American society eventually coughed Alex Jones out of its system.
Could we maybe do the same with Tucker Carlson?
The thing is, once he gets up the nerve to finally name Trump the person he’s yapping about, he’ll have a whole new career joining Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arne Carlson as “the good Republicans”.
Not sure why he’s waiting.
Not all the fraudsters are Somali.
But all of them, Somali or Anglo, do have one thing in common: they are part of the DFL and its non-profit/institutional complex.
So if you want to get out of ethnic name-calling, I’m fine referring to the current flap as “the Wave of DFL Fraud”.
Hope that helps.
I drove by one of the “No Kings” “protests” on Saturday – a little one, on Yankee Doodle Road near Pilot Knob, in what probably passes for “downtown” in Eagan.
It almost fooled me. There were a whole bunch of flags – all of them American, none of them Palestinian or BLM. They didn’t completely fool me – the average age was probably 65, and they all had ELCA hair, so I had them made before I actually read any of their signs.
But it got me thinking – perhaps Big Left spent some time getting the “No Kings” people to try act a little less crazy? Maybe they figured out that Palestinian flags and guys in assless chaps aren’t polling well in the provinces?
I wasn’t wrong:
What came next was the real kicker. When Austin asked about the protest’s peaceful vibe, the woman didn’t hesitate. “We’ve all been told to be peaceful,” she explained matter-of-factly. “We’ve had training on how to be peaceful and to deescalate.”
Training.
As in organized, structured instruction on how to behave at a protest.
Austin didn’t get the chance to follow up on who exactly provided this training or which organization bankrolled it, but the admission alone punctures the myth that these movements are leaderless and organic. When the protester was asked to show her Antifa-marked sign more clearly, she refused. Funny how that works.
If true? No, it’s not something to welcome: Big Left is trying to cater to the less-insane Democrat constituency, whatever and wherever it is. They’ll be sliding into the same hungry maw as all the insane ones. They will be assimilated, or disposed of when able.
Democrats, Today: “‘Anti’-Fa doesn’t exist”
Democrats, Tomorrow: “‘Anti’-Fa exists, but it’s tiny and super marginal.
Democrats, the Next Day: “‘Anti’-Fa exists, and it’s Republicans fault”
Democrats, The Day After: “‘Anti’-Fa exists, and it’s an absolute good.
“Haha! The FBI says there’s no evidence that Taylor Robinson was a member of any group! That means the killing of Charlie Kirk was non-political!”
So here’s an incomplete list of politically or socially-with-plenty-of-politics-motivated spree killers, terrorists and assassins who *weren’t affiliated with any group*:
And, let’s be honest, Timothy McVeigh, who *had* been part of a group, of which he and Terry Nichols were pretty much the two remaining members.
The problem is, it’s a big country with a lot of people with mental health issues, and when you spend enough time and effort telling unstable people that “speech is violence” and that some inscrutable murky sinister evil force is going to “erase” you/destroy democracy/steal your future/commit “genocide”/are “Nazis” or “fascists” – people against whom we fought a life or death war two generations ago – eventually someone’s going to connect the dots and start shooting people.
And if you ARE part of a group whose goal is to destabilize society, having people who *aren’t* in your group do the dirty work is a feature, not a bug.
So don’t believe the hype.
U of M professor, clad in a terror scarf, calls for “dismantling” the US:
I seek to dismantle the United States. I hope you seek to dismantle the United States. And if that isn’t your politics…OK? (Hahahahahah). I speak as if everyone has this commitment. And the thing is, you should have this commitment. This is the goal…
As she prattles on for a while about “decolonization”, she should start by rejecting the money and job paid for by those “colonizers”.
SCENE. It’s December, 1944. Bastogne, Belgium. The men of the 101st Airborne Division are surrounded, defending the vital road junction, as seven German divisions close in.
Men of Company F, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment – just down the line from the famed “Easy Company”, not the same guys at all – are coming out of their foxholes after a German bombardment.
PRIVATE JEB RANKIN (a farm boy from Alabama): Hoooo-iiiie, that was something.
TECH SERGEANT FOURTH CLASS ANDREW “ANDY” PILSNER (the platoon radioman): I heard Lieutentant Ratchett in Third Platoon got blown up. (The others shake their heads in that “glad it wasn’t me” manner).
PRIVATE FIRST CLASS GUISEPPE “JOE” RANDAZZO (a former streetcar conductor from Southie in Boston): Rattled my fillings.
STAFF SERGEANT WILLIE BUXTON (a Montana rancher turned NCO, and the platoon sergeant): Everyone OK?
