Let’s start with a little music:

The facts we hate
We’ll never meet
Walking down the road
Everybody yelling, “Hurry up, hurry up!”
But I’m waiting for you
I must go slow
I must not think bad thoughts
When is this world coming to?

Can’t speak for anyone else, but it’s tough avoiding bad thoughts these days. The larger question isn’t having bad thoughts, but whether you can express them. John Hayward, a/k/a Doc Zero, notices something important — the calls are coming from inside the house:

There is a part of the conservative sphere that has always felt populism is the ultimate sin, only the Left should be allowed to fight culture wars, and genuine conservative grassroots movements should be immediately run down with rhetorical lawn mowers.

There are different reasons why some conservatives gravitate to this way of thinking. Some are paid grifters. Some live deep inside the left-wing information sphere and inherit its prejudices, such as the notion cultural combat is toxic for conservatives but OK for lefties.

It’s always about the rice bowls. But there’s more:

For these timid elements of conservatism, the worst offense of the Right is questioning the motives of the Left. Nothing makes them spring into action against other conservatives faster than insinuations of bad faith or sinister motives against the Left.

Bad faith has been a growth industry on the port side since, I dunno, Rousseau maybe. It’s certainly not a recent development. Continuing on:

Run through the list of top issues: if you want border security, you must be a xenophobe. If you oppose abortion, you must be a blind religious fanatic or misogynist. If you want smaller government, you’re cruel and greedy. Question global warming? You’re a tool of Big Oil.

We are rat bastards, aren’t we? I must not think bad thoughts. But there’s more:

But as soon as any head of steam builds among grassroots conservatives for questioning the motives of the Left on similar grounds, the timid conservatives leap into action. Tut tut! That language is out of bounds! How dare you imply Lefty’s agenda is deliberately destructive!

They’ll tell you it’s paranoia and slander to talk about the destructive agenda of the Left even as hyperventilating lefties are busy laying out their agenda with hundreds of social media videos and vowing to destroy anyone who gets in their way.

I believe Mel Brooks had a number in Blazing Saddles about this, calling it the French Mistake. In modern parlance, that would be David French. But we’re not done:

Too much of the conservative commentariat is exactly that: commentators. They were comfortable remarking on the passing scene, not changing it. “Activism” was a dirty word, something the OTHER guys did. Tossing harmless Nerf footballs of theory around op-ed pages was good enough.

Change is hard and things are pretty cozy in the covens along the Potomac. And most of all, dudes wearing tricorner MAGA hats are not our kind, dear. We must not think bad thoughts. I’ve pulled a lot out of Hayward’s thread, but there’s even more. You should read it in full. But while his cri de coeur is compelling, it is clear our betters remain in their sinecures. And we’ll come back to that topic in the coming days.

Dennis Prager once wrote “whatever the Left touches it ruins.” In the 1950s, Leftists beheld Eisenhower’s America and set about trying to ruin it. In those years, America was the colossus astride the world. The only major power in the post-war years with its economy and infrastructure intact, America’s economic engine was roaring. Fueled by the GI Bill and real purchasing power, nuclear families ignited the rise of the suburbs while doubling the country’s Gross National Product.

Entertainment of the time reflected social norms. Programs such as Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver depicted stable, healthy families. Naturally the Left saw what was good and recoiled in revulsion.

The Beat Generation was a major Leftist reaction to 1950s culture. It began at Columbia University where Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and other early Beats attended. William Burroughs attended Harvard, but he spent a lot of time in New York City’s subculture and was introduced there to Kerouac and Ginsberg.

I don’t think it is an accident that the Frankfurt School had relocated to Columbia University to escape the Nazis. Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer and Erich Fromm among others helped found the basis of critical theory, the destructive brew of Marxism and philosophy that is the grandfather of today’s wokeism.

Some restaurants – including one Twin Cities favorite – are instituting “equity charges“.

They would appear to be doing it, at least in part, because they believe their customers are idiots:

On its website, Broders’ has a notice to customers notifying them of a new 15 percent “benefits and equity” charge they’ve instituted. They justify the charge, first, by explaining that “many states have allowed reduced minimum wages for service staff in the form of a tip credit.” (More on this in a minute.)

But Minnesota (the restaurant being referred to is in southwest Minneapolis) is not one of them.

Oh, also they think you’re a bigot…

“Studies have also shown that there is inequity and built-in bias in the way consumers give tips,” the statement reads. “In general, Black or Brown servers receive less tips than Caucasian servers. There is gender bias as well.”

