Remember last spring and early summer? When New York’s catastrophic mismanagement of the Covid pandemic led to a national scandal that humiliated Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill “Squiggy” DiBlasio?

Of course not. The media tamped it down. With a contentious election already underway, Big Media and Big Left didn’t want any splatter getting on the Democrat nominee, whoever that was going to be.

But it was horrible; both New Yorks, state and city, had death rates that still dwarf the rest of the country. Over 10% of all nursing home residents died in a matter of mere weeks. The city was a charnel house. One nursing home left a few dozen bodies in a n un-refrigerated U-Haul, and hospitals were, as related by an endless stream of morose NPR stories, overwhelmed (even as a Navy hospital ship rode, almost empty, at anchor in the harbor, lest President Trump garner any credit whatsoever).

Big Left rallied around the inept Cuomo, spending nine months treating him as a saint walking among us, as an epidemiological Omar Bradley smiting the viral foe from the field, plumping up the sales for Cuomo’s absurd public health “how to” book, putting him up for an Emmy Award for his televised appearances.

Until the inauguration.

Now that Democrat are in charge, Cuomo’s stock has fallen faster than GameStop.

Seems weird?

Not at all. Cuomo is not popular on the hard left that is currently in vogue in DC. He’s too centrist. The progressive wing of the party hates him – and Mayor Squiggy has aspirations in Albany and (absurd as it seems) DC.

Two theories, not mutually exclusive:

All The Facts That Fit The Narrative: It’s verging on being a Berg’s Law – modern media “fact checking” is largely a matter of making sure Democrats get all the credit for the true stuff. Cuomo was a hero – until Big Left wanted him out of the way.

Which is not in any way discontiguous with the other theory:

Try To Find A Pickaxe In Albany. I Dare You: I think it’s a purge on the left. The “progressive” wing, which controls everything in DC (including, let’s be honest, the “Moderate” Biden – wants their slightly-too-moderate bete noir out of the way. While Cuomo’s presidential odds were likely slim and none, he certainly has a powerful bully pulpit within the party.

Well – had one.

This past week, in my observation, has been almost perfectly stage-managed – with the news of the whistleblower coming out while the Governor was in an audience with Biden.

Why? I addition to being a “moderate” (yep, you read that right – Cuomo is like Phyllis Kahn) wart on the Democrat party’s butt that can be excised, making room for more acceptable “Progressives” for the nation’s third-or-fourth-most powerful, but certainly most prestigious, governorship, it also allows Democrats to claim the “credit” for getting “justice” for all the seniors that died…

…even though conservatives owned the story from the beginning.

Like Stalin ordering Trotsky’s murder, this purge – with able assistance from the media that is giving itself leg and lip cramps kissing Biden’s ass – serves all sorts of purposes for Big Left.

Badda bing.

Ryan Winkler takes a strong moral stand:

About time Ryan Winkler took a strong, courageous stand against corporate prisons…

…of which there are zero in Minnesota.

Remember when I said DFLers can count on the fact that DFL voters are overwhelmingly badly-informed and lousy at critical thought?

Any questions?

.

Where have you gone, our #UmbrellaMan?

The Star/Trib turns its lonely eyes to you:

In a city ravaged by leftist violence several times in the past year, we’re going to focus, hard, on finding the dozen doughy ex-Libertarians, sitting in their parents basements, who identify as Trumpo-Anarchists.

In related news, Germany, expressing alarm over a 1939 attack on a border radio station, is concerned about potential Polish aggression.

Last summer, on my show, I interviewed a guy – an engineering professor – who had a side project, mathematically modeling the progress of the Covid pandemic.

His assertion – that somewhere between 5-10 times as many people had been infected as the testing showed – because “getting tested” was at best a self-selecting set of subjects (if, at that time, they could get tested at all) and most people were asymptomatic, or had limited symptoms.

The numbers were plausible – and the limited symptoms part resonated with me. I barely talked myself into getting an antibody test. My symptoms were fairly minimal – a fever for about a day, a nasty cough for a few more, basically the bronchitis I get every couple years. Were it not for a rash on the back of my hands, I might have just skipped the whole thing. The antibody test showed I’d had Covid, in late March or early April – consistent with the symptoms I did have.

