Power Line’s Scott Johnson has been calling attention to Katherine Kersten, a columnist at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Like Jeff Jacoby at the overwhelmingly liberal Boston Globe, Kersten’s conservatism forces her to swim upstream against the inclinations of her own paper. And like Jacoby, Kersten deserves the attention of conservatives nationally. In this NRO piece on “Women We Love,” Johnson introduces us to Kersten. And in this Power Line post, Johnson describes the latest dustup between Kersten and her own paper.
What caught my eye, though, was a recent piece by Kersten on a dispute about Muslim taxi drivers who refuse to haul customers carrying alcohol. In “Airport taxi flap about alcohol has deeper significance,” Kersten detects what may well be the hand of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood behind the trouble. It’s tough to say what will come of this. Muslim assimilation in the United States has been notably better than in Europe, and compared to Europe our prospects look good into the future. Yet Kersten’s piece shows that America may not necessarily be barred from the sort of disputes and problems we see playing out now in Europe.