The Left wants Donald Trump on the ballot this fall – the Trump with no internal governor who wrote the mean tweets, the Trump of the (often dishonest or fabricated) media narratives, and especially of the “January 6” of fact, fiction and in between.

But then, so does the GOP.

But which Donald Trump? The business tycoon? The loose cannon that could rope-a-dope either world leaders into agreement, or his own cabinet into distraction? Or the person that focused the economic and social concerns of a whole lot of people – middle America, blue-collar “Red” America, and by the bye more Black and Latino voters than any Republican in two generations, into political action?

The Virginia gubernatorial election showed us a hint: it’s #3. The first two camps barely registered in that fairly meat ‘n potatoes contest.

We’ve got a group of primaries coming up this month – Idaho, and later this month Georgia.

But it started last night, with Ohio’s primaries for Governor and Senate.

And it saw the above-mentioned three camps squaring off:

Was it that voters wanted a businessman? Well, Mike Gibbons was a successful businessman.

Was it that Trump was “the craziest son of a b****” in the room, as Thomas Massie sometimes wondered? Then Josh Mandel was your man.

Or was it the “America First” agenda on the immigration, trade, and foreign policy? If that’s what you thought, then J. D. Vance was your candidate.

And the winner: Vance.

But Vance’s advantage was that he campaigned on the politics he believes in. That’s one of the reasons he was able to campaign so much more than his opponents; he doesn’t need to read from cue cards. It’s why he was able to constantly reiterate his position on the Ukraine war with confidence, even as his opponents got lost while searching for their own views. Much has been made of Vance’s supposed transformation from the author of Hillbilly Elegy to the Senate candidate endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene. He shifted his assessment of Trump, absolutely, but his politics have remained much the same. Even Vance’s vengeful former roommate — who tried to harm his campaign by sharing a text showing that, years ago, Vance made an overheated comparison of Trump to Hitler — ended up proving the point. In that text exchange, Vance was saying that the Republican Party needed to deliver tangible benefits to working-class white people who have migrated into the party. That’s the message he had three years ago, too.

I suspect this is at least part of the reason Big Left is trying to make they hay they are over the leaked Roe decision; the GOP is running on the Trump legacy that’s least convenient to then. .

We’ll wait to see how Idaho and Georgia turn out.

So we have a leak and it appears the Supremos are sending Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood to the dustbin of history. A few very brief thoughts:

• Justice Alito is right: Roe was always built on a foundation of nothing. Justice White was also correct when Roe was decided. Roe was an exercise of raw judicial power. And raw power is always used eventually.
• And if we’re in housekeeping season, now do Wickard v. Filburn.
• The Dobbs ruling, assuming it goes through, changes nothing in Minnesota. Abortion is legal by statute here.
• The leak itself is awful for the Court, but it was also inevitable. There was always an incentive to break this particular taboo and the leaker will be celebrated, not punished. MSNBC will have a corner office prepared by EOB today.
• I don’t know what Chief Justice John Roberts will do, but it’s going to be another opportunity for him to go peak weasel.
• One unanswered question — does Dobbs apply to pregnant men?

The usual caveats about interesting times are in full effect.

Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past.
…
Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police.

-1984, George Orwell

On Wednesday at a budget hearing before the Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, DHS Secretary Mayorkas made some news in revealing a new Disinformation Governance Board. (His written testimony made no mention of it.) This came in an exchange with Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ohio). Video of the hearing is here, the exchange starts at about the 1:39:54 mark.

Underwood: Another huge threat to our homeland is mis- and disinformation. You noted that it’s a concern of yours at the border with human smuggling organizations peddling information to exploint vulnerable migrants for profit.

One of my main concerns about disinformation is that foreign adversaries attempt to destabilize our elections by targeting people of color with disinformation campaigns. After it became clear that there was more meddling in our 2016 election, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence authored a report on the disinformation tactics used by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the IRA, to interfere in the election. The report found that “no single group of Americans was targeted by the IRA information operatives more than African Americans.”

A newer trend that we saw in the 2020 election and already in the 2022 midterms is that disinformation is being heavily targeted at Spanish speaking voters, sparking and fueling conspiracy theories. DHS and its components play a big role in addressing mis- and disinformation in Spanish and other languages. Can you share what steps you’ve taken and what future plans you have to address Spanish language mis- and disinformation throug department-wide approach?

Mayorkas: Our Under-Secretary for Policy, Rob Silvers, is co-chair with our principal deputy general counsel, Jennifer Daskal, in leading a just recently constituted Disinformation Governance Board. The goal is to bring the resources of the department together to address this threat. I just read a very interesting study that underscores the importance of the point that you make, the spread of mis- and disinformation in minority communities specifically, and we are focused on that in the context of our CP3 and other efforts.

