So 2019: Conservatives watching the media’s relentless slide to the left and saying they’ll eventually be actively aiding and abetting violence against Conservatives.
2020: The media proves the conservatives right.
“If You’re ‘On The Fence’, You’re Complicit”\
No. If I’m “on the fence on an issue”, then neither side has convinced me yet. “Better to be quiet and have people think you might be a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”.
And being considered a fool by anyone using a line like the star of today’s piece is at best irrelevant and at worst mutual.
I’ve had a couple people ask what I thought about Federal law enforcement, driving rental vans and wearing generic mil-cop camouflage, grabbing individual “protesters” off the streets of Portland.
To be honest, I’m not of two minds about it. Maybe three or four.
Bear with me, here.
I was a Libertarian with a capital L. I’m still a libertarian with small “l'”. I read my Soviet history (which is why I’m not a DFLer or a “progressive”). Cops descending out of nowhere and throwing people into vans and driving off is not a good look.
And if you can show me that those people have disappeared without a trace – as opposed to appearing in federal court being arraigned on charges involving destroying federal property and other federal crimes – then we’ve got something to talk about.
On the other hand:
I will wager a shiny new quarter that every single one of these “peaceful” protesters is going to appear in enough video, witness statements and other credible evidence to support at least an indictable allegation that they were involved in destroying federal (as in “you and me paid for it”) property, and/or travelled across state lines to organize other peoples’ felonies.
Now – given that Portland has in effect been turned over to “Anti”-Fa [1], and in effect told its own police to leave them alone and get out of the way, what’s going to be the best way to get these alleged violent conspirators – rolling up in a van labeled “FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT”, warning the wannabe tough guys to form a mob and get their bats and bike chains and guns out, and starting yet another riot?
Or maybe take the subtle approach, get the organizers they want, and leave without letting the mob destroy the neighborhood – again?
On the other, other hand:
All of you people demanding openness and transparency in law enforcement in tracking and arresting (for sake of argument) people who are credibly alleged to be organizers of violent riots that have caused tens of millions of dollars of damage to private, local and federal property: Where were you brave, iconoclastic souls in 2011-2013, when prosecutors in Wisconsin were serving no-knock “John Doe” warrants with SWAT teams armed not one degree behind the Specal Forces fashion curve, along with gag orders signed by courts that the Kangaroos released a statement saying they didn’t want to be associated with, against people accused of…
…supporting Scott Walker for Governor?
Where were you?
Is opaque government only a problem when it’s the people you agree with (?) getting arrested under unseemly circumstances?
And on the other, other, other hand:
Is Federal law enforcement and the whole federal justice system, with its 98% conviction rate and its indulgent rules that allow federal prosecutors to squeeze people to choose between guilty pleas or having their lived completely destroyed and being personally, legally and financially ruined forever, too powerful?
Well, I agree – and if you root for that same system when they pick out a white collar criminal to hound to death (read Howard Root’s “Cardiac Arrest” for a great local story by a guy who beat the rap – at the cost of $25 million), but get the vapors when it’s an entitled, upper-middle-class, over-schooled but under-educated “progressive” anarchist, then yes, I am going to point out your (let’s be polite here) inconsistency.
“Silence is Violence”.
No. It’s not.
Silence – if you catch me silent at all – is me keeping my mouth shut while I figure out what I think, to say nothing of what I’m going to say. Your freedom of speech doesn’t give you the right to tell me what I’m going to say.
If your response to that is “there is only one thing to say”, and that’s to agree with your point of view – then most likely you’re trying to logroll and shame people into knocking off all that pesky thinking, and just acquiescing.[1] If your position is worthy, I may eventually agree with you. Not doing so, in and of itself, doesn’t make me the immoral one.
Logically, it’s Orwellian – silence is the opposite of violence. Morally, it’s worse than Orwellian.
If your response is “that’s how Germans reacted when Jews were getting hauled off” – well, there’s your opportunity to convince me that the issue we face is, actually, that clear-cut.
If it’s not? If there are some facets to the issue at hand over which reasonable people may debate?
If you were to tell a spouse or a significant other “if you’re not verbally acquiescing with my point of view, you are party to evil”, a therapist would call you an emotional abuser.