Here’s the deal – the modeler and I considered it good news. With viruses, all other things being equal and acknowledging there’s a lot we still don’t know about Covid, recovering from an infection gets you, if not immunity, at least resistance, at least for some period of time. And even limited immunity and enhanced resistance is a huge thing; the common cold is largely shrugged off by most Westerners, but it was frequently lethal to natives when Westerners traveled to places where the people had never had exposure to it. The difference between a lethal pandemic and the sniffles was a few (or few dozen) generations of having had it and survived.

The modeler’s advice? Everyone who wasn’t under sixty and/or in relatively decent health should protect themselves accordingly until a vaccine came out; everyone else should “play spin the bottle, and power through the infection as fast as possible”.

Having “Survived” a mild case, I’ll recuse myself from the games.

And that particular modeler is not the only person to have found these results.

Shrieking Ninnies In Expensive Suits – which was why I was a little surprised not only to see this story from National Public Radio’s “health” beat reporters, about a study from Columbia that reached precisely the same factual concusion that Covid had infected 5-10 times as many people as we thought…

…and not just that they thought it was seriously ground-breaking news (emphasis added)…

The model has not been published or peer-reviewed yet, but lead researcher, Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University, shared the data exclusively with NPR.

…when my lil’ ol’ talk show covered this exact same conclusion eight months ago…

…but the conclusion these “elite” “journalists” reached:

…[the model] gives a much more complete — and scary — picture of how much virus is circulating in our communities…The model’s conclusion: On any given day, the actual number of active cases — people who are newly infected or still infectious — is likely 10 times that day’s official number of reported cases.

So let’s recap: a model that is:

• Unpublished
• Not peer-reviewed
• Reaches a statistical conclusion that is “news” only if one’s sense of credentialism has eaten whatever journalistic inquisitiveness one might have had

…is presented not only as “new” news, but as bad news.

Now, during my brief, not very successful career as a reporter, one thing I did do well was ask questions – which used to be a key qualifier for journalists.

And I have so many of them, reading both the study and the “elite” journos at NPR’s take on it.

• Given that the number of deaths and serious hospitalizations are a reasonably known quantity, and their numbers has been broadly tracking with known infection rates, and we presume that this discrepancy is not brand new, doesn’t that mean the disease is on 10-20% as fatal as we thought?
• Again assuming that the infection rates have always been ahead of testing, doesn’t that mean an order of magnitude more people have been infected, and (remember, we know the death rates) recovered, and thus are at least partly immune or resistant? Isn’t that good news (except of course for the number of immune people getting scarce vaccines, and also the fact that our government response seems to be discounting natural immunity entirely?)
• Wny, in fact, does this story ignore the natural/herd immunity implications of numbers like this?

This sort of “reporting” is neither science nor, if my various bosses, teachers, editors and mentors were to be believed, journalism in any sense other than “providing PR for an authioritarian narrative”.

David Hogg, who has built a very rewarding career slandering law-abiding gun owners, is his immense expertise from “gun safety” to industry. Seeking to “own” Mike Lindell [1], he announced last week he seeks to start a pillow company.

Last Friday, it turned out Hogg’s big idea had run into the same roadblock as his gun control agenda – reality:

That Harvard education is serving the lad well, isn’t it?

As seniors try to navigate buggy, inept MN-IT (but I repeat myself) websites, or pile in to try for a single-digit percent chance of a shot (maybe, or again, maybe not), teachers union members get a special vaccine event…

…even though they’re still ambivalent about going back to work at all.

Just saying – when David Brooks is right, he’s very, very right. Teachers unions are just as intelledtually vacuous and immune to real science as the most blinkered pandemic conspiracy theorist:

in-person learning can be done safely with the right precautions. This was unclear last March and April, but now study after study has shown that schools can be safe. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just attested to this fact. The evidence seems clear.

Private and some public schools are already operating safely all around the country, with little evidence that attendance is spreading the virus.

[But] teachers unions don’t seem to have adjusted to the facts. In Washington, Chicago and elsewhere, unions have managed to shut down in-class instruction. The Chicago public schools union is on the verge of an illegal strike, even though 130 private schools and 2,000 early learning centers have been open safely since the fall….The Chicago district installed air purifiers in classrooms, conducted ventilation tests, increased rapid testing and held more than 60 meetings with union leaders, but so far the union has been able to keep public schools from reope

Of course, it’s not about science – because the Teachers Union is no more about science than it is about, well, teaching:

A study by Michael T. Hartney and Leslie Finger found that political partisanship and teacher union strength explain how school boards approached reopening. Another survey, conducted last year by Chalkbeat and The Associated Press, found that roughly half of white students had access to in-person learning, compared with a quarter of Black and Hispanic kids.

