Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

As surely as the sun rises in the east over Washington, D.C., where Rep. Jim Hagedorn has worked most of his adult life, you can bet he will repeat the latest iteration of Fox News’s culture war propaganda.

This time Hagedorn is glomming on to Fox’s manufactured outrage over “critical race theory.” Fox News has been interviewing “concerned parents” about its impact on their children’s K-12 education. Media Matters for America identified at least nine of these parents as also being paid conservative operatives and personalities, which raises questions about their motivation for stoking conflict over an esoteric theory.

In a recent Facebook post about the theory, Hagedorn insinuated that to educate students how systemic racism shaped American history is “anti-Americanism.”

We don’t have to peer too far into the institution of slavery, Jim Crow laws or the common grave of three Freedom Riders — who were murdered 57 years ago this month by a gang including a deputy sheriff and a Baptist minister for registering black people to vote in Mississippi — to know that racism was codified in American law and brutally enforced by citizens in myriad ways throughout our history.

Hagedorn’s thinking doesn’t seem to have evolved much since his now-deleted “Mr. Conservative” blog, where he repeatedly made creepy and inhumane statements about women, Native Americans and Muslims.

By deliberately triggering racial anxieties, Hagedorn is manipulating his constituents’ basest fears instead of exercising leadership and appealing to their highest ideals. He’s playing his constituents for rubes, and it’s sad commentary that Hagedorn won our district in 2018 by fueling fear of “migrant caravans” and now thinks conjuring dread for more inclusive, more accurate American history lessons is a winning strategy for 2022.

If Hagedorn worries that he would not achieve as much in a fairer, less racist, more democratic society, it is a reasonable fear. Not because he is white and male, but because he’s mediocre and charmless. From his post as a 22-year-old intern in “friend of our family’s” Rep. Arlen Stangeland’s D.C. office, his strongest suit has always been the privilege afforded by his family connections. It’s little wonder he eagerly parrots the vile white nationalist nonsense that frozen TV dinner heir Tucker Carlson recklessly spouts on Fox News.

Hagedorn is also soft on insurrection and mindlessly obedient to former President Trump, whom former attorney general Bill Barr describes in the Atlantic as pushing a narrative about election fraud that was “all (expletive).” In service to Trump’s destructive lies, Hagedorn voted against certifying President Biden’s substantial electoral victory.

He also leans on Christian identity politics, yet Hagedorn’s positions on women and trans people more closely resemble Bronze Age tribal values. Many basic teachings of Jesus are absent from his stances: Love your neighbor as yourself, remember the poor and lame, release the oppressed, a person can’t serve both God and money, etc.

Due to how terrifying he wants people to believe “socialism” is, would Hagedorn deem these verses from Chapter 4 of the Book of Acts a Marxist dystopia? “Now the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one soul; neither did anyone say that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common. … Nor was there anyone among them who lacked; for all who were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the proceeds of the things that were sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet; and they distributed to each as anyone had need.”

It’s almost as if Karl Marx nicked his famous line, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” from the Bible.

Conservatives have historically leaned on Marx’s atheism to distract people from noticing that Marx’s ideas are more compatible with Jesus’s teachings than are capitalism’s prioritization of money and profit.

To believe that Christianity isn’t subverted by either capitalism or association with a party that idolizes capitalism, one must dismiss Jesus’s warning about trying to serve two masters.

Simply put, Republican politics are notably estranged from Jesus’s social teachings, which are still radical by today’s standards. John Kenneth Galbraith summed up the situation nearly twenty years ago: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

In other words, serving the other master.

Conservatives protect the status quo, while Jesus was executed for threatening the entrenched and likely inherited power structure of the Sanhedrin. To borrow Hagedorn’s verbiage in such matters, Jesus was too “divisive.”

The only “marginalized” people whom Hagedorn defends are the billionaire class against higher marginal tax rates that would help pay for hard infrastructure projects to benefit the rest of us.

Our district deserves better representation. Come to Jesus, James Hagedorn.

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