Compliance!

This got some headlines yesterday: a group of Somali Muslim families in Saint Louis Park pushed back against the school board, with the aid of a couple of conservative public interest law firms, and forced the district to allow their children to opt out of LGBTQ content in school.

I’ve added emphasis:

This change comes after two public interest law firms, True North Legal and First Liberty Institute, sent letters to the school district saying the district’s previous denials of opt-out requests violated the First Amendment and state law.

In 2023, six Muslim families requested that St. Louis Park public schools provide notice before LGBTQ-affirming books were discussed in class. These families, who emigrated from Somalia over the last two decades, also requested the ability to opt out their children from participating in the curriculum.

According to previous press statements from the two law firms, third- and fourth-grade children who were members of the six families were exposed to LBGTQ content in October 2023. These LGBTQ-centric readings were also allegedly accompanied with the teacher’s commentary on LGBTQ identity. This situation caused “significant confusion and distress” amongst the six families.

The school district was reportedly, uh, not cooperative. Contrary to some social media palaver, this affects parents of all faiths at SLPS.

The system, naturally, is not amused:

It’ll be interesting to watch the bureaucrats response.

The Conversation We Need

I’m going to commend you to this particular episode of Ben Shapiro, from a couple weeks ago.

He’s talking about the Republican Candidate debates – comparing the debates Republicans deserve with the one the nation needs.

The one we deserve? Well, the donnybrook between DeSantis and Newsome was a great one. In another time and place, it might have been a classic, like Reagan/Mondale.

But it was just another chapter in this nation’s formerly biennial and now permanent ritual of the tribes ceremonially throwing rhetorical (for now) bricks at each other, immune to any reason the other side may be throwing back.

The debate we need, on the other hand?


It’s a bit of a cartoon – whenever you suggest that maybe it’s time to discuss, even think about, how this nation approaches the subject of perhaps having a “National Divorce”, leftists immediately chant “That was settled in 1865!”.

The only response to that that matters is “Well, no – it was settled in 1776”.

We’ll come back to them.

From the center right, the response is probably more rational, and definitely more frustrating: “we have to preserve the union”.

Why?

If the union’s moral and political compass decays to the point where “the union” has completely trampled on the Constitution, the RIghts of Man and the whole notion of Government being a free association of equals, what is the point?

Put another way – what is more important: The nation’s founding principles, or its political union.

I’ll take founding principles, and ditch the parts of the country that disagree, every time.

There are those on all sides who shy away from the topic, saying any national breakup will inevitably look more like Bosnia or Kosovo or Belfast than some Trulbert-like organic readjustment.

Again – why? If one had asked a typical political thinker in Europe in 1770 what would happen if a people threw off the monarchy and established a constitutional Republic, what do you suppose they’d have predicted?

Chaos. At best.

And given the moral and intellectual midgets who set the standards for our culture, the idea of the “peaceful divorce” just might be harder than it needs to be.

But as Dennis Prager correctly notes, America was less divided in 1861 than it is today. I believe a renewed commitment to federalism is the only hope to maintain a nation.

And a renewed commitment to federalism would require a huge bounce-back resurgence in Federalists in politics. We’re out there – but we’re nowhere near power, even in the GOP.

So our culture is rolling the dice. And the best way to assure that any future, uh, “civic readjustment” is absolutely a bloody debacle is to shame the conversation into the shadows, were only the crazies and the extremists will own, and consider, and be ready, for the split when and if it finally happens.

The Gulag On The Hudson

New York State christened the “least free” in the United States:

The report, conducted by the Cato Institute, showed that New York ranked last place among the 50 states for 2022 policies that impacted economic, social, and personal freedoms. 

New York ranked 50th for economic freedom and scored at or near the bottom for debt and state and local taxation, government consumption, land use and labor policy.

“Heeeeeyyyyyy – the study is by the Cato Institute! They’re biased toward freedom!”

We live in a world where that can be seen as a pejorative.

The Enemy Within, Around And Above

This is this sort of thing that should send Americans to be barricades. This is ample reason to block freeways (in DC and Silicon Valley and Saint Paul’s Government Canyon anyway). This is a reason to break out tar and feathers and lots and lots of harsh tweets.

It’s a thread. Click through in Twitter.