Readers, many of us got involved in the Black Lives Matter marches last summer. I guess I would ask you, do Black lives matter to you only when they serve your political purpose? If not, shouldn’t we all be marching to get Black and brown children back safely into schools right now?

There were many haunting moments in MacGillis’s ProPublica piece [cited elsewhere in Brooks op-ed]. One comes when he asks the National Education Association president, Becky Pringle, about her claim that reopening schools could lead to the death of 50,000 children. MacGillis points out to her that, in fact, the number of American children known to have died of Covid-19 up to that point is around 100.

The unions are not reflecting reality. Instead of addressing legitimate fears with facts and evidence, they are using their political muscle to inflame those fears. The most vulnerable people in our country are the victims.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Republican legislators are trying to change the Governor’s emergency powers. I applaud that effort.

An “emergency” is an unforeseen combination of events requiring immediate action. A tornado, a blizzard, a flood, even a disease outbreak, can all be emergencies.

But for how long? At what point is “immediate” action no longer required, and “deliberate” action should replace it? At what point should the Governor return power to the people’s elected representatives to make decisions?

Presently, the law says his power continues until a majority of both houses revokes it. That’s backwards. It should end unless a majority of both houses extends it.

Joe Doakes

The provision, if it was given much thought at all, was (I suspect) written with the assumption that all future goverors would operate from a basis of integrity and concern, mutually held with a statesmanlike legislature, for the balancing of order and liberty.

Events have shown that to be a poor assumption.

Events have also shown us that the Second Amendment movement got it right in 2015 when they pushed through limitations on the Governor’s emergency powers in re confiscating guns and curbing gun rights under a “state of emergency”.

We need to do that with the rest of state law.

Assuming the opposition can ever prevail.

Senate File 26 passed the Republican-controlled Minnesota Senate unanimously and is headed for a vote in the Democrat-controlled House.  The bill makes it easier for people to obtain marriage licenses during the Walz Dictatorship.

Weren’t Republicans going to fight to end the dictatorship, rather than enabling it to continue? 

What was so urgent about this bill that Republicans had to go along with it, rather than hold it up to force concessions?

I get that they’re all amateurs, citizen-legislators, but isn’t there anybody up there who knows how to play this game? 

Joe Doakes

I’ve wondered the same, from time to time.

But political parties are run by those who show up.

Every conservative that’s stayed home out of anger over Trump being nominated, or Trump losing the 2016 caucuses, or failture to retroactively condemn or canonize Tim Pawlenty or Michele Bachmann, or Jennifer Carnahan-Hagedorn’s performance as chair?

The party reflects those who show up. In some places – the 7th CD – that’s a good thing. In some – CD4 – it’s deeply problematic.

But it”s those who show up that pick the people who get elected that fight the fight.

I’ve been out for the past couple years – call it burnout.

I”ll be back.

President Biden, we’re told, is a devout Catholic, which is a good thing…

…as opposed to Amy Coney Barrett, for whom it was a bad thing.

Also – “Ascendant liberal Christianity is an eternal hope on Big Left. Sort of like Blue Texas. There’s anways been a “blue” church: mainline Presbyterians, white Methodists and Episcopoals, ELCA Lutherans, and an awful lot of mainstream Catholics, who have made their peace with abortion in exchange for programs just as easily as “Feminists” made theirs with Bill Clinton.

The “blue” church is “ascendant” because one of its own is in power. These also happen to be the denominations that are in demogrpaphic free-fall.

But there is no narrative but the narrative.

The party that defended Ted Kennedy’s sluffing his way through legacy admissions to Ivy League undergrad and law school, to say nothing of allowing a woman to slowly die in his car as he staggered around Chappiquiddick looking for sobriety and an alibi with all the conviction of OJ looking for the real killers…

…is tittering over Lauren Bobert’s education, and a “criminal record” matching those of an awful lot of teens and 20-somethings.

Berg’s Eighth Law is universal. There is nothing a Prog needs to destroy more than one of “their” people – women, minorities, the underclass – leaving the plantation.

