I just got this from a contact of mine at UC Berkeley:
My contact asked “is that all they could find – one quote from Ben Shapiro?”
Right Now In Berkeley
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Category Archives: Big Activism
It’s Satire
Barely.
Let The Great Retraction Begin
There must have been a poll showing that voters don’t, in fact, thing of “Anti”-Fa / the “Black Bloc” as anything but a bunch of pampered snowflakes; the left is starting to distance themselves from them.
The mayor of Berkeley – which has all but packed box lunches for the Blackshirts in recent months – is suddenly talking…well, as tough as a Democrat is allowed to talk about the children of his pals:
“I think we should classify them as a gang,” said Arreguin. “They come dressed in uniforms. They have weapons, almost like a militia and I think we need to think about that in terms of our law enforcement approach.”
Arreguin said that while he does not support the far right, it was time to draw the line on the left as well, especially on the black-clad activists who showed up in force and took over both the protests and the park, and played a part in Sunday’s violent clashes.
Word has it the Blackshirts plan on “demonstrating” this Sunday at/around the State Fair. It’ll be interesting to see if the City of Saint Paul – which has, in the past, “stood down” for the children of their political superiors – will do anything.
Charlottesville Was Just The Middle Of The Story
Even Orwell couldn’t keep up with this vision of today’s American left.
Too many good quotes to even pick one. Just read it.
I’m Not Saying The Strib Editorial Board Seeks A Totalitarian Government.
I’m just saying that in the future, if some future wannabe despot wants to take over this country, suspend the Constitution and crush our freedoms without firing a shot (up front, anyway), he’ll need a society full of people who “think” like the Strib editorial board to have a chance of succeeding. r
They want the President to stop having rallies like last week’s event in Phoenix – for everyone’s best interest:
These campaign-style rallies serve little practical purpose with the next presidential election not until 2020. Instead, they unnecessarily stoke anger and division at a volatile time, with the rally locations attracting the violence-prone on all sides of the political spectrum.
Well, no. For the past year and a half, they have drawn unstable, violence-prone, Urban-Progressive-Privilege-sotted “Anti”-Fa blackshirts. Lately, to be sure, they’ve drawn people on the other side who’ve come to aggressively defend themselves. What, you expect people to stand still while they’re being gassed and clubbed for exercising their rights?
Clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters have already left one woman dead. It is only by the grace of God that more people didn’t die in Charlottesville. Or that violence didn’t spiral out of control during another gathering last Saturday in Boston.
Excluse my middle English, but bullshit. All the violence in Boston was on the left. Thousands of drooling scumbags descended on an expressly peaceful event that specifically excluded and condemed “white supremacists”. Boston was a monument to the spoiled entitlement of Big Left and its idiot children – which is why it’s disappeared from the media.
It’s just common sense to let these tensions settle down and, until then, not offer up another obvious gathering point for extremists itching for action. President Trump should have recognized this before Tuesday’s rally, but making his way through the large, tense and often heavily armed crowd in Phoenix should have really driven that point home. Thankfully, there were no serious injuries Tuesday, but the event clearly strained local law enforcement’s capacity.
Look at the bright side; being a Red area, at least the cops in Phoenix showed up.
My suspicion; Big Media is decreasingly able to cover up the depravity of its nephews and nieces in the extreme left.
News Conferences I’d Love To See. And Participate In.
SCENE: Press conference where a Free Speech Rally is being announced for the Minnesota state capitol grounds. A group of reporters is questioning the organizers of the rally – Madison JAMES, Tyrone JEFFERSON, and Jorge WASHINGTON.
WASHINGTON: …So to sum up, we will hold our Free Speech rally at precisely noon. We have our permit, and we are ready to stand up for the free speech rights of all Minnesotans and all Americans.
JEFFERSON: Even those we don’t agree with.
JAMES: We’ll now take questions. (Sees hands rising, points to a sallow endomorph in his late forties with severe acne). Yes.
REPORTER 1: I’m Edmund DuChey, from “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com”. So your rally of Nazis and White Supremacists…
WASHINGTON: Yeah, you can stop right there. As noted before, this rally specifically denounces the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and everyone who would actively curtail the rights of others based on their ethnicity, religion or anything else.
