This election is about reclaiming or rejecting freedom:

You can choose Experience or Indoctrination.

I am not a politician. I did not go to college to study politics. I have not spent years running for or holding office. I cannot lie to your face while picking your pocket. If that’s what you want, you have plenty of other options.

What I am is your neighbor next door. The guy that will help shovel your walk after a snowstorm. The guy that will help bring up your trash cans after collection when you’re not home. Someone that you know will give you a hand when need it or maybe just a reassuring smile and wave. The guy that notices when something is not right in the neighborhood.

I know the joys of raising children or just a quiet day off. I know the struggles and frustrations of being short of money when the bills are due. I know there are no guarantees in life and sometimes you just have to figure it out or go without, but as long as I can move, I am not willing to become reliant on government and the whims of politicians.

I have been working and learning for roughly a half century. From my family sweet corn stand and relatives farms north of Stillwater in the 80’s to the high tech semiconductor factory in Bloomington today, from janitor to management, from production to transportation to retail and even a combat tour in the middle east. I have lived a life very similar to your own and I am willing to temporarily be your voice in St. Paul.

You can choose Lies or Truth.

Politicians lie. Whether deliberately, by exaggeration, through omission or unwittingly, politicians lie to achieve their immediate objective without regard for the consequences. Government doesn’t create anything but additional cost. Every law is about picking winners and losers, but politicians only ever talk about the winners.

As an example, we have a constitutional amendment on our ballot this year to modify the Permanent School Fund:

“Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to increase the funding going to all school districts from the permanent school fund, which is a fund that supports school districts without raising individual income or property taxes, effective July 1, 2027?”

Sounds great! Why wasn’t this done originally? Because the writer’s of the constitution understood math, and specifically the power of compounding interest. This amendment actually provides a small boost now while permanently and significantly reducing payments about 35 years in the future in the best case scenario. You will never hear about that from those that seek to benefit. A quickly generated AI request can show the truth. This also helps explain why politicians are so nervous about AI. It will be much harder to lie.

I will always seek to provide you with both the benefits and consequences of any laws that I propose or am going to have a vote in. That is the only way that you can provide me thoughtful input.

You can choose Prosperity or Poverty.

Government does not create the services that they promise to provide. They act as a middle man that extracts a fee for telling you what to do and how much you’ll pay whether you want the service or not. Government always increases the cost while controlling your options. They are pushing more government involvement in health care while ignoring the fact that current involvement has created a system whereby the actual health care providers receive less than 20% of health care spending dollars with the rest going to administration. They are pushing more government involvement in child care while ignoring that parents should be doing the most important job on earth themselves.

Politicians pick winners and losers based on their own political needs. Every decision is based on vote counts and they don’t care what happens to you after. They make promises they cannot keep today, and excuses for your suffering tomorrow. They make lifetime careers out of your misery.

They spend decades running on “climate change” promising to put the oil companies out of business and a switch to “renewable” (high cost) energy, then blame others for the shortages and price hikes that result. Energy price hikes are amplified throughout the entire economy raising the production, transportation and ultimately retail cost of everything else.

They spend decades printing money through deficits, then blame the resulting inflation and interest rates on “greedy corporations” and the “rich.”

I believe that you should be able to keep as much of what you create as possible and decide for yourself what you will do with it. As a start I propose raising the income tax standard deduction to the median wage of the previous year. This would eliminate income taxes on nearly half the working population and reduce them on the rest.

You can choose Fortitude or Fragility.

Victimhood is a choice. I grew up learning the phrase “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” This phrase demonstrates aspects of both the first and second amendments in a manner that children can understand.

First, while speech can be intended to be hurtful, it’s only effective if the listener allows it to be. We see instances on social media every day of leftists needing their safe spaces because of what someone else said. I do not care what you say if you cannot be respectful and articulate with supporting evidence.

Physical attacks are never appropriate and people have the right to protect themselves, their families and their property by any means necessary, both at home and in public. As another popular phrase goes, “god created men, Samuel Colt made them equal.”

You can choose Freedom or Subservience.

I very deliberately chose a self funded and run campaign strategy. I do not solicit or accept donations or endorsements. I wish to be free from outside influence to do what’s right for the people of Apple Valley, Rosemount and Eagan. I am the Republican nominee entirely by the decision of the voters.

