To: Mayors Carter and Frey
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Your Hostages

Mayors,

You just announced your new and, if I may be frank, moronic Covid restrictions:

Let’s make sure we’re clear here.

I had the OG Covid, way back in 2020. Back before it got easy to catch and less virulent.

I’ve donated convalescent plasma. As much as I could, in fact.

Got vaccinated – not out of any ideological drive, but because I’ve got some exceptionally vulnerable relatives.

Pretty sure I just got over Omicron.

I’ve been contributing to herd immunity since most of you, my “Karen” neighbors, were hiding in your basement and dunking your food in rubbing alcohol before eating it. I am likely the immunologically safest person you will meet anytime soon.

And I will not be spending one dollar in Minneapolis or Saint Paul until this is over. And if I get completely out of the habit of spending in Saint Paul?

Oh, no.

Bear in mind – I’ve been trying to spend more money in harried Saint Paul establishments over the past 20 months; I’ve tried to help my neighbors out.

No more. You people voted for these hamsters. You all can go down with the ship.

Not another dime.

The house DFL caucus is starting to “take a crime seriously”.

Or at least that’s what the headlines are intended to say: “In response, we are already drafting bills based on the input of all stakeholders”

All?

Well, not all the stakeholders. Not the party that currently holds the minority in the Minnesota house.

There’s a reason for that, of course; this has nothing to do with fighting crime, and everything to do with fighting the perception that the majority party in the Minnesota house is nothing but a pack of feckless felon coddlers.

In other words, a public relations stunt to pray on a news media that serves as little but a bunch of feckless DFL coddlers.

Outstate Republican: “Minneapolis and Saint Paul are a mess”

DFLer from Crocus Hill/Linden Hills: “Ack-shu-ally, you never come here, so who cares what you think?”

People from Midway, East Lake, NoMi: “No, he’s right”

DFLer from Crocus Hill/Linden Hills: …

2022 will mark this blog‘s 20th anniversary.

I’m kind of excited!

But first let’s talk about the weekend.

Tonight – New Year’s Eve – my band “Elephant in the Room” is playing at the American Legion in Fridley. We will be starting at 8:30 PM, and ringing in the new year. The Legion has those cool edge of the metro food and drink prices, without actually being outside the metro, which is kind of cool. Hope you can make it out there.

Tomorrow on the show? I will be talking with Rebecca Brannon about her run in with the Hennepin county machine over her reporting on Sheriff Hutchinson‘s DUI.

And tomorrow night, we will be playing at Neisen‘s Sports Bar and Grill, in Savage. I love our bars, but Nissans has a stage that makes you feel kind of like a rockstar, and a sound system that makes us sound like one. No cover.

I hope we run into each other, literally or figuratively, during any or all of the above!

Prosecuting “straw buyers“ – people with clean criminal records who buy firearms and knowingly sell or give them to criminals – isn’t especially “sexy“. No County prosecutor ever got elected to the US Congress, governor, or the state legislature by prosecuting criminals girlfriends, grandmothers, or people running side hustles moving metal to thugs.

It’s gone so far as the US attorney covering Chicago saying, basically, he just doesn’t care.

And we see how that’s worked in Chicago, right?

Hennepin county attorney Mike Freeman has also made it very clear he doesn’t care about straw buyers enough to make it a priority. He clearly doesn’t think it’s much of a problem.

It’s a problem:

And the next Hennepin county attorney is going to be Ryan Winkler, who played a disproportionate role in making sure that state legislation about straw buyers never got heard in the house, and got ruled as non-germane when brought up as amendments by Republicans.

So no, the problem isn’t going away anytime soon.

If you get your car jacked in Hennepin County?

The carjackers themselves will likely do less time than your vehicle.

Minneapolis is, as of yesterday, at 93 homicides for 2021 so far.

The record, during the Murderapolis years, was either 95 or 97, depending on your source.

Context? Sure.

In 2016 there were 82 unjustified homicides…

…in the entire state of Minnesota. 30 of them were in Minneapolis.

Whenever the DFL used to win elections by lopsided margins, they’d drunkenly chant “We own this city!”

Yep, chuckleheads. You sure do.

Carjacking comes to Lynden Hills – the leafy, upper-upper-middle class part of Minneapolis that adjoins Edina.

Via KARE11:

Catch the bit starting at 1:23?

