Chinese national in the US on a student visa, busted for leading a ring (one might say “racket” of iPhone thieves that stole over 1,000 smart phones (sometimes violently) worth over $800K, gets arrested…

The central figure behind what prosecutors called a roving network of robbers admitted to leading the scheme to steal cellphones in downtown Minneapolis and Dinkytown, drain their financial apps of money totaling more than $275,000 and then ship the phones overseas for sale.

Zhongshuang Su, aka Brandon Su, 33, of Minneapolis agreed to plead guilty to four amended felony counts of stolen property in connection with the operation that lasted roughly a year until charges against Su and his band of thieves were filed last September.

Su is accused of being the man known to others in the scheme as the “iPhone Man,” who bought the stolen phones and sent them to foreign buyers. In total, prosecutors believe Su shipped more than 1,100 phones to addresses in Hong Kong. Prosecutors put the value of those phones at more than $800,000.

…and gets a sentence that couldn’t even be failrly described as a slap on the wrist:

The plea agreement between the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and the defense calls for a 13-month sentence that would be set aside for three years and dismissal of the felony racketeering charges as long as he stays out of legal trouble. The prosecution also reserves the right to ask for Su to serve up to a year in the workhouse.

Someone trying to defend themselves against one of the thieves could easily have gotten a tougher sentence.

Mark Moyar reviews the new memoir by former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust.

Faust was an unabashed radical during her time running the university – a once-great institution that recently graduated David Hogg.

And her memoir highlights a tendency that I’ve identified in a depressing pluraity of “progressives”, including a dismal mass of American ones; an understanding of “freedom” that is utterly perverse (I’ve added emphasis):

Faust doesn’t delve into the how, but she does address the why in her third objection. When she was 15 years old, she recounts, her outlook on American anti-communism changed during a trip to Eastern Europe. The police-state tactics of the communist regimes, she acknowledges, seemed to violate their professions of freedom. Nevertheless, “I began to understand that when East German communists used — as they often did — ‘freedom,’ they meant something quite different from what I had come to understand. ‘Freedom’ in my mind had meant exclusively ‘freedom from’: freedom from censorship, from restrictions of movement, from governmental dictates or oppression. It was a revelation for me to hear East Germans speaking of a ‘freedom to’: freedom to be educated, to get health care, to work.”

The success of communists in providing universal health care and eliminating unemployment was so persuasive, Faust recounts, that she decided American anti-communism to be unjustified and immoral. Hence, the war to stop communism in Vietnam was “cruel and illegitimate.”

It’s not a revelation that Communists saw “freedom” in the same way a herd of anthropomorphic livestock might.

And, sad to say, it’s no longer a revelation that one of academia’s most prestigious executives might, anymore, either.

“A Gaffe is what happens when a politician accidentally tells the truth.
— Michael Kinsley

Governor Walz may have committed a gaffe the other day:

https://twitter.com/GovTimWalz/status/1700904036889674117

He’s being too modest.

With its proposed ban on liquid fuel, the DFL is working to ensure that no matter where you grow up or go to school, you have to stay in your community.

It’s been 22 years since the 9/11 attacks. We have an entire generation, and are starting a second, that has no memory of the event.

Last year, or maybe in 2021, I despaired that the nation had not learned the necessary lessons from 9/11 – or, worse, had learned the wrong ones.

Or maybe our political class has succeeded in ignoring them. They were not, indeed, the ones that paid the price that morning in NYC, Washington or Pennsylvania, or in the two decades of war that followed.

Of course, entropy is real – especially when combined with a failing education system. Significant numbers of Americans don’t believe the Holocaust happened, to say nothing of having any serious knowledge about 9/11.

Either way – Barack Obama’s greatest triumph maty have been convincing a plurality of Americans that its greatest enemy was not from outside, but was America itself.

I’m going to recap something I wrote on this date 14 years ago, when the clear moral lens was fogged for different reasons.

---

Today is the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

You’ve heard a bit about it today, no doubt.  You’ve read a bit about it on this blog over the years.  Along with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s the single most pivotal event of my adult lifetime.

And, as my radio colleague/partner Ed Morrissey notes over at Hot Air today, his as well:

While New York City and Washington DC (and Shanksville, PA) are far removed from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, that really only mattered in our sense of impotence as the towers collapsed and the Pentagon burned.  We knew that the terrorists didn’t attack New York City for being New York City, or Washington DC for being Washington DC.  They had attacked America for being America — and that made it all local and personal.

Which is something some Americans – on all sides of our political “aisle” – have forgotten since then.  They didn’t attack cities, or coasts, or electoral blocs; they attacked America.  And all of America responded.

And continues to.