And they’d be right.
Logrolling is no substitute for a convincing argument.
Unfortunately, people using this form of logrolling, gaslighting chanting point aren’t trying to “convince”, and they’re not trying to provoke thought.
Portland cop (who happens to be black) – the leftist protest mob, especially those organizing them, are the actual racists:
You’re be hard-pressed to show that the “protesters” rioting in Minneapolis weren’t the same pack of over-schooled, under-educated, entitled upper-middle-class honkies.
More later today.
Individualism is groupthink.
Hard work is indolence.
Objectivity is emotion.
Respect is hate.
Delayed gratification is fleeting and temporal.
Apparently Orwell is “the New Normal”, at least among progs:
Not just Orwellian – socially illiterate. These are traits of Western Civilization – which sprouted in the West, which happens to have been almost entirely white until a few hundred years ago, but could hypothetically have happened anywhere the ideals of individual worth and the value of the individual’s work have caught on. For all the left’s yapping about “historical accidents” and “lotteries of history”, this was the ultimate one, in human terms.
I used to wonder what these people supposed would happen when you treat a group that isn’t fundamentally an “Identity” group as as identity group.
Now I’m pretty sure that’s the goal.
Correlation doesn’t equal causation.
Every kid with a decent junior high science teacher knew that by, well, the end of junior high.
But Millennials didn’t have good science teachers. Seriously – how did medical schools find students, much less graduate doctors, over this past 15 years?
But I digress.
It also seems to be what passes for “Journalism” lately.
To wit – according to the WaPo, a spike in violent urban crime over the past three months “followed” the greatest wave in history of people…
…“led to” a spike in violent crime.
Not dumb enough for you?
“We find that states where individuals are more likely to search for racial epithets experienced larger increases in June firearm sales,” they wrote, “even after adjusting for the personal security concerns that likely generated the March spikes in gun sales.” This is a new development: Running the same analysis on previous spikes in gun-buying yielded no correlation between racial animus and purchasing behavior.
No, it’s not the Babylon Bee. But it’s pretty damn close.
Question for the “reporters” involved: why are we so sure it’s not the other way around – that the crime wave didn’t cause the surge?
The death rate for media credibility is way ahead of the one for Covid.
I figured this out the other day.
Just as “White Privilege” is really class privilege sanitized for white progressives’ protection…
…so, too, is “white fragility” in fact “blue fragility” – the inability of “blue-state” progressives to reconcile their class advantages with their white prog guilt.
And both, also, are one sweet bit of grifting, if you got in on the ground floor:
DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” article was, in a sense, an epistemological exercise. It examined white not-knowing. When it was published in 2011 in The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, it reached the publication’s niche audience. But three years later it was quoted in Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger, during a fierce debate — with white defensiveness on full view — about the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s casting of white actors as Asians in a production of “The Mikado.” “That changed my life,” she said. The phrase “white fragility” went viral, and requests to speak started to soar; she expanded the article into a book and during the year preceding Covid-19 gave eight to 10 presentations a month,
This is verging on becoming, if not a full-fledged “Berg’s Law“, at least a corollary to the 7th.
Remember the Indians who tore down the Columbus statue on the capitol grounds, as Capitol Police stood by and did nothing?
Governor Walz promised there would be “consequences.” Haven’t noticed any news articles about charges being filed. Did they get a time out? Double secret probation?
What exactly are the consequences for destroying government property? I’m feeling oppressed by the health department. Can I go burn it down?
Joe Doakes
If the “Penalty” for destroying statuary is nervous foot-shuffling and occasional statements with no followup, I’m totally going after that Floyd Olson statue.
While browsing about for thought material the other day, I tripped across this:
“… The higher the proportion of infectious diseases, the greater the trend towards totalitarian politics at the local level“.
Huh.
Presented without any conscious reference to any state or local government, or legions of fear driven, but supremely entitled, Karens or anything like that.
Perish the thought.
Like a lot of Twin Cities residents, I’m eyeing next spring – sometime after the scheduled March opening of the Derek Chauvin trial – nervously, remembering that the LA riots (at least the ones everyone remembers) began not with the pummeling of Rodney King, but with the acquittal of the four officers involved.
