Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A couple of days ago, I urged application of Berg’s 18th Law of Media Latency to the events at the Capitol. I was right. The FBI has charged a Leftist for the Capitol riot. He was running a false flag operation, dressing as a Trump supporters to infiltrate the crowd to commit violence.

Still, I’m seeing bloggers and columnists on the Right saying that even though President Trump did not urge his supporters to commit violence; and even though Leftist infiltrators did commit it; it’s still President Trump’s fault.

Look, I expect the Left to blame the victim of its false flag operation – that’s the point of running a false flag operation. I expect Never-Trumpers to do it too, because they hate Donald Trump and want him gone by any means.

I wasn’t expecting it from people nominally on our side. It’s disappointing. There’s a flavor of Saint Peter’s Denial about it, of throwing the man under the bus to avoid denunciation by the Liberal mob, of saving one’s own skin at the expense of one’s own principles.

In terms of fighting the system, I think Donald Trump may have been the greatest American President since Andrew Jackson. I think his reelection victory was stolen from him. I think he has received shabby treatment from his friends and allies, people I thought were my friends and allies.

Monday is a federal holiday to remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., another man who fought the system and lost. I’m taking a few days off to think about things. Take care, everyone.

Joe Doakes

There’s a lot to think about this month.

The left’s urge to control thought has gotten to none other than George Orwell himself – a push that is positively…

…well, you know where I’m going.

The piece is an object lesson on how American education has failed society in completely abrogating the teaching of critical thinking. How can we tell?

The gaping irony of this bit, for starters, responding to people who “reduce” Orwell to “tyranny bad, liberty good”:

But Orwell’s book is much more sophisticated. Orwell was interested not just in communicating the badness of totalitarian regimes but also dissecting how they succeed through the manipulation of language.

And in comparing the fascists Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War (on the side of the doomed communists) with Trump supporters, the writer and USAToday participate in the reduction of the language to a tool of political coercion.

I’d like to issue a hearty “welcome” to all of you “progressives” out there who, in view of Twitter’s wholesale de-platforming not only of President Trump but masses of fairly mainstream conservatives, have become zealots for property rights (private and corporate) and freedom of association.

Good for you! It’s a big step!

Now – you and your movement owe a bit of an apology to all those bakers, photographers and florists you’ve been legally harassing for the past decade.

But baby steps! You can do it!

It’s reapportionment time. And Minnesota – which held onto its eighth US House seat just about the lowest possible margin ten years ago – finally stands to lose a Representative.

California and New York appear to be in line to lose 2 or 3 seats apiece, with Florida and Texas the big winners so far, by all appearances.

But what’ll happen in Minnesota?

You can wager money that “combining the 4th and 5th CDs” won’t be on the table. Don’t even bother.

To my mind, it looks a little like this:\

• The 4th and 5th are sacrosanct. They’re not going anywhere.
• The 1st, 7th and 8th are associated with large, socially and geographically distinct areas.

But the 2nd, 3rd and 6th are all mixed bags. Now, I don’t think there’s much case to be made to dissolve the 6th, much as the DFL would love to send Tom Emmer back to private practice.

But getting consolidating either the 2nd or 3rd, and expanding the neithboring districts to fill in the gap, makes a lot of sense.

Thoughts?

ME (talking with a political operative who shall remain nameless): “So I see The DFL houses committee assignments are out, and representative Rena Moran is the chair of the house ways and means committee“.

OPERATIVE: “Ha ha. That’s pretty funny. “

ME: “No – I’m serious. Rena Moran. Chair of Ways and Means.”

OPERATIVE: “…”

ME: “ I know, right?“

Q: “Mitch – you said during the campaign that Biden – and, indeed, all Democrats – were campaigning on messages that couldn’t possibly be true, but that it didn’t matter, because people susceptible to voting Democrat are gullible herd animals with no critical thinking skills who vote based on knee-jerk emotion and reaction to chanting points, knowing that nobody will ever call them to account on their promises once the dust settles and everyone gets inaugurated. Why?

A: Because it’s true. Every time.

Minneapolis police note that they were kept from the crime scene of a recent shooting near “George Floyd Square“ near 38th and Chicago in south Minneapolis, and that parts of the “citizens committee“ that have turned the area around the intersection into a de facto “autonomous zone“ contaminated the evidence that could be used to try to prosecute the perps, if they are ever found.

A couple of the inspectors involved have emailed a few members of the student Senate… um, City Council.

