Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Denmark is putting troops at the border and on guard duty around synagogues.

Why now?  Martin Luther, Henry VII and John Wesley all died centuries ago.  It can’t be Anglicans, Methodists or Lutherans threatening Jews.  What’s changed in the last couple of years that has disrupted Danish life so much they need to put troops on the streets to maintain order?

Amazing, they have both kinds of unrest:  Muslim and leftist.  The incident cited was a Muslim terrorist who shot up a free speech event.  Striking parallels to the Left in this country.  Sounds as if Danes need to start listening to The Donald.

Build The Wall.

Joe Doakes

That should stretch the Danish military to the breaking point. Not joking.

(Danish Military trivia:  the Hjemmeværnet, or “Home Guard”, which is their national militia, was established after WW2 on the basis of the wartime Resistance – and with the mission of operating independently of the King and Parliament to defend the country (or kill invaders) regardless of the any government capitulation.  It was the closest I’ve seen to a “Second Amendment”-style policy in any non-Swiss European state.  But in recent decades, that mission has been softening; the Hjemmeværnet has been drawn more into the government mainstream, and the notion of having to resist an invader even in contravention of a (subjugated) government has faded from living memory.  I wonder if it’ll make a reappearance?   Nota bene:  don’t underestimate the Danes).

The shooting in Vegas was an atrocity. But it hasn’t been 48 hours.

Until 48 hours have passed, you’re better off getting your news from the crazy lady at the bus stop than the MSM.

Given the targets, it’s every bit as likely this attack was spawned by “Punch A Nazi” entitlement as anything.

(And if it was? Watch this be the least-publicized spree killing in history. Or watch for the Big Left to blame “Punch A Nazi” on Trump)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

There are 32 teams in the NFL and each team has a 53-man roster, for a total of 1,696 players in the NFL.

There are 15,588 college seniors who are eligible to be drafted from the NCAA to the NFL.  Add in a few more from other, non-NCAA schools, and we’re talking about 17,000 or a 1-in-10 ratio.  But most players last several years, which means that for every man that makes it into the NFL, many more don’t make the cut.  How many, I don’t know.  20?  30?  50?

What’s the qualitative difference between the guys who make it versus the guys who don’t?  Aside from the Heisman Trophy Winner, I’d bet it’s a razor-thin margin. Which means the NFL could afford to dump a powerful number of existing players to replace them with almost-as-good players, at least for a while.  Ever see the Keanau Reeves movie “Replacements?”  Like that.

Wouldn’t even have to do it.  Just threaten it.  Call in some of those replacements for tryouts.  Let the regulars know their replacements are warming up.  “See that line of guys out the door and down the block?  They all want your job.  How badly do YOU want your job?  If you are more interested in social justice antics than playing football . . . .”

Joe Doakes

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I live in Vikings territory so I learned to ignore NFL games years ago, long before players started kneeling to protest the nation that made them rich.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The school bus company requires boys to sit on one side of the aisle, girls to sit on the other side, most likely the result of insurance company lawyers trying to avoid claims of inappropriate touching, sexual harassment or sexual assault occurring on the bus while under the driver’s control which would make the school bus company likely to get sued for failing to protect the students.
Two girls choose to sit on the boy’s side of the bus and won’t move back.  The driver puts them off the bus.  Outrage occurs because the girls claim to be pre-operative transgender boys.  They look like girls, they dress like girls, they act like girls, they flirt like girls . . . but in their secret innermost thoughts, for today anyway, they’re boys.  So asking them to sit on the girls’ side of the bus is a hateful act of gender discrimination . . . which makes the bus company likely to get sued for failing to protect those students.
Thus we see the problem with attempting to establish rules for ordering society based on subjective, secret, ever-changing and unverifiable criteria, rather than based on objective, obvious, easily established criteria.
Joe Doakes

What “duckspeak” is to language, our “elites'” current conception of “gender” is to biology.

