This Is Today’s DFL

Christians are the same as slaveholders.

No, that’s what Rep. Luke Frederick of Mankato says:

He’s responding to an amendment that would protect churches and their members freedom of conscience about transgender issues.

The MNDFL is at war with the Constitution.

UPDATE: Harry Niska sums up the, er, debate:

I’ll be talking with Rep. Niska on the NARN tomorrow.

Urban Progressive Privilege: Clouds Of Smug Descend

“Art” as humanity used to know it is pretty much dead, at least in any community of people who call themselves “artists” anymore.

This was from a, for lack of a better term, “art event” in Powderhorn Park over the weekend:

Ignore the stupid sled.

Look, rather, at the audience. What do you see?

Inevitably, they are smug, corn-fed, entitled, white progressive members of the laptop class and the non-profit/industrial complex – no doubt from “Urban Life” theme parks like Marcy Holmes or Merriam Park, larping it up as “art fans” in Powderhorn, the part of Minneapolis that smug progressives go to when they want to be “down with the neighborhood” (before they scamper back home to where all the barristas and short order brunch technicians have to commute to from Fridley and Brooklyn Center).

The MPD has condemned the display – which, I’m sure, is causing all sorts of nasal snorking over lattes this morning.

And why not? It’s not their stores being cleaned out (none of them as any concept of the free market more involved than a coffee shop), not their cars being jacked (does anyone actually steal electric cars?), not them waking up to bullet holes in their siding.

Here’s hoping every last one of these cretins needs a cop sometime soon.

Who knows? Sometimes even Progressives can learn something.

Compromise

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.

Urban Progressive Privilege: Peak Karen

Henco is going to have a “contested” County Commission race, where “contested” means “a battle between bad, worse and worst” .

I think the found ‘worst”.

People inexperienced in the ways of Metro “progressives” might joke “I wonder if she’s going to put “Irritating people into behavioral change” into her campaign literature, yuk yuk”.

To those who know the breed, it’s not a joke. The suburban white upper-middle-class “progressive” seeks out different flavors of trite masochism and whiffle-ball self-abnegation – paying for bags, making “stolen land declarations”, putting up “In This House” signs – that have little financial and no moral cost, to signal dubious but convenient virtue to the less englightened.

I bet she wins.

Unexpectedly

With great fanfare, Minneapolis and Saint Paul raised their minimum wages to $15 an hour. 

And now, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve says the policy has done…well, exactly what every conservative said it would do:  

 Pay is up 1% among those with jobs – but 2% fewer are employed as a direct result of the policies, and that’s just scratching the surface (emphasis added):

Many economists have reached similar conclusions about minimum wage increases in the past. Still, the size of the impacts the researchers measured — by comparing Minneapolis and St. Paul to data culled from other Minnesota cities from 2017 through 2021 — were eye-popping, especially in low-wage industries.

Take Minneapolis’ retail sector, for example: The minimum wage increase led to 28% fewer retail jobs than researchers would’ve expected from a similar city during the same five-year period. By this comparison, Minneapolis also saw a 20% drop in hours worked and a 13% dip in aggregate worker earnings.

Across St. Paul’s restaurant industry, the city’s 2018 minimum wage hike was responsible for drying up nearly one-third of available jobs, the study found. In “limited-service” (fast food) restaurants, both hours and earnings fell by more than half after the increase took effect.

“Good, they’re mostly terrible jobs anyway” say the white progressives from the non-profit/government/industrial complex. They re literally spinning this as good news – or excuses for more programs.

It’s possible that Big Left isn’t pushing these minimum wages as a way to gut opportunity for entry level workers. But if it were, I’m at a loss for what they’d do differently.

Urban Progressive Privilege: Sign O The Times

The Strib finally hired a new editorial cartoonist to replace the worthless and unlamented Steve Sack.

It’s Mike Thompson.

And he’s brought a new sound to Minneapolis.

