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My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

I timidly approached a yellow school bus that stopped for me on a busy highway on the first day of school, and a friendly bus driver opened the door and welcomed me aboard. Kenny was a local dairy farmer who milked cows before and after his bus route.

The older boys in the back seats sometimes threw punches at each other, and Kenny would calmly pull over and break them up. I wondered how he could be so outwardly unruffled by their rowdy fights.

Kenny died 10 years ago this week, and his obituary said he co-piloted a B-29 during World War II. I hadn’t known this, but the thing is, people like Kenny were everywhere when I was a kid. They saved the free world as young adults and then went back to ordinary life.

It would have been unthinkable back then for a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate to say, “It dawned on me today… The bad guys won in WWII. There were no ‘good guys’ in that war.”

Royce White posted those words on Twitter two years ago. This year he won Minnesota’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate, with 370 votes coming from Freeborn County.

Something disgraceful has taken over the Republican Party. The entire party is MAGA now, and it’s defined by open appeals to white supremacy, female subjugation to male authority, xenophobia, conspiracy theories and greed.

If you’re a conservative who typically votes Republican but you believe in fairness, the entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants, personal freedom, fact-seeking, scientific rigor and preserving natural resources, please see that the Republican Party doesn’t stand for any of this anymore.

The change is so drastic that Liz and Dick Cheney, both staunch conservatives, are voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. They recognize that MAGA efforts to brand Harris as a “communist” are lies. Harris holds mainstream economic positions within a capitalist system.

The MAGA ticket is causing violence and disruption with its lies. Jan. 6 was a domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol, led by Trump, to try to overthrow the will of the voters. More recently Trump’s lies about immigrants have instigated violent threats that caused lockdowns in Springfield, Ohio, and safety concerns for FEMA workers helping people recover from hurricanes.

Voltaire was right: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

Sticking to the truth and facts is critical for protecting human rights, helping people and preserving constitutional order.

As for pocketbook issues, Harris would be much better at managing the economy than Trump. The Biden/Harris administration had lower rates of inflation than our European counterparts and has successfully brought inflation nearly back down to 2 percent. Congress had to bail farmers out after Trump’s disastrous trade war with China, and Democrats resurrected the economy after Trump bungled the COVID response.

This time around, Trump wants to impose bigger tariffs like a weird Gilded Age redux, which would drag down the economy the way he sank his own businesses. Trump has little business acumen, just a flair for self-aggrandizing story-telling.

On the economy it boils down to this: Is it acceptable or is it wrong to exploit other people for personal gain? The Republican platform seeks to concentrate private wealth in the hands of a few, cut regulations that protect consumers and cut public programs like Medicare, but Trump takes this exploitation to a completely different level, including hawking cheap Chinese-made Bibles for $59.99 during Holy Week. To Trump, money washes all sins, seediness and crime away.

If that doesn’t sound Christian, or ethical, or smart to you, I hope you’ll vote for the entire Democratic ticket — Harris/Walz, Amy Klobuchar, Rachel Bohman and Joe Staloch —which knows how to make the economy work from the bottom up and middle out.

According to Politico, at least one veteran in Albert Lea thinks a candidate who loves to hunt and who served 24 years in the Army National Guard appears to be “sucking up to everybody” when he wears a camo-print cap. Does one wrestle with whether Walz’s hat is phony rather than Trump telling John Kelly, whose son was killed in Iraq, that people who die in wars are “suckers” and “losers”?

Retired Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019 to 2023, revealed to Bob Woodward, “I had suspicions when I talked to you about [Trump’s] mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country … a fascist to the core.”

This makes me nervous, but I think of the reassuring smile of Kenny, who flew a superfortress before he drove bus No. 14, and all the other quiet heroes who stopped fascism. We must follow their example on Nov. 5 when we vote.

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