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The least-accurate thing ever to happen to Minneapolis just happened to Minneapolis.
"Just left a no-go zone in Minneapolis," a stranger in town tweeted to his 186,000 followers this weekend. "One of the friendly local Somali men asked me 'Are you trying to get killed?' "
Now, I know of at least three no-go zones in Minnesota:
The skyways. Nobody can get anywhere up there. The maps are terrible.
Minnehaha Falls, which is much too slippery to approach this time of year. How many times do we have to ask you to stop snapping selfies under the icicles?
The city of St. Paul. Do not approach. They will challenge you to a snowball fight.
This guy didn't seem to be in any of those places. He just rolled in to town to insult Minnesota to its face.
We could ignore this display of not-Minnesota not-Nice.
This guy and his friends are a bunch of squeaky clown shoes, and they aren't worth the ink it would take to print their names.
But this weekend, they cast lie after lie after lie into the wind, describing a Minneapolis that is a terrifying wasteland, safe only to travel in armored cars and with bulletproof vests. We don't know who's waiting downwind, believing every word.
We've heard stories like these before. We've seen camera crews from Fox and Friends trawl the sidewalks of Cedar-Riverside, mocking the people they meet.
We've seen the three militia guys the FBI arrested last year — the ones who allegedly drove in from Illinois to toss a bomb into the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center.
When bullies come to town, you can ignore them and starve them of the attention they so dearly crave. Or you can push back when they try to push people around.
Bullies came to town this weekend. And Minnesotans were not having it.
"This is a lie," state Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, fired back at the stranger on Twitter. "For anyone outside of MN, please realize Minneapolis — like any large city — has some rough neighborhoods. But there is no such 'no go zone.' This is a farce."
Tony Webster, Twin Cities champion of open records, sacrificed his weekend to keep tabs on the visitors as they tweeted about town — from U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar's office to Dar Al-Farooq to the lobby of the Star Tribune — and tried to fact-check them in real time. For his troubles, he said, somebody sent him threatening messages about his dog.
Their team consists of a Mueller report footnote, somebody banned from Twitter, some other guy and a crack security detail they can't show you but, trust us, they're just off-camera.
The Worst Super Friends Reboot donned bulletproof vests and headed out into the town they kept calling "Minneapolistan."
"If you're not familiar with Minnesota, you don't know how this works, but the Islamicist forces have taken over sections of the respective police departments," they explained in the same earnest tones they used to try to convince potential donors that it costs $8,000 to get to Minnesota. For every minute they spent lying about conditions in Minnesota, they spent at least four begging for donations for their cause.
"There are sharia police in Minnesota now," they said, hilariously wrongly. "There are men who walk around in orange vests that say 'sharia police.' "
The mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul could not be bothered to fact-check this nonsense Sunday, because they were busy having a snowball fight in St. Paul — in one of those snow-go zones you hear so much about.
