MOORHEAD — Minnesota Republicans, unable to win statewide races and heading toward a 2022 governor's race in which their candidate will be a conspiracy theorist wingnut, are jumping on the historical culture war bandwagon. It's their local version of the critical race theory fever giving conservatives the vapors in other states.
The battle in Minnesota is over the state historical society and its administration of Fort Snelling, the former military post at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers that served as the crucible for the state's birth.
Republicans, led by state Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer, wanted the state to take over management of Fort Snelling (and other sites) because they believe the historical society has been hijacked by woke activists who are trying to erase white history and send visitors on a guilt trip.
Historians say they are simply trying to tell a more full version of history that includes the perspective of all affected by Fort Snelling. Like, you know, the Native Americans who lived in the area for centuries before European settlers arrived and Black slaves who were kept by Army officers at the fort.
The proposal was dropped, but the battle lines were drawn.
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It is this fuller version that so offends Republicans. For them Minnesota's history is a neat and tidy affair, like a seventh-grade textbook, where the military and early settlers are unconditionally heroic figures and native peoples were here to be moved out of the way and "civilized" as the nation expanded.
Any attempt at telling a contextual version of Fort Snelling's impact on earlier inhabitants is called "revisionist history," a devious lefty agenda meant to shame white Minnesotans into hating their state and country.
Others would call it "the truth," a difficult and controversial concept for the current iteration of the Republican Party to grasp.
Why Republicans are so afraid of historical truths remains a mystery. The best guess is that it's a convenient political tool in their ongoing culture war, used to easily stoke fake outrage among their base and sympathetic right-wing media.
How else are you going to convince Henry from Hinckley that the woke mob is trying to cancel him?
Fear and anger are far easier to implement than critical thinking.
How insisting on sanitized white-centric history helps Republicans broaden their appeal is a question only they can answer.
"History is messy," a Minnesota historian wrote in the Star Tribune, defending the historical society's efforts at telling a broader narrative. "... These various stories do not sit comfortably alongside each other. Nor do they cancel each other out."
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Her point was that Minnesota's history isn't an either/or proposition. Key early figures in the state's history can be revered for their work and questioned for their treatment of Native Americans. European settlers can be lauded for their courage and it can be acknowledged they took their land from those who were here first.
"The bigger and the more inclusive the story," the historian wrote, "the messier the history becomes."
Minnesota Republicans don't want to be bothered by that messiness, especially when anger is so easy to peddle.