Has anyone noticed how the phrase “studies show…” may as well be a shorthand signal for “weasel words will follow”?

I used to like to ask “what studies? Where?“, But that would get us into a Bergs 16th Maw situation, almost immediately, almost every time..

SCENE: A suburban family room. MOTHER and FATHER are anxiously looking at their SON, who’s watching…TV.

MOTHER: It’s all he’s watching lately. .

FATHER: What is it?

MOTHER: He’s binging Band of Brothers

FATHER: Again? This is like the third time.

MOTHER: And before that, it was 13 Hours. And then Taken.

FATHER: I caught him watching Die Hard the other day.

MOTHER: He has the scene of him rescuing his wife from being pulled out the window with Hans Gruber as his social media avatar.

FATHER: God. I wonder what’s going on with him?

So I started binge watching “The Flight Attendant” last night.

Pros: it’s really well written. That’s nothing to sneeze at. I’ve been terribly disappointed by the writing in a lot of things I’ve seen lately (I’m looking at you, Love Life, whose laziness completely wasted Anna Kendrick).

The writers toss out a completely un-subtle “Crime and Punishment“ reference in the first couple minutes, and then go on to deliver on it throughout everything I’ve seen so far (#StuffEnglishMajorsLike). And Kaley Cuoco makes a completely believable protagonist.

Bonus pro: it’s got Rosie Perez, who may be the most underrated actress of her generation (although she’s just a tad underutilized in the first couple episodes).

It’s not Dial M for Murder, much less Gaslight, but it ain’t bad.

Speaking of that Ingrid Bergman / Charles Boyer classic…

Cons: These aren’t all in re Flight Attendant alone – far from it.

Hollywood writers seemed to have gotten together and signed a weird, junior high quality pact amongst themselves: “For decades, we wrote women as one dimensional caricatures; madonnas, whores, bimbos and housewives. Let’s pack a century of retribution into a couple of years worth of television and movies.“

Apparently, women can be protagonists, or nuanced, complex characters, or turbocharged badasses, for good or evil – or at least not incompetent caricatures.  That’s a good thing.

On the other hand, rules for men of these days seem to be boiled down to:

• Gay besties
• stock black, Asian, Latino or Semitic guys
• The villain (usually an older white guy, usually played with all the subtlety of a mustache-twisting melodrama villain, although occasionally a white woman)
  – The love interest – who is usually safely ethnically ambiguous.
• pathetic, beaten down sacks
• Buffoons, tools, frat bros (apparently all white anglo-saxon protestant males get lacrosse scholarships. I didn’t know that), frat bros that have grown up to be buffoons and tools, cliché rednecks and every kind of cad ever offered up by central casting.. Almost inevitably white, although I guess it’s a sign of evolution the screen writers are showing the occasional less than bright/moral/ethical black male character.
• Part of a married couple – usually as a hapless schlub whose league his spouse is waaay out of, but with plenty of dysfunctional, abusive cads thrown in. (Same sex couples apparently are immune to most serious dysfunction in Hollywood. Who knew?)

Patronizing? I think so.

Virtue signaling? Sure.

 Lazy? Completely.

Gaslighting?

FATHER: Junior? Why are you watching all these…

MOTHER: …movies and TV shows?

SON: Because it’s fun, for a change, for the first time in my life, to see people like I am, or plan to become, not portrayed as idiots, buffoons, fools, blackguards and expendable simps?

MOTHER: (sotto voce, to FATHER). Do. you think we should call a therapist?

If there’s one thing people love, it’s feeling better than others.

And as America has undergone its “Great Sort”, pop psychology has provided a dysfunctional society boundless opportunities to do just that. Those opportunities are scientifically dubious, but just plain feel good, because they satisfy that primal need to dunk on other people.

These opportunities came in successive waves of theories: “Conservative/liberals have better sex lives than liberals/conservatives”, self-adulatory navel gazing about Boomers/Xers/Millenials/GenZs, the brief fixation on the joys and superiority of introversion, endless diagnoses (during the Trump years, “narcissistic personality disorder” was in vogue)…

…and, I suspect, this latest one: pathologizing “stupidity”.

In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.

Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.

Let’s take a look at Cipolla’s five basic laws of human stupidity:

The “five laws” are there, and make sense, more or less.

But I’m wondering – does nobody think this sort of affectation through? Ever?