No, not the popping of the Glock full-auto conversion.

It’s the wailing and gnashing of entitled, plush-bottom, White progressive Minneapolis Yoo-hoos losing their spit over being lampooned by an editorial cartoonist.

They have no frame of reference. Modern MSM editorial cartoons have all the intellectual diversity of The Colbert Show or NPR.

So the calls for “canceling” Thompson have already started.

It’ll be interesting to see if Thompson is forced to repent of his sins.

Urban Progressive Privilege: Our Vacuous Overlords

I’ve listened to a lot of vapid, trite radio in my life.

Janeane Garofalo’s attempt at a talk show. Most any “audio essay” by David Sedaris. Just about every local show on AM950, from Nick Coleman and Wendy Wilde and Two Putt Tommy and Steve Timmer through Bart McNeil or whatever his name is. Lots of dreadful stuff.

But I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything quite this stomach-pumpingly vacuous as this two year old episode of “Radiolab”, an NPR podcast [1] which combines an oppressive amount of cutesy sound editing with a programming lineup that captures all of the lows of “This American Life” with none of TAL’s occasional highs.

it’s a rebroadcast [2] from a couple of years ago, when the Covid pandemic had come and gone for most of America, but was still leaving the world a Camusian hellscape for the organically-fed fashionably angsty member of the Laptop Class that work for and listen to National Public Radio.

And in it, the plush-bottom yoohoos in the studio seem to be straining to make the case that 2020 and 2021 is a candidate to be horrible years in history, as compared to…

…536AD. When something, a bunch of volcanoes or comet dust or something blotted out much of the sunlight for years, causing a chain reaction of crop failures, famines, plagues (as hungry rats invaded granaries) and wars that led to the death of perhaps 20% of the people on the planet at the time.

But Covid’s pretty bad, too!

Here’s the neat (if nauseous) trick: Listen to it, and you can almost feel like you’re sitting in a “breakfast place” on Eat Street listening to a bunch of non-profiteers bitching about how lack of rent control is genocide.

NPR should really be funding itself.

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Urban Progressive Privilege: It’s “One Minnesota”, And It’s All Theirs

It took a week for the story to get out – but somehow, it did.

A group of Mayor Carter’s staffers showed us what “One Minnesota” looks like when the new gentry cross paths with the proles:

“They just came in, they were obviously intoxicated,” recalls restaurant owner Jason Dorweiler.

He says a group of seven people came in asking for a table, while three men went to the restroom.

“They were very loud, we heard noises from inside the bathroom, outside while service was going on,” Dorweiler explains. “We kind of checked in on them. It appeared that they had urinated all over our floor, which is a bad sign, in addition to them coming in and just being annoying. They proceeded to sit down and were just being belligerent the whole time.”

Too tl:DR,and need a summary? Here you go:

Naturally, they tried to play the victim card after the fact:

A second police report, filed days later, shows Cruz Williams called police, saying she wanted to report an assault.

In the report she says ‘she was trying to de-escalate the situation’ — and that she told the manager she and her friends were going to leave.

No wonder the DFL is so keen on gun control. They’re afraid real. people may start protecting themselves from the DFL.

Urban Progressive Privilege: Alone

To: Lieutenant Governor Flanagan,
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Glad You’ve Discovered Light Rail Crime!

Of all the people who’ve been beaten, robbed and murdered on Twin Cities light rail platforms, it’s good to know you’ve paid attention to one of them, finally:

But clearly, you do not ride the light rail. I suspect you hitch a ride to the office with the state patrol, just like the governor. I’m gonna guess you haven’t ridden a train since long before you became Lieutenant Governor.

Just a quick tip from someone who rode the Vomit Comet (aka “Green Line”) day and night for a year and a half; when you’re out there on that platform, late at night, in the city you and the DFL created, you are absolutely, completely alone. Nothing there but you and God. None of your ex post facto happy talk is of the faintest bit of protection against The DFL’s Minneapolis.

