Among the “setter projects” that Americans established as we (yes) conquered the North American continent, along with representative democracy, were universities.

And I’m thinking that those are among the “settler projects”…

…that actually need to be dismantled.

Or at least, it’s time for an actual honest-to-god McCarthy-style purge of Universities.

I wonder if the members of the DFL “coalition”…

…will start to put together for themselves how much of that “alliance” is built on social gaslighting and browbeating by their white, pronouned, “progressive” overseers. (and, naturally, their “leaders” bellying up to the trough for their graft paymetns)?

One the current tropes among the populist right is that “college is useless, and you should send your kids to learn a trade”.

There’s a truck loaded with cinder blocks full of truth in there – for many 18 year olds, a year or two spent learning how to weld, be an electrician or mechanic or tool and die maker would be a much faster path to self-reliance than four years at college racking up debts while learning little or nothing that one needs to succeed in the world.

Now, let’s be clear, here – I don’t think college needs to be a longer more expensive trade school; there can be value to learning a “liberal art”, something traditionally intended to teach one to think rather than strictly to design, build or fix something…

…provided that that that education actually teaches how to think.

We’ll come back to that.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, my father was a great teacher. He taught. high school speech, writing and literature, and college-level education classes. He was one of the two best teachers I ever had. He also used to agree, at least hypothetically, with the likes of Mike Rowe – the ideal education, he said, was spending a few months or years learning a trade, and then going on to some other course of more abstract study after one could pay the bills.

This, of course, may have been a little idealistic projection from a man who, on good day, knew which end of a screwdriver to hit the nail with. He was and remains a brilliant teacher – and one of the least handy people I’ve ever met, myself included.

When I was in high school. and college, I had not the slightest interest in going to trade school – not out of any sense of college being “above it all” or “better” – I was every bit as peripatetic back then as I am today, and if could have squeezed in learning how to machine metal or be an electrician, I would have.

But to my Dad’s point, I also figured I already had a trade; I’d started in radio when I was 15, and had learned a lot. I figured my fallback would be working at some station, somewhere. It wasn’t the dumbest idea, at a time when radio was a tough but viable way to make a living. It’s not advice I’d give a kid today, but that was then.

With the “trade” part figured out? I sought a life living in my head; I majored in English and minored in History and German. I also majored in Computer Science almost long enough to get the minor, but I hated it, and didn’t touch a computer for seven years after I graduated – but that’s another story. And for me, at least, the promise of a “liberal arts” education was fulfilled; I learned how to think, and when the opportunity to jam a bunch of different facets from my background together into a new career fell into my path, I was able to jump on it.

Of course, I’m not sure colleges today teach critical thinking the way Dr. Blake did.

But I come here not to wallow in nostalgia, but to weaponize it.

While I don’t disagree in the least with my Dad, or Mike Rowe, I also think this is a lousy time for conservatives who are so inclined to completely abandon the academy, if only because it’s people from Harvard and Penn and MIT who will write the histories and the textbooks and play an inordinate role in defining our culture…

…and if you see the people who are driving our system toward collapse and calamity today, that should be pretty terrifying. Because just as Califonria-style government followed Californians who fled to Colorado, a society run by the products of our crypto-Maoist university system – the judges, politicians and culture-definers of tomorrow – will follow you into your shop van or plumbing business.

Big Left has been ‘marching through the institutions” for over fifty years; they’re not going to be set back to square one by a season of scrutiny. But it’s an opportunity. And the future of a free society demands that some young conservatives, and the older ones that still control some levers of power (if only their checkbooks) take a shot at that tackle, before the current wave of barbarism completely rewrites the definition of “freedom” for a few more generations.

In addition to football, we saw last week the annual “progressive” tradition of wrapping one’s self and others in un-earned victimhood.

It was “Trans Violence Awareness Week”, during which Leftis pols conjured up victims from the ether to rally the soft-minded to their cause.

Senator Smith, for starters (with a riposte from Shawh Holster)

If the Human Rights Coalition says it, its worth fact-checking:

The only catch is that no such systemic violence exists. According to Jean-Pierre herself — and, presumably, to an LGBT-rights group with every interest in magnifying the phenomenon — the total number of trans-identified Americans known to have been killed in 2023 is 26. If we round that up to 30 (to account for December) and assume that just 1 percent of the U.S. population is trans (given that, as one very limited survey shows, around 3 percent of young Americans are), we obtain an annual transgender-murder rate of 30 in 3.32 million, or just 0.9 people per 100,000 people. Even if we, alternatively, assume an American trans population of just 1.6 million — to gel with one high-quality but conservative recent estimate — the resulting murder rate would be merely 1.9 per 100,000 people.