Because if combine this (I predict) fad-to-be with the fad that is currently ebbing – the “Dunning Kruger Effect – people doing the diagnosing will realize that they are, largely…

…well, subject to which facile, self-adulatory cultural trope?

Again – don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here…

Joel Doakes from Como Park emails:

If:

A sane man instinctively recoils in horror from harming another, and later suffers PTSD from the guilt;

A sociopath cares about his own group but not other groups and therefore has no problem harming them; and

A psychopath actively enjoys harming people and seeks out the opportunity to do so; then,

judging from behavior observed on freeways, grocery stores, Twitter and social media, ordinary Americans seem to be sliding from sanity to sociopathy, becoming less empathetic and more emphatic, less generous minded and more generally pissed at the world in general. And judging from crime reports and YouTube videos, young African-Americans seem to be sliding from sociopathy toward psychopathy.

If true, this change will make it easier for all Americans to resort to violence, murder, rebellion, revolution, which is what certain Liberal/Progressive/Leftists seem to desire: an end to the United States as it now exists.

Why has this happened?

Did we fall or were we pushed?

Joe Doakes

Well I’m not going to answer directly, I will remind you that the extremes like it when people feel the need to abandon the center.

[Author’s note: this completely unoriginal attempt to pick low-hanging fruit so low it would take a ladder to reach cantaloupe was arrived at independently from our host’s post… in the future we will strive to be unoriginal in original ways…]

This is Jeopardy! Our contestants today are our returning champion Warren, from Bakersfield CA. And, Ketanji Brown Jackson from Washington DC.

Here’s our host, Bert Convoy!

[Applause light on]

[Bert] Thank you! Let’s get right to it.

(later in the game)

[KBJ] I’ll take Facts of Life for $200.

[Bert] And it’s a Video Daily Double! What is this person?

[KBJ] I, I can’t… I’m not sure. I’m not a biologist.

[Warren] What is a woman?

[Bert] Correct!

(later in the game)

Exhibit 33,045

SCENE: Mitch BERG is having a glass of wine at the bar in Whole Foods in Saint Paujl, after a day of vigorous shopping. Lost in the reverie, he doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE has walked in.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, shhhhhuuuure enough, it’s Avery. Long time no see. What’s u..

LIBRELLE: Marsha Blackburn asked Ketanji Brown Jackson a stupid, badgering question at her confirmation hearing to be the best Supreme Court justice ever.

BERG: Best?

LIBRELLE: She is the most qualified jurist in history! The Washington Post showed it! Pictures, being science, never lie!

BERG: Well, not so much.

LIBRELLE: I never read National Review.

BERG: Clearly. So why do you think it was a “stupid, badgering question”?

LIBRELLE: It’s purely politicized, and she’ll never have to rule on that. “What’s a woman?” Mitch, please.

BERG: First: SCOTUS hearings, politicized? Bring that up when Robert Bork, Janice Rogers Brown, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are up for confirmation.

LIBRELLE: Those people were all in the past…

BERG: Exactly. As to never having to rule on that? Perhaps. But answering “what is a woman?”

LIBRELLE: It was an unfair question for which she had no time to prepare.

BERG: (looking at watch). A woman is an adult human with two “X” chromosomes. Three seconds. No prep time. And I didn’t even go to Harvard Law School.

LIBRELLE: She will never have to rule on what a woman is.

BERG: Perhaps. But she’ll be asked to rule on questions where much of the population does know what the answer is; the fact she’s willing to equivocate on something this comical, to keep the “progressive” wing of her party happy, is a very bad sign.

LIBRELLE: There are no such quesitons in the law! Its science!

BERG: When does human life being?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.

BERG: When do community standards violate free association?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not the community.

BERG: Huh. When does the right to free speech interfere with private property rights?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not a professor of rhetoric.

BERG: Huh. What does the phrase “Right of the People” mean?

LIBRELLE: I don’t know. I’m not a law professor.

BERG: A SCOTUS justice will be ruling on any or all of those things, including in the next term.

LIBRELLE: I don’t care. It was still a stupid question.

BERG: Nah. It fixed the front lines in the culture war – the issue beneath all the other issues in the upcoming mid-terms. And it showed which side are the metaphorical Russians, and which are the figurative Ukrainians.

LIBRELLE: Bla bla bla. So where are the avocados?

BERG: I don’t know. I’m not a grocer.

