… is what fascism looks like; [1] San Francisco State University, thanks the student to Ryan, head against Riley Gaines (a bio woman, speaking out against having to compete against transgender athletes), hit several times (by a bio male), and forced to take shelter in the back room, protected by campus police until the riot cops showed up to escort her and the group she was with out of the building.

“I am also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully. These issues do not go away, and these values are very much at our core. ”

She even offered them counseling – for the fact that Riley Gaines exists, apparently:

[1] actual fascism. Not the meaningless, wiffleball college students and other leftists today keep referring to.

Man tries to rob parking lot attendant in New York. Shoots him twice. Attendant nonetheless takes the gun away, and shoots the attacker.

Police arrest the victim, charge him with illegal gun possession. For taking the gun used to try to kill him.

[Attendant Moussa Diarra, age 57] was shot twice during a tussle with suspected thief Charles Rhodie at Carolan’s West 31st Street garage early Saturday before using the accused man’s weapon to shoot him back.

Diarra was initially charged by cops in the case, including with criminal possession of a weapon for having Rhodie’s gun at one point, but Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office Sunday dropped the raps. Rhodie still faces charges including attempted murder.

Bragg’s office dropped the charges after public outcry.

Let’s emphasize that properly – it took public outcry to get these morally depraved charges against an innocent man who defended himself dropped.

And just so I’m clear, by “depraved” i mean “evil”.

When governments goal is to make people more afraid of the consequences of protecting themselves than of being victimized, there is no other word for it.

SCENE: December 2020.

THE DFL: “The state has a $17.5 billion dollar surplus. This is a monument to the wisdom of the Walz/Flanagan Administration, and will be used to move forward as One Minnesota…

NORMIES: Uh, the “surplus”” is a combination of one-time or shor-time stimulus money from the Feds, and tax revenue driven by people spending all that stimulus money. It’s not permanent. But I bet you people are going to turn all this one time money into permanent spending, aren’t you?

THE DFL: The answer is, go forward, inclusive equity one people one leader one Minnesota!

NORMIES: That’s not an answer…

SCENE: March 2023

THE DFL: The “surplus” was always one time money, and we need to raise taxes”

NORMIES: Uh, that’s what we said.

THE DFL: As always, let’s go forward, inclusive equity one people one leader one Minnesota!

Up until 2020, DFLers could respond to conservative concerns about the state of the Twin Cities with “Hey, at least they’re growing”.

And yes, both Minneapolis and Saint Paul grew, after a fashion, between 2000 and 2020.

But all that has come to a screeching halt, and reversed:

Unstated: most of the people hitting the doors are the productive, taxpaying ripe suck class. Whatever growth is happening is among the class that consumes government revenue – in particular, the non-profit industrial complex and its clients.

Former Crystal city councilman and slap target emeritus Jeff Kolb responds, as usual, economically and precisely:

The Met Council has been running a demographic ponzi scheme, trying to plump up the numbers of the productive class to justify spending, taxing and playing infrastructure games like the cities are healthy and growing.

Like Detroit, I suspect Minneapolis and Saint Paul are about to find out what happens when the productive class hits the exits.

It’s a gloomy, cloudy Monday morning.

And yet my heart is dancing.

Because it’s another day alive in God’s creation? Sure. Goes without saying, but needs to be repeated anyway.

But beyond that? There’s this:

It’s the Anoka County Attorney slapping down Jamie Becker-Finn over the proposed “safe storage” bill, which would have required all guns to be stored unloaded, with ammo locked up separately from the guns, and required a carry permit to have an uncased, loaded gun in the home, allowing police wide latitude to barge in and check on the above.

It’s fairly clearly a Fourth Amendment shortcut. It would disproportionately affect Black and Latino gun owners. It’s patently unconstitutional.

And any day that starts with Rep. Becker-Finn getting water squirted on her nose is a good, glorious day.

SCENE. Mitch BERG is in his muddy driveway, replacing a taillight on his truck. Avery LIBRELLE, happily inspecting the contents of peoples recycling bins for violations, sees him, and saunters over before BERG notices.

LIBRELLE: :Merg!

BERG: Uh…hey…

LIBRELLE: I read your bit on Watler Hudson’s hateful speech calling for genocide against trans children.

BERG: If you’re down to nothing but lies, I don’t think we’ve got anything to talk about…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. You are motivated by pure hate.

