Christopher Ingraham, Minnesota Reformer

A GOP-endorsed candidate for district judge has promoted numerous fringe conspiracy theories, including the Pizzagate child sex trafficking hoax.

Nathan Hansen, a practicing lawyer and longtime fixture on Minnesota’s conservative social media scene, has also called an attempted 2009 airline bombing a “false flag attack”; claimed “Satanic people run our government”; said that “all property taxes are illegal under the Minnesota State Constitution”; called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve and the Central Intelligence Agency; and once said he found himself “consistently agreeing” with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Hansen deleted roughly 100,000 of his Twitter posts prior to announcing his candidacy, according to social media analytics service Social Blade. But a number of those posts have been preserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and other posts on Facebook and YouTube remain public. ...

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance faced off Tuesday in their first and only vice presidential debate.

But both brought up claims that were nothing new.

Here’s a look at some of those claims and States Newsroom’s assessment of the facts: ...

Far-right conspiracy theorist Royce White won his U.S. Senate primary on Tuesday, taking advantage of a big field of candidates to eke out a victory with less than 40% of the vote.

White was endorsed by the Minnesota Republican Party in May despite a lengthy history of bigoted comments against women, Jews and LGBTQ people, in addition to findings of campaign finance irregularities and missing child support payments.

His endorsement and subsequent victory are emblematic of an ongoing rift between institutionalists and burn-it-all-down activists who are increasingly frustrated with the party’s failure to win a statewide race since 2006. That split is plainly on display in the geography of yesterday’s primary results. ...

In the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, many leading Minnesota businesses announced they were pausing their political donations to review their giving strategy.

Some went further, vowing not to bankroll political candidates who supported Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

But today, three and a half years later, nearly all of them have resumed giving money to politicians engaging in election denial, according to an analysis by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit that investigates government corruption. ...

It’s not easy being a wolf in northern Minnesota.

Every year dozens of the animals die of starvation, disease, parasites, vehicle traffic and poaching.

But the No. 1 killer of Minnesota wolves may come as a surprise: agents of the federal government, acting with the full force of the law....