And here’s a fearless prediction (one I’ve already made): Chauvin will be acquitted of Second Degree Unintentional Murder – not because of any legal cop-fu, but because while I’m not a lawyer, I don’t think you need to be a lawyer to see why it’s going to be very hard to show that Chauvin was – check the emphasis, taken from the statute for 2nd Degree Unintentional Murder…:
(1) causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense other than criminal sexual conduct in the first or second degree with force or violence or a drive-by shooting; or
Is a cop responding to a call “the commission of a felony?” I can see Alondra Cano believing that – but Ellison? Someone who’s ostensibly been to law school?
Unless there’s some bodacious lawyer-fu in store, or the Attorney General’s office plans on tampering with the entire witness pool, I’m just not seeing it.
But does the concept of qualified immunity mean there could be yet a third adverse verdict for George Floyd’s supporters and the Twin CIties’ far left’s many professional and amateur hooligans?
Was it “clearly established” on May 25 that kneeling on a prone, handcuffed arrestee’s neck for nearly nine minutes violated his Fourth Amendment rights? The issue is surprisingly unsettled in the 8th Circuit, which includes Minnesota.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit blocked civil rights claims in two recent cases with broadly similar facts: handcuffed detainees who died after being restrained face down by several officers. Unlike those detainees, Floyd was not actively resisting at the time of his death, except to repeatedly complain that he could not breathe.
While that distinction could make a difference in the constitutional analysis, we can’t be sure. Even if the 8th Circuit concluded that Chauvin’s actions were unconstitutional, it could still decide the law on that point was not clear enough at the time of Floyd’s arrest, meaning Chauvin would receive qualified immunity.
The 8th Circuit could even reach the latter conclusion without resolving the constitutional question, as courts have commonly done since 2009, when the Supreme Court began allowing that shortcut. To defeat qualified immunity in this case, says UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz, a leading critic of the doctrine, Floyd’s family “would have to find cases in which earlier defendants were found to have violated the law in precisely the same way.”
The whole piece is worth a read – and the whole concept of seriously reforming qualified immunity is something conservatives need to take an enlightened lead on.
Because it’s for damn sure the other side won’t.
A friend of the blog emails in re the Taco Bell at Snelling and Edmund in the Midway:
Hmmm, are we positive that the city council didn’t pay people to riot in St Paul? Now I just read that the Taco Bell on Snelling can’t reopen until a conditional use permit for drive thru is issued because they need that in order to rebuild. (Even though they already have a drive thru currently).
I know the city has been itching to get rid of the shopping center and the Taco Bell both. Seems too easy…
As we noted last week, the whole “renovation by Molotov Cocktail” thing this past month does seem to have been all too convenient…
The feds turn down Governor Klink’s disaster funding request:
The federal government has denied Gov. Tim Walz’s request for aid to help rebuild and repair Twin Cities structures that were damaged in the unrest following George Floyd’s death.
Walz asked President Donald Trump to declare a “major disaster” for the state of Minnesota in his request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on July 2. More than 1,500 buildings were damaged by fires, looting and vandalism in the days of unrest that followed Floyd’s May 25 death in Minneapolis police custody, racking up more than $500 million in damages, according to Walz.
“The Governor is disappointed that the federal government declined his request for financial support,” [Walz spokesperson Teddy] Tschann said in a statement. “As we navigate one of the most difficult periods in our state’s history, we look for support from our federal government to help us through.”
The “disaster” was, of course, caused by sixty years of DFL governance that is swerving exponentially to the left, decades of mismanagement, a toxic culture run by white liberals more concerned with virtue-trumpeting than competence and justice, and of course by a city that simultaneously rolls out the red carpet for young, largely white, largely upper-middle-class radicals (the direct action arm of the DFL) which the city was packed full of when Mayor Frey made his ill-fated decision to evacuate law enforcement from East Lake Street.
Why should the American taxpayer – especially those who work hard to support competent government, almost invariably in red states – pay for the DFL’s decades of depraved indifference to their own incompetence?
You break it, you buy it.
The Washington Redskins will be announcing a new nickname today.
I’m going to suggest the Washington Possums. They get killed at home and run over on the road.