When asked about it, the odious Jen Psaki let the mask slip and mentioned COVID as a topic where the heavy hand of the government may be needed to keep the peasants in line.

“We know there has been a range of [disinformation] out there about a range of topics, I mean, including COVID for example, and also elections and eligibility,” Psaki said, adding that she would check for additional information on what the board plans to do.

The American Experiment also points out that SitD’s own Senator Klobuchar is in on the act, tackling “health misinformation.”

At a recent conference hosted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, Senator Amy Klobuchar failed to answer a reporter’s direct question about the nature of her proposed bill, the “Health Misinformation Act,” leaving open the possibility of government and bureaucratic control over what constitutes internet misinformation and who has the power to make that decision.

Sitting on a panel at the “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference on April 8, Klobuchar was asked a direct question about her proposed bill by Chicago Thinker co-founder and Managing Editor Evita Duffy: “If I were to say there are only two sexes — male and female — would that be considered misinformation that you think should be banned speech on social media platforms?” Klobuchar proceeded to give a light chuckle and insisted it pertained to vaccine misinformation during a “public health crisis.” She refused to define misinformation and the parameters under which the proposed bill’s carveout would go into effect.

Klobuchar’s bill seeks to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives internet platforms protection from civil liability for published content. The amendment creates a carveout that would strike immunity from those platforms that use algorithms promoting content and permit the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), “in consultation with the heads of other relevant Federal agencies and outside experts determined appropriate by the Secretary, shall issue guidance regarding what constitutes health misinformation…”

Klobuchar’s evasive “answer” is not surprising considering the actual language of the bill has zero mention of vaccines and fails to define “misinformation.” But this lack of specific language and purpose in the bill — despite what Klobuchar may say at a conference — is very troubling. It leaves the door open for politicians and unelected bureaucrats in public health to determine what can and cannot be promoted on sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, harnessing the power of the federal government to punish platforms disseminating speech it deems “misinformation.”

As Scott Johnson pointed out at Powerline, there is clearly a coordinated effort going on that has led to the creation of this board. In early April, at a conference entitled Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, at which Rep. Underwood was a featured speaker by the way, Barack Obama gave a lengthy address entitled “Disinformation Is a Threat to Our Democracy”. He said:

All right. With that as my starting point, I believe we have to address not just the supply of toxic information, but also the demand for it. On the supply side, tech platforms need to accept that the play a unique role in how we, as a people and people around the world, are consuming information and that their decisions have an impact on every aspect of society. With that power comes accountability, and in democracies like ours, at least, the need for some democratic oversight.

For years, social media companies have resisted that kind of accountability. They’re not unique in that regard. Every private corporation wants to do anything it wants. So, the social media platforms called themselves neutral platforms with no editorial role in what their users saw. They insisted that the content people see on social media has no impact on their beliefs or behavior — (laughter) — even though their business models and their profits are based on telling advertisers the exact opposite.
…
We do expect these companies to affirm the importance of our democratic institutions, not dismiss them, and to work to find the right combination of regulation and industry standards that will make democracy stronger. And because companies recognize the often dangerous relationship between social media, nationalism, domestic hate groups, they do need to engage with vulnerable populations about how to put better safeguards in place to protect minority populations, ethnic populations, religious minorities, wherever they operate.

For example, in the United States, they should be working with, not always contrary to, those groups that are trying to prevent voter suppression and specifically has targeted black and brown communities. In other words, these companies need to have some other North Star other than just making money and increasing market share. Fix the problem that, in part, they helped create, but also to stand for something bigger.

This announcement naturally gave rise to accusations that this board would be a new Ministry of Truth. I don’t think that is the right analogy, though. In Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Truth was the propaganda factory. It was responsible for spreading Newspeak and rewriting history.

I think a better analogy from Orwell would be the Thought Police. This organization was responsible for enforcing not only what people could say, but what they could think. It’s why the Thought Police needed to be the only effective organization. If the people are controlled, and there’s no outlet to inspire other people to action, all else falls into place.

Orwell’s insight about the Thought Police was that they knew the truth, they knew the past. They had to in order to know how to change it. Someone knew the lies, and spread them anyway.

There was no mention from Rep. Underwood about efforts to declare the Hunter Biden laptop story as disinformation, and how people and organizations have been thrown off of public platforms for mentioning it and other “unapproved” thoughts.

