This blog hasn’t shown a lot of love for Ilhan Omar.

There are a lot of good reasons for that.

But as Greenwald points out, there’s more than one dimension to keep in mind:

The first point in particular – I was unaware of it, but am happy to see she stood on a principle most of us can agree on.

It almost physically hurts to say it, but ya gotta give her some credit.

The honeymoon won’t last, but let’s give her that.

Minneapolis extremists and the DFL – pardon the redundancy – are going to start portraying themselves as the victims of this past couple of years:

Note to Minneapolis progressives: whatever the Minneapolis Police Department’s problems, your “progressive” council members were not the ones being “victimized”.

Tens of thousands of blue-checks who were supposed to have moved to Canada in 2017, and who threatened to leave Twitter if Elon Musk managed to buy the platform, are apperently still there.

As of last night, Mr. Blow has not, er, blown this pop stand.

Weird.

As noted in countless other venues, the cognitive dissonance among the blue-checks nearly violates the laws of physics:

Infinitely more dangerous than peeish blue checks? A bureaucracy run amok.

The EU wants Big Tech to do its censoring for it.

Out: Russian Bots

In: EUBots.

What would happen if someone in a position of authority blatantly defied the law? Would a piece of paper immediately appear and envelop them in parchment shackles?

Sulla is remembered as the first Roman dictator to take power by force. He first displayed his military prowess while serving under Marius, and a sharp rivalry developed between the two. The Senate was becoming wary of Marius’ own ambitions and when war broke out against King Mithridates, Sulla was given command of the army sent to deal with him.

In Rome, Marius maneuvered to have command given back to him, but Sulla had the messengers sent to give him the news killed and Sulla marched back to Rome. Sulla was the first to take an army past Rome’s sacred pomerium and enter the city. Sulla regained his power, Marius fled to Africa, and Sulla marched east again.

Allies of Marius (who died in 86 BC) continued to work against Sulla, and Sulla once again marched on Rome, this time decisively defeating his opponents at the Battle of the Colline Gate in 82 BC. The Senate appointed Sulla to the office of dictator, the first in 120 years, but this time with no expiration date. Sulla began a purge of people opposed to him and his friends, and Sulla used his dictatorial powers to undertake many unilateral reforms.

Our own constitution is a marvel of checks and balances designed to keep power from concentrating in a few hands. Power is pushed down towards the people and not the other way around. And yet, it is just a piece of paper. It has no inherent power. It is only our own will to abide by constitutional law and our will to enforce it against those who won’t that give the US Constitution Power.

Berg’s Seventh Law is absolute, and the Left routinely clutches its pearls and sees Republican Sullas on every street corner. Be you Trump or Dubya, you’re a dictator.

Let’s not rehash Obama’s unconstitutional use of the IRS against its political enemies, or its unconstitutional DACA, or Biden’s unconstitutional extension of the eviction moratorium.

My point in all this is a US President as dictator is not the only fear, and indeed is not necessary to erode the protections we enjoy under the US Constitution.

What if instead of one Sulla at the top, there are a thousand Sullas across the land? On school boards, in state assemblies, in bureaucracies, in entertainment executive offices, in corporate board rooms, in banks. What if people with power to affect how we live just decide “I’m going to do what I want. I’m going to take what I want. I dare you to do something about it.”

Vigilance cannot sleep. Wherever a Sulla is found, they must be met with force. I don’t mean physical force. I mean determined political resistance. If Sulla is on the school board, then we are there making ourselves heard. If Sulla is in the Speaker’s chair of a state House, then we fill the seats in front of them with our candidates.

The pieces of paper we hold dear may inspire us, and even empower us, but the foundations of freedom must rest on something stronger than paper. I don’t fear those who would do what they want whether legal or not, I fear those would let them.

Most readers of this feature knew the truth in 2020 — Hunter Biden, the uber-prodigal son of the now Leader of the Free World, abandoned a laptop computer at a repair shop in Delaware. The laptop was filled to the brim with embarrassing and yes, incriminating evidence of financial malfeasance and videotaped debauchery. It was real and yes, it was spectacular. And the New York Post was on the case.

But you weren’t allowed to know any of it, and if you tried to tell anyone what you weren’t allowed to know, you were in for a banning:

Twitter went so far as to lock users out of their accounts if they shared this piece of journalism that was clearly in the public interest. It locked the Twitter accounts of the actual White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, and the New York Post itself. Here we had the spokesperson for the democratically elected president of the United States and the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in America being cast out of social media for the crime of sharing a story that was true. This was surely the most egregious, arrogant interference in democratic politics and press freedom carried out by corporate elites in recent times.

