Someone claiming to be MN State Senator Grant Hauschild posted this on TWitter yesterday:
Proud to join our @HermantwnHawks Teachers this morning as they advocate for fair wages & better family insurance. Our Teachers are some of the most important public servants in our communities, standing behind them when they need it should be easy #mnleg@EducationMN@MNAFLCIOpic.twitter.com/orKc8Y9cc1
This must be a Russian hoax. Hauschild,and the rest of the DFL caucus in the legislature, to say nothing of the Flanagan/Klink Administration, spent the whole first half of summer high-fiving each other over “fully funding education” (in between selfies of grinning legislators stuffing donuts and corn dogs in each others mouths).
Now, they never, not once, explained what that meant.
For that matter, the term has vanished from the DFL’s chanting points since about Bastille Day.
Blaming the existence of Israel as a Jewish state for the Hamas terrorist attacks is antisemitism. And antisemitism has no place in our schools. https://t.co/1vgn5WJfrx
My friend, advice columnist and author Amy Alkon, has been chronicling the orgy of antisemitism bursting out in the Los Angeles area.
She filmed this encounter over the weekend:
We Jews thought we were safe in America. I no longer feel that with so many mobs on the streets openly calling for the mass slaughter of Jews.
Here in Venice, we just had these terrorism-loving monsters shouting for the slaughter of all Jews — and note the "from the river to… pic.twitter.com/KrR6P9O6wc
Let’s take Judaism, Antisemitism and the Middle East out of this incident. Let’s say this was a domestic altercation. A man Two men use their physical bulk and subtly aggressive invasion of personal space to force a woman out of the way? That’d be considered abuse in court, and justification for a restraining order and, likely, loss of child custody if the woman really wanted to put her back into it, legally .
When I was working in bars, if I saw a man behaving like this around a woman, I’d have called the bouncers in. And there’s nothing those bouncers liked more than having a pretext to pummel guys who were threatening the ladies.
Big Left – maybe 5% of the population – is trying to intimidate the 55% that passively or actively disagree with them into submission.
And the subtle threat of violence implicit is there, in this “man’s” delivery and in Big Left’s approach to every issue today – be careful, or you’ll get Swatted/a visit from “Anti”-Fa/doxxed – is waiting out there for everyone – especially if you try to rally in response.
I’ll be interviewing Amy on my show this coming Saturday.
“The Devil’s greatest achievement was convincing the world he didn’t exist” — “Keyser Söze”, The Usual Suspects
One of the greatest achievements of the modern Big Left is convincing the world, and itself, that the Nazi movement of the 1920s and 1930s was, like today’s “American” “Nazi” party, a movement of ignorant blue-collar and no-collar losers.
It was in fact a youth movement, led by academics and artists. Besides Hitler himself, most of the cabinet that ran Germany from 1933 to 1945, much of the party’s senior leadership were writers, playwrights, journalists, painters and academics.
Same as the Communists before them.
And same as today’s Big Left. This is Judith Butler,
“Hamas and Hezbollah are social movements that are progressive and are part of the Global Left."
Some of the western left really wants to align themselves with the same terrorists who want to throw them off a roof when all is said and done. pic.twitter.com/6FSKBUUSIV
Big Feminism – in this case, the always-puerile Jessica Valenti – is going after Idaho with the same nuanced grace as a Rashida Tlaib press conference.
They’re attacking over Idaho’s first prosecution in an “abortion trafficking” case:
Abortion, Every Day Exclusive:
Idaho has brought forward charges in the state's first 'abortion trafficking' case.
Law enforcement used geolocation data to place a teenager at an Oregon abortion clinic. pic.twitter.com/Ndisv2sjmB
Unmentioned (but for community notes) – the woman was impregnated by a rapist. The accused rapist and his mother allegedly kidnapped the pregnant woman and drove her to Idaho to destroy the evidence.
Someone walks up to you with a baseball bat. They say they want to kill you.
Your response is “no, I don’t want to get beaten to death with a baseball bat”.
Looks like you have a standoff. A controversy. A conundrum.
