July 13—ROCHESTER — For years, Wes Lund has used the public commentary period at Rochester School Board and City Council meetings as a platform for his brand of political satire and absurd theater.
Lund once showed up at a school board meeting wearing a Guy Fawkes mask to protest the district’s mask mandate during the pandemic.
Another time he wore the head covering of a Muslim burqa, and another time a clown mask with a missing mouth to make the same anti-mask point. He wore a hat made of aluminum foil to a city council meeting.
He once spent the entire time at a school board meeting speaking Spanish, to the astonishment of many bystanders.
At a board meeting, he held up a Dr. Seuss book and appeared to read from it — an unspoken reference to the publisher’s decision to stop publishing several Seuss books because of their racist and insensitive imagery. Never mind that the Rochester School Board had nothing to do with the decision.
All to gain the public’s attention, as he vented his frustrations and railed against his favorite political pet peeves, such as political correctness and ‘woke’.
“There’s no other way to get their attention,” Lund said in an interview. “The antics, the outrage, the humor has to be part of it, because there’s no other way to get the media’s attention.”
Then Lund made a truly unexpected decision. He would no longer just sit on the sidelines and do some antics. He would run for a seat in the state legislature against DFL Rep. Andy Smith, who represents House District 25B in Rochester. Lund won the GOP’s endorsement last April.
Lund estimates his chances of winning the DFL-favored district are slim to none, but he hopes his place in the political spotlight will give him more power to push for the issues that matter to him.
“I’m going to go down in flames anyway, but I did raise some issues,” Lund said.
Should Lund even run? At times, his approach to addressing issues and the topics and people that preoccupy him on social media reveals a dark, obsessive side to his thinking that some see as disqualifying for someone seeking higher office. “F— Juneteenth. There, I said it,” Lund posted on several of his Facebook accounts, referring to the June 19 holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people in the U.S.
Lund later explained in a Facebook post that his biggest objection to the holiday was that it gave taxpayer-paid government workers an extra day off.
He reposted on X, formerly Twitter, a manipulated video of George Floyd singing “Let It Snow” as he is pinned to the ground and killed by police officer Derek Chauvin. Other reposts by Lund on social media show an orgy of violence between blacks and whites.
It’s hard not to see a racist element in those social media musings, says Tawonda Burks, an African-American woman running for Olmsted County Commissioner and the new owner of Rochester Women magazine.
“You’re just saying terms like ‘F— Juneteenth,’ what do you think?” Burks said. “And he says certain things on his social media page that would be considered racist.”
In interviews with people who are the targets of his trolls, Lund is often said to be polite and friendly to the people he trolls and makes offensive comments about.
Burks said Lund has been sharing an unflattering video regularly in which Burks can be heard cursing in an attempt to paint her in a negative light. Alongside the video is a photo of Rochester’s mayor Kim Norton and Burks together. “We definitely need more diversity in Chicago like this joint,” Lund said in a comment. Later, when Burks introduced himself to Lund at a Rochester School Board meeting, she pointedly asked him about his sharing and posting of “stuff about me.”
“And then the first thing he said was, ‘You know, I need more black friends.’ So I said, ‘Stay positive.’ And then he said, ‘No, I really need more black friends. I just don’t know why people don’t like me,'” Burks said.
Lund once wore a T-shirt that read “In Celebration of LGBT History Month” and featured fire and brimstone raining down on a community. This was an apparent reference to the divine punishment meted out to Sodom and Gomorrah for their wickedness, which included sexual sins such as rape, child abuse and homosexuality.
“The implication is pretty clear that all homosexuals deserve to die,” Smith said. “I have spoken to Mr. Lund on several occasions and he has been cordial with me personally, but that doesn’t change the fact that his beliefs and antics are actually harmful to many who live in Rochester and Minnesota.
“I find it tragic that a man of his beliefs would receive the support of one of our major political parties,” Smith added.
Smith, a first-term DFLer, has faced criticism for his own social media missteps. Smith took down his X account in February of last year after he mockingly referenced a fire that had damaged a building housing several conservative organizations.