CORPORAL JAMES “JIMMY” STEVENS (a former rendering plant worker from Indiana): Crissake. Why do we do this.
RANDAZZO (Sardonic): To defend democracy.
RANKIN (earnest): To liberate Europe.
SECOND LIEUTENANT LLOYD MOUNTEBANKE (A Yale Business School graduate who is the platoon leader): That’s incorrect.
RANDAZZO: Sir?
MOUNTEBANKE: This is why we’re fighting:
RANKIN: We’re sittin’ here thousands of miles from home, so…people can kill babies, sir?
RANDAZZO: Ma’Donn (crosses self).
MOUNTEBANKE: You heard the woman. Carry on. (Exits into the woods as suddenly as he appeared)
STEVENS: (Sotto Voce) That doesn’t seem right…
BUXTON: OK, men, that’s enough jawing. You heard the Lieutenant. We’re fighting to kill babies. Now get some top cover on those foxholes.
And SCENE
Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:
Liberals are protesting Donald Trump for exercising his authority as President. They don’t want our country to be ruled by a king.But maybe by Lords?There are so many examples of liberal Democrats thinking they are above the law, better than ordinary people, entitled to do as they please.The governor going to a French restaurant while the rest of his state is locked down. A governor’s daughter spying for protesters burning down a city, a high official running a secret email server, a legislator getting rich from insider trading…….. the list goes on.Liberals don’t want Donald Trump to be King but they sure would like to be Lords and Ladies themselves. As for the rest of us peasants in flyover country, if we do not grovel sufficiently before the new nobility, they will replace us with illegal immigrants who will.Joe Doakes
It’s getting difficult to find numbers small enough to measure how low “Rolilng Stone” has gone.
It’s easier to quantify the number of readable non-musical pieces they’ve run since PJ O’Rourke left whatever’s left of the once-legendary magazine: zero.
But however far they fall, Rolling Stone manages to violate the laws of physics to find a little more room to drop.
Rolling Stone is to fact-checking…what “Dog Gone” was to fact-checking.
There are no numbers small enough to measure how low Rolling Stone has fallen.
If you were involved in any way in the 2020 riots in Minneapolis, even as a spectator, you know there was little organic and nothing spontaneous about them.
With that in mind, I urge you to read this entire thread about the LA riots:
Babies getting tear-gassed?
They’re just eggs for the greater omelette:
The MO points to “leftist NGOs with deep pockets”.
Who, how deep and how did they get so deep?
DataRepubliican (yes, another “X” thread) has more:
The major one appears to be “CHIRLA” (“Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights”). And yes, course you and I are paying for it:
And, oh yeah. don’t forget the leftist billionaires:
I’m going to go out on a short, sturdy limb and guess that Big Left’s A-team was too busy planning in Los Angeles to turn last week’s fracas in Minneapolis into the riots some clearly so deperately wanted.
A group of federal law enforcement agents – FBI, DHS – apparently served a warrant for drug trafficking and money laundering on a restaurant at Lake and Bloomington in South Minneapolis yesterday.
And it’s almost – I say, almost – like Twin Cities Big Left is trying to coax a riot out of the situation:
I mean, a riot over ICE, or whoever, would certainly divert attention away from the collapsing schools, the crime, the downtown that is disintegrating and leaving a gaping maw of taxes that will wind up being made up by an increasingly beleaguered middle class, a dysfunctional city government and a state government run by a bunch wastrels that squandered a $18 Billion surplus, wouldn’t it?
It’s not news to anyone who’s been following the subject – education is in crisis.
And the mainstream conservative response seems to be “let it burn!” If you talk with a lot of mainstream conservatives, the kids should be heading straight out into apprenticeship programs and becoming electricians, HVAC techs, plumbers, truckers…
And I get it; the urge to chuck a mainstream education culture that has grown to hold most of “us” in contempt is tempting.
But there’s a catch. Someone’s gonna have to write the history books. Someone’s gonna have to tell tomorrow’s cultural narrative what today’s cultural narrative was. If politics is downstream of culture, and conservatives are doing the flooring and concrete finishing for the people that pass that information along, what do you think happens to culture in the future?
More of what is happeninbg tioday, that’s what.
Which is what I thought when I read this piece by Joanne Jacobs, a Brit academic critic, about today’s woke fad of only teaching kids authors that are “relatable” to people today:
There is nothing compassionate about teaching an easier, more familiar, “culturally relevant” curriculum to disadvantaged children, writes Mark McCourt on EMaths, a British blog. It’s condescension.