BERG: Saying those who disagree with you on *policy* issues act out of “hate” is the mark of a dolt.

Don’t flatter yourself. I won’t risk corroding my soul wasting hate on those who disagree with me. I love those who differ from me – including transgender people – as my savior said to love my fellow imperfect human.

Hate? Get over yourself. If you thought it before, you were delusoional. If you believe it now, you’re manipulative, gaslighting human garbage.

LIBRELLE: Oooh. You’re melting down.

BERG: Maybe if I splashed water on you, you would.

And SCENE

All last week: the DFL telling the peasantry that 2+2=5.

The weekend:

Endless gauzy-focused, staged cheesecake (literally, this weekend) photo-ops, breathlesslyt lapped up by a tame, generally almost worthless media.

Remind anyone of any utterly depressing and ever-more-timely literary masterpieces?

Last December 8, when the DFL was crowing about having a “$17.6 Billion Surplus”, I noted tha the so-called “surplus” was nothing but bIllions of dollars in federal Covid stimulus dollars, routine Minnesota DFL overtaxation (plumped up by receipts driven up by inflation in the cost of the goods being taxed, and that all of that that taxation and inflation was going on over an epipandemic surge in stimulus-swollen consumer spending that would end with the subsidies.

And I predicted:

• The DFL will turn that “$27.6 Billion in Surplus” into permanent spending
• The economy will slow into recession (as even the DFL’s cheerleaders in their bespoke press are starting to observe).
• Without the Covid stimuli, and with the economy contracting, tax receipts will crash again. “Unexpectedly”
• The state will have a multibillion dollar deficit by 2026, probably 2024.

I think it’s fair to say the first bullet is in the 10 ring:

“Seemingly”.

Of course, some are taking this as a cue to celebrate:

No word from Rep. Stevenson if making the trains run on time is next.

My ultimate prediction – billions in deficits – is now inevitable.

No, it’s not just me. Walter Hudson:

This is how they describe the free lunch bill:

A “tax cut”.

I suppose public education is a “tax cut” because parents aren’t doing teaching at home, too?

A regular reader sent me this:

Social services get funding based on how much need exists – which means it’s in their interests to make sure people know to get their needs out, front and center.

No stone left unturned.

Senator Smith took to Twitter to shill for “ESG“ – rules that require businesses to make decisions based on “Environment, Social Credit, [woke corporate] Governance l”practices.in other words, replacing fiduciary responsibility with “woke“ “social justice“ (read: Marxist) values.

there are really only two possibilities:

• Smith really is this ignorant.
• She knows she can count on a majority of her voters being this ignorant.

Given the last few elections in Minnesota, #2 isn’t the dumbest strategery .

Attention, “fact-checkers” – yet again, we were right and you were wrong. The lab leak theory – which for over half the pandemic was labeled a racist conspiracy theory, repeating which could get you kicked off of social media and drummed out of polite society – appears to be true.

But if there’s one thing the American media does well, it’s come together to deflect attention away from its collective misdeeds. (emphasis added): .

Media outlets that had once definitively debunked the lab-leak theory innovated a new journalistic genre: the un-debunking. And yet, the explicit intention behind these retrospectives was to indemnify those who’d collaborated in the pressure campaign against the theory’s proponents — or, at least, to validate their good intentions. “Were news reports diminishing or disregarding the lab-leak theory actually ‘wrong’ at the time,” asked the very same Washington Post that had savaged Senator Cotton, “or did they in fact accurately reflect the limited knowledge and expert opinion about it?” You won’t be surprised by how the paper answered its own question.

In other words, “the truth may change, but it is always what we say it is”.

And nothing changes the definition of truth more than you-know-who:

In February 2021, Facebook lifted an arbitrary ban it had imposed on posts that included “false claims about Covid-19,” including the notion that the virus was “man-made or manufactured.” The decision was attributed to the “evolving nature of the pandemic,” but the pandemic had not actually evolved at all. What had evolved was the conventional wisdom. At the same time, Facebook reportedly tightened the regime restricting users’ ability to post “content that has been rated false,” or at least has yet to be deemed true. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the biases shared by those who “rate” relative factuality might extend beyond epidemiology. And in Facebook’s defense, ABC News absent-mindedly admitted, “the claims [sic] that the virus came from the lab was one often pushed by former President Donald Trump, though he never provided evidence.” Enough said.

