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My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

Robert Hoffman didn’t write his own My Point of View column for the county Republicans last week but instead submitted a letter by Rep. James Comer. As I stated before, Comer is bumbling around to find something treacherous in Walz’s hard work leading multiple student trips to China, and it’s a stunt which will yield nothing but coveted FOX hits.

As a cheap attempt to smear Walz’s candidacy for vice president, it’s also an attack on a public school teacher who went above and beyond to provide life-changing educational experiences for his students.

It’s clear from his “column” that Hoffman disdains public school teachers. If you’ve read my columns before, you know that I am highly critical of many of our current state Rep. Peggy Bennett’s positions, but I don’t attack her record as a teacher. Tim Walz was an exceptional high school teacher, and it’s disgusting to see Hoffman attack his service in this lazy way.

This is the second time this year that Hoffman submitted a column he didn’t write. The first time he copy-pasted a couple of debunked chain emails.

The Republican Party has changed a lot since the last World War II veterans left office. Many leaders had witnessed their young compatriots sacrifice their lives in service to our country, and many of them had permanent physical and psychological scars. For example, Lincoln Chaffee, who served as a Republican U.S. senator from Rhode Island from 1976 to 1999, left Yale to enlist in the Marines and fought in the intense battles of Guadalcanal and Okinawa.

These public servants believed that we need to look out for each other. Giving one’s life in service to our country doesn’t make a person a “sucker” or a “loser” (as retired general John Kelly confirmed Trump said), it makes one a hero. Now Republican leadership is marked by a shared breach from reality, and there’s no one left to tell James Comer he has gone too far.

We also see Republicans abandoning so-called “family values” for the strip club values of people like U.S. Senate candidate Royce White. At the intersection of Bridge and Fountain this past weekend I saw a truck pulling a big sign for Trump and White. Both of these candidates objectify women and rate them on sexual value. They demean any that aren’t sufficiently attractive to them or subservient enough to their demands.

White, who is Republicans’ gratuitously unserious rival to Sen. Amy Klobuchar, recently said on his podcast “Please Call Me Crazy” that any Republican candidates vying for the votes of suburban women are “living in a cucked mentality.”

“Cucked” is a term favored by Republicans who want to reimpose a strict pecking order. They want an unfree society where people with higher status can trample on the rights of others with impunity.

There is no path to victory for either Royce or Trump without the votes of suburban women, especially in swing states. White is demonstrating disdain for both women’s electoral power and reality.

Trump’s campaign showed contempt for both women and veterans at Arlington National Cemetery last week when Trump broke federal law to use Section 60, a 14-acre area where soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried, as a campaign photo op.

His campaign’s self-serving excuses for Trump using these soldiers’ graves as props include a false claim that individual families who support him have special privilege to override the rules that govern everyone else, and that the personnel who they pushed aside when she tried to stop them from breaking federal law was “suffering from a mental health episode” and is a “despicable individual” (ad hominem lies to deflect consequences for wrong-doing).

The Army reported that the woman is not pressing charges because she fears retaliation from Trump supporters. This is a pattern we have seen repeatedly. Still, many people stand up to Trump’s intimidation tactics, and Trump hates them with a fury. This includes military personnel, judges, representatives, journalists, teachers, election judges, etc.

Trump cannot stand service to our country, only loyalty to himself.

Trump drew a separate rebuke from the VFW for saying last month that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is “much better” than the Congressional Medal of Honor, since those who get the Medal of Honor are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”

Incidentally, 35 service members received the Congressional Medal of Honor for fighting in the Battles of Guadalcanal and Okinawa, 19 of them posthumously. Two of the fallen were Minnesota natives.

Trump is a crass, woman-despising thug. He experienced the “affirmative action of generational wealth” by inheriting $400 million from his parents, but his personality defects are becoming obvious to more people as reality breaks through the gold plating.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.