Nordics, Skrælings, & Hubert Humphrey’s North Country:
Why We Need to Win Minnesota Over

4,637 words

It Feels Like 1996

We’re headed into another election season. To this author, the upcoming 2020 election has a remarkably similar feel to that of 1996, except that the roles played by the two major parties have been reversed. On the Right in 1996, there was plenty of dislike for incumbent Bill Clinton, but the vast middle was happy with his efforts. This is much like the situation today, except that the boiling dislike is on the Left. In 1996, the Republicans were also in a bad way. They were blamed for the government shutdown during the winter of 1995-96. Today, the Democrats have become a bumbling circular firing squad, and there are all sorts of gaffes and disasters that cloud any message they might develop.

In 1996, the Republican Party’s strategy was to fall back on its default position of the Cuckservative Cringe. They nominated Senator Bob Dole.[2] Dole had no vision, no new ideas, ran a low-energy campaign, and was doomed in the face of a good economy and no ongoing international crises to make a stand on (the Cold War was over, and the “war on terror” was still years away). The Democrats might very well field a Dole-like candidate after what appears will be an ugly primary. And like Bob Dole’s hapless Republican Party in 1996, the Democrats are running with considerable disadvantages. Trump is embroiled in no foreign quagmires (yet), still retains a loyal base, and the economy is approaching something like the heady days of the mid-1990s. But unlike the Republicans in 1996, the Democrats are being embraced with religious fervor by liberal whites, often called “The Great Awokening.” These awokened whites view non-whites as objects of worship and Trump and his supporters as evil incarnate. And there is an open hostility toward whites on the part of the Jewish and non-white Democrats that was not as noticeable in the 1990s. American political culture has taken a dark turn. In 1996, there was no talk of a second American civil war; today, civil conflict is part of the national conversation.[3] Beyond this, there is the simple fact that if the economy tanks, or The New York Times actually memes a recession into reality, Trump is doomed. (Conversely, if there is another 9/11 type attack between now and Election Day, Trump could be a shoe-in.)

Minnesota is in Play

Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “civil rights” disaster disarmed whites and armed non-whites, setting the stage for a big explosion in the future. There is actually no way to know when or how such a conflict will play out. If and when it happens, would matters be settled forever, such as at Appomattox in 1865, or would they grind on interminably, such as in Lebanon? If matters are settled in an anti-white way, will whites be enslaved, put in prisons, and have the entire mainstream against them for centuries to come, such as it is today in the defeated South? With the stakes this high, it is time to look for where we might find allies. Minnesota is one such place. The Land of Lakes almost went for Trump in 2016, and the state may very well be in play in 2020. While Trump has been far from ideal, he is nevertheless the most pro-white[4] President I’ve seen in my lifetime. He could be something like a John the Baptist for later politicians who might bring us to the broad, sunlit uplands of the white ethnostate.

This article will focus on Minnesota in order that we may better understand the people of that state and win them over to our cause. There are several reasons to do this. First, the state’s white population is above average in every way. Its IQ level is very high: 103.7. The state is highly connected to the Yankee cultural zone that has had such an outsized impact on the United States, and Minnesota contains areas[5] of the United States that will follow its lead. The first part of this article will summarize the state’s history, especially its pioneer founding. The second part will examine the life of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. “Triple H,” as he was often called, was a liberal Minnesota progressive, and his outlook is not unlike that of other Minnesotans, such as Senator Eugene McCarthy and Vice President Walter Mondale. Finally, I will assess Minnesota’s culture in order to show that it is not in fact filled with anti-white liberals.

The North Country

Minnesota could be unique among America’s Midwestern states in that there might have been white men there as early as 1362 AD. In 1898, a Swedish immigrant farmer discovered a runestone dated to that year which told a story of “ten men red of blood and dead.” The runestone was initially believed to be a hoax, but later investigations showed that it may be authentic. We now know that Vikings did build a sizable village in L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, and we know for certain that there were Viking trading posts in Baffin Ellesmere islands at that time. It is also possible to get to Minnesota by the sea from Greenland and the High Arctic Islands through Hudson Bay, through the Nelson River, across Lake Winnipeg, and finally to the Red River of the North. Another way is via the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes. Viking sagas that were written in Greenland and Iceland tell of the Skrælings, who were very likely North American Indians. There are also documents in the Danish and Norwegian archives that tell of expeditions to Greenland and beyond at around that time.