Being able to disagree is a dying art – and a vital one:

To say the words, “I agree” — whether it’s agreeing to join an organization, or submit to a political authority, or subscribe to a religious faith — may be the basis of every community. But to say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes — ego non — these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere. G

Diagreeing civilly and productively is what makes representative government possible.  We’re losing that ability.

Andrew Klavan finds pretty much the entire left in Jimmy Kimmel.

Read the whole thing – but the conclusion does, well, conclude things pretty well:

Kimmel doesn’t matter. He’s just another half-smart big mouth Hollywood multi-millionaire. But they’re all Kimmel, all the left. They’re all doing the Kimmel Three-Step: 1. Emotion. 2. Hectoring. 3. Violence. Trying to get you to give them and their government your money and your freedom.

In short, and in order, Kimmel follows Big Left’s template:

1. Lead with emotion
2. If that doesn’t shut up the opposition, follow with name-calling
3. If that doesn’t work, move to the violence.

It’s been the case with just about every lefty pundit I’ve ever dealt with.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A rapist is now confined to a women’s prison because he identifies as a woman and calls himself Jessica.

Who could have seen this coming?

Joe Doakes

Nobody.  Nobody could have seen it coming.

Some critics say Hillary’s new blame-all autobio includes a “bizarre misreading” of George Orwell’s 1984.  Among them is Allahpundit, from Hot Air.

There are establishmentarians, there are big-government establishmentarians, and then there are people who read Orwell and see a parable about insufficient trust in authority:

Here’s the passage

I say they’re being pollyannaish.

Hillary’s a lot of things – I’ll skip the hour-long session of listing them all – but she’s not stupid, and she’s not illiterate.

We’ve noticed this with not a few figures on the left; they’re pretty much sure they can get away with saying anything; God knows the media will never call them on it. I’ve focused on it in particular as re Second Amendment policy – this blog has  a  large, well-populated tag documenting the Minnesota victim disarmament movement’s serial fabulism – but we’re really just scratching the surface.

My thesis:  Hillary thinks knows she can say anything she wants; the media will never check her; her supporters can’t stop jabbering about their credentials, intelligence and level of information (they watch Rachel Maddow, dammit!) to bother reading the damn book in the first place.

I just got this from a contact of mine at UC Berkeley:

My contact asked “is that all they could find – one quote from Ben Shapiro?”

Distort the economy of a sector, an industry or a city to benefit an industry, a policy or a class of people, and you’re going to cause unintended consequences – almost all of them bad, at least for someone.

Fifteen years ago, the NPR-listening, Whole Foods-Shopping, Volvo-driving set nodded and snapped their fingers to the beat of Richard Florida, who wrapped up a bunch of toxic economic interventions in a bunch  of artisanal wrapping paper and slapped a name on it – appealing to the “Creative Class” – that was marketing genius, making the children of America’s upper-middle-class feel like their apps, their hedge funds and their vegan restaurants were part of something Big and Important.

Cities – or rather, city planning wonks (who love to see themselves in that Creative Class – fell all over themselves to engineer cities to draw this class, on the promise that they’d spur economic growth.

The results?   Well, I predicted this – and now, Richard Florida himself is acknowledging it:

The rise of the creative class in such cities as New York, Washington, and San Francisco did produce economic growth—but mostly just for those who were already wealthy. The poor, and especially the working class poor, were right out of luck. They were priced out of the city and driven out to the suburbs, where they created the kind of urban problems known only to the cities. The modern city is the greatest economic engine the world has ever known, but these days it seems to run only for the aid of those who need its benefits least. When the rich, the young, and the bohemian revitalized Austin, Boston, and Seattle, they induced a cycle of soaring prices and class replacement. The creative class brought an income inequality that hadn’t been predicted. Florida could call them a new class all he wanted. They proved to be merely the children of the old white-collar meritocracy, grown doubly rich from the rising tide of urban renewal.

So, in The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida takes a long second look at the nation’s cities. He doesn’t admit that he had been wrong in 2002 with The Rise of the Creative Class, mostly because he doesn’t think he was wrong. The city progressed just the way he described. But what he has called the “externalities” have mounted to such an extent that they now outweigh the gains he saw 15 years ago. The creative class triumphed, and his prize cities have turned into wealth preserves—the old gated communities of the suburbs, transplanted to the urban core.