The threat from boards like this and where they can go isn’t that government official truly believe things such as the Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, or that Trump colluded with the Russians, or that men can be women, or that America is a systematically racist country. It’s that they know these to be lies yet spread them anyway, and worse, work to suppress your opportunities to say otherwise.

But this runnin’ with the Bidens, boy, just ain’t where it’s at:

Hunter Biden’s closest business partner made at least 19 visits to the White House and other official locations between 2009 and 2015, including a sitdown with then-Vice President Joe Biden in the West Wing.

Visitor logs from the White House of former President Barack Obama reviewed by The Post cast further doubt over Joe Biden’s claims that he knew nothing of his son’s dealings.

If Biden claims he knows nothing about such things now, I tend to believe him. He doesn’t appear to know much of anything. That ol’ historical record is an issue, though:

Eric Schwerin met with Vice President Biden on November 17, 2010 in the West Wing, when he was the president of the since-dissolved investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners.

The logs also reveal that Schwerin met with various close aides of both Joe and Jill Biden at key moments in Hunter’s life when he was striking multi-million dollar deals in foreign countries, including China. Yet President Biden has long insisted he had no involvement in his son’s foreign affairs. “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” he said in 2019.

Does Biden’s denial beggar belief? Of course. If Hunter Biden’s surname had been, I dunno, Doakes, a guy like Schwerin would have been as welcome roaming the halls of power as the guy with the facepaint and the Buffalo headgear was on Jan. 6. But as an associate of Biden the younger, he had the golden ticket. 

”Not everyone gets to meet the Vice President of the United States in the White House. The press should be asking why Hunter Biden’s business associates — like Eric Schwerin — had that privilege and were given access to the Obama White House,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin). “This is additional evidence that Joe Biden lied when he said he never discussed Hunter’s foreign business dealings. It’s well past time for the corporate media to demand the truth from Joe Biden. The corruption of Biden Inc. must be exposed.”

Strictly speaking, the logs don’t prove Biden lied, but it’s certainly the way to bet. And while Senator Johnson is correct in asserting the press ought to be asking questions, I would not count on any investigative reporting happening any time soon. There’s a lot more at the link, including this reminder of how incestuous the power structure is in Washington:

In October 2009, just months after Hunter co-founded Rosemont Seneca, Schwerin met with Evan Ryan, Vice President Biden’s assistant for intergovernmental affairs and public liaison, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building where the vice president’s office is based, according to the visitor logs.

While working in the halls of power Ryan acted as a conduit for Hunter Biden and his cronies, hard drive emails show.

Ms. Ryan is now the Cabinet Secretary for Biden. And speaking of Biden’s cabinet. . .

Ryan went on to marry Antony Blinken, who now serves as President Biden’s Secretary of State, while she herself was appointed to a plum gig as White House Cabinet Secretary in January 2021.

It’s all in the family.

SCENE: The studio at the National Public Radio Twin Cities bureau. Mitch BERG is sitting, in headphones, in front of a microphone. Around the corner of the table is Cat SCAT, designated “fact checker” at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, she is the office manager at a small phrenology practice. Through the glass, an engineer, an assistant engineer, an editor, an editorial assistant, two associate producers, a producer, a digital producer and an executive producer sit, listening intently. Across the table from SCAT and BERG sits MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER 1: “Aaand we’re rolling”.

SILBERMAN: (Reading from a script). Thanks, Kathy. That dress is adorable, by the way. Now, we look at America’s large and growing political divide. With us today are Cat Scat, Executive Fact-Checker at the journalism site “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com”, a source of journalism and news for Minnesotans since 2008.

SCAT: Hello. Is this thing on?

SILBERMAN: And Mitch Berg, blogger and talk radio host.

BERG: Uh…yeah, hi.

SILBERMAN (Still reading from script) Since 2016, concerns about the rise of authoritarianism have swept the nation…

BERG: Er, MylLyssa? That’s not true – on either side. People on the left were concerned about a rise in populism in Europe in the early 20`0s, when, rightly or wrongly, they fretted about the rise of the Volkspartei in Germany, and Victor Orban’s Fideš party in Hungary, as well as some pretty potent Polish nationalism. In the meantime, conservatives in the US have been concerned about the politicization of the state bureaucracy, with Barack Obama weaponizing some of the tools of excessive power that George W Bush instituted during his administration’s control over the War on Terror…

(BERG stops, noticing that SILBERMAN and SCAT are glaring at him).

ASSOCIATE ENGINEER: Take two?

SILBERMAN: Yep

LEAD ENGINEER: Rolling.