JAMES: And we’ve specifically disinvited them from the rally, and are ready to enforce that.
JAMES: Next question.
REPORTER 2: Walter Lennon-Marks from Minnesota Public Radio. I notice that you have not disinvited people who plan on carrying firearms, concealed or openly, from the rally.
JEFFERSON: That’s correct.
LENNON-MARKS: Don’t you find that intimidates other speech?
WASHINGTON: I find that it most definitely intimidates those who would threaten our rally with violence like “Anti”-Fa did in San Francisco.
JEFFERSON: Or those who would act on those threats, as “Anti”-Fa did in Boston, and clearly plan to elsewhere. Inducing them to keep their speech non-violent is a feature, not a bug.
JAMES: Next question?
REPORTER 3: Yes – Yvette Stahlen from the Star Tribune. Why do all three of you make the scare quotes with your fingers whenever you say the “anti” in “Antifa?”
WASHINGTON: Because they are “against fascism” in exactly the same way the Bloods are against the Crips, or the Gambinos were “against” the Luccheses. These are two sides of the same noxious, anti-democratic, anti-freedom, pro-totalitarian coin.
STAHLEN: But my editors’ oldest daughter is a member of Antifa, and has been ever since zhe graduated from Oberlin.
WASHINGTON: (Walks down from the stage with a microphone, hands it to STAHLEN). Here.
STAHLEN: What do you want me to do with this.
WASHINGON: Drop it for me. I couldn’t possibly have ended this better than you did.
(And SCENE)
Charlottesville = Gliwice?
It’s not quite a Berg’s Law, but it’s getting close; if violence breaks out between the left and the right, and the media claims not to know who started it? The left started it. And if they claim the right started it, without absolute dead to rights evidence? The left started it.
Maybe a corollary to Berg’s Seventh Law.
Was Charlottesville painstakingly engineered by Charlottesville’s Democrat government? .
Maybe. I am not quite ready to nail this down into the “Setup” category – I’d like some on-the-record sources.
But as Joe Doakes noted the other day, the “Anti”-Fa had a demonstration permit – that they had to violate to attack the “White Supremacists”, who were apparently in their permitted area. Because that’s why they give out permits for demonstrations; to keep them apart.
So if “Anti”-Fa had a permit, they broke the rules to get to the “White Supremacists”. And if they didn’t, they broke the rules to get to the “White Supremacists”.
Rebooting Berkeley
This email was circulated at Berkeley earlier this week, according to an acquaintance of mine:
“Dear Students, Faculty and Staff,This fall, the issue of free speech will once more engage our community in powerful and complex ways. Events in Charlottesville, with their racism, bigotry, violence and mayhem, make the issue of free speech even more tense. The law is very clear; public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view. The United States has the strongest free speech protections of any liberal democracy; the First Amendment protects even speech that most of us would find hateful, abhorrent and odious, and the courts have consistently upheld these protections.But the most powerful argument for free speech is not one of legal constraint—that we’re required to allow it—but of value. The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university. The philosophical justification underlying free speech, most powerfully articulated by John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty, rests on two basic assumptions. The first is that truth is of such power that it will always ultimately prevail; any abridgement of argument therefore compromises the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. The second is an extreme skepticism about the right of any authority to determine which opinions are noxious or abhorrent. Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it.Berkeley, as you know, is the home of the Free Speech Movement, where students on the right and students on the left united to fight for the right to advocate political views on campus. Particularly now, it is critical that the Berkeley community come together once again to protect this right. It is who we are.Nonetheless, defending the right of free speech for those whose ideas we find offensive is not easy. It often conflicts with the values we hold as a community—tolerance, inclusion, reason and diversity. Some constitutionally-protected speech attacks the very identity of particular groups of individuals in ways that are deeply hurtful. However, the right response is not the heckler’s veto, or what some call platform denial. Call toxic speech out for what it is, don’t shout it down, for in shouting it down, you collude in the narrative that universities are not open to all speech. Respond to hate speech with more speech.We all desire safe space, where we can be ourselves and find support for our identities. You have the right at Berkeley to expect the university to keep you physically safe. But we would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous. We must show that we can choose what to listen to, that we can cultivate our own arguments and that we can develop inner resilience, which is the surest form of safe space. These are not easy tasks, and we will offer support services for those who desire them.This September, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos have both been invited by student groups to speak at Berkeley. The university has the responsibility to provide safety and security for its community and guests, and we will invest the necessary resources to achieve that goal. If you choose to protest, do so peacefully. That is your right, and we will defend it with vigor. We will not tolerate violence, and we will hold anyone accountable who engages in it.We will have many opportunities this year to come together as a Berkeley community over the issue of free speech; it will be a free speech year. We have already planned a student panel, a faculty panel and several book talks. Bridge USA and the Center for New Media will hold a day-long conference on October 5; PEN, the international writers’ organization, will hold a free speech convening in Berkeley on October 23. We are planning a series in which people with sharply divergent points of view will meet for a moderated discussion. Free speech is our legacy, and we have the power once more to shape this narrative.Sincerely,Carol ChristChancellor”
In between the lines, it looks like the Chancellor is trying to reboot Berkeley’s policy to disallow violent suppression of dissenting opinions. This is a marked contrast from the University’s behavior over the winter.
