, Ralph Goonburger of Altoona, PA howls joyfully at a racist remark,” just so future generations can appreciate the contributions these otherwise unnamed citizens are making to the culture.

The other thing is that I, personally, am descended from immigrants from Norway and Sweden (and also England). Much of the history of my family in the 19th century was generation after generation of people from Norway bringing in new wives from Sweden and raising big families on frigid farms far from the mainstream population, creating kids with thick accents to work as farm laborers. We managed to avoid the worst of the general bigotry because it was displaced to more obvious targets — African and Asian peoples — but we had much in common in our circumstances with the Somalis and Hmong who followed along later. The only grounds for singling us out as “nice people” (we are nice people!) is the color of our skin. I cringe to see my tribe brought to the front of the room to be presented to the class as one of the good ones, setting us in opposition to our fellow, equally worthy, equally valuable citizens as somehow better. We aren’t. They aren’t lesser.

It’s ironic that he’s been complaining bitterly about Minnesota lately, a state where we acutely aware of and proud of our makeup as a blending of Scandinavian and German immigrants, with a good population of Native Americans (who we are embarrassed to say were treated shamefully by the state), which has been welcoming to other immigrant populations from Africa and Asia. We do have horrible racists living here, but generally, we’re conscious of them and try to do better.

What he was saying was simply blatant bigotry. That’s our president, the racist-in-chief.

It must be because of his German ancestry. We should work harder to keep those people out.

Worst president ever.

Mr. President, thank you. Um, the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, is saying that he’s actually proud to have the largest Somali community in the country. And his police chief,
he’s a fool.
Well, his police chief is also saying,
I wouldn’t be proud to have the largest Somalian. Look at their nation. Look how bad their nation is. It’s not even a nation. It’s just a people walking around killing each other. Look, uh, these Somalians have taken billions of dollars out of our country. They’ve taken billions and billions of dollars. They have a representative, Ilhan Omar, who they say married her brother. [Not true]It’s a fraud. She tries to deny it now, but you can’t really deny it because, you know, just happened. She shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman.[Why? Because she’s black and a member of the opposition party?] And I’m sure people are looking at that. And she should be thrown the hell out of our country. And most of those people, man, they have destroyed Minnesota.[Cool. I’m looking out my window at the snow coming down. Doesn’t seem to be destroyed] Okay, Minnesota, you have an incompetent governor. You have a crooked governor. He’s crooked as hell, but he’s incompetent. [no evidence given]
Uh Waltz is he’s should be ashamed. That beautiful land, that beautiful state, it’s a hell hole right now. [I don’t know about that. I kind of like it here] And the Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain. [Isn’t that what Donald is doing here?] You have her. She’s always talking about the Constitution provides me with uh go back to your own country and figure out your constitution. [She’s an American citizen, she is talking about her constitution. Donald just doesn’t like the American constitution] All she does is complain about this country and without this country she would not be in very good shape. She probably wouldn’t be alive right now. So Somalia is considered by many [When a student hands in an essay with this kind of vague handwaving and evidence free claim, I fail them] to be the worst country on earth. I don’t know. I’ve I haven’t been there. I won’t be there anytime soon. I hope. But uh what Somalia what the Somalian people have done to Minnesota is is not even believable. It’s not even believable. [Correct. What the president says about Minnesota is not believable] And a lot of it starts with the governor. A lot of it starts with Barack Hussein and Obama because that’s when people started coming in. And you have to have people come in that are going to love our country, cherish our country. They want to kiss our country good night. They talk about our country. We want them to pray for our country. This is not the people living in Minnesota. And she’s a disaster. She should not be and her friends shouldn’t be allowed. Frankly, they shouldn’t even be allowed to be Congress people. Okay? They shouldn’t even be allowed to be Congress people because they don’t represent the interests of our country. [She represents my interests well. Trump? Not so much] Anybody else? There you are.

That’s just appalling. He just rambles on lying, and dumbass people accept it.

Are the Washington press corps going to just stand there and take it? Trump needs to be deposed and leave office immediately.

It is fair-minded in pointing out that while Minnesota has done a poor job of preventing fraud, it doesn’t justify the racist comments Trump has made. He’ll probably declare it fake news.

Minnesota finds itself in a harsh spotlight as President Donald Trump revs up his attacks on Gov. Tim Walz, an old political foe, while simultaneously expanding his demonization of Somali Minnesotans.