A frequent commentor asked: “What utility does a ghost gun have that a
serial numbered gun does not?”

It’s a question frequently asked by those in favor of “common sense” gun
control.

To which I reply: “What utility does a Catholic have that an Anglican
does not?  Why can’t we have common sense Catholic control?”

And, “What utility does conservative political speech have that liberal
political speech does not?  Why can’t we have common sense speech control?”

To ask these questions is to reveal the fundamental disagreement between
my view of how government should operate and the questioner’s view,
between the Founders’ view and modern-day Democrats’ view.

How far we’ve strayed . . .

Joe Doakes

My other preferred answer: “I’m a citizen doing something I have a Constitutional and statutory right to do. The utility it has is giving people like you a big f*** you”.

So far in this series, I’ve ascribed blame for the dismal downward curve in the greatest society in the history of the world – from the apogee in the early nineties to the riot at the Capitol amid dueling thud-witted social media chanting mobs – to some easy suspects; the President himself, the extreme Progressive tilt of the left, and the collapse of trust in the institutions, education and law enforcement and the media, that we depend on to keep government fair, accountable and transparent.

Today? I turn the cannon on the Republican Party.

The GOP had virtually nothing to lose when it nominated Ronald Reagan in 1980. Gutted by Watergate and the Nixon resignation after four decades of basically being Democrats with better suits, sometimes it seemed that Ronald Reagan dragged the GOP into success, kicking and screaming and against its own will.

But by 1994, when the Newt Gringrich phalanx swung Congress to the GOP for the first time since the ’20s, the Party seemed to have its priorities straight: limit the size of government, cut taxes, and defend the country. Being a polyglot party, it enacted policy perfectly in none of those areas. But from 1980-ish until about 2000, the GOP was clear, principled alternative to the Democratic Party.

After that?

Analogy Time

I left the GOP in 1994, disgusted by the votes of so many Republicans for the 1994 “Crime Bill”, a knee-jerk reaction to a surge in crime that marked a high-water point in gun control as well as the weaponizing of drug policy.

I complained that the GOP – which had always paid lip service to gun rights – was happy to collect the votes of gun owners, but wouldn’t deliver for them when the chips were down. (Which was true – it took a surging gun rights movement to give the GOP religion on the subject). The complacent assumption that gun owners owed the GOP their votes drove me to the Libertarians – for a while, anyway.

The complacency drove me crazy.

And it still does.

Of course, economic economic conservatism is hard and tends to get people un-elected these days, so that by 2000 the Republican president was a bigger spender than the Demcorat he replaced (albet Clinton’s relative “conservatism” was a reaction to the 1994 Congress).

Hey – he was better than Algore would have been…

…right?

Second Acts

Fifteen years after Newt Gingrich’s revolution, the GOP was back in the minority in both chambers, victims of economic circumstance and offering roughly no reason to vote for them other than…you guessed it, they were better than the alternative.

The Tea Party sprang from nowhere, doing for basic conservative causes like fiscal discipline and limited government what the gun rights movement had done for “Shall Issue” over the previous two decades – took it to the streets and the halls of the Capitol. Very successfully…

…briefly. The “establishments” of both parties teamed up to slander the Tea Party out of existence – leaving only a few elected members of the Class of 2010 left to tell the tale.

And with the Tea Party beaten back underground, the GOP stood for…

…well, what?

Really, two things – an appeal to cliche, and another to some party crashers.

The Business Of The GOP Is…

The GOP’s commitment to business – or, mostly, limiting the impact of business taxes – is undeniable.

Unfortunately, it was a broad brush approach that focused on the sorts of breaks larger companies get with the help of offices full of tax lawyers, and left smaller busineses, and especially younger consumers, mostly alone.

Which played its part in creating a generation to whom the wealth hasn’t “trickled down” yet, and may well not at this rate.

We’ll come back to that later.

And of course, after nearly twenty years of standing for nothing, it spent five years falling for something that gave it purpose – populism. Giving the people what they want, rather than what a civilization needs. Given a choice between standing for the principles that gave it success in the first place, and the dog’s breakfast of big spending and big lip service to its ideals, the GOP ditched its principles like a two dollar date.

And with Donald Trump’s imminent departure from office, what will the GOP replace him with?

The GOP doesn’t even know, at this point.