Of course, the real bellwether would be “how do the campus’s tiny conservative minority fare in day to day interactions”. That’s the part I’m most intrested in.
But it’ll be interesting to see if this announcement is followed up with effective execution – and if any other schools follow suit.
Punch Back
The builders of the Dakota Access Pipeline are suing the racket of “environmental” groups that spent half a year obstructing their work:
From last summer through the first couple of months of 2017 there was an all-out assault on the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Protesters, summoned to rural south central North Dakota by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a myriad of environmental groups, blocked roads and set fires and harassed pipeline workers all in an attempt derail the project.
It didn’t work. Oil flows through the Dakota Access Pipeline today, but the State of North Dakota did run up a $38 million bill for the law enforcement response.
Anyway, today Energy Transfer Partners (the company behind DAPL) filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing some of the environmental groups involved in the protests of racketeering.
For all the fawning coverage MInnesota Public Radio gave the protests and protesters, I’m almost amazed they weren’t named as co-respondents.
Tribes
I’ve run into some people since the Charlottesville episode who’ve been rationalizing “Anti”-Fa; basically, the line is “they’re thugs, but they’re thugs who beat up people I don’t like”.
I’m not saying people who believe this are people who want to bring on tyranny.
Just that any tyrant is going to need society to have a lot of people like them around to have a chance of taking over.
So Much Work To Be Done
So many statues out there – ergo, so much triggering.
As Big Left prowls the country looking for history that “triggers” them and must be destroyed [1], it’s probably worth pitching in and helping findi more history that needs to be expunged.
Exhuming McCarthy: much has been made of the statue of Lenin in, where else, Seattle:
Leftover “art” from some misbegotten WPA project from hell?
No – a labor of “love” in the full Orwellian sense of the term; from Wikipedia:
Lewis E. Carpenter, an English teacher in Poprad originally from Issaquah, Washington, found the monumental statue lying in a scrapyard ready to be sold for the price of the bronze; Carpenter had met and befriended Venkov while in Czechoslovakia. In close collaboration with a local journalist and good friend, Tomáš Fülöpp, Carpenter approached the city officials with a claim that despite its current unpopularity, the sculpture was still a work of art worth preserving, and he offered to buy it for $13,000.[1] After many bureaucratic hurdles, he finally signed a contract with the mayor on March 16, 1993.[4]
With the help of Venkov, the statue was cut into three pieces and shipped to the United States at a total cost of $40,000.[1] Carpenter financed much of that via mortgaging his home
The architect of a kleptocratic thugocracy that murdered tens of millions of people over seventy years? I’m #triggered! Break out the tow cables and the blowtorches!
But we’re not done expunging Communism’s murderous legacy. The Minnesota State Capitol is crowded with paintings and sculptures of people who were figures in the “Farmer Labor” Party, and the early years of the merger between them and the Democrats to form the “DFL”.
