University of Kansas prof says that men who don’t vote for Harris/Klink should be…
Well, it’s all right here. Go for it.
Not that this is news, necessarily.
The University issued one of those “Oaaaaakaaaay, we’ll look into it, because hypothetically that’s not the kind of thing we approve of here, if it happened…” statements that says between the lines “our PR department is working overtime on this one…”
In my interview with former Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka last Saturday, we talked about the depths of Governor Klink’s radicalism.
With that in mind – with any luck, this should turn up in the Veep debate tonight:
In a very significant development — I am almost prepared to say the most significant development in the current presidential contest — it has recently been revealed that Brian D. Lozenski, an associate professor of urban and multicultural education at Macalester College and a leader in the development of Minnesota’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum, explicitly called for the “overthrow of the United States.” This goal has demonstrably shaped Minnesota’s ethnic studies standards, according to which students are taught as early as kindergarten that America is evil. The video recording of Lozenski was made two years ago but was taken down the day after it was spotted by Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center…
And for someone who’s made a bit of an art form out of concealing his radical nature under a couple of layers of Elmer Fudd-wear, it’s actually been kind of brazen of Walz.
But there’s not much point in trying to make Lozenski look like anything but a CRT Kommissar:
To make as explicit an assertion as did Lozenski is extremely rare; indeed, I have never seen or heard such an admission. The destructive intent of ethnic studies or CRT has been very apparent and much commented upon for many years by the conservative commentariat. But Lozenski’s open, cavalier articulation makes the destructive nature of ethnic studies virtually impossible to deny.
So the debate should be interesting, for a change.
Look – it’s not like there’s any reason at all, ever, that I’d vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I am not better off than I was four years ago, and likely either are you.
But in addition to the whole “communist” thing, she appears to have been exactly the kind of soulless bureacratic bean-counter and image-polisher that I excoriated here.
Kamala learned well from her Marxist parents; you gotta break some coconuts to make an omelet unburdened by the brat that has been.
Or something like that.
#3: No matter how well they start and how promising they look, the Vikings will break your heart.
#2: “Keith Olbermann needs to put down the phone and get out a little.
#1: Jen Rubin has departed controlled intellectual flight:
It’s an evergreen statement. And yet periodically she outdoes herself.
George W. Bush’s Air Guard record.
Mitt Romney’s tax returns.
The Russian Collusion hoax.
The “Perfectly Fine People” hoax.
“White Supremacists started/did most of the rioting in Minneapolis!”
“Kids are coming to school hungry in Minnesota”.
And now this:
A PBS senior corresponent apologized Wednesday after falsely telling her audience thart former President Donald Trump tried to talk Israel out of a cease-fire amid its ongoing war in Gaza.
Judy Woodruff passed off blame for the blunder by “clarifying” that she based the flimsy scoop on outside reporting that she had read byefroe broadcasting from the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago.
“The reporting is that former President Trump is on the phone with the prime minister of Israel, urging him not to cut a deal right now, because it’s believed that would help the Harris campaign”, Woodruff told a PBS roundtable”.
Woodruff posted a tweet “Clarifying” her regret that she’d been caught:
But it’s out there. Democrat tweeps are chanting it like it’s fact. The intellectual gerbils that make up the Democrat base are parroting merrily away.
Because, well perception is reality. And who controls what people perceive, anyway?
Could happen to anyone.
Hey – wasn’t “misinformation” public enemy number one?
Berg’s Seventh Law is getting more and more inerrant.
…when the left comes to realize that it was a, er, tactical error to pick people like these as their public face:
But it sure hasn’t been this election cycle.
Saturday’s murder of a Trump supporter and father of several, the serious wounding of at least two more, and the miraculously slight injury to candidate Trump, was shocking.
But it was far from unexpected.
First things first: Thomas Crooks was the one who pulled the trigger, killed Corey Comperatore, and tried his damnedest to kill former President Trump. On him alone lies the immediate responsibility.
