Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Transcript of remarks:
“May I have your attention please?  Thank you.  Welcome to your first day at Harvard Law School.  As you may know, this year’s class is Special: there are no White students, no Asian students, certainly no Hispanics, only Black students, to make up for centuries of racist oppression.  Congratulations on being selected for our first Reparations Endeavor.  I see a hand up, yes, do you have a question?

No, there are no courses on your course schedule. The courses here are geared for brilliant and hard-working people, which, judging from your grades and test scores, includes few of you.  If you were to take our courses and be graded honestly, you’d all fail miserably and be kicked out.  That would generate terrible publicity for the school which would defeat the purpose of having you in the first place; therefore, you will attend no courses while at this school.  Instead, courses have been replaced with attendance-optional discussion sessions geared to your level of ability, in which students will discuss their feelings about law, oppression, discrimination and, of course, slavery, plus everyone will be awarded internships with major civil rights organizations like BLM and Antifa to gain hands-on experience bringing about social change through direct action.  Yes, over there, another question?

Not to worry, everyone will be getting straight A’s.  Class rank?  We have a new system for class rank.  Each of you is A Class of Your Own.  Everyone will graduate First in Class, be selected Valedictorian and have an opportunity to give a speech (on Zoom, because Covid) to your friends and relatives.  Yes, you on the right? 

Well, no, I don’t suppose you will learn much law here. But that’s not really a change, is it?  I mean, you’ve been Affirmative Action recipients all your lives. Special breaks in high school, special admission to college, special grading there . . . you’ll notice none of you took the GRE to test your knowledge in your major area of study, some of you took the LSAT which is a general knowledge bullshit exam, but most of you were given a test waiver on account of your race.  Subject matter expertise has never been expected of you; why start now?  In the red shirt, yes, your question?
No, no! Perish the thought.  Your Harvard Law Degree won’t be worthless: it’s worth half a million dollars each, to the school. Plus you will receive a handsome diploma, suitable for framing, at no additional cost.  Speak up, please, young lady, your question? 
How will you get a job if you don’t know anything?  Oh, don’t worry about that.  Big law firms will be falling all over themselves to hire a Black Woman like you.  They desperately need to fill quotas for their HR departments.  Moving on, yes, you there?

Well, now, I don’t know that I’d put it that way.  Calling yourself a ‘token’ is so harsh. And besides, better to be a ‘token’ in a major firm than not working in a major firm at all, right?  I mean, it’s no secret you’re an Affirmative Action graduate, they knew that the moment they laid eyes on you. In fact in your case, Duante, is it?  They knew it when they received your resume, which is why your resume rose to the top of the pile ahead of better qualified students named Chad or Tiffany, Yang or Levi.  

I see so many hands, I think it’s time to end this introductory session so I can hand you off to your personal Diversity and Inclusion Deans, one for each student.  They’ll help you feel good about yourselves and your role here in this historic class.  Welcome to Harvard and remember: you are Special!”

Joe Doakes

Today’s satire is tomorrow’s journalism.

And to the inevitable chirping “That’s racist” from the usual pack of pseudonymous progressive trolls: what do you call simultaneously piddling on academic merit and making race – absent all over context – a primary social determiner?

If it were in regard to sending people to prison rather than the finishing school for America’s “elite”, it’d be pretty unconscionable, wouldn’t it?

Winston Smith, the man killed last week in Uptown, was apparently already “at war” with the police:

Smith’s violent resistance to arrest may have been motivated by his belief that he was engaged in a “war” on cops.

For years leading up to his death, Smith made statements across social media platforms vowing to shoot police officers if he were ever to be apprehended, encouraging his followers to bring guns and bombs to protests and outlining tactics he believed would be most effective to kill members of law enforcement. He also frequently suggested that he was meeting with like-minded people and taking tangible steps towards these aims.

“Get ready for war,” Smith told his followers via Instagram in mid-April.

“Motherfuckers are finna move on these ‘ops,” he continued, using a slang term that means people would attack police.

“All the shooters, suit up,” he ordered. “Lace your boots up, it’s war fucking time. Bring your gun to the protest, bring them fucking bombs and rocket launchers and all that shit.”

Even some of the local media – in this case, ,reliably left-of-center Fox9 – are taking their break from the Twin Cities media’s usual “write a hagiography first, ask questions later” procedure and noting that there just might be an elephant in this particular room.

UPDATE: It’s unclear from media or law enforcement reports whether Smith was involved in January 6, the only example of violence in American history.