Given an opportunity to cement our nation’s, and civilization’s, status, the GOP…

…whiffed.

It had help, of course.

More in the next installment.

It

I’m not going to say I’m the world’s biggest Angela Merkel fan. American fans of Merkel tend to be be the kind of people who think soccer is a gripping watch and that Governor Walz’s knobs and levers are a great metaphor for communicating complex public health policy to the knaves.

Er…people.

But she was born in East Germany – and, unlike today’s woke mob, understands the inevitable result of their philosophy. So she earned the woke mob’s ire last week by coming out against Twitter’s canceling of the Trump twitter account.

Unexpectedly.

And now, Poland – a nation that was fighting for its freedom back when America was arguing over whether Miller Lite tasted great or was less filling, is firing a shot across Silicon Valley’s bow.

What do they know that thousands of Bernie Bros and Oberlin grievance studies grads don’t?

We’ve got some problems going on today, on the hosting end (I hope). Posting will be relatively light until things get sorted out.

Time was, these sorts of server glitches we’re not uncommon – every 12 to 24 months, they would be a day when things just needed a quick reset. .

Of course, while I won’t flatter myself by thinking this blog is big enough for the powers that be to notice anything enough to justify any monkey business, it’s pretty inevitable for a conservative pundit, even a D-lister like myself, to wonder…

Fingers crossed, hopefully things will be back to normal shortly.

We’ve got some problems going on today, on the hosting end (I hope). Posting will be relatively light until things get sorted out.

Time was, these sorts of server glitches we’re not uncommon – every 12 to 24 months, they would be a day when things just needed a quick reset. .

Of course, while I won’t flatter myself by thinking this blog is big enough for the powers that be to notice anything enough to justify any monkey business, it’s pretty inevitable for a conservative pundit, even a D-lister like myself, to wonder…

Fingers crossed, hopefully things will be back to normal shortly.

I’ll admit to two things:

1. Having seen how the radical left works up close and personal, when I saw the Capitol riot the week before last I thought “I’d wager a shiny new quarter they had some “encouragement” from provocateurs from the left””.
2. At the same time, after two months of hearing about legal “Krakens” that turned out to be Ewoks in court, I’ve noted that some in the MAGA crowd have a certain flair for issueing, and consuming, information you may not want to stake your life on.
3. On the other hand, the response from the Left – “There was never any provocation, Winston” – seemed just a little…pat?

And so re-read Berg’s 18th Law, and waited to see what happened.

And sure enough:

Read the whole thread.

Of course, saying “the “Anti”-Fa guy made me do it” is a flimsy defense, legally and morally.

But this is a reminder to all of you who might be involved in any sort of public demonstraiton for conservative causes: keep tape rolling. Photograph everything and everyone that seems out of place, and perhaps more importantly everyone that seems waaaaaaaay to enthusiastically “in place”.

We learned this during the Tea Party, when the shills were amateurs. Now it’s the “A” team, and they are getting people killed.

Pardon a brief, but I believe illuminating detour into psychology.

For this detour, I’ll ask your brief indulgence; try to go back to a time, five short years ago, where the term “Narcissism” hadn’t been hijacked by cancel culture to refer, like “Racism”, “Whiteness” and “Fascism”, to refer to “anything that triggers me or refers to people I hate but can’t reasonably define why”. Like all those terms, and many more, modern leftist academic and media culture has dumbed it almost out of existence. Remember a few years back, when the term “narcissism” was both an ethical description of a personality trait – solipsism to the point of self-destruction – and a clinical diagnosis, one of many flavors of “Personality Disorder”.

With that indulgence asked, onward.

I may be the only pundit in the world who refers to this article, 20 Diversion Tactics Highly Manipulative Narcissists, Sociopaths And Psychopaths Use To Silence You – a key tool for describing modern-day “progressives”.

And when you read through them, it’s not even a stretch.

• Gaslighting: “Mask (or climate, or white supremacy) denialism shows you don’t care about others!”,
• Projection: This blog has made a virtual science out of cataloging that trait.
• Nonsensical conversations from hell: the language of modern academic “social justice”, which has been leaching into and leeching from public education for decades, is the very definition of the “word salad” that defines this trait.
• Blanket Statements and Generalizations: “One in five women will be raped at university”, and the concepts of “Toxic Masculinity (Whiteness, Individualism, etc, etc)” leap out at one.
• Deliberatelly misrepresenting your thoughts and feelings: Here was a master class in the subject.