…but we have to address whatever the greater problems are…that have brought about such system unrest. So my biggest hope is that enough of a light gets shined on this that we all start working toward some real substantive change.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and presume, given the language and the “white guilt”-addled neighborhood, that she’s not talking about ending “catch and release” and “bail reform” for habitual violent offenders?

Stockholm Syndrome is the psychological phemenon of people becoming attached to their hostage-takers.

Minneapolis Syndrome is one step beyond – where you blame yourself for the fact that they attacked you in the first place.

Remember:

Yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors…And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that [concern] comes from a place of privilege because for those of us for whom the system is working,

Minneapolis City Council PResident Lisa Bender, June, 2020

It appears Minneapolis has solved that particular “privilege”:

This sort of thing is unacceptable in North Minneapolis, in Frogtown, out on the Lower East Side or deep in the heart of Phillips.

But this isni’t in any of those places. This is in leafy, green, upper-middle-class, DFL-voting Nokomis. The heart of Mayor Frey’s power base. Just down the road, figuratively, from Lisa Bender’s privately-secured house.

The victim is speaking out:

Public Safety is a privilege – one that Lisa Bender enjoys with all the subtlety of Keith Moon at an open bar, at taxpayer’s expense, to the tune of well into six and heading toward seven figures, if last years spend rate has kept up.

This is the choice facing the entire state next year; more of this, or drawing a line on the cement and say “they shall not pass”.

And make no mistake, that is the whole choice; Mayor Frey is stuck with a city council that was bruised but not chastened by the electoral results last month. Governor Walz is a beard for the “Progressive” wing of the DFL (read: the DFL), the extremists who call all the shots in the DFL these days, without whom he will be an empty plus-size suit out of a job in 2023. That wing thinks the disorder is a good thing. If they didn’t, it wouldn’t be running rampant in Minneapolis.

This is the choice.

PS: This is the situation in Minneapolis, with Mike Freeman – “liberal”, but not “progressive” – runs the Henco Attorney’s office, perfunctorily shoveling cases before “progressive” judges who’ll kick everyone back out on the street before their cell beds get warm.

Imagine what life’s gonna be like when Ryan Winkler is the Henco Prosecutor!

The Uptown McDonalds.

In the eighties and early nineties, if was a great place to go to watch dissociatives dissociating.

For most of the past 20 years? On a Saturday night, it’s the place to go if you wanted to watch college girls in cocktall dresses throwing up on the sidewalk on 30 degree nights.

Today? It’s a great place to go to feel like you’re in Beirut in the ’80s.

Rebecca Brannon – one of very few actual journalists working these days – was there around bar closing on Saturday night/Sunday morning.

This is what she recorded:

But the 20 second video doesn’t show the half of it. I talked with Brannon on the show over the weekend. What got her attention was…

…guys, including the guy with the long-ish gun (looks like a Hi-Point carbine to mme) standing around in the parking lot, openly displaying their guns.

Brannon started taping when the guy with the long-ish gun fired a shot in the air. He shot into the air again when he drove off in the stolen car.

A civil society can not sustain this sort of thing. If the authorities don’t stop it, either the economic crash that follows the collapse of order will, or the people themselves will. Hard to tell which is worse.

cc: Shiny Happies.

The media yesterday expressed wonder that Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey had created a group of his “political critics“ serves a task force to “work“ on the cities crime problem.

A reader emails describe that group as:

…a veritable who’s who of those with their snout in the trough.

With LA carpetbagger Nekima Levy at the helm nothing but good can come from Mayor Frey’s Community Safety Workgroup

This gets, I think, to the truth that our media won’t, can’t, or aren’t supposed to talk about; this exercise is entirely a matter of greasing all the palms that need to be greased.

This is on the façade of the former uptown theater Dash the long beloved, offbeat art house theater that was a victim of the pandemic, and, perhaps more so, what Minneapolis has become.

“Transtifa”.

Will they be getting into a war with “Anti-“Fa? And will “Anti”-Fa Now I have to change them to “CisFa”, Or risk losing its Progressive cred?

It’s sort of reminds me of the old joke; Q: if the hair-metal bands Poison and Cinderella got into a flamethrower fight, who would win? A: The world.

…that this was impossible.

#Weird

This story came out last week.

On one hand, a round of applause for the locals who grabbed the guy.

The good news: People are getting sick of criminals.

The bad news: Perhaps they’re also getting sick of a system that coddles criminals, and are ready to start doing order (if not justice, in the sense we’ve come to expect) themselves.

