Hi Ed,
I was just at the Washburn library and grabbed a copy of the Southside Pride. I remember reading it when I lived on Chicago Avenue many years ago.
Your front-page article (“Please, go to your DFL precinct caucus”) led me to suppose there would be a second article urging people to go to their Republican Party caucus. Or perhaps an article that listed the party platforms of both the Republicans and the Democrats, so readers could make their own choice as to which caucus to attend.
Then I turned to page 4 and saw your article “Trump, the avenger of white male grievance.” It characterizes Trump as a racist. Under Biden we have had MS-13 gang members and terrorists from diverse countries cross the border. We have also had a surge of fentanyl deaths, which are due, in large part, to our de facto open borders.
The Democratic Party defended slavery; started the Civil War; opposed Reconstruction; founded the Ku Klux Klan; imposed segregation; and fought against the Civil Rights Act. Those attributes of the Democratic party sound rather racist to me.
I have a son-in-law (who was born in Mexico) who had to wait in Juárez, México, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, while he took the legal route to citizenship. He became an American citizen three years ago.
I am not a racist and I voted for Trump because he is for secure borders, less government regulation, lower taxes, and he is most definitely more pro-life than the party of Death (aka the Democratic party) which supports abortion till the moment of birth and is also clamoring for the legalization of assisted suicide. We will all have a “right to die” when our bodies fail us. We do not want our relatives or state officials hurrying us along.
The first rule in journalism is to know your audience. Since you are distributing a free newspaper in the Twin Cities, be assured, there are many Republicans and Trump supporters out there. Republicans do listen to Democrats, and we also read what Democrats write, but we also have a choice (whatever issue is being discussed) to agree or to disagree.
Ann Redding
Editor Ed Felien’s response:
Hi Ann,
Thanks for writing. A lot to unpack here.
First, all news is presented from a point of view. Southside Pride began 33 years ago in opposition to the first Gulf War begun by George H.W. Bush. We are unashamedly anti-war, anti-racist and feminist. We believe we have a responsibility to try to change the status quo and make things better, and just because a media source defends the status quo doesn’t mean it isn’t presenting news from a point of view. Southside Pride doesn’t pretend to be “fair and balanced” like Fox News (which had to pay out almost a billion dollars for lies they spread about Dominion voting machines).
You say we should publish the Republican platform to give readers a choice of political alternatives, but didn’t Trump abolish the Republican Party platform at the last Republican National Convention in 2020?
You complain about our “de facto open borders,” but ICE arrests under Trump were lower than under Obama and fewer unauthorized immigrants were removed, and it was Trump who just killed the compromise border bill.
It is true that Southern Democrats defended slavery; started the Civil War, opposed Reconstruction; founded the original Ku Klux Klan; imposed segregation; and fought against the Civil Rights Act. It’s also true that Northern Democrats wrote the Civil Rights Act and LBJ said, after he handed the pen with which he signed the legislation to Martin Luther King, “We just lost the South.” And it is true that, as a result of the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon, Southern racists left the Democratic Party and joined the Republican Party. And it is historically true that D.C. Stephenson built the Ku Klux Klan into a force that ruled the Republican Party in Illinois and Indiana in the 1930s.
Ann, we both value freedom. We differ on whether that freedom means a woman should have the freedom to control her own body.
There is one profound area where we are probably in complete agreement: the liberal elite bureaucrats that actually run our city don’t really give a damn about what we think or how we choose to live. The smart-ass planners downtown will decide parking and whether our street will become a one-way or a bike path. They will eliminate whole neighborhoods and replace them with high-rises as in the 2040 Plan without as much as a how-do-you-do and good-bye to the people who live there. The Park Board, under the skillful manipulations of master planner Michael Schroeder, wants to turn Hiawatha Golf Course into a swamp. They refuse to take down the dams that block water from leaving Lake Hiawatha because they think the look of a swamp is much more natural. And the school board adds more and more administrative bureaucrats which means less money for teachers which increases the number of kids in a classroom which means more and more kids are not getting the attention they need.
Read “1984” by George Orwell and “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley again. That’s the kind of world these liberal elites are creating for us.
Gov. Floyd B. Olson, in his Farmer-Labor convention address at the St. Paul Auditorium, St. Paul, Minnesota (March 27, 1934), said:
“Now I am frank to say that I am not a liberal. I enjoy working on a common basis with liberals for their platforms, but I am not a liberal. I am what I want to be—I am a radical. I am a radical in the sense that I want a definite change in the system. I am not satisfied with tinkering, I am not satisfied with patching, I am not satisfied with hanging a laurel wreath upon burglars and thieves and pirates and calling them code authorities or something else. I am not satisfied with that.
“I want, however, an orderly, a sane, and a constructive change. I don’t want any visionary things any more than the hardest Tory or Conservative wants them. But I know the transition can take place and that, of course, it must be gradual. It can’t come overnight, but I want to do all I can to set it in motion and keep it going steady, not in jerks, or jumps, or in spurts, but going steadily ahead.”
Thank you, again, for writing. I hope you found other articles in our February edition useful and interesting. And please don’t hesitate to write again if you find you disagree with another of our published perspectives.
Ed Felien
