A view from Minnesota: Grappling with the Unthinkable

A crisis that once again forces us to reevaluate - and call upon - our exceptionalism.

It’s been a truly awful week in Minnesota. We’re all grappling with the assassination of one of our state’s most exceptional leaders, Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark, as well as the attempted murder of several other political leaders including state Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, who survived multiple gunshot wounds.

In a state with a tendency towards feelings of exceptionalism, after decades of above-average outcomes and a history of bipartisanship, our sense of self has felt deeply challenged in the wake of political violence. This isn’t supposed to happen here.

Of course, it isn’t supposed to happen anywhere.

I counted myself lucky to get to work with Speaker Hortman when I was in state government. As a rookie government official, I was trying to navigate a polarizing pandemic that was fraught with challenge. Hortman deftly helped me build unemployment insurance extensions and small business grant programs with support from both parties in a divided legislature. She did it with calmness, a shrewd understanding of politics, and a deft negotiator’s touch. But it was her kindness toward me that gave me confidence in my role, a gift she gave to so many others, too.

Now at the Minnesota Star Tribune, I’ve gotten to witness her skill along with the rest of Minnesota.

Hortman’s exceptional gifts helped a House that was deadlocked 50-50 pass a state budget when she cast a difficult but necessary vote to make it happen, taking the political heat for her party to help our state move forward.

“Minnesotans expect us to come together and govern,” she said in a statement afterward. “A true compromise means no one gets everything they want.”

To be a Minnesotan has long meant to believe in bipartisanship. This is a state where people consistently split their ticket between Republicans and Democrats when they vote. It’s a place where divided legislatures haven’t stopped us from making major legislative progress. As many historians have noted, our politics has an almost “moralistic” tone to it - service is seen as a duty, as is rising above our differences.

Recent years have challenged that image. Hortman’s assassination is the second major crisis of the last five years that has put our state on national display in ways that force us to question our unity. But just as unity is not inevitable, its unravelling isn’t, either.

Maybe some well-meaning exceptionalism is just what we need. If we don’t believe we’re better than this, then we never will be. Perhaps, in the wake of another horrendous tragedy, the best thing we can do to bring unity to our state and our country is simply to believe it’s possible, and keep fighting for it.

Speaker Hortman’s children, Sophie and Colin, have already set an example in a statement they released just days after their parents were gone.

“Hope and resilience are the enemy of fear. Our parents lived their lives with immense dedication to their fellow humans. This tragedy must become a moment for us to come together. Hold your loved ones a little closer. Love your neighbors. Treat each other with kindness and respect. The best way to honor our parents' memory is to do something, whether big or small, to make our community just a little better for someone else."

A GoFundMe for Speaker Hortman's family can be found here: http://bit.ly/Donate-Hortman

And here's one for Senator Hoffman & his wife Yvette: http://bit.ly/Donate-Hoffmans

The Strib in Action

A central challenge in breaking news events today is that misinformation spreads fast. Intense searches for answers gives space for bad actors to try to mislead the public, and the dynamics of the Internet fracture our sources of truth. That’s why I’ve been so proud of our team at the Minnesota Star Tribune for the deeply comprehensive and timely journalism they’ve been producing over the past several days.

From the moment I got an early Saturday morning text from the newsroom alerting me to the breaking news, I saw our team spring into action across the state to cover the story. They made our report the most reliable place, locally or nationally, to get information about the crisis from every angle.

One of our reporters, Chris Vondracek, shared his experience covering the story over the weekend with Slate reporter Aymann Ismail. I found his comments on how newsrooms fight misinformation to be powerful:

Q: I remember early on there was a frenzy for finding out information about the shooter, assigning to them either a Democrat or Republican label. At one point, I read that the shooting was related to the “No Kings” rallies staged across the nation. It was pointed out that the shooter was appointed to a state board by Walz in 2019. How did all of that complicate your job?

A: What’s weird for me is that I don’t want to call it misinformation. Yes, the suspect was on a nonpartisan workforce industry 16-member board, first appointed by then–Gov. Mark Dayton. That’s accurate. But there was other stuff, too. Rep. Hortman, who was then minority leader, voted with Republicans and Walz to strip health care for undocumented people to get the budget bill passed. That was a big caucus-splitting vote for Rep. Hortman. A Republican I know messaged me what I had been seeing online, pointing to that vote as a potential left-wing activist motivation.

As a journalist, you don’t want to dismiss any idea outright, even if it seems far-fetched. But I’m grateful to have a whole team of reporters who are professionals that can point to the inconsistencies in those types of rumors. And as more information came out, like the names of many other progressives who were on the suspect’s list of targets, it became apparent that that rumored motivation was not right. There was maybe 90 minutes there where there was some fluidity on that front, where we tried to understand what this workforce board was that the suspect was on. But now, as we’ve seen, the dude was a big supporter of President Trump, listening to Infowars….

I covered Gov. Walz on his pheasant hunt last fall when he was a vice presidential candidate. I remember not getting any Wi-Fi in the field we were in as I and 20 other journalists followed him around. After leaving the field and getting Wi-Fi, I saw all this weird misinformation from across the world, all the way in England, alleging that Walz couldn’t take the shells out of a shotgun. In the three hours we were out there, for 10 seconds while he was talking to the press standing there, his gun jams a little bit. Is that misinformation? Or is it selective sharing of snippets of a broader whole that get weaponized by people online?

This moment has served as another reminder of what local news organizations like ours were built to do: bring truth to chaotic moments and help our state and the world understand what’s happening, and why it matters.

If crisis forces us to examine who we are, it also reminds us what we need: strong institutions like local news organizations that bring clarity to chaos and help communities get through their darkest times.