(And SCENE)

I personally detest inter-generational politics, and the identitymongering that lt breeds. Few things make me want to clap a couple of cinderblocks around someones head like Bugs Bunny playing the cymbals on Elmer Fudds noggin like some moronic little twerp chirping “OK, Boomer”, or “Go get your participation trophy, Millie”, for that matter.

But you know your “generation” spends too much time navel-gazing about itself when people start writing bilge like this about it.

The CVS store that has served for the past few decades as one of the anchors of the MIdway’s “main street”, at Snelling and University (but for seven months after the George Floyd riots, of course, where it stood boarded up, a monument to the perfidy of the metro DFL) is closing in a couple of weeks.

A friend of the blog emails:

CVS is keeping the store in a residential neighborhood on Fairview open, but not the one on a busy urban corner next to transit and a “world class” soccer stadium? Why would they ever not want to do business there? We’ve been told over and over again how precious that real estate is, how the train and the stadium were going to be a boon.
http://www.twincities.com/2022/03/09/longstanding-st-paul-cvs-at-snelling-and-university-to-close-at-the-end-of-the-month/

Perhaps boon is in the eye of the beholder- it certainly has been a boon for vagrancy, crime, and vacant lots. I shouldn’t assume that that wasn’t the goal.

Expect apologists for the Carter, Walz and Biden administrations to claim “It’s not our fault! Look at this:”.

In mid-November, the Rhode Island-based pharmacy chain announced a major realignment of its national retail footprint, with a heavy focus on consolidating retail locations operating in close proximity to each other. The closures amount to 300 stores per year for the next three years.

Of course, the fact that that location is in an increasingly crime-ridden area, and has a record of being looted from wall to wall, couldn’t have possibly.affected the decision to close this store, rather than the one in Mac-Groveland, Crocus Hill, the Target on Uni, or the two at the University of Minnesota, nosirreebob.

A friend of the blog emails:

No. This person does not deserve our sympathy at this time. He attempted to murder someone. I don’t care if he’s a friend of yours, if he was “on your side at one time.” He attempted to murder someone.

I wonder how sympathetic Hannah Drake would be if the shooter were a white man with a MAGA hat. They both could have the same mental health issues, be going through the same thing.

Doesn’t matter. Attempted murder is attempted murder and it is illegal.

For a depressingly large part of our population, morality means “everything I want to, believe and accept is right“.

“So, Mitch – why do you say that the democratic party in United States is the party of authoritarianism? “

Because they tell us they are. Strong majority of Democrats approve of Justin Trudeaucescu‘s treatment of civil disobedience:treatment of civil civil disobedience:

35 percent overall approved of Trudeau’s crackdown, while 10 percent said they were unaware of what’s happening to the US’ northern neighbor.

Looking at Democrat likely voters alone, 65 percent said they favored Trudeau’s crackdown on the protestors, and 17 percent said they disapproved.

I mean, even the rhetoric is becoming too obvious to avoid; Orwell’s villains declared that freedom was slavery; today, democrat thinkers closer and closer to the main stream say freedom is “white supremacist“.

Tomato, tomahto.

Not every “blue” government does it all the time.

But eventually, one way or the other, one metaphor or another, this mechanism or that, this is blue governance in action.

I almost wondered if someone hacked into Ilhan Omar’s Twitter feed earlier this week:

I mean, talk about biting the hand that fed her.

More on the Ilhan Omar response tweet – itself just a big fascination – later.

Now – let’s take a look at this tweet, from someone justifying the hacking of crowd-funding data for people supporting the Trucker Convoy, included this photo and blurb:

Stay with me on this: it zigs, and it zags.

We’ve got “neo nazis”…

…at a libertarian, anti-masker rally of mostly rural, western, and libertarian-sympathetic Canadians, themselves likely to be not especially mask-y, especially if they take that whole Gadsden Flag “Don’t Tread On Me” thing seirouslly…

…all masked up as tightly as the most constipated Karen?

Does anyone ask actual questions anymore?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Covid is over: you know it and so do I. Democrats want to frighten the public long enough to steal a few more seats through mail-in voting this Fall, but can they fool the headline-reading low-information voters that long? Maybe. Maybe Lesko Brandon can bribe the World Health Organization to continue the pandemic until right after the election. That would be ideal.