Have we reached a tipping point in the culture war as re guns?

It’s not a new point – if you’ve listened to my show, you’ve heard the story.

But this past year, 40% of gun sales were to people outside the “white male who’s already got a bunch of guns” stereotype:

Not only were people who already had guns buying more, but people who had never owned one were buying them too. New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners. And the data, which has not been previously released, showed that new owners were less likely than usual to be male and white. Half were women, a fifth were Black and a fifth were Hispanic.

In all, the data found that 39 percent of American households own guns. That is up from 32 percent in 2016, according to the General Social Survey, a public opinion poll conducted by a research center at the University of Chicago. Researchers said it was too early to tell whether the uptick represents a reversal from the past 20 years, in which ownership was basically flat.

Further evidence (along with the fact that younger Americans overwhelmingly support the right to keep and bear arms) of this thesis.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/an-arms-race-in-america-gun-buying-spiked-during-the-pandemic-its-still-up/ar-AAKvZfB?fbclid=IwAR3XpPNFnN3AzvSBuOo0Lg1yYnPyr606bKqagbSsPdSkYuIWo5cFxPEFA90

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:\

I missed this earlier.  Sarah Johnson has proposed a ‘race offender registry.”  The idea is that people who are racists (actual, accused or suspected) should be prohibited from living near racial minorities.  It’s based on the sex offender registry concept.  Her idea is back in the news because Ms. Johnson was accidentally injured in a drive-by shooting.  Honestly, I didn’t know they had those in England, what with guns being banned and all. 

In honor of her bravery and sacrifice, I’d like to give her concept a try.  I’d be willing to live in a community entirely made up of suspected or potential racists: White people only, no Black people at all to ensure no possibility of racism or microaggression.  I envision a large mixed-use development with housing, retail, and casual dining areas called “lunch counters.”  Our community motto will be: “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” and I already have a great idea for a flag.

We’ll call it ‘Alabama.’

Joe Doakes

Watching to see the Cathy Newman-ing in 3…2…1…

The sound of gunfire, off in the distance/I’m getting used to it now.

That wasn’t off in the distance. It was the scene at 38th and Chicago yesterday, also known as George Floyd Square. Sure, it was the middle of the day, but it’s always a good time to bust a few caps, right? This news report was, ahem, deadpan:

The Minneapolis intersection where George Floyd died was disrupted by gunfire Tuesday, just hours before it was to be the site of a family-friendly street festival marking the anniversary of his death at the hands of police.

Nothing quite says family-friendly street festival like random gunfire. But fortunately, a bona fide journalist was on the scene:

Journalist Philip Crowther, who was shooting live video from 38th and Chicago, reported hearing as many as 30 gunshots about a block east of the intersection. Crowther said a storefront window appeared to have been broken by a gunshot.

“Very quickly things got back to normal,” Crowther said. “People here who spend a significant amount of time, the organizers, were running around asking, ‘Does anyone need a medic?’ It seems like there are no injuries.”

Mr. Crowther? There’s nothing normal about any of this. But hey, we appreciate the narrative!

There are few statements I personally find less convincing than “my ancestors suffered, so I have absolute authority on a completely different question“

Friday Morning: local media cover the bejeebers out of a press conference – the sort of coordinated coverage that screams “a PR flak is working this hard”:

While challenges remain, downtown Minneapolis’ progress toward a post-pandemic revival is picking up steam, according to the panelists who joined a Friday morning online forum hosted by the Minneapolis Downtown Council…“My take on all of this is that you haven’t seen anything yet. Downtown is going to come back stronger and bigger than ever,” said Fhima, who leads the kitchen at Fhima’s Minneapolis.

Still, the panelists said, downtown is currently battling the perception that it’s unsafe — a perception Fhima [1] said was fueled by the lack of foot traffic on downtown streets during the pandemic, when many office workers shifted to working from home and widespread closures of restaurants and venues kept visitors away. Just as an empty restaurant might make diners question the quality of the food, he said, an empty downtown can leave visitors unnerved

“Challenges remain”, indeed.

18 hours after that coordinated burst of manufactured sunshine blowing up the Twin Cities collective nethers:

Two people were killed and 8 wounded in a shooting in downtown Minneapolis, police said early Saturday.

“Preliminary investigation reveals that two people were standing in a crowded area and got into a verbal confrontation,” the Minneapolis Police Department said in a statement.” Both individuals pulled out guns and began shooting at each other.”

