An apparent teenager was shot and killed on the Nicollet Avenue LRT platform on Tuesday afternoon, in broad daylight, during a Twins game.

#DowntownIsBack #Vibrant!

Minneapolis’s progressives sprang into action against the real problem…

…which is apparently “people who point out that Minneapolis has a problem”.

If only people would stop talking about crime, it wouldn’t be a problem, would it?

Woman in the Phillips neighborhood of south MInneapolis describes the break-ins and arason that followed her criticism of a neighborhood “homeless camp”:

“This would not happen in Kenwood. This would not happen in Lowry Hill, in Linden Hills. This would not happen by the lake. We’re on our 18th camp in a six-by-six neighborhood,” that homeowner told us when explaining the last two years.

She is fearful for her safety after what happened at her home. It’s why we are not showing the woman’s face or using her name.

After being out of town, she came home to a horrible scene two weekends ago. Every room in the house where she’s lived for 20 years was ransacked.

“Everything destroyed and torn apart. Doors kicked in. Everything I owned [was] trashed. Stolen. Bags of stuff stolen and taken out of the house,” she said.

She believes it was retaliation for speaking out about homeless encampments in the neighborhood.

The woman may be anonymous. but she knows how things work in a modern, “woke” city:

The woman was candid about what’s gone on.

“So, when the city talks about equity in every breath, every breath they say ‘in the eyes of equity.’ I’ll just say it’s bullshit, because if it was in the eyes of equity, they would be containing crime here in the Phillips community,” the woman said.

Liz Collen at Alphanews has the whole story:

When people can’t count on government to keep them safe, they’ll figure out a way to do it themselves. And that’ll get very ugly, very fast.

There are times I miss the old website “Stuff White People Like“.- a satirical, often hilarious look at the foibles of generally upper middle class, educated, urban honkies. It became a best selling book, chronicling the gentle social satire of a much less divisive time – the George W. Bush administration.

Will come back to that.

Last week, after an hours long standoff that allegedly began, and continued, with random gun fire fired blindly through the walls into neighboring apartments, police snipers apparently killed Tekle Sundberg, aman who (let’s be solicitors) was apparently mentally ill, and (let’s be honest) had apparently been terrorizing the other residents of that apartment block for quite some time.

I’m not equipped to comment on the merits of the police action; while we have passed the statutory three day limit imposed by birds 18th law, The Twin Cities media just doesn’t do a good job of covering stories where facts and progressive narrative intersect. Like the Christine Rusczyk shooting, this is is going to be a long, ugly ride.

What I am equipped to comment on, though, is the behavior of perhaps the most loathsome group of people in society today – Woke, Overeducated, Middle-class Progressive White Activists. (Hereafter WOMPWAs).

And one of the things WOMPWAs like is standing around in groups of like-minded people, preaching to the infidels. Sometimes they are called protests, sometimes visuals – and, more accurately, group virtue signaling.

Which is what they were doing on Friday, until of Mr. Sundberg’s victims – Arabelle Foss-Scarabella, a single of mother of two who lived next-door to the late Mr. Sundberg – arrived on the scene:

“It’s not the time”, one of them progsplained a woman…

…who’d been protecting her kids from this:

There is plenty of evidence that Sundberg was deeply mentally ill.

There is even more evidence that WOMPWAS are equally mentally ill, in their own way.

The other day, I joked – sort of – that after the violence in downtown Minneapolis on July 4, the city councilman, Michael Rainville, might look for the sort of help that former city council president Lisa bender once referred to as “privilege”.

Yesterdays joke is today’s policy:

Minneapolis City Council member Michael Rainville says Governor Walz is sending in state troopers, as confirmed by the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, to help Minneapolis with policing in the interim. The police department has about 600 officers, down from 800.

The ne’er-do-wells finally found a neighborhood where the sense of entitlement overcame white progressive guilt.

Minneapolis delivery driver with a (apparently) permitted handgun gives carjackers a significant emotional growth experience.