For me?  It wasn’t just an attack.  It was the world sinking back into some very bad habits.  I wrote this on March 11, 2002 – a month into this blog’s life, six months after the attacks.

I grew up in rural North Dakota, not far from the vast fields of Minuteman III missiles, close to the glide paths of the B-52 bombers,. all of which were on alert for my entire cognitive life. I was keenly aware of the presence of all of those first strike targets, forty miles away. And while I may have been one of a minority, growing up around all of that did affect me – there was a long-standing anxiety that my life and the entire world around me could be incinerated in seconds, or irradiated away, without warning.

The Berlin Wall fell about the time my oldest child was born. It would be easy and melodramatic to tell you that knowing my daughter would grow up in a world without that tension hanging over her was a wonderful, liberating sensation – but it’s the truth.

I was driving to work on September 11. I was on 394, by Xenia/Park Place. I’d just flipped over from KQRS’ interview with PJ O’Rourke to MPR’s live coverage of the attacks, without warning. And as the day wore on , and the shock sank in, that exhilaration – covered by the many other emotional layers of an adult’s life – sank away. The threat is different – but it’s still the same.So my kids are growing up in the same world I did, now. The threat is less omnipresent – I dont’ suspect the Twin Cities are high on any terrorist’s hit list – but more visceral. Maybe that’s a good thing – it’s harder for this threat to fade into the background of daily life.

Like Ed, I wanted to do something.  But I was a 38 year old newly-minted single father with a bum knee and a bad eye – not the kind of person the military was going to be bidding for.   I had no job skills the military needed, even as a civilian contractor (unless I got a PhD in usability and human factors – and that wasn’t going to happen). 

The blog was as close as I got to something remotely useful.  I started it five months after 9/11, the very day I learned what a “blog” was and how I could do one. 

But I changed some other things.  I’ve always loved shooting -and I got more diligent about it since 9/11.  I’ve come to believe it’s the duty of a law-abiding citizen to have the knowledge and means to defend themselves, their families, their communities and their freedom.  And while I don’t rationally believe there will be terrorists skulking through that shadows of Saint Paul, ever (even though “domestic terrorism” has bounced off the far corners of my life, once), the knowledge that I can pile a few of ’em up like cordwood if I need to helps with one of the most important things a human can do; replace fear with purpose.  It doesn’t matter if evil wears a turban, s**tkickers or anything in between; the ability to shoot it in the face equalizes a lot.  It’s not fear (I keep having to explain to lefties, who too often just don’t get it); it’s pre-empting fear.

I have also gotten more proactive about making sure government leads, follows or gets out of the way.  In the wake of 9/11, before the blog, I asked my kid’s principals, adminsitrators and other school officials “What would you do if, say, a tank car of anhydrous ammonia blew up at the Empire Builder yard, and a cloud of poison were heading toward the school?”  I was distinctly underwhelmed with their answers – but no moreso than those of the nameless bureaucrats at the World Trade Center who told everyone to stay in place.  I’ve marveled – and found immense comfort – in the stories that showed that Americans do maintain our tradition of not needing authority and officialdom to react properly to events, in ways big (United Flight 93’s passengers’ counterattack) and small but profound (the people in the WTC who organized their own orderly evacuation, long before the firemen got there; absent the thousands of office-dwellers who thought for themselves and took care of each other, the death toll would have been vastly higher). And as best I can, I’ve tried to bring my kids up with the idea that this nation,l it’s ideals, its people and its history, is something exceptional – even more worth defending than it is worth attacking.  Has it stuck?  We’ll see, I’m sure.

So on this eighth anniversary?  It’s a good time to remember. 

And head to the range.  And send the world’s scumbags a message. 

Actually a box of messages.

Reports of genocide against native children in Canada appear to be at least for now greatly exaggerated:

Four weeks of excavation work at a residential school in Canada reportedly failed to turn up evidence of mass unmarked burial sites, raising questions over the claims of widespread indigenous graves across the country.

Minegoziibe Anishinabe, an indigenous group also known as Pine Creek First Nation, has excavated 14 sites in the basement of a Catholic church near the former Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba over four weeks this summer, but has yet to uncover bodies at the sites that were suspected of being possible burial locations of indigenous children, according to a report from Global News.

The work comes after ground-penetrating radar used at the sites detected what were described as “anomalies” at 14 locations in the basement of the church, part of a series of discoveries over the last two years in Canada that were reported to be “mass graves” of children who had attended the country’s residential schools.

There’s a significant part of the western left that’s disappointed.

Find out more about the political and legal efforts re Minnesota’s new cannabis law at the ANC Foundtion.

And here’s the music list:

That might not be the result of this episode – at least, I but this past Tuesday Shivanthi Sathanandan, a Minnesota state DFL executive who advocated defunding the police gets the living crap beating out of her by carjackers.