The whole thing is worth a read.

The Big Media complains that America is just too tribalistic.

And I have to ask myself – why, oh why?  Why does half of America seem to hate the other half with a fury beyond Dodgers vs. Yankees?

Stephen Colbert’s contribution to civil, de-tribalized discussion in this country. Yes, he’s “Sieg-Heil”-ing Trump.

Why on earth would half of America distrust the other half?

Blackshirts of “Anti”-Fa in masks attacking unarmed Republican demonstrators.

Why would half of America think the other half is not only imposing itself on the rest of the country, but doing it on behalf of ideas that have failed miserably?

The book that asked “why don’t Red states vote for their ‘best interests'” – like the people of Baltimore, Newark, Trenton, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Stockton, Saint Louis, Camden and Minneapolis did.  Notice the cover, by the way; like any good delusional, the author thinks the donkey is carrying the elephant.  

Why, oh why?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When you abandon the “women and children first” policy because it’s sexist and ageist, this is what you get.

Joe Doakes

When society’s traditions collapse, who do you suppose is waiting to rush in?

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is filling up his gas tank, focusing on the meter, as Avery LIBRELLE rides up on a Vespa.  

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg.

BERG:  Er, hi, Avery.  What’s up?

LIBRELLE:  Trump is an idiot.

BERG:  Naturally.  Why this time?

LIBRELLE:  He wants to deport DACA kids.

BERG:  Well, no.  He’s giving Congress six months to come up with a law that passes constitutional muster; DACA did not.  Trump is right about this.

LIBRELLE:  Nonsense.  It’s not these childrens’ fault their parents came to America.

BERG:  So children are not at fault for what their parents – the previous  generation – did?

LIBRELLE:  Absolutely not.

BERG:  So White people…

LIBRELLE:  …are all still at fault, precisely and exactly, for racist acts committed by white people from the 1500s to the 1960s, even if their ancestors didn’t own slaves, didn’t live in slave states and didn’t have anything to do with the slave trade.

BERG:  Children of illegal immigrants…

LIBRELLE:  …bear zero culpability for their parents supposed misdeeds.

BERG:  White people…

LIBRELLE:  …are still fully complicit in acts that happened 400 years ago.

BERG:  Huh.

LIBRELLE:  Say, I need to put gas in this thing.  Which pump is vegan and gluten-free?

And SCENE. 

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which is being sued for slandering conservatives,  has moved $69 million overseas.

Nice work, if you can get it.

The SPLC is the Big Left’s Goebbels.

…I leave questions of eternal consequences to the Almighty.   It’s his job – not that I could affect that (outside myself), even if I wanted to.  Which I do not.

But I do hope there’s a smack upside this woman’s head in the afterlife.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Engineering school is not exempt from Social Justice Warriors.

Purdue is shifting from teaching engineers how to build a bridge, to teaching them how to feel about bridges.

I’m sure that will be enormously helpful when the next I-35 disaster occurs.

Joe Doakes

My new theory – and it’s so new, I haven’t even thought it out:  Trump’s presidency is entirely designed to squeeze all of Big Left’s lunacy out into public view, so the public will be so disgusted, the left will be shamed out of power forever.

But a guy can dream.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The next step in the culture war:  fire employees for their political views.

I’m all for it.  Start by repealing tenure, fire all the pointy-headed leftists in academia, save millions of young minds from their poison.

Next, career bureaucrats in the IRS and State Department who claim they’re “The Resistance” – out you go, to make room for true patriots.

Yes, this is a wonderful advance in employment law.  Glad the Liberals adopted it, makes cleaning house much easier.

Joe Doakes

Given the concern some “progs” are showing, suddenly, for federalism and limiting government power, you never know.  Anything’s possible.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Well I’m certainly not in favor of this proposal.  Took years and cost a fortune to get my license to practice law including a background check and continuing classes every year – now they’re proposing to hand out law licenses to people who aren’t even supposed to be in the country?