But there’s more.

As of when this post was written (Saturday morning), Minnesota had 84 homicides – two more than for all of 2020.

Let’s put that in context. In 2016, there were 82 unjustified homicides.

In the entire state of Minnesota. Minneapolis had 30-.

Thjis is what civic collapse looks like.

I more or less figured that the “Defund” initiative in Minneapolis was going to be a white progressive thing (along with “people of color” who work in the non-profit/industrial complex).

It’s been a long-time narrative-busting truism that people who actually live in crime-ridden neighborhoods want more police presence.

They’d like that presence to act fairly, to treat the locals with the respect due taxpayers in a free society, and to not get treated like criminals until proven otherwise – but they want law and order. Becuase while they may or may not put it in as many words, they understand something I razz libertarians for not getting; without some sense of order, prosperity is impossible; without prosperity, liberty is academic. (And, of course, order without liberty is onerous and tyrannical; that part, they get).

With that in mind, here are the result from Tuesday on the Defund the Police initiative:

I’m not in the least surprised of the intensity of support in the tony, boho Southeast (perversely, the darkest-green blob on the Northeast of the map), or hipster-plagued Northeast (again, perversely, the north central part of the map, and least of all Longfellow and the near South Side and the Wedge (the green splotches around the middle of the city); this is the home of the non-profiteers, the recent college grads and the like.

I’m a little shocked that the far Southwest, and the western border, were such strong “no” votes, though. Ward 11 – along the south dentral border – ejected Councilman Schroeder over this initiative. Democrats with money apparently believe they have something to lose after all.

Not surprising in the least? The North Side (actually the Northwest qjuadrant of the map) where the actual crime is curbstomped the initiative, taking down Philippe Cunningham (the far northwest part of the city) and almost Jeremiah Ellison in the process (just south of him).

When Don Samuels came out sounding like a Montana state legislator on the law-and-order subjects, I knew something was up. I had no idea it’d be this decisive.

Ilhan Omar, Jeremiah Ellison and Phillipe Cunningham – the three biggest champions of the “Defund the Police” madness – had a campaign rally in North Minneapolis yesterday.

It was apparently sparsely attended.

But it was the people nearby that drew the attention; audio tweet below::

The MPD apparently doesn’t respond to shootings that don’t hit anyone anymore (although I have a hunch that’d change around Omar, Ellison, Cunningham or Lisa Bender’s houses), so the media will feel no obligation to cover it. Although that might also have something to do with the fact that the “machine guns” involved are utterly illegal, have been for eight decades, and are still everywhere.

It’s enough to make you wish there were a viable politifal opposition in Minneapolis. Because this’d be a great opportunity.

Philippe Cunningham, Minneapolis’s first transgender black city Council woman, says that even though she has spoken, and voted for, defunding the police, she doesn’t actually support defunding the police.

Or… Something like that?

Phillipe Cunningham is the first black, gay, female-to-male transgender person to become a council member in the city. Last year, Cunningham appeared alongside eight other council members at a protest in Powderhorn Park. The centerpiece of this demonstration was a stage that prominently featured the words “DEFUND POLICE” in bold, all capital letters.

Although Cunningham voted late last year to remove $8 million of funding from the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), she said she doesn’t actually want to defund the police and was “deceived” into standing on the defund police stage.

Apparently Cunningham was dealing with a pretty incredible con man (con person?), who deceived her into saying an awful lot of things that she never really believed:

“It is possible for us to keep our own community safe,” Cunningham said. “In north Minneapolis as the buildings were being broken and burned by white supremacists and extremists, MPD was nowhere to be found … so we had to come together ourselves in order to protect our community.”

Cunningham also praised the people “who threw the first bricks at police officers at Stonewall,” calling on the crowd to “honor our elders.”

Apparently the ne’er-do-wells have moved on from the “Nigerian prince“ scam, and done it in a big way.

Be careful out there.

During the Twin Cities marathon yesterday, former Viking and former Minnesota supreme court justice Allen Page…

…cheering on the runners by playing the sousaphone.

Got to say, Page is looking pretty good for a 76-year-old guy, especially for a former NFL lineman from back in the “concussion? We don’t care about no stinking concussion“ stage of the game.

Minneapolis, 2021.

There is so much gunfire in North Minneapolis and Uptown, they had to get a liquid-cooled shot spotter system.

The economy is falling apart.