The Farmer-Labor, as well as the DFL it joined, was expressly pro-communist. The new party inherited the FLP’s support for the USSR and Josef Stalin. The infant DFL, in other words, supported the party of the Holodomor, of the Gulag, of the Purge.
It’s time to rid our state of this noxious legacy of genocide. I suggest a painting-burning and smashing.
Politically Incorrect: Next, it’s time to address statues and other public art that pays omage to a Christianist preacher who was a very powerful spokesperson against gay marriage – one whose influence among opponents to gay marriage today is too huge to calculate; one who, were he alive today, would be railing against same sex marriage with a fluency and authenticity today’s speakers can only dream about.
That anti-gay bigot?
Martin Luther King!
His failure to support gay marriage – presaging the mass dissent from most black Christian ministers, even today-
Can this be allowed?
Proxy War
At Berkeley, police stood down as the Blackshirts attacked conservative events – twice.
At Middlebury College in Vermont, police stood idly by as “Anti”-fascists attacked a conservative speaker and one of their own professors.
And in Charlottesville last weekend, the police were given a “Stand Down” order, (by a mayor who condemned the permitted protesters, but pointedly refused to address the Blackshirts) allowing the Blackshirts to attack a “white supremacist” rallly with impunity
Nope – nobody dare suggest that Big Left is all about getting and holding power. Perish the thought.
Telegraphing
To: Minnesota Public Radio News
From: Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re: Your Teaser This Morning
Heard on MPR’s morning edition: Cathy Wurzer blurbs to tease an upcoming story: “Will an Embridge pipeline in Northern Minnesota become the next Standing Rock?”
Given MPR’s connections to the Twin Cities’ Big Environmentalist Left, you’ll pardon me if it sounds like:
- Big Environmentalism and Big Protest have been planning to make this pipeline “the next Standing Rock” for some time.
- MPR, being tied into the same Twin Cities “progressive” non-profit circles as Big Environment and Big Protest, knows this fully well.
- Standing Rock was good business for MPR. Their reporters had constant access to the Standing Rock site, and responded with what sounded to this listener like an awful lot of sympathetic puff-piece coverage. MPR News and APM would no doubt love to have another story like it to fill this long slow, election-free summer.
Of course it’s going to be “like Standing Rock”. And I’m pretty sure everyone that matters at MPR already knows it, is planning for it, and started booking hotel rooms up amid the jackpines long before Wurzer’s teaser was written.
I mean, am I wrong?
That is all.
Mission Accomplished, Dumb*sses
It’s 2009.
Barack Obama is president – elected in part by a biblical wave of support from black voters and novelty in the general election, and identity-mongering in the primaries.
You’re a Democrat strategist, planning ahead to the next two elections. You need to keep women – Hillary Clinton voters – engaged enough to vote for Obama again in four years. Child’s play; engineered a fake “war on women” and assign the media to run it. Which they will. They always do what you tell them. It doesn’t always work – NPR was trying to make “Occupy” a thing for a solid year after the last rat-infested rape camp was carted to the landfill – but often enough, it gets the ignorant riled up enough to move the dial.
But look ahead four more years. Obama will be termed out. The Democrat bench is painfully shallow; the buffoon Biden, Fauxcahontas, the photogenic failure Martin O’Malley, and a few other governors that (you can’t possibly know or believe, yet) will be turned out of office next year…and the donkey in the room, the inevitable Hillary Clinton.
Who you gonna call?
Of course Hillary’s the front-runner. She’s been painstakingly grooming herself and building a machine since 1998; but for the tsunami of identity that carried the freshman Senator Obama into office, she’d likely have already been president already.
But – but, you think she’s going to be like 200 years old in 2016.
So how do you get a tsunami of African-Americans to turn out in the same kind of numbers for a geriatric honky?
Create a race relations crisis, and send the order down the chain of command to the mainstream media to create a national issue of it. Then, exploit it with a presidential campaign that was about virtually nothing but identity politics.
Well, as re the crisis, it’s mission accomplished:
Unfortunately (for Hillary), the relentless identity-mongering backfired, turning blue-collar honkies into an identity group in its own right.
And so today we have Hillary still out of office, a lingering race relations crisis that’s killing hundreds of people a year in our inner cities…
…and a media awaiting orders for the next national politically-based squirrel chase.