Even so, Covid rules must end someday. Democrats’ entire political appeal is grounded in the moral superiority of people being Special. You like to dress up and play sex games? You’re Special. Society should not only accept you, society should Celebrate you. What’s that, you’re so mentally unstable that you need to bring your emotional support hippopotamus on the bus? No problem; you’re Special. Other passengers should budge up to make room. You’re afraid your children might die of Covid from an unvaxxed person? Darn right, kids are Special; we’re going to mandate masks, social distance, vaccines and punish the non-compliant as long as it takes for everyone to be perfectly safe.

Democrats can’t suddenly tell all those Special people to grow up and get a life. It’d be political suicide.

And then there are the immune-compromised, the Type I diabetics, the asthmatics. Covid could kill you so that makes you Special? Yeah, you’re right, it does, that’s a legitimate complaint. But society needs to move on, needs to learn to live with Covid and not under perpetual mask-and-vaccine requirements. How can Democrats sell that to all the Special people who make up their base?

Maybe it won’t be as hard as I think. Cindy Sheehan had absolute moral authority until one day, she didn’t. The media dropped her faster than a Black school shooter. Maybe it’ll happen to all the Mask Karens?

Joe Doakes

My prediction: the Mascists, having just gone through a conflict that is The closest their generation and social class will get to storming Omaha B each or breaking the siege of Khe Sanh, Will resent the loss of the best two years of their lives, and the sudden disassociation with their bands of Karens. There will be a wave of what used to be called the “readjustment blues” back in the 1970s, but which has always attended people who come back from war.

Because that’s about how these people see themselves, and this situation.

Study shows that “racial justice” protests that include “Anti”-Fa are at least 18 times more likely to end up in violence than protests where they didn’t show up.

And no, the same does not hold true for “right wing“ groups:

They continued on to question whether the right-wing groups were the real source of the violence given that Antifa tens to show up to counter their presence.

“That’s not what our research found. We sawno difference between events in which antifa was facing off with a group such as the Proud Boys or the Three Percenters and when they were protesting unopposed,” they wrote.

The use of violence as a tool of political “persuasion“ appears to be almost purely a leftist phenomenon.

It would be easy, and understandable, after watching the rampant property and violent crime, and the rioting that has mangled the quality of life and Innervated, and literally gutted, so many American cities going back to 2015, that the left has no interest in law enforcement.

The dim bulb mayor of Baltimore even described it openly, saying that government needs to give rioters “room to destroy“.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that People on the left can get very creative indeed when it comes to enforcing the laws – provided the “offenders” are on the right.

A friend of the blog sent me this bit of brow furrowing from the Canadian left, on the trucker protests, which appears to be a greater crisis than World War II – and has re-introduced the Canadian left to a fairly radical concept, noted in bold below:

Police are the only ones who can defuse the convoy protest peacefully, said Candyce Kelshall, the president of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies in Vancouver.

“Protest is legal. Breaking the law makes it illegal.

And, almost as if gift wrapped and sent to the Minneapolis police department, and the Hennepin and Ramsey county attorneys offices…:

If police look impotent, that’s the way they are perceived,” said Kelshall. “It emboldens people.”

Huh.

Why, it’s almost as if the enforcement of laws depends on the “criminals” you’re talking about.

I would bet a shiny new quarter that the mayor of Ottawa won’t be abandoning any police stations to the truckers.

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

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

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

I don’t as a rule care about artists politics, anymore than I care about a politician’s taste in music.

But the flip-flop of so many “counterculture” artists to “cultural enforcer” would be jarring, to anyone who thought about it critically.

It made headlines last week: Neil Young, who’s spent the last couple weeks trying to shut down Joe Rogan, was participating in “Free Speech rallies” in 2006.

Now, you could call them anti-George W Bush rallies that had little to do with free speech; I certainly called them that at the time.

But the language Young used is interesting:

“Just getting up in front of a lot of people makes you nervous. But when you know that some of them are really going to be angry at you, and you’re in a crowd, and it’s a volatile situation, people have been drinking, whatever — you know, it makes you nervous.”

“It was just that critical time in history where things were turning. Things were changing,” he added. “Those who feel the way we do had some hope and those who don’t feel the way we do were angry that the change happened. And those people have got a voice, and they have a reason for feeling the way they do. They strongly believe in the convictions. They believe in the military.” 

“They believe that we’re doing the right thing for the world, and they have every reason to be respected for their beliefs,” he said. 

Does it look like he’s describing Rogan listeners to anyone else?

Did Neil Young become The Man? Did “Rage Against the Machine” become “Rage Enforcing The Machine?”