And yep, she was one of those DFLers::

In her June 2020 post, Sathanandan thanked two Minneapolis City Council members for their “radical leadership” in working to “dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.”

“We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me,” she wrote.

This past Tuesay, Sathanandan it was in her own yard when…:

“Four very young men, all carrying guns, beat me violently down to the ground in front of our kids. The young men held our neighbors up at gunpoint when they ran over and tried to help me. All in broad daylight,” DFL Second Vice Chair Shivanthi Sathanandan wrote in a public Facebook post, which included a picture of her face after the alleged assault.

“Look at my face in the picture. This is the face of a mother who just had the sh$t beaten out of her. A mother whose only thought was, ‘let me run far enough and fight hard enough so that my kids have a chance to get away.’ This is the face of a mother who just listened to her four-year-old daughter screaming non-stop, her seven-year-old son wailing for someone to come help because bad guys are murdering his Mama in the backyard, her neighbors screaming in outrage … all while being beaten with guns and kicks and fists,” she said.

It’s not Sathanandan’s job to add that if any of those neighbors had responded with the kind of force that could have ended the assault, Mary Moriarty would likely have prosecuted them far more harshly than the carjackers themselves.

But unlike some previous victms, who’ve blamed “the system” and themselves, Sathanandan reaches a rational conclusion:

“And I have rage. These men knew what they were doing. I have NO DOUBT they have done this before. Yet they are still on OUR STREETS. Killing mothers. Giving babies psychological trauma that a lifetime of therapy cannot erase. With no hesitation and no remorse,” she said.

“We need to get illegal [!!! – Ed.] guns off of our streets, catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM,” she said. “Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.”

.

It’s natural – and in some cases appropriate, and in Sathanandan’s case documentably true. The DFL does in fact own the situation. And I do pile schadenfreud on the

But I’m going to urge people to take the opportunity to see the opportunity, here. Sathanandan may never become a law-and order conservative – but Minneapolis got where it is incrementally, and any improvement will be at least as incremental.

And if you’re so inclined, pray for those kids. The fruits of the politics of the parents shouldn’t be visited on the kids.

Much less their neighbors.

UPDATE. There is speculation that this is staged. Some are make a plausible case. The blood doesn’t look like any head laceration usually looks (and believe me, I’ve had a few), and she takes a pretty composed-looking photo for someone with a broken leg.

OTOH: the hoax, if it is one, benefits conservatives, and even the Frey administration, against whom the Minneapolis DFL is mustering money and votes.

Not saying that’s not plausible – but why?

The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus has one at least one level of its case to legalize citizens ages 18 to 20 for carry permits.

Keith Ellison, being Keith Ellison, is fighting them:

https://twitter.com/robdoar/status/1700086954610618681

So just so we are clear on this: in the state of Minnesota, if you’re a 10 year old who has decided they want to get themself chemically castrated, you have full legal standing.

If you’re a 20 year old veteran of the Armed Forces who wants to defend themselves, you are not only not old enough, you are an unperson.

This may be the perfect metaphor for the state of Minnesota today.

NOTE: Nobody of any age should write blog posts using “voice to text“ without taking the time to edit.

The DFL wants “assisted suicide”:

https://twitter.com/FOX9/status/1699592204036042967

Further evidence of Big Left’s contempt for human life.

Fearless predictions:

2024: “assisted suicide” for specific conditions.

2026: “Conditions” list expanded to include depression, fatigue. (Like Canada)

2030: List expanded again to include “state thinks you’re too expensive (Netherlands)

2033: List includes political undesirables.

The Georgia Attorney General is bringing RICO charges against 60+ “Anti”-Fa droogs:

“We contend the 61 defendants together have conspired against the construction of the Atlanta public safety training center by conducting, coordinating, and organizing acts of violence, intimidation, and property destruction,” said AG Carr, in a press conference on Tuesday.

As alleged in the indictment, the defendants are members of Defend the Atlanta Forest, which Carr described Tuesday afternoon as an anarchist, anti-police, and anti-business extremist organization.

Time to remind your “progressive” friends that “Anti”-Fa is the lineal descendant of the German Communist Party’s version of the Brownshirts – and unlike the Brownshirts, they still exist.

Watch for Democrats to claim RICO is an affront to democracy later today.

SCENE: A group of reporters and an editor are sitting around a conference table.

EDITOR: OK. We need a story. Something to break us out of the summer doldrums.

REPORTER 1: We spent such a long time reporting on abuse of children in the Catholic Church…

REPORTER 2: I know, right? It’d be great to find another story like that.

REPORTER 3: Wonder if there’s another story out there like that…?

