This past weekend the Strib went after the Minnesota Political Class’s elephant in the room:  what’s the problem with Minneapolis?

I’m not going to do a bunch of pull quoting – I’m not going to pay, and the piece was pretty much meh.  

But I’ve found another problem;  when you try to discuss the collapse of Minneapolis with people under, say, 45, it quickly becomes clear – they have no idea what Minneapolis, the Twin Cities and the state declined from.   

When I moved here in 1985, Minnesota was an economic, cultural and technological powerhouse. It was a destination – which was a big part of the reason I moved here.  

Let’s recount what we’ve lost

In 1984, Minnesota was a legit competitor to Silicon Valley. The top two supercomputer companies – the highest tech of the time – were here, spinoffs from a Cold War defense industry that was a national destination and made MN a tech leader.

It wasn’t just defense. In the ’90s, Minnesota had the densest concentration of medical R&D in the world. Hundreds of companies in biotech, medical devices, bio-engineering and every other corner of medical technology sprang up here; it was called “Medical Alley” for a long time. This concentration of money, technology, infrastructure and talent made the state a business hub. “Wait”, you say, “MN still has a lot of Fortune 1000s!” Sure. Headquarters. But 3M used to have plants all over the place, bringing manufacturing jobs and middle class incomes to places like the *East Side of Saint Paul*. Honeywell, Ford, 3M, Ecolab, Medtronic, Whirlpool and countless other companies used to BUILD things here. And it wasn’t just business – although we’ll come back to that.

Minnesota was a cultural center, too. Everyone remembers Prince; many remember Flyte Time – Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and some of the biggest hits of the era; some of us recall when the Twin Cities were a hotbed of *all* kinds of music, pop and punk and what later become grunge.

And it wasn’t just  music; in the ’80s, MN was the greatest concentration of theater outside NYC, and we punched WAY above our weight in other performing arts – everything from dance to standup comedy.

And there was a film industry – one that actually employed a lot of people, full time, doing Hollywood production for MN prices.

That’s all gone now.

Some of it was external: the Cold War ended, so the big defense companies (Sperry, Burroughs, CDC, Honeywell) downsized. Technology changed, so Cray, ETA and 3M followed suit. NAFTA moved some of the manufacturing elsewhere.

But tax policy was exporting jobs long before NAFTA. 3M started shifting R&D and headquarters to TX in the ’80s; the film industry succumbed to a DFL tax grab in the ’90s, and disappeared overnight. And as to the rest of MN’s cultural scene?

There’s a reason places develop thriving artistic cultures, and it’s got little to do with artists. Look at every flourishing of ANY art, anywhere, throughout history; they all coincide with places and times where there was enough surplus wealth to support that talent.

Broadway didn’t create a wealthy NYC; it was the opposite.

Minneapolis in the 70s-80s was like that – a place with lots of people with extra time and money to support talented people doing cool stuff, and who were inclined to participate in great things. In 1986, Fodors Travel Guides called the Twin Cities “the Athens of the 20th Century”. Hyperbolic, perhaps – but not all wrong, either. Nobody’s said anything of the sort in almost 30 years. We’re just another Midwestern city now.

People like the Strib columnist, and people who take the Strib seriously, are saying we’re “witnessing the birth of a new city – different from the old one, but just as good in its own way.   

Maybe. Sure.

But cities and cultures don’t happen because of wishes. They are responses to economics, policy and demographics. So ask yourself this: Do this state’s current policies foster creation of things – cardiac catheters, R&B records, naval cannon, software, scotch tape, and the ultimate vote of confidence for the future, families?

Or is it just a bunch of people in buildings, just consuming goods and services?   And I’m not just talking welfare stacks – the “walkable city” is nothing but a vision for how people consume goods and services – a genial fantasy that never includes offices, warehouses, repair shops, utilities – or schools, playgrounds or kids.  

Because that determines the city and state you get. MN has become a consumer, not creator, culture.