Fierce
Not long after the inauguration, when Big Feminism threw their nationwide “Women’s March” in media centers around the country, I heard the usual suspects hyperventilating about all the “strong, fearless, powerful women” who were converging for the marches.
Of course, I saw episodes like t his…
…and observed that it’s always the “feminists” – male and female – who jabber the hardest about how strong, fearless, powerful and “fierce” they are that are the first do dive into ofay ad hominem babble (“your male privilege…”, “mansplaining”) if you dare dissent from their current gospel in any way.
(I was also tempted to find some of those precious little snowflakes and ask them if they though they could last twenty minutes in my grandmother’s shoes; she, who raised my dad by herself while running a photography studio, in a small town, during WW2? I think not).
David French on feminism’s new shiny toy, the “Fierce Girl”:
We are living in the age of the fierce girl. That’s the new feminist ideal. Do you want to make online feminists furious? Just try writing a television or movie script that even implies that “damsels in distress” need any man to rescue them from danger. No indeed. The modern female action star can take down any number of burly men. Doubt me? Watch Charlize Theron destroy man after man in this trailer for Atomic Blonde.
It’s modern feminism, telling modern women what they must do and be with their newfound “choice”.
Lie First, Lie Always: The Anti-Gun Amateur Hour
Earlier this morning at the House Public Safety Committee hearings on the “Stand your Ground” billl, a “pro-bill” testifier erupted in a caracature of a pro-Trump, white supremacist tirade; at one point, he reportedly said it was time for gun owners to return to “lynching” people.
Then he got up and walked out.
He’s utterly unknown to Minnesota’s close-knit 2nd Amendment activist community.
The moment I saw the photo (a screen grab from video), that voice in my head that monitors stereotypes screamed “Carlton graduate and non-profiteer paid to be a false-flagger”.
Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.
“He” registered for the event as “Ross Koon”
And, sure enough, searching for “Russ Koon” leads you to a Facebook profile.
And here’s his publicly-visible post:
So he misrepresented himself about being a pro-gunner, and his “testimony” was a “satirical” sham designed to defame people he pretty much hates.
That’s pretty much the whole story, right?
Of course not. Anti-gun ghoul Joan Peterson tweeted instantly:
Coincidence that the doyenne of Minnesota criminal-safety is right there ready to go with a tweet in support of this bit of “satire?”
But that’s just a clenched old liberal exercising her penchant for overheated hypberbole – right?
Of course not. Mr. Koons’ pro-criminal-safety pedigree goes back a ways. Turns out Mr. Koon’s mother is one Mary Koon. And Mary Koon is a pastor at ultra-liberal Oak Grove Presbyterian Church, and publicly lists as her “likes”…
…Moms Want Action.
(“But” you might say, “that doesn’t make her a member!”. Perhaps. On the other hand, it’s pretty much all you need to do to be counted as a member, so we’ll run with it).
So let’s sum it up:
- The scion of one of Minnesota’s white, privileged “elite” liberal families lied about his personal beliefs, in order to…
- Slander gun owners in front of the legislature, and did it…
- …with the obvious, full knowledge of Minnesota’s anti-gun/pro-criminal-safety “elite”.
This was just the most egregious episode in a hearing where the anti-gunners essentially beclowned themselves, treating the hearings like a private flash mob.
Keep up the good work, Reverend Bence!
(Thanks to the crew from MNGOC for all the research on this post)
UPDATE: From a witness:
He didn’t immediately leave the building. I watched him get hugs and attaboys from several of the anti-gunners present, including the lady in charge of handing out red Everytown shirts.
This was no random happenstance.
Leftist Justice – Saint Paul Style
Last weekend, a group of “anarchists” attacked a pro-Trump rally at the Minnesota State Capitol. Thugs wearing helmets and masks sucker-punched and kicked unsuspecting peaceful demonstrators, and in one case sprayed mace into a crowd of people.
It was not a spontaneous event; they were quite obviously organized, equipped, and had planned for the event.
They sprayed what was described as “Bear Mace” into a crowd of unsuspecting people – which can easily be a lethal weapon for people with respiratory conditions. There were six arrests.