To my credit, I figured it would be a victim like this, that got you to finally pay attention to street crime.

Sort of.

That is all.

Urban Progressive Privilege: “The Word Means What I Say It Means. Also, It Doesn’t Exist”

In my 20s, I had a section of my bookshelf that I called my “Know Thy Enemy” section.

It had an assortment of books that, broadly, are antithetical to Western Civliization: Marx, Mein Kampf (in German and translation), even a copy of “The Turner Diaries” at one point (although that last one got tossed along the way).

Point being, while I don’t still literally have that bookshelf, I find it useful to know our enemies.

So I listen to NPR. Not all the time. Mostly when I’m stuck on a long drive. I seek out the blinkered, the entitled and the depraved.

The New Yorker Radio Hour rarely disappoints on any of those counts. Like it’s fellow WNYC production, NYRH is a reliable stenographer for the inner id of eastern transatlantic progressive reflexes.

This past weekend? The etymology of word “woke”…

…which, we are reminded, doesn’t really exist:

Lately, conservatives have blamed “wokeness” for everything from deadly mass shootings to lower military recruitment. Still, few have a ready definition for what the word means. 

The episode then goes on to provide its etymology (I’m a linguistics geek, I live for that stuff) and several working definitions and its history of use on the “progressive” left…

…on the way toward telling us the whole thing is a conservative messaging scam.

This is, of course, the leftist pattern:

  1. Coin a term – “Politically Correct”, “CRT” “Woke”, “Mostly Peaceful” – to describe one of the left’s activities or goals
  2. Use it.
  3. Turn it into a social cliche.
  4. When conservatives turn the cliche against them, declare it never existed and that that it’s all right-wing messaging (leaving behind a residue of people who didn’t get the memo, and continue to use the term in its original form with dogged, entitled obstinacy).
  5. Move on to the next term, lather, rinse, repeat.

My project for the coming year: do my little bit to push “white supremacy” down into Step 4.

New Feudalists Vs. The Free Market

Remember Compact Fluorescent Bulbs?

Government and the expert class all but brought them to your house and forced you to change out incandescent bulbs at gunpoint. Government tried to jam them down with by force of law, notwithstanding their cost (to purchase, and to dispose of), and their many other drawbacks.

And then, just about the time the jamdown was complete, the free market came up with the LED bulb: cheaper, better light, easier to dispose of (and they last longer, so there’s less need to dispose of them) and they use even less energy.

Point, free market!

That same expert class is saying we need to switch to electric vehicles to “save the planet”.

Steven Hayward at Breitbart spells out how there’s no rational way to look at this as anything but returning the world to feudalism.

Hate flipping through Twitter threads? I unroll the thread, below the jump.

We’re already getting there, under “unusual” (for the moment) circumstances.

Of course, yet again, the free market may well have a better answer – more sustainable (especially if society kicks its unscientific superstition about nuclear power), more affordable, and capable of keeping the world, not just the top 10% of it, mobile. More on this in the future.

Watch to see how the would-be ruling class tries to gundeck hydrogen power.

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Government Of Merriam Park NIMBYs, By Merriam Park NIMBYs And For Merriam Park NIMBYs

The sentence from the title isn’t officially in whatever passes for a “constitution“ for the city of Saint Paul.

But it might as well be.

The neighborhood – southwest of Allianz Stadium, south of the freeway and west of Snelling – is the home of an awful lot of ELCA-haired “progressive“ with boundless spare time for nattering on about politics.

Most everything corrosive and stupid about politics in Saint Paul gestates in Merriam Park. It was where the smoking ban – which crushed bars in Saint Paul, before the ban went state wide Dash was conceived. It’s where the decades of waffling about what to do with the old Snelling Avenue bus barn got the energy behind its lack of energy (before giving the property away to a billionaire to build a soccer stadium). Support for light rail down the middle of University Avenue, with stops every half mile (as opposed to a route that would’ve made more sense)? Ranked choice voting?