That’s a problem.

This fall and winter – when the Minnesota fraud story finally broke nationwide – has been a long time coming. 

As has been a broad realization, at least among modestly independent media, that the Twin Cities media is exactly what we’ve been saying it is for the past 20-odd years:

“The Minnesota Star Tribune masquerades as a newspaper,” New York Post columnist Miranda Devine posted on X. “It’s actually a Democrat front, hiding news, twisting facts, lying outright. One of the worst in the country.”

Additionally, the paper’s CEO is Steve Grove, who served as Gov. Tim Walz’s former commissioner of employment and economic development, which has sparked criticism from some who say that the paper is hesitant to pin Walz to the fraud crisis. 

Fox News Digital spoke to several locals who argued that media outlets either didn’t cover the scandal thoroughly enough or, in cases where it was covered, Walz’s oversight role was downplayed.

“The Minnesota Star Tribune has proven itself to be nothing more than communist fish wrap,” Republican House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who represents Minnesota 6th Congressional District, told Fox News Digital. 

 

A free, independent press – the one they envisioned when they wrote the First Amendment – is one of the things that makes self-government above the “tribe” level possible.  

Maybe we’ll get one of those in Minnesota someday.  

The Strib has run three pieces on the past few weeks pondering who paid for Rick Kupchella’s “A Precarious State” – which lays out the state of Minnesota’s decay, and lays much of it at the feet of the Minneapolis and legislative “Democrat Socialists of America”.  

Who’s paying for Kupchella to put the facts out?

My question is:  who’s paying the Strib to cover them up?

OK, I have another question that I’ve been asking of Kupchella’s many left-wing critics:  which fact presented are in error?

Other than “who funded it?” (who cares, if the facts are correct?), the closest I’ve gotten to an answer is “it’s one-sided”.  To which I respond “so is the flat-earth debate.  That doesn’t mean one side is wrong”.  

You be the judge:

“Haha! The FBI says there’s no evidence that Taylor Robinson was a member of any group! That means the killing of Charlie Kirk was non-political!”
So here’s an incomplete list of politically or socially-with-plenty-of-politics-motivated spree killers, terrorists and assassins who *weren’t affiliated with any group*:

• John Wilkes Booth
• Charles Guiteau
• Leon Czolgosz
• Lee Harvey Oswald
• Luigi Mangione
• Richard Reid
• Elias Rodriguez
• Nidal Hasan
• Ted “Unibomber” Kaczinski
• Ryan Routh
• Dylan Root
• Vance Boelter
• Payton Gendron
• Anibal Hernandez-Santana
• Every rioter at the Capitol on January 6
• Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik,
• Thomas Crooks
• Mauricio Garcia
• Micah Xavier Johnson
• Ryan Palmeter
• Robert “Robin” Westman
• Anderson Lee Aldrich
• Audrey “Aiden Williams” Hale
• Omar Mateen

And, let’s be honest, Timothy McVeigh, who *had* been part of a group, of which he and Terry Nichols were pretty much the two remaining members.
The problem is, it’s a big country with a lot of people with mental health issues, and when you spend enough time and effort telling unstable people that “speech is violence” and that some inscrutable murky sinister evil force is going to “erase” you/destroy democracy/steal your future/commit “genocide”/are “Nazis” or “fascists” – people against whom we fought a life or death war two generations ago – eventually someone’s going to connect the dots and start shooting people.

And if you ARE part of a group whose goal is to destabilize society, having people who *aren’t* in your group do the dirty work is a feature, not a bug.

So don’t believe the hype.

I don’t wish anyone trouble with their jobs.  

And that includes the poor saps who work at the Strib’s printing plant. 

Well, worked.  Or will have worked…:

I mean, the schnooks in the plant don’t set the editorial policy.  They’re not the ones painting Ilhan Omar’s toenails in the boardroom, or telling Rochelle Olson what hit pieces to write.  

