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“The Seditious Six”: Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), Sen. Elise Slotkin (D-Mich.), Rep. Maggie Goodlander (D-N.H.), Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.).

There was a time when I could count on perhaps 50,000 subscribers to the Duluth News Tribune having the opportunity to read anything I sent to them. Maybe more. 75,000?

That was still true when the publisher of this august tabloid invited me to write a “conservative” column to help keep the Reader from becoming too liberal leaning.

Journalism is supposed to be neutralish. The Reader has offered me something I value deeply. The freedom to make an ass out of myself short of defamation. 

I found myself trapped last Friday with a column on a book I started but was only 20% finished with. Even with the freedom to be an ass I have my standards. So, I cast wildly about wondering what I could substitute it with. By chance last week, I was so pissed off at a Trib column that I sent in my first non-election related piece to editor Chuck Frederick in perhaps 20 years.

I grieve the loss of “the paper of record” that the DNT once was. When I moved to Duluth 52 years ago it is how I came to learn the city and its politics. I regret not clipping out the two-page spread on turmoil in the local democratic party I read with names of people I had yet to encounter. Two whole pages sans advertising! Those were the days.

The editors of the Trib and I have thrown brickbats at each other for about 20 years but always with the kind of wary respect that America’s political parties of old showed each other.
No matter what slights the paper has lofted my way, I always give Chuck a cordial howdy-do when we cross paths.

When I sent in my reply to the column by Mr. Grandson, he happily welcomed it but not without some fussing uncharacteristic of the Reader. To my delight he printed my letter almost unscathed. I even had the satisfaction of seeing him concede he’d never heard about Donald Trump’s salacious chat with Howard Stern over vaginas and STDs. But….

But when the letter only appeared in their online edition it just didn’t cut the mustard.  If the twice printed weekly and daily online Tribune have anything like their old rates of readership I doubt more than a thousand people saw my plaint. So, I publish it here in the Reader looking for a few more eyes.

To the Editor:
I couldn’t have disagreed more with “part-time story teller” John Grandson, as he was identified, in part, at the end of his Feb. 7 “Local View” column, “The Seditious Six’s real message wasn’t a reminder; it was political.”

The column objected to six Democratic members of Congress who released a video in November reminding young soldiers that our laws free them from following orders to, for instance, commit war crimes.

Here’s my story. During Vietnam, my attorney dad, an ex-Navy man, was in a conference call with Gov. Wendell Anderson’s heavy-handed chief-of-staff, Tom Kelm, who threatened to send the National Guard against college war protestors. Dad told Kelm, “We will not have another Kent State in Mankato!” The soldiers didn’t come.

I accept Donald Trump’s presidency. He legitimately won four more years after being defeated in 2020. What I can’t forget or forgive is something Grandson seems oblivious to. Trump’s response to his 2020 defeat was to call tens of thousands of his supporters to D.C., who then stormed Congress as though it was Germany’s Reichstag. Armed with guns, zip ties and nooses, they attempted to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.

Now that Trump’s back, I’ve seen his vengeance exacted on Minnesota. Masked, heavily armed police, apparently recruited for their loyalty to Trump, have seemingly been on steroids. At the same time, the president has dismissed thousands of FBI agents who were insufficiently obsequious in the face of his megalomania.

Grandson may be in “My Lai” denial, but I’m sure he hasn’t watched the Republican Party’s mutation as closely as I have. I heard it slander Hanoi Hilton’s Sen. John McCain before the South Carolina 2000 primary when Republican voters were called and told McCain had fathered an illegitimate Black child. That was two decades before the draft-dodging, narcissist-behaving Trump called McCain a “loser.”

How reassuring to see Trump, a man who once claimed his “Vietnam” was fighting STDs, become a poster boy for patriotism.

I commend “The Six” for warning young soldiers to think twice before imitating Trump’s sedition. It would be tragic if the fate of Renee Good and Alex Pretti heralded the fate of our democracy.

Harry Welty of Duluth is a former school board member who says he “has been reading Pulitzer-worthy American histories in bulk since (President) Donald Trump’s first election.”