EDITOR: I have no idea.

REPORTER 4: Hey, look at this:

Remember when they mocked parents for homeschooling their kids? pic.twitter.com/vuSeDxpHci

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 3, 2023

EDITOR: Did I stutter? I said – I have no idea.

And SCENE

It’s amazing…

Elena Gorokhova in her 2010 autobiography, A Mountain of Crumbs, “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”https://t.co/sbgHav0xIq

— Social Media Freed the World (@VittoJC) September 3, 2023

…how many descriptions of Communism apply to the modern DFL.

Article on how to respond to being “gaslit”…

…gaslights half the species (emphasis added by me):

The form of emotional abuse, where someone seeks to make a person doubt their own sanity, is something experienced by many – particularly women, who, according to a 2018 policing report, account for 95% of all gaslighting victims. 

The linked report, by the way, relies on British police reports from domestic abuse situations in relation to an expansion of domestic abuse law to cover “coercive control”, something that the researchers point out is fuzzy, vague and not the subject of any broad consensus, but was passed by a legislature wanting to expand the definition of “domestic abuse”.

Put another way – data gathered by mental health non-professionals about an ill-defined offense in an area of law that is heavily weighted against men to begin with, related to a psychological phenomenon that even mental health professionals don’t entirely agree on, is being used to tell men they are inclined to abuse women – not to mention giving women the oddly Victorian notion that they are just plain less capable of abuse, particularly psychological abuse, than men.

So – do I credit this to a writer with an agenda? Or to a sloppy, probably 20-something pseudoacademic writer who eagerly prattles what she’s told on command?

I say “why choose?”

With the advent of taxpayer paid school lunch for literally every student in the state of Minnesota, a friend of the blog emails:

So have you figured out the menu for the first bunch of rich folk’s kids you’ll be buying lunch. I think mine will be liver and onions and lutefisk so they’ll never ask again.

Not a bad idea, at least on the surface.

But remember Dash this is going to be government food.

I have a hunch lutefisk will look pretty good by the time they choke it down for a month or two.

Hope you’re enjoying your long weekend dedicated to a movement that mistook “two decades of inflated wages when the US was the world’s only functional economy, while Japan and Germany and South Korea were bombed flat and India and China were busy with socialist noodling and starving themselves back to the 1800s and unable to manufacture anything more complicated than motor scooters” for an eternal entitlement.

And they still do:

The backbone of this economy isn’t big corporations and businesses – it’s workers.  
 
Workers who deserve living wages, safe workplaces and the right to organize and form a union.
 
Happy Labor Day! https://t.co/eg9Jrf8Hh5

— Tina Smith (@SenTinaSmith) September 4, 2023

Senator (gag) Smith: go ahead. Put a bunch of workers – with or without union cards – in an open field. See if a factory or a workshop or, since you’re a DFLer and it’s your only perspective of the private sector, a coffee shop springs up around them.

We’ll wait.

Well, tomorrow I’ll wait. I’ve got labor day plans.

A friend of the blog emails:

I’m old enough to remember when they wanted to ban smoking basically everywhere.

So why should pot be any different?

Nothing about the states legalization of pot was thought through, beyond “getting GenZ votes, and shutting down the legal weed parties“.

The review of the review of Liz Collin’s They’re Lying,

Today’s music list:

The city of Champlin is mulling over seceding from Hennepin County, and joining Anoka County:

And they’re not wrong:

“When you look at the big picture, it feels like we’re just an ATM,” said Mayor Ryan Sabas about the Hennepin County Government. “But they are not making deposits here back to the city of Champlin.”

One-third of resident’s tax bill is sent to the Hennepin County government, according to the mayor.

And they are not wrong:

One example the mayor provided is that currently there are no transportation dollars being spent on projects in the community over the next four years.

“Our efforts with Hennepin County over the years to have them assist infrastructure, road projects or any requests with the county, really goes unheard,” said Mayor Sabas.

I expect a pretty robust response from the DFL. Presumably, including building a barbed wire fence around Hennepin County, with mines and guard dogs to keep people from leaving people.

I saw this tweet from Governor Klink, and it brought me back in time almost (cough cough) years, to when I was trying to decide what to do after college:

When I’m asked why young people should move to Minnesota, I tell them we’re:
 
✔️Protecting rights, not taking them away
✔️Making a generational investment in housing
✔️Establishing paid leave
✔️Preparing Minnesotans to enter high-growth jobs – from education to health care

— Governor Tim Walz (@GovTimWalz) August 31, 2023

And I clearly remember my thought process when figuring out where to move, and why:

1. If a condom breaks, will my future nonexistent girlfriend be able to abort it even up until birth?
2. If we have a kid, and get divorced, and that kid decides to transition genders, will I be able to get the custody order ignored?
3. Can I afford the rent…not now, per se, but at some indeterminate point in the future, when a hodgepodge of government programs have some promised effect, whatever it is?
4. Can I get paid leave from the job I neither have nor, honestly, have really figured out what it’ll be, yet?
5. Will other kids coming after me be “prepared” for the jobs I’m trying to get?