(Borrowed from someone on Facebook).
I’ll cop to it – I’ve been pretty cynical about “hate crimes” lately. Let’s stipulate in advance – they do happen.
But Berg’s 20th Law – “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” – is a law for a reason.
Or, rather, many, many reasons – including this one from, what else, a poitician from the west coast:
Jonathan Lopez, who is Latino and was a recent candidate for Umatilla County commissioner, claimed he discovered the hate-filled missive in his mailbox on June 23, the East Oregonian reported.
On his now-deleted Facebook account, he shared a photo of the letter, which said that Lopez and other “Mexicans” were “not welcome here,” according to local news station KEPR-TV.
“Don’t waste your time trying to become anything in this county we will make sure you never win and your family suffers along with all the other f–king Mexicans in the area!” the letter said.
Lopez wrote in the post that he “holds no resentment for whomever wrote this,” the outlet reported.
Oh, I bet he holds some resentment for the writer – or at least the writer’s judgment…:
“Our investigation has shown that Mr. Lopez wrote the letter himself and made false statements to the police and on social media,” Hermiston Police Chief Jason Edmiston told the East Oregonian.
“The end result is a verbal and written admission by Mr. Lopez that the letter was fabricated.”
Edmiston said the case would be forwarded to the Umatilla County District Attorney’s Office for review on charges for initiating a false report.
“This investigation is particularly frustrating as we are in the midst of multiple major investigations while battling a resource shortage due to the current pandemic,” Edmiston told the outlet.
In a party where reputations and political capital are ever-more based on intersectional virtue-signaling and dog-whistling, politicians are gonna virtue signal and dog-whistle.
Well, presuming the guy’s a Democrat.
Because Mr. Lopez’s party is never mentioned in the article.
Weird, huh?
To: Governor Walz
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: State Of Non-Emergency
Your Highness,
Your ongoing, and apparently endless, emergency declaration is, put mildly, draconian – especially if you’re in the private sector, especially an entrepreneur. You’ll notice that a sizable majority of people supporting the your most extreme quarantining provisions are public, non-profit or academic employees, students, or the retired. There’s a reason for that.
Now, we’re Americans. Most of our anscestors came here to escape tyranny – some petty, some very much not.
But for most of us in the private sector, “resisting” the worst excesses of your emergency measures is beyond our control or ability. Our businesses are shut down; trying to re-open leaves many of us open to getting ratted out to state licensing and permitting authorities on the government-sponsored snitch lines, which the “Karens” among our neighbors are all too happy to keep busy, thus making earning a living a risky venture.
Our jobs, our livelihoods, our social lives – especially those of us for whom “zoom calls” are no substitute for business or pleasure – are all on hold until events meet criteria that our Governor, in a display of abusiveness that would get him tossed in jail if he did it to his wife or kids, won’t tell us.
So what do we do?
History is dotted with ways in which people, deprived of all other means of hitting back at their oppressor, hit ’em anyway.
When Norway was occupied during the Second World War, Norwegians – the ones who couldn’t escape to the UK or into the mountains to carry on the battle – would draw a number “7”, or flash seven fingers at fellow citizens. It referred to Norway’s king, Håkon the 7th. It was a small, almost meaningless gesture – but it gave the people the feeling that they were doing…something, at least, that the occupier couldn’t control.
And so, I suspect, with masks. Minnesotans, their jobs reducing hours or cutting pay or just plain gone, their businesses gasping for air, their social lives and recreation limited to whatever’s in their houses, only as safe from retaliation as their least stable, least passive-aggressive “Karen” or “Chad” of a neighbor, are resisting with the only tool they have.
Their faces.
Work With Me, Here – And you know what? It didn’t have to be this way.
Been to stores that require masks? Many people gripe about it – but most people put ’em on.
I mean, I don’t personally care – I’ve already had Covid, and can neither catch nor spread the disease; I may as well wear a red rubber clown nose. But there IS a reason surgical staff wear them, too [1]
I have a hunch if Minnesota would have done it, given the right information and a choice, if the state had…:
a) Asked people, nicely, to wash their hands, stay home when sick, and put on a mask when around crowds, and
b) Foregone the whole “act like your scolding mother” and gone a lot lighter on the whole “emergency powers” thing
c) Focused the state’s efforts on protecting the vulnerable…
…things might have worked out a lot better.