Rent control?

If it’s a stupid idea that benefited only upper middle class, college educated white progressives, it started in Merriam Park.

“Including Saint Paul’s “Tony Soprano“ trash collection system?

What do you think?

A friend of the blog emails:

Illegal dumping did not go down, it went up in Saint Paul’s mafia organized trash collection system. Some say the promise of city wide trash collection was not met, but I still remember the promise of city wide trash collection was so that the elite, privileged Merriam Park residents wouldn’t have their deck sitting, coffee sipping morning ruined by the awful sound of 2 trash trucks running down their alley. To that end, the promise has been met.

But, illegal dumping hasn’t gone down? Huh, did anyone seriously believe it would? I know that I didn’t. The dumping that I see tends to be by renters moving out who aren’t dumping, per say, but offering free on curbside, oexcept no one wants the free on curbside stuff. It is mostly college student renters, since they move the most. Maybe the city should start requiring landlords renting to college students to have fully furnished apartments. (Strike that, let’s not give the council more ideas on how to restrict landlords).

Then there is President Brendmoen who tells is that equity demands we all pay into the system so that the elites continue to have a peaceful coffee sipping morning, er I mean she says it is so that trash remains affordable to the rest of us. She also thinks city staff and city owned trucks will do it even better.

I mean, trash was affordable back when we had less illegal dumping, back when Merriam Park residents were free to organize their neighbors around one trash hauler while the rest of us either used our skills to get cheaper prices or shared with our neighbors. Tell me again how getting the city even more involved will make it even better? Oh, yeah, they’ll probably screw us even better than the trash consortium mafia is.

Many of us tried to warn the city of St. Paul – or, at least, the parts of the city that weren’t the Merriam Park NIMBYs – “Minneapolis has had municipal trash collection paid for (and paid, and paid and payed) out of property taxes, for decades. And if you drive through Minneapolis, there is all sorts of trash illegally dumped on the street, even though trash collection is “free“”.

Open Letter To Governors Abbot And DeSantis

Governors,

Seeing the hair pulling response of upper middle class leftist to actually have to pay the freight for their own policies on the border is, to put it frankly, utterly glorious:

Put another way:

Might I humbly suggest you send a couple of buses to:

  • Merriam Park in Saint Paul
  • Kenwood in Minneapolis
  • City Hall in Rochester
  • Crocus Hill in Saint Paul
  • Linden Hills in Minneapolis
  • Lexington at Chatsworth in Saint Paul
  • The DFL headquarters, down on Plato Boulevard.

The footage will be off the hook.

That is all.

Urban Progressive Privilege: Their Own Dog Food

Governors Abbot (TX) and DeSantis (FL) sendig illegal immigrants to New York, DC and – major kudos to DeSantis here – the epicenter of Urban Progressive Privilege, Martha’s Freaking Vineyard.

The Vineyardians are not amused:

The bleating of the likes of Fernandes (to say nothing of NYC Mayor Adams and DC Mayor Bowser) is pure Berg’s Seventh Law: Big Left’s notion of “helping” illegals is like the PJ O’Rourke’s recounting of Tipper Gore’s account of a drive with the Gore kids through a blighted part of DC; the kids observations prompted Tipper to…

…start a group to plug for public funding for more homeless charities.

The squirming, deflection and projection is glorious.

“But Mitch – those are human beings!”

To me? Yes.

To you? Maybe.

To Big Left’s pols? Not in the least. They are votes and news cycles on the hoof.

Limits

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Should that cover demonstrating outside the homes of judges to demand a particular result?

The purpose of speech directed at the government is to change government policy, which is properly made by the Legislative Branch (albeit sometimes the details of how to carry out policy are delegated to the Executive Branch). But the Judicial Branch does not make policy, it decides cases according to the policies set by the Legislative Branch, as we all learned in high school civics class. That’s how the checks-and-balances system of the Constitution was set up.