If Northmen did travel to Minnesota during the Middle Ages, they would have come to an area where the two most powerful Skræling tribes, the Ojibwes and the Dakota, enjoyed the blessings of multiculturalism and diversity by being constantly at war with each other. The former tribe was in the northeasterly part of the state, and the Dakota were situated in the southern and western parts. Indian battles were not bloodbaths such as those one finds between whites, as in for example the Battle of the Somme in 1916, but when the US government took control of the area in the early 1800s, its representatives couldn’t stop the constant skirmishing.[6]

Putting this aside, Minnesota’s white history most certainly starts with French explorers who traveled by canoe from Quebec in the early 1650s. The United States acquired the area during the Jefferson administration, and settlement started in earnest in the 1830s. Minnesota is unusual in that the first Anglo settlers were from a failed settlement scheme in Manitoba called the Red River Colony rather than from Massachusetts, Virginia, or Pennsylvania, like nearly every other western territory. Very quickly, New Englanders became the largest group of Anglo settlers. Madison Grant writes:

The native-born were overwhelmingly of British ancestry and represented a prolongation of the westward movement of population from New England that have been going on for more than two centuries. Minnesota [in the 1830s] had a Nordic population and was predominately Anglo-Saxon[7] in character.[8]

Settlers from Norway and Sweden began to establish farms in the 1850s. As with the rest of the Midwest, there are many Germans in Minnesota. The development of the state was hindered by the 1862 Dakota War, a vicious racial conflict started by Indians even as they drew aid and money from whites. Skrælings drawing welfare and yet simultaneously carrying out violence and terrorism against whites continues in Minnesota today, with the Somalis being the worst offenders.

 

From the 2000 US Census: United Church of Christ Adherents (a proxy for Anglo-Puritans), Icelandic Americans, Scandinavians, Finns, Norwegians, and Swedes. These distributions show that Minnesota is very Nordic, and its population is highly connected to the Anglo-Puritan culture that spans the northern and western United States.

Hubert H. Humphrey[9]

Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr. (1911-1978) was a deeply Minnesotan man. He was born in Wallace, South Dakota, a territory that is a cultural extension of Minnesota. His father’s family were of New England Puritan stock. His grandmother, Addie Regester Humphrey, taught at a Quaker school, and Humphrey’s mother, Christine Sannes, was from Norway. Humphrey was baptized into his mother’s Lutheran church, but he worshiped later in life as both a Methodist and a Congregationalist. Humphrey was thus genetically a mix of Minnesota’s native Nordic groups and culturally a mix of Minnesota’s deeply Protestant religious milieu. In true Minnesota style, Humphrey’s extended family – his uncles, aunts, siblings, and so on – were all above average. If a Humphrey woman was a housewife, then her children ended up in prominent jobs when they grew up. The Humphrey family is simply exceptional.

Humphrey’s upbringing was not much different from that of anyone else in the Upper Midwest during the Great Depression. His father was a prosperous drugstore owner, but the family did struggle financially on occasion given the economic crisis of the time. These struggles were more a matter of making hard choices to manage debt rather than missing meals, though. As the family developed their business, their New England-style creative genius kicked in, and they invented and manufactured their own drugs, both for people and farm animals – and these drugs worked.

Humphrey married Muriel Fay Buck in 1936. His family was prosperous enough that he was able to attend university in the dark years of the Depression. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1937 and earned a Master’s degree at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in 1940.

In an area where most people voted Republican, the Humphreys were Democrats. The main reason for this was that in the election of 1896, the Democratic Party fielded the most extraordinary candidate for the presidency which did not win: William Jennings Bryan. The Democratic Party was no longer only the party of ex-Confederates and Irish Catholics. It became the party of new ideas, especially economic ones. Those ideas still work. If you purchased groceries for your family in October 2008 (when the Great Recession started) with a credit card because you had no cash, you were able to do so because of William Jennings Bryan’s banking and credit ideas.

As a result of the Democratic Party’s transformation into something truly progressive, Hubert Humphrey, Sr. became a Democrat. He was a Representative in South Dakota, and served as a South Dakota’s delegate to the Democratic Party’s conventions in 1944 and 1948. Hubert H. Humphry, Jr. was thus like other wildly successful politicians: He came from a family already involved in public service.

As one would expect, Humphrey was a good university student. He also met a great many fellow students who would themselves become prominent Democratic politicians. Like all others who become successful, he surrounded himself with good people. Like many other Democratic Party leaders in the 1960s, such as LBJ, Humphrey’s career in politics began with him working as a teacher through one of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal programs, soon becoming an administrator of teachers in the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Humphrey found that the WPA’s teachers were of three varieties: ordinary Americans grateful for a job and willing to work hard, and either Stalinists or Trotskyites. Humphrey found that the latter two didn’t do a good job, and he fired them at every opportunity.