Y’know – like they did in South Dakota.
Of course, that is all predicated on the notion that the state’s response was about mitigating the effects of Covid.
That is all.
[1] And no, people who get health problems from the minuscule amount of CO2 that gets trapped in their masks are about as common as people with actual Celiac disease (I’ll let our millennial readers shuffle uncomfortably and clear their throats).
A few weeks ago, I joked – well, “joked” – that you could that most of the destructive rioters were upper middle class white kids, closely linked to the Twin Cities’ political class.
How could I tell this?
Because Allianz Field, home of “Minnesota United” soccer club, and a mere block from stores that were burned or looted wall to wall, didn’t have so much as a single graffito on it.
We’ll come back to Allianz Field in a moment.
The strip mall that adjoins Allianz, the “Midway Center”, essentially the Midway’s “main street”, was damaged extensively in the riots – but not comprehensively.
That hasn’t stopped the mall’s owner from terminating all the leases in the complex.
Jenny Hui got choked up earlier this week when talking about the family business being shut down.
She’s 28-years old and essentially grew up inside Golden Gate Cafe.
Her parents opened the restaurant in St. Paul’s Midway Shopping Center shortly after they emigrated from China decades ago.
“They worked super hard all these years to build everything we have now,” Hui said. “It’s devastating to see it go out like this.”
But the aftermath of civil unrest last month left parts of the Midway Shopping Center significantly damaged, and the landlord has informed tenants that he intends to terminate their leases.
The Pioneer Press obtained a copy of a letter dated June 25 in which the landlord cited a clause in the lease agreement that allows him to terminate in the case of extensive damage. He noted that all personal property must be removed from the premises by July 1
Now, stop me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t “MN United” looking to clear that shopping center out of the way to make way for its own development plans – plans that cater only dubiously to the neighborhood?
Major League Soccer’s Minnesota United principal owner Bill McGuire is involved in the property, though owner Rick Birdoff with RK Midway wrote the letter to tenants. Neither responded to requests for comment.
The Midway Shopping Center sits in the shadows of the newly constructed Allianz Field soccer stadium, home to Minnesota United.
Convenient, huh?
To: President Trump
From: Mitch Berg, Irasicble Peasant and Scott Walker supporter
Re: Disaster Request
Mr. President,
This past week, Governor-For-Life Walz asked you to declare Minneapolis and Saint Paul “disaster areas”.
Make no mistake – they are.
But they are a disaster entirely due to generations of DFL policy, decades of mismanagement, and a week of seemingly assessing the situation during the various riots and seemingly selecting the stupidest, most self-destructive response.
So – just as insurance companies won’t cover damage to your house if you take a sledgehammer to your walls and countertops, there is no way the taxpayers of the United States – or Greater Minnesota – should be on the hook for the Minnesota DFL’s stupidity.
As they point out whenever they win an election, they “…own these towns”. Paying federal tax money to ameliorate the stupidity of Walz, Frey, and generations of DFL politicians before them is throwing good money after bad.
But I’m nothing if not a uniter. So I have a suggestion.
Tell Minneapolis to start rebuilding with whatever’s left of the $500,000 Mayor Frey charged your campaign for the nonexistent “security” at your rally at the Target Center last year. You know – the one where mobs of leftist droogs (including at least one City Council member) attacked your supporters out in the streets (usually five or six of thugs, and their soi-boifriends, ganging up on an old guy, or a woman, usually from behind), all but cheered on by the Mayor. There is no way any of that “security” money got spent. Tell the DFL to use that.
Please don’t let Real America down on this. Please, please tell the Governor-for-life and Mayor Frey to go f*** themselves. Preferably in as many words, preferably on national TV. Until there are consequences for their, and their party’s, crimes against their positions and the people they govern, nothing will ever improve.
That is all.
I hereby wager a shiny new quarter that this episode is one of two things:
Any action on that bet?
The Senate GOP – the only real bit of power the opposition has in Minnesota – is finally going to ask the question that it seems nearly nobody in our media will.