Maybe – but I suspect the Tea Party, and its slandering back into the shadows, from whence it emerged mean and without manners as the Trump Populist movment, had a lot to do with it. The counterculture of 50 years ago is now the dominant culture.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Is this a clever public relations ploy to divert attention from Ukraine, is it a mere prank tweaking the Left’s nose, or have Russians actually become more sensible than Democrats?

Substitute “America” for “Russia” and I could sign up today.

Joe Doakes

It’s all three.

And I suspect most conservatives already have signed up – to the private sector initiative, at least.

Not only is it time for the US to leave the UN and cut off all our funding to it, but we need to dismantle the building and recycle the material, preferably into new guns to distribute to deserving Americans.

UN distributes cash and sob stories to “migrants” seeking asylum:

In one, the U.N. was cited as the source of cash cards used to fund lodging, food, and medicines on their journey from Mexico to the U.S. border. Those payments have recently drawn the ire of some Republicans in Congress angered over the efforts and costs…Bensman reported some families receiving $400 every 15 days to use as they wish….

In another report Monday, Bensman said U.N. groups are providing migrants with psychological help to pull stories of torture and abuse from their memories. Those stories are often needed to win temporary asylum passage into Mexico and eventually the U.S.

“At least two U.N.-funded nonprofits with operations in the southern border states of Chiapas and Tabasco pay stables of clinical psychologists to help migrants recover ‘repressed memories’ of government persecution and other hardship stories that qualify migrants for Mexican asylum and a residence card, allowing an eventual trip over the U.S. southern border,” the report said.

I’d vote for a controlled implosion. After the bureaucrats inside have relocated.

If possible.

When I interviewed Michael Yon last winter, he characterized the “migrant caravans” as.a direct assault on American sovereignty, clearly not spontaneous, clearly planned.

It sounded conspiracy-theory-y.

Not so much anymore.

10 year sentence – a downward departure from sentencing guidelines by nearly half – in the burning of a Minneapolis pawn shop during the George Floyd riots:

Black Lives Matter rioter Montez Terriel Lee Jr., of Rochester, New York, was sentenced Friday to 120 months in federal prison for his role in burning down a Minneapolis pawn shop during the destructive George Floyd riots in May 2020.

Lee had previously pleaded guilty in July 2021 to a single count of arson in connection with a fire that destroyed the Max It Pawn Shop on Lake St. at 2726 E. Lake St. He admitted to starting the fire on May 28, 2020, which is now considered one of many arson incidentsthat happened during the summer riots.

Oddly, the article doesn’t list which white supremacist group he was part of

When I was a kid, working at small-town radio stations in North Dakota, my favorite part of the job was working during tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings.

Which seems counterintuitive, perhaps – but there was something about the crackle and buzz of imporance, of purpose, in the air; the increasingly urgent National Weather service bulletins, the terse phone calls from the cops and sherif, that far more than overcame the whole “there’s a tornado coming!” thing.

And as a tall, gawky, greasy-haired, uncoordinated kid with little apparent athletic talent in a town that idolized the basketball team, it didn’t hurt that I knew, all over town, people were listening.

To me.

Of course, when the warning was over, I and the rest of Stutsman and Foster Counties went back to normal life. I didn’t keep telling people to stay in their basements when the front had passed and the warning was over. Because much as I enjoyed knowing that people were paying attention (and, more important, that I could deliver what they were tuning in for, with style), there were other things in life, and I didn’t need the state of crisis to keep giving me value.

A lot of people out there today can’t say that.

Covid has brought out a strain in a small, but socially prominent, group of people that find their self-worth in crying “Crisis!”.

Not just the media – it’s a given that they will make hay out of crises; pandemics and riots make them more relevant, just as tornados made Mitch Berg’s patter more important to more people than the usual diet of local sports and Rupert Holmes records that occupied most of my time on those stations.

No – it’s regular, workadaddy, hugamommy, usually but not always left-of-center types, for whom being the harbinger brings meaning to life.

And it’s to them that so much of Big Public Health’s narrative is aimed.

Great Twitter thread on the subject:

They – on social media, in the checkout line at Target, or in the comment section here – remind me. of the kids who ran to the teacher when someone stepped out of line when talking from the classroom to the water fountain. They got their sense of personal value from enforcing rules on others – whatever the rules, however niggling and petty and useless – back then, as now.

It’s the toxic corollary to “we’re all in this together”: the unstated “…and I’m not gonna let you forget about it!”.