To give the minimum possible credit where it is due, and indicate how very low the actual bar is, Councilman Andrea Jenkins seems to have a veered close to something within rifle shot of common sense in her response:

Jenkins told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS she supports the memorialization of George Floyd Square and wants it to become a permanent fixture as she and others on the City Council pursue racial justice and police reform. But she does not condone any action which inhibits police investigations.

‘We want justice for everybody and it concerns me and I am not happy with what I read in the email,’ said Jenkins. ‘To somehow disrupt or delay that kind of response is completely irresponsible and an obstruction of justice.’

My fearless prediction; Jenkins will be castigated as a conservative reactionary, and will have a primary opponent from the left. be castigated as a conservative reactionary, and will have a primary opponent from the left.

Ever since the retirement of Phyllis Kahn for being too moderate for her crazy-left district in Minneapolis, it’s seemed fairly plain – no matter what happens in Minneapolis politics, the drift will be the left.

So this post is both a test of my theory, and a prediction.

Alondra Cano is leaving office.

Now, you know me. I have never come to praise Cano, but to try to bury her in ridicule.

But here’s my prediction: she will be replaced by someone who makes her look like Phyllis Schlafly in comparison.

Predictions as to what she’ll do next? Leave your predictions in the comment section.

UPDATE: Hardly seems possible this was five years ago, already. It may be my favorite post title in the history of this blog.

It’s rhetorical, because Big Media never actually responds to the plebs.

But is it possible…:

…that there could be a less scientifically literate phrase than “believe in Science?”

How about “Think Critically about the data in front of us, and make an informed decision?”

Nah, that’s just more radical conservative talk.

Remember – it’s not what you know.

It’s who you know that has the power and media acquiescence to flout the rules any damn way they want to.

Berg’s Eighth Law of Diversity states: “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.”

And given the news that Trump had the highest share of the African-American vote since Richard Nixon in 1960, I’m going to suspeect that an awful lot of progs are going to be working extra-hard at gaslighting people back into compliance. Heck, it happened during the campaign, from Biden himself (“You don’t vote for me, you ain’t black, maaaaaan”), and becoming incredibly vicious when directed at actual “out” black conservatives on the retail level.

Gaslighting, by the way, is pretty much all you get from this piece on the subject in Medium (Motto: “Like Tumblr for pretenious and often narcissistic fops”).

It was hard to find a single pullquote that simultaneously encapsulated both the piece’s awfulness and its barometric nature for Big Left’s assigned role for black progressives. They all pretty much suffice.

So I cut to the conclusion (since I don’t want you all to have to try to stomach it):

And yet, the Black Republican bridge in 2020 is a bridge too far. There is too much “I” in their statements, too much “mine.” Too many personal anecdotes, too much misrepresented history presented as evidence. If you only want to go for yours, just say so. Or better, don’t say anything; people can read between the lines. Just stop citing Black survival as a reason for siding with a party that is wiping Black people off the map.

And is there a better statement to sum up all progressivism – “there is no “I” in “Unity”?

Our stereotype of the banana republic dictator is that he/she does their oppressing from above – with the military, the secret police, the “legal system” and so on.

And that’s all true – the KGB, the Gestapo, the Pasdaran, were or are all pretty effective at making life miserable, nasty, brutish and short for those who didn’t toe the authorities’ lines (and, often enough, for those who did, just to be safe).

But Americans are blessed to live in a place where, for the most part, we haven’t had to learn about how authoritarians subjugate us from “below” – by weaponizing the “underclass” against the middle.

History is chock full of examples, of whom most Americans are blissfully uneducated.

The Soviets weaponized envy against the closest thing that existed to a “middle class” in much of the USSR, the “kulaks” – which, like “counterrevolutionary”, was a fungible, malleable term that ould be expanded to include pretty much anyone those in power disdained. Sort of like “racist”, “misogynist” and “fascist” today.

The Nazi Sturmabteilung – popularly “the Brownshirts” – were a popular way for people with no particular talent or skill to fit into something, by being a thug and smacking down the opposition (and the Communists’ Rote Fahne, which lives on as “Anti”-Fa today, were the same thing for the communists).

The “Red Guards” in China certainly weaponized class envy, along with a parallel groups in Cambodia.

Former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega enlisted his “Dignity Battalions” – a “paramilitary” mass of down-and-outers and slum-dwellers who beat down opposition without a whole lot of ceremony.