 

What’s the point of following the law, if nobody else has to?

What’s the point?

Devaluing law, the same as Big Left has devalued labor, community, morality and individuality.

SCENE:   Press conference where a Free Speech Rally is being announced for the Minnesota state capitol grounds.   A group of reporters is questioning the organizers of the rally – Madison JAMES, Tyrone JEFFERSON, and Jorge WASHINGTON.

WASHINGTON:   …So to sum up, we will hold our Free Speech rally at precisely noon.  We have our permit, and we are ready to stand up for the free speech rights of all Minnesotans and all Americans.

JEFFERSON:  Even those we don’t agree with.

JAMES:  We’ll now take questions.   (Sees hands rising, points to a sallow endomorph in his late forties with severe acne).  Yes.

REPORTER 1:  I’m Edmund DuChey, from “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com”.  So your rally of Nazis and White Supremacists…

WASHINGTON:  Yeah, you can stop right there.  As noted before, this rally specifically denounces the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and everyone who would actively curtail the rights of others based on their ethnicity, religion or anything else.

JAMES:  And we’ve specifically disinvited them from the rally, and are ready to enforce that.

JAMES:  Next question.

REPORTER 2:  Walter Lennon-Marks from Minnesota Public Radio.  I notice that you have not disinvited people who plan on carrying firearms, concealed or openly, from the rally.

JEFFERSON:  That’s correct.

LENNON-MARKS:  Don’t you find that intimidates other speech?

WASHINGTON:  I find that it most definitely intimidates those who would threaten our rally with violence like “Anti”-Fa did in San Francisco.

JEFFERSON:  Or those who would act on those threats, as “Anti”-Fa did in Boston, and clearly plan to elsewhere.    Inducing them to keep their speech non-violent is a feature, not a bug.

JAMES:  Next question?

REPORTER 3:   Yes – Yvette Stahlen from the Star Tribune.  Why do all three of you make the scare quotes with your fingers whenever you say the “anti” in “Antifa?”

WASHINGTON:  Because they are “against fascism” in exactly the same way the Bloods are against the Crips, or the Gambinos were “against” the Luccheses.   These are two sides of the same noxious, anti-democratic, anti-freedom, pro-totalitarian coin.

STAHLEN:  But my editors’ oldest daughter is a member of Antifa, and has been ever since zhe graduated from Oberlin.

WASHINGTON:   (Walks down from the stage with a microphone, hands it to STAHLEN).  Here.

STAHLEN:  What do you want me to do with this.

WASHINGON:  Drop it for me.  I couldn’t possibly have ended this better than you did.

(And SCENE)

For years, the “Southern Poverty Law Center” has been slandering perfectly legitimate conservative organizations, smearing them as “hate groups”.

The practice hit home a few years back, when they called the “Taxpayers League of Minnesota” a “hate group”. Their “hate” was, apparently, manifested by getting lawmakers to pledge not to raise taxes – because taxes, apparently, are love.

Most slandered people can’t fight back, as I found out myself a few years back; it’s expensive, courts err very sharply on the side of free speech (which is a good thing in the great scheme of things, of course), and even if you “win” in court, the judge can rule that a retraction and apology will suffice (as I myself was told in 2012 by a lawyer, who told me I had a very strong defamation case against an online stalker – provided I came up with a $20K retainer and accepted the fact that there was a very strong chance of a legal victory with no financial payback whatsoever).  B

But with all that aside, it’s good to see someone  taking it to the fake watchdog group

On Tuesday, D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM) filed a lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the charity navigation organization GuideStar, and Amazon for defamation, religious discrimination, and trafficking in falsehood. The SPLC listed DJKM as a “hate group,” while GuideStar also categorized it in those terms, and Amazon kept the ministry off of its charity donation program, Amazon Smile.