SILBERMAN (Still reading from script) Since 2016, concerns about the rise of authoritarianism have swept the nation. As right-wing anti-science theocrats took charge, fomenting boog bang… (stops). we’ll cut that in the edit. (deep breath) book bans, restrictions on saying “gay”, bans on reproductive rights, and a rise in hate from the right…

PRODUCER: (breaking in on the talkback): MyLyssa – read that as “skyrocketing racial hatred from red America directed at people of color and LGBTQ+ Americans.

EDITOR: …and “women and their children”.

PRODUCER: Love it. Got that, MyLyssa?

SILBERMAN: (scribbline on script) Got it.

ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Take it from “As right wing…” (SILBERMAN nods)

ASSOCIATE ENGINEER: Three, two, one…

SILBERMAN: As right-wing anti-science theocrats took charge, fomenting book bans, restridctions on saying “gay”, and skyrocketing racial hatred from red America directed at people of color, LGBTQ+ Americans and women and their children, we want to get the views of our guests – Cat Scat, progressive journalist and activist, and Mitch Berg, right wing hatemonger.

BERG: Uhhhhh

SILBERMAN: Ms. Scat, what’s your take?

SCAT: The problem entirely started in 2016, when hatemongers took over the White House, ushering in an era of hatred for people of color, for LGBTQ+, for women’s reproductive choice, for transgender and queer folk, for demoracy itself, and replacing it with a paranoid neo-nazi ammosexual delusions of a bunch of red-state trailer-park dwelling cousin-f**king high school dropouts, which studies show the majority of red America are…

BERG: I’m gonna break in, here. Your statement is the kind of lie that gets legs of its own if you let it fester. It’s a preposterous slander of tens of millions of millions of Americans; we almost invariably are motivated not by hate, but by concern over the trashing of the parts of Western Civilization that have made us not only the free-est and most prosperous society in history – one where for the firs time ever, obesity is a bigger problem than starving to death – but more humane, especially for gays, people of color, LGBTQ+ and whomever you’re concerned about, and don’t support authoritarians, ever, in any way.

PRODUCER: What can we do with that last bit.

ENGINEER: Wait one…

(freantic computer editing)

ENGINEER: OK, here’s what we got:

(BERG’s voice, edited, in the playback): “I’m gonna break…Your…legs …we… hate… the trash…of Western Civilization…obesi…gays, people of color, LGBTQ+ and whomever you’re concerned about and…support authoritarians…in any way.

SILBERMAN: So you hate people of weight as well as POC, LGBTQ+ and Latinx people…

SCAT: You’ve been fact-cjhecked!

BERG: I did in fact record the original unedited exchange on my phone and this digital recorder.

SILBERMAN: Unfair!

PRODUCER: Chilling effect on journalism!

EDITOR: Why do you hate the free press?

And SCENE

Based, loosely but not nearly loosely enough, on an MPR piece I caught last week.

Fatherhood is high on Big Left’s hit list – especially Big Feminism and Big Intersectionality. Without strong fathers, families are missing half of the behavioral background the children need to grow to be strong people.

Debasing fatherhood is key to Big Left’s crusade to “reinvent” – i.e. destroy – the nuclear family.

Ron DeSantis signed a bill designed to rehabilitate fathers in Florida. And there’s a Minnesota connection:

DeSantis signed the bill at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers training facility in Tampa, according to WTSP, noting that he put pen to paper at the team’s AdventHealth Training Center alongside former Bucs head coach Tony Dungy, who is also the spokesperson of and contributor to All Pro Dad, a national fatherhood nonprofit program that will be provided funding via grant opportunities by the bill. DeSantis said the organization uses “evidence-based parenting education.”

Dungy gave an impassioned speech as he backed the bill, saying that it will “be such a big help to fathers in Florida agencies that support fathers in Florida.” He commended DeSantis for bringing his children with him.

The program is designed to rehab fathers who’ve gotten out of jail, and whose kids are in the social-services system.

I’m waiting for Big Feminism to start with the gaslighting.

I’m also waiting for DeSantis to make them look like the yawping psychopaths they are.

DeSantis is pulling waaaay out front in my personal 2024 poll. .

Years and years ago, on a NARN broadcast at the “Back to the Fifties’ car show at the Fairgrounds, James Lileks made a point that summed up why “progressivism” is so noxious to so many people; there would, and could, never be an electric equivalent of the 1965 Ford Mustang.

Progressivism isn’t about muscle, happiness, abundance. It’s about shared misery – spreading it, virtue-signaling it (and, if you’re one of the “Big Guys”, quietly and flagrantly avoiding it). It’s no accident that it’s the “progressives” that are still wearing masks as they walk their dogs, alone, down empty streets.