The driver was making a delivery to one of the Abbott buildings at 29th and Chicago, when the ne’er-do-wells made their move:

“My dad was making a delivery at Allina hospital earlier today and almost got carjacked, the suspects got scared and ran when my dad pulled his gun on them. One of them had a pistol and was tapping his gun on the passenger side window while his friend was trying to force open the door. [I’m] glad I convinced my dad to carry especially with how crazy crime is.”

The video leaves a bit to the imagination.

The part I’m having the most fun imagining…

SPOILER ALERT

…is the discussion the two punks had with the getaway driver who peeled out and left them running on foot away from an armed man.

But it’s fun to imagine.

…of Minneapolis’s demise…

… apparently aren’t far off.

Four shot last night, right around downtown Minneapolis‘s casual tourist epicenter, the Stone Arch Bridge.

My favorite part about episodes like this; the wave of progressives from “City Life“ theme parks like Seward and Powderhorn who will sniff down their noses at people from Maple Grove expressing alarm at crime in Minneapolis.

None of the Twin Cities major media covered this story: carjackers attack woman in Northeast Minneapolis.

The surveillance video caught the episode, outside Tony Jaros’s River Garden:

That man then threw her to the ground in the parking lot, cocked the gun, beat Marlo, and pistol-whipped her across the head. Marlo said it appeared the gun jammed. His accomplice then walked over. It’s when Marlo says the bar’s cook just happened to be outside on a smoke break when he heard the commotion and came to her rescue.

They all tussled on the ground before one of the masked men knocked her keys away and attempted to get into the car. Marlo again got up to stop them from driving off. A group of men from the bar also joined the fight and another man pulled up in a pickup truck to help.

The men all dragged the driver out of the car and onto the ground. The two thieves eventually ran off.

I can not be the only one wishing the locals would have kept stomping when they got the punks on the ground.

It’s gonna happen someday, if the Hennepin County Attorney and the Minneapolis City Council don’t start taking this seriously.

It’s not just law abiding home and business owners that can’t get any help from overstretched Minneapolis law enforcement until it’s too late:.

If I’m reading that correctly – and I believe I am – the dispatcher was aware that the guy had passed out on the train platform for three solid hours before someone checked him out.

This is “New York City in the 1970s“ level stuff, here.

The real wave of terror is going to be all those white right-wingers.

Someday.

One of these days.

Any time, now.

Honest.

In the meantime, though, we’ve just got the regular left-wing terrorists in the Twin Cities:

Or at least some Macalester poli-sci majors apprenticing with Big Left. By the way – the guy with the Molotov Cocktail in the pic is black – but I’ll wager a shiny new quarter that everyone behind this leaflet is whiter than me, and comes from a family with an income well into six figures.

Remember – if the people to whom we pay taxes don’t provide law and order, people will provide it for themselves.

And it ain’t gonna be pretty.

F#&*k around and find out, indeed.

The Minneapolis Police have problems.

It’s been the most open secret in the world for as long as I’ve lived in the Twin Cities. Minneapolis cops leaning on black and minority drivers, being more willing to take off the gloves when operating in black neighborhoods – this was news in the mid-80s. It’s like most police departments – a few bad apples among a lot of good cops – only seemingly moreso.

Minneapolis has problems.

If you didn’t see it three years ago, you should have noticed it in the past two years. They had a city council president who said in as many words that expecting law and order came from a place of “privilege” (a privilege she was happy to enjoy with $1K a day in taxpayer-funded private security, of course), and a council that backed that up with policy, to the point whereJacob Freaking Frey looks like a law and order conservative (whenever there’s not a crisis, anyway).

It’s a city that seriously believes the answer to crime is to transfer more taxpayer money to “community” “non-profits” – the same people who’ve been profiting from the status quo, and code for “the DFL’s political farm team”. (It’s the same answer they have for education, economic development, and pretty much everything else).

The Minnesota DFL has a problem.

Polling for mid-terms is abysmal – potentially catastrophic. Early signs are they could lose the House of Representatives and fall further behind in the Senate; it’s even hypothetically possible the hapless MNGOP could finally get a governor.

The economy shows every sign of starting to slow down (at best) – something the media will try to spin until after a new, GOP-controlled Congress and Legislature take over, but for now, things seem to be getting away from ’em.