“We embarked today on a journey to right a terrible wrong,” Dr. Frank Wright, president and CEO at DJKM, said in a statement Tuesday. “Those who knowingly label Christian ministries as ‘hate’ groups, solely for subscribing to the historic Christian faith, are either woefully uninformed or willfully deceitful. In the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center, our lawsuit alleges the latter.”

The SPLC has labeled DJKM an “anti-LGBT hate group” for its opposition to same-sex marriage and transgenderism.

I’m hoping Kennedy wins and wins huge.

If I can find a place to donate to the legal fund, I’ll post it after I donate.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Logical argument does not persuade people. We know this from conversations with Liberals in everyday life. They are motivated by rhetorical and emotional appeals.

That’s why this new campaign is so effective.  Somebody borrowed the anti-fascists slogan to use on posters.  The posters have an emotional impact that turns people against the slogan.  “Punch a Nazi” becomes synonymous with domestic abuse.  It makes clear that all people who employ violence are evil-doers.

 

Genius

Joe Doakes

Interesting – just as I opened Joe’s email, I was thinking “perhaps ridicule is the answer to “Anti”-Fa.

But Joe’s right.  It is an ingenious campaign.  Or will be provided that Big Left doesn’t excuse domestic violence “for all the right reasons’ too…

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is looking through the stacks at Midway Used Books.  G. Wellington BENBRIDGE-GELLER – better known to his social circle and fellow ‘Anti-Fascist Action Macalester” colleagues as “Wookie” – comes around the corner.  BENBRIDGE-GELLER, age 25, a graduate of Carlton College (BA Anthropology and Women’s Studies), is dressed in black from head to toe, including a black hoodie splotched with home-painted slogans, over a “Che Guevara” t-shirt – the only color in his mien.  He carries a gas mask and a bottle of bear spray in an NPR tote bag.  

BENBRIDGE-GELLER:  Hey, Merg!

BERG:  Uh, hey, “Wookie”.  What’s up?

BENBRIDGE-GELLER:  Fascist symbols are, themselves, a threat of violence to their targets, and thus justify violence in response.

BERG:  Meaning what?

BENBRIDGE-GELLER: It’s time to Punch a Nazi.

BERG:  Huh.  And you can tell Nazis by…

BENBRIDGE-GELLER:  Swastikas.  Brown shirts.  Make America Great Again caps.  GOP elephants.

BERG:  So, pretty much anyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi, so you feel you have leave to punch pretty much anyone.

BENBRIDGE-GELLER:  Yep.

BERG:  That means if anyone sees you, as you are an immediate threat to them, they can respond violently to you, then, as you are an immediate threat to them?

BENBRIDGE-GELLER:  Nope.  (Stops for a moment).  Hey – aren’t you a conservative talk show host?

(BENBRIDGE-GELLER winds up to kick BERG, but BERG reacts first, emptying a container of CS spray into his BENBRIDGE-GELLER’s face.  The younger guy falls to the floor, screaming, as BERG squirts the last remnants of the bottle at BENBRIDGE-GELLER’s head.  He tosses the empty bottle container, hitting the younger man in the face, and then grabs the reading stool and brings it down on BENBRIDGE-GELLER’s solar plexus before turning to walk out of the store.  A couple of patrons look at him, shocked)

BERG:  What?  You’re expecting a mildly sarcastic comic send-off to the bit?

(Bystanders go back to shopping as BERG pays for a couple copies of King and Country, and leaves store). 

And SCENE.

Back in the eighties, I interviewed a group called the “Backroom Anarchist Center”. They were a bunch of dissipate university students who had a clubhouse in South Minneapolis, and used to roam about demonstrating against stuff – provided it was conservative stuff. I booked several of their leaders on my old KSTP show, which ran from 2-4 AM on weekends. Their phone numbers were all – every last one – from the nicer parts of Edina, Minnehaha Parkway and Woodbury. These “anarchists” were inevitably the children of immense privilege; their parents were professors, non-profiteers, insurance salespeople – *not* hot tar roofers and truck drivers. I never kept track of any of ’em, but I suspect they’re doing just fine socially and financially today.