But creating the atmosphere in which a 20 year old would consider blazing away at a crowd that included a Presidential candidate?
That’s been a team effort.
Society’s been building up to this – and, I think, worse – for a while now. I’ve been predicting it for a decade and a half.
I’m far from the only one.
Of DNA And Psychiatry: This is what America does to dictators.
This is what we did to Nazis.
We’ve brought a lot of them down in our time:
Our cultural memory involves a lot of fighting against actual tyranny – indeed, it’s an inextricable part of our country’s DNA:
And so last Monday, a week ago, when the once-presigious New Republic ran this as their cover…:
…and supported it with this…:
We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.
Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.” We unreservedly choose the latter course.
I’m not saying the New Republic intended to inflame some nutbar to take a literal shot a Trump (and, let’s not forget, a crowd of his supporters, murdering one and leaving two more in the hospital). But if they were, it’d be hard to know what they’d do differently.
It’s nothing new:
Untermensch: Of course, it’s not just Trump – although he’s been the focus of most of Big Left’s efforts over the past 8-9 years.
The left’s noise machine has moved someone to put literal crosshairs on Republicans – but the rhetorical iron sights were in play long ago.
POTATUS? As recently as the day before the assassination attempt, this was the President (or at least his loathsome social media tweep):
He covered last week’s boogieman of the week.
It’s been a running theme of his entire presidency; here’s his entire “Independence Hall” speech in which, surrounded by fascist re-framings of totems of American democracy, he said that half the population – “MAGA Republicans” – wanted to “end democracy”.
I’m loathe to use phrases like “declaration of (fill in adjective) war” lightly. But it’s too corrosive a narrative to just call “collctive slander”. The President actively tried to stoke irrational fear in half ot the population, of the other half of the population, for purposes of inflaming passions to turn people out for a mid-term election the Democrats expected to lose.
But it’s about way, way more than just elections.
Bad History: Big Left – the collective institutions that support the larger leftist drive for power, the media, academia, big leftybusiness, the non-profit/industrial complex, the public employee unions – have been actively working to demonize, marginalize and dehumanize their opposition as a matter of “etermal campaign” policy for a solid decade and a half.
Remember Obama’s DHS Secretary Napolitano memoing America’s law enforcement agencies to expect a wave of conservative terror that would (as re-parroted by the late, unlamented and loathsome “Dog Gone”) dwarf the war on terror that’d been going on in the Middle East for seven years at the time? Or the risible notion that White Supremacy was becoming popular again (notwithstanding the fact groups like the Klan have been shrinking by abour an order of magnitude every generaion)?
What was that but collective slander to create a boogieman to sic the droogs on.
Sic them to commmit violence? Oh, heavens no.
But who can control everyone?
In the latter two episodes, official actions can be seen as positive incentives to commit violence against Trump, his supporters and conservative dissenter is general.
So the alarming wonder isn’t that some cretin tried to murder Trump (and succeeded in murdering one of his supporters). And it’s not just lil’ ol’ me noticing this.
The surprise is that it took this long to bubble up to Trump.
The counter-gaslighting has already begun:
But to me, for purposes of this piece, the worst is this:
That’s a lie – both in re Biden and in general.
This is the culmination (so far) of a fifteen year long arc of stoking hatred for political gain. Caling it otherwise is delusion at best, evil at worst.
For Want Of An Inch: But Trump survived.
And the imaging is much more redolent of Churchill…
…whom, let’s be honest, Big Left hates just as badly.
Perhaps you heard – conservatives won big in EU elections last weekend.
You might have missed it, because the news only referred to “the far right” – as if Francisco Franco were back from the dead.
Indeed, it’s yet another term that today’s left have rendered meaningless:
Let not pretend this is accidental. Big Left has been working for decades to gain control of the language and its perception. The systematic turning of all “right wing’ thought into some neo-fascist aberration shifted into high gear in 2009, when Obama’s Homeland Security czaritsa Janet Napolitano told the nation’s law enforcement “don’t mind all those leftist terrorists, watch out for all that right wing terror which is going to come out of nowhere someday, pinky swear!”.