Recent times? I think the term we’re looking for here is ever. And as Brendan O’Neill discusses in the piece linked above, the implications are chilling:

This was a truly extraordinary moment in the political life of the United States of America. A free-thinking daily newspaper published a fascinating report on the emails and behaviour of the then vice-president’s son and it found itself shamed, blocked and defamed for doing so. Californian oligarchs, former members of the American deep state and virtually the entire opinion-forming set of the East Coast clubbed together to denounce the Post, ban it from Twitter, and rubbish its reporting as the handiwork of evil Ruskies. Yet some of them now admit the story was actually true, a fact that has been clear since at least December 2020, when federal authorities started investigating Hunter. What took place following the Post’s breaking of the laptop story was a terrifying assault on media freedom, the right to dissent and truth itself.

We are free, theoretically, to express our views. From the founding of the republic, we have been able to drag a soapbox to the public square and hold forth. Twitter isn’t the only public square available; in form and in fact, it’s an upholstered cesspool. But it is the realm where our betters and minders, coextensive as they are, disgorge the received wisdom of our age. And it’s where the game is played. And the game is rigged. Back to O’Neill:

But it was the elites’ brutal stomping on this story that should worry us more. It confirmed that the new woke elites will do whatever it takes to crush inconvenient facts, to bury stories and ideas and beliefs that pose a threat to their power or their interests. And it confirmed that Big Tech billionaires will happily engage in explicit political censorship to protect their allies and sponsors from scrutiny. If an established newspaper like the New York Post can be forcefully locked out of the 21st-century public square, just imagine what could be done to you or me if we ever happened upon some facts the elites would prefer to keep hidden.

There’s a chilling line in the 1939 French film La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game). The character Octave (played by Jean Renoir, the film’s director) says:

You see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.

Those who control the game and the general discourse in the country have their reasons as well. The reason is power, nothing more and nothing less. If we are to play the game, we’d better understand that.

To: Senator Warren Limmer, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the entire Senate GOP Caucus

From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant and, hate to say it, guy who’s starting to feel like a bit of a chump

Re: Action

Senators,

Let me direct your attention back to 2002. The GOP had played safe on “shall issue” carry permit reform for years. But in 2002, just in time for those crucial midterms, the GOP doubled down.

The time was right. Every DFLer in greater Minnesota who opposed the bill in the 2002 legislature, got retired from office that fall.

OK. Back to the present. it’s 20 years later, gun rights are in the ascendant. Why are you acting like it’s 1996?

We need to talk.

I supported you. When your people called, I gave you airtime. I voted for you.

Enough of us did to keep you in the majority – last year, against incredible odds, when most of the smart money said we would be falling into the minority again.

A key part of that fairly miraculous performance was the fact that Minnesota’s hundreds of thousands of gun owners turned out for you, come hell or high water.

So here you are, now, sitting on a thin majority, heading into a midterm where all the signs show the people are chomping at the bit to get out and support red meat conservative issues.

So, Senator Limmer, why in the flaming hootie-hoo are you sandbagging us on stand your ground and constitutional carry?

Despite complete GOP control in the Minnesota Senate and years of promises to Minnesota’s law-abiding gun owners, the Senate GOP is not moving on important gun rights legislation.

Call Senator Warren Limmer, Chair of Senate Judiciary, TODAY and demand hearings on Constitutional Carry and Stand Your Ground.

Then visit our Action Center at http://gunowners.mn/action and send an email to your State Rep & Senator demanding action on this important gun rights legislation.

They’ve made campaign promises of support for these bills for years – let’s hold their feet to the fire to take action!

If I may speak frankly – and it’s my blog, so I certainly may – you have played it too safe, and squandered opportunities to move the needle, for far too long.

Please see to this ASAP.

That is all.

A friend of the blog emails regarding the civil liberties situation in Canada.

Remember that?

Anyhoo:

Did people get their bank accounts unlocked?

Do they still have to get vaxxed?

guess we forgot about Canada

To wax conspiratorially for a moment? I don’t think anyone was “forgotten”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This author suggests Ukraine should have adopted the Finland model: every citizen a citizen-soldier. Makes sense to me, and also aligns with the “well-regulated militia” concept of the Second Amendment.