Speaking the language of care, some argue that children in poverty “should be shielded from the rigour of canonical texts, or complex scientific ideas, or abstract mathematics, he writes. “That Shakespeare is beyond them. That Bach is meaningless to them. That the laws of thermodynamics belong to someone else’s world.”
School “is meant to offer new worlds,” writes McCourt. “It is meant to take the child by the hand and lead them to places they never knew existed, places beyond their post code, places they have every right to belong.”
Remember – “education” and schooling are very different things.
And it seems to me if you want to make a society decline and collapse, you take away its imagination. What could do that faster than focusing on the here and now?
Minnesota schools failed during the pandemic. Some might say they collapsed.
Governor Klink isn’t gonna let that happen again:
Aside from trying to deal with the deficit he created, he’s trying to pay back his cronies in the Teachers Unions.
TAKE 2: A couple of key paragraphs disappeared from this one on Friday, the first time I tried it…
SCENE: A press conference at the Minnesota State University system. Spokesperson Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK stands nervously in front of a podium, facing a gaggle of barely-engaged press, and Mitch BERG of Shot in the Dark/AM1280/HotAir.
BIRKENSTOCK: So, with the changes in federal funding, it appears the Minnesota State University system is going to have to make unprecedented hikes to tuition:
BIRKENSTOCK: Any questions?
BERG: Yes – wouldn’t that $18 billion in surplruses that the DFL wasted in 2023 and 2024 have come in handy for this?
BIRKENSTOCK: No hablo ingles…
BERG: Si no hubiéramos desperdiciado el excedente, ¿seguiría siendo un problema?
BIRKENSTOCK: No further questions.
BERG: That was English.
(But Birkenstock has left the podium)
(And SCENE).
Joe Doakes, looking at Como Park through his rear-view mirror, emails:
Harvard is pushing back against President Trump’s demands for reform. President Obama praised them for resisting. He is joined by several Thoughtful Republicans Of Moderate Bona fides On Neither Extreme Side (TROMBONES, the new and more acceptable word for people formerly known as RINOs) who agree that yes, racial discrimination is bad, and viewpoint discrimination is bad, and antisemitism is bad, but is that any of the federal government’s business, particularly at their elite private Ivy League alma mater?
Harvard’s defenders have a point. But so does Trump.
The purpose of federal student loans is to help poor kids go to college. The purpose of federal research grants is to subsidize schools who can’t afford to hire good people. Why should grandma pay income tax on her Social Security to subsidize leftist hatred at a billion dollar private school?
Trump should announce that henceforth, student loans and research grants will be based on need – individual and institutional. Harvard can subsidize its own students and researchers to hate whomever they like on their own nickel.
Joe Doakes
I’d love to see schools fill out a FAFSA form and spend a few weeks waiting to see if they get qualified.
Entire Twin Cities media and left (ptr) last week: “A graduate student, one of America’s best and brightest, was snatched away in the middle of the night by ICE for exercising free speech! They could come come for any of us, citizen or not!”
Waiting period specified in statute passes:
Not sure it ever fails.
Which is why we call ’em “laws”.
I’ll admit it – two months of DOGE has made me a little inured to stories about outlandish things that the Federal Government spends our money on.
Promoting DEI in Serbia? Transgender comic books in Peru? Yaaawn. Get back to me when you’ve got something interesting.
So when I heard that there was a fracas about funding universities in Australia, a part of me thought of course there is. Why would we not be funding universities in Oz?”
What I didn’t figure on was that there would be so much of it the risk of losing it would cause a national emergency down under. The Trump administration is asking seven Australian universities, not to do without all that American aid money, but to justify the aid money they are getting, in terms of American nationional interest. According to the Guardian:
The Trump administration told Australian university researchers a push to promote administration priorities and avoid “DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal” was behind a “temporary pause” of funding, according to a memo seen by Guardian Australia.
University sector sources say the US has severed research funding at six universities – Monash University, Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and University of Western Australia – since Donald Trump came to power, including some as early as January. ANU is the first university to publicly acknowledged it.
Which is, according to Sky News, an urgent enough matter that Australian PM Tony Albanese is being urged to drop everything and get on the case:
A memo sent by the US office of managament and budget to an Australian university project on January 27 and retrieved by The Guardian, declared financial assistance for the researchers was a waste of taxpayer money and explained federal spending priority would go towards “the will of the American people”.
“Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again,” the memo said.
“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”
The cuts would leave a $600M hole in Australian research budgets.