Just watch – in a month, NPR and the NYTimes will furrow their brows and wonder why society has had a “Big Sort”…
The good news: these sorts of results usually bode well for elections in America, at least for the upcoming cycle.
Leftists, 2020: “Punch a Nazi!”
Leftists, 2024, being thwarted in their protests in support of actual modern-day Nazis [1]:
“Heeeeeeey! No fair punching!”
[1] In the “fascist dictatorship founded on racial obsession, focused on murdering Jews” sense of the term, rather than the “I’m a leftist and I don’t whatever it is” sense.
Hamline University in Saint Paul is an exquisitely expensive instution that seems to be not quite as prestigious as Saint Thomas, and always a couple of degrees behind Macalester in terms of the impeccability of their leftist orientation.
But they aren’t to be left behind.
Here’s their “pro-Palestine” neo-Brownshirt “encampment”, as a rainy night ended this morning.
So maybe we’ll have Hamline kids puking on their own lawns for a change this weekend.
Being stalked?
Living in a crime-prone neighborhood?
Have an abusive, violent ex in your life?
These upper-middle-class white suburban women have a message for you:
Suck it.
But at least you have a selfie!
Everything that needs to be said about you – those who deny the use of the institution for which the majority of the students, and the taxpayers, pay (and pay, and pay and pay and pay) was said almost six decades ago…
…by the best president of my lifetime (and yours, if you’re over 37 years old, whether you’re smart enough to know it or not).
It’s high time we stopped calling Ivy Leaguers like this Columbia spokesbeing:
…as “our best and brightest”.
By the way – at “Mitch Berg University”, students who infringe other students rights – Jewish, conservative, liberal, communist, I don’t care – by depriving them of the use of the campus they pay to attend will be blockaded into their “autonomous zones”; no water or food go in, no sewage comes out.
Only way out is through a checkpoint where they either make a videotaped apology and commit to pay restitution to the students they’ve adversely affected, or sign the acknowledgement on their expulsion paperwork.
Harvard and MIT disgraced the nation’s “elite academia” last year.
Columbia says “hold my kombucha”:
Yep – progs standing in the door of the schoolhouse, trying to keep the race they hate out.
Is a single Democrat office-holder or leader anywhere going to condemn this?
“Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students safety”.
Oh, I suspect the NYPD could do it, if there were any political will to do so.
The fact that there isn’t should make every American sick to their stomach.
Bonus question: as someone else put it (I wish I could claim credit) – if Trump was responsible for what happened in Charlottesville, why aren’t Biden and his boss responsible for this?
The worst part about last week’s news about long-time National Public Radio (NPR) editor Uri Berliner’s tell all about the network’s, uh, systemic bias toward the left isn’t the bias itself (and if you haven’t read Berliner’s entire article, you should). We all knew that; it was obvious on issue after issue:
It’s not that the network has lied about it for decades; as recently as a couple years ago, Ira Glass and Bob Garfield dismissed the allegations, saying “multiple studies” proved it was untrue – conveniently without showing the “studies” for serious examination.
It’s not that they went full-bore “woke”:
Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.
These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.
It’s not even that NPR actively denies they have a problem – “my weaknesses are actually my strengths”, as Michael Scott put it in a similar situation – and septupled down, suspending Berliner for doing business against the family and hiring a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who reads like a Babylon Bee caricature of a Prius-driving “In This House” sign-wielding upper-middle-class credentialist Karen.
(Naturally, the real crime is “pouncing” on Maher)
As great a service as Berliner has given the world of journalism, the biggest problem isn’t even that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Berliner’s observations about NPR appear to apply, to one degree or another, at every mainstream media newsroom, particularly here in the Twin Cities. All four local TV news stations, to say nothing of the Strib, are reliable DFL mouthpieces. While some reporters are modestly diligent about getting a variety of points of view, that appears to be much less a priority than it used to be..