Kudos, Governor Klink. Nailed it.

Is it just me, or was that tweet about coaxing young people to move to Minnesota – something they’re not doing – written by someone who’s never been a young person thinking about moving to another state?

It’s been a little over a year since Liz Collin released “They LIed”, her investigation of the Derek Chauvin trial .

I’ve been on the air with Liz – and for that matter, she’s filled in for me on my show – but the book didn’t come up.

But to get on topic: I basically accept that two things can be true:

• the death of George Floyd had many huge gray areas
• and the Henco establishment twisted and gamboled and lied through their teeth to avoid sharing liability with Chauvin and his co-defendants.

But someone referred me to this review of the book, by one Deb Copperud, writing in “Racket”, which is one of the myriad attemepts to come up with an online replacement for the City Pages.

The article – it’s billed as a “review”, but we’ll come back to that – is sub-headed “With sources like convicted murderer Derek Chauvin and his mother, the former WCCO-TV reporter serves up red meat to Alpha News junkies in ‘They’re Lying.”.

I’m not sure the “editors” at “Racket” caught the irony of the juxtaposition of the chortle about sourcing with the article’s title: “Liz Collin’s High School Classmate Reviews Her Stupid New Book”

Just for fun, let’s keep count of the logical fallacies – ad homina, appeal to authority, etc – which will be presented in bold, and facts presented, which I’ll mark in bold and underlined.

I am not the target audience for local journalist Liz Collin’s debut book, They’re Lying: The Media, the Left, and the Death of George Floyd. I read it because I’m a longtime leftie Minneapolis resident and I take perverse enjoyment in the opinions of suburbanites who denigrate the city as a burned-up, carjacked wasteland.

As a longer-time resident of Saint Paul, I take even more perverse enjoyment watching people who live in leafy green upper middle class enclaves like Copperud’s House District 61B, which might be better described as an “urban life theme park” [1], pleading the authenticity of their urban street cred – especially as opposed to, y’know, Minneapolis cops and those who are married to them.

Ad homina: 1.

As a professionally unsuccessful former classmate of Collin, I have followed her career with interest, envy, and, most recently, schadenfreude. I wanted an explanation of how Collin’s marriage to Bob Kroll, former union president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis and mustachioed chthonic avatar of police brutality, downgraded her career from WCCO darling to Alpha News right-wing shill. Plus, books from low-rent vanity publishers are funny and make me feel grammatically superior to their authors. 

Copperud writes for Racket, and does a podcast. No word on the budgets for either outlet, but she apparently missed the memo that, in this online era, that self-publishing often gets you better financials than going through a “real” publisher. Ask Ed Morrissey.

Ad homina: 3.

Collin’s 261-page book begins when she and Kroll return from a weekend out of town, oblivious to the events of May 25, 2020. They are quickly gobsmacked and astounded by what they consider to be an outsized reaction to bystander video of George Floyd pinned to Chicago Avenue by Minneapolis Police Department Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee. Collin’s incredulity lingers throughout the entire book, as she cannot or will not recognize the significance of Floyd’s murder. She refuses to see Floyd as a synecdoche for victims of an unjust and brutal culture of policing. Instead, she turns him into a caricature, a dangerous, drug-addicted urban villain.

Collin does acknowledge that the video “looks bad.” But she refutes the optics with dubious arguments that accuse all of the major players, from former MPD Chief Medaria Arradondo, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, and Attorney General Keith Ellison, of engaging in a vast left-wing conspiracy to victimize the MPD officers who were called to Cup Foods.

Let’s take a moment to point out a simple fact, inconvenient to both “sides” of this discussion: two things, sometimes more, can be true at the same time.

In this case, four things:

• The MPD does have a long history of bad behavior.
• George Floyd was not the sainted figure that Big Minneapolis Left turned him into. He was objectively a pretty flawed guy. Did he deserve to die? No. That was established at trial.
• Bob Kroll’s job is to defend “his” officers – just as Denise Spect and Javier Morillo defend “their” teachers and SEIU members without a whole lot of gray area or nuance.
• Minneapolis and Henco leadership have made being in law enforcement – and, by extension, life in neighborhoods that, unlike Copperud’s leafy green theme park of a neighborhood – very difficult.

None of those are especially controversial – are they?