That’s just the first five. I could – and soon, no doubt, will – go on from there.

Indeed, I commend you to read the list, and think of how it applies to the Progressives you deal with.

Control

Captain Obvious phoned in with the following statement of the plain-as-day: As the Democratic Party has moved sharply to the left, and been taken over by people who reject the tenets and goals principles of the civilization that the United States has always led, control of power has become the goal.

“Yeah, but that’s all politics”.

Sure, in a sense. And I don’t want to overidealize the way 240 years of American politics have hewed to those principles.

But it’s not a stretch to say that Hubert Humphey would be laughed out of today’s Democratic Party; that Lyndon Johnson would be revered not for his principles, but for his tactical acumen; that Jimmy Carter would be treated like a naive college kid.

You can say, if you want, that the Democratic party doesn’t itself exalt the worst, most toxic traits of modern “progressive” culture – cancel culture, identity politics, an academy that would have made Orwell recoil in horror, and a desire to control not only the narrative but history itself that Mao would have loved.

You could say – as many Democrats have said to me – that the fact that Biden is, himself, proof that Democrats reject this. To do this, you have to ignore the fact that his mental shelf date is (I take no joy in saying this, dealing as I am with a parent with dementia) very obviously approaching, and those waiting in the wings make no bones about their own goals and means. You have to ignore the way the left is governing at the state and especially local level, looking at the left’s “bench”, the Lori Lightfoots and Gavin Newsomes and Fredo Cuomos and Squiggy DiBlasios, not to mention the endless self-adoring prattle of The Squad.

And you can look at the tortuous rationalizations – “Nonsensical conversations from hell” – by which they justify the months of rioting to which, it’s fair to say, last week’s rumble at the Capitol was in large part a response.

But let’s be clear on something, here:

Where Blame Is Due

The blame for the Capitol riot goes to the rioters, and those, up to and including the President, who fomented it. No way around it.

But it didn’t happen in a vacuum.

Progressivism – with its habit of hamfisted power that rules by turning people against each other – was the fuel for the fire, not only last week but behind our society and country’s downward arc this past few decades.

And like all fires, it needs a spark and air to start burning.

We’ll come back to that next.

A democracy can not survive if people do not trust its institutions – the law enforcment, courts, voting systems, education, and the media that is ostensibly charged with keeping government accountable.

Hold that thought.

On March 4, 2017 – six or so weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration – a Republican event in the rotunda at the Capitol in Saint Paul was crashed, literally, by a group of “Anti”-Fa. They hit an elderly woman in the head with a smoke bomb, one of the “men” in the group punched a seventeen-year-old girl in the face, and they pepper sprayed a group of Republicans who had the termerity to fight back.

It was low-grade terrorism – trying to shut down one’s opposition with violence.

The offenders – including “Woody” Kane, son of Hillary Clinton’s VP nominee, Tim Kane – got off too lightly for it to be called a slap on the wrist. More like DFL loyalist John Choi whispering “slap” at Kane’s wrist while giving him a back rub.

Think a Republican would have gotten off so lightly maliciously attacking Democrats?

Jacob Frey all but gave “Anti”-Fa an engraved invitation to attack Republicans at the various Trump rallies in Minnesota; the hospitality apparently convinced them to stay around and burn the place in the bargain.

In the meantime, utterly peaceful groups like the GOP National Convention and the Tea Party were actively oppressed.

It’s not just the Twin Cities, of course; while there’s a broad sense of disquiet at Trump’s post-election behavior, the same people who insist Trump ordered the riot at the Capitol (hint: give us a pointer to the time-mark in a video. We’ll wait) are utterly silent about Nancy Pelosi’s ongoing, onanistic fantasies about violence about Republicans, uppermost among those of many, many other Democrats.

Bring this up in the context of law week’s Capitol riot, and you’re accused of “whataboutism”.

False.

The point isn’t “Democrat do it too”.

The point is, if we can’t trust our institutions to hold everyone accountable, by the merits of the case rather than their politics, how is a free society supposed to survive?

Jenn at Redhead Rambling comments along similar lines:

The left hasn’t bothered to look into why 73 million people cast their vote for Donald Trump this election. I don’t know if they don’t care, or they don’t want to know the answer or if they assume deplorables are so beneath them it’s simply not worth the effort. Not all 73 million of those votes came from people like the ones who breached the Capitol. Most of them came from regular people, even if they won’t admit it to you.