Stop laughing. I know that’s not how it was done in the past – abortion, gay marriage – but that’s what Alito’s draft opinion means. It means the Judicial Branch is restoring Constitutional government to the land.

Justice Thomas was absolutely correct when he said, “We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like. We can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want. The events from earlier this week are a symptom of that.”

The people protesting outside judges’ homes demanding a particular result are using the same intimidation tactics as cross burners and ‘protection’ racketeers. They should be arrested and prosecuted for domestic terrorism.

Joe Doakes

Justice Thomas was right. He was also raised in a generation that had some concept of “living with consequences “.

We haven’t had one of those generations, least of all among our “cultural elites“, in quite some time.

Urban Progressive Privilege: Only The Right Kind Of Compliance!

A friend of the blog emails:

Rise Bagel Company has decided to not have to make a choice of who they serve. They are now closed to indoor dining, open for take out. Their business, their choice. All customers treated equally. Shouldn’t be any controversy.

But, yet there is- people who like the vaccine mandate are somehow mad that Rise Bagel Company is closed to indoor dining. Read the comments on the Facebook-people are upset that this business isn’t doing the least bit to keep people safe. But, what? Isn’t closing down to indoor dining even safer? I’ve heard there are quite a few others doing the same thing, whether out of protest or lack of staffing.

They can only except people closing down for the right reasons.

No, that’s not hyperbole:

I suspect “Rise Bagels” couldn’t be happier to lose this person’s business.

But the point remains – this isn’t about infection control.

Just control.

Rule Of Law

Governor Klink had a union obligation to save the bloody shirt yesterday:

I mean, he’s not wrong – although I doubt he knows why.

The part of our “democratic ideals” that the mooks ofJanuary 6 attacked was the process – the Constitutionally-mandated steps for determining who the President is.

The rioters tried to circumvent that process. That – not the hooliganism in the Capitol itself – was the attack on democracy.

When government encourages or (hold onto this word) allows people to chuck the process and impose rule themselves – that’s the very definition of an attack on democracy.

Like, January 6? Sure.

Even if they’re dead sure the election was stolen, because Rudy Giuliani said so, and Sidney Powell had

Like when a group of protesters tore down the statue of Christopher Columbus on the Minnesota Capitol mall – bypassing the rule of law (the Capitol Architecture Committee), but with the tacit blessing of the Administration (whose Lieutenant Governor, Peggy Flanagan, chairs the committee); the DFL machine then “punished” the ringleader by “sentencing” him to preach to school kids why Columbus was evil enough to warrant trashing the process. Which would be more or less like “sentencing” Sheriff Hutchinson to a punitive round of tequila shots.

Is the destruction of the statue as big an assault on the rule of law as the riot a the Capitol?

In and of itself, of course not.

Is the fact that our institutions, and our media, tolerate one side attacking the rule of law while hammering on the oppositions attacks?

Yeah,that doesn’t help one little bit.

Like Fourth Grade, All Over Again

Sheriff Dave Hutchinson, to Fox9’s Mary McGuire:

Well, let’s get that reflected in statute, pronto! Everyone does it!

(Maybe he meant “everyone at the Sheriff’s Association meeting? We’ll never know – all cameras were reportedly barred. What happens near Alexandria stays near Alexandria).

And when they do, and a Henco sheriff’s deputy pulls them over and they come in with a .17 (which was what the .13 from his urine test likely was at the time of the accident), they don’t get a whiffleball home booking with not one second spent in a jail cell.

And if a Minnesotan with a carry permit is busted with over .04, they’re at very serious risk of losing their carry permit.

What happens to cops who lose their right to carry?

I’d love to ask the sheriff this question. I’m gonna guess I don’t get any chance to.

By the way – I’ll be talking with Rebecca Brannon on the show this Saturday about this story, including the blowback she’s gotten from local cops.

