In 2015, I spent some time in Detroit on a business trip.

And even then, before Covid, downtown Detroit felt…vibrant.  Fun.  There was stuff going on in the evening.   There were places to go, things to do, people around and about. 

Companies were paying people good money to buy or rent downtown and walk to work. 

Things felt pretty decent…

…in about a square mile downtown. [1]

Go outside that square mile or two and it became…well, Detroit.

But I come not to praise Detroit, but to bury WUPHs – White Urban Progressive Homers, people who tie their identities so close to their cities that it squeezes out all humor, and all thought itself.

It’s not smack. It’s actual journalism, when referring to the ravages of two generations of non-stop corrupt Democrat governance on a city.

Like Detroit.

Or, if things keep going as they are, Minneapolis.

[1] I have no idea how Covid might have affected that state of affairs, but I’m not optimistic.

Remember Angie Craig?

Every two years she dusts off the ads with her four-wheeling around the back roads of her district, hanging out with the good ol’ boys in LeSeuer County, trying to appear “moderate”. 

Remember Yusuf Haji? 

Probably not.  He’s running for Dakota County Commission. 

Seems pretty innocent, right?

Turns out Haji’s got friends in low – and left-wing – places:

Turns out, not so much.

Haji is affiliated with “Our Revolution Twin Cities” – a group that wants to defund the police, among a dog’s breakfast of other bad ideas. Here’s an X thread with more on ORTC.

MInd you, this is in the same community that just had two cops and a firefighter killed by someone who would have been in jail but for the DFL’s other dilution of the criminal justice system.

Thing is, this area – the DakCo Commission, the various House districts (Gabriela Kroetsch is a strong GOP challenger in HD55A), and of course Angie Craig is vulnerable enough that this district is considered a plausibly contested race. 

So if you live in the south burbs, don’t be fooled.  Haji is a Moriarty – and Angie Craig is sucking up to the radical fringe that is no longer a fringe in this metro.

A guy who started a snitch line, enacted a thoughtcrime database, sicced the Attorney General on businesses that tried to survive his draconian and capricious Covid regulations and turned radical protesters into a fourth branch of government when he wanted social policy done…

…is lying to warn us about authoritarianism.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’d think a governor who’s built his entire career out of rigorously-contolled optics – lots of photos of eating fair food and holding animals and social media strawmen, no uncontrolled press conferences or public debates – would know better than to do…

…that.

“Grassroots”:   When a candidate who has never earned a primary vote, and only run one seriously contested election in her life, gets installed by the troika of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama after defenestrating the current President for being unfit to run a campaign (although apparently not to be President of the United States). 

Example:

Hope this resolves any confusion.

How It Started

This, of course, is the campaign Tim Walz is used to running: carefully curated photos of him holding animals, being fed corn dogs by Peggy Flanagan, and occasionally spouting risible strawmen via social media.

An “Instagram” Governor.

The bit above may be the perfect metaphor for Tim Walz, 2004-2023.

How It’s Going

Klink, while pheasant hunting with “influencers” over the weekend:

Now, I’ll give him half a pass on this: automatic shotguns are a pain in the ass. I hate ’em. And they are nothing like handling an M16/M4, the “weapons of war” Walz carried in the Guard and on the war-ravaged (checks notes) airfields of Italy.

But only half a pass.

Because when you’ve curated your entire public image as being a “progressive” who also fixes gutters and eats Fair Food and dresses like Elmer Fudd and shoots things for fun, one might think you’d take a little care – maybe check the piece over before the cameras show up – and maybe get it right when doing…

…y’know…

…your big instagram op.

“White Dudes for Harris” – the collection of online man-buns, barristos and Soho cliches from earlier in the summer – didn’t do it.

Picking Tim Walz – a thinly-closeted authoritarian with penchant for dressing up in Elmer Fudd costumes and eating Pronto Pups on camera – didn’t do it.