The President took a lot of flak after his first response to Charlottesville for criticizing all violence at the riot, “right” and left.   “Don’t lump Nazis together with “Anti”-Fa”, Big Left bellowed in unison.  “They’re good kids, and they mean well, and they’re attacking evil people”.

I didn’t vote for Trump – and I’m going to criticize his false equivalence in this case.

“Anti”-Fa is much worse than the Nazis, is a much greater danger to our society, and deserves far greater condemnation.

There are three reasons:

• “Anti”-Fa has a long history of violence against peaceful demonstrators
• “Fascists” are the fringe of the fringe (rhetoric aside)
• “Anti”-Fa actually has power.

The Road Goes On Forever, And The Party Never Ends:  If your entire awareness of the battle between “far-right” lunacy and left-wing violence started with Charlottesville – and for many, it clearly did – you might think that both sides are about the same.

Of course, there’s a long, ugly history of “Anti”-Fa attacks on “fascists”.

Unfortunately, in most of those cases the “Fasicsts”, weren’t, outside the “Everyone we don’t like is a “fascist”” sense of the term.   They were Trump supporters (no, not the same thing), Republicans, even left-leaning college professors who made the mistake of standing up for free speech.

The bottom of the barrel – so far – came in Boston over the weekend.  About fifty people – bipartisan free-speech advocates who had expressly disinvited all extremists – held a free speech rally at Boston Common.  They were by thousands of “counterprotesters”, led by a gang of blackshirted “Anti”-fa screaming “F**k Free Speech”.  Violence was had.

The media didn’t care, naturally.

It was similar to the March 4th Trump rally at the Minnesota state Capitol, where “Anti”-Fa blackshirts came to a peaceful, permitted rally with masks, mace and weapons at the ready;  they attacked the crowd of  middle-aged, workadaddy, hugamommy Trump supporters; they sucker-punched a seventeen year old girl, they hit an older woman in the head with a burning smoke bomb, they bear-sprayed a group of people resisting them in the face.

This, of course, put a lot of people in a mind to either avoid rallies, or to meet fire with fire – both of them goals of all extremists.

There’s been a sold year-long buildup to the idea of fighting back against the Blackshirts.

The Blues Brothers Said It Best:  This may be the only time I ever compliment Hollywood.  Ever.

In the wake of the 1979 Nazi march through Skokie – home of thousands of concentration camp survivors – Hollywood responded, unintentionally but brilliantly.    In the original Blues Brothers movie, the Nazis chasing Jake and Elwood Blues were lampooned to a fine sheen; portrayed as bumbling, deliusional, and just a tad closeted before plunging to ignominious doom.

If you remember the movie, you remember the scene.

They could never make it today.

“Nazis” and “White Supremacists” are, precisely, the hapless losers that Kevin Williamson depicted in NRO last week.  They have a fraction of the numbers they had when The Blues Brothers was made (or had a fraction; the lavish publicity the mainstream media has given them this past nine months certainly has to have added a few, even if you filter out the Southern Poverty Law Center’s partisan hysteria).

“But those symbols are themselves weapons, because of what they mean and the history they bring up”.    Symbols truly do have meanings. The First Amendment gives you the same power to exhibit your own symbols, and to show them (so far, anyway).

In 1978, the Nazi Party marked in Skokie, Illinois – a town where a sixth of the people had survived concentration camps.  After several court battles, the Nazis prevailed with the help, inevitably, of the ACLU.

On the day of the parade, 20 Nazis showed up – and were met by thousands of Jews, who shouted them down  (without a punch being thrown) and humilated them, rending them a punch line for the next forty years.  They didn’t erase the swastika’s symbolism – but they did take its power away from them.  Their symbols – the Star of David, the Stars and Stripes – represented the victors; victorious, prosperous people; the Swastikas, the losers.

My biggest concern is that we’re giving them that power again.  Indeed, I think giving them that power is the left’s goal.

Woody – But the biggest reason?   “Anti”-Fa is the children of the upper-middle-class snowflakes that I met at the “Backroom Anarchist Center” way back when – maybe literally.