In particular, Minnesota Public Radio seems to have abandoned their long-time drive for, if not “balance”, at least trying to include more perspectives. Not so long ago, NPR reporters would reach out to the state’s opposition – not just in the legislature, but opposition advocacy groups for their groups points of view on issues. When the DFL would float one of their gun control bills, for example, you’d hear Bryan Strawser or Rob Doar along with the usual suspects from Everytown or “Protect” MN.
When was the last time you heard any of that?
And while I try not to conflate Human Resources with news, it can’t possible escape notice that while MPR is famously hostile to hiring anyone to the right of Paul Wellstone, and is an actively hostile workplace to any that might leak through, they hired a meteorologist who’d gotten whacked for rhetoric too extreme for KARE, had a political reporter who dated and eventually married the state’s sitting ultraprogressive Lieutenant Governor, and another newsroom figure who we are assured no-way no-how frothed with hatred for conservatives and all they stood for before he retired.
No. The worst thing is, all of this systemic bias not only guts the media’s ability to do it’s most important job – holding government accountable – but eradicates any real reason to trust the media to do that job. It erodes the trust among people and institutions that a society needs to make “democracy” work.
And the worst part still? Either they are too cloistered in their class bubble to see the problem, or they think their class’s interests are what society actually needs.
The fact that NPR has become “Religious Radio” for the secular faith of the modern left hasn’t been even a serious debate outside prog journo circles in over a decade.
The perception that the rest of the media is the same thing in a lower-gloss format? That’s the part that needs to sink in.
Sunny Hostin on The View: Climate Change caused the eclipse, has brought out the cicadas:
I wonder what “intellectual self-defense” looks like, legally? Because this woman is an immediate danger of destroying or gravely injuring the national intellect.
…and I give you the Minnesota DFL:
A friend of the blog emails:
I was always afraid the activists had too much control, [the FOB’s spouse] was confident that the state wouldn’t do something this stupid. But, it is getting talked about in mainstream media now. It’s probably really going to happen, isn’t it?
The FOB is talking about the “Plan” being pushed by “advocates” to replace I94 between the downtowns with a “boulevard”.
Normally at this point, of course, I’d say it’s just another racket to transfer money from the taxpayers to the non-profit and consultant “advocate” class. They can write puff-piece reports and squalls of PR material on the indirect public dime, build entire careers out of yapping about vaporware projects.
But the people who love to play with the levers and buttons and knobs of government have gotten their hands on this, so I’d say the odds are pretty decent that a lot more money will be spent on this.
The obvious question is, what happens when an untstoppable money-squandering force (the drive to gut 94) meets the immovable money-squandering object (the drive to put a deck over the freeway to rebuild Rondo)?
They can’t both win…
Saint Louis Park Public Schools is looking for a new Assistant Superintendent.
But not just any Assistant Super. Nosirreebob.
This one is going to have some extra special administrator-fu (emphasis added):
The first sentence of the position’s summary says, “the Assistant Superintendent proactively supports the Superintendent to create and communicate anti-racist structures and systems, works to interrupt systems of oppression, and serves as a role model for culturally relevant pedagogy.”
The school district continues its summary of the position by saying the assistant superintendent must be “unwaveringly committed to anti-racist actions and use data to adapt and sustain their efforts towards racial equity to plan, direct, and coordinate action to achieve the mission and strategic objectives.”
The job description continues by saying the school district is seeking an assistant superintendent who can “examine the presence and role of ‘Whiteness’ in systems and structures,” and is “open to feedback regarding their own racial blind spots.”
The job will pay between $130-200K.
I think we finally found out what “fully funding education” means.
