It’s Quiet

A week after a massive, potentially catastrophic hurricane, and the media is fairly quiet about things.

It’s because while it was a disaster, they haven’t been able to pin anything on Ron DeSantis.

They’ve tried. Oh, Lord, they’ve tried.

But the attacks have bounced off like lawn darts off an M1 Abrams. Even the complete fabrications squibbed:

So come on, Dems. If you think you’re gonna convict Trump of something, do it, so DeSantis can sweep unopposed to the nom in 2024.

In Cold, Alcohol-Thinned, Probably Mentally Ill Blood

UPDATE: Welcome, fellow Power Line fans!


Let’s talk about Cayler Ellingson.

Berg’s 18th Law” says that after any politically and emotionally fraught event – mass shootings, police killings, riots, pretty much any event over which people disagree – we need to wait at least 72 hours before taking anything we hear seriously from the media, since they will be more interested in scooping the competition than getting facts straight. I made an executive decision to stretch that deadline to a full week, since on a good day the mainstream media might know how to find North Dakota on a map.

Here are the things we know after a couple weeks:

  1. After a street dance in McHenry, ND (population 64) on September 18, an extended altercation of some sort happened between the 18 year old Ellingson and 41 year old Shannon Brandt, of nearby Glenfield (population 94).
  2. After a back-and-forth that went long enough for Ellingson to call his mother several times to ask for a ride home, Brandt hit Ellingson with his truck, and drove home.
  3. Brandt, who has a DUI and some other low-level crimes on his record, was arrested there a few hours later, intoxicated. Ellingson died shortly after.
  4. While being interviewed later, he said he thought Ellingson was an “Extremist Republican” who was calling friends to come and get him.
  5. The Foster County [1] prosecutor (They’re called “states attorneys“ in North Dakota) initially charged Brandt with vehicular homicide, and released him on $50K in bail.

This – and a complete absence of coverage in mainstream media outside North Dakota – led to a tsunami of anger in conservative media, based around two points:

  • the charges and bail seemed ridiculously lenient – and, according to some, politically so.
  • the media coverage was lackadaisical, given the politics involved.

Let’s talk about both.


On the show, I pushed back on the first point; the job of Foster County’s State’s Attorney Kara Brinster is to bring charges she and her (tiny [2]) office can prove beyond a reasonable doubt given the evidence they have, without regard to public opinion or pressure. My theory – Brandt’s statement made “Criminal Vehicular Homicide” a slam dunk right away the morning after Ellingson’s death. Anything beyond that would take investigation – and the States Attorney has all the time they need to do that. The national criticism – up to and including Tucker Carlson – apparently didn’t faze Brinster. She investigated, got the evidence she needed, and had Brandt re-arrested on murder charges. He’s being held in the Stutsman County Jail [3]. If convicted of murder, he could get life without parole.

Some think it happened because of the national attention. I say BS – Brinster ignored the media (none of whom came within 100 miles of the story, literally) and did her job. Keith Ellison should so as well [4]. Criminal justice everywhere should be as lucky.

As to calling the original charge, and (statutory) bail, politically motivated? That’s a good way to show you have no idea about North Dakota politics. It’s perhaps the most conservative state in the union. Trump won by 30 points – and most of the Democrats live within ten miles of the Minnesota border; the Democrats who live west of ND Highway 1 would fit into two booths at Kroll’s Diner in Minot. State’s Attorney Brinster was elected in a county that likely voted 3:1 for Republicans.

So let’s park those allegations in the back 40 and let them quietly rust away.


Now let’s talk about the politics that are involved.

I’m not even talking about the fairly trite point – if a Republican had run down an 18 year old Democrat, it’d be national news, with commentators furrowing their brows and declaiming about tribalism and right-wing violence., regardless of the actual facts.

That’s a given; it’s background scenery with today’s media.

But let’s focus on the details of this case.

Shannon Brandt, according to reports, as a reputation around Glenfield of being a little mentally ill, possibly with a bit of a drinking problem. By appearances and reports, he’s the kind of doughy but dimly malevolent loser that everyone from a small town recognizes, polishing bar stools in double-wide taverns off of two-lane roads until they get enough liquid articulation to start talking, then yelling, and so on.