But…

The DFL controls the state bureaucracy.

The report that was issued by the MN Department of Human Rights – which is like one of those non-profits we mentioned above, only part of the executive branch – earlier this week could have been issued at any time in the past 35 years. It should have been issued at any time in the past 35 years; you don’t have to be a black community activist to notice the MPD has issues. If the DFLers who created the Human Rights department, and who have always staffed it, had needed to issue it at any point in the past 35 years, they would have.

But they didn’t need to issue it then. It might be excessively cynical to say a city full of people angry about their police suited them, per se – but it wasn’t against their interest.

But now? As Democrats nationwide are being weighed down (justifiably!) by their performance on law and order issues – now the MNDoHR comes out with a report on the MPD?

Right around the time the DFL statewide needs to deflect the “conversation” about crime away to…anything but six decades of failed DFL rule?

• DFL-caused problem (problems, really – crime in Minneapolis is the DFL’s baby, and the DFL has controlled the MPD for three generations).
• DFL-controlled bureaucracy.
• Report that tries to shift blame for crime away from the DFL, which has controlled literally all the factors leading to the problem since Eisenhower was President.

Seeing a pattern, here?

Minneapolis extremists and the DFL – pardon the redundancy – are going to start portraying themselves as the victims of this past couple of years:

Note to Minneapolis progressives: whatever the Minneapolis Police Department’s problems, your “progressive” council members were not the ones being “victimized”.

You may recall this bit of footage; a woman, at last summer’s mini-riot in Uptown, seeing this rather chilling bit of footage; a woman with a pistol (and atrocious trigger discipline) wandering around on either Lagoon or Lake. 

As the TV cameras rolled, she fired a couple of shots in the air.    

Not just into the air; she reportedly shot at passing cars, full of people going to work, screaming “shoot all the white people”.  Something about that says “hate crime” to me, but what do I know

Perhaps unbelievably, the cops nabbed her.   Seems the Minneapolis administration was already getting nervous about mid-terms.  

So she went to jail…

…but if you follow Minneapolis politics, you know that’s not the end of the story.

Or, rather, more accurately, it’s the end of the criminal justice segment of the story. The “Minnesota Freedom Fund” bailed her out…

…and a Minneapolis judge gave her a stayed sentence that involved zero jail time. \

So to sum things up – a dangerous racist is out on the street, after attempting (if the reporting is correct, and the Twin Cities media will never let us know one way or the other) a spree shooting (and failing) of honkies, thanks fo the “Minnesota Freedom Fund” and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and judiciary.

Governor Klink likes to say we’re “One MInnesota”.

I’m not feeling very united, to tell you the truth.

Report apparently leaked last week shows – to the surprise of nobody – that the City of Minneapolis just was n ot ready for the George Floyd riots – or much of anything else:

An independent audit of Minneapolis’ handling of protests and riots following the police murder of George Floyd found city leaders and police ignored emergency plans in place, instead making decisions on the fly, according to Council Member Robin Wonsley Worlobah, who saw a draft report.

One line in the report Wonsley Worlobah pointed to reads: “We learned that MPD does not adhere to the principles of the ICS (incident command system) but rather addresses emergencies and crises with an ad hoc command structure.”

Of course, the fact that Minneapolis wasn’t ready was on display worldwide, almost two years ago – including the fact that Minneapolis’s administration had no idea how to ask a passive-aggressive governor how to get the National Guard onto the streets.

I’ll take a moment to air this tweet, by “Dr.” Katie Knuth, 2021 Minneapolis mayoral also-ran and..

…well, we’ll delve back into her resume in a moment.

The administration has “no clue about basic emergency operations”?

Now, it seems that at one point the CIty of Minneapolis had a full-time bureaucrat, a “resiliency director”, whose vague and unaccountable brief would seem to the untrained eye to cover things like “making the city resilient”.

Now, I’m just an untrained, unlettered peasant, but one might think it’d be part of a “resiliency director’s” brief to make the city…resilient?

So who was city’s first “resiliency director”, two scant years before the riots?

