Remember 1998? 

Minnesota was doing so well that we could play a practical joke on ourselves.   

We were one of the most successful states in the union.  The combination of “good government” Democrats – naive, misguided but not actively malevolent – and a Republican Party that in retrospect still hadn’t caught up with the Reagan Revolution gave us a government that on the one hand did too much, but on the other hand kind of left things alone enough for them to work.  

Things were so good that we could elect a professional wrestler as governor.  

And things stayed good, or at least acceptable, until…

…well, sometime after 2010.  I can’t quite place it – sometime between Mark Dayton’s election and 2020 – that that ended.   Maybe it was the fourth tier of taxes, or the takeover of Minneapolis and then the DFL by the DSA, or Walz’s idiotic response to the pandemic.  

But in that time, Minnesota has gone from one of the good states to somewhere between “laggard” and “death spiral”.  

I’m not mongering doom – I think the state can be saved.  But the slice of time where that’s possible is flying on by.  

With that in mind?  It’s convention weekend.   

The DFL

The DFL’s convention is happening in Rochester.   And the only real question is, “will it matter”?  Klobuchar is going to win the nomination and, barring an epic October Surprise on fraud or corruption from the Feds, she’ll likely become governor.   More on that when we come to the GOP side.  

The Senate race – which is no longer a race – is more interesting.  Angie Craig yesterday announced she’s headed straight to the primary, after learning 75% of the delegates were pledged to Peggy Flanagan.   

In 2010, knowing the delegates were insane, Ken Martin stepped in and poured on the money to overthrow Margaret Anderson-Kellihers endorsement at the primary, with Mark Dayton.  Eight years  later, after the convention gave the nod to the Karen twins, Erin Murphy and Erin Maye Quade, as well as actual Communists Matthew Pelikan for attorney general, Martin brought in the money and the public union clout to jam down Walz and Flanagan as well as the relatively moderate Ellison in the primary. 

Peggy Flanagan is likely the weakest statewide candidate the DFL has endorsed in my memory.   She could be beaten – more on that below – and I suspect smart DFLs know that Craig would be a much easier sell outside 494/694.   

If it we were talking about Ken Martin and a DFL before, say, 2020?  No question about it, the statewide DFL leadership would yet again nullify the convention and jam down a more electable candidate.  

But the DFL has changed since 2018 – they took their defeats in 2018 and 2021 (on the police funding question in Minneapolis) as a signal get really serious about taking over the DFL.  And you can say two things about Richard Carlbom; no way, no how does he look like a young Hermann Gôring, and he’s no Ken Martin.   

I wouldn’t put it past the DFL, though. I know if I were a GOP Senate candidate, I’d much rather face Flanagan.  

The MNGOP

The Governors race appears to be a tossup between Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth and Kendall Qualls, although Mike Lindell has been doing well in Central Minnesota and has some strong delegate support as well.   I suspect Demuth will win the endorsement, and I’m going to guess it goes to a. primary.  I like both Demuth and Qualls (Lindell’s got a great story, but in the general he’ll make the GOP long for the good old days of Kurt Bills), and I think Demuth has the lead with delegates so far, but let’s be honest – the real key to this election lies with the Feds, and if they drop a huge string of indictments against key DFLers in October.  And the media will be doing its best to mute even that.  

And it’s a shame, because getting a Republican – any Republican – into the executive branch to check and balance the DFL’s depredations may be the only sustainable hope the state has to pull out of the tailspin it’s in.  

So fingers crossed for the Feds.  

For the Senate race?  

This is the first time I’ve harbored any genuine hope in a Minnesota senate race since the mugging they call the 2008 election – mostly because Peggy Flanagan is such a very weak candidate. 

The three contenders are Adam Schwarze, Michelle Tafoya and Royce White.  

I follow the Buckley Commandment – vote for the most conservative candidate who can win. 

White has his proponents – mostly among the “burn it all down” crowd pushed by “Action4Liberty”.   A4L has cracked the code on weaponizing ignorance of politics and, along with “Minnesota Gun Rights”, profits from defeat. I don’t see him getting the nomination, “rocks and cows” support notwithstanding.   He will , I suspect, have enough oomph to be a kingmaker or to deny any endorsement at all.  