So he went to a street dance, gets into a fight with a kid less than half. his age, allegedly chases him down, runs him down and kills him…

…and the first thing he thinks of to try to excuse, or get sympathy for, his action is to claim he thought his victim was an “Extremist Republican?”

Last month, in an address full of bizarre thirties-retro authoritarian imagery, President Biden called Republicans “fascists”. An awful lot of Democrats took that statement very, ebulliently, gleefully seriously; they want to believe that the other half are part of a political philsosophy against which our grandparents went to war, fighting whom 412,000 of their generation died; people that anscestors, some of the still with us, spent the best years of their lives killing.

And lo and behold, mere days later, a demented drunk, whether acting out of considered political malice or drunk and mentally ill self-preservation, picks *that* excuse to ennoble, excuse, or at least try to explain killing a human being?

Have we connected those dots yet?


[1] Trivial but topical disclosure – I lived in Foster County, briefly, while working at the radio station in the county seat, Carrington. Being a ND native, I’d imagine I know people who know both the perp and victim, and likely the county attorney and the law enforcement involved, if I asked around for thirty seconds.

[2] The population of Foster County – the whole county – was 3,231 in 2020. About 2,000 of them live in Carrington alone.

[3] Further trivial disclosure – it’s two blocks from the house I grew up in.

[4] But can’t, and won’t.

From The Horse’s Mouth

No reporter in Minnesota has covered the Feeding Our Future scandal like Bill Glahn. (Few have tried, but that’s another issue all together).

With that in mind, rather than trying to recap all the facts we know, I’m just going to attach this video of Glahn talking with John Hinderaker at the Center of the American Experiment:

It’s easy to see why Big Left has been swerving the hate machine toward the CAE lately.

Possibilities

Let’s talk about the Cayler Ellison case.

Berg‘s 18th law normally takes affect for the first three days after a politically charged event, since our main stream media is more concerned about ratings and “scoops“ than getting facts straight, especially in politically charged events.since our main stream media is more concerned about ratings and “scoops“ then about getting facts straight, especially in politically charged events.

And I’m going to make an executive call, and in this case extend the statutory Bergs 18th law deadline to a solid week, since the main stream media got no closer than 100 miles from McHenry, ND, the actual scene of the crime – i’ve seen no evidence of any journalists reporting from any place closer than Fargo.

But here’s what we know so far: at a street dance in McHenry last Sunday, some sort of altercation lead Shannon Brandt, age 41, to run down the 18-year-old Mr. Ellington. Ellington died of his injuries.

Brandt, Who has a drunk driving record and who blew over a .08 after his arrest, told of the 911 operator the afternoon that Ellingson was a member of a “extremist Republican“ organization.

Big media has soft pedaled this story. Conservatives say it’s evidence of media bias. Progressives hope it’s true, and that they can erase both another Republican and red state voter from the list.

Let’s consider the actual possibilities, Hare:

It’s The Bias, Stupid: for the past decade and a half, big media has been wedded to the idea that the next big wave of terrorism is going to be white, Republican extremists. A democrat extremist doing the actual terrorizing, much less killing? Is that – like the would-be Brent Kavanaugh assassin, or the many other examples of Democrats killing or attacking Republicans – doesn’t fit the narrative. Narratives beget lazy journalism.

But in McHenry North Dakota?

And it’s easy for journalists to get lazy when it comes to covering places like McHenry, North Dakota – in Foster County (where I lived, briefly), a very red place in one of the most Republican states in the union, a County were Donald Trump may have won by just shy of a three digit margin.

Which sets off a small warning bell with the conservative narrative: it’s easy to conceive of people roaming around looking to kill conservatives with impunity in places like Highland Park or Cambridge Massachusetts. but in rural North Dakota?

Let’s put a pin in that idea.

Of Course It’s The Bias – But Not The Bias You’re Thinking About: so let’s say that, rather than being it would be Democrat assassin roaming rural North Dakota looking for “Republican extremists“, you’re just a guy with a drunk driving record and, according to his neighbors, a history of troubling behavior. You’ve just gotten into a spat with someone less than half your age, at a street dance, and run them down.

What’s your alibi? The thing that you think that is going to make you a less unsympathetic perpetrator?