The entire fracas was caught on film, in front of dozens of witnesses. There is not problem showing the violence, brutality and intent of the event.
No matter. They are aligned with the left against the right. And in Saint Paul, that’s license to block streets, clog freeways…
…and now, to physically attack people with potentially lethal force. Ramsey County has declined to charge the arrested protesters – four boys and two girls – with anything.
Monday, the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office said there were insufficient facts to prove felony-level riot. The attorney’s office said State Patrol has presented the case to the St. Paul City Attorney’s Office for consideration of misdemeanor charges.
That is bullshit, stacked high and deep.
If it were a bunch of rednecks from Isanti County who’d maced the “Womens’ March” a couple weeks ago, they’d still be in jail.
Look at the boys and girls who were arrested. Check out the names: Anton. Isabell. Linwood. Those are upper-middle-class white kid names. Breck School names. Names that drive Subarus until they get a Volvo. Names like the children of John Choi’s law school classmates and Chris Coleman’s Crocus Hill and Kenwood cronies have.
It’s the special, deluxe, “for progressives only” justice, part of the “progressives only” school, university, public sector union and non-profit parallel universe of power and privilege that the Big Left in Minnesota gets.
UPDATE: I’ve seen reports that Linwood Kaine is the son of Hillary Clinton’s VP candidate.
Well, I’m gonna guess there were some lawyers involved, huh?
Shame In? Shame Out!
THEM: “The only reason you didn’t vote for Obama was because he’s black!”
US: “Er, yeah, right. Because if a while socialist were running or office, I’d vote for him because he was white. Right? That’s freaking ingenious! You must be one of those ‘smart liberals’ everyone keeps talking about”.
THEM: “The alt-right is an outlet for White America’s endemic racism”.
US: “The “white supremacist right” is a fraction of the size it was 25-35 years ago – but has suddenly gotten a surge in mainstream media coverage. So the “white supremacist right” is really more of an outlet for the Big Left’s hatred of Middle America, and a clumsy, Alinskyite attempt to frame Middle America. But keep trying, genius”.
THEM: “You’re insensitive to the plight of transsexuals and gays”
US: “I’m a working stiff who has to bang out all kinds of overtime to break even. I don’t have time to be ‘sensitive’ to my own sexuality, ifyacatchmydrift, much less anyone else’s. Carry on your little tantrum elsewhere, snowflake.
THEM: “Stand your Ground’ allows white people to kill black people, no questions asked”.
US: “Riiight. Go buy a gun, go to Florida, kill a black kid at random, plead ‘I don’t like hoodies’, and see what happens. Wave ‘hi’ from the electric chair, genius. ”
THEM (in this case, a woman with a German last name playing at being Native American): “Have some Brawndo, Christianists. You won’t be happy until the earth is dead and cold”.
US: “Reel it in, lapsed-Catholic-with-Daddy-issues playing Native American dress-up. Pollution is a fraction of what it was 40 years ago, at least here. But science is hard, isn’t it?”
THEM: “HItler was elected. Just like Trump!”
US: “No. Hitler was elected, just like Al Capone was elected. Learn your history, you gabbling illiterate”.
Tired of being “shamed” by our society’s useless yellow buildup of Social Justice warriors?
As Glenn Reynolds says, it’s ‘time to punch back twice as hard.
Field Recognition Guide
When I saw that Democrat protesters – led, inevitably, by paid activist shills – were howling and stomping at Republican town hall meetings, I knew it was a matter of time before our dimbulb media started making comparisons with the Tea Party.
So with two “Tea Parties” floating around, how can you tell the difference?
Never let it be said I’m not here to help. Here’s the Shot In The Dark “Tea Party Field Recognition Guide.
| If the “Tea Party” event you’re watching is: | Then it is: |
| Large, organic, and animiated but well-mannered | A conservative Tea Party |
| Foul-mouthed, vituperative and rife with threats (whether verbalized or not) | A liberal “Tea Party” |
| Leaves the protest site a mess choked with trash and debris | A liberal “Tea Party” |
| Leaves the place neater than when they showed up: | A conservative Tea Party. |
| Is attended by leftist ringers with racist signs and t-shirts parading in front of a (let’s be charitable) gullible media | A conservative Tea Party |
| A challenge to the GOP | A conservative Tea Party |
| Indistinguishable from the Democrat Party, because it’s a paid offshoot of the Democrat Party | A liberal “Tea Party” |
Hope that helps!