Collin posits that “politicians were creating the illusion of accountability without holding themselves accountable” and that they conspired to convict Chauvin and the three other officers without due process. She tries to support this thesis with an analysis of Maximal Restraint Technique training materials and a close reading of Floyd’s autopsy and subsequent autopsy reports.

And…what about that analysis? How did, or didn’t, it support Collin’s thesis?

Don’t just leave that dangling out there, Ms. Copperud!

Ad Homina: 3
Facts Presented: I’ll call it 0.5; facts were presented, but significance was not established. Or attempted.

The most frustrating piece is Collin’s hammer-headed insistence that a “mixed race group” of police officers could not possibly engage in racist violence. This is a “but I voted for Obama!” type of racism denial, as if J. Alexander Kueng’s presence magically absolves the MPD’s well-documented history racially discriminatory practices. 

So we’ve got competing bits of illogic: “Mixed groups can’t be racist” vs. “Minneapolis cops can only be racist, and if you try to say otherwise, I’ll drop this Obama-era criticism of white liberals. That’ll show you”.

Occasionally, the timeline jumps backward 30 years to arcane MPD stories which Collin intends to connect with the 2020-21 narrative and support her conspiracy claims. But the only common thread linking these incongruous 20th century flashbacks with the rest of the book is just that “Bob was there.” In my imagination, the writing process looks like Collin clacking away at her computer with Kroll standing behind her, tapping her shoulder, spraying moist bits of spearmint Kodiak across her keyboard as he goads, “Lizzie, ya gotta tell ’em about the time I took down the Vice Lords!”

Well, at least she called it a product of her imagination.

Collin centers herself as a victim of “the media and the Left,” taking particular umbrage at her former employer, accusing WCCO’s management of having a liberal political agenda. She blasts WCCO for requiring reporters to interview racially diverse subjects, for issuing a disclaimer about her marriage on crime and policing stories, and for taking her off the anchor desk. She writes, “I was blacklisted. I went from being a familiar face on WCCO-TV down to being on the news barely a minute a day.” 

The victim narrative continues

Wait!

That list of actions does in fact sound like Collin was, in fact, dealt dirty.

Does WCCO not have a liberal agenda?

Are Collin’s assertions wrong?

“[They] started insulting me personally—for the color of my hair and skin,” Collin writes.

And is that untrue?

She portrays Kroll as a maligned target who suffers online burns from bullies like former MPD Police Chief Janee Harteau and Twitter troll @BillyAn23338604.

Or that?

After Kroll and Collin’s address is doxxed, the “cancel culture vultures” protest outside their home in Hugo, Minnesota. Activist and attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong “segregated people” and had “Blacks” (yes, that is Collin’s actual word choice) kneel in front of a flagpole on Collin’s front lawn. 

Now, that did happen. It’s on film – from (ahem) liberal WCCO, and at least another TV station. Does Copperud dispute that?

Chauvin, of course, positions himself yet another victim: “When Derek Chauvin heard about Arradondo’s public indictment,” Collin writes, “he said, ‘That’s when I knew they were stacking the deck against me.’”

It’s still a free country, sorta, no thanks to people like Copperud. Chauvin can say what he wants.

The reverse racism claims are gross but predictable. More troubling is Collin’s unwillingness to acknowledge racism at all. She writes “systemic police racism” just like that: ensconced in quotation marks, mocking the phrase Joey Tribbiani-style. I understand where she’s coming from because I grew up two years ahead of Collin, in Worthington, the small, southwestern Minnesota town where she started a neighborhood newspaper as a kid.

“Gross but predictable” – maybe, maybe not.

But are they wrong? It’s hard to look at future/former Rep. John Thompson’s behavior as anything but racist. Isn’t it?

Back in the 1990s, when Collin and I both exercised in the basement of the old downtown YMCA and served Tremendous Twelve and Granny’s Country Omelet breakfast orders to the Sunday morning after-church crowds at Perkins, Worthington was an ethnically diverse town. But it was also a consequence-free setting for casual racism. This was a point in time when a FUBU brand Love Sees No Color T-shirt could effectively declare its wearer to be free of bigotry. Very few words or actions were considered racist, short of calling someone an ethnic slur while punching them in the face. Incredibly, in 1998, half of the Worthington High School students cast in the spring musical performed in blackface. Even more wild? No one objected!

But just because no one got in trouble for racist stage-makeup or behaviors back then doesn’t mean that they weren’t racist. Concepts like double consciousness, code switching, cultural appropriation, unconscious bias, systemic racism—these are all nuanced distinctions that had to be picked up while fulfilling college credits, or while attending workplace sensitivity training, or just by being a literate person who’s heard about social injustice.