Someone else steps in and asks “How about we compromise? Will you settle for a traumatic brain injury?”
It’s the middle way, after all. The guy with the bat might even say “sure, I just wanna hit you, hard!“
You might respond “No – in fact, I don’t want anyone hurting me in any way. At all”
And the buttinski responds “Why won’t yiou compromise?”
Who’s right?
You?
The guy with the bat?
Or the person striving to find the middle ground between the two of you?
If your response is “I’m putting my foot down; nobody is hitting me with a bat for any reason at all“, and the other to ask “why do you hate the guy with the bat?“, does that change anybody’s mind?
Point being, sometimes the middle path, the compromise, is not the most moral path forward.
Senator Erin May Quade assumes DFL voters aren’t that bright, critical or well-informed.
She was commenting about the GOP Debate from Wednesday:
So let’s talk about the Overton window that moved tonight: Republicans openly called for the defunding of public education. Yes, the GOP hates public schools — they’ve been working against them since schools were integrated (that’s where vouchers come from, btw).
It's deja vu all over again — staffing shortages in schools across Minnesota just weeks, or days, before classes begin. What will help? Better pay, more time and freedom to teach, and equitable pensions to start. #mnleghttps://t.co/EMS5Z3YBTx
Now, wasn’t it just 2-3 months ago that Ken Martin, Governor Klink and Co-Governor Flanigan, the brodudes in the MNDFL Communications office and the chattering hamsters of the DFL Legislative caucuses telling us they’d “fully funded” education?
I can think of lots of adjectives to add to Smith’s hamfistedness. Velvet ain’t one of them.
And what usually happens after you see DFLers posting “attagirls” over inexplicable media. puff pieces?
Some dirt comes out on them. .
For example – during the session, the DFL noise machine broke out into a round of praise for Rep. Finke. It went from zero to 60 in three seconds, as if the Representative had just pulled someone from a burning building Clearly something had happened.
That something was Finke had charged across the House floor at another representative over retweeting a trans-skeptic account.
So am I too cynical in asking “what dirt is coming out about Smith?”
“First, they ignore you. Then they. mock you. Then they attack you. Then you win” – Gandhi
I remember during the heyday of the Tea Party, in 2009-10, living through Gandhi’s aphorism – and, in the end, seeing how very overrated Gandhi was as a keeper of profound wisdom.
But I digress.
The Democrats, MSM (ptr) and the Mitt Romney wing of the GOP did their best to pretend it didn’t matter.
And then we won – at least, in 2010. Big Left and Big GOP still don’t want to talk about it, but the Tea Party beat both establishments like Keith Moon beating a rack tom.
Of course, in 2012 and onward, the Empire struck back. Big Left and Big GOP teamed up, in effect, to smother the insurgents. It didn’t help that, by dint of being elected to actual office, the Tea Party became “the establishment” that the Ron Paul crowd railed against in the next presidential cycle. The momentum ebbed – as it often does when grassroots movements have to get back to their day jobs.
These conservative mothers and grandmothers, who in recent years have organized for ”parental rights,” including banning discussion of gender identity in schools, have been classified as extremists by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They have also been among the most coveted voters so far in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
Donald Trump praised their work, saying organizations such as Moms for Liberty had taught the liberal left a lesson: ”Don’t mess with America’s moms.” Ron DeSantis said ”woke” policies had “awakened the most powerful political force in the country: mama bears.” His wife, Casey DeSantis, who launched ”Mamas for DeSantis” in leadoff-voting Iowa, said moms and grandmas were the ”game changer” in DeSantis’ blowout win for a second term as Florida governor. She predicted they will be again as he runs for president.
Who wants to tell columnist Sara Burnett know that nobody outside the mainstream media thinks the SPLC has any more objective down the middle credibility than ISAIAH or Moms Want Action?
Ye shall know them by their opposition:
”Republicans have decided that this is, I think, their golden ticket for the primaries to rile up their base,” said Katie Paris, who runs Red, Wine and Blue, a network of women pushing back on GOP-backed policies such as the anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans efforts of Moms for Liberty.
