Readers Write: Multiculturalism, COVID-era fraud

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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John C. Chalberg’s March 29 column “A multiethnic society is a blessing; a multicultural one is doomed” has numerous serious problems, including extremely problematic ethnocentrism. I’ll only focus here on two historical errors. First, he ignores the existence of and the mass killing and displacement of Native residents of this country entirely when he says, “Besides, there was a largely empty country that needed to be populated.”

Second, he tries to perpetuate the myth that compared to recent immigrants, early settlers quickly learned English. Almost 20 years ago, UW-Madison linguistics professor Joseph Salmons and Miranda Wilkerson, a UW-Madison Ph.D. graduate, studied German immigrants’ language use in Wisconsin from 1839 to the 1930s. They found many settlements in which the inhabitants spoke German exclusively and even the next several generations, born in the U.S., still only spoke German as adults.

“These folks were committed Americans,” Salmons said in an article by Brian Mattmiller in a UW-Madison publication. “They participated in politics, in the economy, and were leaders in their churches and their schools. They just happened not to conduct much of their life in English.” As Mattmiller writes, “Salmons says their study suggests that conventional wisdom may actually have it backwards — while early immigrants didn’t necessarily need English to succeed and responded slowly, modern immigrants recognize it as a ticket to success and are learning English in extremely high percentages.”

Davida Alperin, St. Paul

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It was hard to follow Chalberg’s meandering essay on (allegedly) opposing concepts for our nation. He simply declares that it’s fine to have people of different ethnic backgrounds living together — Thai food! Pita bread! Mariachi bands! — but they must all share a single “culture” or we’re doomed. And this mandatory culture rests on one language (English) and one amalgamated religion (Judeo-Christianity).

This “analysis” falls to the slightest breeze of pushback. Let’s start with empirical evidence. Peoples of differing languages, cultures and religions can’t share a nation? Tell that to Canadians, Belgians and Swiss, for starters. Or Indians — at least before Hindu nationalists began imposing uniculturalism by fiat.

But Chalberg’s claim is not just factually wrong; it’s normatively abhorrent. The one truly original concept in our founding documents was this: We are nation unified not by language, geography, religion or ancient cultural heritage — the “blood and soil” that have characterized so much of human history — but by ideas. Ideas of civil process, equality, fairness and fidelity to the rule of law. Of course, we have not always lived up to those ideas, but they are more noble, in my view, than grasping for a national “culture” that so easily curdles into autocracy.

Nothing I say here would have been even slightly controversial to my long-departed Eisenhower Republican parents. What surprises me is that I must write this letter now, to communicate truths I thought were self-evident.

Stephen Bubul, Minneapolis

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I could not disagree more with Chalberg’s opinion piece. He must be observing a different Donald Trump than I have for almost 10 years now, but especially during the last two months. First, he seems to be praising Trump for declaring English should be the official language of this country, which Chalberg soft-peddles as giving “his stamp of approval to the notion.” In my opinion, Trump’s message was anything but an endorsement of a “multiethnic society.” Rather, it was one of his many attempts to pander to his base and denigrate the value of people whose first language is not English.

Chalberg goes on to extol our “unicultural language” and “unicultural history” and to suggest that the goals of today’s educational system are to “secularize and multiculturize.” Apparently, it is OK to celebrate the “food, the music, the events and more” of our ethnic differences, as long as we preserve “America’s Judeo-Christian heritage.”

Is that the same Judeo-Christian heritage that pushed Native people off the land they lived on for centuries and attempted to obliterate their culture and religions so that “our” new country would be unicultural and Christian?” Are those the same ancestors who tolerated or promoted the kidnapping and enslavement of African people and attempted to obliterate their culture? Or the ones who dropped atomic bombs on Japan, killing or maiming hundreds of thousands of non-Christians? Heaven forbid that we teach our white kids this history and make them feel guilty. And where do the millions of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and nonbelievers fit into Chalberg’s vision of a Judeo-Christian United States?

Chalberg ends his piece with apparent praise of the “astounding numbers” of Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters who cast their ballots in 2024 for the “allegedly divisive presidential candidate.” Trump may have received a lot of their votes, but according to the Associated Press, 83% of Black voters, 55% of Latino voters and 55% of voters of another race voted for Kamala Harris. Looking back to the Kennedy presidency, Trump has arguably (not “allegedly”) been the most divisive of our last dozen presidents. With the chaos that Trump and his wealthy allies have created and the lives they have disrupted or destroyed in two short months, I have to wonder how many Trump voters are regretting their votes today. I also wonder what our country will look like by January 2029.

Tony Keenan, Columbia Heights

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I read Chalberg’s commentary with both hurrahs and frustration. I agree with what he wrote 100%. My frustration is that it needs saying. The left is obsessed with pitting Americans against each other, with victims and victimizers based on culture, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity and so on. They want to transform America into something unrecognizable, apparently with winners and losers based on their notions of who deserves what. They can’t seem to see how unworkable this is and how it corrodes and weakens us as a country, nor how it violates our most important laws and institutions. It’s why I, a former committed liberal, voted for Trump. Trump sees how toxic this trend is, and that’s why one of the first things he did this time in office is to begin to dismantle it. And the left responds as if he’s the one undermining our country. In the same section of the newspaper, on the same day as Chalberg’s piece, is the report “Critics say Trump trying to sanitize racism in U.S.” No, Trump knows that actually, more than one thing has ever happened in America and some balance in our attentions is a good thing.

Mary Riley, Mendota Heights

As hinted by Mike Galdo, former director of COVID-19 fraud enforcement for the Justice Department, in the article “Fraud flourished amid torrent of COVID aid” (front page, March 30), there is a reason for the difficulty in catching fraud in an emergency. The agencies are trying to get the money in the hands of people who really need it as fast and easily as possible. Of course, crooks know it too. For another example, look no further than our Department of Defense.

Having spent 28 years in the military I have seen it and, I suppose, benefited from it. In times of war (or apparently all the time these days) nobody wants to deny the military what they need — or want — and damn the cost! There is much the same fraud and abuse in the military, but it is called “DOD accounting.” (Remember the millions of dollars in cash flown into Iraq on pallets to be distributed to Iraqi “officials”?)

Same principle with pandemic funds. It was not built for efficiency or actuarial effectiveness; it was to get to get money out to the people who needed it as quick as possible. This not an excuse for what occurred and the clearly poor oversight by the state. I mention this only so that as we all sit and Monday-morning quarterback, it is helpful to have a full picture of the situation. And perhaps some sympathy for those folks who are stuck with managing this almost hopeless process?

D. Roger Pederson, Minneapolis