His time with the WPA sheds lights on how fortune smiled on Humphrey’s political career during his early years. Humphrey made decisions based on his understanding of the circumstances of the time, and how those circumstances played out ended up making him look good. He was right to mistrust and fire Communists from liberal American institutions like the WPA and the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), for we now know that the Communists were up to no good and their system didn’t work. Humphrey also took a huge risk and gave speeches supporting the Roosevelt administration’s foreign interventionist policies in heavily isolationist Minnesota and the Dakotas. These risky speeches gave Humphrey political gains. After Pearl Harbor, the isolationist movement never recovered and Humphry looked like a prophet. He thus got in on the ground floor of what would become the extremely successful Cold War liberal stance. Humphrey really fought Communists – and won. He also fought Communists in the most courageous way possible: domestically, in the world of ideas, with his own job at stake, at a time when he had to support a growing family. Humphrey was rejected for military service several times due to his colorblindness. As a consequence, Humphrey unsuccessfully ran for Mayor of Minneapolis in 1943, and then won in 1945.

In Minneapolis, Humphrey’s career gained focus. Humphrey believed from his time in Baton Rouge that “discrimination” was what was driving black lack of accomplishment, and he sought to end it in Minneapolis. Both Minneapolis and St. Paul practiced segregation, and:

In winter 1946, journalist Carey McWilliams published a scathing indictment, “Minneapolis: The Curious Twin,” which labeled the city the “capital of anti-Semitism in America,”[10] whose deep prejudice had been rekindled by the Great Depression and nativist and Republican political attacks on the former governor Elmer Benson for having Jewish aides.[11]

As Mayor, Humphrey banned “hate literature” in the city.[12]

At the same time that Humphrey was fighting “discrimination” in Minneapolis, the Democratic Party was internally dived on the issue of “civil rights.” The party’s base up until 1968 was, in fact, whites from the Deep South. They had more cultural experience with black issues and saw “civil rights” for what it was: a racial attack upon whites by Jews using blacks. However, these voices couldn’t match the eloquence or vision of progressives like Humphrey. At the 1948 Democratic Party Convention, Humphrey gave the speech that shot a Mayor from a mid-grade Midwestern city into political superstardom. It deserves to be quoted at length:

We can’t use a double standard – there’s no room for double standards in American politics – for measuring our own and other people’s policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantee of those practices in our own country. Friends, delegates, I do not believe that there can be any compromise on the guarantees of the civil rights which we have mentioned in the minority report. In spite of my desire for unanimous agreement on the entire platform, in spite of my desire to see everybody here in honest and unanimous agreement, there are some matters which I think must be stated clearly and without qualification. There can be no hedging – the newspaper headlines are wrong. There will be no hedging, and there will be no watering down – if you please – of the instruments and the principles of the civil rights program. My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. People – human beings – this is the issue of the twentieth century. People of all kinds – all sorts of people – and these people are looking to America for leadership, and they’re looking to America for precept and example.

How the “civil rights” revolution happened is as complex a story as how the French Revolution happened, but Humphrey illuminates some of the “civil rights” disaster’s root causes. First, Humphrey lived very far from blacks in an area where everyone you meet works hard and has a high IQ. In Minnesota (and the Dakotas, for that matter) for the most part, one person really is as above average as another. It is thus easy to go to Louisiana and misread Jim Crow laws as the cause of black pathology rather than as a legitimate reaction to said pathology.

Also, Humphrey was part of the group of talented men who got behind “civil rights” and sold it to the American public. They were probably the critical part of the coalition that allowed “civil rights” to occur in the first place. Essentially, adherents of “civil rights” – those men who pushed the Civil Rights acts of 1957 and 1964, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, were valorous white men with deep roots in America’s past. Although Humphrey did not serve due to his physical limitations, many of his peers in the “civil rights” movement had been field-grade officers in the Second World War, such as Lyndon Baines Johnson (Lieutenant Commander, US Navy), Robert McNamara (Lieutenant Colonel, US Army Air Corps), and James A. Michener (Lieutenant Commander, US Navy). There is a generational aspect to this, also: All of these men were born between 1907 and 1918. None are Baby Boomers. None thought they were being traitors to their own kind, or dupes of the J-Left.