The problem is, poor societies don’t solve problems. It takes prosperity to innovate. Leftists never get that.

Not everyone on the left believes in the virtue of wallowing in privation for “the common good”. Ruy Texeira – author, TED talker and public radio regular guest, who describes himself as a committed liberal – writes an excellent piece in the National Review about all the things the Democrats are getting wrong. It’s a longish and excellent read (and might require a subscription, i dunno)…

…and makes a similar point; Democrat disdain for prosperity (among the proles, at least – nobody’s coming for Zuckerberg’s spare yacht) is hurting them among the normies,

Energy is a big fault line:

Closely related to Democrats’ relative indifference to economic growth is their lack of optimism that a rapid advance and application of technology can produce an abundant future. More common is fear that a dystopian future might await us thanks to AI and other technologies. This is odd, given that almost everything ordinary people like about the modern world, including relatively high living standards, is traceable to technological advances and the knowledge embedded in them. From smartphones, flat-screen TVs, and the Internet to air and auto travel to central heating and air-conditioning to the medical devices and drugs that cure disease and extend life to electric lights and the mundane flush toilet, technology has dramatically transformed people’s lives for the better. It is difficult to argue that the average person today is not far, far better off than her counterpart in the past. “The good old days were old but not good,” as the Northwestern University economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it.

Doesn’t the Left want to make people happy? One has to wonder. They show more interest in figuring out what people should stop doing and consuming than in figuring out how people can have more to do and consume. They rarely discuss the idea of abundance, except to disparage it.

Texeira may never do lunch on Nob Hill again, but it’s worth a read.

I’m not one of those conservatives that bags on teachers as his default setting. My mother’s parents were teachers. My dad was a great teacher. My little sister teaches. Three out of four of them voted or vote GOP. Teachers are as individual as anyone else.

Now, as an example, when bad cops – corrupt sergeants, mobbed-up detectives, thumpers on patrol, sadists in squad cars – emerge, the question pops up; why don’t the good cops do something about the bad cops? Why does the “thin blue line” seem to believe standing with a bad cop is more important than good civilians?

So – let’s take that (perfectly valid) logic and apply it to teachers. Why aren’t the good ones able to do something about teachers like this?

The question is only partly rhetorical.

It’s almost impossible to put enough lipstick on the porcine Biden administration. All the polls are in the crapper and the only numbers that are going up are in the grocery aisles. Meanwhile, as Joel Kotkin notes, Biden and the rest of the party are doing their best Thelma and Louise imitation, especially where the environment is concerned: 

The cave-in to the greens has increased the Democrats’ economic vulnerability, particularly in the wake of Russian aggression and the continued role of China as the world’s dominant greenhouse-gas emitter. The well-funded American environmental elite lack the grudging sense of realism of their German counterparts, who have been forced to reconsider some of their energy policies in light of the invasion. But in resource-rich America, the green grandees still oppose boosting fossil-fuel energy supplies, despite 80 per cent of voters, and an equal percentage of Democrats, favouring the use of both fossil fuels and renewables. Public support for Net Zero / the Green New Deal hovers around 20 per cent.

You don’t want to get crosswise of the ol’ 80/20 rule, but somehow the Donks have pulled it off. And it’s got the old Clinton hands up in arms. Back to Kotkin:

Cultural issues represent another fault line between the bulk of the electorate and the tin-eared elites of the party. Democrats’ have embraced what former Bill Clinton strategist James Carville scathingly labels ‘the politics of the faculty lounge’, such as support for the increasingly discredited Black Lives Matter movement and its calls to ‘defund the police’. This idea may be beloved at places like Harvard, but among the less elevated mortals it is widely unpopular, even among minorities, including two of the nation’s Democratic African-American mayors, Houston mayor Sylvester Turner and New York City’s Eric Adams.

Voters view crime as the second-most pressing issue, after the economy and inflation. Here again the survey results are equally distressing for the progressive agenda. Voters, according to one recent survey, blame the Democrats for the current crime wave by a margin of two to one. Moderate Democrats, like retiring Florida congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, herself a refugee from Vietnam, found her support for legislation that would penalise undocumented criminals got her labeled as ‘anti-immigrant’ by the party’s dominant progressive mob.

Now it may surprise those of us in Minnesota that Black Lives Matter is increasingly discredited; Esme Murphy and the KARE Bears haven’t mentioned it much. But it should surprise no one that someone like Stephanie Murphy would lose support of the party apparat; on the bright side, she has thus far avoided being called a Russian operative, but it’s early and she might still get the full Tulsi if she’s not careful. Closer to home, it will be interesting to see how self-styled moderates like Dean “Everyone’s Invited” Phillips navigate the electorate.