So I’m sorry about the jobs, guys ‘n gals. 

But if it’s another step on the Strib’s road to extinction?  That’s a silver lining.  

The paper will be printed in Iowa – presumably the day before it reaches the newsstands (or wherever you get paper papers these days – I dunno).  

Next stop Mississippi.  

Anyway – turns out the late Nick Coleman may have been right about something.  I wasn’t rooting for the demise of the Strib back when he was accusing us bloggers of doing that. 

But I sure am now.  

When Jim Smorada was teaching me how to write the news, he taught the same cliche every other journo student and cub reporter gets:  do the who, what, when, where, why and how of the story.

So I caught this yesterday:

And I thought – maybe it’s just the social media intern doing a terrible job of clubbing and burying the lede?

So I looked into the story proper:

Brooklyn Park Police said a crowd gathered for a cultural event had to be dispersed Saturday evening due to people trying to force their way into a stadium.

According to police, officers were working at Park Center Senior High on Brooklyn Boulevard, where a cultural event was taking place.

Police said a crowd had gathered outside the event, which then began to try and force their way into the school district’s facilities.

 

So let’s break it down:

Who:  A crowd, and “people”.  Who?  What people? 

What:  A “cultural event”.  What culture?  What event?

When: Saturday evening.  

Where:  Park Center High, in Brooklyn Park.   

Why: Uhh… 

How:  With…er, “force” apparently.   

And this is the Five – the  least PC-whipped of the local TV stations.  

(Hat tip to Bill Glahn, who had the same idea). 

A leftist murders two Jews in DC. Big Left staged riots in LA and (almost, again) Minneapolis.  

The mainstream media attacks…

…well, who do you think?

“White Supremacist” group membership dropped by an order of magnitude every generation over 100 years from millions in the 1920s to the single-digit thousands in 2016. 

But we’re to believe that, now, all of a sudden, it’s because they think they won?

Compare and Contrast:

The number of people in “white supremacist” groups dropped by an order of magnitude every generation from 1916 to 2016, from millions down into the single digit thousands. 

News media:  “Meh”.

Today:

News media: “It’s because they think they won“. 

No matter how much you hate the media, it’s not enough.

Tony Snow dies.

Democrat “Influencers”:  “Hah!  Conservative puppet had it coming!

Ronald Reagan dies.

Democrat “Influencers”:  “Hah!  The only good thing he ever did was die!”

No, really:

Jerry Falwell dies.

Democrat “lnfluencers”:  Although we believe in neither God nor Hell, he’s certainly going to one and not the other!

George HW Bush dies.

Democrat “lnfluencers”:  Good riddance!

Steve Scalise almost dies.

Democrat “lnfluencers”:  “OK, that’s one semi-automatic rifle we can make an exception for!”

Rush Limbaugh dies.

Democrat “lnfluencers”: “The world is a better place today!”

Trump survives two assassination attempts.

Democrat “lnfluencers”: “Maybe there’ll be a third try!

Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis revealed:

Conservatives:  “He was a lousy president, but also a human.  I pray for a recovery”.

Democrat “Influencers”: “Don’t you dare politicize this man’s illness!”

Literally, hundreds of them, mostly identical, in the past 24 hours.

But while I have no desire the politicize this, I would like to medicalize it:

If the medical staff actually missed this cancer., in one of the most examined people on earth for the past four years, then it’s pretty epic malpractice.

If they didn’t, then this is yet another coverup. 

So why now?

To draw attention away from the utterly damning Hur recordings?

This was recorded shortly after 10/7 – a geopolitical moment when the western world needed a President, not an auto-pen.  

It hardly bears saying that if it weren’t for double standards, the DFL would have no standards at all. 

But does anyone seriously think that if someone used AI to make and circulate a caricature of Melissa Hortman, Brion Curran or Erin Maye Quade capturing all the “crazy woman” cliches that this one does…

…of Republican rep Krista Knudson, it’d launch an army of femiminsts and “feminists” into paroxysms of rage?