Because to the – there is no better term – clique that sees itself as running America’s media and messaging, it’s not even the medium that’s the message. It’s the messenger:

In what must have been a painful concession in September 2021, science historian Naomi Oreskes admitted that the “lab-leak theory is plausible.” But even so, she qualified her mea culpa by calling “some of the people promoting the claim” — and Donald Trump, in particular — “irrational.” “We all judge messages by the messenger,” this distinguished voice in the field of science journalism let slip. Even the center-left columnist Jonathan Chait, who had been brave enough to buck the social pressures culminating in a consensus around the virtue of censorship, justified his colleagues’ prejudicial impulses after the fact, writing that the “idiotic conformity of the right’s pseudo-journalistic apparatus” had essentially incepted in the Left an equal and opposite reaction to its “propaganda.”

It’s hard to do anything but taunt big media anymore.

Lori Lightfoot, out as mayor of Chicago, after failing to advance to the runoff, in Yesterdays election:

The top two vote getters – the liberal endorsed by the police union, and the center radical endorsed by the teachers – will face off in the runoff:

Mr. [Paul] Vallas, an adviser to the Fraternal Order of Police during its negotiations with Ms. Lightfoot’s administration, used the crime issue against her on the way to his first-place finish, calling for hundreds of new police officers.

Turns out blue city Democrats can reach a tipping point.

Exactly what that means will be interesting to see, where “interesting“ means in the classic rural Scandinavian sense of the term.

Never let it be said the DFL isn’t on top of the important issues.

Democrats have introduced a bill in the Minnesota Legislature that would ban the sale of bottled water in the state.

Introduced earlier this month by Rep. Sydney Jordan, a Democrat from Minneapolis, the bill would prohibit manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers from “selling or offering for sale bottled water in Minnesota.”

The bill defines bottled water as “water contained in a formed or molded container” that is “comprised primarily of plastic resin, sealed, and holds less than two liters when full.”

They’re not on top of them.

But the powers that be will never let it be said.

To: Senator Omar Fateh
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Bad Look

Sen. Fateh,

You said this:

I suspect you, like all DFLers, know your voters don’t know any better, and wouldn’t think about it critically if they could, which they can’t, but perhaps you’re not the one to be yapping about your colleagues’ propriety.

That is all.

Berg’s 8th Law is universal and omniscient.

American progressivism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder.

To wit:

Presidential candidate Nikki Haley was accused of using “her Brown skin to launder White supremacist talking points” during a racially charged interview on MSNBC Sunday night.

“I see [Haley] and I feel sad,” Daily Beast contributor Wajahat Ali told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, “because she uses her Brown skin as a weapon against poor Black folks and poor Brown-Black folks.”

“[S]he uses her Brown skin to launder White supremacist talking points,” Ali added.

There is no harder job in America than to be a female, black, Latino, Asian, gay or Muslim conservative.

Fentanyl is killing like crack only dreamed of killing.

We could be on the brink of a couple of World War IIIs.

The national debt is unsustainable.

People can’t afford things from rent to eggs.

President Biden:

Up next: tax relief for high end restaurants and professional espresso machines.

Staffer for conservative GOP Latina congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna discusses how loving and accepting the left is:

Berg’s Eighth Law has no exceptions.

I guess everyone is just finding ways to economize, these days.

I suspect that’s one of the radionaliztions batted around the Strib, WCCO and MPR newdsrooms after learning that questions about the ethics of pouring “consulting“ money into a firm owned by her husband, Omar has been spending a lot less on consultants:

A lot.

Fox News is reporting that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign has paid out comparatively little in consulting fees after cutting ties with a firm co-owned by her husband.

According to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings reviewed by the outlet, Omar’s payments to political consultants fell to around $1 million during the 2022 midterm election season.

That is a two-thirds decline from the nearly $3 million she had paid to E Street Group, a firm co-owned by her husband, Tim Mynett, during the 2020 election cycle, when she faced a far less competitive primary challenger.

By the way, they’re referring to her current husband. Not the guy who was no way, no how her brother, you racist.

Whenever your “progressive“ friends condescendingly coo “nobody’s coming after your guns“, just remember that career bureaucrat and St. Paul, representative Dave Pinto is out there plying his trade:

School counselors.

Leftist ministers at “progressive“ churches

Marriage counselors, with six hyphenated last names.

