Is nothing normal in Minnesota anymore?
The state that kicked off the decade by giving the nation George Floyd riots; continued the streak by introducing Americans to its governor, the hapless and hopeless former vice presidential nominee Tim Walz; and is lately best known as a hotbed of fraud and lunatic protest, is making all the wrong headlines again.
And this time, it’s for something as quaint as a “Teacher of the Year” contest.
According to a report from the conservative Minnesota outlet Alpha News, one of the 11 finalists for the state “Teacher of the Year” competition is out of the running after bondage-themed photos of him began surfacing.
The news site reported that Thomas Rosengren, a sixth-grade teacher in Grove City, which is about 90 miles west of Minneapolis, had withdrawn from the competition after Alpha News asked its organizers for comment about the images.
Apparently, “participating in simulated sex acts with several men” doesn’t qualify as “Minnesota nice” — even in 2026.
“Because the images are publicly accessible online, they raise serious questions about whether students may have viewed the content,” Alpha News wrote.
“The images also raise concerns about whether the school district was aware of the material, as well as broader questions about professional standards and district oversight involving a publicly funded teaching position.”
Feel free to look at the Alpha News site to see the pictures, which are from a gay kink bar’s “Mr. Minneapolis Eagle” contest of 2019.
But be warned, you won’t need to be an innocent recluse to think they’re stomach-turning. They’re stomach-turning.
On the bright side, our Mr. Rosengren came out on top, according to a May 19, 2019, write-up on the website “The Leather Journal.” And to some schools of thought, a win is a win.
But there’s a deeper question raised by the Rosengren development beyond what public school teachers are doing in their off hours.
Basically, what in God’s name is Minnesota’s problem, anyway?
Has it always been this screwed up and no one knew it?
Some 50 years ago, it’s a good bet that about all anyone outside Minnesota thought of the state — if they thought about the state — was a football team with pretty cool uniforms and a television show with the brilliantly funny Mary Tyler Moore and her friends.
(Sure, probably some hipsters might throw in that Bob Dylan grew up there as Robert Zimmerman, but if Dylan could spend most of his career pretending that didn’t happen, so could the rest of the country.)
Yes, Minnesota has always had liberal politicians and liberal politics — but it was always a state that seemed more misguided than malicious and too inept to be dangerous.
In the 1968 presidential election, then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon in a thumping he couldn’t even blame on George Wallace and the segregationist South that split the Democratic vote.
Nixon’s 301 Electoral College votes would have beaten Humphrey even if he’d won the Democratic hearts of all the states in the Old Confederacy.
In 1984, then-former Vice President Walter Mondale got his hat handed to him by Ronald Reagan in a 49-state-to-1 Electoral College rout that will always be one of the brightest stars in the Republican night sky. (The one state that didn’t go for Reagan, of course, was Mondale’s own Minnesota.)
Things really started to look bad in 2002, when lefties turned the funeral for lefty Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone into a campaign rally. (A failing campaign rally, as it turns out.)
They looked worse when the state elected Al Franken, a reasonably funny comedian but terribly leftist liberal, to the Senate in 2008 after a recount fight that rivaled Florida’s 2000 presidential vote for granular detail, even if the stakes weren’t quite as high. (As it turned out, Franken ended up disgracing his state and himself.)
But all of that’s nothing compared to the infamy the Land of 10,000 Lakes has achieved becoming the Land of 10,000 Somali Scams, or the North Star State becoming the Squalid State.
We’ve gone from fresh-faced Mary Richards tossing her beret in the air to foul-mouthed (and now-deceased) Alex Pretti kicking out the taillight of an ICE vehicle — not to mention the antics of the late Renee Good.
And now it’s got a “Teacher of the Year” award finalist who apparently should be teaching Robert Mapplethorpe retrospectives rather than in a classroom full of children on any given day.
According to Alpha News, the remaining 10 finalists for the award are going to find out who the winner is at a May 3 banquet in St. Paul.
But don’t be surprised if something else goes wrong first.
This is Minnesota in 2026. There’s nothing normal about it.
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