It’s going to be be between Adam Schwarze and Michelle Tafoya.   Schwarze likely has the lead among the delegates, although Tafoya has been working the room pretty hard for someone who is generally considered to be headed for the primary.  

Schwarze has all the things that delegates and activists love – a former SEAL, impeccable conservative credentials, and a vow to abide by the endorsement.  He’s also got next to no name recognition outside party activists, and will have to buy some by November.   

Tafoya has some cons – a stance on abortion that is simultaneously too accomodationist for many GOP activists and identical to Donald Trump’s position (12 weeks), and a “path to citizenship” stance on immigration that is a poor sell at the convention but likely not a problem in Maple Grove.  She’s also got name recognition, is raising serious money, and has at least some polling showing her close to the margin of error against Flanagan.  

I’d pay money to see either of them debating Flanagan or Craig.  

So – who is the most conservative candidate who can beat Flanagn or Craig?

I was in a discussion a few weeks ago about what the future holds for the Twin Cities. Someone – a Minneapolis booster and fan of the current administration in Minneapolis and Minnesota – said the cities’ current decline is a sign that the metro is in “the throes of a new city being born”. 

Well, maybe. Good times aren’t guaranteed to last, and any city can turn things around. And they can turn in either direction – fifty years ago Detroit was a thriving city with some worrying symptoms, and Nashville was a backwater with some music companies. The elevator goes down *and* up. 

But a whoooole lot of people, particularly boosters of the status quo in Minneapolis and Saint Paul over the past ten years, think that’s the *normal*. 

It occurs to me – when we talk about what the Twin Cities and Minnesota used to be, people under 40 have no idea what we’re talking about. Minnesota was an economic, cultural and technological powerhouse. It was a destination. It was certainly a destination when I moved here in 1985. 

Let’s recount what’s changed since I’ve lived here.

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. “Sure,” 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, IBM, 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 Tyme; some of us recall when the Twin Cities were a hotbed of all kinds of music. And not just music; in the ’80s, MN was the greatest concentration of theater outside New York. 

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.

It wasn’t all local. Some of it was external: the Cold War ended, so the big defense companies (Sperry, Burroughs, CDC, Honeywell) downsized (freeing up a tidal wave of capital that financed the prosperity of the ’90s). Technology changed, so Cray, ETA and 3M followed suit. NAFTA moved some of the manufacturing elsewhere. 

But state tax policy was exporting jobs long before Clinton cashed the “peace dividend”, much less 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 it’s not just big businesses. The startup I’ve been working on (www.storyaliz.com) moved, along with 2/3 of its staff (of, uh, three people) to the Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati. Between taxes, regulations, the “family leave” policy and the stagnancy of the small business climate, there’s just no upside to trying to do a tech startup in Minnesota. 

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, when I was producing the Don Vogel show, I booked a writer from Fodors Travel Guides – which were where you went for information about places you wanted to travel, before there was an internet, and were pretty well-respected at the time – for the show. He’d just written an article calling 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.

So when people like the one I was talking with say “we’re watching the birth of a new city”?

Sure. It happens. 

But cities and cultures don’t happen because of wishes. They are responses to economics, policy and demographics. 

So ask yourself this: do our current policies foster creation of things – cardiac catheters, R&B records, naval cannon, scotch tape, comedy, brilliant ideas and products of all kinds – or just consuming goods and services? 

Because that determines the city and state you get. 

I think there’s a very strong case that Minnesota has become a consumer, not creator, culture. 

That’s a problem.

And poof, just like that, people who always venerated “due process” and chanted “NO KINGS” on demand…

…had always opposed due process and believed themselves kings. 

It’s not news – liquor licensing has always been a political meat tenderizer, used to beat businesses into whatever the powers that be want the business to comply with, frequently things most of us agree with (like punishing flagrant serving of minors or lots of unchecked brawling.   

But to “punish” businesses for patronizing a class of people who are doing something completely legal?

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

New York City Mayor Mamdani: Free Day Care for All!

Minneapolis Somalis: One-Way Ticket to New York, Please.

Joe Doakes

 

I suspect a few unindicted fraudsters are dusting off their resumes.  

So I’ll admit it – I gave Mayor Frey about a 51% chance of beating Omar Fateh last week.   