And if you guessed some Ozzie academics would refer to Americans wantintg American money to serve American interests as “foreign interference” – well, you’ve been paying attention this past four years (and you know that public unions are pretty much the same around the world):
“The Federal Government must push back on the Trump administration’s blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms.” – Alison Barnes, NTEU National President
— NTEU (@NTEUnion) March 13, 2025
Read the full media release here 👉 https://t.co/vUg4if1lJw@AlisonBarnes25 pic.twitter.com/rGDB2mUIlY
The National Tertiary Education Union’s (NTEU) national president Alison Barnes slammed the missive, and said the Albanese government had to “guarantee Australian researchers would be protected.” “The federal government must push back on the Trump administration’s blatant foreign interference in our independent research in the strongest possible terms,” she said.
Not to mix my metaphors, but “the first three weeks of a new diet are the. hard part” seems appropriate under the circumstances.
Namecalling during the 2024 Presidential election turned out not to be a “wonder weapon” for the left.
Turns out bullying, castigating and defaming people doesn’t win them over.
It’s a lesson most people learn by middle school.
The Minnesota left still hasn’t learned it, oddly enough:
VanDassor, a Highland Park Middle School teacher, was first elected president of SPFE in 2021. Her union is a champion of left-wing causes, including “restorative practices,” which are a “model for a healthy, racially equitable school culture.”
In her statement, she said that SPFE members “will continue to do what we have always done: care for and educate ALL of our students. Feed them. Keep OUR schools safe for them. Teach them the full history of our country.”
VanDassor asserted that “fascist regimes” always begin by “targeting the most vulnerable populations and by making it a crime to tell the truth.”
Hmm. Making it a crime to tell the truth, you say? Huh.
I’m hoping they never learn.
I first codified Berg’s Seventh Law – progressives are always projecting their motives and actions onto conservatives – nearly twenty years ago. It may be the thing for which I and this blog are best known outside Minnesota.
And there’s a reason for that. It’s universal.
We’ve seen it in different ways in different eras in the evolution of Big Left. But the most grating started sixteen years ago, when the Obama administration could be said to have started on its path of racial division and plate throwing by starting the claim that our society was awaiting a wave of right wing/”white supremacist” terror that “would dwarf 9/11”.
Of course, since then left-wing terror has dominated the coercion landscape by (charitably) a couple orders of magnitude – even when Big Left begs for evidence of right wing terror they can’t find it, while it just keeps coming to us.
Case in point: while falsely calling Elon Musk a “Nazi”…
…they act exactly like brownshirts.
Or at least yap about it on social media:
Gotta destroy the public square to save it, apparently.
It’s become a bit of an easy trope on the right:
It’s a progression with no end; every day brings new loathsomeness. It’s entirely possible it’s a barrel with no bottom to scrape.
But Nicole Wallace has to be getting close to that metaphorical nadir:
So let’s break it down: Wallace:
So maybe you can hate Big Leftymedia more than you do. But beyond this, doesn’t it all kind of blur together?
Margaret Brennan has emerged in this past few months as the poster girl for all that is stupid and depraved about our “elites”.
But even I didn’t think she’d go here…:
Stupid reporter?
Or a natural progression of the whole “free speech is bad” thing that elites were pushing during a campaign where the Democrats were opposing it?
Why choose?
I am intermittently concerned that Big Left might eventually learn the lessons of this past election.
And then I see things like this:
…and I’m at least a little less concerned about the mid-terms.
Paul Krugman is leaving the NYTimes.
Podhoretz sums up my thoughts on the matter.
I can’t speak for Krugman’s career as an economist – I wish King Banaian was still blogging, and hopefully he’ll talk about this in his show one of these days.
As for me? Fact-checking Krugman – the guy who said the Internet was a passing fad – has been a fairy steady pastime on this blog for a long, long time.
So while his retirement leaves me with one less source of material, [1], it is enough for today to rejoice in the fact that for a moment, America will be incrementally less dumb by omission.
[1] Although the Cano Corollary to Berg’s 21st Law warns us to not celebrate too hard: ” “blue” never gets “lighter” or less “progressive”. There is only one electoral direction – more “progressive”. While written about elections, the New York Times would seem to be germane.
I met Cenk Uyghur – host of “Young Turds” – once upon a time.
Now, I’m a pretty polite guy. And I had bigger things going on than having to waste time on the guy.
So even though my first impression of the guy was pretty awful, it never occurred to me to uncork on him quite like this:
But I’m glad Hassan did.
UPDATE: I’m told his show is called “Young Turks”. I regret the error.
FROM THE. HISTORY FILE: This clip from Election Night 2016 will never not make me smile:
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…”
You are currently browsing the archives for the Big Left category.