“He was a Republican extremist?“

The idea that there are people out there for whom that is their first thought, even in an alcoholic or psychiatric fog, should concern everyone, no matter what your politics.

Occam’s Shot Glass: let’s go back to the pin we put, earlier.

Brandt’s neighbors say he has a history of being, basically, nuts. He drinks a bit. He’s got a criminal record.

I don’t think I’m going to outside of Berg‘s 18th laws statutory boundaries to think perhaps this episode was both

  • Less less of a political assassination then a crazy drunk Freestyling his way into the middle of America‘s toxic political divide, and
  • Via his choice of “Republican extremist“ as his drunk/crazy excuse for having just committed a hit-and-run, a symptom of how toxic the political divide in this country actually is.

Hopefully we will find out sooner than later.

Campaigning 102

Ryan Wilson – who’s running for State Auditor, and is leading incumbent DFLer Julie Blaha in the latest Trafalgar poll on Minnesota statewide races – did a whirlwind tour of Minnesota yesterday, as recounted in this twitter thread.

Read the thread, and notice what’s missing:

At no point in the tour did he drive of the road in a cloud of White Cloud cans, like incumbent DFLer Julie Blaha and her sidekick, Melisa Franzen-Lopez. There was no need for MNGOP chair Dave Hann need to pull up to the scene in a converted Scooby Doo “Mystery Machine” and rescue Wilson from the cops.

At no point did Wilson crash and roll his vehicle leaving a trail of beer cans and ammo, like Dave Hutchinson, the retiring DFL sheriff of Hennepin County and, possibly, the only sheriff in the state that would endorse Keith Ellison.

“No driving off the road in a cloud of empties” would seem to be a low bar…

…oops.. Wrong term. Sorry.

I should say – I assume that Wilson didn’t drive off the road leaving a trail of empty beer cans. If a Republican had done any such thing, we’d have heard about it in the media. endlessly, between now and November. Sort of like when Tom Emmer’s DUI at 20 got wall to wall media coverage, Tim Walz’s at age 31 was completely ignored – that’s how I know .

Anyway – the GOP: the candidates who don’t drive off the road.

Don’t Forget

It’s about six weeks until the election. And with polls showing Governor Klink seven points up on Scott Jensen, it’s time to remind minnesotans, with their famously short attention span‘s, about what this last couple of years have been like.

The Twin Cities media desperately wants to memoryhole this episode:

Governor Klink created a three class society:

  • “Essential“ workers – people whose stores and businesses had to be kept open at all costs; grocery stores, gas stations, pretty much any big box store, and the worlds largest candy store, in Jordan, which just happens to be owned by a big DFL campaign donor.
  • “Nonessential“ workers – people who worked at frivolous hustles like oncology clinics, cardiologists, and all manner of surgeons.
  • “The Laptop Class“ – everyone who could work at home, including most government union employees. and pretty much any big box store

But then, his administration added injury to insult. while you couldn’t visit your family in hospitals or nursing homes, or whole funerals if they passed, somehow the Klink administration made a “scientific“ exception for demonstrations and riots – which, according to the “party of science“, were actually good for health, since science.

The Twin Cities media is going to go out of its way not to remind you of any of this, or of the prosecutions of business that, desperate to stay solvent, defied the ham fisted and unscientific emergency orders.

Don’t let this go down the memory hole.

No Bias Here

This is the graphic that WCCO used yesterday, to show Keith Ellison‘s 46 to 15 lead over Jim Schultz:

Er, wait…

What??

It’s actually a 46 to 40 lead, with a margin of error considerably more than the gap?

Look, it’s possible that the station that keeps putting Esmé Murphy on political stories might not be trying to logroll Republican voters into staying home, especially in this, the race against one of the most vulnerable DFL politicians in Minnesota, the George Soros/Michael Bloomberg funded Ellison.

And if someone would care to explain how, I’ll be happy to move on.

Diligence!!!

They’ve been in office a combined total of thousands of years.

Two months before the midterm elections, the three of them erupt in a spurt of tweeting about needing to reform congressional stock trading laws.

Gosh, I wonder why?

The good news for the three of them? This is the last that will be heard of it. Because they are DFLers.