Leave it to Big Left to try to rally women around box wine. What next – an activist group called “Valium Girls?”
”Call it ‘parents’ rights,’ call it ‘mama bears,’ and try to make it sound like something that would be common sense. … The reality about ‘parents’ rights’ is that it’s just about the rights of a vocal minority that is trying to carry out an extreme political agenda.”
I can’t wait for the next Minnesota DFLer to try to comment on that last sentence.
At some point over the last five or six years, Big Gun Control – a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Left – decided they were done trying to debate second amendment rights groups.
Its hard to fault them on their reasoning. Every time they have tried to debate the issue against a “near pair opponent“ in the past 35 years, they have fared incredibly badly.
With the flameout of the mascist establishment over Dr. George Hotez crab walking away from a challenge to debate Robert F Kennedy, Junior, the entire the left’s noise machine has switched into full gaslighting mode.
After two solid years of being busted using power, instead of fact to shut down debate on issue after issue after issue – on Fomite spread, the Wuhan Lab origin story, on vaccines preventing spread, and on and on – suddenly not only will they not debate, but…
"'Debate me' has become a bad faith propaganda tool for the right, designed to legitimize lies & target critics for harassment. It’s ripped from the right's 'free speech' playbook, which demands bad actors get access to all platforms & audiences – or else" https://t.co/7Qlig7swdi
Of course, when you’ve been wrong about climate change guns, transgenderism, welfare, the Soviet Union and pretty much everything else, I suppose avoidance is understandable.
But let’s call this what it is. Gaslighting.
The Left is America’s narcissistic abusive spouse. .
This, according to [UST Housing Director Zoe] Chang, is done as discreetly as possible in order to avoid upsetting parents. The video, OMG said in an email, documents the “mountain of rule changes and preferential treatment provided to trans students when it comes to their housing accommodations.”
The video:
1st OMG Citizen Journalist-Led Story:
A Citizen Journalist was rewarded $1000 for this recording obtained about a Catholic University allowing "trans girl" to room in the girl’s dorm without their knowledge. pic.twitter.com/eFmsTZnm1W
In the wake of his move to Twitter, some bad news for Tucker Carlson.
He’s been banned from…
…uh…
BREAKING: Tucker Carlson is hit with bad news as new Twitter competitor Tribel announces that they just permanently banned Carlson from their growing social media app, declaring that, “Tribel has decided to permanently ban Tucker Carlson from our network because Mr. Carlson is a… pic.twitter.com/svAaoeKUwy
— Occupy Democrats (@OccupyDemocrats) May 10, 2023
“Tribel”.
Because apparently nobody’s banning people on Mastodon.
He called out America’s de facto Ministry of Information for what it is:
Big Media is rallying around their own – as they always do:
Twitter has labeled National Public Radio as ''state-affiliated media'' on the social media site, a move some worried Wednesday could undermine public confidence in the news organization. https://t.co/Hjx7QDZoNG
NPR hosts actively pine for Marxism. They plot, in the open on the air, for ways to censor dissident media, not to mention using media to direct politics in their desired direction.
Anyone who sees the need for an impartial media that holds all government accountable should feel no confidence in NPR – Big Left’s PR shop.
That’d be a good start.
UPDATE : By the way – NPR’s “Fact check” of Twitter sniffs that the network only gets around 1% of its budget from government.
It’s technically true.
But the figure doesn’t count:
Subsidies and other grants from many other levels of government that are turned into program subscription fees that go…to NPR.
Perigovernmental and pseudogovernmental bodies – the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and various foundations, whose goals are in lock step with big government.
With that swag honestly counted, the total is by some counts well into the 30-40% range.
It was probably 15 years ago that I wound up running into a young Assistant US Attorney at a social event.
We got to talking – as I am wont to do with, well, people.
What quickly became evident in talking with him – early 30s, graduate of an Ivy League law school after having been a legacy Ivy League undergrad – was the sheer contempt he had for the people outside the federal “criminal justice” system he met.