Why didi the DFL politiclal “chain of command”, from Mayors Carter and McDreamy up through Governor Klink, allow two of the Twin Cities poor, blighted but slowly recovering neighborhoods to get torched, looted and bludgeoned almost beyond recognition?
Republicans specifically want to know the details of what led Minneapolis police to abandon the Third Precinct police station. Additionally, they want to know why the National Guard was not a visible presence on the ground in Minneapolis until the weekend, four days after the violence started.
At the press conference, Gazelka did not directly answer a question about whether there will be subpoenas issued for the hearings, but a top aide clarified that the Senate Judiciary Committee does have subpoena power, and they will be involved in these hearings.
Democratic senators will be part of these hearings as well. It sets up for what is likely to be a spectacle at the Capitol, with Republican Senators, most of whom are from greater Minnesota, grilling top state and even city officials over the basic question of what happened.
The DFL’s evasion controls are set to “emergency”:
Susan Kent, the DFL Senate leader, responded to Republican plan to hold hearings, saying that Republicans should be just as focused on criminal justice reform as they are on the destruction of property. She noted that these hearing come after a recent special session, where no police reform proposals were agreed upon, during which the Senate held a single, informational hearing for criminal justice reform.
“It is deeply discouraging and troubling to see Senate Republicans prioritize hearings that completely fail to address racial disparities within our criminal justice system,” she said, adding: Minnesotans statewide are asking us to do our jobs and take meaningful action. The one informational hearing they held on weak proposals doesn’t cut it. It is now abundantly clear they were never really interested in passing critical legislation.”
And I’ll agree with the suburban doyenne Sen. Kent, at least halfway; we should examine the “racial disparity”.
Why is it always the black neighborhoods that the hordes of white “anarchists” and “anti”-fa and other members of the DFL’s direct action force flock to to burn and loot?
In watching yesterday’s kerfuffle about the couple in suburban Saint Louis who strapped up – to a horde of catcalls about their deeply flawed gun handling – against a bunch of “peaceful” protesters who’d just smashed their community’s gate – I can’t help but recall four scan weeks ago…
…when armed Americans were briefly all the rage, if a confused sort of rage, to our cultural betters…
The left, last week: “People don’t need the police! People can defend their own communities!”
The left, this week after people defended their own community:
“Chilling”. The “protesters” were encroaching on private property after forcibly breaking down a gate. The implied threat could miss nobody who isn’t already insulated by Urban Progressive Privilege.
The only “chilling” part of this episode is the atrocious firearm-safety the couple are exhibiting; fingers on triggers, sweeping each other and people who aren’t immediate threats. Get some training, people.
And it’s instructive to note how “chilling” it wasn’t to the mainstream media last month, when stories about black neighborhoods and business owners strapping up to deter looters met with…uncomfortable acquiescence.
Minneapolis voted last week to change its police force into…
…well, something.
And if that makes you nervous, don’t worry – accountability for the results of this sweeping change is going to be split 14 ways. Because we all know the stories of successful enterprises in the worlds of politics, business and ideas that’ve had 14 co-equal chief executives.
What it does mean, so far, is a transfer of power from the mayor to the City Council, a transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to the myriad “community” groups and non-profits that will be part of the system – a system that feeds money, influence and people to the DFL…
…and a transfer of accountability for public safety from a police chief and a mayor (both of whom flunked the test terribly this past month) to…well, leave a message and someone will get back to you.
But hey – if you’re really worried about your safety, there are other options…
I left North Dakota for a lot of good reasons. Pretty much everything I wanted in life, especially back when only Al Gore had the Internet, was in a major metropolitan area; a place to try to be a songwriter, a musician, a writer, or something just different than I could be back in one of the most rural states in the US.
And that judgment was largely right, then and now. I found opportunity in the big city that would have eluded me back in the rural west, then and, let’s be honest, now. I’d have never fallen out of college into a major market talk radio job; I’d have never tripped into either of the careers I’ve had since then; nothing that is my life today had I stayed in North Dakota, other than faith and family – and my family is mostly here, too.