The Strib is engaging an ad agency to explore a new name:
The media organization has been known as the Star Tribune since 1987, five years after the Minneapolis Tribune and the Minneapolis Daily Star merged to create the Star and Tribune.
The rebrand is being overseen by former Google executive Grove, who was appointed CEO and publisher of the Star Tribune a year ago having spent more than three years as Minnesota’s Department of Employment and Economic Development commissioner under Gov. Tim Walz.
So in the spirit of community, let’s give them a hand.
Suggestions in the comments.
Wait – didn’t the DFL in the Legislature spend most of April and May of last year doing the endzone happy dance celebrating having “fully funded” education?
I do believe they did.
So – what is up with this?
Now, when you asked a DFL legislator or an EdMN partisan what “Full Funding” meant, the “answers” should have come with a side of blue cheese for all the word salad. It was gibberish. And that was just the ones that didn’t ignore the question entirely.
As we see now, pretty much intentionally so.
I started banging this drum in 2009, when the Obama Administration and its camp followers started moving the Overton Window of authoritarianism to encompass basically every variety of conservative group, to gin up hysteria for (as a former commenter used to refer to it) a coming “tidal wave of right-wing terror that’d dwarf 9/11”. This bit of social slander started in 2009, had hit close to home when the Southern Poverty Law Center claimed the Taxpayers League of Minnesota was a “hate group”.
Some have taken to the change in tone with alarming facility – some of them private citizens…
…and some, er, not so much.
Two peaceful pro-life students appear to be listed by a University of Maryland’s terrorism center database.
UMD did not respond to inquiries from The College Fix, but a pro-life group said its attorneys would review the research to consider legal action.
The university’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism has endeavored to track alleged “extremism” from 1948 to 2021 through a database titled, “Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States.”
PIRUS lists mainstream pro-life organizations, like Pro-Life Action League, among threats such as the Ku Klux Klan and Al Qaeda. Moreover, two subjects affiliated with Students for Life of America appear to be peaceful protesters who were cleared of charges, The Fix found.
Of course, Big Left knows and operates according to Mark Twain’s aphorism “a lie will travel around the world while the truth is waiting for its Keurig to warm up”. It’s easier to call an innocent person a terrorist, white supremacist, “Christian Nationalst” or “hate group” falsely, knowing that gullible or depraved “Journalists” and influencers will hammer it home like a bunch of monkeys on espresso for eternal preservation on the internet, than it is for the victim to un-call it.
Exasperated conservatives sometimes refer to the media as “the enemy”.
It’s understandable – the media at the editorial and national level is in general a PR firm for Big Left – and accurate in terms of long-term effect.
But not since Walter Duranty has it been quite this literally true.
Five Israeli families are suing the AP and Reuters for their “journalists” obvious collusion with Hamas on October 7:
The lawsuit filed by the victims’ parents last week alleges that five photojournalists, Hassan Abdel Fattah Eslaiah, Hatem Ali, Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa, Ashraf Amra, and Ali Mahmoud who filed photographs in real time of the atrocities being perpetrated by Hamas terrorists were in fact a component of the attacks themselves, and were not conducting legitimate journalistic work.
The journalists were either aware ahead of time that a mass invasion and terror attack was about to be staged by Hamas or, being present from the very outset of the attacks, were culpable for doing nothing to stop the assault, including failing to warn the Israeli authorities, the suit asserts.
While the free market is having its real final say with Big ProgressiveMedia, a little economic justice would be welcome. FIngers crossed.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is leaving a guitar shop on Selby Avenue after dropping off an instrument for some repairs, when MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, steps out of a chi-chi coffee shop.
SILBERMAN: Merg.
BERG: Oh, hey, MyLyssa…
SILBERMAN: Terrible, what’s going on in Gaza.
BERG: Yep. 1,300 Israelis massacred, thousands of Gazan human shields dead, hundreds of Israeli soldiers killed…
SILBERMAN: Dozens of journalists killed in Gaza by Israeli forces. It’s terribly dangerous for journalists.