Lund has also displayed a strange, seemingly unhealthy obsession with those he perceives as political antagonists. For several years, particularly during the pandemic, Lund doxxed and trolled Norton, creating “inappropriate memes” about her that reflected a fixation Norton describes as “personal, intrusive and insulting.”
Once, when she ordered groceries online and had them delivered to her home, he posted a list of the items in her shopping bag online. Another time, he posted an announcement online when a repairman would be at her home, Norton said.
Norton estimates that Lund has posted nearly 10,000 “likes” or “laughs” or comments on her Facebook mayoral page in a year. Norton said she decided to stop her virtual “Morning with the Mayor” videos — a way for the community to keep up to date on city news — when Lund shared the videos on the pages of nearly 100 right-wing and extremist groups.
“It’s intimidation. He just kind of gets pleasure out of the intimidation that he does,” she said.
Norton said Lund’s harassment of her began shortly after she was elected mayor, when she attended her first national mayoral conference. There, Norton had her photo taken with former Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, whom she met for the first time. She later posted it online with a “guess who I met” slogan.
“And that made him laugh,” Norton said. “From that point on, he was on my page every day for the (next) six years. So you were triggered by that? Betsy Hodges? I don’t know why he apparently didn’t like her, which is fine. But why that triggered him to attack me the rest of the time, I don’t really know.”
For those who only know Lund from his in-your-face street theatre antics, he cuts a different figure in his podcast. There he comes across as polite and friendly with a passion for local issues. His guests tend to be ideological kindred spirits.
Don Barlow, a member of the Rochester School Board, has had extensive phone conversations with Lund. He said there is a difference between the grand public persona Lund presents at board meetings and the one he encounters in phone conversations.
“When he calls, it’s not necessarily to change my mind or to sway a vote. I think he just wants to have a meaningful conversation,” Barlow said. “He’s quick to say, ‘I hadn’t thought about that,’ or ‘The assumption I was operating under has to change now that I have more information.'”
Rochester City Councilman Shaun Palmer was a guest on Lund’s podcast to discuss a proposal for the Silver Lake Dam project.
“He’s a very intelligent person. I mean, he speaks several languages. He’s well-read,” Palmer said.
Palmer said voters in the fall election will face a difficult choice: Smith or Lund.
“I think Smith is as far left and socialist as you can get, and Wes is as far right as you can get,” Palmer said.
Lund’s own political journey has elements of whiplash. He said his earliest roots were in the Democratic Party. He knocked on doors for George McGovern as a young man. He voted twice for Barack Obama before casting his first vote for a Republican presidential candidate in Donald Trump.
“What made me realize that Trump is different is that the Republicans themselves didn’t like him,” he said.
Lund said his faith in the government’s ability to improve people’s lives had been shaken by scandals such as Feeding Our Future. The government initiative aimed to end child hunger but was undermined and corrupted by a $250 million fraud scheme.
“When you see this happening over and over again, there is not enough representation for working-class people who are living hand to mouth or treading water,” Lund said.
Lund said one of his priorities, if elected to the House of Representatives, would be a full audit of the state Department of Health and Human Services.
“There would be a full and thorough accounting of every dollar spent within that organization,” Lund said.
Still, it can be a bumpy road to understand and follow the thread of Lund’s thoughts in other conspiracy-theory-like areas. He complains unconvincingly that Norton is a “globalist” who is turning Rochester into a “Bloomberg City.”
He compares the Community Engagement Response Team (CERT), a black-led volunteer team that works with the Rochester Police Department, to the “brownshirts,” referring to the party militia that helped Adolf Hitler come to power in Germany.
He argues that Isaiah Minnesota, a Minnesota-based activist organization that promotes left-wing policy priorities, “is really about promoting Islam.”
“How does that square with ‘I am a person worthy of being chosen to represent you,'” Norton said of Lund’s years of online harassment. “It’s just unbelievable that he chose to participate and that he was accepted.”
All of which raises the question: What prompted the local GOP to cheer on Lund’s candidacy and support him? Lund himself suggests he’s a reluctant candidate. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he said. But apparently no one else was willing to run. Wendy Phillips, chair of the Olmsted County Republican Party, declined to comment.