Not that this is news – but here’s one of a wallet full of money quotes:

-EIP [Election Integrity Partnership – Ed.]“stakeholders” (including the federal gov’t) would submit misinformation reports

-EIP would “analyze” the report and find similar content across platforms

-EIP would submit the report to Big Tech, often with a recommendation on how to censor

If you’d told me 15 years ago that voting for candidates attitudes about censorship, lockdowns, mandates and enforcing top-down social cohesion would be as important as stances on spending, immigration, healthcare and foreign policy, I’d have shaken my head and wondered “what else are they going to tell me – CD8 will someday be Republican?”

LIfe Is Full Of Ironies, If You’re Not Smart

To. Governor Walz
From: Mitch Berg, obstreperous peasant
Re: SInce you put it that way…

Governor Klink. Er, Walz.

On Tuesday, you – or, let’s be honest, the chirpy little intern from Macalester who manages the flood of selfies and donut shots that is your Twitter feed – twote this:

You – either of you, I guess – are right. Freedom isn’t guaranteed.

For example, society might – just might – have a leader who:

  • Arbitrarily shuts down most social and business interaction
  • Sics the state’s law enforcement on dissenters
  • Tries to strong-arm people into complying with untested experimental procedures, on pain of losing their jobs, businesses and life’s savings.
  • Hides the evidence of your errors and, as time progressed, your error turning into downright perfidy
  • Lies to the people to panic the gullible into voting for them
  • Positions himself, with the aid of a compliant and docile media, in a position of complete opacity to the public .

So yeah. Gotta watch out for those tyrants.

That is all.

Thoughtcrime

Minnesota is getting its thoughtcrime registry.

First, some credit where it’s due. I actually found a relatively fair, well-balanced story on the subject.

Of course, I had to go to Grand Forks to do it.

The piece covers the registry’s background – including some of the fairly inspired quesistoning by Republicans Harry Niska and Walter Hudson:

The key moment that caught the most attention? An exchange during a floor debate when Rep. Harry Niska, R-Ramsey, asked House bill sponsor Rep. Samantha Vang, DFL-Brooklyn Center, if publishing an article on the theory that COVID-19 was a bioweapon that had originated in a Chinese laboratory could count as a bias incident under the new legislation.

Vang said it would be possible.

“With the rhetoric we have seen since the pandemic regarding accusing Asians of bringing in the coronavirus, that is bias-motivated,” the first-term representative said. “So that can be considered a bias incident.”

Now, the bad news.

Wags in some conservative circles floated the idea of flooding the agency with reports of progressive hate speech, of the type that run of the mill DFLers are constantly dribbling out.

No such luck. The lsw’s DFL sponsors saw the potential for the registry to be buried in “progressive” hate, and tightened it down. (Emphasis added).

In its final form as a law, language calls for the department to “analyze civil rights trends … including information compiled from community organizations that work directly with historically marginalized communities.”…

In other words, they did for it what they did for “Feeding Our Future” money: made sure only the DFL Non-Profit/Industrial Complex could participate.

But what about safeguards?

Why, after spending a decade and a half obliterating all rational grounds for the “high trust society” that democracy needs to survive, we’re supposed to just trust ’em!

What officials do know right now is community organizations such as Jewish Community Action, the Coalition of Asian American Leaders, and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, will provide reports of bias incidents to the state…Putz said it would have been more of a problem if the human rights department were to take direct reports of discrimination from individuals. With nonprofits and other groups with a track record of documenting discrimination being the source of information, that won’t be a concern, he said.

Nothing says “trustworthy” like a (partial) list of non-profits that are also DFL farm clubs.

Senator Zaynab Mohammed – a “devout Muslim” who voted for chemical neutering and abortion after birth – should put your mind at rest (although hopefully not “at rest” enough to vote DFL) (emphasis added again):

Asked by Forum News Service whether spreading a lab theory on COVID would count as a bias incident, Sen. Mohamed said she trusted the judgment of Human Rights Department officials.

“Could that happen? Sure, maybe,” she said, but added: “They know exactly what they’re doing. They understand the goal of what this legislation is supposed to do.”

That whole idea of breaking CD1, 6, 7 and 8 away into a separate state is sounding better every day.

A Hell “We” Can Make Happen

I came across this tweet last week.

At first blush, I thought it was parody, and not especially good.