Example: we got to talking about gun control. He was a Hillary guy. And he went to a demo the ATF put on for federal “criminal justice” employees, where they learned some basic firearm safety, and got to test-fire some of the guns the Feds used. And with that, he did in fact consider himself to be one of the class that should have the right to keep and bear arms (not that he would). The rest of the plebs, naturally,, should be disarmed forthwith.
Now bear in mind this AUSA wasn’t working on organized crime. Or even “crime” as most of us would understand it. His bailiwick was various abstruse import regulations. Not cocaine or fentanyl, mind you; things like wood, food and alcohol, livestock, furniture.
So that’s right – he oozed with sneering contempt for otherwise honest people who ran afoul of abstruse import regulations.
And he didn’t seem to be all that unusual among federal “criminal justice” employees.
My own struggles with the Saint Paul school system were at a time when the big dumb consultant idea was “zero tolerance” for even the faintest most ethereal hint of “violence”.
Dumb as that could be – and outmoded as it has apparently become, given the evaporation of safety in Saint Paul schools – it was a fart in the breeze compared to the contempt shoveled at parents since the dawn of “woke” education.
I figured – correctly – that Saint Paul and Minneapolis would be pretty hopeless.
But – Little Falls (via Gary at LIberty & Proosperity Blog)
“My name is Cassie Fredregill, a local resident of Little Falls. As my 10-year-old daughter came home from school one day, she told me that there was going to be a class on sexting. As any concerned parent, I reached out to her teacher to confirm what my daughter told me and asked what this class was going to be about.” The thought of a 10-year-old getting taught about sexting is utterly repulsive…
…Cassie wondered why she hadn’t received paperwork that permitted her to opt her daughter out of the class.
In response?
The school district barred her from parent teacher conferences.
She was not happy (jump to 5:25):
Point being, a distressing number of schools are starting to see parents as the enemy – and themselves as a class of aristocrats who shouldn’t have to be troubled by them.
But…has the organization learned the right lessons?
(Emphasis added):
When asked about his priorities, Lansing invoked what he has called the network’s “North Star” since his arrival in the fall of 2019: a push to ensure the network has a bigger and broader audience base, rooted in younger and more diverse listeners, readers and consumers. The emphasis, he says, must be on drawing in “the future audience to make NPR sustainable for the next 50 years.”
“Younger”? Well, over the past decade, the network has sure jammed down more than its share of breezy mediocrities (“It’s Been a Minute”, “The Moth Radio Hour”) – not sure if yesterday’s news is a verdict on that.
As to “more diverse” – they’ve tripled down on antagonizing half their audience. Even their “game shows” carry the message; the once excellent “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me“, which used to include the late PJ O’Rourke as a regular panelist, has become as lively and politically unpredictable as “Late Night with Steven Colbert“.
But you remember above, when I said I didn’t take joy in others misfortunes?
Well, I’m going to ask forgiveness for this, since I’m going to make an exception. Emphasis added:
The layoffs are in keeping with an increasingly grim landscape for media companies over recent months. Vox Media cut jobs by 7%; Gannett and Spotify by 6%. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, eliminated its Sunday magazine and a handful of other jobs. After becoming part of Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN cut hundreds of jobs and killed off its brand-new streaming service, CNN+.
Hunter Biden paid $50K a month to rent a house he claimed he owned:
Hunter Biden claimed he paid $49,910 a month to live at President Joe Biden’s Delaware residence where classified documents were discovered, a document shows.
The file, labeled “background screening test,” shows Hunter Biden lived in the president’s Wilmington, Delaware, residence between March 2017 and February 2018. Hunter Biden also claimed to “own” the property, according to the document.
The document was originally discovered on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, according to the Washington Examiner, and was reshared on Twitter by the New York Post’s Miranda Devine.
In 2018 Hunter Biden claimed he owned the house where Joe Biden kept classified documents alongside his Corvette in the garage Via @jj_talkingpic.twitter.com/L7c80MRRiS
Hannah-Jones participated in a Dec. 6 “moderated discussion” as part of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs Distinguished Carlson Lecture Series.