Entire Twin Cities media and left (ptr) last week:  “A graduate student, one of America’s best and brightest, was snatched away in the middle of the night by ICE for exercising free speech!  They could come come for any of us, citizen or not!”

Waiting period specified in statute passes:

Not sure it ever fails. 

Which is why we call ’em “laws”. 

When I started this blog, 23 years ago this month, I had a few assumptions about politics:

• Minneapolis was as crazy as it was ever going to get
• If you told me CD8 would ever vote Republican, I’d have said you were certifiable
• Big media – from the Strib and MPR to the NYTimes and WaPo – were on a sluice-track to being Pravda, and nothing was going to change that. 

I was wrong about all of them – including at least part of that third bullet: Jeff Bezos, whose Washington Post has for the past 15 years considered Jennifer Rubin “conservative”, frankly shocked me just a tad. Read the whole thing.

Am I cynical enough to wonder what the “but” is?  Hell yeah.  If Jennifer Rubin was “conservative”, maybe Robert Reich is “pro free market” and Fareed Zakaria is a “personal liberty” guy.  Who knows?

But conservative-ish populism seems to be gaining ground in our culture -and maybe, just maybe, dragging some institutions with it. 

More later in the week. 

I’m old enough to remember when Rolling Stone was vividly counter-culture.

But only barely .

Read this piece on Amy Klobuchar.

Pressed for a message to viewers, the Democratic senator cited her own disenfranchised feelings since the inauguration, saying it’s important, “To not give up, to not look down [and] to not end up in The Container Store like I did for three weekends in a row cause I decided I wanted to bring order to my life.”

Klobuchar added that one interaction in particular at The Container Store made her feel less alone in her frustrations. “This constituent comes up and says, ‘I know why you’re here,’ the senator reccounted. “It’s cause you feel like everything’s out of control and you’re trying to control it.”

Klobuchar told a similar story in a recent podcast interview with The Daily Beast. As the publication notes, the four-term senator “was on the hunt for baskets to organize her coffee and tea collection—and, in retrospect, the broader sense of satisfaction that comes with things being the way they’re supposed to be.”

 

Am I the only one who thinks is reads like an ad for the Container store woven not-all-that-cleverly into a piece on Klobuchar’s (checks notes) stunnng courageous boss-lady journey over the past month?

Does she need to moisturize, with all the tongue-baths she gets from BIg Media?

…don’t you dare claim there’s intrinsic bias in Twin Cities media:

So many ways to word that:  “uphold federal immigraiton law”, “stop abuse of the healthcare system”, “drop non-qualified non-citizens from taxpayer-funded healthcare”, among others.

But they just have to imply malice.  

You think you hate the media enough?  You…well, you know where this goes, right?

Star-Tribune, 2020:  Crippling mass layoffs due to knee-jerk government response to Covid.   Economy in the tank.  Governor Klink sics his pet Soros Attorney General on dissenters, declares emergency power, sets up a snitch line. 

Star Tribune:   <Crickets>

Star Tribune, 2025:  A pulse:

I keep saying “you don’t hate the media enough”.   I’m trying to figure out a way to convey that idea without wearing it out.

Margaret Brennan has emerged in this past few months as the poster girl for all that is stupid and depraved about our “elites”. 

But even I didn’t think she’d go here…:

Stupid reporter?

Or a natural progression of the whole “free speech is bad” thing that elites were pushing during a campaign where the Democrats were opposing it?

Why choose?

I’ve spoken with a few Twin Cities journalists about their complete collapse (I’ll be charitable, as to “collapse” there would have needed to be some actual intent to cover the issue) in re the coverage of Tim Walz (not to mention Ilhan Omar) over this past six years and, for that matter, the Legislative DFL over this past week.