And for better or worse, that’s the way it’s going to be for at least the next five years. I was working remotely – at least for a while – before it was cool; from 2015 through most of 2017 I worked from home. And it was great. But when the jobs ended – and they did – the immutable fact is, being where the work was, having a network and a presence and a reputation among a critical-enough mass of people in the industry to find the next job was pretty much non-negotiable.
So the ties that bind me to the big city are emotional, financial and personal.
Oh, yeah – and I’m stubborn. I may eventually walk away from the city, to someplace in Minnesota with a functional two-party system, or across the river to solid, competent, red Northwest Wisconsin. But I’ll do it on my own time. I won’t run away from the mob, either on the street or in city hall. Not if I can help it.
So I’ve got my reasons for being here, and I’m fine with that.
Still, I brought a little bit of my home here. North Dakotans are famously stoic, and calmly but ruthlessly pragmatic – and it shows in the way the state governs itself. And, to be honest, it did, mostly, even when the state’s governor and its congressional delegation were longtime Democrats – although the likes of George Skinner and Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad would look like Barry Goldwater in the modern Democratic Party; Collin Peterson is as close as you’ll find in the wild today. And I compare the public life of my “new” home of 30-odd years to my old one, and find it grossly wanting. Perhaps the lower population density means that there’s noplace to escape the wrath of an angry populace; perhaps the more modest budget for a permanent political and non-profit class means that politicians of all stripes need to mind their manners, since they are unlikely to wind up in permanent political sinecures. More than a few former governors in the Dakotas and Montana went back into private legal practice after leaving office; perhaps knowing they were going to be back on Main Street one day tempers behavior in a way that looking forward to a “teaching” job at the Humphrey Center and a cushy and largely ceremonial “job” at a law firm or non-profit doesn’t. And I suspect it’ll take a genuine catastrophe – not the twin, training-wheels problems, Covid and the Floyd Riots – to strip away enough of the surplus wealth that enables rot-enabling dross like our non-profit/industrial complex and academic complexes to thrive. And that’s a level of catastrophe that will make Governor Walz’s original models look pollyannaish – a serious epidemic, like aerosol Ebola or a reawakened Bubonic Plague; rioting with guns instead of spray paint.
And let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
I’ve got a fair number of people in my metro social circle who are making active noises about moving to the rural west. South Dakota is a current favorite – Governor Noem has distinguished herself in leading SoDak through the Covid crisis to the point where there’s talk of her being, unthinkably, a national contender. (In a just world, Governor Burgum of North Dakota would be a legitimate contender as well – but being a billionaire and by all indications pretty dang happy where he’s at, he’d have no reason to want to). I ask, mostly in fun, “you have two Dakotas to choose from, and you pick that one?”, but I get it…
…mostly.
My next question is absolutely serious: “Go to South Dakota…and do what?” If you’ve got a career that’s genuinely portable and can exist anywhere – or no career at all, and able to start over from rock bottom – then that makes sense. If you earn your living via the many, many parts of the economy that only occur in metro areas larger than 250,000 (and Fargo makes the cut, more or less, batting well above its weight economically – but it’s also developed its own class of “progressive” useless mouths, and along with Grand Forks the state’s only real collection of institutional Democrats), you may be looking long and hard to find a way to make ends meet. And if you’re counting on your remote job to carry you through – check those connections, both on the Internet and on your LinkedIn. You’d best have a very high profile in your industry to be able to find your next job from your den in Aberdeen.
Still, for all the Metro governments have poured into the bogus, politically-correct, perverted-to-the-point-of-Orwellian definition of “resiliency”, Victor Davis Hanson reminds us in his meditations on Æsop’s fable of the City Mouse and Country Mouse that life in the more rural areas offers the real thing – the ability to provide one’s own “safety net” far more resilient than that of even a well-intentioned social one, a genuine community.
And there are times that sounds attractive.
We don’t like the statue of Columbus on the Capitol Grounds.
We tried to get it removed through official channels.
We lost.
We announced we were going to tear it down ourselves.
We heard the Governor tell us not to, that the police would stop us.
We didn’t care.
We weren’t stopped.
We weren’t arrested.
We weren’t charged.
We weren’t even scolded.
We are heroes, taking back the lands our ancestors sold a century ago.
We’re coming for your house, next.
Joe Doakes
Some animals are more equal than others.
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