These are a partial listthe people that today’s DFL wants to give control over your civil rights.

By the way – where to fight that mental health crisis, making half the population distrust the mental health industry.

…when those 87,000 new IRS agents were “only going to go after rich tax cheats“.

The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service today issued Notice 2023-13, which contains a proposed revenue procedure that would establish the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program, a voluntary tip reporting program between the IRS and employers in various service industries. The IRS is issuing this guidance in proposed form to provide an opportunity for public comment.

The proposed SITCA program is designed to take advantage of advancements in point-of-sale, time and attendance systems, and electronic payment settlement methods to improve tip reporting compliance. The proposed program would also decrease taxpayer and IRS administrative burdens and provide more transparency and certainty to taxpayers. The proposed program includes several features:

Politicians lie. It’s a fact that was building careers for editorialists, humorists and satirists since long before it made WIll Rogers a well-known man.

But today’s Democrats seem to be counting on, not just gullibility, but active willful ignorance, on a titanic scale.

Oh.

The art dealer representing Hunter Biden said the president’s son had the potential to be one of the most influential painters of the modern era, but declined to say whether he’d cooperate with a congressional investigation into sales of the art.

Georges Bergès, who has been overseeing the sale of Biden’s paintings, said the 53-year-old would ‘become one of the most consequential artists in this century.’

His comments came as the New York Post pressed him on whether he would comply with requests from the House Oversight Committee, which asked to see the names of individuals who purchased Biden’s artwork and the price they paid for it.

It’s art. You wouldn’t understand, peasants.

When The Post asked Bergès whether or not he intended to cooperate, the art dealer declined to comment and instead waxed poetic about the heights of Biden’s artistic prodigy.

‘I represent Hunter Biden because I feel that not only his art merits my representation, but because his personal narrative, which gives birth to his art, is very much needed in the world,’ he said. 

‘His is a story of perseverance; Hunter’s story reflects what I believe is the beauty of humanity, judged not by the fall, but by having the strength to rise up, by having the character required to change and the courage to do it.’

The worst thing about current events is, unlike books, you can’t skip to the end to see how i t

Democrats in Minnesota and nationwide are switching into enforcement mode.

The legal persecution of Jack Phillips continues…

Phillips’s public expression of his faith had placed a target on his back, and the narrow Supreme Court ruling in his favor had the two-pronged effect of further inflaming activists while simultaneously depriving the baker of decisive, precedent-setting protections against their agitations. In 2017, “the very day the Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’s case, Autumn Scardina, a transgender activist in Denver, called Masterpiece Cakeshop and requested a custom cake with a blue exterior and a pink interior to symbolize a gender transition,” David Harsanyi wrote. Scardina was allegedly a member of the Church of Satan, and court documents alleged the activist had also sought Phillips’s services for charming depictions such as a cake celebrating Satan’s birthday, which would feature “a large figure of Satan, licking a 9″ black Dildo,” with the requirement that the dildo must necessarily be “an actual working model that can be turned on before we unveil the cake.”

Phillips, of course, politely declined Scardina’s requests. Scardina, of course, proceeded to file a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The commission, of course, ruled against Phillips. In August 2018, two months after his initial Masterpiece Cakeshop victory, Phillips was back in court.

Last week, a panel for the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld an earlier court decision requiring Phillips to bake Scardina’s transgender cake. No surprise there — the same court had also upheld the state’s original injunction demanding that Phillips bake the same-sex wedding cake. What should be abundantly clear at this point is that “civil rights,” in this context, are more about power — wielded against disfavored groups, and in favor of privileged ones — than any neutral conception of legal protection. Even as it ruled against Phillips, the Commission upheld the right of bakers to refuse to make a Bible-shaped cake inscribed with the message: “Homosexuality is a detestable sin. Leviticus 18:2.” This double standard is a feature, not a bug, of how these bureaucracies function. As NR’s editors noted today, the practical effect of the Left’s weaponization of anti-discrimination laws “is to demand that the faithful kneel before favored identity groups.”

…and is so hamfistedly symbolic that a sophomore-year English prof would send it back for rewrite if it were fiction.

The process is the punishment.

Of course, the MNDFL does its darnedest to make it difficult, even impossible, to run as a Republican. I’ve heard more than one GOP legislator who’d been pondering running for higher office without having spent their teens and twenties as cloistered monks say they were going to demur on running , because the DFL’s opposition research crowd would make not only their lives, but their family’s, a living hell.