According to a contract obtained by Alpha News, the university paid Hannah-Jones’ agents $50,000 for her appearance on campus. The contract prohibited the university from recording the live event, which some school officials took issue with.
“Is the no recording item firm? I would like to remove that if possible. I am looking at one of our local news reporters for the moderator, and we’ve had great success with replaying the conversation via Minnesota Public Radio when we use their hosts. This, along with providing the recording to classrooms for instruction and discussion is important to us,” wrote Gail Fridlund, an events manager with the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
But of course, the U acquiesced.
Tom Gagnon, executive vice president of the Lavin Agency, said “that provision is firm” but offered to explain the “good” reasons for the recording prohibition.
“I don’t want folks to think she’s being a diva!” he said in a later email.
The university ultimately agreed to prohibit recording and covered the costs of Hannah-Jones’ travel and lodging expenses.
Those “good reasons” are none other than you and me – taxpayers with the capacity for critical thinking. They’ve seen what happens when the plebs see how the grift works.
If someone knows someone with a samizdat recording, let me know.
The Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco is hosting the “Third Annual Midwest Gender Identity Summit,” – discussing the “needs of transgender patients in healthcare,”
Just kidding. It’s the “Sanford Research Center”, in Sioux Falls.
Both Sanford and the Transformation Project are representative of the larger forces that are working to bring the transgender movement to the deepest-red corners of the United States — a coordinated, well-funded campaign for which South Dakota has become something of a trial run. That campaign’s influence has reached the Republican-dominated state legislature, where dozens of anti-gender-ideology bills have failed over the past decade. “No one thought South Dakota was a state where this could be stopped,” Libby Skarin, the campaign director for the ACLU of South Dakota, boasted in February. “I think the fact that we have consistently stopped these bills has been a source of hope for folks, like if they can do it in South Dakota, we can do it in our state.”
Sanford, which purports to be “the largest rural health system in the United States” — it currently employs nearly seven times more South Dakotans than any other business in the state — has played a pivotal role in orchestrating those conservative failures. In 2021, a National Review investigation detailed the medical giant’s links to the failure of House Bill 1217, which would have banned males from competing in women’s sports. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem had sparked conservative outrage by vetoing the bill earlier that year — a move that dampened her status as a rising Republican star, even after she hastened to reintroduce an analogous bill at the outset of the next legislative session.
The Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) agenda is being pushed into very red places by very blue big business – as a project to try to “convert” red parts of the country.
And in the case of Transgender ideology in South Dakota, it’s working:
Despite the overwhelmingly Republican composition of South Dakota politics, gender ideology has made inroads in almost every area of the state’s governing institutions. Last month, for example, SDSU drew conservative criticism for hosting a “kid-friendly” drag show, an event that multiple local lawmakers argued could be illegal under the state’s prohibition on “show[s] or other presentation[s]” deemed “harmful to minors.” Elsewhere, the Noem-appointed head of the state’s Department of Corrections signed a new “Management of Gender Dysphoria” policy specifying that state-prison inmates could request transfers to facilities that corresponded with their “gender identity” rather than sex — and be provided with sex-change drugs on the taxpayer dime.
But no set of institutions in South Dakota has embraced gender ideology more than the state’s Sanford-dominated business community, which sits well to the left of the state’s political center of gravity. (In November 2020, Sanford replaced its CEO of 24 years after he informed employees that he wouldn’t be wearing a mask around the office, arguing that he had recently recovered from the Covid virus and therefore posed no threat of spreading it.) The state’s Chamber of Commerce chapters, which are closely tied to Sanford, regularly lobby against social-conservative bills, including medical conscience rights, the prohibitions on sex changes for minors, birth-certificate gender changes, transgender locker room use, and bans on men in women’s sports.
“It’s Been a Minute” (henceforth IBaM) s one of the current plague of podcasts repackaged as radio shows that plagues both public and commercial broadcasting. As we discussed yesterday, some are better than others – some are OK radio, some are utterly dreadful as radio.