I moved from there to Assumption B – a chuckleheaded sophomore political science major from Austin, or Seattle, or maybe the University of Saint Thomas. It can be hard to tell parody from reality with them, sometimes.

That’s what I thought. Or, let’s be honest, that’s what I hoped. Parody, or young lefty dolt.

But no. Mr. Lee is a California state assemblyman, detailing the world he and most of Big Left hold out as their idea.

No mention of that social credit score you gotta pass to get into your “public bank account”. No mention of who’s going to be teaching at those “awesome public schools” or building, maintaining and operating that “green transit”, or even why either would exist if people get Universal Basic Income. No mention of how in a world without the generation of value and wealth, the “UBI” will pretty much inevitably devolve into ration tickets, to buy…what? Who’s doing the producing, the farming? Robotic cricket mills creating insect paste is about the only logical option.

Primary Education

The culture war is fought and lost or won in a million little nooks and crannies in our society.

The collective perception of historical ephemera that tumble-dries together to form “the public consciousness” is one of those collections of crannies.

And somewhere in that perception floats the collective dog’s breakfast of ideas and ideals that form the cultural idea of what is and was good, and what isn’t and wasn’t.

You ask most Americans “who was the worst president in American history”, you will get many answers. Conservatives and progressives may differ – Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush likely trend toward the top for both, respectively. There are some consensus picks; Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan and a few others.

But among the eternal parade of cultural skirmishes that could stand some winning, the left’s rewriting of history re Woodrow Wilson needs to be turned around and pointed back toward history’s lower colon, where it belongs.

A national consensus on hating Wilson is long overdue. It is the patriotic duty of every decent American. While conservatives have particular reasons to detest Wilson, and all his works, and all his empty promises, there is more than enough in his record for moderates, liberals, progressives, libertarians, and socialists to join us in this great and unifying cause.

The roll call of the worst presidents in American history includes some consensus top choices. James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce both contributed mightily to the nation’s slide into the Civil War, and Andrew Johnson did enduring harm to Reconstruction in the war’s aftermath. But all three of those men were repudiated by the end of their single term in office. They left no heirs who would acknowledge their influence, no fleet of academic hagiographers who could see themselves reflected in those presidencies.

Wilson, by contrast, served two full and consequential terms. He was the only Democrat re-elected to the job during the century between 1832 and 1936. He was lionized by liberals and progressives in academia and the media for most of the century after he left office in 1921. In my youth, and perhaps yours, Wilson was presented in history books as a tragic hero whom the unthinking American people didn’t deserve. He was often placed highly on academics’ rankings of the presidents. Princeton University named its school of international relations for him. Even in rescinding that honor in June 2020, the university’s press release declared: “Though scholars disagree about how to assess Wilson’s tenure as president of the United States, many rank him among the nation’s greatest leaders and credit him with visionary ideas that shaped the world for the better.”

Nah. Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash. He was a bad man who made the country and the world worse. His name should be an obscenity, his image an effigy. Hating him is a wholesome obligation of citizenship.

Let us count the ways:

  • He institutionalized racism, segregation and eugenics just as America was slowly evolving out of each.
  • He was the father of the modern administrative state – he brought academic contempt for The People to that bureaucracy, where it’s metastasized for a century now.
  • With the income tax administered by that administrative state, he started the roll down the slippery slope from liberty to corporatist servitude.
  • He started the notion of “the living Constiitution”.
  • His “contirbutions” to foreigtj policy did more than most to facilitate the rise of Naziism, Fascism and Communism; his wartime regime was a catastrophe for civil liberties.
  • He was the father of the “imperial presidency” – taking a slim win (41% of the vote, after Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote) and acting like it was a mandate.
  • And he may have botched the Feds response to the Spanish Flu even worse than Biden and Trump’s Covid campaigns.

Read the whole thing if you can.

Whatever other missions I have in life,extinguishing any lingering ignorance about the loathsomeness of Woodrow Wilson is going on the list.

Public Service Announcement

It’s been my pleasure and privilege to participate in the “Speaking Proudly” speech tournament since 2019.

The tournament is for high school girls – grades 9-12, in public. private, charter or home school – to speak about democracy in America.

If you know a high school age girl who’s interested, applications are due by the end of the month:

This is a genuinely great event. The ability to speak convincingly in public is one of the great markers for success in life. Please pass it along.