To put that in context, the murder rate for blacks in the U.S. is currently 30–33 per 100,000 people. The African-American community is an outlier but not necessarily a remarkable one: In a representative recent year, 4.5 percent of black-male deaths were the results of homicide, versus 2.3 percent for American Indians, 2.2 percent for Hispanics, 2 percent for Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders . . . and 4.9 percent for all whites under full majority. To say the obvious, all of these groups are currently living far more dangerously than “trans women.”

Holster ran down the HRC’s numbers in this twitter thread:

Long story short – like iron ore, Big Left wants to take the raw material of intra-relationship and street violence, and try to refine it into yet another social grievance to keep the ignorant and uncritical in a hot lather.

Someone claiming to be MN State Senator Grant Hauschild posted this on TWitter yesterday:

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.

Weird.

…or ever: Ryan Winkler is right.

And the Minnesota Federation of Teachers has gone full Brownshirt.

Notice that the “Resolution” says nothing about the Hamas Charter’s call for the extermination of the Jews “from the river to the sea”.

Weird.

Also – BDS is not “peaceful”. It’s just an unarmed form of belligerency.

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:

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,

And if you wonder if today’s Big Left is bigger and more powerful? You’re not alone.

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:

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.

If they’d only driven to Minnesota…

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.

So much that feels like parody but, sadly, is not, in this tweet from Senator Fateh:

• Omar Fateh, of the party that insists “we’re not socialists, we’re Democratic Socialists, at a meeting of Socialists.
• At Macalester.
• And…that crowd.

When I said the left hates Lauren Boebert because she could beat all their men at armwrestling, you can see what I mean, now. Right?

Senator Erin May Quade assumes DFL voters aren’t that bright, critical or well-informed.

She was commenting about the GOP Debate from Wednesday:

Now, if you haven’t been in a coma or getting your news from the Strib for the past 20 years, you know:

• It’s families of color that use most vouchers, because they want them, because public schools most often fail their kids, and b)
• it’s the Left that’s re-segregating society – including with public schools.

Maye Quade is counting on reaching “voters” know don’t know and wouldn’t care if they did.

Wait just a doggone minute.

I read this earlier today:

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?

Why yes.. It was:

And yet they never actually defining what “full funding” meant…

…oh. Yeah. Now it makes sense.

Every DFL politician’s social media feed is raving about this puff piece from HuffPo which christens Tina Smith “the Velvet Hammer”.

The Velvet Hammer?

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.

Then it turned to mockery and its idiot cousin, uninformed defamation.

Then came the attacks.

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.

The cycle has cycled.

“The Strib paid notice in its op-ed page that the “Mama Bears” – who’ve been sitting it out, apparently, since Sarah Palin left the stage – are back (emphasis added):

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.

Representative Walter Hudson put it best:

Much more to come

This is National Education Association primo Becky Pringle, speaking to the Red Guards in Shanghai in 1961.

Just kidding. She’s speaking – er, “Speaking” – to a teachers convention.

She walked on her applause for a solid minute. That’s just bizarre.

OK – so it’s poll time. Who does Pringle most resemble:

A: The austere Italian political wonk:

B: Dwight Schrute

C: Noted animal rights activist and social benefits champion:

Votes in the commlents.

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 itself is bad.

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. .

University of Saint Thomas, as a matter of policy, apparently doesn’t tell young women if their assigned dorm roommate is is a bio-male who identifies as female:

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

— O’Keefe Media Group (@OKeefeMedia) May 10, 2023

If progressive policies are so unambiguously good, why do they have to lie about all of them?

In the wake of his move to Twitter, some bad news for Tucker Carlson.

He’s been banned from…

…uh…

“Tribel”.

Because apparently nobody’s banning people on Mastodon.

Or Air America, apparently.

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:

“Could undermine confidence”

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.

Qualifies as state media in my book.

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.

Of course, I ran head-on into the contempt another tranche of government employees – the public school system – feels for the peasantry, first-hand, around that same time.

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.

I’ll have Ms. Fredregill on my show on Saturday.

I worked in radio long enough that I make a point of never revelling in the job misfortunes of others.

So yesterday’s news – 10% staff layoffs at National Public Radio – don’t provoke a happy jig. I wish em all luck, even the most useless mid-level bureaucrat among ’em.

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+.

Maybe it’s not “joy”. Maybe more “I told you so”.

Except Vox. That’s pure childlike joy.

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.

Of course it’s money laundering. It won’t be confirmed until long after Biden has left office, but STFU. This is a payment to the Big Guy.

My only question: how will Big Leftymedia limber up for the logical and factual gymnastics they need to do to bury this?

The U of M paid Nikole Hannah-Jones $50K to speak at the U – and complied with a demand to conceal the evidence (emphasis added by me):

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.

Is there a career option as solid in the long term as being a leftist alarmist, whether one is never, ever right or merely always wrong?

No. There is not.