There’s a long time between now and November, but it’s difficult to envision a reversal of the trends. One should never underestimate the ability of the Republican Party to blow it. Still, the Donks find events in the saddle and all the narrative engineers at their disposal can’t change the prices at Hy-Vee or Holiday. For nearly half a century, Joe Biden has wanted to be president in the worst way. And he’s getting his wish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report apparently leaked last week shows – to the surprise of nobody – that the City of Minneapolis just was n ot ready for the George Floyd riots – or much of anything else:

An independent audit of Minneapolis’ handling of protests and riots following the police murder of George Floyd found city leaders and police ignored emergency plans in place, instead making decisions on the fly, according to Council Member Robin Wonsley Worlobah, who saw a draft report.

One line in the report Wonsley Worlobah pointed to reads: “We learned that MPD does not adhere to the principles of the ICS (incident command system) but rather addresses emergencies and crises with an ad hoc command structure.”

Of course, the fact that Minneapolis wasn’t ready was on display worldwide, almost two years ago – including the fact that Minneapolis’s administration had no idea how to ask a passive-aggressive governor how to get the National Guard onto the streets.

I’ll take a moment to air this tweet, by “Dr.” Katie Knuth, 2021 Minneapolis mayoral also-ran and..

…well, we’ll delve back into her resume in a moment.

The administration has “no clue about basic emergency operations”?

Now, it seems that at one point the CIty of Minneapolis had a full-time bureaucrat, a “resiliency director”, whose vague and unaccountable brief would seem to the untrained eye to cover things like “making the city resilient”.

Now, I’m just an untrained, unlettered peasant, but one might think it’d be part of a “resiliency director’s” brief to make the city…resilient?

So who was city’s first “resiliency director”, two scant years before the riots?

Oh.

Senate majority leader Gazelka called it: the various metro teachers unions are making a grab for a chunk of the “9 billion dollar surplus”.

Erin Murphy – Senator from the mean streets of Highland Pari, and living proof that the DFL is the party of misogyny – decided to chirp:

Yeah, those damn teachers…

…who work for a system that is the biggest consumer of tax dollars in the state, whose administrative overburden is the biggest single expense, and whose union is by far, not even close, the biggest and most powerful lobbying body in the state.

Less anyone wonder why the teachers unit in Minneapolis is out on strike – besides grabbing “their share“ of the “surplus“ – their union boss spells it out pretty clearly:

At least she was honest-ish.

Minneapolis teachers will likely be walking off the job.

The timing…doesn’t seem great, from their perspective:

I think Majority Leader Gazelka got this one right:

I’m not sure there’s scientific evidence of any of these – but if someone gave me a seven figure government grant, I’m sure I could come up with some.

School Kids “Walking Out Of Class” Is Not Spontaneous: Big Left must be trying to get people to the polls in nine months; the headlines are again full of stories of teenagers “walking out of school” to “protest” “causes”.

Amazingly, there were news cameras waiting right there as they walked out of school, carrying their professionally printed signs!

Those are some pretty motivated, well-funded, well-organized high school kids!

There are, of course, exceptions.

Mascists, Lockdown Fanboys/Fangirls Will Exhibit Deep Psychological Issues When Crisis Fades: The people hectoring you about your mask at Target are having the time of their lives right now. Feeling that they’re saving lives by badgering people about masks, virtue-signalling their vaxx status, and demanding we stay the locked-down course are living out their version of fighting an existential threat – sort of like their grandfathers landing on Utah Beach, only with DoorDash bringing them Oaxacan tacos, left “safely” on their doorsteps.

And like many of those veterans, when the crisis is over, so will end The Best Years Of Their Lives.

I”m picturing a movie in ten years about the readjustment blues and trauma that “veterans” of the pandemic will feel – sort of like Coming Home, only with DoorDash bringing Oaxacan tacos.

A friend of the blog emails:

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

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

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

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

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

Last week’s kerfuffle between Spotify (and their contract employee, Joe Rogan) and Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Barry Manilow and (reportedly) Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters, may not mark the point where the iconoclasm and “rebellion” of popular music fromthe 1950s through the 2000s finally died.

But it’s certainly a waypoint on populist conservatism’s path to being the real iconoclasts.

Kid Rock wraps himself, crudely and profanely, in the Constitution in a new song aimed at the President, “woke” culture and the cancelers.