It would behoove the left to figure out why because the midterms are fast approaching and shit like this ^ will impact that vote.

In the USA we govern by laws, laws meant for everyone to follow, not just the deplorables and the peons. We actually expect people like Nancy Pelosi and Chris Cuomo to follow the same rules and laws they expect us to follow. It’s actually one the things that makes this a pretty awesome country.

One would logically suspect that even the most blinkered Blue-stater would realize that without a nation, they really have no meaningful power.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this scene last week:

I first started paying serious attention to politics in about 1980. Like a lot of high school kids, then and now, I was somewhere out on what would be called “the left”; I wrote a platform for North Dakota Boys State (a statewide mock government program put on by the decidedly conservative American Legion) that called for systematic redistribution of wealth, abolishing nuclear energy and nuclear disarmament, and a whole bunch of stuff that would be pretty mainstream among the Bernie Bros today.

Three years later, due to the good graces of my English professor, Dr. Jim Blake, I had re-evaluated most of my assumptions. I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984, and never really looked back.

And I had no reason to. None of us did. Although the history books, all being written from the perspective of the Left, will never admit it, the two decades from 1980 to 2000 were, objectively, the last American Golden Age. I’ll squeak out an optimistic coda and add “so far”, but I’ll be honest – I haven’t been feeling it, but I’m a firm believer in acting like you want to feel, and so there is is. “So far”.

I’ll come back to that.

There’s no denying it was one of the high points of American history. We led an economic surge that brought more wealth to more people than any in history. We, as a nation, led a political surge that led to the collapse of one of the most evil regimes in history (although not the other one – so far).

Maybe it’s just the perspective of one guy’s lifetime – but I suspect you’d have to look long and hard to find a place and time when it was generally better to be a human.

Not just in material terms, but in terms of the tension between freedom and order, one of the hardest things about running a self-governing society, being in relative balance – and, more importantly, the general commitment to the system and process that kept all those moving parts in balance.

And it’s been downhill from there.

The arc from Morning in America in 1980 to last week’s skirmish at the Capitol – which, loathe as I am to come even close to Democrat chanting points, was a form of coup, not against President-Elect Biden, but against the states’ constitutional power to select electors – peaked…somewhere in the late ’90s – when one of the glories of the American system, gridlocked government, combined with a Peace Dividend brought about by the end of the Cold War (thanks, President Reagan), led to an outburst of technological, entrepreneurial and market power that brought so much wealth, and security, and general well-being, to so many people that it may have been as close to a uptopia, in some ways, as humanity can get. Because of the gridlock in government.

Somewhere between 1998 and 2005, things started to turn back south again. It’d be easy to point to the polarization of American politics, starting with the various Clinton scandals, through the fiasco of the 2000 election, the near-decade of squabbling over the War on Terror and the 2008 government-caused financial meltdown, as the cause – but it went in parallel with a lot of other changes in our nation’s political, moral and social lives that have led to their…

…I was going to say “culmination” last week at the Capitol. But of course, that’s not true. Last week’s sorry episode was, like last summer’s riots, and the social back and forth that gave us Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Trump himself, and the movements that supported them all in a way that was increasingly “un-American” (I’m still claiming a meaning for that term), and if you think that was the peak, or trough, or any sort of ending to the story, you just haven’t paid attention to 20,000 years of human nature.

So let’s not call it a culmination. Let’s call it a checkpoint, on a path that may be going up, or down, but control over which We The People need to take before the phrase “We The People” is forever relegated to the museum.

How have we gotten from the peak of Western Civilization to…this, in my adult lifetime?

Let’s talk about it.

We’ll start with President Trump, next.

But we’re damn sure not going to finish with him.

Here’s Minnesota governor, transcribed from a “virtual fundraiser“:

“ They are using this as a way to try to divide us along cultural lines, along ethnic lines“

Clearly the DFL has a problem in greater Minnesota; look at the results of the last three or four elections. The DFL is losing, not gaining, traction among those whom Governor Klink refers to as “rocks and cows“

Let’s translate this.

In 2018 Governor Klink threw “Greater Minnesota” under the bus and french-kissed the Metro Progressives to get into power.