Out There With All Those 19 Year Old Cooks

The Twin Cities media did its darndest to make the story go away.

But Tom Behrends – retired Command Sergeant Major in the Minnesota in National Guard unit, and the man who replaced former provisional CSM Tim Walz in that position when our current governor abruptly left the guard to run for Congress, a departure that just happened to coincide with a deployment to which he had committed – is speaking out again.

And this time he’s really angry.

The riots of 2020 – especially the burning of the third precinct – confirmed everything Behrends tried to warn us about:

“Allowing that to be burned down was just like having the Alamo be burned down. It was like, you defend that to the last man,” Behrends said of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct.

“If he would have went to Iraq, he’d still be hiding under his desk over there because that’s just, you know, just the cowardice that I see portrayed with him,” Behrends added.

Walz’s August 2020 description of National Guard members as “19-year-old cooks” added to Behrends’ anger.

“I would take any 19-year-old cook before I’d go to war with him,” he quickly replied.

“I don’t know how he could even utter such a statement. I mean, it’s just absolutely sad,” he added.

And beyond all that? Waltz is still referring to himself as a retired Command Sergeant Major.

“He was saying that and there were campaign letters coming in the mail saying that. They said, right on therehe’s a retired command sergeant major. Just tooting his own horn, hanging on the coattails of people that actually are command sergeant majors that went through all the process and put all the time in,” Behrends said…Documents show the Army corrected Walz’s service record. He was reduced in rank to an E-8 master sergeant after retirement.

And yet there it is:

The media is going to memory hole this story – just like they did before:

A spokesperson said this has been in the news before and pointed Alpha News to a past story where Walz said “normally this type of partisan political attack only comes from one who’s never worn a uniform.”

Like stories about Mark Dayton‘s physical and mental health – which reported on in the most cursory way possible, nine months before anyone was paying attention to the 2010 election – nothing that reflects badly on a DFL politician will be allowed for the next 60 days.

You should read the whole thing, and pass it around, since God knows the Star Tribune and MPR aren’t going to do it.

Just The News!

The “MN Reformer” is yet another effort to start a news organization by progressive plutocrats with deep pockets – because after the Minnesota Monitor, the Minnesota Independent and MNPost, certainly the fourth time’s the charm.

They’ve actually done some decent reporting over the last year.

Emphasis on “in the last year” – when there wasn’t an election on the way.

But there is.

The Reformer ran an op-ed by Dr. Hannah Lichtsinn calling for the state medical authorities to revoke Dr. Scott Jensen’s medical license. Jensen is, by the way, the GOP candidate for Governor. He’s also been an out-front skeptic of our state’s hamfisted, tyrannical public health response.

Neither the op-ed, the Reformer’s bio-blurb about Dr. Lichtsinn, nor any of the Reformer’s social media traffic makes any mention of any political bent that she might have.

Anecdotally – and I’m the one with the anecdote, here – Dr. Lichtsinn has been pretty much the polar opposite of Jensen; on social media, she was a positively strident proponent of lockdowns, mandates of every kind, and draconian enforcement.

And the reason for that is, she’s every bit as much a Democrat activist with portfolio as she is a doctor:

It’d be fair to say that, when not playing nice and empirical in op-eds intended to be marketed to the unconvinced center, she’s a “groaningly strident” progressive

Apparently the Reformer didn’t think the reader needed to know that.

Which is why the Reformer – unlike the MN Monitor and the MN Independent before it – bothered with all that “decent reporting” last year; to put up a veneer of legitimacy around what was intended to be yet another DFL PR operation during the 2022 campaign season.

WaPo: “Poor, Poor, Pitiful We”

The problem with “mass shootings” is there are just too many of the to cover ZOMG!

“Agonizing decisions”.

We’ll come back to that.

Until then, let’s define our terms.

A “Mass Shooting” is any shooting with 3+ victims, whatever the motive. It might be a school rampage, true – but it also covers botched robberies, sicarios executing suspect mules, a drive-by shooting indiscriminately into a crowd sending 3-5 people to the hospital, a murder/suicide – even self-defense.