When the police pulled the masks off the Blackshirts that attacked the March 4th State Capitol rally, one of them was Woody Kain, the son of Virginia senator Tim Kain – AKA the man who would have been Vice President of the United States had conventional wisdom held sway.

I’ve seen these “kids”, most notably around the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul in 2008.  Everything about them screamed the sort of entitlement that comes from being, if not “the elite”, at least someone who rides “the elite’s” coattails.

Which is what makes “Anti”-Fa much more dangerous than the “Alt-Right”:   “Nazis” and “White Supremacists” are not just the fringe, they are the fringe of a part of society that has precisely as much influence as the media and political elite decide to give them.   

On the other hand, “Anti”-Fa are the children of those same elites.  These are not the children of carpenters, struggling to get jobs after community college; as Dennis Prager says, you need an elite education to be this stupid.  These are children who went to Bard and Oberlin and Carlton and Macalester and will, one day, when the lifestyle gets old, will use their class privilege to move seamlessly into positions of power and influence.   They will be tomorrow’s college professors, organizers, non-profiteers, teachers, and politicians.

Having people chanting “we must protect the white race” in an echo chamber is bad.  Having them chanting “F*** Free Speech” in front of a class of impressionable freshmen ten years from now is incalculably worse.

President Trump was too kind.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Somebody threw an improvised explosive from a moving van onto the lawn at a mosque in Minneapolis at 5:00 a.m. last Saturday.  Blew out some windows, nobody injured.  Governor Dayton is all over this ‘act of terrorism’ which is part of a massive upsurge in violence against Muslims nation-wide, all caused by Trump, no doubt.

Except . . .

Most Minnesotans couldn’t identify a mosque if they were standing in front of one.  Most Minnesotans couldn’t identify an imam if they were standing next to one, nor would they know his daily schedule to target him. Minnesota has no history of violence against Muslims (Catholics, yes; Muslims, no).  IEDs are not a weapon commonly used in Minnesota crimes.  It doesn’t feel like a Minnesota crime.

You know who could identify a mosque, uses terror as a weapon and is familiar with IEDs from the Old Country?  Muslims.  You know who blows up buildings all over the world?  Muslims. You know which Minnesota minority has contributed the most new members to Islamic terror groups?  Muslims. You know which religion has sects utterly devoted to killing each other?  Shia and Sunni Muslims.  This feels like a Muslim crime.

 

If the bombing was a real act of terror, how does the Governor know this was Minnesotans persecuting Muslims?  How does he know it’s not ordinary Islamist sectarian violence?

And what if it wasn’t a real crime at all?  The bombing was carefully timed to avoid hurting people and to do only cosmetic damage. Nobody has claimed responsibility.  There are no suspects.  What if this is another in a long string of hate crime hoaxes? You know who has the most to gain from a hate crime hoax?  I’ll give you a hint: remember the ‘flying imams’ fake hate crime at the airport and who benefitted from that?  Muslims.

The Governor insists this is an act of terrorism committed by cowardly Minnesotans.  I’ve been skeptical since day one and now, we have more evidence it may have been a publicity stunt.  Muslims are complaining Trump hasn’t dropped everything to rush to Minnesota to condemn the bombing.  “He has to come here and at least express his feelings and say this is bad.”

No, that’s precisely what Trump does NOT need to do.  Amazingly, he’s sharp enough to know it.  The press secretary got it right.  It’s a local crime, if it’s a crime at all.  There are no national security implications. There is no federal government component that is being ignored.  This is not a matter for the President.

Listen up, guys. You are not the boss of him.  You don’t get to tell him where to go and what to say.  Acting like you’re so special that the President himself is at your beck and call . . . is the attitude that got him elected in the first place.  And Muslims setting off bombs in America is the reason his ban on travel from war-torn Muslim countries ban is entirely justified.

Joe Doakes

We don’t know much about the bombing – which was nearly two weeks ago – yet.

But Joe articulated a few points that I felt, but couldn’t quite put my finger on.