Manufactured Crisis

SCENE: MItch BERG is waiting for some delicious brisket at his favorite BBQ joint. As he orders, he notes Avery LIBRELLE walking in the door. He ponders bolting out the kitchen, but it’s too late.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Uh, hey…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. Ron DeSantis is imposing a fascist censorship regime in Florida! He wants to imprison any bloggers that criticize him!

BERG: It’s a bill with one sponsor – its author, who is most likely its only supporter in the legislature. It won’t get a hearing, much less pass either chamber, much much much less get signed into law. If you hear about it after this coming week, it’ll be from people on the left who are desperately trying to keep it alive to promote the “DeSantis is literally Hitler and even worse than Trump!” canard.

I mean, there’s a grain of sense to it – there are plenty of “bloggers” and other social media tweeps who don’t reveal who’s paying them to write.

LIBRELLE: Blah blah, blah. Hey – I wanna order!

GIRL BEHIND COUNTER: Certainly, Ma’a…er, S… (Looks at BERG, in a cold sweat)

BERG: No idea.

LIBRELLE: Do you serve cricket meal loaf”

GIRL BEHIND COUNTER: Uh, no.

LIBRELLE: What the…

BERG: (to Girl behind counter) I’ll take my order to go, thanks. .

And SCENE

A Boot On Your Neck. Forever.

Democrats in Minnesota and nationwide are switching into enforcement mode.

The legal persecution of Jack Phillips continues…

Phillips’s public expression of his faith had placed a target on his back, and the narrow Supreme Court ruling in his favor had the two-pronged effect of further inflaming activists while simultaneously depriving the baker of decisive, precedent-setting protections against their agitations. In 2017, “the very day the Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’s case, Autumn Scardina, a transgender activist in Denver, called Masterpiece Cakeshop and requested a custom cake with a blue exterior and a pink interior to symbolize a gender transition,” David Harsanyi wrote. Scardina was allegedly a member of the Church of Satan, and court documents alleged the activist had also sought Phillips’s services for charming depictions such as a cake celebrating Satan’s birthday, which would feature “a large figure of Satan, licking a 9″ black Dildo,” with the requirement that the dildo must necessarily be “an actual working model that can be turned on before we unveil the cake.”

Phillips, of course, politely declined Scardina’s requests. Scardina, of course, proceeded to file a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The commission, of course, ruled against Phillips. In August 2018, two months after his initial Masterpiece Cakeshop victory, Phillips was back in court.

Last week, a panel for the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld an earlier court decision requiring Phillips to bake Scardina’s transgender cake. No surprise there — the same court had also upheld the state’s original injunction demanding that Phillips bake the same-sex wedding cake. What should be abundantly clear at this point is that “civil rights,” in this context, are more about power — wielded against disfavored groups, and in favor of privileged ones — than any neutral conception of legal protection. Even as it ruled against Phillips, the Commission upheld the right of bakers to refuse to make a Bible-shaped cake inscribed with the message: “Homosexuality is a detestable sin. Leviticus 18:2.” This double standard is a feature, not a bug, of how these bureaucracies function. As NR’s editors noted today, the practical effect of the Left’s weaponization of anti-discrimination laws “is to demand that the faithful kneel before favored identity groups.”

…and is so hamfistedly symbolic that a sophomore-year English prof would send it back for rewrite if it were fiction.

The process is the punishment.

Of course, the MNDFL does its darnedest to make it difficult, even impossible, to run as a Republican. I’ve heard more than one GOP legislator who’d been pondering running for higher office without having spent their teens and twenties as cloistered monks say they were going to demur on running , because the DFL’s opposition research crowd would make not only their lives, but their family’s, a living hell.

WIth that in mind?

Keith Ellison is going to show Scott Jenson that running against the DFL has consequences. Via David Strom:

…the Attorney General of the State of Minnesota has taken it upon himself to step up the harassment of Dr. Jensen based upon already adjudicated charges that should never have been brought in the first place. It is disgraceful and can be explained by nothing other than politics.

It is a political hit job–punishment not for what he has done, or even said, but for who he is. A well-respected Republican who dared to challenge Tim Walz in the last election. They are sending a message that taking on the Democrat establishment will ruin your life.