Armond White reviews it:

The strongest lyric on Kid Rock’s new single “We the People” is 235 years old: “In order to form a more perfect union / Do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”…On the day Kid Rock released his song, rock-music veteran Neil Young publicly threatened Spotify with an ultimatum: Either remove its broadcast of the political commentator and comedian Joe Rogan, or he’d remove his music from its streaming service. It’s enough to make a true rock and roller revolt…In this sudden ideological skirmish, Kid Rock wants to reclaim populism and protest against Young’s imperious assertion of authority and limited expression.

As with most things Kid Rock has done in the past three decades (but by no means all), light leaving “safe for work” right now won’t reach us for centuries. A radio edit bleeping out the profanity would sound like Morse Code.

You’ve been warned. Here goes.

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

So why are the Democrats hammering on January 6?

To draw attention away from their own hatred of self-government, of course:

Anyone say “it’s not about science, it’s about power?” Perish the thought:

– Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters would oppose a proposal for federal or state governments to fine Americans who choose not to get a COVID-19 vaccine. However, 55% of Democratic voters would support such a proposal, compared to just 19% of Republicans and 25% of unaffiliated voters.

Who are those 19% of Republicans, anyway?

Of course, that’s benign compared to some of the other things Dems favor:

– Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a proposal is opposed by 61% of all likely voters, including 79% of Republicans and 71% of unaffiliated voters.

Forget about the First Amendment…:

– Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications. Only 27% of all voters – including just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliated voters – favor criminal punishment of vaccine critics.

Hey, if reason and messaging don’t work, you can just ship ’em off to southern Idaho:

– Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a policy would be opposed by a strong majority (71%) of all voters, with 78% of Republicans and 64% of unaffiliated voters saying they would Strongly Oppose putting the unvaccinated in “designated facilities.”

Remember when people said comparing vaccinations to the Holocaust was abhorrent? Well, it still is – but a lot less so, in view of that graf.

The more you read, the. more you realize: Orwell underestimated Democrats:

– While about two-thirds (66%) of likely voters would be against governments using digital devices to track unvaccinated people to ensure that they are quarantined or socially distancing from others, 47% of Democrats favor a government tracking program for those who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine.

I swear, sometimes – if AOC called her next campaign “the Great Leap Forward”, not a single Dem would get the irony:

How far are Democrats willing to go in punishing the unvaccinated? Twenty-nine percent (29%) of Democratic voters would support temporarily removing parents’ custody of their children if parents refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine. That’s much more than twice the level of support in the rest of the electorate – seven percent (7%) of Republicans and 11% of unaffiliated voters – for such a policy.

Whenever someone chants “there’s no difference between the parties”, reference this poll.

When I was a kid, working at small-town radio stations in North Dakota, my favorite part of the job was working during tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings.

Which seems counterintuitive, perhaps – but there was something about the crackle and buzz of imporance, of purpose, in the air; the increasingly urgent National Weather service bulletins, the terse phone calls from the cops and sherif, that far more than overcame the whole “there’s a tornado coming!” thing.

And as a tall, gawky, greasy-haired, uncoordinated kid with little apparent athletic talent in a town that idolized the basketball team, it didn’t hurt that I knew, all over town, people were listening.

To me.

Of course, when the warning was over, I and the rest of Stutsman and Foster Counties went back to normal life. I didn’t keep telling people to stay in their basements when the front had passed and the warning was over. Because much as I enjoyed knowing that people were paying attention (and, more important, that I could deliver what they were tuning in for, with style), there were other things in life, and I didn’t need the state of crisis to keep giving me value.

A lot of people out there today can’t say that.

Covid has brought out a strain in a small, but socially prominent, group of people that find their self-worth in crying “Crisis!”.

Not just the media – it’s a given that they will make hay out of crises; pandemics and riots make them more relevant, just as tornados made Mitch Berg’s patter more important to more people than the usual diet of local sports and Rupert Holmes records that occupied most of my time on those stations.

No – it’s regular, workadaddy, hugamommy, usually but not always left-of-center types, for whom being the harbinger brings meaning to life.

And it’s to them that so much of Big Public Health’s narrative is aimed.

Great Twitter thread on the subject:

They – on social media, in the checkout line at Target, or in the comment section here – remind me. of the kids who ran to the teacher when someone stepped out of line when talking from the classroom to the water fountain. They got their sense of personal value from enforcing rules on others – whatever the rules, however niggling and petty and useless – back then, as now.

It’s the toxic corollary to “we’re all in this together”: the unstated “…and I’m not gonna let you forget about it!”.

Remember in the 1980s, when some “conservative” fundies rejoiced at the deaths of AIDS patients.