Look – I enjoy downtown. I’ve worked there, and 2-3 years ago I used to go down there for concerts fairly regularly – move the Dakota than the First Avenue these days, but whatever. And as a taxpayer, I’ve had a lot of taxpayers money “invested” in it on my behalf, so it’d be nice if the current occupants at the City Council stopped screwing things up.

Not holding my breath, of course.

[1] Have any of Dave Fhima’s restaurants ever succeeded? . I haven’t paid much attention to the restaurant scene, but going back ten years or so, any of his places turned into their own vacant slices of downtown in a year or so.

We’re a week past the lifting of the mask mandates. But as Miranda Devine notes in the New York Post, confusion reigns:

This is how confused New Yorkers are about masks. At Barnes & Noble Wednesday, no mask was required to browse the bookshelves, but on the other side of Union Square, the Strand bookstore had mandated masks for all shoppers. Practically everyone inside both stores was wearing a mask, anyway, despite CDC advice that you don’t need one, indoors or outdoors, if you’re vaccinated against COVID-19.

Considering that more than half of Manhattan has been fully vaccinated, something is very wrong with the way we are processing risk. The trust between public health experts and the public is broken and now no one knows what to believe.

Why is that? Devine has a culprit:

We can blame one man above anyone for this parlous state of ­affairs: Saint Anthony Fauci, the coronavirus czar once hailed as the most trusted man in America for his leadership through the pandemic. He has flip-flopped on every piece of advice, never admits doubt and tells lies with ­brazen indifference.

True, Fauci is a dissembler for sure. But the weirdness must be just in places like Manhattan, right? But what are we seeing here in Minnesota? 

Mitch shared a few examples yesterday. Here is what I’ve seen: I get a cup of coffee every morning at a gas station near my home. While I live in Ramsey County, I am not a St. Paul resident and there is no mask mandate for our community. The mask requirement signs are all taken down. But based on what I’ve observed, just about everyone who enters the station, at least in the morning rush, is wearing a mask. I started watching this behavior midweek. In the two days I observed, I saw about 25 people enter the store. Almost all of them were still wearing masks. The only guys who consistently didn’t wear a mask going into the store were the guys delivering milk. And, um, me.

Is there a health benefit to still wearing a mask, especially if you’re vaccinated? Or is it theater? Back to Devine:

It was just on Tuesday that Fauci admitted it was not science but theater that kept him wearing a mask — even double masking — despite being fully vaccinated for ­almost five months.

“I didn’t want to look like I was giving mixed signals,” he told “Good Morning America.” “But being a fully vaccinated person, the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low.”

So it is. But even then, he squirted out more octopus ink:

“I think people are misinterpreting, thinking that this is a removal of a mask mandate for everyone. It’s not,” Fauci told Axios. “It’s an assurance to those who are vaccinated that they can feel safe, be they outdoors or indoors.”

And Devine isn’t having it:

Fauci at this point is being deliberately confusing. He is feeding the mental disorder of vaccinated Karens who cling to their masks. He needs to tell them the truth and stick to it.

I agree. And don’t expect Governor Walz to help straighten things out.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Iowa State University professor tries to limit contact with White People. Sounds fair. I try to limit contact with groups of Black people for my own safety, because I’ve read the statistical proof. Of course, that essay is nearly 10 years old so the numbers may be out of date. Anecdotal supporting evidence came last year, in the Third Precinct in Minneapolis, and also in recent airport melee videos, and I live in a city committed to diversity entitlement above law enforcement, so the principles are still valid.

The professor lives in a town of 65,000 people that is 92% White/Asian (they’re the same nowadays, at least for affirmative action purposes) and she teaches at a school that is 85% White/Asian. True, there have been racial crimes reported in Ames, but they’re Black-on-White crimes so the professor’s safety is not at issue. What’s her reason for avoiding White People?

Joe Doakes

The “progressive” electorate isn’t going to call her on it. Who would know better than one of the people whose job is to un-teach critical thinking skills?

After reading this story, I’m overwhelmed with a desire to lead a movement to get conservatives to eschew smashing their own faces into rock or cement walls.

No true conservative would ever smash their face into a cement or rock wall.

Just a bunch of face smashing sheeple.

Who’s with me?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Military adopts “grading on the curve” for physical fitness.  The usual suspects are up in arms but that’s just White Male Hatred speaking out. 

Reducing physical fitness standards for women in combat will not affect performance.  We’ll simply assign them to battle against women’s units in the enemy army.  