I said above that the process is the punishment. At some point, the determination that he may continue to conduct medicine will not exonerate him, nor return the time, effort, and money that he has to spend to defend himself. They have turned him into a doctor who has faced 5 investigations. How many potential patients will avoid him for that alone? Countless.

No matter how bogus the charges are, the punishment has taken place simply by making the charges and forcing him to defend himself.

Politics ain’t beanbag, and it is usual for people in the midst of campaigns to hurl charges at each other. But this goes way beyond that. They are mobilizing all the power of the state to destroy Jensen.

This is what tyranny looks like in America.

When all your oppoonent cares about is gaining and consolidating power, “democracy” is just a decorative verbal sprig of parsley on top of whatever horrors our new Leninists are hoiking up.

Schiffed

One of the things about having one’s party in the minority is that, free from the possibility of having to try to craft compromises to pass legislation, they can submit legislation that reflects their core principles to a T.

When the GOP is in the minority – as it is in the MN House and Senate? Then you see bills that make you wonder “where was that kind of thinking when the Republicans controlled the gavel?” Of course, it’s easy to stand on pure principle as the minority – it’s all for the campaign lit in the next election.

Parties in the minority submit legislation that reflects their inner id.

WIth the GOP in the minority, you get solid conservative, even daringly libertarian proposals.

WIth Democrats in the minority? You get attacks on core liberties.

Adam Schiff and his fellow Dems dream of gutting the First Amendment. He and his cronies are proposing to reverse Citizens United – which ended speech rationing for non-union corporations – and re-regulate political spending, which is political speech.

Of course, they’re in the minority, for now:

It’s just a political stunt, of course, as Schiff doesn’t have the votes. But it does reflect the authoritarian outlook of the contemporary left on free expression. From the day the decision came down, 13 years ago this week, Citizens Unitedwas a rallying cry for those threatened by unregulated discourse. President Barack Obama infamously, and inaccurately, rebuked the justices during his State of the Union for upholding the First Amendment. Since then, Democrats have regularly blamed the decision for the alleged corrosion of “democracy.”

“Democracy”, in Democrat usage, is losing meaning almost as fast as “White Supremacy”.

Go Time

Governor Klink released his gun control proposals yesterday.

Did he propose to push metro prosecutors to use the sentence enhancement for using guns to commit crime?

Perish the thought, simple peasant.

No, the usual California-stye gruel: magazine capacity limits, age limits, and most importantly gun registration [1].

It’s time to turn out.

The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus is holding its annual “Lobby Day” on Thursday morning. Come on down to the Capitol. Members of the Caucus will meet you, show you how to find your Rep and Senator in the various office buildings, and help you represent gun owners, face to face, to our legislature.

The legislature takes these days seriously since they know that unlike the astroturf clutches of biddies with ELCA Hair that ProtectMN and Moms Want Action sends waddling around the place, we represent a hell of a lot of actual voters that consider the 2nd Amendment a litmus test. And there are a lot of us out there. Enough to flip a chamber or two in 2024? Yep.

Hope to see you there on Thursday morning!

[1] They’re called “Universal Background Checks” – but the only way to make them “universal” is to keep track of which guns have been background-checked. This creates a set of linked data points – or, as they’re called in the information management business, a “database” . Ringing a bell, yet?

Nullification

Most Illinois counties say they will refuse to enforce Governor Pritzker’s unconstitutional “assault weapon” ban:

Edwards County Sheriff Darby Boewe wrote in a statement that part of his duty is to protect the right to keep and bear arms.

“The right to keep and bear arms for defense of life, liberty, and property is regarded as an inalienable right by the people,” Boewe wrote. “Therefore, as the custodian of the jail and chief law enforcement officer for Edwards County, that neither myself or my office will be checking to ensure that lawful gun owners register their weapons with the State, nor will we be arresting or housing individuals that have been charged solely with noncompliance of this act.”

The statement was drafted by Illinois Sheriffs’ Association Executive Director Jim Kaitschuk, according to ABC News, and sent out to sheriff’s departments to use or make edits if desired.

DuPage, Sangamon, and Iroquois counties are among the 74 departments that have released similarly modified statements. Iroquois County Sheriff Clinton Perzee said he would not use his jails to detain people exercising their civil rights, according to the Lake and McHenry County Scanner.

Just your periodic reminder that, outside America’s moldy blue core cities, gun control is largely dead.