But I figured that if Frey did win, the results would look a lot like the 2021 “Defund the Police” initiative vote; 

• Progressives, especially feckless young white ones, voting for the radical change
• People who had something to lose from that radical change – people in North Minneapolis who already live with crime, and people in Linden Hills and west of the Lakes with something to lose – would vote against. 

And lo and behold:

The blue precincts went Fateh; the tan (?) ones, Frey.

And who’d thunk it – Fateh took the urban-life theme parks like Marcy Holmes and Northeast below Broadway, and the toffs in Kenwood, and the wannabe starving artists in Whittier.  

The North?  Linden Hills and Nokomis?  West of the Lakes?  All Frey.  Even Longfellow thought Fateh was a radical too far.  

Color me amazed.   

Perhaps mores – the defeat of Katie Cashman leaves the DSA unable to override the mayor’s veto for the first time in years.    That’s gotta smart.  

After their debacle in 2021, the DSA said they’d be back in force for 2025.  They weren’t gonna let that happen again.  

And yet here we are.  

I’m sure they’ll be back again.  The next election is always the crucial one.  

But if this was indeed the perigee for leftism in Minneapolis (and I remain to be convinced), and the city is going to have to deal with slow decay rather than flaming implosion – well, that’s a slightly better grade of crisis, isn’t it? 

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

The media will try to spin the elections as a devastating loss for Republicans and repudiation of Trump.

Virginia has reliably voted for Democrats for years. New York City, the same.  That’s not a change, it’s business as usual. The real surprise would be if traditionally Republican districts flipped Democrat. 

Which could happen next time if Republicans keep kicking people out of the big tent because they are not ideologically pure enough.   That tactic might be morally satisfying but it doesn’t win elections … just ask the Libertarians.

Joe Doakes

 

 

 

Yep.  Virginia was “dog bites man”.  NYC was more like “dog licks dog” – the inevitable collapse of a far left society moving into overdrive.  

The fact that Jack Ciatarelli made it a fight in New Jersey, again, is a sign that there’s hope.  

And I never thought I’d say it, but did not expect Jacob Frey to beat out Fateh.  I suspect it means that the same crowd that turned out to reject the “Defund” initiative four years ago is still not amused by the DSA’s antics.   I’m going to need to look at the city’s results, but I’m going to go out on a short sturdy limb and guess that the same areas that bludgeoned the “defund”ers – the North Side, Phillips and the like – came out for Frey, while the white prog areas like Powderhorn and Whitter were all Fateh.  

How about Linden Hills and Kenwood?

I’ll follow up on this.  

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:

SCENE:   Mitch BERG is having an Old Fashioned at a bar in northern Wisconsin.  Engrossed in a conversation with the waitress, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE has walked in, wearing a “MEAT IS MURDER” t-shirt.  

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  Of, for…the second time this week, how ya doing…

LIBRELLE:  Shut up.   It’s the guns, stupid. 

BERG. So I’ve got a question for you, Avery.   Whenever a spree killer can be tied, however tenuously, to the right, the media and people like you get veeeery serious about dissecting connections to “extreme” ideology.  Like Vance Boelter…

LIBRELLE:  Extreme pro-life MAGAt!

BERG:  …but when it’s someone like the Covenant or Annunciation shooters, whose manifestos were like Gen-Z leftist movie screenplays, full of hate for Christians, Jews, conservatives, Trump…

LIBRELLE:  It’s the guns and only the guns!   And how dare you blame all transgender people!

BERG:  Where did I mention transgender people?

LIBRELLE:  You did. 

BERG: (Turns to stenographer sitting at next stool) Please read back the converstation starting with “shut up”:

COURT REPORTER:  OK.  Starting from where Mist…er, Mizz…er…(looks to BERG with look of inciipient panic)

BERG:  Don’t worry. Just read. 

COURT REPORTER:  OK.  

LIBRELLE:  Extreme pro-life MAGAt!

BERG:  …but when it’s someone like the Covenant or Annunciation shooters, whose manifestos were like Gen-Z leftist movie screenplays, full of hate for Christians, Jews, conservatives, Trump…

LIBRELLE:  I could have sworn I heard you call for the deaths of all transgender people.   

BERG:  You’re thinking of Mayor Frey…

LIBRELLE:  Shut up.  Why are you bringing a court reporter with you?