The real question is: what will the military do when cis-male military members realize they can slack off by declaring themselves trans and demanding to take the women’s test, thus wrecking the curve for cis-women?

Joe Doakes

The part I wonder about is, when a helicopter heads upcountry to a firebase in the the middle of insurgent territory, is it going to make room for maintenance hormones along with ammo, food, water and first aid supplies?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A friend writes:

***

Google Earth street images, which have a timeline feature, have not had any new images of Minneapolis since Summer 2019.   Places where for past years there are numerous dates to choose from, simply have no images later than June of 2019.  Covid prevented cameras from working on the streets ever since the riots ‘mostly peaceful’ protests started?  I just checked Cup Foods at 38th and Chicago: no Saint Floyd Memorial.  No images of boarded up or burned down buildings.  It’s weird how Covid has had such unique and selective symptoms.”

***

Joe Doakes

Weird.

Could be jiggering the algrorithm.

Could be the class inclined to drive Google camera cars is mostly Karens.

Hard to say.

Remember when there was an unstated rule, when following news coverage of a crime in the Metro – if they didn’t mention the offender’s ethnicity or show a photo, it actually answered the question?

New addition to the rule: if the story pertains to criminal justice’s response to last year’s riots, and the offender’s ideology – “Boogaloo”, “proud boy”, whatever – isn’t mentioned, you know by omission whose “side” they were on.

Case in point.

Prove me wrong.

There was a time when news outlets in the Twin Cities would, on occasion and when it was germane to the story, reach out to people on the political right. It even got to the point, in the last aughts, when lowly lil’ ol’ me was getting occasional calls from Channel 4, MPR and WCCO Radio for a grassroots conservative perspective on stories. This hit a peak during the Tea Party years…

…and then, abruptly, stopped.

We’ll come back to that.

The “point/counterpoint” feature was, if not a staple, at least a fairly normal part of American media life not all that long ago. Before “Crossfire” – which, I’m surprised and pained to see, has been gone for over 15 years – there were others; the earliest I can remember was a weekly bit on “Sixty Minutes”, “Point/Counterpoint”, with liberal Shana Alexander and James Kilpatrick – two articulate spokespeople for two diametrically opposed viewpoints.

Of course, CNN’s Crossfire was the biggest of them all. The original cast – Pat Buchanan and Tom Leyden – was the best, and sometimes created some fantastic TV – and I say this as someone who was pretty much a Democrat back then, although I hadn’t really thought that much about it (which makes me amply qualified to be a Democrat today). The most memorable bit, in those days when “white supremacist” groups operated in the open and were at least an order of magnitude larger than they are today, was an interview with a uniformed American Nazi. And Leyden, the show’s liberal and a World War 2 veteran, opened the segment by saying “My biggest regret in life was that I didn’t kill more of you back during the war” as the normally un-out-irascible Buchanan looked on, his jaw momentarily agape.

It’s a scene you wouldn’t get today – partly because any notion of patriotism and objective good and evil is gone from the left…

…and partly because Crossfire is long gone.

Now, according to Ben Domenech at Federalist, it was killed by Jon Stewart, who during a fabled appearance in 2004 completely trashed the premise of the show:

Readers will recall this was the infamous “hurting America” clip, where Stewart crapped all over the very concept of a debate show that paired left and right as co-equals in a running debate over the direction of America.

Stewart, who’s a fan of uninformed hubristic rants generally but will put the clown nose back on the minute you call him on it, went on a jeremiad against hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala as representing the worst aspects of American politics. But looking back on the ramifications of his comments — “Crossfire” was canceled months later — what do we see? There is today essentially no program on all of cable television that pairs left and right perspectives on camera as co-equal hosts, allowed to engage in free and open debate about the topics of the day.

Domenech’s premise – that event was the beginning of the end of actual debate in the media:

So we should ask: Is that a good thing? Is the media landscape Stewart helped create better for it, where Brian Williams regularly engages in Stewart-like snark (he called Ron Johnson a Russian asset the other day for reading a Federalist article into the record) and Tucker Carlson is the biggest name as a solo act in cable news?

In a context in which so much ink is dedicated to the concept of silos and the elimination of common space between right and left — and I mean the real right and left, not David Brooks and Maureen Dowd — do we honestly want a world where there is no space where these warring sides meet to do rhetorical battle?

The answer is: of course not. It’s much, much worse. The inability to have a space where such debates play out, and the inability of existing entities to provide such a space, has led directly to a degradation of our political conversation and a lack of familiarity with even the most basic version of the other side’s perspective on the world.