Iran’s Basiji – basically a theo-political militia reporting to the Revolutionary Guards – serve much the same purpose in Iran; they are “Karen” with firearms. ]

And Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Militia of Venezuela” – basically a half-million-strong mob of thugs that bypasses the military chain of command to report to Maduro? Same exact model – a mass of characters with no particular stake in life other than upholding the regime/s that gave, or give, them any status at all.

All of them were threats looming out there, awaiting anyone who spoke up, who demonstrated, who were seen to be thinking about being a threat to the various regimes. A nervous knot in the stomach that everyone needed to keep in mind, and keep happy.

The lesson is obvious – a population that’s nervous about getting pummeled in the street, and publicly castigated out of public life by a drooling mob of (usually armed, always legally-supported) people, can’t do mundane (to Americans) things like organize, speak, oppose the regime. It ratchets the consequence curve outside the range of more and more people’s abilities to accept.

Nervous people are politically passive people.

I thought about that reading the news that Los Angeles County is decriminalizing a wide swathe of offenses:

In a new policy directive entitled “Declination Policy Directive,” Gascon has directed his subordinates not to enforce Penal Code Section 602 (trespass), Penal Code Section 415 (Disturbing the Peace), or Driving without a Valid License (Cal. Vehicle Code Section 12500).

Social justice warriors believe these are all statutes the white aristocracy uses to subjugate members of minority communities, institutionalizing racism. Resisting Arrest will also no longer be prosecuted.

Gascon will end the practice of charging minors as adults for murder and other serious crimes. He will extend victims services to the families of anyone shot by police. He will eliminate gang enhancements in criminal complaints, a practice Republicans initiated in the 1990s. He will have no cash bail, and the death penalty will no longer “be on the table.”

So – if you’re a “normal” in LA County, you have to worry about your city/county regime arbitrarily shutting down your livelihood. You have to worry about “Anti”-Fa and the cancel mob coming after your personal and professional reputation. And even without all that, you have to be concerned about the ongoing decay in your community that these sorts of policies inevitably bring.

LA County is doing de jure, by the way, what Minneapolis is doing de facto today. Watch for the student senate that runs Minneapolis to keep up with the Joneses before too terribly long.

You may find yourself looking back at the past four years.

You may find yourself wondering “why did the Democrats spend so much time and effort pushing the “Russian Collusion” hoax?

And you may say to yourself “Russia? They’re a paper tiger in a demographic spiral, keeping themselves afloat with arms sales and natural gas exports. They exert a tiny shadow of their influence compared even to thirty years ago”.

And you may ask yourself “Why does this make sense?”

And you may answer that question with a hearty “Berg’s Seventh Law explains it all”, as is usually the case.

Chinese intelligence has apparently been cultivating contacts among American politicians for years:

A suspected Chinese intelligence operative developed extensive ties with local and national politicians, including a U.S. congressman, in what U.S. officials believe was a political intelligence operation run by China’s main civilian spy agency between 2011 and 2015, Axios found in a yearlong investigation.

Keeping Berg’s 7th Law, and four years of chanting points about “collusion with Russia” in mind, any guesses which party their efforts were aimed at?

Make this your mission. Whatever it takes.

Please see to it that Tide Pod Evita has a role to fit her, er, capabilities at least a year before midterms.

Thanks in advance.

Ilhan Omar has been paying her husband’s firm $2.7 million in campaign donations.

Under most of your community property laws, that means she’s been paying herself a whole lot of money.

And yet while prospering mightily from Omar’s campaign (they grossed $4 million in the 2020 cycle, a nearly 25-fold increase on the firm’s 2018 billings), they received Covid payroll stimulus money:

Public records show that E Street Group, co-owned by Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, received nearly $135,000 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and $500,000 in Economic Injury Disaster loans. …

Public records show that E Street Group, co-owned by Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, received nearly $135,000 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and $500,000 in Economic Injury Disaster loans.

Federal Election Commission filings also show that the firm received payments for other campaigns, including $175,000 from the committee of Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and nearly $130,000 from the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

When Democrats say “never waste a crisis”…

To: Democrats
From: Mitch Berg, Unruly Peasant
Re: Your Marching Orders

Dear Democrats

Consider it your moral duty to do exactly this. As much as you can, and then some.

Preferably right out of the gate in the next session of Congress.

If you succeed, Wellstone will smile down on you.

That is all.