Point of order: the Finnish (And the very similar Swiss and Israeli) models presume that service in the military is part of a citizens duty to the stage, like paying taxes and serving on juries.

For millions of Americans, you wouldn’t even need to issue weapons. We have them already. Just give us a couple of weeks’ training in small unit movement, ambush basics, sniping, asymmetrical warfare, guerilla tactics. Conquest by invasion would be impossible. The Wolverines would prevent it.

Of course, giving people military training assumes the government trusts its own citizens and vice versa. Can we say that with confidence in America today?

Joe Doakes

We can, of course, assume those such thing; in fact, the Government/Media-Industrial complex has spent the last 40 years demonizing the concept of “the militia“ to a fine sheen – One might assume, to protect itself from any organized opposition. At the moment, the social cost of supporting, much less belonging to, a “militia“, are just too high, whatever the finer points of constitutional ideals, for the average schmuck.

Idaho bill would require prosectors to reimburse people with successful self-defense claims, whom they opt to prosecute anyway:

If enacted, the legislation would require the county or prosecuting state agency where the person was charged with a crime to reimburse the defendant for “all reasonable costs” if they are found not guilty by reason of self defense. Reasonable costs would include lost wages, the costs of any lost business opportunities and legal costs including bail, expert witness fees, attorney’s bills and other expenses. The bill also includes a “safety net” to protect defendants if they are sued by victim in a self-defense case, she said.

It’s intended to provide consequences for the sort of malicious, specious prosecution of people like Kyle Rittenhouse – cases with lots of political sturm und drang but little to no actual evidence of unjustifiable homicide.

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

National Guard going to DC in anticipation of another mostly peaceful protest.

I wonder, which President holds the record for “Days Under Martial Law During Peacetime” in Washington, D.C.? What with the inauguration, January 6, and now the upcoming truck parade, I’ve gotta believe Lesko Brandon takes the cake. Any historians in the SITD readership?
Joe Doakes

I would imagine it would have to be FDR in the 30s. But that is a speculation.

If citizens can’t defend their freedom, then they are not citizens. They are subjects.

The Canadian truckers have shown us that if they don’t have the ability to defend their personal finances from government opporession, they are not citizens. They are subjects.

And against even more drastic threats?

The Peasant Revolt of 1381 – in which peasants in what would now be the eastern suburbs of London rebelled against onerous taxation and government overreach (figuratively and literally) may or may not have been an impetus for the Second Amendment – but it certainly should instruct any study of the issue of popular power versus government authority.

This video explains the event; if you ignore the presenter’s obvious left-wing bias (trying to connect Margaret Thatcher and King Richard II is the kind of thing that plays better in a faculty lounge than in reality), the lesson is fairly clear:

And for people with ears to hear, the lesson remains clear: Ukraine, responding to a Russian invasion, has “granted” their citizens a right that can not be legitimately taken away in the first place.

Preparing for the possibility of a large-scale Russian invasion, the Ukrainian government has moved to declare a 30-day state of emergency, grant citizens the right to bear arms, and conscript military reservists between the ages of 18 and 60, adding nearly 200,000 troops to the country’s defense as Russian troops continue to enter the Donbas region.

Of course, the Ukrainians are implementing under duress what the Estonians have made a part of their national culture (although not, alas, in the sense of being an inalienable right, but more a matter of duty to state and people). Defending their freedom from Russia is an actual national hobby even in whatever passes for “normal times” on the Russian border (I’ve written about the article linked above in the past; it may be even more worth reading today).

This is the lesson: today, as in 1381 and 1776 and 1939, and in Ottawa today, your freedom is only as secure as your ability to defend it; legally, in courts via the Marquis of Queensbury rules of the legal system…

…or otherwise.

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

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

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

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

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

Tomato, tomahto.

So – did Mayor Frey promised to push reform of “no knock raids”.

And to hear him discuss it, you’d think he’d made progress:

When you’ve got Channel 4 actually criticizing DFLers’ policies, you know…

…that there’s a crazier DFLer in the wings, who has given the Big Four TV staitons, the Strib and MPR permission to do so.

If this is a ban, I’d hate to see what a no-knock offensive looks like:

It’s amazing how that creeps up on you…

…as it were.

A friend of the blog emails

Love this:

This is what sliding into authoritarianism looks like.

During the American revolution, it’s pretty likely a thin majority of the population thought living under the British was juuuust fine.