Largely .

Like the villain in “Scream”, it will keep bouncing back until we finally cut the head off.

The Real Authoritarians Debate, Part 1: Defining The Terms

Last week, this blog received something of a challenge: A debate on “who the fascists actually are in modern American society”. \

But one of the key tenets of a meaningful debate is to make sure you agree on your terms.

What is…

…well, let’s start with the state that each side in American politics accuses one another of – “Fascism”, “Communism”, “Naziism”, “Socialism” – all of which have much in common, all of which are subtly different in some contexts and utterly indistinct in others.

The left’s self-indulgent rhetoric has denuded terms like “Fascist”, “Nazi”, “Racist” and “White Supremacy” of much of their meanings, and usefulness as debate yardsticks. The right did the same with “Socialist” (although the left has played its part in sapping that term of its zing as well).

So I’m going to try to settle on one of two terms to use as yardsticks; “Authoritarian” and “Totalitarian”. They are more pedestrian and academic than the list above – no mortal enemy of our nation has rallied behind either of them, so (let’s be charitable) neither side has seen fit to devalue them yet.

And yet, America – or parts of America – seems to be turning into an authoritarian society.

To wit:

  • Authoritarian: one who seeks to have their government control society
  • Totalitarian: One who seems to have one’s rule become indistinct from society

So – how do we define either of ’em?

John Miltimore has a decent start in this blog post; he defines “totalitarianism” with fourteen criteria. It works as a matter of . I borrow and adapt them below:

Once we have the definitions nailed down, we’ll debate each point. Then, victors, losers and maybe even draws will be declared.

So I started with Miltimore’s list, added and rewrote a few things, and reorganized them:

Co-option of Institutions

Society’s formal institution are convinced to support the goals of the regime, or gotten out of the way, willingly or not.

  • Media is controlled, directly or indirectly, by the state
  • State police (and the laws and processes that guide its actions) protect the regime, not the people
  • Power is concentrated in inner ring of elite institutions and people

Co-option of Society

An authoritarian society co-ops the institutions, not only of government, but of society itself. Government deploys carrots and sticks to create a society that complies – willingly or not. .

  • Dissent is actively demonized (e.g., equated to violence)
  • Mass conformity of beliefs and behaviors is demanded
  • The ruling caste leverages divisions in society to multiply their power

Eroding Rule of Law, Uplifting Rule of Men

Free peoples laws observe a process over a goal. Authoritarians laws have goals – not always stated clearly in the text.

  • The legal system is co-opted by the state
  • State exerts power to quash dissent
  • Rights—financial, legal, and civil—are contingent on compliance

Perverting Society’s Norms

While the institutions squash dissent, the co-option of society gradually makes dissent not only too costly, but unthinkable.

  • Private and public levers of power are used to enforce adherence to state dogmas

Creating Official Boogeymen And Enemies

A state of war hysteria keeps peoples minds from what they’ve lost to the regime – it even makes them happy to sacrifice wealth, freedom and autonomy. Authoritarians need enemies.

  • Entire classes singled out for persecution
  • Harsh legal enforcement against unfavored classes
  • Extra-legal actions are condoned against internal regime opponents
  • Semi-organized violence is permitted (in some cases

So what needs to be added or removed?

Two Americas

As the late Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards said, there are two Americas.

Both of them might look at this video, of Chinese cops searching peoples cell phones for signs of anti-regime badthink.

One America thinks “get a warrant, bitch”.

The other America gets a tingle down its leg and thinks “imagine what we could do for vaccine, mask and distancing compliance!”

That second America is the one that’s nattering at the first America about “democracy”.

Expectations

I’ve always detested “Generational” politics. Among all the things that divide us as a nation, artificial, externally-defined demographic trends have to be the dumbest of all.

Still, a huge chunk of the population perceives them – and perception is reality.

David Hogg – like many “prog” human message bots before and many more to come – repeats a set of chanting points that years of indoctrination have inflicted on a disproportionate share of Generation Zs:

Among all the ideas that are sapping the vitality of American civilization, there may be few more corrosive than the devaluation of the term “right”. To much of GenZ, the term is interchangeable with “virtues” at best, “stuff we want” at worst.

The notion that inalienable rights come with ineluctible responsibilities eludes many of all generations – but Millennials and Zeepers appear to be the most vocal in imposing their misapprehension on the world.