Urban Progressive Privilege: Just In Case 2021 Wasn’t Weird Enough

Rep. John Thompson shreds the DFL and mainstream media’s hypocrisy in re Sheriff Hutchinson.

And he’s not wrong:

It’s a long-ish video, but worth it.

And there’s still a week to go…

It’s Not Us. It’s You.

A relationship can survive anything, says Dennis Prager, except contempt.

And there is a lot of contempt in our society.

Mostly one-way:

Nearly a quarter of college students wouldn’t be friends with someone who voted for the other presidential candidate — with Democrats far more likely to dismiss people than Republicans — according to new Generation Lab/Axios polling.

And a disturbing number of leftists don’t want to hire or employ those people, either.

It’s the ugly, militant side of Urban Progressive Privillege: not only do people with UPP never need to recognize any different perspectives on life, they increasingly work to actively cleanse their echo chambers of any dissonance.

You could call it cultural cleansing:

The Democrats routinely call Republicans and their activists “culture warriors,” but when it comes to pushing the country in a particular direction away from where it currently is, it’s always the Democrats who have been at the forefront. On abortion, they have been pushing to open up the definition to make it as widely available and as routine as any other form of birth control. With social spending, they have moved to make it more and more available while lowering the requirements further and further, creating programs that are impossible to pay for.

On issues like education, they are tightening their control as much as possible and shutting families out, even going so far as to label concerned parents as “terrorists.”

Urban Progressive Privilege: Am I The Only One That Thinks…

…that the current, possibly-excessive, garment-rending over the “Omicron” variant is the sound of an awful lot of people who’ve gone through lives with little purpose or meaning, and have found a perverted version of both in bullying, shunning and scarlet-lettering people with different conclusions and means of dealing with Covid?

That depression and anxiety might be the least of society’s mental health issues when it comes to this pandemic – that the wave of cultural narcissism it’s released dwarves everything else (except, obviously, the suicide?)

Drunk Teenagers With Keys To Dad’s Bulldozer

We’ll allow for a moment that ‘Medium.com”, when the subject is race, criminal/social “justice” or the economy, is like Tumblr for people with unsupportably high self-esteem .

With that being said, this happened this morning:

Now, for whatever reason it’s not loading for me at the moment, or I’d be llinking to it. I’ll try to catch it later today.

But if we’re judging by the headline?

As I noted last week, people are projecting their views of the rest of American on this trial -and while I pointed out that all “sides” were doing it, let’s be honest; it’s the left that’s making it into a cottage industry.

Two observations:

Pick Your Poison: If you thought Januarhy 6 was an epic assault on America, but don’t see the attempt to bully and intimidate jurors – the backbone of our justice system, as imperfect is it and they are – as something every bit as serious, you are an idiot.

Allow me to say it to your face.

Literally, if need be.

Rules for Radicals: And of course, chaos benefits the extremes – of both sides. Especially the extreme that has a plan and the political and social “infrastructure” to capitalize on and exploit the chaos .

In 1933, the German Communists supported President Von Hindsenburg giving Chancellor HItler – the leader of the Reichstag’s (Parliament’s) largest party, the Nazis – near compete control under an emergency powers decree. The Communists – with their direct action arm, Rote Fahne, which later became “Anti”-Fa – figured they had the political will and street power to capitalize on the chaos they saw ensuing .

They bet wrong.

Big Left, today, isn’t betting wrong. While “Red” America is proud of its traditions, and owns a hell of a lot of guns,there is no organization on the right that is waiting in any significant numbers, with a plan and people with their own willl to power, least of all a will to power that leads back to a Constitutional Republic.

The riot on January 6, stupid and illegal as it was, was never in any real position to alter the Constitutionally-mandated process.

Bullying the justice system? That most certainly is.

Our Betters Have Spoken

Author Thomas Ricks on Twitter:

Three blocks from my house, August 26,2020.

Well, there is a dumbass dupe in the conversation.