In the world we live in, going out in public wearing a swastika will get you pretty roundly reviled. Even Finland, which has been using the swastika as a national symbol since well before the Nazis stole it, finally had to cave in and stop using them.

History will have a way of doing that.

Of course, wearing a MAGA hat might get one reviled, or physically assaulted, by the #Unity “In This House…” crowd. Like it or don’t, but that’s the way things work.

But wear a red star – a symbol associated with more death and suffering than the swastika, by a serious multiple?

Why, you get a job with the Biden campaign, that’s what.

And it’s your fault for bringing it up:

She – the incoming State Department spokesperson – is rocking genocide-wear and turning around and pleading victimhood.

Gotta say, that’s the kind of talent a Democrat PR pro needs.

That, and the knowledge that Democrat voters just don’t think that critically about things, and the in-the-bag media either doesn’t care, doesn’t know any better themselves, or bet on the other guys all along.

The election’s over.

Maybe Biden takes office in seven weeks. Maybe one of Trump’s legal challeges gets traction.

For purposes of this post, I don’t know and don’t care.

Because the 2022 and 2024 campaigns have already begun.

The good news: without Trump, the Democrats are going to have to find someone to unify around. And it ain’t gonna be easy.

From New Republic – now, they have to try to focus on their own problems:

The coming weeks may see the reemergence in backrooms and boardrooms of the tensions that loomed over the 2020 Democratic primaries. Let us review the three power centers in the party as they existed then:

The new economy. Two titans of the finance world (Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer) sought to win the Democratic nomination by funding their own and various down-ballot candidacies. (Both would eventually back Biden.) There was also one impecunious primary candidate who had some original ideas about the tech world: Andrew Yang. The new economy provides wealth for so few people that it can never command the party’s rank and file. But it exercises a dizzying gravitational pull on its leaders.

Socialism. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were its candidates, the former in a doctrinal way (unions, benefits, income redistribution), the latter in a way adapted to strike more precisely at modern power relations (financial regulation, economic rights), which she denied was any form of socialism at all. Each was a more dire threat to the interests of people like Bloomberg and Steyer than anything the tax-cutting, deregulatory Republicans might produce. This is the great drama of the Democratic Party: They are the party of the 1 percent. They are also the party of expropriating the 1 percent.This is the great drama of the Democratic Party: They are the party of the 1 percent. They are also the party of expropriating the 1 percent.

Civil rights. The party’s glue is civil rights, broadly understood. Civil rights long meant looking out for the practical and principled interests of Black people—naturally a commitment on which cooperation with socialists is possible. But over the decades, civil rights has also become a regulatory and judicial system for advancing the interests of other groups, including immigrants (elite and mass), women executives, two-income gay couples, and lawyers—commitments more consistent with those of the Democrats’ plutocratic wing. The role of civil rights as reconciler-of-contradictions can be compared to that of anti-Communism in the tripartite Reagan coalition of the 1980s, which appealed in one way to Christians who thought the country ought to be more fraternal and in another to businessmen who thought it ought to be more rapacious.

Without a boogieman, can they boogie?

That’s the good news.

Now, the bad news: without Trump, the Republicans are going to have to find someone to unify around. It that ain’t gonna be easy.

The Trump “movement” is a lot like Ron Paul’s crowd, eight and 12 years ago – they pretty much came for a single personality, in whom a bunch of hot button issues coalesced; immigration, economic decay, identity politics. Like the Ron Paul crowd, they could easily disappear from the GOP for another generation.

Then there’s the remaining Tea Party, Reagan and even Chamber of Commerce Republicans – none of whom are big enough to put someone in the White House, all of whom are big enough to deny a nomination or scupper an election if they stay home.

The GOP needs a New Gingrich to articulate a vision that brings that throng together in time for midterms, when the reaction to the inevitable “progressive” overreach peaks.

So why did Latinos vote for Trump in record numbers?

Because they’re a bunch of bitter Jesus Freaks, according to the guy who made “bigger Jebus freaks” a political class and social identity group:

.@BarackObama: “There’s a lot of evangelical Hispanics who…the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees— undocumented workers— in cages,they think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion.” pic.twitter.com/g13DHGcM7y

Is there a President in history who has so fully incorporated condescension into his brand as Obama?

BTW – GOP outreach to Latinos needs to lead, front-and-center, with this for the next four years.

