What’s Happening in Minnesota Should Alarm All Americans | The American Spectator

There’s a line — blurred now, barely visible — between hospitality and surrender. Once a cradle of Midwestern modesty, Minnesota is no longer defined by its cohesion. The Land of 10,000 Lakes is fast becoming the land of 10,000 languages. Over 10 percent of Minnesotans now speak something other than English at home — Somali, Hmong, Oromo, Karen, and Vietnamese. What once added flavor now defines the meal.

One needn’t be a disciple of David Duke to find this alarming. One only needs a few functioning neurons and a basic grasp of what holds a society together: shared language, shared meaning, shared trust. Remove the first, and the others hardly stand a chance. For those rolling their eyes, let me ask you this: how do you trust someone you can’t understand? And how do you build anything that lasts — let alone a nation — when no one speaks the same tongue? You don’t. You can’t.

English is the software of the American mind. The shared tongue of revolutionaries, presidents, preachers, truckers, and steelworkers. It was the language of legends and laws, of sermons and steel, of contracts inked and oaths declared. Strip it away, and the American experiment doesn’t just stumble. It starts to splinter. Not because Somali or Oromo or Hmong are inferior — many carry centuries of beauty and meaning. But because they are not what built the United States.

This is an incredibly delicate subject. Especially in an age where disagreement is often met with accusations of bigotry. But clarity matters. A nation is not held together by GDP or GPS; it’s held together by shared understanding. Language is the architecture of that understanding. To point this out isn’t racist. It’s responsible.

Cultures do not remain intact when the language collapses. They fragment. They tribalize. They calcify into little ethnic enclaves with parallel values, expectations, and allegiances. If English is just one of many, then America becomes just one of many. We’ve seen this story before.

In parts of France, entire suburbs operate outside the French language and legal norms. Closed communities where Arabic or Wolof dominates, and where police hesitate to enter. In Sweden, “no-go zones” persist where Swedish is barely spoken and integration has stalled entirely. In Germany, Turkish-speaking enclaves exist where third-generation residents still struggle to speak German fluently. These are not melting pots. They’re pressure cookers. (RELATED: Paris Is Still Beautiful — From Behind Bulletproof Glass)

The Star Tribune’s recent report on Minnesota’s “linguistic diversity” reads like a press release for a U.N. regional office. A celebration of how America steadily dissolves into a patchwork of mutually unintelligible subcultures. Nowhere in the applause is there a pause to ask: what happens when the language of Lincoln, Twain, or King no longer binds the republic together?

Abas Regassa, assistant director at Bultum Academy in Columbia Heights, proudly oversees what is believed to be the first Oromo-language charter school in the country. He explains that teaching folk tales in their original tongue helps bring people together. But together with whom? Certainly not with the English-speaking Minnesotans next door. That’s the problem. It brings people together by reinforcing apartness. Language becomes a wall, not a bridge.

The shift is framed as progress, something to applaud and display like a badge of modern virtue. But one must ask — why? What if it isn’t progress at all, but a quiet warning?

A multilingual society isn’t inherently dangerous. But when paired with declining assimilation and a national identity crisis, it becomes combustible.

Critics will call this xenophobic. But the impulse to preserve a common language isn’t born of malice — it’s born of memory. Memory of a country that once knew itself. Memory of the Ellis Island generation that arrived foreign but worked — sweated — to become American. Today, the expectation has flipped. America must adapt to the immigrant, not the reverse. Press 2 for Spanish. Press 3 for Somali. Press 4 for surrender.

There is no problem with people loving their culture, their stories, their tongue. But America cannot function as a United States if no one speaks a United language.

Where does it end? With ballots in 20 languages? With jury instructions in 10? With a society that no longer even pretends to be a single culture? Already, we see signs of tribal voting patterns, ethnic lobbying blocs, and language-based coalitions that make the idea of a unified polity feel almost quaint.

America is much more than a place. It’s an idea. And ideas need language. Clear, shared, undiluted language. Lose that, and what’s left isn’t a nation. It’s noise. The common ground shrinks. The public square fades. What remains are private islands of speech, side by side, but never speaking to each other.

Every civilization needs a center. Language is that center, quietly holding everything in place. When it gives way, disunity doesn’t come immediately, but it becomes inevitable. The seams loosen. The order frays. And what once held firm begins to slip beyond repair. When a nation no longer speaks in its own tongue, it no longer thinks in its own terms.

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