After unleashing torrents of foul language against Walz last weekend, and then this week referring to Somali Americans, including U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, as “garbage,” Trump reportedly dispatched additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minnesota. Their orders are yet uncertain, but Trump suggests they will patrol a specific class of people, Somali Americans. In other words, strict racial profiling will now extend to our neighbors.

To read some online discourse, including that spewed by Trump in a feverish late-night troll session of more than 160 posts, Minnesota is a den of fraud perpetrated solely by immigrant hordes. This rhetoric is divisive, racist and wrong.

Minnesota is home to the nation’s largest Somali community. These residents are our colleagues, friends, law enforcement officers, public servants, neighbors and taxpayers. That Trump would demonize an entire diaspora — the vast majority of whom live here as legal citizens or permanent residents — is beyond reprehensible. It’s dangerous.

As Trump amped up his verbal and online assault of Somalis last week in the wake of the slaying and critical wounding of two National Guard members by an Afghan immigrant in Washington, according to charges, the president was asked what Somalis had to do with the deadly encounter. Trump’s response was revealing and toxically xenophobic.

“Ah, nothing. But Somalis have caused a lot of trouble,” he said.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue that the president has opportunistically seized on: the amount of fraud that occurred in Minnesota during and after the pandemic. It’s an issue that won’t go away until it’s fully addressed.

Here is the truth, however: Our elected leaders and government officials can prevent and prosecute fraud without villainizing law-abiding Minnesotans or relying upon racist stereotypes.

Yes, Minnesota demonstrated a serious problem with oversight of state dollars during the COVID-19 crisis and the resulting economic calamity. In a well-meaning effort to help people, Walz and his administration fell short.

In the case of Feeding Our Future, the state trusted that nonprofits and other third parties would honor their responsibilities. This enabled the theft of public resources meant to feed the hungry. While most of the perpetrators were Somali, the alleged mastermind was a white woman, Aimee Bock. This crime wasn’t a product of race or ethnicity, but opportunity and criminal greed.

But that’s not the only fraud. In an October commentary in the Minnesota Star Tribune, former Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles detailed the lack of safeguards that enabled fraud in other programs, many of which have led to indictments and prosecution.

Thanks to prosecutors under Democratic and Republican administrations, criminals have faced vigorous prosecution. This is not enough. The public deserves assurances that systemic reform will prevent this from happening again.

Absent this, the state will be unable to credibly launch needed programs to address the growing economic strain on Minnesotans as the cost of living increases and the rate of unemployment is again on the rise.

That said, no specific instances of fraud should ever be used to castigate an entire class of Minnesotans. Minnesotans with German American backgrounds were persecuted as traitors during World War I. Italian Americans were stereotyped as dirty criminals during the 1920s. Hmong immigrants in the 1970s faced distrust and harassment over mistaken assumptions and racial profiling.

Waves of nativist fear have met every immigrant group, and when individuals within those groups committed crimes, they were pinned unfairly on everyone. The answer now is the same as before: Fix the system and police the crime while embracing the individual potential of every Minnesotan to enhance our shared society.

Meantime, any lectures on fraud should come from leaders who want to prevent it, not those who cast slurs and demonize the poor, hapless and innocent. Minnesotans will render their judgment at the polls next year. If our choices are between mushy inaction and spiteful rhetoric, we all lose.

Judging from the responses I’ve seen around this state, people are outraged at Trump’s blatant racism. If he’s planning on running for a third term (unconstitutionally!), he probably shouldn’t count on winning in Minnesota.

Our horribly racist president went on an ignorant rant about the Somali community in Minnesota.

Donald Trump on Tuesday called Somali immigrants garbage and said they should be sent back home in a rant that came as the administration is reportedly increasing immigration enforcement against undocumented Somalis in Minnesota.

In a xenophobic rant during a cabinet meeting, Trump went off on Somalis and Ilhan Omar, the congressional representative who is from Somalia and is a US citizen. He said Somalia stinks and is no good for a reason.

They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you, he said. He called Omar garbage and said we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.

These are people who do nothing but complain, he said. They complain, and from where they came from, they got nothing … When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.

I’ve taught Somali students. I’ve visited Somali neighborhoods in Minneapolis, I’ve eaten in Somali-owned restaurants with food by Somali chefs. Fly into the Minneapolis airport and call for a cab, you’ll probably get a Somali driver. I have a lot of respect for Ilhan Omar, she’s fighting on the side of righteousness. I agree with her response to this racist abuse.