But this? This ad should solve Kamala Harris’s woes with men:

It’s like someone thinks the modern advertising and entertainment industries’ collective caricatures of “men” that you see in every ad or TV show that doesn’t involve an “A”-lister – either neutered, incompetent, buffoonish clichés or “men” who are “Masculine” in the same way trans men are “really women”.

This should really do it this time!

More on Harris/Walz’s male problems here.

Berg’s Seventh Law has been getting quite a workout over the past nine years:

When a progressive issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.

When leftists warn of waves of “right wing violence”, you can bet that either:

• A wave of left-wing violence has just happened, or
• A wave of it is in the pipeline and expected soon.

John HInderaker has an example ripped from the headlines:

Here is another instance: a death threat against Judge Aileen Cannon, the Florida federal judge who correctly dismissed the classified documents case against President Trump. She has been the object of a campaign of vilification by Democrats:

Democrats and their media allies have been lambasting Cannon, a Trump appointee, since she was assigned to preside over the Biden-Harris Justice Department’s prosecution of Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, and they have been apoplectic since July, when Cannon dismissed the indictment.

This past Thursday, Eric James Rennert was arrested based on a six-count indictment charging him with threatening to assault, kidnap, and murder a federal judge and that judge’s family in Florida’s St. Lucie County. The indictment does not name the judge. Nevertheless, as the New York Post reports, Cannon is the only judge who sits in the Fort Pierce courthouse in St. Lucie County.

At the link, Andy McCarthy details the Democrats’ shameful smear campaign against Judge Cannon, which has culminated in this assassination threat.

 

If Trump wins – what are you predictions?

Shot: Democrats act like there’s an exception in the First Amendment for “misinformation”, a term so broad literally nobody can define it (emphasis added):

Did someone send out a memo? Or has the shock of encountering the wild variety of views visible on Elon Musk’s X just been too much for grandees used to moving in circles where the acceptable boundaries of disagreement are narrowly drawn? When John Kerry recently spoke of “dislike of and anguish over social media,” he was presumably referring to how he and like-minded others (among them, it turned out, another failed presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton) reacted as they watched the wrong sort of ideas openly discussed on major online platforms.

For his part, Kerry was talking about climate “misinformation,” a word that, in the hands of those who manipulate its meaning, can encompass not only a misstatement of fact but also, all too frequently, nothing more than the expression of a heterodox point of view. Such fine distinctions, we suspect, are of little interest to Kerry. Instead, he bemoaned the way that people no longer turn to “the referees we used to have” to determine what’s true, but — the horror — “self-select where they go for their news, for their information.”

 

Chaser: The “Referees” we once had to tune into for information are, not misinforming, but actively disinforming us:

After Rathergate, and seeing Lesley Stahl humiliated while covering for Hunter Biden in 2020, you’d think CBS might learn, mightn’t you?

Of course not.

Chalk it up to a self-referential information feedback loop, but when Democrats started yapping about “misinformation”, I’d have bet a roll of quarters something like this was in the offing.

Can Kamala Harris ride “Vibes” and “Rizz” all the way to the White House?

Pessimistic as I am about the collective intelligence of half our population, I’m not always optimistic.

But Jim Geraghty has his doubts:

The Harris campaign’s entire theory of the case is wrong. Reminding people about what they couldn’t stand about Trump and emphasizing “joy” and “vibes” is not sufficient to close the deal with an electorate. It completely misreads the mood of the voters, who have been coping with runaway inflation and a high cost of living for most of the past four years, who have a growing sense that no one is in charge at the border, who worry about a genuine post-Covid rise in crime, and who see an international scene beset by invasions, terrorism, and massacres, all presided over by a doddering old man who was hidden from the public by a staff that took Edith Wilson as a role model.

This past weekend, Peggy Noonan asked the question the Harris brain trust should have asked: Is this the right moment in American life to proclaim a new politics of “joy”? “Do you want to feel joyful?” is the wrong question; almost all of us would prefer to be happier. The question is: Do you look around at the state of the United States and the world today — and the performance of this administration for the past four years — and feel like joy is the appropriate response?