So if you’re a Zeep and reading this:

  • There is no more “right not to be shot” (or to “Go to school and survive”) than there is a “right not to have a car crash” . There is a right to live – with a concomitant responsibility and moral imperative to see to your safety, and the safety of those you’re responsible for (a responsibility that law enforcement at Parkland fell dismally short at).
  • You desire peace and tranquility – but it’s not an inalienable right. It can, indeed, be taken away arbitrarily and horrifically. One has a responsibility as an adult to maintain both of them – neither is guaranteed in anyway in the real world.

Hope that helps.

Property Rights

Democrats, learning Twitter banned discussion on politically fraught topics at FBI request: “Hey, it’s a private company. They can do what they want!”

Democrats, being asked to pay $8 a month for their precious blue checks: “Musk is STIFLING FREE SPEECH ZOMG!!! REEEEEEEEE!!!”

Flipped

Tulsi Gabbard is sick and tired of the Democrat party, and she’s not going to take it anymore:

Click on the tweet to read the entire thread over on the hellscape Musk might buyoughts

A few thoughts:

The Key Log: As Berg’s Seventh Law foretells, one of the reasons that Democrats like to harp on the “extremism” of the GOP is to deflect away from their own. One can hope the popular Senator from the very blue state might be the crack in the dam that brings out this century’s “Reagan Republicans”.

Speaking of Reagan: There’s at least some conventional wisdom that Gabbard has made this move to put her name in the VP stakes for 2024.

“She’s a LIBERAL”, some of my conservative friends say.

Let’s back up a moment.

One of Ronald Reagan’s great bits of genius was his ability to reach across the aisle to get people to pull together on the issues that mattered to his agenda. His agenda, by the way, was two items: right the economic ship, and destroy communism. He used his bully pulpit to push others to make headway on other issues – abortion, 2nd Amendment, the border – but he kept his own political powder dry to get the deals he needed made with Dems like Tip O’Neil on the 1982 Tax Cuts, and with the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland on assisting the Eastern European labor movement against the USSR.

So – could a future Republican president focused on our society’s current enemies – the deep state, stagflation and China – benefit from reaching across the aisle to a center-left “libertarian” Democrat who shares those concerns (in as many words, in her statement above)?

It’s worth a look.

Messaging

There is an ad running at my station, from some major police organization, urging people to not escalate issues with the police during routine contacts.

“It’s easier to de-escalate if you don’t escalate” , the add urges.Which is good advice, provided you trust both sides of the episode to be above board and trustworthy.

The ad sticks in my craw, knowing the advice is only as trustworthy as the system it speaks about.

Which, when you remember that police are an arm of government, gets to be a little less sustainable.

Which is why I’m hoping some police department, somewhere, is having a word with this particular wannabe stormtrooper.

Police departments have spent the last couple of years trying to rebuild their public image, after a decade of episodes of police overreach, arrogance and brutality. 

It’s people like this that make it really hard to “back to the blue“ without a big, bold asterisk afterwards.

UPDATE: The officer, Breanna Straus, apparently was suspended.

It wasn’t enough.

When I Fight Authority, Authority Always Wins

SCENE: Mitch BERG has just ordered at a food truck, and is waiting for his order to come up. Avery LIBRELLE steps around the corner. BERG visibly ponders abandoning his food and slipping away – but LIBRELLE sees him first.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, godododoooood golly, Avery, it’s great to see…

LIBRELLE: Shut up. The Supreme Court just took us down the road to authoritarianism.

BERG: Let me guess. The Dobbs case…

LIBRELLE: …was a blow for tyranny.

BERG: Quick question for you, Avery. Six unelected justices, fifty years ago, making up law out of whole cloth…

LIBRELLE: Democracy!

BERG: Thousands of legislators, and 435 Congresspeople, directly representing millions of voters?

LIBRELLE: (Hisses) Tyranny!

BERG: You do realize these series of satirical sketches barely qualifies as parody, anymore, right?

(And SCENE)

Oh, By The Way

First things first: my thoughts and prayers to Armani Hyde, a 14 year old Saint Paul boy shot in the head last week. As this is written he is in critical but stable condition.