It was a pretty depraved stance. Everyone knows that.

Someone tell the fairly irredeemable LA Times drone Michael Hiltzik – who has reprised that particular bit of human depravity by declaring “Mocking some anti-vaxxers’ deaths is necessary“.

Helpfully, he adds “My exception applies to those who have actively undermined public health for the sake of an ideology and a culture war”.

I’m not going to extensively pull-quote the column – which is full of the sort of “two weeks to stop the virus” cheerleading that seems to have come from a CDC press release in April 2020, or from someone who thinks Gavin Newsom is on the right track.

That’s not especially remarkable.

Remarkable? Humanity is secondary to progs like Hiltzik:

It may be ghoulish to celebrate or exult in the deaths of vaccine opponents. And it may be proper to express sympathy and solicitude to those they leave behind.

But mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-COVID measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled…There may be no other way to make sure that the lessons of these teachable moments are heard.

Actually, there is another way: : stop politicizing public health. Stop spreading distrust of “the Trump Vaccine” during the elections, and then turn around and claim credit for it. Stop making “sowing controllable panic” the default setting for public health messaging. Stop being whores for the Democrats, if you’re the media.

Of course, this is more about them than – and their needs to find a scapegoat for their frustrations – than the unvaccinated.

But let’s not pretend this – mocking and giggling about opponents, on whatever issue, that die unfortunate deaths – is anything but the default setting for ghouls like Hiltzik. After watching people like him giggle and guffaw over the deaths of Tony Snow, Antonin Scalia and Rush Limbaugh, and hoot and holler for the death of Steve Scaliise, it’s a stretch to assume they have any other setting.

Sort of like guffawing about dead AIDS patents, only apparently acceptable.

According to Dana Milbank…

…dissenting from Big Left/Big Media/the Brandon administration is “fascism”..

Not sure if they’re trying to foment a civil war.

If they were, what would they be doing differently?

(And how is the Brandon Administration “salvaging democratic norms?” Labeling everyone that disagrees a “white supremacist?”)

…that a city run by Kim Norton, which has been becoming blue-er and blue-er over time, would play passive-aggressive bureaucratic pattycake games with the citizenry…

…right?

A group of parents, with a Twin Cities law firm, are asking for records related to the district’s adoption of Critical Race Theory.

And how did that go over?

“On Nov. 12, an attorney representing the district said that it would cost ‘Equality in Education’ $901,121.15 to obtain the records and they must prepay before the district completes their request,” the report reads.

The battle lines for next November could not be clearer.

…that looks at an article like this, (and, for that matter, infuriating junior-high-level behavior like this among America’s future US attorneys) cheering on the demise of regard for academia outside, well, academia, and things “More, faster, now!”.

But while it’s a fact that academia has tutyhis rned into a cesspool of leftist indoctrination, I get to this bit here (I’ve added emphasis):

Unfortunately, as we’re starting to see, there’s a bit of a pushback against that sort of thing. It’s limited, but more and more people are flocking toward non-woke entertainment. People are starting to look to the trades as an option after high school. Folks are backing laws restricting some of the leftist indoctrination on our school campuses.

Nothing wrong with looking at the trades.

But academia, worthless as it largely currently is, is of disproportionate importance in a society’s future. As Orwell said, “He who controls the future, controls the past. He who controls the present, controls the past”. Academia controls, not history, but how history is passed down to future generations; they control a disproportionate share of the cultural “present”.

And telling kids who have it in them to fight that battle, to instead go and be an apprentice electrician, is a little like Eisenhower sending the D-Day invasion ashore in New Jersey rather than Normandy. It’s a path of lesser resistance, but it doesn’t really win the war.

I suspect what society really needs is an academic equivalent to Fox News: for conservative money to go to building a classically-liberal academic system, and letting people vote with their feet.

Which is far easier said than done – but then, isn’t everything that’s worth doing?

I was told that if I voted for Donald Trump, school boards would be overrun with domestic terrorists.

And they were right.

“For those who got an issue with this critical race theory equity, this is something I fight for, for my children,” Austin reportedly said during the school board meeting . “How dare you come out here and talk about the things that my daddy and my grandparents went through,” listing things such as Jim Crow, lynchings, and the oppression…

“I’ll bring my soldiers with me next time … locked and loaded,” Austin stated as he was being escorted out of the meeting by officers. Plemmons reportedly questioned whether he had been addressing her, to which he replied, “locked and loaded.”

That’s “1,000 soldiers, locked and loaded”, coming out to defend Critical Race Theory…

…which does not exist.