Oh.

Less anyone wonder why the teachers unit in Minneapolis is out on strike – besides grabbing “their share“ of the “surplus“ – their union boss spells it out pretty clearly:

At least she was honest-ish.

A Tale Of Two Mayors

Minneapolis mayor: Jacob Frey appears in Vogue magazine and, well…:

Kiev Mayor appears in Ukrainian Badass.

Who would you rather have dealing with carjackers?

About a month ago, Open Table released information showing that restaurant reservations were in really bad shape in the Twin Cities.

Another month has passed, and it’s only gotten worse:

Apparently those photos Full of jammed restaurants that Mayor Frey had on his phone were gatherings of Democrats to support free-speech.

One minor shout-out to former Minnesapolis mayor R.T. Rybak; to date, he is the only DFL politician to come on the Northern Alliance. We had a great discussion. You don’t have to throw plates at each other to have a good debate.

But you can sure throw facts at each other:

I mean, if one has never worked in the private sector, one might think re-opening a long-closed restaurant is a matter of unlocking the doors, logging into the stove and getting avocado onto toast.

Not about getting food in stock, even without supply chain problems, or getting staff to come to a downtown that’s gotten very human-unfriendly, on top of expensive to park in and tangibly less pleasant to take the bus or train to, when employment options in much more amenable, affordable places are also available.

And there’s a real sense – at least, among people who pay attention to the DFL – that the current relaxation of Covid hypochondria is tied mostly to mid-term polling ,and when the “gnu” or “omega” variants come out in mid-November everything will get shut down in yet another frothing, unproductive, business-shredding panic, leaving those “Re-opened” restaurants giving their food away so it doesn’t rot in the freezer. Again.

He does realize his party caused this, right?

On the one hand, official hypochondria along with privileged lawlessness is polling very badly for the DFL this fall. So the vaccine mandates (and the whole “public safety is a privilege” thing) have got to go.

On the other hand, if DFLers abandon hypochondria, the Karen vote (social, not ethnic) will rebel.

So the mayors chose the middle path: end the useless mandate, keep the useless masks.

So – did Mayor Frey promised to push reform of “no knock raids”.

And to hear him discuss it, you’d think he’d made progress:

When you’ve got Channel 4 actually criticizing DFLers’ policies, you know…

…that there’s a crazier DFLer in the wings, who has given the Big Four TV staitons, the Strib and MPR permission to do so.

If this is a ban, I’d hate to see what a no-knock offensive looks like:

It’s amazing how that creeps up on you…

…as it were.

Nekima Levy-Armstrong, at the demonstration over the weekend outside what may have been the Minneapolis interim chief’s house:

My – she’s kind of a bully, isn’t she?

She’s well on her way to being Al Sharpton.

When government doesn’t provide the public order that people pay their taxes and exchange a bit of their liberty for, people will seek their own public order.

This is the polite, Midwestern version of that.

It won’t stay that way forever.

Last week, Minneapolis Mayor Frey Took to social media to declare his vaccine mandate – which he implemented as the Omicron wave had already peaked in Minnesota – a raging success, with his phone clogged, clogged, he told us, with photos of people at jam-packed restaurants.

We must only conclude, then, that “Seven”, The long time downtown tent pole restaurant with the best rooftop in the history of Minneapolis hospitality, closed because of overcrowding concerns.

Or not:

Worries about crime in downtown also contributed. “I can’t get staff to be excited to work downtown, because they don’t feel sale” he said.

You may find Karen responding “but restaurants close all the time, and it’s got nothing to do with draconian, misguided, on scientific emergency orders!”

And Karen would be wrong:

Finally, Patterson said city-ordered requirements on masks-wearing and vaccinations dealt the business a final blow. “We’ve seen a big decline even in the past few weeks,” following the revival of an indoor mask order by Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. On an average Friday night, he said, Seven could generate at least $25,000 in sales; after the mask order, Friday receipts dropped to $5,000.