…liberals of the type we call “progressives” these days got very tired of me pointing out the irony that their side was the one obsessed with one level of “class warfare” or another…

…but that on many issues (guns, taxation, property rights), theirs was the patrician side of the “debate”.

It’s even more true today.

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

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

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

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

But the language Young used is interesting:

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

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

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

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

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

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

A friend of the blog emails:

I am in no way in favor of banning books or burning books. I am not in favor of censoring something for others. If I do not want to read something, I simply don’t. This tweet really got my thinking about fascism and the Nazis who burned books.
.

Is this person tweeting sure that it is the right wing side of the country burning Harry Potter books? Gosh, I am old enough to remember the never ending cancel culture of Liberals going after JK Rowling for questioning the transgender culture and the idea that a man can identify as a woman and be legitimately considered a woman

Harry Potter. Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry Finn. To Kill a Mockingbird. God and Man at Yale. Jordan Peterson.

Here’s the difference: On the right, the people doing the book burnings and the other authoritarian depravity‘s are almost invariably nobodies that you’ve never heard of; school boards in Tennessee, county commissions in rural Louisiana.

On the left, it’s the mainstream and leadership burning the books.

…the current President took an oath to uphold the Constitution.

On the other hands…

…his Administration seems hell-bent on destroying it.

Last week, Minneapolis Mayor Frey Took to social media to declare his vaccine mandate – which he implemented as the Omicron wave had already peaked in Minnesota – a raging success, with his phone clogged, clogged, he told us, with photos of people at jam-packed restaurants.

We must only conclude, then, that “Seven”, The long time downtown tent pole restaurant with the best rooftop in the history of Minneapolis hospitality, closed because of overcrowding concerns.

Or not:

Worries about crime in downtown also contributed. “I can’t get staff to be excited to work downtown, because they don’t feel sale” he said.

You may find Karen responding “but restaurants close all the time, and it’s got nothing to do with draconian, misguided, on scientific emergency orders!”

And Karen would be wrong:

Finally, Patterson said city-ordered requirements on masks-wearing and vaccinations dealt the business a final blow. “We’ve seen a big decline even in the past few weeks,” following the revival of an indoor mask order by Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. On an average Friday night, he said, Seven could generate at least $25,000 in sales; after the mask order, Friday receipts dropped to $5,000.

With absolutely Marie Antoinnette like timing, the mayor got perhaps the puffiest puff piece in the puffy history of a puffy magazine this week; This is the week that the mayor appeared in Vogue magazine, as one does:

The mayor’s first term, which culminated in a hard-won reelection in November, gave him endless reasons to pace. Beyond Frey’s brio, he is an exposed nerve. “From the global pandemic to the economic downturn, the murder of George Floyd in our city, the subsequent unrest,” Frey speaks solemnly, “it was a lot. I don’t think anybody, including the former me…fully comprehends what this has been like.” Frey gestures to photos from four years ago, when he took office as a “bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 36-year-old.” He drank Red Stripes and sampled hot sauce with the local press. Now, like presidents gone gray in the White House, “I’ve aged a decade, easily,” Frey tells me, citing crow’s-feet, stress pimples, and trauma he hopes will manifest as post-traumatic growth. “This is a time that changed me forever.”

Speaking of changing:

from Vogue: “Frey, photographed at home in a Rag & Bone sweater with his wife, attorney and advisor Sarah Clarke, in Tory Burch and Altuzarra, and their daughter, Frida. Photographed by Alec Soth, Vogue, March 2022.” Photographs in March 2022?

Glad to know the mayor and his family are doing all right. It must be a tough time for them.

I’ll meet Mayor Frey halfway.

He’s supposed to be Minneapolis’s top cheerleader. It’s part of his job to blow smoke up the world’s collective nethers about the city.

So when he went on social media after about a week of his bizarrely illogical and unscientific vaccine mandate to say everything was hunky dory:

…it wasn’t in and of itself a surprise. Cheerleading the city, and their own policies even moreso, is part of a mayor’s job description.

Of course, the stats aren’t nearly as sanguine. Minneapolis table reservation via “Open Table” are off by…

…ahem…

…two thirds:

Now, it’s entirely possible the Mayor’s phone is flooded with photos of full restaurants. The number of choices in Minneapolis has plummeted. Literally, every place in Minneapolis where I used to do social events has disappeared in the past 20 months.

…and, according to some fairly disturbing college professors, isn’t really freedom, either.

In so many areas, the Twin Cites political class loves to affect an appreciation of Scandinavian governance.

