And my organization loves billboards. If you want to really reach a lot of people, let a lot of people know that there’s something going on, billboards, I think, can be a great medium—we’ve found that here.

What we’re trying to do is to speak for the 85% of the people in this state who support law enforcement, who understand that we need the police, and that the vast majority of the time the police are doing the right thing. And until we came along with our billboards—and now we have ads on the radio and are writing op-eds, and that sort of thing—nobody was really speaking for that large majority of Minnesotans.

By the way, the leftists hate these billboards. And so far, they have been vandalized eight times. The eighth one was just this morning, and it had been a week or two since the last act of vandalism. And I attributed that to the fact that I offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of any of these vandals, and all of a sudden it stopped. But then we got another one this morning. So we’ll see if they keep at it.

Allen: Wow. So have you discovered who’s actually behind this and who’s vandalizing those billboards?

Hinderaker: Yeah. We’ve got some suspects based on social media, but we don’t know for sure, and nobody’s been arrested.

Allen: And when you say “vandalized,” what exactly have they done to the billboards?

Hinderaker: In one case, where the billboard said, “Support the police,” in red spray paint, they crossed out “support” and they wrote in “shoot.” So it says, “Shoot the police,” with the Antifa symbol of the “A” and the circle, and a hammer and sickle. You know, the communist symbol. So it’s things like that.

Allen: Wow. It’s just so hard not to look at that and realize this has nothing to do with moving our nation forward in unity, in defending the rights and fighting for equality of African Americans. … It used to be kind of hidden. Now it seems like a very, very blatant, highly woke, progressive, really, Antifa agenda being pushed forward.

Hinderaker: Yeah. That’s right. And we certainly are seeing that here in the Twin Cities.

One more example of that, there are so many, but one of these groups—and I think it was an all-white group, as far as you can see, maybe there were a couple of Native Americans in it—they announced on Facebook that the next day at 5 in the afternoon, they were going to take down, destroy, remove the statue of Christopher Columbus on the grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol.

So it was a crime that was scheduled in advance. And 5 the next afternoon, sure enough, here come these miscreants, and the state police are there. They know that this is scheduled to take place, and the state police are there apparently to protect these vandals against ordinary citizens who might come by and try to stop them.

So the state police stand guard and these people get out their ropes or whatever, and sure enough, they tear down the statue of Christopher Columbus.

So we’ve got a situation in this state where we’ve got a governor who’s very, very far left. His name is Tim Walz. Utter incompetence, and very far left. We’ve got mayors of the major cities who are leftists. And certainly in Minneapolis, we’ve got a City Council that’s entirely on the left. And so we have some pretty serious governance issues.

Allen: John, one other situation I want to ask you about, we were chatting earlier before we started recording about a video on YouTube that has received quite a lot of pushback from the left. Can you tell us a little bit about that situation?

Hinderaker: Yeah. So last week we had a terrific program. It was virtual. It was livestreamed. We had Heather Mac Donald, who is the No. 1 expert in the country on the intersection of crime, policing, and race; author of the 2016 book “The War on Cops.”

Heather did just a wonderful 40-minute presentation for us on those issues, and basically debunking the whole mythology that surrounds Black Lives Matter. The whole myth of systemic police racism. And she went through statistics on crime and race and so on, mostly from the FBI database, and really debunked that mythology of systemic racism.

Many people attended live, and then my plan was that it would be archived on YouTube, and for years to come would be the definitive resource where people can go to get the real facts on this very controversial set of issues.

So we livestreamed the video in a number of venues, including YouTube Live. And within an hour after the program was over, YouTube just deleted the video, took it down, said it was inappropriate. I appealed that, and about an hour and a half after I appealed it, they relented and put it back up, but they age-restricted it.

In the meantime, we got the original file of the video from the guy that produced it, and we uploaded that file to YouTube separately, so it’s now actually in two different places at YouTube, and they didn’t do anything to the one we uploaded, which has got 77,000 views currently, according to YouTube.

But then last night, Heather was on the Tucker Carlson show and she talked about this back and forth that we’ve had with YouTube and their age-restricting the livestream and so forth, and apparently, as best I can tell, within minutes after that Tucker Carlson interview ended, YouTube went in and they now addressed the second video, the uploaded version that they hadn’t done anything to before. And they put a warning on it.

So if you go to look at that video now on YouTube, you see this big, black, somber square where the video should be. And it says that, “This video has been flagged as inappropriate.” And it says, “Viewer discretion is advised. But then if you want to proceed, nevertheless, you can click here.”

Allen: Wow.

Hinderaker: So they’re actively trying to suppress viewing of this video. Which, by the way, at the moment, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it’s got something like 4,000 likes on YouTube and like 32 dislikes.

Allen: Did YouTube reach out and explain, “This is why we feel like it’s necessary to put this disclaimer”?

Hinderaker: No.

Allen: No?

Hinderaker: They haven’t. So we’re going to do battle with them. I just haven’t had time today to launch some kind of appeal there.

YouTube never likes to explain why they do anything, though. They’ll refer you generally to their community guidelines and so forth, and allege that you violated them, although they don’t like to explain why. So we’re looking at the possibility of legal action, and it’s probably a little remote, but something I’m looking into.

Allen: You all set up a website, supportmnpolice.com. Can you tell us a little bit about the petition there and what our listeners will find there if they go check it out?

Hinderaker: Yeah. It’s supportmnpolice.com, and there’s a lot of information there, including the poll data that we’ve gotten from the poll we did just recently on what Minnesotans think about policing and crime; recent news stories; posts on this topic from our website, americanexperiment.org.

And on that website, supportmnpolice.com, you can sign a petition, and we deliberately made the petition very broad. Basically, it’s a statement of support for law enforcement in Minnesota. And we are approaching 15,000 signatures so far on that petition. I’d like to get 100,000.

Allen: Wow. That’s amazing. Well, John, thank you so much for the work that you all are doing and for your time on the show today. We just really appreciate getting to hear about all the work that you all are doing.

Hinderaker: Hey, thank you. Happy to be with you.