With absolutely Marie Antoinnette like timing, the mayor got perhaps the puffiest puff piece in the puffy history of a puffy magazine this week; This is the week that the mayor appeared in Vogue magazine, as one does:

The mayor’s first term, which culminated in a hard-won reelection in November, gave him endless reasons to pace. Beyond Frey’s brio, he is an exposed nerve. “From the global pandemic to the economic downturn, the murder of George Floyd in our city, the subsequent unrest,” Frey speaks solemnly, “it was a lot. I don’t think anybody, including the former me…fully comprehends what this has been like.” Frey gestures to photos from four years ago, when he took office as a “bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 36-year-old.” He drank Red Stripes and sampled hot sauce with the local press. Now, like presidents gone gray in the White House, “I’ve aged a decade, easily,” Frey tells me, citing crow’s-feet, stress pimples, and trauma he hopes will manifest as post-traumatic growth. “This is a time that changed me forever.”

Speaking of changing:

from Vogue: “Frey, photographed at home in a Rag & Bone sweater with his wife, attorney and advisor Sarah Clarke, in Tory Burch and Altuzarra, and their daughter, Frida. Photographed by Alec Soth, Vogue, March 2022.” Photographs in March 2022?

Glad to know the mayor and his family are doing all right. It must be a tough time for them.

I’ll meet Mayor Frey halfway.

He’s supposed to be Minneapolis’s top cheerleader. It’s part of his job to blow smoke up the world’s collective nethers about the city.

So when he went on social media after about a week of his bizarrely illogical and unscientific vaccine mandate to say everything was hunky dory:

…it wasn’t in and of itself a surprise. Cheerleading the city, and their own policies even moreso, is part of a mayor’s job description.

Of course, the stats aren’t nearly as sanguine. Minneapolis table reservation via “Open Table” are off by…

…ahem…

…two thirds:

Now, it’s entirely possible the Mayor’s phone is flooded with photos of full restaurants. The number of choices in Minneapolis has plummeted. Literally, every place in Minneapolis where I used to do social events has disappeared in the past 20 months.

The DFL is waking up to the fact that people don’t like crime, and they don’t see law and order as a “privilege”.

I was going to write out the last couple years of history, but the Twitter embed seems to have added that for me.

DFL policies pretty much negate the DFL’s proposals:

You can boil these “proposals” down to “trying to fix the damage they’ve wrought into a couple of categories:

Transferring more taxpayer money to the state’s political class and the non-profit/industrial complex.

“Innovation” and “Local Community Policing” grants might be well described as “greasing the right palms”.

Paying to undo the DFL’s damage

Body cameras? Training investigators?

We had investigators. They quit when the county attorneys stopped prosecuting repeat criminals.

Trying to blame Republicans

Which, as long as the DFL runs both cities, is really what it’s all about.

I shudder to imagine who’s convinced by this.

A group of restauranteurs and bar owners are taking the Frey regime to court over the city’s bizarre, unscientific vaxx mandate:

Plaintiffs in the complaint filed in Hennepin County Fourth Judicial Court Thursday include Bright Red Group, LLC (owners of Smack Shack), 90’s Minneapolis, LLC (The Gay 90’s), PJ. Hafiz Club Management, Inc. (Sneaky Pete’s), Urban entertainment, LLC (Wild Greg’s Saloon), Urban Forage, LLC (Urban Forage), and MikLin Enterprises, Inc. (Jimmy John’s) and I & E Inc. (Bunkers Music Bar & Grill).

According to the complaint, the emergency resolution “is calculated and purposed to attempt to prod the general public toward vaccination… Minneapolis bars and restaurants are being used as pawns to further Mayor Frey’s agenda of pushing for and convincing the public to get vaccinated. Whether the end being sought is noble, the scheme is forcing restaurants and bars to lose additional patrons and business that have already been reduced over the past two years and incur new costs and burdens to enforce the requirements.”

When I saw the original mandate, I wondered – so some 20-something 110 pound female hostess encounters someone without a vaxx card who wants to eat anyway. Then what?

Does the restaurant call the cops?

Even if there’s some response on their part, they’ll show up long after the customers have ordered, eaten and left.

What is it exactly that the Frey regime expects restaurants to do under color of his mandate?