Omar, a naturalized U.S. citizen who fled Somalia’s civil war as a child and has represented Minnesota’s 5th District since 2019, responded on X: “This president’s bigotry won’t silence our contributions to this nation. Somalis built Minnesota stronger. Your hate only exposes your weakness.”

If there is any corrupt, lazy garbage to be removed, it’s the person of Donald Trump. I stand with our Somali citizens over any Republican sleazebag.

I occasionally look in on our local racist cult — but not very often, because dear god, they are boring. We have an Asatru chapter near us, in Murdock, Minnesota, which was initially controversial when they bought an old church and announced that they were establishing a whites-only congregation. Since then, though, they’ve been quiet, festering in their small town enclave. That’s a danger, so I check in on their website now and then, because I half-expect to erupt and collapse at some time, which can be either hilarious or horrifying.

Asatru is a very silly religion…although, to be fair, all religions are absurd and fundamentally stupid. New religions just look particularly goofy because the older faiths benefit from familiarity. Mormonism, for instance, is crazy and unbelievable because we know it’s relatively recent and its con man founder, while Catholicism’s origins are buried in the murk of ancient history, and its founder is walled off behind thick layers of myth. Asatru was conjured up in 1972 by a couple of old guys meeting in a cafe in Reykjavik, built on a framework of myths and historical practices from the Edda, a book (the Prose Edda, at least, the Poetic Edda has older roots) written by a Christian in the 13th century. The old Norse religion has been dead for centuries. The Asatru folk are trying to resurrect a faith that has long been dead and buried in its grave.

I live in a state full of the descendants of Scandinavian immigrants, and they all came here steeped in the dogma of the Lutheran church (with a scattering of Catholics), and there was no heritage of Old Norse pagan religion among them.

The local Asatru chapter, called the Baldrshof, seems to be largely struggling to invent a mythological foundation in scraps of lore. A couple of their leaders meet once a week to record a video of their godawful boring conversations about Asatru; their channel is called Victory Never Sleeps, a title that is pretentious and nonsensical. These videos are painful to watch.

They’re 2 or 3 hours long, and they talk fantasy. I can’t watch them. They could be imbedding secret codes and nefarious plots in short messages deep in the long-winded drone and the FBI and I wouldn’t notice. They have been putting out short videos, too, that are more digestible but equally dull and silly. Here’s Matthew Flavel, the head of the local church, babbling.

When people see pictures of us, and see that those guys are Asatru, does that elevate the Aesir and our ancestors, or is it a cause for them to be ashamed?…Does that interaction bring glory to the Aesir and our ancestors, or does it make them cringe?

I have some good news for him: they aren’t cringing, because the Aesir don’t exist and his ancestors are all dead. The bad news for the rest of us is that tales of Norse folklore is a smokescreen. The rest of the world around them are doing the cringing. And we know that they have a different motivation. It’s racism.

The myth cycle, our powerful truths, they’re not literal truths, they’re pathways to truth. They show us truth in ways that our mind and our soul is uniquely capable of understanding the divine. And you find that because that’s developed through thousands of years of the experiences of our people. That’s why I think it is uniquely suited to each of as people of Northern European descent, as people who trace their roots back to that font of Aryan consciousness to embrace that spirituality. And you see that expressed throughout Europe and in little corners of the rest of the world that have since been diluted by white genocide. – Excerpt from “Asatru: A White Man’s Religion,” a speech current AFA leader Matt Flavel delivered at the Northwest Forum, a conference organized by white nationalist Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents Publishing

If the Ethnic European Folk cease to exist Asatru would likewise no longer exist. Let us be clear: by Ethnic European Folk we mean white people. It is our collective will that we not only survive, but thrive, and continue our evolution in the direction of the Infinite. All native religions spring from the unique collective soul of a particular race. Religions are not arbitrary or accidental; body, mind and spirit are all shaped by the evolutionary history of the group and are thus interrelated. Asatru is not just what we believe, it is what we are. Therefore, the survival and welfare of the Ethnic European Folk as a cultural and biological group is a religious imperative for the AFA. – Second point in the Asatru Folk Assembly’s current “Declaration of Purpose,” featured on the organization’s website

So I keep an eye on the local Asatru, boring as they are. I’m hoping they’re just going to continue to wallow in made-up folklore and fade into irrelevance, but you never know — the Mormons and the Catholic Church were also once a small cult of people with silly beliefs, too.