Adjectives fail me, of course; disgraceful, pusillanimous. fawning, obsequious, impotent?

An abomination against whatever “Journalism” was supposed to be?

So on the chance that any Twin Cities journos (outside the half dozen or so that do seem to try to do the job) are tuned in – I present this as a lesson on how interviewing a politician is supposed to be done:

Now, this isn’t a journo – its a member of London’s city legislative body. 

But when I heard it, I thought “if this is a journalist interviewing politician about an important issue, this is how it’s supposed to be done.

Reporter from the Star-Tribune questions Minneapolis Police Department assistant chief Katie Blackwell about the dozens of MPD cops who swore out affadavits that she perjured herself about Maximum Restraint Technique (MRT) during the Chauvin trial:

Just kidding.  It was Liz Collin, from Alpha.   A conservative news organization, which does most of the actual “journalism” in this town.

The list of stories the MSM won’t touch until shamed into it by local conservative media, or naitonal/international media, or both, just keeps getting longer. 

In fact, it deserves a list of its own. 

Stay tuned. 

One of the more satisfying stories of this past year was watching the accelerating decay of the mainstream media’s influence over society.

And this was one of my favorite examples:

Watching the orwellian “Joy” campaign get pelted with rhetorical rocks and garbage by the commoners was one of the greatest, er, joys I’ve had, at least politically, in recent years.

Am I the only one that heard about Taylor Lorenz’s “Joy” at the murder of Brian Thompson…

…and thought “that certainly puts a new spin on the Harris campaign’s theme?”

• Freedom is slavery?
• 2+2=5?
• Murder is joy?

One “joy” I try to deny myself is excessive schadenfreud. Pinky swear.

But I’ll confess, I feel quite a bit of it seeing Lorenz’s sociopathic level of self-unawareness splashed about the place:

Less schadenfreud, Mitch.  Less schadenfreud. 

Paul Krugman is leaving the NYTimes. 

Podhoretz sums up my thoughts on the matter.

I can’t speak for Krugman’s career as an economist – I wish King Banaian was still blogging, and hopefully he’ll talk about this in his show one of these days. 

As for me? Fact-checking Krugman – the guy who said the Internet was a passing fad – has been a fairy steady pastime on this blog for a long, long time.

So while his retirement leaves me with one less source of material, [1], it is enough for today to rejoice in the fact that for a moment, America will be incrementally less dumb by omission.

[1] Although the Cano Corollary to Berg’s 21st Law warns us to not celebrate too hard: ” “blue” never gets “lighter” or less “progressive”.  There is only one electoral direction – more “progressive”. While written about elections, the New York Times would seem to be germane.

NPR’s token Aztlani, Maria Hinojosa, yelling “SLAY, QUEEN GIRLBOSS!” as Mexico’s socialist female president briefly flexed on Trump’s border plans:

How it’s going:

Yep. The whole world witnessed it:

It’s always the food photos with Governor Klink.

Only this time it’s not Pronto Pups:

Huh. For the past two years, we’ve been told Minnesota’s economy is boooooooming.

Now that a Republican is president-elect, the GOP will own Congress, and the DFL trifecta is dead…well, you see how this works.

So let’s translate this from MSM to English: “Governor who claimed MN economy was booming and promised to “reduce poverty 30%” by squandering a $19B surplus, now trying to get ahead of zooming poverty by spending >1% of what DFL constituents defrauded in “Feeding our Future”.

Liek this “legal note” – aka “bit of emergency ass-covering from the legal department” – that Sunny Hostin was forced to read on The View lest Matt Gaetz sue them for slander.

The pain was visible.

And glorious. 

And I don’t think they’re done.

To:  Brian Stelter, CNN
From:  MItch Berg, obstreporous peasant
Re:   Brendan Carr

Mr. Stelter,

You tweeted this about Brendan Carr, President-Elect Trump’s pick to head the FCC:

Just curious – what is it you think Carr is wrong about?

That is all.