BERG: er, yeah. I suppose that’s a problem too. But, as in World War II, if you’re where the action is, there are dangers.
SILBERMAN: World War II killed dozens of journalists.
BERG: Right. And between 30 and 50 million other combatants and civilians.
SILBERMAN: And dozens of journalists.
BERG: And during the New York Draft Riots of 1863, which killed thousands, especially black and immigrant New Yorkers…
SILBERMAN: Rioters besieged the New York Times building and killed several journalists.
BERG: When the Titanic sank, it was a tragedy that…
SILBERMAN: …two journalists died.
BERG: But it’s not like they were singled out. I mean, they were on a ship…
SILBERMAN: Aren’t you listening? Journalists died.
BERG: Right. So – Rwanda…
SILBERMAN: Journalists were murdered!
BERG: Hmmm. And during the Minneapolis riots, the biggest outrage was…
SILBERMAN: Journalists getting pepper-sprayed and shot with rubber bullets. And some government officials didn’t respond to our requests for interviews.
BERG: And the destruction of East Lake Street and University Avenue, the Third Precinct, and much of civil order…
SILBERMAN: (Yawns broadly). Sorry. I really have to get to the Society of Professional Journalists meeting
BERG: No doubt.
(And SCENE).
Earlier this week, the Minnesota Reformer – a news outlet financed by “progressive” plutocrats iwth deep pockets – did its review of AlphaNews’s “Minneapolis Has Fallen”.
The claims – well, I’ll let the tweet do the talking for the piece, entitled “I Watched Minneapolis Has Fallen So You Don’t Have To”.
Let’s go briefly through Winter’s claims.
Restraint
The biggest hit Winter has against Collin is that, according to her, the movie’s revelation that Chief Arredondo and his training officer lied about whether “Maximal Restraint Technique” was part of the MPD’s training and policy. Collin showed cops, and Chauvin’s mother, opening the manual to the exact section, and showed multiple current and former MPD officers saying they’d been trained in the technique. The movie also said the jurors were not allowed to see the body cam footage that showed that Chauvin did the technique correctly – with his knee on the shoulder blade, rather than on George Floyd’s neck.
Winter claims that yes, the jury saw both.
OK – so if that’s true, and the jurors saw the same training that the officers had, then could someone explain to me why Chief Arredondo still lied about it?
Neither reporter has clarified that for me, so someone else has to.
UPDATE: Danger Close
And as I wrote this in a hurry, I forgot this. But as “Bigman” noted in the comments – why the fact that Cahill failed to sequester the jury – who came to and from a courthouse that was being fortified like the Green Zone in Baghdad, and who were being told more or less directly that if they reached the “wrong verdict” that they were in huge trouble – not being discussed?
I’ll ask the question because Winter didn’t think she had to.
White Riot
Winter goes on to discuss the parts of the film dealing with the riot, most specifically the evacuation of the Third Precinct (on which. apropos nothing much, I scooped the entire Twin Cities media), I’m trying to figure out what Winter’s point is.
I’ll dispense with the fact that Winter…lacks a certain amount of empathy, or at least insight outside her own apparently narrow experience (emphasis added):
Collin also spends considerable time questioning why the MPD and local and state officials were slow to take action as protests devolved into riots and arson that destroyed hundreds of buildings across the metro.
Retired MPD officer Jason Reimer tells Collin what bothered him the most is “they let people throw rocks and bricks and firebombs and we’re supposed to just put on a helmet and take that.”
Well, helmets, but likely also bulletproof vests and eye-irritant spray, handcuffs, Tasers and semi-automatic pistols.
Bulletproof vests don’t keep you from burning to death. Spray and tasers are useful to get control one on one, not against a mob.
And I’ll let Deena Winter’s idea of shooting into a crowd of rioters hang out there, because I sure didn’t want to have to do it for her.