Downtown is becoming blighted. The North Loop, the jewel of the city’s redevelopment plan, is turning into a shooting gallery

The schools are collapsing.

The wealth disparity gap is growing.

But, by golly, they’ve got their priorities straight.

Minneapolis’s city council, in its infinite, er, wisdom, voted to replace its police department with…

…well, they’ll get back to you on that.

But if you’re looking for a hint as to what law enforcement might look like in a new “Moved Forward” Minneapolis, this episode might offer a clue:

On the one hand, I suppose “dumping the problem on the general public, especially the ones you’ve been demonizing for a generation, like landlords” makes sense to a certain segment of the population.

On the other? Responsibility and accountability without the power and authority to do what’s needed to carry them out is the very definition of oppression.

I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and guess that barbering about “oppression” is going to be considered a “privilege”.

Minneapolis is almost on track to beat the murder rate from the “Murderapolis“ years.

There have been 50 homicides so far this year in Minneapolis, which is close to the amount that had accumulated by the summer of 1995 — the year the city was given the nickname “Murderapolis.” There were 97 total murders that year.

Unlike most Minnesota endeavors, I wouldn’t rule out Minneapolis “winning“ the title this time around. During the Murderapolis years, both of the Twin Cities mayors believed that law and order and public safety our primary jobs city government what is there to do. Not “privileges“.

I can’t say I was a huge fan of Sharon Sayles Belton, but she and the City Council she had actually knew what their priorities were supposed to be.

While Jacob Frey ran for office as a “law and order“ candidate (compared to the contenders in the field against whom he ran, at any rate), Minneapolis is weak mayor system and strong, and progressive to a fault, City Council make that more or less futile.

MInneapolis City Councilor Andrea Jenkins, presumably feeling herself swaddled in Urban Progressive Privilege and Intersectional Armor, went to a demonstration.

And was promptly out-lefted:

“BLM” blocked her car, demanding she sign a list of their demands:

Which, naturally, happened.

Let’s assume for a moment that this whole spiel isn’t staged, to give Jenkins’a whiff of the intersectional activist’s most important commodity, victimhood – and the fact that “BLM” put a dorky white kid in front of the car, allowing Jenkins to bellow about “white suprmacy” just loudly enough for the camera to pick it up, lends at least casual credence to the theory…

…and the more I think about it, the more I think “staged”.

But let’s pump the brakes. What if it was legitimate and organic?

Remember – if anyone replaces the clown car that is running Minneapolis – Frey, Jenkins, Cunningham, Alondra Cano, Jeremiah Ellison – it’s going to be someone to their left.

A few weeks ago, when the “city of Minneapolis” first “tried” to “Clear” George Floyd Square, at 38th and Chicago, they spun it (with the willing connivance of our media) to try to make it appear that a community group had somehow gotten a bunch of city trucks and their unionized employees out to one of the edgiest flashpoints in America without the mayor knowing about it.

As if it just…happened. Spontaneously.

Go ahead. Get your community group to try it.

It’s apparently spreading. Lisa Bender seems to think city crews are out wildcatting.

After city employees went to clean graffiti off the streets of Minneapolis, City Council President Lisa Bender allegedly stopped the process. When Bender first heard about the cleanup work being done, she wrote that she assumed the city employees “were talked into this [cleaning up the graffiti] by the business association.”

In a later tweet, she said that the public works employees “mistook the drive aisle” at the location of the Winston Smith memorial for a “public space.”

I remember the good old days, when Minneapolils just competed with Portland and Seattle for “miles of bike lanes per capita”.

From Minneapolis Crime Watch – one of the tiny fringe of feeds that make Twitter worthwhile – yesterday:

That’s right – if you’re a 98 pound woman, and you get bodily tossed from y our car by a coulpe of 250 pound White Supremacists who theaten to curb stomp you to death, and you don’t report a gun, the MPD isn’t nallowed to pursue.

The other side of the Looking Glass called, and asked Minneapolis to dial back the crazy.

…Minneapolis’s PR firm is going be earning its pay over this next one-to-fifty years.

“Protesters” took to blocking off streets in the Uptown area over the weekend – leading to an incident where someone drove into the crowd, killing one woman.

Which led a crowd to block off Lake Street yet again. And it wasn’t an especially “peaceful” bunch of protesters.

One local news crew actually videotaping a woman wandering around, gun in hand, shooting at God only knows what or two:

I’ll try to post the video when and if it becomes publicly available.

By the way – ain’t Uptown looking grand these days?