In 2020, the DFL is all but extinct outside the Metro – and his hamfisted, incomptetent Covid quarantine has disproportionally affected Greater MN. Klink has to try to make inroads in what could be a pretty monolithic GOP vote outside the Twin Cities, because the Metro vote alone may not be enough.

The Minnesota State Legislator is back in session today.

Things to be thankful for: this time six months ago, I fully expected the GOP to lose the Minnesota Senate. The good guys held on by one vote, and actually cut the DFL’s margin in half in the House, meaning the good guys might see some progress – if only some floor votes forcing vetos by Governor Klink, to be bandied about in the 2022 elections. Which is a start.

Is it enough to shut down Governor Klink’s emergency powers? Well, we’ll see. More on that later.

If you’re a gun owner ? I talk here with Rob Doar and Bryan Strawser of the MN Gun Owners Caucus about the outlook for this session, and by extension the next one, and the 2022 campaign season.

By the way – if you’re a Minnesota gun owner, or even just sympathetic with civil rights in general you need to be supporting the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus. If nothing else, get on the mailing list – we excel at bringing the civil, rhetorical biblical-level wrath down on legislators when a gun bill comes out, and to be honest it’s fun being on the side of righteous fury once in a while.

Do it!

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, I’ll be talking with a disgruntled Minnesota teacher who goes by the social media handle “DisgruntledMNTeacher”. We’ll be talking about why they’re disgruntled.

That, and my continuous mission to diagnose Big Left.

Join me from 1-3PM on AM1280

To: The City of Saint Paul
From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re: Scruples

Dear Co’SP

Huh.

OK. Now do Saint Paul and Minneapolis teachers with Che Guevara stickers or t-shirts, or any other Hammer-and-Sickle-wear.

TIA.

People who invested their lives and fortunes, who filled out forms and jumped through hoops, who passed background checks and credit checks and character checks, people who pay wages and taxes and fees and support the local schools, are dirty, rotten, low-down criminals who ought to be thrown in the hoosegow.  Keith Ellison is all over it.

From the article: “Two more courts have recognized the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and the firm legal foundation of the State’s legitimate interest in putting a stop to it,” Ellison said.

Somehow, I doubt that. I’d bet a brand-new nickel the court didn’t listen to one minute of testimony from anybody about the Covid virus, its infectiousness or its fatality rate to determine whether Covid was actually a severe problem or not.  And I seriously doubt there was extensive briefing on the rational basis between the alleged problem and the Governor’s solution, which is the Constitutional standard for government restrictions that take away a vested property right.  Governor Walz’ restrictions are so arbitrary, so whimsical, so ridiculous that even the New York Times had to admit they were unscientific and bizarre.  I’d be surprised if a court found differently.

Instead, my guess is the court simply presumed the order was a valid exercise of executive power and like the Red Queen, skipped the trial to go directly to punishment.  As long as Democrats refuse to return power to the elected representatives of the people, Ellison will use the infinite power of the state to crush business owners, the courts will lie back and let him, and Minnesotans will continue to suffer.

When the political process is unavailing, the judicial system is unavailing, and the result is unjust, what’s the remedy?

Joe Doakes

Whatever it is, let’s f*****g get on with it.

To: Mike Lindell, Likely Gubernatorial Candidate
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Conservative Peasant
Re: Love Your Pillows. Don’t Love Your Rhetoric.

Mike,

For someone who wants to represent the party of liberty, the rule of law as opposed to the rule of men, and rationality, this is a really terrible look:

Look @dougducey you made the list and your crooked buddy @BrianKempGA! @realDonaldTrump please impose martial law in these 7 states and get the machines/ballots! https://t.co/GXWkRtHlRW

— Mike Lindell (@realMikeLindell) December 20, 2020

Now yes, you did delete the tweet – but nobody’s fast enough to get past the DFL’s oppo researchers and media. But I repeat myself.

Berg’s 16th Law exists for a reason. While a prominent elected Democrat can beat the snot out of his girlfriend with impunity, anything rash, impudent, ill-timed, context-mangled or yes, stupid, said by any Republican, anywhere, no matter how fringe, how isolated from power or the mainstream (which doesn’t describe Lindell, obviously), will be reported to the widest audience possible, in the least flattering context that can be engineered, and held against the entire part.

Love the pillows, Mike – but think.

That is all.