So to try to pick some cherry tomatoes out of the word salad:

• Copperud and Collin grew up near each other.
• People then didn’t practice the orthodoxy Copperud now finds indispensable.
• Dissenting from that orthodoxy – acquired in (some varieties of) college or work or something something – is grounds for relentless, nuance-free either/or sorting. No gray area, no argument, no inquiry or intellectual disagreement need apply.

To sum it up: Copperud is tarring Collin via the behavior of other people, in another place, from decades ago.

Collin has not evolved beyond the ’90s dichotomy of racist or not-racist. For Collin, as long as there is no historical precedent and no prior consequences for racist behavior, then racism isn’t a problem.

Copperud assumes that dichotomy is wrong without saying why, beyond invoking a standard that Copperud finds absolute and certain but which must not and therefore can not be questioned.

She seems to lack the intellectual curiosity to dig in to what Floyd’s murder symbolized. Anyone who lumps people together as “Blacks” in 2022 and who thinks that a couple of police officers of color can negate a whole racist system of policing has a long way to go on their anti-racist journey. Collin is still parked in her Hugo driveway. 

“Anti-racism” is, of course. not to be mistaken for “not being racist”.

Ad homina: 5
Facts Presented: 2 (including the ‘anti-racist journey’ which, if you stipulate that “not being racist” is an imperfect state of mind while “anti-racism” is a bit of social logrolling, kinda straddles the categories).

But we’ve come all this way through this…er, “review” to find that Copperud seems to have buried the lede:

I have to admit that Collin’s journalism is competent, dogged, and detailed. I expected dubious research and, while Collin sometimes footnotes sources that blur the boundaries of credibility (New York Post, Alpha News, Heritage Foundation, @crimewatchmpls),

Whose “boundaries of credibility”? And why? Does the writer for that bastion of reason, “Racket.com”, have any reason beyond unvarnished ideological chauvinism?

Especially given that…

most of the citations are sound.

Screaaaaaaaatch.

One could also take serious issue with her sourcing, which includes: convicted murderer Chauvin, plus the convicted murderer’s mother Carolyn Pawlenty, imprisoned partner Thomas Lane, and failed defense attorney Eric Nelson, among other uniformly pro-cop voices.

One could?

Why?

Because of any of the facts presented? Or statements presented as facts without countervailing information?

Or just because Deb Copperud wrinkles her nose in disgust?

Overall, the book met my expectations. I hoped for grammatical idiosyncrasies and They’re Lying delivered. Collin credits Dr. JC Chaix for his proofreading work, which includes unconventional spelling, inconsistent capitalization, unnecessary commas between subjects and verbs, and a complete disregard for a uniform style guide.

Oh.

I don’t recommend buying They’re Lying, but I do recommend looking up Chaix’s bizarre author biography on Amazon.

Ad Homina: 5
Really odd, irrelevant ad hominem: 1
Facts presented: 2.5-3.5, more or less.

At times I actually enjoyed the narrative, especially when Collin skewers Mayor Frey’s vanity. She recalls how he flailed during the protests and riots and reminds the reader that Frey was, is now, and ever shall be, as long as he is in office, in sole charge of the MPD.

So…Collin was right?

Hold on.

Waaaay back in this review, didn’t Copperud call Copperud’s allegations about Minneapolis and Henco leadership “dubious?”

I shared Collin’s disgust with the leaders, past and present, who failed to reform policing before and after Floyd’s murder, who held nothingburger press conferences, who promised transformational change and then approved a new union contract and $7,000 bonuses to MPD officers.

Surprisingly, They’re Lying gave me hope! If both Collin, hawker of MAGA propaganda, and I, avowed member of “the Left,” can agree that crime and policing in Minneapolis are worse after five years of Frey’s blustery, ineffective leadership, then there is a tiny bright spot cresting over the 2024 election horizon

Huh. I did not see that coming.

So, to sum up the “Review”:

1. Deb Copperud doesn’t like Liz Collin, Bob Kroll, the NYPost, or Alpha News.
2. She notes – correctly and disparagingly – that Collin doesn’t bark “anti-racist” dogma on command, while not even trying to establish that makes her, or anyone, racist
3. She can’t find fault with Collin’s actual reporting .
4. She agrees with Collin about Minneapolis’s leadership, but not when Collin actually says it. Or something .

In restrospect, the name “Racket” makes sense now.

[1] If the person who brings you your coffee and avocado toast has to commute, by rail, bus or hooptie, to get to work in a “Fifteen Minute City” she can’t afford to work in, then your “Fifteen Minute City” is really an “Urban Life Theme Park”.

When the left talks about gun control / “gun safety”, it’s talking about you.

Not them..