Remember that at the beginning of the 2025 legislative session your representatives chose not to show up for you and abandoned your needs at the direction of their party in support of a fraudulent election being overturned. Remember that they raised your taxes a dozen times over the last 4 years to fund known but ignored fraud while you were financially crushed by their failures.

I support right to repair, I do not support warrantless public surveillance by government or industry. I will always work from a perspective of personal privacy.

You can give up freedom, but once you do, you cannot get it back without significant bloodshed. On this 250th anniversary of our nation, remember that we have already had to fight two wars to establish freedom.

You can choose Personal Responsibility or Collective Chicanery.

Freedom comes with Responsibility, the two cannot be separated. You need to take responsibility for developing the skills necessary to create the life you want to live. Many workers are paid by the hour for convenience, but in reality they are not paid for the hour, but rather for the wealth they create during that hour. Farmers, long haul truck drivers, sole proprietors (such as beauticians) still understand this, but one of the consequences of the industrial revolution is that many people forgot this. The value of that wealth is determined by the customer.

Socialists want you to believe that you should be provided everything you “need” regardless of what you contribute, either by your employer or the government. They completely ignore the fact that if one person is given more than they create, that requires that someone else create more than they are given. Communism is the state achieved when the workers give up.

I have seen many politicians waving studies showing the benefits of their social programs (“free” school lunches, “free” childcare, Universal Basic Income (UBI) or what used to just be called welfare cash assistance). I have yet to see any studies of the people that were forced to pay for those programs.

I believe that we should be rewarding those that are responsible and disincentivizing those that refuse to be.

You can choose whether you or the culpable suffer the consequences of transgression.

We have been witness to what happens when consequences are not placed upon the transgressors. We have seen county attorneys continually release, many times without even charging, those that have committed crimes against our community. We have seen our attorney general sue the targets of crime.

You cannot stop crime by blaming the targets of or tools used by criminals. We need to return to holding those that commit crimes accountable from the first instance and stop issuing second chances ad infinitum. We need to begin holding those responsible for administering our justice system accountable for their failures.

You can choose Legislation through Thoughtfulness or Fear.

This years fearmongering theme appears to be Artificial Intelligence (AI), Social Media and Data Centers. I guess the soaring energy prices have put a damper on Climate Change for the time being.

The latter however, is a cautionary tale of the consequences of passing legislation based on your fear and their ulterior motives. I hear from politicians that AI is going to sexually assault and kill us within the next decade (a timeline that seems to recur throughout politics, ie massive flooding of our coastlines due to climate change or our spending will balance the budget in). Amazing how similar these fears are to the past as in the beginning of this documentary from 1968 referring to the electronic monster. https://youtu.be/WedkbWSyT9w?si=EsvNO32K2xnjzRy2

Upon investigation, you’ll find that these legislator’s proposed and enacted legislation is actually to punish these companies for allowing free speech on their platforms that doesn’t conform to their political agenda. Minnesota now has a law against “nudification” that exempts “artists” from sexually degenerate rainbow coalition groups. (Subd. 3. Exemption.The prohibitions in subdivision 2 do not apply when the website, application, software, program, or other service requires the technical skill of a user to nudify an image or video.) I abhor any form of child abuse, but as the law only applies to Social media companies that are used for free speech activities, and was written and defended by the same government that pardons convicted pedophiles to prevent them from being deported, it clearly is not intended to protect children, but as an end run around the 1st amendment to infringe on free speech.

Government has a horrible record of predicting the future and an even worse record of preparing for it. I believe in more generic laws that protect the people from today’s harms and that are upheld by the legal system.

You can choose Reality or Delusion.

We have an epidemic of mental illness spreading throughout our society made worse by treatment by those same “medical “ ghouls that ravaged state hospitals, performed lobotomies and prescribed drugs over discipline for our children along with other horrors throughout history. Society should not be an experiment. I do not hate “Transgender” people, I pity them. They have been lied to by those they trusted for help. Eventually they will realize that they cannot achieve what they were promised and cannot go back to what they had. The lawsuits against the hospitals and providers have already started, but it is the victims, health service users and taxpayers that will ultimately pay the price.

the last 4-8 years have been a masterclass in mismanagement of state government. this year you have the opportunity to restore sanity.

Thank you for your consideration,

Raymond Petersen.