On Friday, December 15, 2017, the Alexandria Area High School Democrats Club invited their Minnesota State Representative Mary Franson (R) to speak with them. Rep. Franson declined, saying first that she wouldn’t meet with a “partisan group”.
The students called ten times, tried to set up meetings at Franson’s office and elsewhere, but she kept refusing to meet with them. They were constituents, they said, who wanted to discuss issues of concern: college tuition and climate change. Then, Franson brought a whole new level of ugly to the exchange by claiming that she could not be alone with minors because of the #metoo movement.
In the face of Franson’s increasingly snarky and contemptuous refusals, the students decided to share their exchanges on Twitter.
The exchange went viral, and is now a national story. Franson finally met with several of the students, but deleted her Tweets to AAHS from her Twitter history. However, screen captures preserved it for posterity.
Congratulations to the AAHS Dems. Your perseverance and savvy on social media paid off. Now, would you mind coming to Colorado? We have a few Senators that share Franson’s attitudes about meeting with constitutents….