Domenech may have a point – the event was certainly the beginning of the end on cable.

But the stifling of actual co-equal debate began much earlier. I recall the woman who edited the “Letters to the Editor” page at the Strib, back before the internet made everyone an LTE editor, and then before social media made us all stupid, describing on a talk show how she made sure she picked only the dumb voices on some subjects, like gun control and abortion. You know which side she favored.

But it’s become absolutely airtight. As I noted way up above, local media made a point of at least acknowledging some sort of opposing opinion. During the run-up to the Republican National Convenion in 2007, I got invited on an MPR program on the planned protests, to discuss planned counterprotests. Because there was a counterpoint, and there was another side.

A few years later, when I spent some time fact-checking NPR’s fact-check column, both here and via email – correctly – one of MPR’s news execs inadvertently cc’ed me on an email to RIchert, telling her not to bother engaging. And that was the last I’ve heard from NPR, on any level, for any reason.

And it’s not just me. Far from it – even “tame” liberal Republican voices like David Brooks are getting rarer.

It was almost like a switch flipped, along about 2011. LIke the media saw what a motivated, decentralized, idealistic conservative-libertarian throng like the Tea Party could so (and did, in 2010), and figured they needed to starve it of that most precious political commodity ,air time.

I strongly suspect that the “outing” of “JournoList” didn’t end the collusion around the progressive narrative in the media – indeed, I suspect that, like an evil, adenoidal Gandalf, it just came back, bigger and stronger and more secret still.

And the nation is much worse off for it.

I’ve had Covid. It was a symptomatic case, although very manageably so.

As such – as we have established in this space, with information from the National Institutes of Health – I have an enhanced degree of, if not complete immunity, at least enhanced, probably highly-enhanced, resistance to Covid.

WIth that being said, I also got vaccinated. The wisdom or lack thereof, or that action’s adherence to your particular version of libertarian conservative, is not up for discussion, and won’t be discussed in this space. I got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, because I figured it was the minimum expenditure of effort – one shot and round of side effects rather than two – needed to get at least some of the less-irrational Karens, especially business and institutional Karens, to shut the hell up in the coming months. Given that I also have some degree of natural immunity and likely resistance, the J&J vaccine also provides the results I want; since the evidence shows I’m unlikely to get infected at all, preventing infections – the supposed upside of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines – is irrelvant to me. Preventing such an infection from killing me or putting me in a hospital, should the current understanding of science turn up flawed, is my only real goal.

Again – the fact that I got a vaccination isn’t up for discussion.

Evading Karen

What is up for discussion is this: Governor Klink has set the state’s restrictions to end on July 1. May it please the crown, thanks. Sarcasm intended. We’ll be caught up with Wisconsin – in seven weeks. Probably.

That’s right – it’ll be mandatory to wear a mask on June 30, but perfectly safe on July 1. Science!

But let’s ignore that, also. We’ve talked about that in this space for over a year, now.

Given that I, like most Minnesotans, have some combination of natural immunity, vaccination or both, masks are completely pointless.

Completely. Pointless.

And yet there is a lineup of stores – big box and ma and pa – promising to continue requiring masks after July 1.

And I want to make sure that I don’t patronize them after July 1. At all.

But how to tell which business is which?

The first step I’ve seen is this crowd-sourced map.

It’s being provisioned by people on both sides of the argument, of course – and some of the “reviews” would be comical if you didn’t realize these people have the same right to vote that you do.

What’s needed next is some way of searching for businesses that, shall we say, match your preference, so you can find ’em on the go.

Twelve years ago, during the first year or so of the Obama administraiton, I pointed out my, shall we say, skepticism over the Administration’s, and Big Left’s, claims that we were on the verge of a wave of “white supremacist terror” that was going to, in the words of more than a few pundits, “dwarf 9/11”.

White supremacist terror was certainly a real thing. In the 1920’s, aided and abetted by Woodrow Wilson, the Klan was a major power in the South, and could even muster thousands of member to rallies here in Minnesota.

And I”m old enough to actually remember active White Supremacists doing bad things; the Medina Shootout, the shooting of Alan Berg, and others.

But to paraphrase Martin Luther King, the arc of White Supremacist organizations has been long, and has curved toward Palookaville. According to actual sources that had to keep their jobs by reporting facts, groups like the Klan, the Bund and other radical white supremacist organizations mustered:

• Millions of members and active sympathizers in the 1920s
• Hundreds of thousands by the 1960s
• A few tens of thousands by the time I graduated from high school, after a decade and a half of rigorous prosecution.
• As of 2015 or so, a few thousand, powerless, isolated, ridiculed, inbred losers living in their parents basements.