BERG:  Seems I need one lately. 

And SCENE.  

Berg’s 21st Law is about to get its sternest test.  

More in a moment. 

Who knew there was something too extreme for Richard Carlbom?

The longtime DFL strategist, the guy behind getting gay marriage ensconced in the Minnesota Constitution, replaced Ken Martin as chair of the MNDFL after Ken Martin moved on to a star-studded reign at the DNC.  

And his first crisis is something that he’s gonna need another gay marriage or abortion tempest-in-teapot to fix:  the DSA, rotting out his party from the roots. 

The party just nixed Omar Fateh’s endorsement for Minneapolis Mayor:

 

DFL Party Chairman Richard Carlborn says the decision to remove the mayoral endorsement comes after a review of the challenges found “substantial failures” in the DFL convention’s voting process, and “acknowledgment that a mayoral candidate was errantly eliminated from contention.”

The CRBC findings after the review show that the voting system for endorsement produced a very inaccurate count of the first, undercounted by 176 votes. 

The findings also state that the entire Ward 5 credentials books were lost by the Minneapolis DFL, causing delegates to have to re-establish delegate status. Additionally, the master check-in sheet at registration was not properly secured.

Huh. So – corruption all the way down…

…according to the DFL?

This is the sort of battle we’ve seen pretty much every major cycle in the DFL:  the crazy activists pick crazier candidates (remember when Keith Ellison was the rational moderate against Matt Pelikan in 2018?) and the state party steps in and jams down the person they want.  

So is the state party strong enough to upend the city party?

Can a civil society survive when society spends more time and effort protecting criminals than the law-abiding citizen?

The Mayor of Boston just made her, and presumably her city’s, priorities pretty visible:

Now, you might say it costs nobody anything – the victims are alive, the attacker dead. Expressing (misplaced) sympathy isn’t going to kill him again, or endanger the victims. Is it?

I see your logic, and raise you Mary Moriarty (open and expand the thread):

But here’s the money quote:

A source familiar with the case told us that charges were declined by Mary Moriarty’s office because the victim was able to fight back.

Got that?

If you defend yourself, that’s all the justice you need.  (How much do you want to bet the intended victim only evaded assault charges because he was a teenager?)

We are getting to the point where the lesson is the one people in all low-trust societies eventually get to; it’s better to handle “Justice” by yourself.  To do the job, to not talk to the police – even enforce the practice – and make offender examples on your own.  

I’d ask “is this what you want”, but this is  the DFL we’re talking about. 

Lets you wondered what Omar Fateh’s actual priorities might be: 

Not fixing potholes.  

Not making a city in economic freefall into a destination again. 

Protecting illegals from the boogeyman.  

Minneapolis is in the best of hands.  

The good news:  Bloody Mary Moriarty is not running for re-election as Henco Attorney.  

The bad news? It’s so she can focus on “transforming the office” even further:

“I ran for this office to do the hard work; the work that desperately needed doing and the work the voters chose when I was elected in 2022 by 16 points,”Moriarty said in the release. “We’ve become accustomed to elected officials who don’t deliver results and end up more invested in clinging to power than doing the work of the people. That is not me. As I have weighed whether I wanted to spend the last year and a half of my term focused primarily on campaigning or continuing to transform this office, the choice became clear. I want to focus on running the office, rather than running for office.”

The worse news?

Remember – the Cano Corollary to Berg’s 21st Law is called a “law” for a reason:

In Blue city electoral politics, “blue” never gets “lighter” or less “progressive”.  There is only one electoral direction – more “progressive”. 

A symptom of this is when one sees people just barely to the left of a city’s Overton Window referring to the progressive politicidans and institutions in power as “Conservatives” or “Republicans”.  

When Alondra Cano seems like a sane, rational stateswoman, the Frey Corollary is in effect.

Worst – ergo most likely – scenario:  Moriarty spends the rest of her term gutting whatever vestiges of traditional law and order might remain her her office, turns it over to someone who will be subtly running to challenge Omar Fateh, Keith Ellison or Ilhan Omar from the left one day.  

Omar Fateh won the the DFL – let’s be honest, DSA – endorsement for Mayor of Minneapolis:

Well – probably won:

Anyway, close enough for city work.