Also with cooling it with the “Deport-em-all” talk.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emailed a week or so back:

Saint Paul, Minnesota
November 20, 2020
For Immediate Release

Dictator-for-Life Walz today announced a new Executive Order intended to save Minnesotans from the deadliest virus ever known, Covid-19.

“It is well documented that Black people are more susceptible than Whites,” he said. “It stands to reason the more people who have the virus, the more people they can spread it to. We must prevent the spread of the virus which could overwhelm medical facilities and leave thousands of people to die untreated. Therefore, effective immediately, all Black people are required to present themselves to local authorities for removal to permanent and isolated Relocation Authority camps where they will be confined for the duration of the emergency.”

In response to Republican claims that such an order would somehow violate the “Constitution,” a spokesman for Attorney General Ellison stated, “Since the Governor’s order is authorized by statute and has not been overturned by the Legislature, it is presumptively valid. There is ample legal precedent for this measure provided in the Supreme Court case of Korematsu v. United States. The notion that the Governor lacks the authority to suspend people’s so-called “Constitutional rights” during the time of state-wide emergency is absurd on its face.”

Local Black Lives Matter and NAACP officials called a press conference to protest the order but were summarily arrested and have not been heard from since. It is believed they are the first Blacks to be sent to the Relocation Camps, although that rumor cannot be confirmed.

In Saint Paul, Joe Doakes, reporting.

It only seems preposterous if you haven’t been following Governor Fredo and Mayor Squiggy in New York.

Or, y’know, history in general.

What Tom Bakk and Dave Tomassoni did this week in Minnesota, it seems Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is doing, more or less, in the US Senate.

And progs aren’t happy about it:

While he would certainly never acknowledge it, Joe Manchin just took it upon himself to go on national television, and had the brilliant idea to singlehandedly throw away any reason someone in the state of Georgia would have to vote for a Democrat in order for them to take the Senate. If he has already positioned himself as someone more interested in catering to the right as opposed to the left, and it’s all but guaranteed he will act as a barrier to any meaningful legislation whatsoever that Democrats could pass, does he not understand he just essentially told people that nothing was going to get done if Democrats control the Senate? Does he not realize he essentially just told voters to go ahead and make the Democrats the majority, while at the same time telling them there was actually no reason to do so considering he has made himself the barrier to anything their base wants to see done?

However the George Senate runoffs turn out, Joe Manchin is going to be one of the most powerful people in the United State for the next two years, at least.

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barack Obama showed us, when you’re seen as “the first” at something (incorrectly, in Ginsburg’s case), you really don’t have to do that much or do it all that well to be revered as an epochal hero.

On the left, anyway.

And Kamala Harris seems poised to continue that tradition.

To some observers, gun rights were on the brink of going viral, and in a positive way, before last March. Gun ownership, gun culture, and the notion that the right to keep and bear arms is not merely an essential, but a normal part of regular civic life, were on the ascendant.

One could even point out that the extreme anti-gun stances in “Blue” America were a reaction to that ascendancy in most of the country.

Then came the twin pandemics – Covid and violence tolerated with a nudge and a wink by Blue city governments…

…and it would seem gun control has, itself, been shot in the foot.

It’s not all good news – given that Biden has pledged to be a gun grabber, Big Left may well see that this may be their last decent chance to disarm the nation.

This is the correct response to Covid: We’re going to treat it like any other respiratory virus.

It is simply not possible to stop a virus from spreading, or to prevent people from being exposed to it.  Instead, we must focus on protecting those most at-risk from the virus, and treating those sickened by it, as best we can. 

Everybody else – get back to work.

The existence of the virus is not a hoax; the panic response is a political hoax that deliberately sacrifices senior citizens’ lives to terrify voters into electing a man who promises to keep them safe.  It’s despicable.

Joe Doakes

Rahm Emanuel let slip the great Progressive commandment – “never waste a crisis”.

The pandemic was real. So was the Democrats’ adherence to Emanuel.

…not only that Berg’s Seventh Law is universal and immutable, but that Democrat politicians can and do count on their voters being unthinking lemmings who know neither history nor critical thought.

Barack Obama:

Barack Obama – who won a Nobel Peace Prize before spending eight years making “Hellfire” a more common precipitation in the Middle East than rain, and who did more to clamp down on critical media than anyone since Woodrow Wilson – bags on Trump, who made the first serious progress on Middle East peace in decades, and who ramped down military adventurism..

…the way the increasinly Wilsonian-looking Obama promised, and failed, to do.