Kersten Makes Star Tribune’s List of Most-Read Writers for 5th Straight Year

It’s become a holiday tradition of sorts for the Star Tribune to highlight its most widely read and, arguably most influential, opinion pieces published in the paper each year. From what I can tell the paper began tallying the list in 2015, prominently posting the most popular op-eds and authors in the spot usually reserved for the day’s editorial.

In those five years, only one author, outside the Star Tribune editorial board, has been a fixture with at least one column included among the most-read rankings every year–American Experiment Senior Policy Fellow Katherine Kersten. In the process she’s specialized in fearlessly tackling contentious issues deemed too intimidating for many to discuss, much less write about, due to the forces of political correctness, yet absolutely essential for us as a society to understand and address.

Typically in 2019, Katherine Kersten’s byline appeared on two of the Strib’s most disseminated posts. Kersten’s piece on the treatment of children with gender-identity issues placed sixth on the paper’s most-read list for good reason given the one-sided view of the issue often presented in the media and by school and state officials.

In April 2019 the Twin Cities’ flagship facility for pediatric care, Children’s Minnesota, launched a clinic for transgender and “gender diverse” young people. Ironically, within days of that opening, the Times of London reported that five clinicians at the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service — England’s only National Health Service pediatric gender-identity clinic — had resigned “as a matter of conscience.”

Kersten’s second piece, the 11th most read Star Tribune op-ed of 2019,  alerted Minnesotans to a comprehensive attempt by the New York Times to reframe American history in a project being distributed in the media and schools.

The Times’ project is the latest chapter in the American left’s ongoing campaign to rewrite history. This movement approaches history, in all its messy complexity, not as a search for truth but as a vehicle for advancing a political agenda.

The 1619 Project aims to recast Americans’ concept of their nation as one founded on freedom, equality and opportunity into one irremediably corrupted by slavery, inequality and racism. Using distortions, half-truths and outright falsehoods, the Times promotes a narrative that our founding ideals, allegedly false from the beginning, remain so, by extension, today.

It took two columnists in the following Sunday edition of the Star Tribune to respond to Kersten’s column on the 1619 Project. Tellingly, neither of the authors joined Katherine on the list of the  most-read opinion pieces of the year.