The number of actual identifiable active “White supremacists” has shrunk, in terms of verifiable numbers, by an order of magnitude every generation.

Of course, with the election of Trump, the narrative turned: while there were fewer verifiable, actual members of organizations, the “rhetoric” of the new administration “created more sympathizers”…

…which was simultaneously unverifiable, un-testable, and conveniently allowed the keepers of the narrative to brand anyone to the right of Amy Klobuchar as a “potential” “white supremacist”. Like Candace Owens.

But I digress.

The narraative saw comical spectacles like the pathetic gaggle of a hundred or so endomorphic cretins gathered from across ten or more states to Charlottesville, parading with tiki torches before set upon by a much larger mob with the active connivance of a “progressive” mayor, presented as evidence of the coming Racemageddon.

Berg’s 20th Law reads “All incidents of “hate speech” not captured on video (involving being delivered by someone proven not to be a ringer) shall be assumed to be hoaxes until proven otherwise” has heretofore concerned itself with dime-bag racial huckstery like last week’s collossal FUBAR at Adelphi University, where university staff indulged in a “Ready, Fire, Aim” moment: an anonymous social media post declared that there was a wave of lynchings of blacks headed toward…Adelphi?

In response to the anonymous post — which included no corroborating evidence — the school sent a statement to the student body.

“There have been recent incidents of students using racial slurs, hateful comments, and reported threats of violence and retaliation on social media — and sadly, this is not the first time these issues have occurred,” said Adelphi President Christine Riordan. “To those among us who have been targeted, directly and indirectly, we hate that this has happened to you, and we hate that we have not yet found a way to stop it.”

“Ignorance, racism, hate and violence hold no place in the Adelphi community, yet those things keep happening here,” continued the communication. “We know there is no place at Adelphi for inexcusable messages of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, but such racist attacks are a stark reminder of the work we need to do to combat systemic inequality and ongoing racism in our very own community.”

Adelphi University Strategic Communications Director Todd Wilson directed Campus Reform toward another statement published the following day.

The second statement admitted that public safety and local police officers “have continued to ask for direct evidence of threats from those who have received them firsthand and none have been submitted for investigation.” 

As with the entire wave – remember that word – of such hoaxes, so significant as to lead to the enshrining of Berg’s 20th Law, there shall be none.

But maybe I, and my law, have thought too narrowly.

The law focused on penny-ante hoaxes like Adelphi, or this one (one of several such in recent years, which seem to come up so frequently I have to check to make sure they’re not the same episode) or the similar one at Saint Olaf a few years back (a school which is no stranger to hate crimes, but all of them seem to be directed at the right).

But the entire “wave of terror” narrative applies. Like the scads of little hoaxes, everything about it must be observed, questioned, verified…

…and, if the pattern continues, as it usually seems to do, mocked and taunted from public life.

Woman, teacher, paranoid racist?

Product of a decade and a half of Critical Race Theory indoctrination?

Why choose?

Some of the social media feedback quips “this woman could be teaching your kids”.

If your offspring’s teacher is a member of the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers, the odds are actually pretty decent she already is, one way or another.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Andrew McCarthy writing at National Review says the Chauvin jury was correct to convict him, not based on anything reported in the media or introduced as evidence at trial or the pervasive atmosphere of intimidation, but because the conviction means Chauvin is a bad cop and that exonerates the rest of society from the charge of systemic racism. 

Sacrificing a victim to the mob is shameful.  Twisting your shameful act to pretend it’s all for the greater good is disgusting.  But I expect nothing less from a Never-Trumper. 

Joe Doakes

It’s the sort of rationalization I expect from someone who spent way too much time in the prosecution industry.

…Senator Scott would be a contender for the Presidency.

I knew the guy was sharp. This speech clinched it for me:

And I suspect the Dems know it too. That’s why we had…well, this going on on Twitter last week:

Someone with hope about race, the economy, and the world?

Can’t be tolerated.

Joe Doakes from Como Park em;ails:

Has anybody else been getting messages saying that in these troubled times, the sender wants us to know how much they care about us?   My credit card company, my bank, even my grocery store care about me now, in these troubled times, which evidently is something new for them – caring about their customers – since they never mentioned it to me, before.