Finally, as alluded to in his speech, Cold War liberals believed that they couldn’t fight the Communists with “racist” institutions like Jim Crow in place. One can also infer that in 1948, “civil rights” had made considerable progress in offering an overarching metapolitical narrative that people understood. It captured the minds of talented white men like Humphrey when it emerged in the 1930s, and resistance to it was feeble and ineffective. The 1948 Democratic Party convention exemplifies this: Democratic support for “civil rights” caused delegates from the Deep South to leave the convention and form their own party, the Dixiecrats. Despite the fact that the Democrats lost a good part of their base as a result, they still won the presidential election that year. Harry S. Truman thus had to advance “civil rights” to reward his supporters, although his personal views were not so different from those of the Dixiecrats.

Also in 1948, Humphrey ran for Minnesota’s Senate and won. At first he was subjected to insults and slights from other Senators, but he worked hard. His early senatorial career was consumed by the Korean War and the problems of the early Cold War. But he ended up making all the right choices. Senator Humphrey became the big behind-the-scenes man who ended up getting much of the liberal legislation of his wing of the Democratic Party passed. He first ran for President in 1960, and was very likely the last American presidential candidate to use an anti-Catholic “dog whistle” in a campaign: His campaign song was a Protestant hymn, “Give Me that Old Time Religion.” But it didn’t work. By 1960, the Irish had assimilated into America’s larger culture (fortunately), and it was ridiculous to be anti-Catholic when Bolsheviks were everywhere.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson selected him to be his running mate, and after winning the 1964 election, Vice President Humphrey was immediately drawn into the problems of the Vietnam War. Humphrey urged caution regarding escalation, and his supporters often felt that he was duped and ignored by Johnson. I believe this is incorrect. American involvement in the Vietnam War was, among other factors, very much the result of the logic of the Cold War liberal position.

After Johnson withdrew from the 1968 election and Robert F. Kennedy was murdered, Humphrey became a serious contender for the Democratic nominee for President. However, the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago was a disaster, with the party’s various factions clashing – even literally, in the streets outside. While it seemed Humphrey’s campaign was doomed due to the nationally televised punching left festival that was the convention, it is still remarkable how close he came. He returned to the Senate following his defeat and supported Jimmy Carter during his presidency. His legislative efforts after 1968 never had the same idealism and passion as they had before. Things had changed. He was diagnosed with cancer in 1977, but continued to work hard, even making calls on Carter’s behalf in his last few days of life.

Hubert H. Humphrey is exactly the sort of person we need on our side. Humphrey was a liberal idealist, of course, but he wasn’t a philosopher, he was a doer. Humphrey picked up on the “civil rights” trend of the 1930s and ran with it. Humphrey was honest, ambitious, eloquent, and capable. His family was the same, and he attracted talented people. Imagine if we get someone like Humphrey to take our ideas into the party conventions and the US Senate. It would certainly end better than the 1960s did, with black rebellion and ruined cities.

Minnesota: Extreme Whiteness and Extreme Skræling Worship

Today, Minnesota is extremely white, not just demographically but culturally. It radiates Nordic virtue and down-home American homeliness. Minnesota was the setting of National Public Radio’s A Prairie Home Companion, the whitest radio show ever. However, there is an extreme form of non-white – dare I say “Skræling” – worship in Minnesotan culture that has come to dominate politics and culture. Ten years ago, one pro-white author predicted many of today’s issues in the North Country when he wrote:

When it comes to race matters, these Nordics are what Wilmot Robertson called “Old Believers” in his classic book The Dispossessed Majority. Old Believers are whites who are so accustomed to a homogeneous society that they do not understand how destructive non-whites can be. Old Believers remain mired in the outlook of past social reformers and still seem to think that a dose of “understanding,” church attendance, jobs programs, welfare reform, and the like will turn third-world peoples into respectable Midwesterners overnight.

These egalitarian progressive folkways have led Minnesotans to import various groups from the Third World. In the 1970s, the Hmong, a Southeast Asian tribe, were a popular import; there are now 46,000 of them living in Minnesota, and 38,000 in neighboring Wisconsin. Hmong have proven a disaster. They are heavily involved in gangs, which, in addition to committing the usual crimes of auto theft, drug dealing, pimping, and murder, have distinguished themselves through their practice of gang rape. Welfare use among Minnesota Hmong is also sky high. There are few better portraits of the trauma that unassimilated immigrants inflict on white communities than Roy Beck’s classic article on the Hmong in Wisconsin.

Minnesotans still have not learned their lesson. Since the 1990s, they have been importing another third-world people, Somalis, who are also proving inassimilable.

Minnesota now has a Somali Congresswoman as well as local Somali elected officials. There was even a Somali disaster, when a low-IQ affirmative action Somalian police officer shot a white woman in the face. There are Somali terrorists in Minnesota, and Somalis have drained the state’s welfare services.