Anyway, the whole thing is further proof of Berg’s 21st Law.

And at least he knows what the real problems are:

This fall will become known as the moment when Minneapolis’s decay graduated from organic to institutional.

This past Tuesday, scads of feds – FBI, DHS, BATFE – raided eight different businesses around the Twin Cities, serving search warrants related to human trafficking.  

Seven of the raids went off without a hitch. 

But the eighth – at Lake and Bloomington, deep in the heart of white, progressive Minneapolis – was different.  The Feds rolled in in MRAPs and full battle rattle. 

And, in their own way, so did Minneapolis’s entire progressive power structure; the video is worth a watch:

Watching the woman at around 1:15 is enough to make me realize I sold Michael Savage short: progressivism certainly appears to be a manifestation of some kind of emotional trouble.

Around 3:00 minutes in, you can see the crowd – white, progressive, lots of tattoos and man-buns – starting to push and shove the feds.  It’s almost as if someone wants to institgate another riot.  

Around 7:00, the crowd starts to dump trash barrels on the street, apparently trying to keep the feds from leaving. Around 9:30, it gets even worse.

The mace comes out around 11:30. as the MRAPs leave the area.  

This was in defense of human traffickers. 

For all the sturm und drang, it doesn’t appear that anyone involved in attacking the feds or cops got arrested for obstructing justice. 

The reactions from DFLers were…predictable. 

Putative mayoral front-runner Omar Fateh:

Senator Fateh: under “no” circumstances?

Like , not even with active human trafficking?

Weird.

Councilman Chavez – who is the primary evidence not only of Berg’s 21st Law, but of the “Cano Corollary” to the 21st Law, named after the loony-left councilwoman he replaced because she was too moderate for the local DFL – sounded off. As usual:

Remember – this is against an investigation of human trafficking (not to mention drugs and latin gangs).

The Police Union responded:

It’s not like Jacob Frey – who, let’s not forget, was the “law and order’ alternative to Ray Dehn in 2017 – is going to be much better.  Minneapolis cops should have been hauling everyone who pushed the cops downtown.  It was pure incitement – and a sign of a department that gets no support from its prosecutor. 

Because they don’t:

Minneapolis is at a crossroads:  civilization, prosperity and sanity, vs. decay, anarchy and Lord of the Flies.   

A group of federal law enforcement agents – FBI, DHS – apparently served a warrant for drug trafficking and money laundering on a restaurant at Lake and Bloomington in South Minneapolis yesterday. 

And it’s almost – I say, almost – like Twin Cities Big Left is trying to coax a riot out of the situation:

I mean, a riot over ICE, or whoever, would certainly divert attention away from the collapsing schools, the crime, the downtown that is disintegrating and leaving a gaping maw of taxes that will wind up being made up by an increasingly beleaguered middle class, a dysfunctional city government and a state government run by a bunch wastrels that squandered a $18 Billion surplus, wouldn’t it?

And it’s time for one of the great new Minneapolis summer traditions (X thread): 

One apparently dead, five more shot, and one woman injured in the brawl that inevitably followed at Hennepini County Hospital.

Early reports say it was ELCA vs. Missouri Synod.  

Minneapolis deputy police chief Katie Blackwell’s defamation suit was thrown out, and she’s been ordered to pay back part of Liz Collin’s legal fees:

This may be the biggest backfire I’ve seen in a defamation suit – and the subject is by no means academic to me.

In a move that finally brings truth to the matter, Blackwell also signed a written declaration, stating:

“I, Katie Blackwell, acknowledge, agree, and affirm that everything in the Honorable Edward T. Wahl’s Order Regarding Special Motion for Expedited Relief Under Minn. Stat. § 554.09 and for Fees and Costs Under Minn. Stat. § 554.16 dated April 8, 2025 is accurate, true, and correct.”

So, despite her initial claims, Blackwell has now affirmed that all of Judge Wahl’s findings are “accurate, true, and correct.”

So this brings up all sorts of questions about Blackwell’s testimony in the Chauvin trial – including her assertions that the restraint technique Chauvin used on Floyd, which appeared to have been straight out of the department’s training manual as affirmed by several Minneapolis cops interviewed in Collin’s movie, was no-how, no-way, ever part of the MPD’s training canon. 