Now, The Nine ran this story over this past weekend. The whole story is worth a watch…

…but I particularly draw your attention to 1:45 – Mr. Nasiy Narir X of the Lion of Judah Armed Forces.

The LOJAF is noted as an offshoot of the Black Hebrew movement; it’s nothing if not militant; their firearms are a casual part of their presentation; check out their videos. A casual look at at least the material on the Facebook page shows they are especially interested in stopping the black community from killing itself. But they also have a radical streak that they feel plenty emboldened to flaunt.

That’s all well and good – I care no more about law-abiding black citizens exercising their right to keep and bear arms, or dress up as an army, than I do anyone else’s.

But I have three questions:

  1. If a group of white guys were to dress up in army uniforms and walk around with guns, Twin Cities progressives would be projectile-crapping; the media would treat it as a sign of the impending collapse.
  2. Speaking of which – all of the above, times twenty, for “Moms Want Action” and “Protect” MN. What gives, ladies? If an “Oath Keeper” group were to parade in front of a courthouse and promise “Revenge” for Derek Chauvin while open-carrying, would you be this sanguine?
  3. I was reliably informed that if black guys were to be seen walking around open-carrying, the cops would exterminate them on sight. This doesn’t seem to have happened. Note to my culitural betters: please advise. TYVM.

Me? Every law abiding citizen who follows the rules has the same rights as every one else – Second, First and all the other Amendments.

Fearless prediction: the DFL will come out with legislation to go after “paramilitary groups”. Who are all “white supremacist”, natch.

Hysteria

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

I’m seeing hysteria on the Left. “Roe was overturned. Do you know what this means? It means gay marriage, contraception, inter-racial marriage, affirmative action – all of them are at risk!” Thus far, Conservatives have been trolling Liberals using the same line Liberals always use on us: “Oh, no, we aren’t going after those, this decision was strictly limited to one issue.” Time to take the gloves off.

The Supreme Court’s legal basis for Roe v. Wade was the notion that somewhere in the emanations of the penumbra of rights protected by the Constitution is a right to privacy. The Supreme Court abandoned privacy as the legal basis for abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, substituting the notion that abortion is a liberty protected by the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, the “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The Supreme Court went further in the gay marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges, which caused Justice Scalia to write: “If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: ‘The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,’ I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

Once the Supreme Court decided it could invent new rights based on vague notions of privacy, the meaning of the universe, and personal expression of identity rather than historical analysis or constitutional precedent, state laws which had stood for 200 years were tossed out. But now that the Supreme Court has regained its senses, Liberals are correct that all the fake ‘rights’ which were grounded on fanciful bases are at risk. As they should be. The Supreme Court is not a place to impose through litigation the policies which you could not have achieved through legislation. If gay marriage, contraception, inter-racial marriage, affirmative action, and partial-birth abortion are rights which the nation wants protected by the Constitution instead of being protected by state legislatures, there’s a perfectly good amendment process which has been used more than two dozen times already. Go to it. Knock yourselves out.

Yes, we’re coming for your made-up ‘rights.’ We’re coming after all the abominations imposed on us over the last 50 years, taking back the power usurped by the Supreme Court and returning it to the people in the states, where it belongs. Power to the people! Why should we apologize for that?

Joe Doakes

Joe has anticipated one of my “Avery Librelle” plays in one act.

Resistance Is Futile

I’ve been in some form of broadcast and/or news media for 33 of the past 43 years.

I’ve had years of experience and training in every aspect of how the media works; from how to turn on a transmitter (and the FCC license to prove it) and edit video and how to talk so people can understand you, to the standards and practices a professional journalist has to follow to do news.

I’ve paid dues you can’t imagine.

More importantly, I’ve seen how the big media works. Do you have any idea the machine a TV station brings to covering stories and producing content? The sheer number of people in network, or even a major newspaper, can bring to reporting and covering a story? The talent, the training, the experience, the equipment, the money…

If you think you’re going up against Big Media with your First Amendment rights and your Twitter feed, your Tumblr account, your little podcast?

You’re simply delusional. Watch a crew from Channel 4 or MPR News or C-Span in action; you and your cell-phone cam will slink away in shame.

The First Amendment is for the professionals. Like me.


That sounds really stupid, doesn’t it?

So when a cop or “former federal agent” or veteran does the same thing in re civil rights – the Second or Fourth Amendments – does it sound any less myopic?