 

My semi-related theory:  Democrats have been using Minnesota as a testbed for their approach in campaigning; running for high office on pure social media happy-vibing and platitudes, abetted by a mostly-in-the-tank media, worked well for Walz and Flanagan (and Dayton before them).

Why wouldn’t it work for Harris?

The answer – the fact that a few reporters, and “reporters”, didn’t get the message:  Harris could screw up scrambled eggs:

(As noted on yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, let’s just take a moment to savor the irony that Sunny Hostin asked Harris the question that did so much damage.)

Much more in the next couple of weeks.

I mean, Esme Murphy doesn’t tongue-bathe Democrats like Stephen Colbert does.

And yet Kamala Harris botches even that:

If you’re one of the world’s dictators, it’d be negligent of you not to the trying to influence the election in Harris’s favor.

After well over a week, the Administration is putting our money where it’s mouth is as re Hurricane Helene.

Just kidding:

It’s sending money to get Hezb’allah back on its feet. 

Submitted without comment, here’s Governor Walz’s appearance last Sunday on Fox. 

Did I say “submitted without comment?”  You know me better than that.

He does not come off well.  

I’d like to make sure as many Minnesotans as possible see this – not only for the Presidential tilt, but as people assess the DFL’s performance this past six years.

David Strom has a results of VP debate.

In short, I have revised my opinion about the debate. Not about what happened–I thought Vance was clearly better than Walz, but that it wouldn’t matter. Now I think it very well might, not because Vance won the debate but rather the manner in which Walz lost it. 

Walz lost it by looking deranged at times and like a liar. The visuals mattered and Walz’s dancing around on his personal lies mattered even more. 

So I was wrong…I think. The aftermath of the debate has the potential to be devastating to Tim Walz. 

 

The ghosts of Richard Stockdale and Richard Nixon are calling back from the great beyond thanking Walz for making them no longer the easiest “presidential debate flop sweat” joke.

 I’ve been meaning to come back to this.   A Harris/Klink op brought it up with a high hanging curveball:

Being corralled into a staged propaganda exercise?

I’ve never been a big Tim Walz fan. Quite the opposite.

But is anyone else getting some…1930s vibes?

Or perhaps more appropriately to Walz’s time in Omahongkong:

I can’t be the only one that finds that photo a little #weird in and of itself, in addition to the historical allusions (especially when you add in Walz’s “One Minnesota” slogan), can I?

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Tim Walz ducked all meaningful debates in the 2022 cycle.

Highlights of the evening:

Vance calling the moderators on their fairly naked bias: After the moderators used their interstitial bits to finish Walz’s point for him while trying to “fact-check” Vance, Vance finally had enough, and beat them down pretty brutally.

“Misspoke”: Oh, yeah. Bias notwithstanding, the mods asked Walz to answer MPR’s reporting that he was not, in fact, in Hong Kong during the Tienanmen Square massare. And it was pretty glorious:

And his first answer was “I was born into a middle class family…”

No, really – although he’s spent his past eighteen years telling people every detail of that time in China, down to what he ate and which Communist-logo sweatshirt Gwen wore, he slammed on the brakes and phumphered away claiming that he was old knucklehead and had “misspoken”

Facts: Vance was able to shred Walz in detail on a few issues, including his signing of Minnesota’s radical abortion laws – which put Walz back on his heels (and showed us that Tom Emmer was in fact, a pretty effective debate prepper.

And the #1 highlight:

Walz was weird; Vance was not: Walz had his moments – but Vance never lost his cool, stayed on message. Walz did, and did not. Vance won on style and substance, and it wasn’t even close.

And this may have been the first Vice Presidential debate of my lifetime that might have an actual impact on the election.

Fingers crossed. 

In my interview with former Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka last Saturday, we talked about the depths of Governor Klink’s radicalism. 