A “Spree Killing” or “Rampage Killing”‘s only motive is killing for its own sake, and no other motive – not even terrorism. It includes episodes like Uvalde, Sandy Hook ,the Buffalo grocery store, and of course one that were ended by good guys with guns before they turned into “mass shootings” (thus ensuring no media interest).

There may well have been 320 “mass shootings” – many or most of them in places like Chicago, Baltimore, Saint Louis and Newark, with a few very notable spree killings distributed among the list.

And for some reason, the “agonized decisions” seem to involve ignoring “mass shootings” where the victims don’t look like the relatives of network executives.

We Three Things

Medieval Europe saw the world as divided into three orders. Those who pray, those who fight, and those who work.

The first, those who pray, consisted of the clergy. The second, those who fight, consisted of the nobility. The third, those who work, consisted of the serfs, peasants and others who worked the land.

The orders were complementary, and each contributed to society as a whole. The workers were the economic engine and put food on the table. The Church certainly played a role in civic life, but faith was also an integral part of life and seeking God’s favor was both a Christian’s duty and desire. The nobility and the knights that came from it fought to preserve it all.

In France, these orders became known as Estates, and these Estates made up the Ancien Régime which lasted until the French Revolution.

In the 18th century, following from these institions, the Press became known as the Fourth Estate.

The appellation may have started as a witticism, but journalists, convinced of their own priesthood, eventually took it seriously.

While our national media at one time may have functioned as a watchdog, speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, our Fourth Estate has become PR flacks and gatekeepers for the side they have chosen.

Rather than complementing other sectors of society, and contributing to the whole, our Fourth Estate works against those it disagrees with, and that is not a recipe for a healthy society.

Cherry-Picked

Not to sound cynical about big media – good heavens no, not me – but when I see the New York Times reporting on active shooters, I pretty much expect their “reporting” to either lie, or to hide the accurate conclusion in plain sight.

And they’ve done that.

They include a snazzy, Edward Tufte-style graphic to explicate their case – and they reached this conclusion:

“It’s direct, indisputable, empirical evidence that this kind of common claim that ‘the only thing that stops a bad guy with the gun is a good guy with the gun’ is wrong,” said Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama, who has studied mass shootings for more than a decade. “It’s demonstrably false, because often they are stopping themselves.”

So let’s look at the graphic:

So let’s take a look at the numbers.Out of nearly 250 mass shootings that ended before the police arrived, nearly 10% ended with the assailant being shot by a “bystander“ – A “good guy with a gun“. That’s nearly 10% of spree shootings, ended before the cops arrive

(That is, of course, presuming the media actually recognizes the episode. For example, they studiously ignored this recent incident .

Even so, that is actually a tad higher than I’d have figured; given that spree killers tend to pick targets where nobody is likely to be able to resist them, and nowhere near 10% of the population at large generally carries a firearm, that’s actually a better result than one might rationally expect.

But now, let’s look at the other resolutions.

Of the 249 mass shootings that ended before the cops arrived, nearly 80% end with the killer either leaving the scene or committing suicide.

And the devil with these shootings is in the details. Some of the spree killers do leave the scenes of their crimes on their own two feet. But others “leave” because a citizen threatened them with immediate death – as in this case four years ago, where two good guys with guns changed a would-be racist spree killer’s plans, one with the threat of death, one with gunfire, causing him to run away. He was apprehended later.

One that killed himself, did it after killing two people – before a good guy pointed a gun at his head. He ran into a nearby store, and killed himself.

Or this case, where a church “security guard” (a volunteer with a carry permit) shot a spree killer who’d murdered four people already. He killed himself, it’s true – after his plan had been fatally derailed by a good gal with a gun.

So what’s my conclusion?

You can tell Big Media is lying about guns when their lips are moving, or their fingers are touching keyboards.

Same as it ever was.

Unseemly

So have you noticed how many “journalists “in the Twin Cities are doing the DFL‘s job for it?

For example, here’s WCCO TV is Esme Murphy:

What is the difference between actively propagandizing for the DFL, and referring to a cash giveaway as “Walz Checks“?

Call them a propaganda wing of the DFL. Call them the DFL‘s branding or public relations service.

Just don’t call it reporting.

The Home Team

TikTok recently knocked Buzzfeed off my list of tech entities I hate the most. It’s a long list, but the top of the field is still pretty rarified territory.