WIth that in mind?

Keith Ellison is going to show Scott Jenson that running against the DFL has consequences. Via David Strom:

…the Attorney General of the State of Minnesota has taken it upon himself to step up the harassment of Dr. Jensen based upon already adjudicated charges that should never have been brought in the first place. It is disgraceful and can be explained by nothing other than politics.

It is a political hit job–punishment not for what he has done, or even said, but for who he is. A well-respected Republican who dared to challenge Tim Walz in the last election. They are sending a message that taking on the Democrat establishment will ruin your life.

I said above that the process is the punishment. At some point, the determination that he may continue to conduct medicine will not exonerate him, nor return the time, effort, and money that he has to spend to defend himself. They have turned him into a doctor who has faced 5 investigations. How many potential patients will avoid him for that alone? Countless.

No matter how bogus the charges are, the punishment has taken place simply by making the charges and forcing him to defend himself.

Politics ain’t beanbag, and it is usual for people in the midst of campaigns to hurl charges at each other. But this goes way beyond that. They are mobilizing all the power of the state to destroy Jensen.

This is what tyranny looks like in America.

When all your oppoonent cares about is gaining and consolidating power, “democracy” is just a decorative verbal sprig of parsley on top of whatever horrors our new Leninists are hoiking up.

One of the things about having one’s party in the minority is that, free from the possibility of having to try to craft compromises to pass legislation, they can submit legislation that reflects their core principles to a T.

When the GOP is in the minority – as it is in the MN House and Senate? Then you see bills that make you wonder “where was that kind of thinking when the Republicans controlled the gavel?” Of course, it’s easy to stand on pure principle as the minority – it’s all for the campaign lit in the next election.

Parties in the minority submit legislation that reflects their inner id.

WIth the GOP in the minority, you get solid conservative, even daringly libertarian proposals.

WIth Democrats in the minority? You get attacks on core liberties.

Adam Schiff and his fellow Dems dream of gutting the First Amendment. He and his cronies are proposing to reverse Citizens United – which ended speech rationing for non-union corporations – and re-regulate political spending, which is political speech.

Of course, they’re in the minority, for now:

It’s just a political stunt, of course, as Schiff doesn’t have the votes. But it does reflect the authoritarian outlook of the contemporary left on free expression. From the day the decision came down, 13 years ago this week, Citizens Unitedwas a rallying cry for those threatened by unregulated discourse. President Barack Obama infamously, and inaccurately, rebuked the justices during his State of the Union for upholding the First Amendment. Since then, Democrats have regularly blamed the decision for the alleged corrosion of “democracy.”

“Democracy”, in Democrat usage, is losing meaning almost as fast as “White Supremacy”.

Remember last year, in the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision, when Kansas referred a constitutional amendment banning abortion to a popular vote…

…and it lost?

In deep-red (but for Wichita and Kansas City) Kansas?

Big Left took it as a bit of great news – “Even Red America is pro-choice!”

Smarter Americans read it this way: America is divided on abortion:

• About 15% want abortion through all forty weeks, and maybe even a little after (no, I’m not bveing hyperbolic).
• 20-odd percent want to ban abortions completely – many with exceptions in the rare cases where the mother’s life is at risk.
• The remainder support some form of abortion, with support sloping steadily downward from six to 20 weeks, and nearly vanishing after the halfway point in the pregnancy.

The DFL, dominated by that first 15%, has jammed down the most extreme interpretation of “choice” this side of California. Will the people lash back from the extremes, the way they (arguably) did in Kansas?

Well, if I have anything to do with it.

One group that should, doctrinally, be in the second 20% – or at least the most moderate parts of the larger 60% – is Catholics. Of course, we know Catholics oppose abortion, because Catholics never get divorced or eat meat on Fridays, either…

…but if there was ever a time for a hypothetical archdiocese to get serious about doctrine, one might think this would be it.

Ten Catholics in the House, and three in the Senate, voted for the “PRO Act”.

Now, at least a few Catholic bishops and priests have invoked ecclesiastical sanctions against some “pro-choice Catholics”, so it’s not without precedent.

So the question remains – is Archbishop Hebda going to do his job, or find some artful and obtuse grounds to evade it?