With that in mind – with any luck, this should turn up in the Veep debate tonight:

In a very significant development — I am almost prepared to say the most significant development in the current presidential contest — it has recently been revealed that Brian D. Lozenski, an associate professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College and a leader in the development of Minnesota’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum, explicitly called for the “overthrow of the United States.” This goal has demonstrably shaped Minnesota’s ethnic studies standards, according to which students are taught as early as kindergarten that America is evil. The video recording of Lozenski was made two years ago but was taken down the day after it was spotted by Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center…  

And for someone who’s made a bit of an art form out of concealing his radical nature under a couple of layers of Elmer Fudd-wear, it’s actually been kind of brazen of Walz.

But there’s not much point in trying to make Lozenski look like anything but a CRT Kommissar:

To make as explicit an assertion as did Lozenski is extremely rare; indeed, I have never seen or heard such an admission. The destructive intent of ethnic studies or CRT has been very apparent and much commented upon for many years by the conservative commentariat. But Lozenski’s open, cavalier articulation makes the destructive nature of ethnic studies virtually impossible to deny. 

So the debate should be interesting, for a change.

John Kerry – who came waaaay too close to becoming President, and that’s after acknowledging what a disappointment Dubya was in retrospect – accidentally told the left’s truth:

“our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it”

It’s disheartening how many Democrats consider that a bug rather than a feature.

On the weekend before the big debate with JD Vance, Tim Walz reminds everone that he’s a thin-skinned petulant little man:

For the first time in my politics-watching career, I’m excited to go to a vice-presidentai debate. 

Governor Walz takes us back to the glory days of “Separate but Equal”:

But of course there’s a reason for this:

Libraries have got to be woke, you see:

Nicole Cooke, a professor of library and information science at the University of South Carolina, is booked as a keynote speaker for the event, according to an agenda obtained by the DCNF.

Cooke has argued that it is “tantamount to malpractice” to allow students to enter the workforce without first being educated on diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice. In 2017, she received a grant to study “racial microaggressions in libraries,” according to a press release.

The professor has a long history of giving presentations on the importance of racial justice and diversity when managing libraries, according to her personal website. In 2020, she created an “anti-racism resources for all ages” project which includes a number of materials intended to introduce children to the topic.

 

One of the goals is to make libraries “more inclusive”. One would think inviting all those bigoted (checks notes) librarians would be pretty vital, if that’s the goal.

Wouldn’t one?

Paul Gazelka’s book Lifting the Veil is available right here.

Today’s music list:

Governor Walz, with Alex Soros.

Check the body language:

Looks like he’s ready to fetch a ball.

Every day is an opportunity for some new kind of social services fraud.

Medicare?  Food? Childcare? 

Old hat!

Now it’s “Autism treatment centers“:

“I and other former employees witnessed some neglect regarding clients’ education needs and self-care. The clients’ goals aren’t being run by the behavioral therapist there,” she told DHS, which administers Minnesota’s version of Medicaid, known here as Medical Assistance, a federal-state health plan for poor and disabled people.

Smart Therapy did not respond to a request for comment. 

The state is investigating 15 autism providers, has already withheld payments to providers and forwarded five to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. Although the identities of the centers are unknown, an immigrant autism provider complained that DHS discriminates against minority providers.

The autism investigation comes close on the heels of the Feeding Our Future scandal, which is believed to be the biggest pandemic relief fraud in the nation and has underscored state government’s failure to stop program fraud in recent years. 

 

Autism centers are – this beggars the imagination – not licensed in Minnesota, a state that requires a license to braid hair.  But unlike hair braiding (as far as I know), there’s a ton of government money going into “Autism Treatment” and, well, we know how that ends up in Tim Walz’s Minnesota, don’t we?

This is why I wonder how much prosecuting Kamala Harris did while she was in, and then leading, the San Francisco District Attorney’s office.

The first rule of armed self-defense, especially in a “blue” city, is you never talk about armed self-defense.

A particularly zealous DA – like Harris – could use a statement like Harris’s as evidence that one was looking to kill someone; if one were involved in an incident, the DA could use a statement like that to try to impeach the idea that you were an “unwilling participant” in the incident.  Which is enough to turn a righteous self-defense shooting into a term in prison, if you get the wrong jury. 

