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I don’t usually respond to the Republican columns published in the Albert Lea Tribune, but when the comments are so awful, one needs to clear the air of the stench.

Robert Hoffman dredges up a march by some 500 Communist people in Philadelphia a few weeks ago. Five hundred people almost 1200 miles away. Heck, I had to look up what he was talking about to make sense of it. He accuses local Democrats of being part of this group. This is shameless. It reminds me of the way Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s accused people of being Communists, ruining careers and lives for his own political and personal gain. It is unacceptable that a leader of a political party in Albert Lea would engage in such low tactics.

But the reason that MAGA Republicans are trying to create these distractions is that without a real platform (they haven’t passed a bottom-up democratic platform since 2016), they have no issues to run on. Are they trying to improve health care access, housing, infrastructure, the treatment plant, or any of the other problems we face? NO.

Their future is laid out by Project 2025. Funded by wealthy donors, Project 2025 lays out a radical agenda to change the way our government operates in the first 180 days of the Trump administration, should he win. It plans to get rid of government programs we all depend on from Social Security and Medicare to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education.

Their vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, has written the forward to the published version, and many of Trump’s closest advisors wrote this document. MAGA Republican leaders made the mistake of saying their plan out loud and publishing it, and now they are trying to run away from it.

Look, Trump and his folks were unsuccessful in overturning the elections on Jan. 6, 2020. Now they are trying to strip representative government from us should they win.

If you value public education, bodily autonomy and freedom in all its forms and applications, reject them and all their works.

Mary Hinnenkamp
Albert Le