How Minnesota Republican operatives are sowing distrust of Muslims

Last year, I was asked by the civil rights group CAIR-Minnesota to research the financing behind a rash of disparaging news coverage of Minnesota’s Muslims. I assumed I’d be cataloging the work of a few small-town bloggers, and that the hard part would be managing expectations.

I smiled, deposited the check, and confined my white-boy skepticism to my notes. It took less than a week of Googling to learn how wrong I was.

Despite the stereotype of a rural “Trump Country” lashing out at immigrants, most of Minnesota’s aggressively negative news about Muslims is produced by a group of Twin Cities donors, policy wonks, and strategists tied to the state’s most powerful Republican organizations.

View the September 4 article by Logan Carroll on The CityPages website here.