Do You Remember…
…when being against the sitting Administration meant you were either a paranoid whackdoodle or a racist…
…rather than a self-styled and media-ordained swashbuckler?
Yelling And Breaking Things
I’ve been writing this blog for fifteen years. In that time, I’ve written something like 20,000 posts. I’ve written about a lot of topics, of course – but there’ve been some recurring themes.
Liberalism is bad for children and other living things. The right to keep and bear arms is key among the things that separates citizens from subjects. The less centralized authority is, the better. The justification for “elites” being “elite” fades rapidly over intellectual generations.
And the Star/Tribune editorial board is a bunch of out-of-touch upper-middle-class patricians with little comprehension of the political world since Walter Mondale left office.
And I’m unlikely to change that any time soon.
But like the proverbial blind squirrel, they get one right once in a while, in their piece giving grudging support – the same grudging support I give – to increasing the penalties for blocking freeways during protests:
Blocking a freeway or a train track goes beyond peaceful protest. Those are inherently aggressive acts, designed to trigger a confrontation with law enforcement. They pose an immediate hazard to the protesters and motorists, as well as law enforcement.
The Legislature must be mindful of the right to peaceful protest, and of the danger in ignoring the concerns of those who feel aggrieved. But protesters must recognize they do not have a right to jeopardize the safety of others.
They’re pretty close, here. Earlier in the piece, they say:
Any law that seeks to restrict the right to protest must strike a careful balance that preserves public safety, without trammeling on the right to speak against perceived injustice.
As Walter Hudson points out, there is no “balance” between freedom and criminal behavior.
If this particular reform doesn’t pass, though, I’d like to propose a further, different reform. Currently, the “right” to block freeways is entirely contingent on a group’s level of favor with Betsy Hodges’ and Chris Coleman’s administrations. Both need to stay cuddled up to the far left – so Black Lives Matter has carte blanche.
So I say go ahead – let people protest on the freeways. But require a permit, same as any other protest that impacts the public – not to censor the event, but to allow people notice. And require them to be issued to everyone.
No. Everyone.
So if the pro-lifers think they’d draw attention to their cause by protesting on the main arterials leading into Kenwood, Crocus Hill, Nicollet Island and Edina, keeping the DFL’s grandées from getting from their non-profits to their feminist drum circle meetings, they’d be able to do it, too. They can check their Urban Liberal Privilege!
It’s a plan B.
Answers
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I’m glad the women had fun marching, nice weather for it. But I remain unclear on what it’s all about or why I should care.
Votes for women? Already have them but don’t bother to use them, which is why Trump won.
Equality? So, what, end affirmative action for women in education and employment? I’m okay with that.
Abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, presumption of custody, mandatory child support, homosexual marriage, vigorous prosecution of sexual assault and domestic abuse . . . already have all that.
Look, I’m all in favor of ending oppression but you’ve got to give me a hint, here. How, exactly, are American women oppressed and what, specifically, must be done to end it? Mansplain it to me, please. I seriously want to know: what do women want?
Joe Doakes
My hunch – and it’s just a hunch? It’s the Democrat party trying to whip up support / hysteria as a hedge against complete electoral catastrophe in 2018, and beyond that to gin up support for a field likely to be led by another geriatric white ultraliberal in 2020.
When Narratives Collapse
Donald Trump, as I’ve noted on my show more than a few times, is not only more gay-friendly than any of the Republicans in the 2016 field, but was in fact more consistently pro-gay longer than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were:
On gay-related issues, the news media couldn’t have picked a Republican president more in sync with their views than Donald Trump.
But the country isn’t dealing with a rational press right now.
The GOP was stuck on gay stuff until a New Yorker came along and cleared the field for them by saying he was not only “fine” with same-sex marriage but also by actively embracing gays in a bigger way than President Obama did.
Meanwhile, Trump, having grown up in the most diverse city in the world, is an outcast among the gay-supporting national media.