During the relevant time frame, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office rarely issued [carry permits]. Indeed, the office’s practice was to not even process an application for a CCW license absent a special instruction to do so…

…Thomas Moyer is Apple, Inc.’s head of global security. The company’s executive protection team is under his supervision. In 2016 and early 2017 the team began receiving more serious threats against Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, and became concerned about its ability to respond to these threats. As a consequence, in early 2017, Apple decided its executive protection team should be armed and began taking steps to obtain CCW licenses for team members…

…two Apple officials—David Gullo, senior director of global security, and Eric Mueller, senior director of operations for the security team—met with Undersheriff Sung [whose boss was running for re-election] to discuss CCW licenses…On March 26, 2019, members of Apple’s executive protection team were told to pick up their CCW licenses, which they did at the Sheriff’s Office…

Government licensing is a wealth transfer – on the table, or under it.

SCENE: MNDFL Headquarters. Two staffers – a communications person and a researcher who is also a bit of a prankster, are talking, sotto voce.

COMMS STAFFER: He’ll never go for it.

RESEARCHER: Betcha $20.

COMMS STAFFER: (Pulls out a 20). You’re on.

Just then, Ken MARTIN, generalissimo of the MNDFL, walks into the room.

MARTIN: “OK, whaddya got?

RESEARCHER (barely suppressing a snork): “OK, so, research shows that people loooooove (chokes back giggle) lots and lots of selfies of politicians gluttonously stuffing their faces”. (COMMS STAFFER has to turn away).

MARTIN: “Good stuff. I’ll put out a memo”.

MARTIN leaves the room.

COMMS STAFFER forks over the $20.

RESEARCHER: Like taking candy from a baby.

COMMS STAFFER: Shoulda know. But…shouldn’t we tell Generalissimo Martin?

RESEARCHER: Nah, he’ll figure it out. Nobody is that stupid.

MERE DAYS LATER:

https://twitter.com/julieblaha/status/1694731325054353650

https://twitter.com/amyklobuchar/status/1694874902052945965

Note: The giant bean came in second in the “Giant Vegetable” catetory. The winner was Rep. Andy Smith (DFL Rochester)

https://twitter.com/LtGovFlanagan/status/1696887501380587532

https://twitter.com/GovTimWalz/status/1696675918364729744

https://twitter.com/AngieCraigMN/status/1696654946395910161

https://twitter.com/amyklobuchar/status/1694835907113767399

https://twitter.com/GovTimWalz/status/1694880247269712049

COMMUNICATIONS GUY: “Noooooooooooooooooo!

RESEARCHER (Burying head in hands) “What hsve I done?”

And SCENE

The deeply conservative sheriff of Jim Hogg County, Texas, has decided to remove its school resource officers from schools in that rural central Texas county.

Sheriff Jimmy Bob Throckmorton yesterday announced that the Jim Hogg County School District had put bizarre and unworkable restrictions on his deputies.

New: Hennepin Co Sheriff is latest law enforcement agency to pull SRO over concerns w/ recent change in law related to student restraints. Deputy was assigned to Rockford High. pic.twitter.com/ldEhE35fRf

— Torey Van Oot (@toreyvanoot) August 29, 2023

Oops. Did I say Sheriff Jimmy Bob Throckmorton of Jim Hogg County, Texas? I meant the comfortably left-of-center Sheriff Dawanna Witt, of Hennepin County.

Not sure how that slipped past SITD’s copy-editors.

So we’re reliably informed that Downtown Minneapolis is back.

But that it desperately needs Target to force its workers back into the office.

Reporter Brianna Kelly spent months talking to downtown Minneapolis businesses about the flexible hybrid approach of downtown’s largest employer, and the impact it is having on the local economy.

“You know, everyone wants Target to be back; we need Target to be back,” Kelly said. “They’re a huge part of the entire ecosystem downtown.”

The story behind the story is this: if the wellbeing of Downtown Minneapolis is that dependent on a single employer, that whole “Minneapolis is a Cold Flint” comparison is looking better and better, and I don’t say that with any great joy.

Fill in the usual “Can you imagine what’d happen if, say, Ron DeSantis were to take a cheesecake photo with a group of swimsuit models?” boilerplate.

You can pretty much fill in the stock responses from memory.

So here’s Senator Klobuchar at the State Fair:

State Fair pro tip: You don’t want to miss the Minnesota firefighters at the @MNAFLCIO. pic.twitter.com/O3auZqdkGN

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) August 25, 2023

And “The Velvet Hammer”

Thanks for the pro tip Amy — they really swept me off my feet https://t.co/FQFhT9xDKT pic.twitter.com/9bBEox4Wmp

— Tina Smith (@TinaSmithMN) August 26, 2023

Has the feminism correspondent at MPR seen this yet?