Read the whole article.  And buckle up.  This next year or two is going be a doozie in Minnesota courts. 

The Homicide rate in Minneapolis was way below recent trends…

…well, “was” is the operant word, here, isn’t it?   Shootings in the past 36 hours killed five, and left five more injured, several critically:

The shootings occurred at the following locations.

• 25th Street and Bloomington Avenue, just before midnight on Tuesday.
• Cedar Avenue and 17th Avenue at 1 p.m.
• 3300 block of Harriet Avenue at 2:25 p.m.
• Girard Avenue North around 3:50 p.m.
• 15th Avenue South and Lake Street around 7:45 p.m.

In the first shooting near 25th Street and Bloomington Avenue, police say two men, two women and a teenage boy were found shot at the scene: Four were inside a vehicle, and another was on the sidewalk.

The 17-year-old boy, a 20-year-old woman and a 27-year-old man were pronounced dead at the scene, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said. The remaining man and woman were taken to Hennepin County Medical Center with life-threatening injuries.

Welcome to Spring in Minneapolis!

Last fall’s election was a rough one for America’s left.   Their message was rejected by a majority of Latino men, an increasing share of the black vote, an astonishing percent of GenZ (some reports say that Trump drew a third of the vote at the deep-blue University of Minnesota), and even a near supermajority of Native Americans, to say nothing of the usual suspects, white men (especially blue collar men) and married women.

And the Democrats’ woes haven’t abated with the election – with their popularity hovering somewhere below “Serbian War Criminal” and above “Journalist“.  

You might be wondering if the drubbing they took caused the radical wing of Big Left to get a little circumspect?  To see if they might want to change their approach, especially to the parts of their late coalition that forsook them last November?  To even say “maybe we oughtta dial back the culture war schtick”?

Well, not many of them.  

This sign has been popping up in Minneapolis:

For all the “All Are Welcome Here” signs in Minneapolis yards, it’s clear some groups mean “all… except you.” The dark money socialist group “Minneapolis for the Many” finally said the quiet part out loud: “When we say ALL, we don’t really mean ALL.”

I don’t have to agree with… pic.twitter.com/SspBpmHPfd

— BECKA THOMPSON (@realBeckaT) March 23, 2025

The signs are posted by a group, “Mpls for the Many“, which apparently seeks to move Minneapolis’s city government even further to the left, and appears intended to supplant some of those “In This House” signs standing in the front yards of so many white, middle-class “progressives”.  

I put “progressives” in scare quotes because, well, if you read the responses to the tweet above, it just doesn’t seem very “progressive”.  It’s got that whole “scarlet letter” vibe about it.  

And it’s not a rare thing at all – as David (a Minneapolis inmate) points out, many on the left seem to think the social contract is, er, subject to terms and conditions (nearly a direct quote from many of the responses to the tweet above, in fact).  

Tom Knighton (at our sister publication Bearing Arms) points out that the current round of “mostly peaceful” demonstrators are putting the gloves back on – so as not to get gasoline, explosive residue or any stray flames on their hands:

Now, Molotov cocktails are bad, but the nature of them tends to mean that people know good and well that there’s no one around when they use one–or, conversely, that someone is present. Using one is a violent act, but it’s still a thing that gives the user at least some control over who all is going to be hurt by the cocktail when it’s thrown.

After that, all bets are off, which is why we don’t really treat them as a nothingburger.

But bombs are an escalation. These are intended to go off at a later time. It doesn’t say if they were meant for remote detonation or on a timer, but what we know is that these aren’t necessarily controlled and can be much more destructive.

To those who believe in such things as social contracts, it appears that part of our society is conjuring up some escape clauses in the fine print.  

So, what’s worse? 

Empty real estate?

Or vacant lots?

Evan Ramstad – who’s in a hammer-and-tongs battle with Jennifer Brooks for “worst Strib columnist” – says “empty lots”

Now, that could make some sense, if there was some intense craving for downtown real estate – perhaps to build the “housing” that “urbanists” are fantasizing about.  

But Minneapolis already has a glut of overpriced “luxury” housing, and rent control (albeit not quite as stupid and myopic as Saint Paul’s version) and unicorn-style zoning are choking out the supply of middle-class construction.   