My CEO sent an email to top management.  He pointed out that Thursday was an emotional, soul-searching moment; that the last few weeks had been draining and exhausting for all of us; and how important it is we make space for ourselves to get through troubled times like these, particularly BIPOC employees and leaders.  We must take time to pause and recognize what happens when our systems and structures fail in plain sight.  He asked that staff set aside 12:00 to 2:30 to make space for quiet and to observe Duante Wright’s live-streamed funeral, not to schedule work-as-usual or meetings during that time.

I don’t recall seeing similar messages in the past, when our organization’s mission was to “Delight the Customer.”  I started seeing them when the focus changed to “Racial Justice and Diversity in the Workforce” accompanied by a purge of old White men and promotion of women to management.  Apparently, management now believes it’s essential that we fill the organization with Black, Indigenous and Persons of Color who are unable to do their jobs because they can’t handle the ordinary stresses of life.

I liked it better the old way.

Joe Doakes

I figure people who called 2020 “the worst year ever” never heard of 1942, 1916, 1861, or the Black Death, and have little comprehension of actual difficulty in life.

Around the time of the Chauvin verdict, and in the wake of the Brooklyn Center shooting, a group of students at posh Creti\-Derham Hall – a private Catholic school in Saint Paul – held a walkout.

Now, that’s fine. It’s a foreign concept to me, of course – in my day, at my high school, with its principal who’d served as a Marine fighter pilot in World War 2, it was pretty well understood a student’s place was in his damn desk. I honestly think both approaches have their merits.

Now, with Cretin-Derham Hall (henceforth CDH) which charges $14,765 a year in tuition (which, even after adjusting for inflation, is about 40% more than I spent for undergrad college at a private four-year institution), there’s the added imperative with one suspects at least a few parents, to spend more time on learning and less on the social-justice chatter one sees being substituted for “Education” in the public system.

They Doth Protest Too Much

So – was it OK for the students at CDH to walk out? That’s between the students, the faculty and the ATM machines. Er, parents.

What can not be considered OK is the alleged behavior by some of the students, as related in the Pioneer Press’s story on the subject (emphasis added by me):

As the group gathered back at the school, a student organizer used a school megaphone to lead an anti-police, “F— 12” chant, which administrators quickly sought to shut down.

Meanwhile, a group of girls recorded a video taunting a police officer’s son, who stayed home from school on Monday.

Students told the Pioneer Press that at least six students of various ethnicities were suspended.

Into the fray steps a woman – a “Chicano Studies” professor at the U of M, and not only a CDH graduate, but a second generation alum – with an open letter to CDH’s administration (and, of course, all the social media) with the social justice verdict on the subject. Here’s the letter – I’ll leave it to you to read it, if you want. I’ll pullquote it in case it disappears, not that the professor (who I won’t name, because why?) wijll face any consequences for writing it.

She repeats, several times, that she was a “student of color” at CDH -but also mentions that her father also graduated from CDH, that she’s gone onto an academic career including a PhD from UC Santa Barbara and a position at the U of M teaching in a discipline ending with “…Studies”, which I present with no further comment, other than to say that if she was oppressed (as she claims repeatedly in the letter, although generally in the form of “microaggressions”), it’s not apparent from her implied curriculum vitae. Not only did someone spend an awful lot of money to send her to school – implying at least one generation cared about her education pretty profoundly – but someone did the same for her father, somehow.

Failure To Communicate

Her letter is…

…well, about what you’d expect from someone who’s a professor of anything ending in “studies”. But there are a couple of bits that:

• Show the parlous state of higher educations today
• Given the amount of cheerleading support the professor got on social media, show the dismal state of logic in society today.

The first part:

Your call to understand “BOTH” sides, and that “we can be politically conservative or liberal or somewhere on the broad continuum of thought AND coexist in a respectful environment built on common values,” [Bold is original] fails to understand what is currently happening in our city, state, and nation. This is not a matter of hearing each other out. This is a matter of life and death. Black people are killed by police at alarming rates

Have you noticed how often sentences that says a statement “…fails to understand” something almost inevitably deflect someone’s perfect understanding of a situation?

And what actions, that the public knows about, crossed any sort of ideological line? The protests?

No. It was the six kids that allegedly bullied the cop’s kid.

While CDH wouldn’t specifically comment on the nature of the six suspensions, the school confirmed to me that no students were suspended for protesting legitimately. Who does thjat leave? There are only so many possibilities.

So – not only is she saying there are not multiple sides of this issue, and there is not room for multiple perspectives, but that if you think there are you clearly favor killing black people; accusing people of racism for supporting a dialog about issues is bad enough.