In a cover piece for Newsweek in 2012, Andrew Sullivan dubbed Obama “the first gay president.”He also choked up on national television, calling Obama a “father figure” because he said he supported gay marriage.
Obama’s main claim to gay celebrity was changing his mind on marriage. He opposed same-sex marriage before he was first elected in 2008 and then he came to support it before his second term. (By the way, the Supreme Court handled the dirty work, Obama simply nodded in approval.)
Trump was not the first to support gay marriage, but he did a lot. After the mass terror shooting on the Orlando gay nightclub in June, he did what no other Republican would have ever done. He called it an attack on “the members of Orlando’s LGBTQ community” and said the tragedy was done “in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens because of their sexual orientation.”
In July, Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and a big Trump supporter, was the first person ever to declare on stage at the Republican National Convention that he’s “proud to be gay.”
Further proof that the left’s narrative is:
- Entirely left over from 2006, down to the last specious “Hitler” reference.
- Aimed at gullible non-critical thinkers – whose votes, let’s never forget, count just as much as those of smart, curious people with functioning BS detectors.
I’m amazed it didn’t work last November.
When Narratives Are Relentlessly Reinforced
Back during the glory days of the Tea Party, we – the good guys – were famous, among other things, for leaving the sites of our demonstrations cleaner than they were when we arrived. It was a bit of a point of pride…
…especially when compared with the rat-infested rape camps of the media darlings of the “Occupy” movement.
Last weekend’s “Bernie Bro Women’s March against Trump” continued the narrative:
Not sure where this was taken – i got it off social media – but on a deeper level, it doesn’t matter. The “protests” of the Big Left are all centrally planned, and are about as regionally unique as McDonalds’ french fries.
Does it ever fail? No. Not really.
Open Letter To Those Who Just Don’t Get It Yet
To: Some Of You Trump Opponents Out There
From: Mitch Berg, Ornery Peasant
Re: Terminology
Dear Hollywood and New York Showbiz and Media “Elites”
As we come up on inauguration day, some of you are still sore about Donald Trump. I get it. I mean, I didn’t vote for him, either.
You’d like to pretend he’s not your president. Yadda yadda. Whatever. Gotcha. It’s a free country (and will stay that way, so quit your whining), so you can say what you want, and I can mock you for it. But relax; I’m not mocking you for that. Not now.
No, this is worse.
It’s come to my attention that some of you Hollywood types are calling yourselves “the Resistance”.
Stop. Now.
You are among the wealthiest, most privileged, most untouchable residents in one of hte wealthiest, most privileged parts of the wealthiest and free-est society in the world. You lost an election. In four years, you’ll get a rematch (although the way you all are going at this point, most of you will stroke out by mid-terms). And you will get the rematch; there’ll be no dictatorships, no camps, no nothing. Why, I bet a President Trump won’t even jabber about siccing the Federal Elections on your blogs, or turn a politicized IRS and DHS loose on your political movements, the way Obama did for eight years. Our democratic process, imperfect as it is, will go on, and if you don’t go full-blown Joan Crawford on us, you might have a shot, again, someday, God help us all.
So stop using – I believe the term these days is “Appropriating” – the term “Resistance”. That’s a term used by people who had actual skin in the game; the Jews who, as disarmed as you want us all to be, fought back against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto; the Norwegians who overcame the impossible and destroyed the Nazi nuke program; the Polish fighters who rose and took Warsaw, only to be betrayed by one dictator and hunted down like rats by another; the Danes who, the risk of a summary execution hanging over their heads, snuck their nation’s Jews out to safety; people who, with all hope extinguished, still pulled together and rose up and, mostly, died, but gave their tormentors and murders and bloody nose and, in a few cases, against higher odds than Michael Moore winning the NYC Marathon, survived the war to witness against their captors.
Real people, who left behind whatever hadn’t been taken from them, and fought a real enemy who promised to kill them and their families if they failed.
Not overpaid, plushbottom Hollywood prima-donnas upset that they can’t install their choice of president by coup now that the hoi polloi have rejected their candidate.
Here’s my promise to you; call yourselves “the resistance” to my face, and I will spit in yours.
That is all.