So I’m trying to see how this ends up as anything but a downtown full of lots suitable for graffiti, “encampments” and all the other bits and pieces of. urban blight that the Minneapolis City Council and the Strib columnist bullpen seem to think the city deserves. 

After almost five years, the City of Minneapolis “plans” to “do” “something” with the former Speedway in “George Floyd Square”.

I’m adding emphaiss to the quote below for a reason:

The City of Minneapolis has received four applications to redevelop The People’s Way, which was formerly a Speedway gas station at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue.

The gas station turned into a gathering place in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. For the past four years, the community has used the site for twice-daily meetings, annual events honoring George Floyd, gardening and other activities, according to the city’s Request for Qualifications presentation.

So who are these four groups?

City Councilmember Andrea Jenkins represents the area and she told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS not much is known about what the private groups would do with the property, but said it is a positive step toward progress and growth at George Floyd Square.

I’m gonna guess we know one thing about them: They’re dues-paying members of Minneapolis’s DFL/DSA non-profit/industrial complex.

And if you look at Rise & Remember, Minnesota Agape Movement, P3 Foundation and Urban League Twin Cities, you’ll realize not only that nobody ever went broke betting against the City of Minnepolis transferring money to its political class, but that whatever “happens” at George Floyd Square is going to be both exquisitely expensive and a magnet for blight.

Rise and Remember – run, among other people, by George Floyd’s aunt.

Minnesota Agape Movement – headquartered in George Floyd Square. Their “team” page is blank.

P3 Foundation – if I’ve got the right one, they appear to be national nonprofit that is into all sorts of things.

The Urban League needs no introduction.

Anyway – it’s going to wind up being a “community space” that turns into a graffity-coated monument to blight.  But the non-profits will get their payoff.  So tomayto/tomahto, I guess.

How it started: Mayor Frey bleating “Minneapolis is back, baybee!”

How it’s going: Ameriprise Tower in Minneapolis sells for pennies on the dollar:

That tower used to generate $2.5M a year in property taxes. 

I don’t think the city’s spending has dropped 97%.  That burden is all going to residential property owners. 

Minneapolis boosters have been chanting, non-stop, that “crime is down in MInneapolis”.

Seems everyone got the memo but the criminals:

And it wasn’t just homicides – a quick look at the Minneapolis crime dashboard (before they rolled the data over for the new year) showed:

• 3 more non-justified homicides (Minneapolis’ dashboard lumps justified police and civilian shootings together, and there was one more justifiable homicide last year than in 2023).
• Robberies up 10% in past year.
• Vandalism up 14% in year, 31% in three years.
• Assault has been steadily rising over past three years.

And the categories that *are* dropping are doing it very slowly.

Seems like barely two weeks ago that a couple of “transgender women” claimed they’d been attacked at a rail station in downtown Minneapolis (aka “MAGA Country”) as a bunch of people cheered.

I pointed out at the time the story seemed…implausible? A heavily-surveiled place in a leftist city – is this ringing any bells?

CrimeWatch is among the groups that are proving Elon Musk right in declaring the MSM dead.  And as usual, they’ve got the actual story; the video. It’s a short thread:

The bigger the hype of the reveal, the bigger the flop it turns out to be. Never fails.

Two “transgender women” were assaulted in downtown Minneapolis.

No, really.  At 5th and Hennepin.  

No, they weren’t (apparently) going out looking for Subway. But the story is…

..well, I’ll let the Cheerleaders on Four pick up the story:

The incident happened Nov. 10 at Hennepin Avenue and Fifth Street in downtown Minneapolis. It’s where community members gathered for a rally Sunday afternoon, one week since the attack. 

Amber Muhm, a community leader with Trans Movement for Liberation, said the two trans women were attacked by a group of men at the light rail station after one of the men used transphobic slurs.

“No one came to help them. In fact, they said people were cheering the attackers on while they were getting beaten,” Muhm said.

She said the attack left one of them with a broken nose. Minneapolis police confirmed they are investigating the incident, but as of Sunday night, no one has been arrested. 

 

So – 5th and Hennepin, you say?

One of the busiest rail stops in the city? 

With a crowd of cheering onlookers – presumably on the surveillance cameras that are all over the place down there?

Not saying Berg’s 20th Law is the governing statute here, but…