I’ve vented my disdain for Buzzfeed – the news outlet almost too stupid for Aaron Rupar to work for it – since Molly Priesmeyer declared it the future of news, fifteen years ago.

They haven’t improved much:

I should do the same thing with the Strib’s selection of op-ed writers…

Our Idiot Elite, Part MMMLCCXVII

In twenty years of first blogging and then social media, you’d think the semi-literate popsies that populate the ranks of “new big media” would have learned by now: trying to make people you disagree with sound dumb, about things you’re not especially smart about yourself, is going to backfire.

Molly Jong-Fast – a gift that keeps on giving, in the mold of Robin Marty or Jeff Fecke, but with a six-figure income – was exhibit 50,234,632,421 yesterday, in re Ted Cruz’s commentary on how schools should be designed:

I get it. Molly Jong Fast, being on the (pardon the expression) academic fast track (I kid you not – she attended “New York University, Barnard College, and Wesleyan University and completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in English at Bennington College”, which qualifies her as Central Casting Overpromoted Progressive Dimwit in one of my little satirical dramatizations, has likely never spent much time observing the mechanical and logistical details of the physical world around her.

Not just tactical security issues, like Cruz is discussing.

No, I’m talking about this little number here:

Locked from the outside under normal circumstances, easily opened from the inside under the extraordinary ones – say, the ones that would require a fire alarm anyway, like a fire.

Ring a bell?

I’m gonna go out on a short, sturdy limb and guess Jong-Fast thinks knowing about things like this is a job for a Honduran immigrant.

How Can You Tell The Strib Is Lying About Republicans?

The Star Tribune continues to earn its keep as the DFL‘s “unpaid “ PR machine:

For those of you who weren’t paying attention to the GOP convention last weekend – it hardly needs to be said, but nothing of the sort of happened.

A move to disaffiliate with the “Log Cabin Republicans” (to be fair, led by someone who has never been a fan of the notion of LGBTQ Republicans) wrapped up in a procedural motion to vote on the affiliation of each and every affiliate with the party (there are quite a few) led to the clock literally running out on the State Central Committee meeting on Thursday. For the evening, it left the affiliates unattached, and their delegates not credentialed to be seated in the convention.

The body of the convention itself reversed that action on Friday.

This squabble – largely led by a representative from the first congressional district – mirrors in large part a similar fracas a few years ago, when a group of Central committee representatives and convention delegates tried to introduce rules that would bar Muslims from holding Republican Party positions.representatives and convention delegates tried to introduce rules that would bar Muslims from holding Republican Party positions.

It’s the position of this blog that, whatever your personal beliefs about homosexuality and/or Islam, that there is very little that is more aggressively American than “coming out“ as a Republican. Not even buying a house in Burnsville, with a literal freaking picket fence surrounding your front yard.

Indeed, in many of the communities served by these affiliates – Somali, Latino‘s, African-Americans, mong and LGBTQ Dash “coming out“ as a Republican carries an affirmative social risk these are not people to be pushed away; they are frequently the toughest, most resilient Republicans there are.

People may disagree. Let’s disagree.

But let’s also focus on the things we do agree on; for example, the Star Tribune are a bunch of partisan hacks..

Sacked

I try – pinky swear – to see people as people, and not to be constantly petty and venal. We as people aren’d defined by our externalities – our jobs, politics, whatever – any more than we are by our social, ethnic or class identity.

Even less, in the great scheme of things, are they defined by the ways in which I, Mitch Berg, disagree with them.

With that out of the way?

Steve Sack is retiring from the Star Tribune.

I’m not going to say Sack is the worst editorial cartoonist in the business. It’s entirely possible there’s someone more facile, less informed, more generally blinkered by their agenda.

But among the ones I’m familiar with? I’ve almost never been a fan.

I’ll be honest – I came not to praise him, but to bury him.

Clearly, Sack’s “view of the world” is the one most DFLers are issued at graduation, and Sack’s work was more “birdcage” than fridge material. Truth be told, I often considered buying a bird specifically for Sack’s work.

And mine wasn’t the only opinion; I’m told Sack won a Pulitzer or two, which at one point not too long ago wasn’t purely self-parodic.