However, Minnesota’s politicians are not always foolish, self-hating whites. Michelle Bachmann’s farewell speech when she dropped out of the 2012 Republican presidential race had several pro-white themes, including the phrase “survival of the nation” (a Great Replacement dog whistle) and a claim that “[Bachmann will] fight to secure our borders.” Eugene McCarthy, a dark horse candidate in the 1968 Democratic Primary, wrote a book called Colony of the World in 1992 that decried replacement-level immigration from the Third World. And aviation pioneer Charles A. Lindbergh was also a Minnesotan who was J-Woke and pro-white.

Furthermore, refugee resettlement slowed down considerably during the Obama administration and has become even lower since Trump’s election. Agencies like Lutheran Social Services are entirely dependent upon government money to settle refugees – and they’ve shuttered offices. There is no natural economic pull that supports importing Third World charity cases. These agencies could very well become so financially starved that they might fold, and the entire racket could cease to exist. An ideal scenario would be for agencies like Lutheran Social Services to be funded to remove non-white Skrælings from the United States entirely.

We also see the beginnings of resistance to Somali colonization. President Trump has banned Somalis from entering the United States. Additionally, he encouraged the Israeli government to ban Somali Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from visiting Palestine. In doing this, Trump has shown that Somalis, no matter how high their station, are a problem and that their movements must be managed. Although he is not a White Nationalist and there have been some disappointments, if Trump wins Minnesota in 2020, we will know that pro-white ideas have made inroads there. And if we can win Minnesota over, we can win everywhere.

Notes

[1] Mary Lethert Wingert, North Country: The Making of Minnesota (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 354.

[2] One joke I recall from the campaign was when a reporter asked Bob Dole if he wore boxers or briefs. Dole’s reply was, “Depends.”

[3] From American Renaissance: “The story of the contemporary American Left’s sponsorship of hate and violence begins around 1964, when the Democratic Party chose to abandon the Southern constituencies that had been its mainstay since the time of Jefferson and Jackson. In less than a decade, the party found itself increasingly dependent on gaining super-majorities among blacks, upscale liberals, and constituencies of resentment in general—and hence on stoking their hate. For the past half century, America’s political history has been driven by the Democratic Party’s effort to fire up these constituencies by denigrating the rest of America. As elements of cynical calculation melded into self-images of righteous entitlement to rule inferiors, the boundaries between the party and the constituencies’ most radical parts have eroded.”

[4] While some might be disappointed in Trump, he has done the following:

1. He has opposed the transfer of industry from the Midwest to Asia. (I wonder if the US is stirring up trouble in Hong Kong as a policy measure.)
2. He ended support for radical Islamists in Syria.
3. He has enforced anti-immigration laws which were hitherto dormant.
4. He has launched no foolish wars.
5. He has started on The Wall. Once a government program starts, see how hard it is to stop.
6. He has put forward several White Nationalist themes (talking about shithole countries, calling out “The Squad,” and shaming black politicians who morally posture while their districts are in ruins, to name a few). He also played Jews against non-whites when he got two members of “The Squad” restrictions on visiting Israel.
7. He has withdrawn from the Global Migration Compact and reduced refugee resettlement.

[5] Minnesota is a very Yankee state, like Massachusetts or Connecticut, but it also has a considerable German and Scandinavian element. Similar areas include northwestern Illinois, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the Dakotas, and the Montana Prairie Zone. These regions will be influenced by what happens in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and St. Cloud.

[6] Ibid., p. 87.

[7] There are many Minnesotans that trace their ancestry to Pennsylvania’s Anglo Quakers, but they are fewer than the New England contingent.

[8] Madison Grant, The Conquest of a Continent (York, S.C.: 2004), p. 197.

[9] Most, but not all, of the information on HHH comes from Arnold A. Offner, Hubert Humphrey: The Conscience of the Country (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2018).

[10] An accusation of anti-Semitism is more of an attack by Jews on people they don’t like. In the United States, the single greatest ethnic conflict is between Yankees (English Puritans who came to Massachusetts Bay Colony from East Anglia and England’s West Country between 1620 and 1650) and Jews. Minneapolis, then as now, has a business and cultural elite that come from that ethnic group. It is very likely that the 1946 article about “anti-Semitism” was the start of a J-Left attack on Minnesota that culminated in the importation of Somali refugees.

[11] Offner, Hubert Humphrey, p. 33.

[12] I am uncertain of what constituted “hate literature” in 1948. The term “hate group” was used by news commentators on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.