Timmer's post. Read it there in full. It is not excerpted here.
The focus here is on the first item Timmer cites. It is a Strib Oct. 31, 2022, op-ed by Todd Lippert, DFL-Northfield, a member of the Minnesota House and a minister in the United Church of Christ - favoring Ellison but expanding a theme seldom exposed about the Schultz approach - racism.
In the race for Minnesota attorney general, we're being served an extra helping of fear and division politics. The fear mongering and scare tactics being used against Attorney General Keith Ellison are desperate and ugly, and they are being funded by the same large corporations that Ellison as attorney general has been holding accountable.
The disingenuous ads flooding our state supporting Ellison's opponent, hedge fund lawyer Jim Schultz, drip with dog-whistle racism and play on people's fears.
The strategy is clear: distract and divide. Suggest that Ellison, as an African American and Muslim, isn't "one of us," and by association, that other African Americans and Muslims aren't really Minnesotans either.
I recently gathered with Muslim, Jewish and Christian faith leaders from across the state to demand that Schultz denounce these ads and take them down.
Being unfamiliar with such ads because I watch little TV and use a browser ad blocker, where Viking games are recorded and started a half-hour or so after real time to be able to fast forward through ads, while seeing "the game." Beyond that, no TV. So how bad the items, and Schultz's campaign involvement, are without comment here. The Lippert op-ed continues:
These racist ads against Ellison are being funded by the Republican Attorney General's Association. This organization is funded by large corporations, like oil and natural gas companies, big drug companies, gun manufacturers and others, that Ellison as attorney general has been fighting in order to protect Minnesotans.
The top theme I've heard talking to voters at the door this cycle is how exhausted we all are by fear and division politics, politics that pits rural against urban, preventing us from coming together when we know we must. [...]
As a white person from rural Minnesota, it's frustrating to know these dog whistles are created in many ways for people in my communities. Rather than helping us do the needed work of building bridges across race, they are designed to turn neighbors into enemies, reducing our ability to act together [...]
It's not surprising that big corporations that profit from our problems are trying to keep us divided. Their support for someone like Schultz for attorney general shows us what is really happening in this race. Corporations believe he will protect them, when the purpose of the attorney general is to protect the people of Minnesota. And if scorched-earth politics is what is needed to get their guy elected, so be it.
I'm confident, though, that rural communities like mine, and our whole state, can see through this. We know Minnesotans must be better than this kind of politics. When the Schultz campaign and the large corporations behind it resort to racist dog whistles and try to fan the flames of fear, we all lose.
Lippert puts his finger on a problem, but does not trace it to its genesis. And I am not at all confident that many can, in fact, see through the less egregious but still telling dimensions of Jim Schultz deciding he'd want Ellison's job.
From the start racism was injected into the Schultz run, by Schultz himself, alone or with the aid and comfort of his campaign henchmen/henchwomen.
The Jim Schultz campaign, not any outside PAC has a YouTube site. From there: The Schultz campaign kick-off video and the FOX Ingraham Angle item each is racist. Not aggressively so, but in tone. The latter, in particular, ties Omar and Ellison together in an attack - against two who are urban, non-white, Muslim.
It is Schultz, alone, a fifth generation white Minnesotan who is responsible for his campaign dog whistling. No outside corporations in greed and divisive mode needed. He gets the ball rolling. Schultz alone that way.
This FOX item presents the second linked video, with transcribed excerpts:
JIM SCHULTZ: It's been a painful few years in this state. I grew up in this state. I'm a fifth-generation Minnesotan and I feel it, and Minnesotans feel generally that we're losing the state… It's because of these radical policies embraced by Keith Ellison and Ilhan Omar and our terrible governor, Tim Walz, that have led us to this current point. I call it a manmade disaster — the manmade disaster that has descended upon our state, and we have to turn it around immediately.
…
[Rep. Ilhan Omar] spends all her time in Washington these days, she's completely disconnected from the community, and quite frankly, Keith Ellison is disconnected from the community. If they were connected to the community, they would know there's areas of north Minneapolis that have become a shooting gallery, there's areas of St. Paul where on any given day, you might be carjacked or otherwise, and still they end up embracing these policies that have led to such extraordinary crime and violence in our state. These are two kind of limousine liberals who have embraced policies that have led to incredible violence and destruction in our state.
[highlighting added]. Surely it is not the shrillest of dog whistles. But it is there. tightly condensed, to be heard.
We fifth generation white folks, our state, but north Minneapolis shooting gallary (not our neighborhood) impacts our community, where the dark skinned Muslims are "disconnected" from "our community." Walz' name interjected as an aside to soften the whistle. As in, hey, we're dumping on Dems, not a racist dump, Walz too, eh?
Sorry Jim. It is racist, with the Walz bit not fooling anyone.
Readers decide. Am I reading buzzwords wrongly? I don't believe so.
Look to the video editor's intentional use of imagery when the above words are uttered by candidate Schultz:
coordinated with "man made disaster" this
You know who it was who lit fires, who could not breathe. Not us fifth generation rural white folks; it was them, THE OTHER; Ellison and Omar's people. The use of imagery in the video in parallel to the words make the total more visceral.
It was engineered to affect you that way. Carefully so. Oral dogwhistle. Image dogwhistle. It is racist. It is propaganda. It is Jim Schultz, the candidate, the individual, the smiling family man in the banner here. Big time hedge fund Jim - talking deferentially in tone. Low key. While the images do his main mongering.
The kick-off video, watch it too a few times, narration and image use. Little differene.