Haley Taylor Schlitz wins a Spotty ™
Haley Taylor Schlitz, the ‘Gen Z’ columnist at the Minnesota Star Tribune, wins a Spotty™ for her column on Martin Luther King Day. (That’s a gift link, so you have no excuse for not reading it.) I didn’t use the Spotty™ graphic for this one because I wanted to feature the Jeff Wheeler graphic of Minnesota citizens confronting a phalanx of Ice Orcs in the cold. Many of you know that standing your ground — on frozen ground — while your toes go numb and the chill creeps up your legs is not fun.
A principal theme of Ms. Schlitz’s column was King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, where King criticized clergy and others for being more concerned about the temperature of protests than they were about the conditions that produced them.
As if by magic, well, probably not, but karmic, anyway, the first two or three letters in the Strib the same day as Schlitz’s column exhorted protesters and observers of ICE to just cool it. Thankfully, I don’t think protesters and observers are going to cool it anytime soon. Resistance seems to be growing, if anything. We may well wind up with paratroopers buying lunch at Subway, but if it happens, it happens. Let’s hope it doesn’t.
Here are just a few graphs from the Schlitz column:
Dr. King, we are not living in your era, but we are facing a familiar question: Is “order” being used to protect the public, or to protect power from accountability?
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And I keep returning to one of the most basic ideas you insisted on in Birmingham. You were there because injustice was there. Not because it was convenient, not because it guaranteed applause. Because moral emergencies do not respect city limits, and because distance is one of the oldest excuses in American life.
That is the first reason this moment in Minnesota matters on MLK Day 2026. We are being encouraged to treat what is happening here as a local disturbance. A Minneapolis problem. A Minnesota problem. A protest problem. Something to be managed.
Protesters and observers in places like Los Angeles and Chicago have learned before the cost of being an example. But Martin Luther King, through Haley Taylor Schlitz, tells us the game that’s really afoot.
Remember, a Spotty™ is awarded for an op-ed or letter to the editor that I wish I had written myself.
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