Anyway, Mr. Sack; all the best in your future endeavors – something I say knowing that anyone the Strib hires these days is going to make us miss your “glory days” in comparison.

Is There Anything Kristi Noem Can’t Do?

Name something a Republican governor – especially a conservative woman, given how Berg’s 16th Law works – can do that a Democratic governor can’t?

Easy – get “journalists” to report on government!

In this case, the relentlessly Democrat Sioux Falls Argus Leader:

If a Republican beats Tim Walz this fall, I suspect the Strib will develop a similar interest.

Kangaroos Everywhere

SCENE: The studio at the National Public Radio Twin Cities bureau. Mitch BERG is sitting, in headphones, in front of a microphone. Around the corner of the table is Cat SCAT, designated “fact checker” at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, she is the office manager at a small phrenology practice. Through the glass, an engineer, an assistant engineer, an editor, an editorial assistant, two associate producers, a producer, a digital producer and an executive producer sit, listening intently. Across the table from SCAT and BERG sits MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER 1: “Aaand we’re rolling”.

SILBERMAN: (Reading from a script). Thanks, Kathy. That dress is adorable, by the way. Now, we look at America’s large and growing political divide. With us today are Cat Scat, Executive Fact-Checker at the journalism site “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com”, a source of journalism and news for Minnesotans since 2008.

SCAT: Hello. Is this thing on?

SILBERMAN: And Mitch Berg, blogger and talk radio host.

BERG: Uh…yeah, hi.

SILBERMAN (Still reading from script) Since 2016, concerns about the rise of authoritarianism have swept the nation…

BERG: Er, MylLyssa? That’s not true – on either side. People on the left were concerned about a rise in populism in Europe in the early 20`0s, when, rightly or wrongly, they fretted about the rise of the Volkspartei in Germany, and Victor Orban’s Fideš party in Hungary, as well as some pretty potent Polish nationalism. In the meantime, conservatives in the US have been concerned about the politicization of the state bureaucracy, with Barack Obama weaponizing some of the tools of excessive power that George W Bush instituted during his administration’s control over the War on Terror…

(BERG stops, noticing that SILBERMAN and SCAT are glaring at him).

ASSOCIATE ENGINEER: Take two?

SILBERMAN: Yep

LEAD ENGINEER: Rolling.

SILBERMAN (Still reading from script) Since 2016, concerns about the rise of authoritarianism have swept the nation. As right-wing anti-science theocrats took charge, fomenting boog bang… (stops). we’ll cut that in the edit. (deep breath) book bans, restrictions on saying “gay”, bans on reproductive rights, and a rise in hate from the right…

PRODUCER: (breaking in on the talkback): MyLyssa – read that as “skyrocketing racial hatred from red America directed at people of color and LGBTQ+ Americans.

EDITOR: …and “women and their children”.

PRODUCER: Love it. Got that, MyLyssa?

SILBERMAN: (scribbline on script) Got it.

ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Take it from “As right wing…” (SILBERMAN nods)

ASSOCIATE ENGINEER: Three, two, one…

SILBERMAN: As right-wing anti-science theocrats took charge, fomenting book bans, restridctions on saying “gay”, and skyrocketing racial hatred from red America directed at people of color, LGBTQ+ Americans and women and their children, we want to get the views of our guests – Cat Scat, progressive journalist and activist, and Mitch Berg, right wing hatemonger.

BERG: Uhhhhh

SILBERMAN: Ms. Scat, what’s your take?

SCAT: The problem entirely started in 2016, when hatemongers took over the White House, ushering in an era of hatred for people of color, for LGBTQ+, for women’s reproductive choice, for transgender and queer folk, for demoracy itself, and replacing it with a paranoid neo-nazi ammosexual delusions of a bunch of red-state trailer-park dwelling cousin-f**king high school dropouts, which studies show the majority of red America are…

BERG: I’m gonna break in, here. Your statement is the kind of lie that gets legs of its own if you let it fester. It’s a preposterous slander of tens of millions of millions of Americans; we almost invariably are motivated not by hate, but by concern over the trashing of the parts of Western Civilization that have made us not only the free-est and most prosperous society in history – one where for the firs time ever, obesity is a bigger problem than starving to death – but more humane, especially for gays, people of color, LGBTQ+ and whomever you’re concerned about, and don’t support authoritarians, ever, in any way.