But she’s bringing that accusation to bear to support six alleged bullies. Criticizing, not the protests, but the bullying that sprang from them, is racist!

As Dennis Prager points out, it takes an elite education something something something. I forget thje rest.

Speaking of Consequences

Later, apparently criticizing the suspension of (I’ll say it again) six kids who made a video harassing someone for being the son of a policeman, she writes (and I add empjasis):

As educators we must impede the school to prison pipeline. Taking this type of disciplinary action as opposed to teaching, listening, and engaging with these young people is not only a missed opportunity, but continues the same punitive action that this present moment is fighting against.

The professor apparently would have you believe that suspending students at a posh private school for allegedly bullying a fellow student is:

• Going on the students criminal records
• On a moral par with not only being killed by the police, but killed for no cause whatsoever.

The galling part about this is not that someone who teaches our kids is writing this sort of stuff with a straight face. This sort of thought would appear to be the water in which PhDs in anything ending in “…Studies” swim.

The galling part was, when someone posted the letter on a neighborhood social media page, watching the locals – it was in Highland Park – tripping over each other to compliment the writer’s wisdom. And when questioned in any way, how many of them reverted immediately to…

Because Trump.

Moral vacuity is a barrel that has no bottom to scrape in Saint Paul.

Quick Note: Any commenter that asks “So, you’re ok withj black people being summarily executed” will be blocked, forever, and urged to go pay penance for being the moral plaque on societies arteries that you are.

Another Quick Note: “What, Berg – you’re a conservative, riffing on private schools? ”

No. I’m riffing on Cretin-Derham Hall. What the Ivies are to the nation, CDH is to Saint Paul, and I don’t entirely mean that in a good way. There’s a CDH. mafia ijn this town. Which makes the professor’s letter doubly ironic; if CDH grads are “oppressed” in the Twin CIties, it’s because they’ve worked hard to feel oppressed.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We’ve heard a lot of legal expertise tossed around lately.  Let’s see how easily our resident legal scholars handle a first-year law school exam question.:

Criminal Procedure quiz, essay portion:

A man is accused of committing a crime in Minneapolis.  The prosecuting attorney spends a year tainting the jury pool with pretrial publicity.  Defendant moves for a change of venue citing his Constitutional right to a fair trial but the judge concludes the State’s actions have been so widespread, so pervasive, so completely corrupting, that the Defendant cannot get a fair trial anywhere in the state.

The judge’s choices are:

A.  Hold the trial in Minneapolis since that’s where the alleged crime occurred, even as the mob outside the courthouse threatens to burn the city if the man isn’t convicted;

B.  Dismiss the charges on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct in violation of the Defendant’s Constitutional rights.

If the judge chooses A, he opens the door for the State to violate future defendants’ Constitutional rights in a similar manner.  If the judge chooses B, the mob burns down the city. What should the judge do?   Explain your answer in 100 words or less giving citations to relevant statutory, case-law, and rule authority.

You have one hour.  Begin.

Joe Doakes

Er..Racism and White Privilege and the Patriarchy?

Those seem to be the answers for everyone question one can’t answer these days.

The Chauvin trial wrapped up yesterday. As this is written, the jury is deliberating.

But well into last week, Saint Paul was strapping in.

Saint Paul is smoking ’em if they got ’em.

The Midway Menards hasn’t yet piled stacks of plywood in front of the store – which is the “smoke ’em if you got ’em” moment, from where I sit.

Some merchants are of the opinion that some kind of supplication to the crowd might buy them some grace.

But most of the biggest victims last year were immigrants and merchants “of color”, and there’s no reason to expect the white left-wing college kids who did most of the burning last year are going to be any different this time around.

If some legislator wants to push a bill removing “duty to retreat” and allowing self-defense of felony-level destruction of property via lethal force, I’ll pound all the pavement they need.

Or, y’know, assert the rule of law:

Assert it equally, regardless of class, race or all the rest? Absolutely – suggest otherwise (or suggest I suggest otherwise) and you are depraved and need to be shunned.

But assert it, for chrissake.

The press “reports” on Maxine Waters’ weekend trip to Brooklyn Center:

Did they cover everything?

Miss anything?

Like…the incitement to violence?

From the party (and media) that seems to think that there was no political violence in this country before (or apparently after) January 6?

UPDATE/BUMP: Oh, yeah – like Lisa Bender and Philippe Cunningham, Waters wanted special treatment while she incite her violence.

…that Reverend King…

…flew coach.