They love the interventionist social democracy, the often successful tinkering with utopian ideas (dependent, of course, on a small, wealthy society with social cohesion that doesn’t exist in American cities over 5,000), the communitarian ethos (see previous parenthetical), while ignoring the less convenient parts, the ethnic homogeneity, the history of fighting against tyrants…

…and, I suspect, this bit here:

Yep. Critical thought, on the part of the news media:

The article charges that politicians and authorities have “lied” about various aspects of the pandemic, prompting these establishments to lose the public trust, noting that the efficacy of vaccines to end the pandemic was also vastly overstated by health authorities…Ekstra Bladet’s public apology is part of a growing trend in the European media that has begun to question the narrative and the governments’ responses to it. For example, one of Germany’s top newspapers, Bild, issued an apology last August for fearmongering over COVID, specifically about claims that children were “going to murder their grandma.” 

Who knows? Maybe if they see the Danes are OK with it, the Strib – “the newspaper of the Twin Cities of, by and for Big Karen” – will find the guts to think.a little.

A group of restauranteurs and bar owners are taking the Frey regime to court over the city’s bizarre, unscientific vaxx mandate:

Plaintiffs in the complaint filed in Hennepin County Fourth Judicial Court Thursday include Bright Red Group, LLC (owners of Smack Shack), 90’s Minneapolis, LLC (The Gay 90’s), PJ. Hafiz Club Management, Inc. (Sneaky Pete’s), Urban entertainment, LLC (Wild Greg’s Saloon), Urban Forage, LLC (Urban Forage), and MikLin Enterprises, Inc. (Jimmy John’s) and I & E Inc. (Bunkers Music Bar & Grill).

According to the complaint, the emergency resolution “is calculated and purposed to attempt to prod the general public toward vaccination… Minneapolis bars and restaurants are being used as pawns to further Mayor Frey’s agenda of pushing for and convincing the public to get vaccinated. Whether the end being sought is noble, the scheme is forcing restaurants and bars to lose additional patrons and business that have already been reduced over the past two years and incur new costs and burdens to enforce the requirements.”

When I saw the original mandate, I wondered – so some 20-something 110 pound female hostess encounters someone without a vaxx card who wants to eat anyway. Then what?

Does the restaurant call the cops?

Even if there’s some response on their part, they’ll show up long after the customers have ordered, eaten and left.

What is it exactly that the Frey regime expects restaurants to do under color of his mandate?

Joe Doakes from Como park emails:Joe Doakes from Como park emails:

Every government regulation restricts some individual’s freedom. It wouldn’t be a regulation if it didn’t.

A government regulation which affects similarly situated individuals must treat them similarly. That’s what the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment is all about.

To survive an Equal Protection challenge, the government regulation must be rationally related to a legitimate government purpose.

The U of M concedes the Covid vaccine doesn’t halt the spread of Covid but intends to impose a vaccine mandate anyway.

St. Paul and Minneapolis require vaccine or proof of negative test to enter bars and restaurants.

All three government entities insist the regulations are based on SCIENCE. But other government entities in the state have not enacted similar regulations. There is no scientific reason why restaurants in St. Paul would be deadlier than Maplewood, why Manny’s Steak House would be deadlier than Lord Fletcher’s, why a student with natural immunity is deadlier than a vaccinated student.

The regulations do not treat citizens similarly. There is no rational basis for the difference. The different regulations violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In the olden days, there were organizations which cared about such things, the American Civil Liberties Union, for example. They ought to be in court every day, suing on behalf of individual rights. They’re not. Nobody is.

Why doesn’t anybody care about Constitutional rights more?

What happened to us?

Joe Doakes

A friend of the blog emails:

Rise Bagel Company has decided to not have to make a choice of who they serve. They are now closed to indoor dining, open for take out. Their business, their choice. All customers treated equally. Shouldn’t be any controversy.

But, yet there is- people who like the vaccine mandate are somehow mad that Rise Bagel Company is closed to indoor dining. Read the comments on the Facebook-people are upset that this business isn’t doing the least bit to keep people safe. But, what? Isn’t closing down to indoor dining even safer? I’ve heard there are quite a few others doing the same thing, whether out of protest or lack of staffing.

They can only except people closing down for the right reasons.

No, that’s not hyperbole:

I suspect “Rise Bagels” couldn’t be happier to lose this person’s business.

But the point remains – this isn’t about infection control.

Just control.