PRODUCER: What can we do with that last bit.

ENGINEER: Wait one…

(freantic computer editing)

ENGINEER: OK, here’s what we got:

(BERG’s voice, edited, in the playback): “I’m gonna break…Your…legs …we… hate… the trash…of Western Civilization…obesi…gays, people of color, LGBTQ+ and whomever you’re concerned about and…support authoritarians…in any way.

SILBERMAN: So you hate people of weight as well as POC, LGBTQ+ and Latinx people…

SCAT: You’ve been fact-cjhecked!

BERG: I did in fact record the original unedited exchange on my phone and this digital recorder.

SILBERMAN: Unfair!

PRODUCER: Chilling effect on journalism!

EDITOR: Why do you hate the free press?

And SCENE

Based, loosely but not nearly loosely enough, on an MPR piece I caught last week.

The Real Election Fraud

One out of six Biden voters would have changed their votes, had they known about the Hunter Biden laptop story. That would’ve been more than enough to turn a close election into a landslide for Donald Trump.

It’s being noted that, two years later, the New York Times is finally covering the story.

But it was never “disinformation”, nosirreebob.

The idea that this is not the plan, to say nothing of “non-accidental,“ is impossible to the point of being a media unicorn descending from heaven.

We know this, because three weeks after the election, representatives from the New York Times and Washington Post news rooms (speaking in the open, on a national public radio program), declared their mission to be to go to change the walls” of the media, from “passing on the facts and telling the story“ to “denormalizing Donald Trump“.

Do people think there is no connection?

Modern Journalism: Not Just Dead, But Rotting So Hard It’s Bubbling

The KARE Bears are “fact checking” people over, apparently, a run on iodine pills.

No, iodine pills won’t protect you from most radiation effects in a nuclear attack

Which is true as far as it goes…

..but they’re not intended to protect you from “most radiation”.

They’re intended to protect you from one particular kind of radiation – radioactive isotopes of Iodine, which are incredibly prone to getting absorbed into the body and and infiltrating the thyroid – one of the body’s most delicate and temperamental organs – and causing thyroid cancer very quickliy.

It doesn’t, and isn’t intended to, prevent the side effects of other elements of a nuclear detonation – Cesium, Strontium 90 – but then those elements are generally responsible for much longer-term effects (strontium is liked with all kinds of bone cancers)…

…and it’s irrelevant, because the article isn’t about nuclear attacks. It’s about fears in Europe over nuclear plants in Ukraine melting down while under Russian attack.

Modern “fact checkers”; they aren’t “fake news”, per se. But they are fake journalism.

More, Faster

Ron DeSantis crushes a reporter for…

…,well, doing what reporters do these days; omitting the parts of the story that need to be omitted to serve the progressives narrative about conservatives.

In this case, saying that a proposed Florida bill forbade “teaching sex Ed to Florida schoolchildren“ – when it forbids it from ages pre-K through grade 3.

Imitation

In so many areas, the Twin Cites political class loves to affect an appreciation of Scandinavian governance.

They love the interventionist social democracy, the often successful tinkering with utopian ideas (dependent, of course, on a small, wealthy society with social cohesion that doesn’t exist in American cities over 5,000), the communitarian ethos (see previous parenthetical), while ignoring the less convenient parts, the ethnic homogeneity, the history of fighting against tyrants…

…and, I suspect, this bit here:

Yep. Critical thought, on the part of the news media:

The article charges that politicians and authorities have “lied” about various aspects of the pandemic, prompting these establishments to lose the public trust, noting that the efficacy of vaccines to end the pandemic was also vastly overstated by health authorities…Ekstra Bladet’s public apology is part of a growing trend in the European media that has begun to question the narrative and the governments’ responses to it. For example, one of Germany’s top newspapers, Bild, issued an apology last August for fearmongering over COVID, specifically about claims that children were “going to murder their grandma.” 

Who knows? Maybe if they see the Danes are OK with it, the Strib – “the newspaper of the Twin Cities of, by and for Big Karen” – will find the guts to think.a little.