So let’s say I have my doubts.

I’ve said it many times in this space – going back to 1986, I’ve never liked Donald Trump’s public persona.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to vote for him in 2016 – I wrote in Scott Walker. 

And while Trump turned out to be a fine president on a policy level, I thought his behavior in the last few months of his presidency gave him a lot of baggage the GOP didn’t need – which was borne out in the 2022 cycle, and is certainly complicating this one.  His personality cult has, shall we say, underdelivered I was on Team DeSantis before there was a Team DeSantis, and I’m already on his 2028 team.

But with all my ambivalence about Trump, the prospect of a Harris/Walz administration makes the notion of voting for a third party, a write-in or, heaven forfend, Harris herself impels me to do my darnedest to convince people, like I convince myself, to hold my nose and vote for Trump.

Because Harris is that much worse. 

How?

How can I count the ways. 

She Is The Incumbent:  The mess we’re in right now has her autograph on it.

She’s been the sitting Vice President for almost four years. Harris, not to mention Biden, have proudly proclaimed she was the “last person in the room” when decisions about the economy, not to mention the disastrous exit from Afghanistan, were made. She was the “border czar” (Czaritsa?) during an era when eight digits worth of people crossed illegally into the country and stayed, the cartels took de facto control over the southern border, and over 300,000 unaccompanied minors disappeared from the ICE’s radar.

She’s been part of the brain trust that emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine, Iran to invade Israel by proxy, ruinous spending, the porous border, the collapse in Afghanistan and the side-tracking of the peace process in the Middle East, and the hyper-acceleration of Trump’s own ill-advised spending..

She’s Incoherent:  The whole “Joy!” and “Brat Vibes!” memes sprang up as a way to spin attention away from her supremely annoying verbal crutch of breaking into cackling whenever she gets nervous.

She can’t explain anything.  Off the teleprompter, she sounds like a stream of lawn signs and bumper stickers; like an AI campaign slogan generator that needs some more work. 

And all of that is presuming she’s not an alcoholic, prone to working drunk during the day. 

She is hiding.   Behind all the “joy” and “brat vibes”, she’s clearly running out the clock, dodging interviews, committing to nothing, putting up vague bland hints at policy online,

She’s Dishonest:  For all the nine years of palaver about Trump’s facility with the half-truth, Harris spent three solid years lying about President Biden’s health – repeatedly exclaiming the President was stronger and more with it than Jackie Chan in his thirties – until time came to defenstrate him. 

And she’s lying about him now – keeping him in office so the American voter doesn’t see her in office via that 25th Amendment, riding herd on the policies she spent four years helping to drive. 

These two things can not be true at the same time. 

And let’s talk about her magical floating accents.  Her prominent black supporters say she’s “code switching”, something we’re told every black person ostensibly does.  They’re wrong – every human who jumps between linguistic subgroups does it; white academics who grow up in the Mississippi Delta go from goober-chaw brogue back to standard English pretty routinely.  AOC slips back and forth between “Alli from the block” and her regular brand of shrill as needed.  My original accent doesn’t sound like the guy you hear on the radio, and doesn’t usually come out until I’ve been in North Dakota for a bit.   So “code switching” is real. 

But when you’re changing into the accent of a place and culture where you never lived – like Harris pasting on a Latina accent in Hispanic areas – it’s not code-switching. It’s pandering. It’s being a minstrel.

It kind of insults our intelligence.

She’s A Terrible Manager:  Harris ran one of the worst credible presidential campaigns in history in 2019 – jumping from front-runner to donesville before she could garner a single primary vote.

She’s never run a significant compaign very well. She’s never run a tough race; the one race she’s ever run against a Republican, for Attorney General in California, she almost lost, and her only other competitive races have been against Democrats – and in the case of the 2020 primaries, she’s been a disaster.  WIthout the media running active interference for her, she’s a hapless wreck.