IBaM is pretty clearly trying to sell infotainment coverage smothered in public broadcasting convention, but to a black audience. It is, by public radio standards, breezy, sometimes to the point of sounding just a little contrived. But radio standards, it’s not the worst podcast on the air.
But this past weekend’s episode – about the wave of social media misogyny aimed at rapper “Megan Thee Stallion”, after she was shot in the foot by her…uh, paramour, rapper Tory Lanez. It features a “senior producer” from, guess what, another NPR podcast – Gabby Bulgarelli from a podcast called “Louder than a Riot”, and you’re on your own with that one.
Dog Bites Man. There’s an old newsroom bromide, passed down through Journalism 101 classes throughout the past 100-odd years. “Dog bites man isn’t news. Man bites dog is news”. If something is the norm, the expected, the utterly mundane? If you’re not the man being bit, it’s not realy news.
Anyway – I listened to this epi of IBaM, so you don’t have to. But if you’re curious – smoke ’em if you got ’em.
Here’s the part I wanted to focus on. It’s around 6:00 into the segment:
BRITNEY LEWIS (HOST): The coverage of this trial feels somewhat muted compared to the coverage of another trail that gained a lot of public attention this year, Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard. Why do you think that this case feels so different?
BULGARELLI: One, nobody cares about black people. Two, it’s close to the holidays. Three, because it’s a closed court…in some ways they feel similar. A lot of the arguing (sic) against Megan feels similar to how people rallied against Amber in support of Johnny Depp…
LEWIS: Mmm Hmmm
BULGARELLI: …the way Megan has been made out to be a liar – I don’t think anyone believes Megan to be a victim, so they don’t care…
I can’t comment on the merits of Bulgarelli’s argument, presuming there are any.
But she’s ignoring two elephants in the room:
Rappers shooting rappers is, regrettably and tragically, dog bites man. No, seriously – the list is long, and spans genres, coasts, even nations. It’s been a generation, and we still haven’t a conclusive idea who killed Tupac and Biggie. Ms. Thee Stallion was shot in the foot during a domestic squabble. It’s senseless, and stupid – but Ms. Thee Stallion survived, and will no doubt see her profile increase as a result. Oh, yeah – violent misogyny in the world of hip-hop doesn’t even rise to the level of dog-bites-man; it’s more like “Dog Licks Dog” . It’s ugly, and awful, and it’s the norm, to the point that pushing back against it is, in fact, the news in the show-biz press.
On the other hand, what – besides skin color – distinguishes the Depp/Heard trial from the Lanez/Thee Stallion dust-up? A woman’s claims of victimhood have been torpedoed by overwhelming, sworn evidence that she was in fact an emotional and violent abuser – something mainstream narrative denies exists. Millions of men who’ve suffered, either in silence or in the face of open derision from cops, social service professionals and society at large saw at least some vindication, even if only vicarious. The dominant narrative – “the power differential means only men can commit abuse” – was stomped flat, opening the door for millions of men to perhaps, one day, be taken seriously.
The inconvenient truth for identity-thrashers like Bulgarelli is the Lanez/Thee Stallion is “Dog Bites Man”; Heard/Depp is “Man puts mayo and a slice of tomato on a dog and takes a big chomp”, trashing a different bit of identitarian dogma outside Bulgarelli’s career specialty.
I’m going to guess most of you didn’t know that Sunday was “World Toilet Day“ (I personally celebrate the Eastern Orthodox Toilet Day, which is December 3)
Something I didn’t know about the humble toilet; to at least one part of Big Left and, to at least one part of Big Left, it’s a social justice issue:
Unsafe toilets are robbing girls of their futures.
Are you old enough to remember when our Expert Class (TM) sicced it’s PR machine, and Big Left’s army of howler monkeys, from Stephen Colbert down to its horde of demi-human twitterbots, on anyone who expressed even ambivalence about Ivermectin?
“Hahaha, he’s peddling horse medicine!” was about the level and extent of the discourse?
Are you that old?
If you’re a toddler, yes – you are.
If you’re older than a toddler, you remember the “expert” response – from the ridicule…