Winter cites some fairly wrenching scenes in the movie (that reflect what I reported in May of 2020), to which I’ll add some emphasis:
“We were in the middle of a war zone,” Herron said. “We were ordered not to do anything.”
She said the fire department wasn’t responding to calls, and officers were “wandering around aimlessly, waiting to be told what not to do next.”
“They weren’t doing anything to control the riot,” she said. “They wouldn’t let us do our jobs.”
All true – but keep the emphasis in mind – the “they” that left them wandering around were the city and MPD leadership. We’ll come back to them.
Winter adds:
The city and state’s failed response and inability to quell the violence and arson are well documented, but it’s inaccurate to claim police were standing down.
They went on joyrides, fired rubber bullets at protesters (see Jaleel Stallings); an officer, who went on to run an actual banana stand, was caught on video by a journalist macing protesters for no discernible reason; lots of cops in riot gear teargassed crowds.
They shot protestors like Soren Stevenson with a rubber bullet and blinded him in one eye. They maced a journalist from Vice News in the face. They fired rubber bullets at journalists, including Reformer reporter Max Nesterak and Star Tribune reporter Andy Mannix.
Side note: anyone but me notice how journalists only get really irate about injustice and official overreach when it’s other members of the Journo Club who are affected? Lake Street – and a fair chunk of the Midway, my neighborhood – got burned. The Minneapolis Police Department was, and remains, gutted. Crime soared, and is still double what it was as recently as 2018 – enh. But journalists got attacked ZOMG!
Not that Winter’s article tells you, but the main contention of the cops in the movie was that the city and the. MPD leadership – the “they” in the emphasized text in the first round of quotes, above:
So when Winter snarks:
To the people on the other end of a rubber bullet or tear gas or mace, the police response sure didn’t feel like “standing down.”
Stop me if I”m wrong, but everything she cites supports the cops contention. Some cops, operating in a complete vacuum, followed the normal human inclination to fucking hit back.
Either way, there was no plan. They were left danging in the breeze.
Winter doesn’t write about that, so I have to.
Who’s The Boss?
Winter goes on (and I’ll add emphasis):
[retired MPD cop Jason] Reimer says the weak response was all a deliberate attempt by politicians to use Floyd’s police killing to their advantage.
“The elections were coming up,” he said. “They were gonna use this incident for a political narrative, and they did.”
Let’s hope Reimer was a better cop than he is a political analyst: The riots were a political disaster for the mayor, the governor and the entire DFL establishment. DFL political operatives blamed the riots and the defund/abolish police movement for key suburban losses that prevented a 2020 DFL trifecta.
Although both Frey and Walz won reelection, they did so in part by hitching themselves to police during their reelection campaigns and would soon be accused by partisans on the left of being too cozy with cops.
I’m tempted to get cute and “hope that WInter is a better political analyst than Jason Reimer” – because it’d be more accurate to say the riots were a disaster for one city political establishment; the one where Jacob Frey and Andrea Jenkins and Lisa Bender were the “middle” and Alondra Cano was the loony left.
And for them, the riots were a disaster. For the new establishment, the one that gained huge ground in the ’22 elections and is poised to take the city over, the one led by the Democrat Socialists of America, against which Frey and Jenkins barely survived, and Bender and Cano retired lest they be seen as “too conservative” (literally the language the DSA droogs use to refer to Jacob F*cking Frey and Andrea Jenkins – the riots, and the aftermath (including the far far far left’s well-funded and well-organized response to whatever backlash there was in the ’20 elections) were a prime organizing opportunity.
But I won’t call Winter a myopic political analyst. Someone else will have to.
A Bonus I’ll Answer So You Don’t Need To
“Minneapolis Has Fallen” refers to quite a number of former MPD cops. Winter reminds us that a number of them are living on disability pensions and workmens comp settlements.
Someone needs to explain why that’s relevant (as opposed to, frankly, kinda pointlessly bitchy) since Winter will no doubt say she doesn’t have to.