And when she is in office?  Leaving aside her many political failures (until below, anyway), she’s a terrible executive, who’s had over 93% turnover in her office as Vice President.  Which, by my count, is worse than Orange Hitler’s turnover rate.

She’s Got A Record Of Failure.  Look at literally everything she’s “been in charge” of:

She was the “border czar” – and the border is a disaster. 

She was sent on a mission to Ukraine on the eve of the war.  The joy and brat vibes had barely subsided at Hostomel Airport when the missiles started flying. 

She was made the titular head of America’s space program – and NASA is, improbably, in worse shape now than ever. 

Joe Biden sidelined her from most of the “duties” a Vice President usually has, because she’s just not competent.  She is only running for President because Pelosi and Schumer realized the senescent Biden would leave a lot of money on the sidelines.

No World Leader Respects Her:   As Border Czar, she has allowed biggest invasion of US history.  If you’re Putin or Xi, you don’t have to guess what her affect as President will be, even if you leave out the cackling and the vapidity; she played an important role in helping turn San Francisco, and California, into the basket cases they are today.

Her alleged “toughness” as a prosecutor may be a chanting point. 

There’s a reason Ukraine launched its hail mary offensive at Kursk, and why Israel is swarming the net with Hezb’allah; they see a possibility of a Harris presidency, and realize that four more years of vacillation, coddling Iran, and being the adenoidal little guy on the shetland pony rather than the knight on the huge horse is not going to end well for them.

She’s Radical.  In 2019 – the one time in her career she’s had to systematically lay out a vision of a nation with her at the helm – she campaigned to the left of Bernie Sanders.

• Banning fracking
• Eliminating gas cars by 2030
• Decriminalizing border crossings
• Exalting sanctuary cities (she sued to prevent the Feds from cracking down on the ones we had back then)
• Mandatory gun buybacks by executive order
• Taxing unrealized capital gains
• Price controls
• Rent control
• Reparations
• Undercutting law enforcement (she pimped for the MInnesota Freedom Fund)
• Abortion til birth
• Federal funding of gender transition, including for illegal aliens. 

And while she’s painstakingly avoided answering questions about any of these in this campaign, rarely going beyond “Oh, no I di-unt” when asked about her flips and flops, she’s also chanted that her principles haven’t changed. 

Which ones? 

She Is The Actual Threat To Democracy:  The most terrifying thing about a Harris/Walz regime is that it would seek to redefine the deal between people, the states, and the federal government, and the separation of powers defined for each in the Constitution.

To the extent that they deign to talk about policies, they actively promote:

• Killing off the filibuster, specifically to jam down “codifying Roe“
• Ramming through the packing of the Supreme Court and, perhaps worse, bringing it under control of the Executive Branch with term limits and “ethics” guidelines enforced by…the executive branch.
• Changing voting rules, and federalizing control of elections to enable and promote ballot harvesting and, shall we say, emphasizing access over security
• Jam down making DC and Puerto Rico into states, adding four Democrat senators. 
• Packing the Supreme Court, changing voting rules, ballot harvesting, adding new states to stack the Senate.  
• Continue Biden’s abuse of executive orders.  Remember – Harris enthusiastically signed on to Biden’s use of OSHA to to cram down vaccine mandates on 80 million Americans, cashiering thousands of people from the military, and trying to circumvent the limits on the exectutive branch to try to transfer student loan debt to the taxpayers. Actively promotes censorship.
• Harris and Walz will be disasters for the First Amendment; both favor censorship of “misinformation” – as defined by them.  Both enthusiastically colluded with Big Tech to censor dissent about Covid, vaccinations, and every issue in the 2020 and 2022 elections that was inconvenient to the left.  Walz created a thoughtcrime database. 
• Harris and Walz’s antipathy toward the Second Amendment is a matter of record.  While both claim to be gun owners – in Walz’s case, usually while in full Elmer Fudd costume – they also seek to make the Amendment meaningless at its original intent, defending The People against tyranny. 

While the suspense may not be killing you, I sometimes find it clarifying, for me if not others, to list the cons (and, in this case hypothetically, pros).